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Few ancient cities in the Americas announce themselves quite like Uxmal. Rising from the flat limestone plain of the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico, its pyramids and palaces are built without the benefit of metal tools, the wheel, or draft animals, which makes the precision of their construction all the more arresting. The site reached its peak between roughly 600 and 900 AD as a major centre of the Puuc Maya civilisation, and the name itself is generally translated as 'thrice built', a reference to the successive layers of construction that archaeologists have uncovered within its structures.

The architecture here follows the Puuc style, a regional tradition distinguished by smooth lower facades and densely carved upper friezes featuring geometric latticework, serpent motifs, and the hooked nose of the rain deity Chaac. That last detail matters enormously in this landscape: the Yucatán has no rivers and very few surface water sources, so the Maya of Uxmal depended entirely on rainwater collected in underground cisterns called chultunes. Chaac appears hundreds of times across the site, a theological argument carved in stone about the stakes of survival in a seasonally dry environment.