Cancún’s Maya Museum: 50 Years of Cobá Finds

Cancún, Mexico — The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), in coordination with the Boundary End Archaeology Research Center (BEARC), the INAH Quintana Roo Center, and the municipal delegation of Cobá, will inaugurate the exhibition "Cobá: A More Than 50-Year Archaeological Research Project" at the Maya Museum of Cancún on September 4, 2025.

The exhibition will offer a journey through more than half a century of anthropological inquiry into one of the most important Maya cities in the northern zone of the peninsula's eastern coast. Cobá developed between 300 and 1000 AD and constructed a network of terrestrial pathways called sacbe’ob, or white roads, including one spanning more than 100 kilometers that reached Yaxuná, near Chichén Itzá.

Fifty years ago, the Cobá Archaeological and Topographic Project, directed by George Stuart and William Folan, implemented its first seasons of research. Their findings will be presented in the exhibition, which was curated by the executive director of BEARC, Nelda Issa Marengo Camacho, and researcher María José Con Uribe, who has worked at the archaeological zone for more than 30 years.

The exhibition will also feature photographs of the people who lived in Cobá and interacted with the archaeologists and their families during those early years of exploratory work. Visitors will be able to view fragments of mural paintings and a stone panel discovered at the site.

The inauguration will be preceded by a conference titled "Kings and Queens of Ancient Cobá," delivered by David Stuart, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and director of BEARC. As a child, the now-renowned epigrapher lived with his family in Cobá during the 1974 and 1975 field season, where he first became interested in archaeology at the age of eight.

Local authorities and families from the Quintana Roo community also participated in organizing the exhibition.

The show will remain on display at the Maya Museum of Cancún until November 2, 2025. It will subsequently be presented at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., from October 2025 to mid-January 2026, and will arrive in the community of Cobá in December 2026.