According to archaeologists José Francisco Osorio and Francisco Pérez, La Mesa de los Cautivos, as it is now known, was first exposed during clearing of interior rubble in the Templo de los Caracoles building (Structure 5C5; Temple of the Snails) in 2005 during work at the Initial Series Group at Chichén Itzá under the direction of Dr. Peter Schmidt, but only the top surface was seen and the sides were not cleared. At that time, it was identified as a banqueta (bench).

In 2019 it was further exposed by the Proyecto Arqueológico Chichén Itzá, then headed by Osorio, and was discovered to have four carved sides. News of its discovery was published in Mexicon in 2020 (Vol. XLII February). Bruce Love photographed it on March 25, 2021, with permission of then site director Eduardo López Calzada, when Love was working at the site in collaboration with the project La Pintura Mural Prehispánica en México under the directorship of María Teresa Uriarte Castañeda of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas UNAM.  Love made the drawings the following month.

Love’s photographs and drawings were published in Arqueología Mexicana (at a small scale) in no. 172, enero-febrero 2022, in an article by project directors José Francisco Osorio and Francisco Pérez, and the figures with glyphs were added to Love’s Catalog of Non-Maya Glyphs at Chichén Itzá, also in 2022.

Photos and drawings of the four carved sides of the “table top” are published here with the consent of (now) site director José Francisco Osorio to whom I am deeply grateful for his collaboration.

-Bruce Love

Corpus Volume 15: La Mesa de los Cautivos from Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Mexico