Uaxactun
ancient sacred place of the Maya civilization, in present-day Guatemala
Uaxactun (pronounced [waʃakˈtun]) is an ancient sacred place of the Maya civilization, located in the Petén Basin region of the Maya lowlands, in the present-day department of Petén, Guatemala. The site lies some 12 miles (19 km) north of the major center of Tikal. The name is sometimes spelled as Waxaktun.
History of discovery
Despite the achievements in the decipherment of the ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing system since the 1990s, the ancient name of the site remains unclear. It may have shared a name with Yaxchilan, Pa’ Chan, although some lords of Uaxactun used the title “king of Kʹanwitz”, which may have referred to one of the ceremonial centres . A name for the site commonly given online is Siaan K'aan or Sian Ka'an, translated as "Born in Heaven", likely originating from Siyajchan ("Giving birth sky"), an earlier mistranslation of the Pa’ Chan ("Split sky") emblem glyph.
The name Uaxactun was given to the site by its rediscoverer, archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, in May 1916. He coined the name from Maya words Waxac and Tun, to mean "Eight Stones". The name has two meanings; Morley's stated reason for the name was to commemorate it as the first site where an inscription dating from the 8th Baktún of the Maya calendar was discovered (making it then the earliest known Maya date, corresponding the year 328 AD). The other meaning is a pun, since "Uaxactun" sounds like "Washington", the U.S. capital and home of the Carnegie Institute which funded Morley's explorations.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q977738. VIAF identifies the subject as 316430111. Authority coordinates are 17.394, -89.635. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Uaxactun” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.