Puuc (region)
The Puuc region is a karst landscape in the west of the Yucatan peninsula on the territory of the Mexican states of Yucatán and Campeche . The name comes from the Yucatec Maya language and describes hill country or a range of hills ( pu'uk ). The northern limit is called the Sierrita de Ticul . The hill country is the main distribution area of the Puuc style of late classical Maya architecture.
The Yucatan Peninsula is formed from a block of limestone and dolomite several hundred meters thick , which has multiple faults due to crustal movements. The Puuc range of hills protrudes from this as a north-west-south-east running, partly double steep step, the Sierrita de Ticul, which reaches heights of up to 100 m above the plain to the north. It begins directly at the small town of Maxcanú and extends over a distance of 135 km to the vicinity of the Laguna de Chichankanab. This is the result of an uplift movement and temporarily formed a sea coast in the Miocene .
There are two different zones south of the escarpment. The Santa Elena zone, named after a village in its center, forms a narrow triangle between the Sierrita de Ticul and another steep step in the south, which extends from a point between the places Tekax and Tzucacab on the Sierrita to near Calkini . The Santa Elena Zone is a flat undulating area made up of a thick layer of slightly reddish limestone from the Eocene . In the west, the zone merges into the southern part of the plains without any clear delimitation. Here you will find deeply sedimented soils and a large number of natural small lakes ( aguadas ), which are fed by the superficial runoff of the rainy season and sometimes carry water all year round. This favorable condition in the otherwise dry Karstland has undoubtedly greatly favored human settlement and may have had a decisive influence on the choice of location for large pre-Hispanic settlements such as Uxmal .
The second steep step is less straight and is also interrupted several times in its western part. It delimits the Bolonchen zone in the north, which is named after the town of Bolonchen in its center and which is characterized by a pronounced conical karst . What appears as a range of hills in the west is the demolition of this karst hilly landscape. The hills are mostly steep and the rock often comes to the surface. Only at the foot zones of the hills and the small spaces in between has a large amount of erosion material accumulated, which offers good conditions for plant cultivation. Aguadas do not occur here, the sources of water are some deep and difficult to access karst caves (for example Xtakumbilxunan near Bolonchen). The southern boundary of the Bolonchen zone is not so clearly marked. They are expediently drawn along the northern edge of large, deeply caked-in burglary basins , which are characterized by numerous swallow holes , and which extend in a chain further to the southeast. This area is called the Chenes zone after the second part of many place names in -chen . Here the conditions for plant cultivation were apparently less favorable, which is likely to be responsible for a lower settlement density in the pre-Hispanic period.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nicholas P. Dunning: Lords of the hills: ancient Maya settlement in the Puuc Region, Yucatán, Mexico. Prehistory Press, Madison, WI 1992, ISBN 1-881094-04-9