The white road

Where the name of this site comes from.

The word

In Yucatec Maya, sacbe means white road. It names the raised roads of the Maya world, lined with stone and paved with white lime plaster (Scott, 2011). Spanish writers of the colonial period rendered it as calzada, a main road (Wikipedia, Sacbe).

Spelling

Most English writers spell it sacbe, with a c. Sakbe, with a k, sits closer to the modern Maya spelling. One writer notes that sak beh better shows how the word sounds in Yucatec Maya, with sak beho'ob for more than one road (Yucatan Times). Archaeologists use sacbeob for the plural.

An ancient word

The word is old. Stone markers stand along the road from Cobá to Yaxuná, and David Stuart reads a glyph for sakbih on them. The term archaeologists use today was in use when the roads were built (Stuart, 2006).

Two lidar maps. In the upper map, a raised road crosses the image, broken where its stones were taken. In the lower map, the road runs whole through house platforms at Cobá.
Sacbe 1 seen by lidar. (a) A disturbed segment, the gap at X-Cahumil. (b) An undisturbed segment within Cobá. Figure 5 from Ardren, Hutson, Stanton, Rohrer, and Lowry (2026), Latin American Antiquity, doi.org/10.1017/laq.2024.47. Used under CC BY 4.0. Saved at a smaller file size for the web.

What is known

No one can say what share of the roads is known. Each new survey by lidar, a laser scan made from the air that sees through the forest, finds roads no one knew of.

A survey of 2,144 square kilometers in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve found about 106 km of causeways within and between sites (Canuto et al., 2018). In the Mirador basin, a study found about 177 km of raised roads joining close to 1,000 settlements (Hansen et al., 2023). In 2023, INAH mapped an 18 km road between Uxmal and Kabah. Lidar also shows that the road from Cobá to Yaxuná turns and bends, so it runs longer than the 100 km long assumed.

What is still walked

No count exists. Visitors walk short sacbeob inside sites, such as the road from El Castillo to the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. Few of the long roads survive whole. The road from Cobá to Yaxuná lies overgrown, crossed by modern roads.

Still to check

Two claims I have read but not yet traced to a scholarly source. One is that the Maya also called the Milky Way a white road. The other is that a common greeting in Yucatec Maya today asks, in effect, how is your road.

Why this name

A network still being found, named by a word the Maya carved themselves. That is close to where I stand in this study.

Knowing little and connecting dots.

Sources

  1. Ardren, T., Hutson, S. R., Stanton, T. W., Rohrer, P., & Lowry, J. P. (2026). Sacbe 1 and Classic Maya urban culture. Latin American Antiquity, 37(1), 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/laq.2024.47
  2. Canuto, M. A., Estrada-Belli, F., Garrison, T. G., Houston, S. D., Acuña, M. J., Kováč, M., Marken, D., Nondédéo, P., Auld-Thomas, L., Castanet, C., Chatelain, D., Chiriboga, C. R., Drápela, T., Lieskovský, T., Tokovinine, A., Velasquez, A., Fernández-Díaz, J. C., & Shrestha, R. (2018). Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala. Science, 361(6409), Article eaau0137. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau0137
  3. Hansen, R. D., et al. (2023). In Ancient Mesoamerica. To verify the full reference.
  4. INAH (2023). Report of the Uxmal to Kabah sacbe, as covered by Heritage Daily. To find the INAH release.
  5. Scott, J. (2011). CU team finds ancient Mayan road buried by volcano. University of Colorado. colorado.edu
  6. Stuart, D. (2006). The inscribed markers of the Coba-Yaxuna causeway and the glyph for sakbih. Mesoweb. mesoweb.com
  7. Wikipedia. Sacbe. wikipedia.org. To replace with a scholarly source.
  8. Yucatan Times. Sacbeob. theyucatantimes.com