The Temple of the Warriors was built atop a three-tiered, stepped pyramid with four recessed terraces and a single stairway on the West facing the Great Plaza. Its base is approximately 130 feet square.

To the West and the South are the rows of columns which make up the two colonnades known as the Court of the Thousand Columns. That portion of the Court of the Thousand Columns facing the plaza is called the North Colonnade. It is 600 feet by 75 feet. This colonnade was one of the first columned structures of its type constructed by the Mayas. The roofs of all three the buildings have collapsed and disappeared.

he Mayan-Toltec or the Mexican Style is the last of the styles developed in the sacred city of Chichén Itzá. It came about there as the result of a synthesis between earlier Mayan techniques and the art of the Itzás, the Toltec invaders. On their arrival in the city which they would make the central point of their influence on northern Yucatan, the invaders found beautiful examples of architecture in the Puuc and Chenes styles.

The marriage of the existing architectural styles with that of the newcomers from nearby Tula resulted in such a perfect synthesis that historians cannot agree on a chronology for the buildings of Chichén Itzá. It appears that shortly after the invasion, in the middle of the 10th Century, the Itzás built the first Castillo and the Temple of the Warriors. They also made alterations to the Caracol and the east wing of the Nunnery and afterwards built the Court of the Thousand Columns, the second Castillo and the Great Ball-Court. Their period of power at Chichén Itzá extended from 950 to about 1200 AD.

The characteristic line of Mayanized-Mexican architecture is seen in this view of the Temple of the Warriors. From the base of the Court of the Thousand Columns to the pyramid and the temple at its summit, the line is straight, hard, and parallel. The only Classic Maya concept left is the corbel-vaulted passageway under the hall from north to south at the east end of the colonnade (lower right), which measures 7.5 by 320 feet.

The basic style of the Temple of the Warriors is Puuc, with a plain lower facade and a decorated frieze above. In addition, are two feathered-serpent columns with heads like dragons facing the Chac Mool, who reclines looking westward towards the plaza and the Castillo (right). The Chac Mool is the most definitive of Mexican symbols. The name can be translated as "Red Tiger" and was conferred on the idol by Augustus Le Plongeon when he discovered one during the excavation of the nearby Platform of the Eagles. Lying in a preposterously uncomfortable position, with its head always sharply turned over one shoulder, the Chac Mool holds a round disc or shallow basin as a repository for offerings.

This classic group of Maya and Maya-Mexican symbols once formed a backdrop for religious ceremonies which included the deposition, on the receptacle formed by the Chac Mool's stomach, of excised and bleeding hearts. Traces of the color of the serpent's mouth are still visible, At the time of these ceremonies, nearly one thousand years ago, it was painted a flaming red.

The plumed serpents' heads with their open jaws represent the god Kulkulkan. A symbol of the Mexican invasion is the standard bearer, standing just above the serpent's head. This figure was once used to hold a ceremonial banner.

The colonnade was a radical innovation and judging from the Court of the Thousand Columns it gained great popularity at Chichén Itzá. The north building of this assemblage abuts the terrace of the Temple of the Warriors and consists of five parallel vaults supported on the interior by round columns and on the façade by square piers. The Maya used the simplest possible columns, one square in section, the other round with a rectangular capital. The columns were built up of drums or blocks. The round drums were sometimes convex in section.

This reconstructed section of the Temple of the Warriors shows the Thousand Columns Hall at its base. The corbeled vaults of both structures, along with the entirety of their interiors, were plastered over. The technique of making plaster and mortar from burnt lime played an indispensable role in Maya architecture, not just influencing structural forms such as these vaults, but also the character and design of its ornamentation.

The development of Maya building practices can be easily traced due to the fact that they seldom razed a building that had fallen into disuse, but found it easier to bury it completely under masonry which served as the foundation for the new structure. This section of the Castillo shows the original building intact within the massive structure of the new one.

In 1926, when excavations were begun on the heap of rubble to which the Temple of the Warriors had been reduced, another structure was discovered underneath, one imprisoned inside the massive construction of the other. Superimpositions of this kind occur so frequently in the Mayan world that it is now usual to make trial bores to throw light on a building's history. In this case archaeologists were amazed when they discovered, beneath the visible temple on the summit of the pyramid, another intact structure. Investigators stepped into a sanctuary that had not been visited for close to 1000 years. This temple which dates from the early Toltec Period, contains columns, paintings, and a Chac Mool figure. Thus, it is now called the Chac Mool Temple. The colors of the columns of the inner structure have been preserved. While the upper temple was being excavated, several mural paintings, two of which show a village on the sea and an attack, were found below and removed.

As was the case in the bigger temple, the stone ceilings had collapsed. Its parallel aisles, which were supported by wooden planks, had been devised by the new arrivals from a combination of the Mayan system and the formula of the colonnade peculiar to the buildings of Tula, in order to create vast hypostyle halls. When the beams decayed, they dragged down entire masonry vaults in their fall.

The hegemony of the Itzás lasted for no more than two centuries, roughly from 985 to 1185. Disintegration followed, guerrilla warfare between the tribes hastened the ruin of Mayan culture which meanwhile succeeded in assimilating its masters of Mexican origin and caused them to forget their gods. The vital cycle of the Mayan-Toltec civilization was ended by the time the ships of Cortéz reached the coast of Yucatan from Spain. The handful of adventurers who conquered the country between 1525 and 1541 met with a dead culture. Nevertheless, the inheritance of Mayan architecture conveys the evidence of a dazzling past and a glorious, subtle civilization. Mayan town-planning is still capable of teaching us through its sense of space, its generosity, and the miraculous harmony it achieved between the works of man and nature. What greater destiny could have been claimed by these peoples, who have shown us how to build garden cities in the heart of hostile forests and who erected the glowing façades of their temples and palaces with the help of techniques that were to be rediscovered in the New World a thousand years later?

The Castillo is perhaps the best known feature of the great city of Chichén Itzá. It is a great, stepped pyramid flanked by four staircases bordered by ramps, and surmounted by a perfectly preserved upper temple.

The structure is 180 feet long and 100 feet high. Each staircase has 91 steps, making 364 in all. An extra step at the entrance to the upper temple brings the total to 365, the number of days in the year.