Tulum is a pre-Columbian Maya walled city that served as a major port for Cobá, located in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The ruins are situated on a 12-meter cliff along the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula on the Caribbean Sea. Tulum was one of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya and reached its peak between the 13th and 15th centuries. The Maya continued to live in Tulum for about 70 years after the Spanish began their occupation of Mexico, but by the end of the 16th century, the city was abandoned. Tulum is one of the best-preserved coastal Maya settlements.

This place might have been called Zama, meaning City of Dawn, because it faces the sunrise. Tulum stands on a cliff facing east toward the Caribbean Sea. Tulum is also a Yucatec Maya word meaning fence, wall, or trench. The walls surrounding the site allowed the port of Tulum to be protected from invasions. The city had access to both land and sea trade routes, making it an important trading center, especially for obsidian. It was a privileged trading port community precisely because of its location and served as a logistical hub for the region, a redistribution point for local and foreign goods coming from distant places such as Central America, the Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and central Mexico via maritime, river, and land routes. Judging by numerous images on frescoes and sculptures, Tulum appears to have been an important place of worship for the Diving or Descending God.

The city was first mentioned by Juan Díaz, a member of the Spanish expedition led by Juan de Grijalva in 1518. Juan Díaz was the first European to discover Tulum. The first detailed description of the ruins was published by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in 1843 in the book "Incidents of Travel in Yucatan." Approaching from the sea, Stephens and Catherwood first saw a tall building that greatly impressed them, most likely El Castillo (The Castle). They made accurate maps of the walls of the site, and Catherwood sketched El Castillo and several other buildings. Stephens and Catherwood also reported an Early Classic stela found at the site with a date of 564 AD (now in the British Museum collection). It is now believed that the stela was probably built elsewhere and brought to Tulum.

Since 1913, excavations at Tulum continued under Silvanus Morley and George Howe. They worked on restoring and uncovering public spaces. Then from 1916 to 1922, work was continued by the Carnegie Institution and in 1924 by Samuel Lothrop, who first mapped the site, Miguel Ángel Fernández in the late 1930s and early 1940s, William Sanders in 1956, and later in the 1970s by Arthur Miller. Thanks to these later studies by Sanders and Miller, it was established that Tulum was inhabited in the Late Postclassic period around 1200 AD. Although archaeological excavations show that people lived at the site earlier, for example, in 2020, an underwater archaeological expedition led by Jerónimo Avilés conducted excavations in a cave beneath the city and discovered the skeleton of a woman about 30 years old who lived at least 9,900 years ago. According to craniometric measurements, the skull is believed to correspond to the mesocephalic type, like three other skulls found in Tulum caves. Three different scars on the woman's skull indicated that she was struck by something hard and that the skull bones were fractured. Her skull also showed crater-like deformities and tissue deformations, apparently caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis.

According to the lead researcher Wolfgang Stinnesbeck: "It really looks like this woman had very hard times and a very unhappy end to her life. Obviously, this is only speculation, but given the injuries and pathological deformations of her skull, a likely scenario is that she may have been excluded from the tribe and killed in the cave, or left in the cave to die.”

The architecture of Tulum is typical for Maya settlements on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. This architecture is recognizable by a step running around the base of the building, which is situated on a low platform. Doorways of this type are usually narrow, and columns are used as supports if the building is large enough. As the walls widen, there are usually two sets of moldings at the top. The room typically contains one or two small windows with an altar at the back wall, covered either by a ceiling of beams and rubble or vaulted. This type of architecture resembles what can be found in nearby Chichen Itza, only on a much smaller scale.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulum