Acropolis Facade - Ek Balam, Mexico
| General Attributes |
DOI| 10.34946/D6RK5C | |
| Project Name | Acropolis Facade - Ek Balam |
| Country | Mexico |
| Status | Upcoming |
| Citation |
| Travis Stanton, Nelda Marengo Camacho, Ashuni Romero Butrón, Scott McAvoy, Jeremy Coltman, Falko Kuester, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH), Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) 2026: Acropolis Facade - Ek Balam - LiDAR - Terrestrial, Short Range Scan. Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.34946/D6RK5C |
| Download |
| Spatial Data | Coming Soon |
| Data Type |
Size |
Device Name |
Device Type |
| LiDAR - Terrestrial | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Short Range Scan | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Background |
| Site Description | Set on the fourth level of the Acropolis — the massive six-tiered palace that is the largest building at Ek' Balam, some 160 meters long and 32 meters high — the stucco façade of the Sak Xok Naah ranks among the finest surviving works of Maya modeled plaster. It framed the entrance to the mortuary chamber of Ukit Kan Le'k Tok', the founding and greatest king of the Talol kingdom, who ruled from roughly 770 to 800 CE. The building's name, taken from an inscribed capstone within, is often read as the "White House of Reading."
The façade takes the form of a colossal Chenes-style monster mouth. A fanged lower jaw projects from the base of the central doorway, while the doorway itself forms the toothed upper jaw; above rise the muzzle and eyes of an earth deity whose gaping maw symbolized the entrance to the underworld, so that those who passed through were, in effect, swallowed and reborn. A small figure sits on the lower eyelid, and an image of the ruler once crowned the muzzle, its head now lost.
Around this central mouth spread molded masks, geometric motifs, and the site's celebrated stucco "angels" — elaborately costumed winged human figures unique in the Maya world.
The façade's preservation is itself extraordinary. After the king's burial the chamber was packed with rubble and sealed, protecting stucco that was left its natural cream color rather than painted red like the rest of the Acropolis — so that it survives almost as it looked the day it was finished | |
| Project Description | In June of 2023 Archaeologists worked with site conservation authorities to scan the entire facade at 0.7mm resolution with the artec Leo during a restoration effort, removing protective netting and scaffolding as the work went on. over 60 individual scans were taken, and painstakenly cleaned and aligned.
In August, two researchers returned to the site to create a metric terrestrial LiDAR model, to better tie the individual scans together over the large area.
details are available in the following field reports:
Stanton, T. W, Mcavoy, S. P, Rissolo, D., & Kuester, F. (2025). Chichen Itza, Yaxuna, Ek Balam, Yula, Maya and June 2023, Yucatan Mexico. UC San Diego: Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at Calit2. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9666z0dd
Mcavoy, S. P, Rissolo, D., & Kuester, F. (2023). Chichen Itza and Ek Balam, Yucatan, Mexico August 27th – September 2nd 2023. . UC San Diego: Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at Calit2. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qg65087
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| Collection Date | 2023-06-15 to 2023-08-29 |
| Publication Date | 2026-07-06 |
| License Type | CC BY |
| Model Information |
| Reuse Score | B - High-Quality Model without Georeferencing |
| Curator Notes | Artec Leo short range scans do not have a good open source interchange program. For now, all LEO files provided only open with artec studio, though each scan is also provided as a pointcloud. At some point these scans will need to be reprocessed, as software issues prevented the incorporation of color data. |
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