Tulum (Spanish pronunciation: [tuˈlun], Yucatec Maya: Tulu'um) is the site of a pre-Columbian Mayan walled city which served as a major port for Coba, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.

[1] 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.

Stephens and Catherwood also reported an early classic stele at the site, with an inscribed date of AD 564 (now in the British Museum's collection).

The work was continued by the Carnegie Institution from 1916 to 1922, Samuel Lothrop in 1924 who also mapped the site, Miguel Ángel Fernández in the late 1930s and early 1940s, William Sanders in 1956, and then later in the 1970s by Arthur G. Miller.

Through these later investigations done by Sanders and Miller, it has been determined that Tulum was occupied during the late Postclassic period around AD 1200.

[5] According to study lead researcher Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, "It really looks as if this woman had a very hard time and an extremely unhappy end of her life.

Although archeologists assumed the divers found the remains of the missing Chan Hol 2, the analysis proved that these assumptions were erroneous in a short time.

Stinnesbeck compared the new bones to old photographs of Chan Hol 2 and showed that the two skeletons represent different individuals.

[6] Due to their distinctive features, study co-researcher Samuel Rennie suggest the existence of at least two morphologically diverse groups of people living separately in Mexico during the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene.

The room usually contains one or two small windows with an altar at the back wall, roofed by either a beam-and-rubble ceiling or being vaulted.

The part of the wall that ran the width of the site was slightly shorter and only about 170 meters (560 ft) on both sides.

Constructing this massive wall would have taken an enormous amount of energy and time, which shows how important defense was to the Maya when they chose this site.

On the southwest and northwest corners there are small structures that have been identified as watch towers, showing again how well defended the city was.

Above the entrance in the western wall a stucco figure of the "diving god" is still preserved, giving the temple its name.

A mural can still be seen on the eastern wall that resembles that of a style that originated in highland Mexico, called the Mixteca-Puebla style, though visitors are no longer permitted to enter.The Temple of the Descending God consists of a single room with a door to the west and a narrow staircase that was built on top of another temple that served as its base.

The Tulum ruins are the third most-visited archeological site in Mexico, after Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza, receiving over 2.2 million visitors in 2017.

[15] Director Rachel Appel filmed a documentary entitled "The Dark Side of Tulum" in 2018 as an exposé of the environmental impacts of the local tourist industry.

The primary safety concerns in the area typically revolve around natural occurrences such as hurricanes during the months of June to October.