This little-known Mayan city is 1800 years old, and it reached its apogee between 600 and 800 AD. Its first few centuries were spent under the dominion of Piedras Negras and later Yaxchilán. The political, administrative and religious center of the city was never very large, but it was more spread out than other Mayan cities in the Usumacinta basin, owing to the capacity for agricultural production of its surrounding valley, which produced cacao as well basic foods. The city must have been segmented into several neighborhoods directed by members of the local aristocracy, who were responsible for collecting taxes for the governor.
Bonampak has a central plaza surrounded by not very tall religious, administrative and residential buildings. A stela in the plaza and others on the steps of the Acropolis demonstrate very fine workmanship. To the south of the Great Plaza, the impressively large Acropolis has a stepped base and is 150 feet high. All buildings that have Mayan vaults in the city are in this area, distributed on two levels, which are reached by broad stairways. On the first level there are three buildings, and the one on the right is reminiscent of the magnificent Building 33 at Yaxchilán on account of its shape and size. The local Lacandon people were amazed when they discovered the three rooms inside the Building of the Paintings, which had been abandoned many centuries earlier, and when they guided foreign visitors there for the first time one day in 1946, they too were stunned. The three rooms were, and still are, profusely decorated with mural paintings, some of the best conserved and revealing of ancient Mexico.
The artists Antonio Tejeda and Agustín Villagra made the first copies of the murals during the first three scientific expeditions to Bonampak by the Washington Carnegie Institution between 1946 and 1948. The task was hindered by the fact that the murals were hard to see as they were covered by a thick layer of carbonate salt deposits. The INAH restored the murals in 1984 after extensive and lengthy deliberation at national and international levels, to a large extent recovering their original bright colors.
New studies of the murals were carried out in the 1990s, one led by the Institute for Aesthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico which culminated in the publication of two volumes with complete photographs of the murals and another, led by Mary E. Miller of Yale University, which used photographs as the basis for a digital reconstruction of the murals. Since 2011 the INAH has begun a second restoration process, this time using modern methods, which enable us to see the room 3 murals in fine detail.
The Bonampak murals have recovered their vitality as a result of these processes. In the first room from left to right we observe a procession of priests and members of the nobility. The second features an important battle in which Chan Muwan II, the lord or "ajaw" of the city, defeated the previous governor with the support of Yaxchilán. The governor had attempted to maintain the neighboring city of Sak´ Tz´i´, and he was imprisoned with his captains in preparation for sacrifice. The final room shows a ceremony with dancers in resplendent dress, the family of the victorious lord and the lord himself practicing the self-sacrifice ritual of bleeding the tongue with obsidian knives.
