Palenque

Palenque rises in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the Usumacinta River, a Maya city-state whose surviving temples and palaces date largely from the Late Classic period under the ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, who reigned from 615 to 683 CE and under whose government most of the site's major buildings were constructed. Its best-known structure is the Temple of the Inscriptions, which conceals Pakal's own tomb, alongside the three-temple Cross group, comprising the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and a sprawling Palace complex distinguished by a four-story observation tower unusual among Maya buildings. A separate structure, Temple XIII, holds the tomb of a still-unidentified high-status woman known to archaeologists as the Red Queen. European visitors first examined the ruins in 1773, with further expeditions through the 1780s and into the early 1800s, but the site's most celebrated discovery came in 1949 to 1952, when the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier became the first person in the modern era to see inside Pakal's tomb after years of careful excavation beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions. Despite more than two centuries of study, only an estimated ten percent of the ancient city has been uncovered, with more than a thousand additional structures believed to remain buried in the surrounding jungle.