The heart of Tikal in its eighth-century prime: two temple-pyramids facing each other across the Great Plaza, the acropolis of the royal dead to the north and the palace ranges to the south, white causeways running out to the other great temples, and patio groups of thatched houses graded outward from the centre.
No Maya treatise on planning survives; the books that might have held one were burned. The rules of a Maya city have to be read from the buildings, and from the one Spanish writer who saw Maya towns still working. Diego de Landa, in the 1560s, wrote that the temples and their fine plazas stood in the middle of a town, the houses of the lords and priests round them, then those of the leading people, and at the edges those of the poor. Excavation has found the same gradient at Tikal eight centuries earlier: the higher the platform and the finer the house, the nearer it stands to the Great Plaza.
The centre is a cosmogram. Temple I, the tomb of the king Jasaw Chan K’awiil, faces Temple II across the plaza on an east–west line, the path of the sun; the North Acropolis, crowded with the temples of earlier kings, closes the north, the side of the ancestors and of the sky; the Central Acropolis, a maze of vaulted palace ranges round courts, closes the south. Raised, plastered causeways (sacbeob) join the centre to the other great groups: Temple IV at the end of the Tozzer causeway, the twin-pyramid groups built for the end of each twenty-year katun, the old astronomical group of the Lost World. Reservoirs caught the rain from the paved plazas.
Beyond the core, households lived in patio groups: three or four thatched houses on low platforms round a small court, often with a family shrine on the east side, among kitchen gardens and fields. Click any building to see what it is, which rule shaped it, and on what evidence.