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The 2012 Season of the Chan Chich Archaeological Project
of the creek in his report as a succession of
pools in the dry season and the fact that his
map does not show the creek connecting to
the Rio Bravo suggest that he only crossed the
creek southwest of the ruins of Chan Chich,
certainly along the border between Guatemala
and British Honduras, but possibly along the
road between Kaxil Uinic and San Jose.
To return to the issue at hand, Kaxil Uinic
village, Teobert Maler (1910:151) makes
two mentions of “Kaxilvinic” on his journey
from Merida in Yucatan to Lake Peten-Itza
in Guatemala. Departing the small village of
Chúnkutil, Mexico on May 9, 1895, Maler
(1910:151) reported:
The second day’s march brought us
to the wholly abandoned settlement
of Santa Rita…From this Santa Rita
a path branches to the left, to the east,
toward Kaxilvinic, three days’ journey
distant, and Icaiché, the dread retreat
of the free Mayas, is two days distant
from Kaxilvinic. Today this path is
untraveled and wholly overgrown.
Icaiche was a settlement in southern Quintana
Roo, infamous for harassing the British in
northern Belize in the nineteenth century
(Bolland 1977). The Maya living at Kaxil
Uinic were a splinter group that had migrated
from the Chichanha region of Mexico into the
area following the Caste War in 1857 (Jones
1977). This group, which moved into an
unoccupied region of Belize and Guatemala,
became known as the San Pedro Maya, named
after the principal village south of Labouring
Creek (Jones 1977:141). Jones (1977:157,
162) reports that Kaxil Uinic was settled in
the 1880s as the third village in what he calls
the San José Minor Cluster, speculating that
migrants from a Holmul cluster village named
Holuitz that was abandoned sometime after
1868 may have originally settled Kaxil Uinic
village. Jones also (1977:161–162) provides
the most detailed account of the settlement in
the literature:
Kaxiluinic was on the Río Bravo,
about 19 kilometers west-northwest
of San José and about 5 kilometers
from the western boundary line. It
does not appear in the historical record
until January 1885, when Mexicans
were said to have escaped through
the settlement following some grisly
murders committed by them at a
mahogany bank near San José. Later
that year a British party under William
Miller began to resurvey the western
boundary line and ran into difficulty
with the inhabitants of Kaxiluinic, who
apparently considered themselves to
be on Mexican territory. Gov. Roger
Tucksfield Goldsworthy asked Gen.
Gabriel Tamay of Icaiche to order the
alcalde of Kaxiluinic, one Antonio
Baños, to put a stop to the disturbances.
Tamay, however, had already denied
knowledge of the settlement. Tamay’s
denial was false, for in July there were
further “disquieting rumours from
the village of Kaxi Venic regarding
the attitude of the Indians of Ycaiche
towards the Survey Party,” and the
survey party later crossed “an old trail
that was supposed to be lead from Xaxe-
Venic to Ycaiche.” Miller’s map of
the Western frontier shows Kaxiluinic
connected with both Icaiche and San
José by this path.
The intersection of the discussions about Kaxil
Uinic village and Kaxil Uinic ruins come in the
form of Sir J. Eric S. Thompson (1963), who
planned to excavate the ruins using labor from
the village in 1931. Thompson mentioned that
“There is a Maya village at Kaxwinik, where
it should be easy to obtain labor, thus avoiding
the expense of importing labor and the laborers’
food, the transportation of which during the
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