A US consul bought Chichén Itzá for 200 pesos and shipped the Sacred Cenote's offerings to Harvard; his heirs won the land back in Mexico's Supreme Court

The Maya threw gold, carved jade, pottery and people into the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. In 1894 Edward H. Thompson, US consul in Yucatán, bought the Hacienda Chichén, which included most of the ruins, for 200 pesos. From 1904 he dredged the cenote, then hired divers; he stopped in 1911. He shipped thousands of objects to the United States, and they went to Harvard's Peabody Museum and the Field Museum. The archaeologist Teobert Maler accused him of theft. In 1926 Mexican federal authorities charged Thompson and seized the hacienda. Thompson died in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1935. In 1944 Mexico's Supreme Court ruled he had broken no law, and the property reverted to his heirs, who sold it to the tourism businessman Fernando Barbachano Peón. In December 1959 the Peabody returned 94 gold pieces to Mexico. Barbachano died in 1964 and the land passed to his two children. His grandson Hans Jürgen Thies Barbachano inherited the parcel holding El Castillo, the Great Ball Court and the Temple of the Warriors. In 2007 a federal deputy asked, "How can a Wonder of the World have owners?" On 29 March 2010 Thies Barbachano agreed to sell about 200 acres to the State of Yucatán for 220 million pesos ($17.6 million). Thompson's collection of about 30,000 objects is split among US museums, private collections and INAH.