Izapa

Large Formative centre in the Soconusco of Chiapas, at the foot of Volcán Tacaná, running about 1.5 km north to south with 161 mapped mounds, six major plazas and roughly 250,000 cubic metres of architecture. The whole layout is set 21 degrees east of true north. Occupied from about 1500 BCE by Mixe-Zoquean groups — the same language family as the builders of Iglesia Vieja up the coast, and the family most often connected to the Olmec — with its apogee between roughly 500 BCE and 100 CE and occupation continuing to about 1200 CE. Its carved stelae are dense enough that they named a tradition : the Izapan style turns up along the Pacific piedmont and into the highlands at Takalik Abaj and Kaminaljuyu, and sits chronologically and iconographically between Olmec and Maya. Stela 5, the so-called Tree of Life stone, carries a crowded scene that has been argued over for seventy years; a 1950s reading by M. Wells Jakeman took it as a depiction of a Book of Mormon narrative, which Mesoamerican archaeology has not accepted, while the stone itself remains genuinely difficult and genuinely important.

14.9234°, -92.1798°

Walkthrough videos (1)

Izapa: Mormon Archaeology, Trans-Oceanic Contact, and the Origins of Maya Civilization · The ARX Project

Nearby sites

• Zaculeu88 km
• Olmec Rock Carvings of Pijijiapan141 km
• Iglesia Vieja215 km