Align the principal avenue and every building of the city to a single bearing (at Teotihuacan about 15½° east of north) so that the whole city shares one orientation with its great pyramids.
White roads between the groups
Join the great groups of the city by raised, plastered causeways (sacbeob), running straight from plaza to plaza.
Sacbe means “white road”. At Tikal the causeways also served as dams, channelling the rain off the paved centre into reservoirs; in northern Yucatán the longest runs a hundred kilometres from Cobá to Yaxuná. They were processional ways as much as roads, and Landa mentions the causeways of the ancient cities among their marvels.
Related rules
Orient the principal axis of the monument on the rising or setting of the sun at a solstice, so that the architecture frames it.
Put the temples and their plazas at the centre of the town; round them the houses of the lords and priests, then those of the leading people, and the houses of the common people at the outskirts.
Close the great plaza on the east and west with temple-pyramids facing each other across it, the ancestors’ acropolis on the north and the palaces on the south, so that the plaza lies on the east–west path of the sun.
At the end of each katun of twenty years, build a plaza with two flat-topped pyramids facing east and west, each with four stairs, a walled court on the north for the king’s stela and altar, and a range of nine doorways on the south.
Build a household as three or four houses on low platforms round a small patio, with the family’s shrine, over the ancestors’ graves, on the east side.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “White roads between the groups”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/maya-sacbe. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.