Northeastern Yucatán Project:
Archaeological Survey in the Northeastern Corner of Yucatán, México

The Site of Teapa

The archaeological settlement of Teapa is located slightly north of the homonymous modern town; it may be reached through the paved road that connects Colonia Yucatán with Kantunilkín, and is found 3 kilometers away from Colonia Yucatán, towards the southeast.

This seems to be the site Coe II described in the ’50s of the XXth century (Coe, op. cit.). Today, only a few residential platforms distributed in different plots of the town are visible. Coe reported a substructure with rounded corners, which we have described in the section of Sinsimato. This means that since ancient times and up to this day, to reach the place where the major group of structures is located, people could use two different roads, one from Colonia Yucatán and the other one from the town of Teapa, although the site was one and the same, a fact that caused some confusion among researchers: even though we have considered it as a separate site, in fact it did include portions of Sinsimato, similar to the remains identified as "Amado León" by Kepecs (Kepecs, op. cit.).

After Coe’s visit, and as I have already noted, the substructure reported by him was completely destroyed, and only some traces of the structure’s rubble were left in place together with a part of the basal alignments, though they hardly reflect what they were in pre-hispanic times or at the time of Montejo the Adelantado’s arrival in 1528.

Both east and west are found cenotes in the shape of caves, falling straight down and creating a two-meter space between the water surface and the natural ground surface.

Most likely Roys (Roys, op. cit.) visited a portion of this site, as also a portion of an adjacent ranch known as Simsimché, making reference to the ancient settlement of Sinsimato.

During our visit to this place, one inhabitant of the modern town of Teapa showed us an artifact consisting of a greenstone axe, recovered in one of the residential platforms located north of the site (Photo 24 and Figure 6, shown below).

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