Maya Murals Fill the Rooms of Bonampak

Near a tributary of the Usumacinta River in Chiapas, the ancient Maya settlement known locally as Usiij Witz stood as a regional political dependency of the nearby center of Yaxchilan. Long integrated into the shifting conflicts of the Usumacinta basin, the town had become firmly subordinate to its northern neighbor by the seventh century. Its lord Yajaw Chan Muwaan II, who according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History took power in 776 and was the brother-in-law of the ruler of Yaxchilan, ordered the construction of Structure 1, an elevated masonry building whose murals, painted around 791, preserve one of the most comprehensive pictorial records of Classic Maya court culture.

Structure 1, also called the Temple of the Murals, rests on a T-shaped platform, measuring about sixteen meters long and four meters deep. Divided into three independent vaulted chambers, the building was extensively painted both inside and out. Its exterior once carried brilliant red, yellow, and blue hues, bands of glyphs, stucco figures, and sculpted lintels over entryways measuring around 1.75 meters in height. The interior surfaces were treated with equal care, featuring blackened floors and walls coated in elaborate fresco sequences. A combined team of plasterers, pigment preparers, and painters filled the interior with hundreds of human figures, producing a narrative of courtly ceremony, battle and sacrifice whose exact sequence and protagonist scholars still debate.