Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The peoples and cultures which comprised the Maya civilization spanned more than 2,500 years of Mesoamerican history, in the Maya Region of southern Mesoamerica, which incorporates the present-day nations of Guatemala and Belize, much of Honduras and El Salvador, and the southeastern states of Mexico from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec eastwards, including the entire Yucatán Peninsula.
El Mirador (which translates as "the lookout", "the viewpoint", or "the belvedere") is a large pre-Columbian Middle and Late Preclassic (1000 BC – 250 AD) Maya settlement, located in the north of the modern department of El Petén, Guatemala.
It has alternatively been interpreted as meaning "the place of the voices" in the Itza Maya language. Tikal, however, is not the ancient name for the site but rather the name adopted shortly after its discovery in the 1840s. [7] Hieroglyphic inscriptions at the ruins refer to the ancient city as Yax Mutal or Yax Mutul, meaning "First Mutal". [6]
Ideas and customs were shared extensively along this route. Sacred spaces and buildings were laid out according to cosmological principles, and innovative water management systems, ceramics, and lapidary art can be found. Today, Indigenous groups of different affiliations still consider the site a sacred place and visit it to perform rituals. [6]
Map of the Maya region showing locations of some of the principal cities. Click to enlarge. Until the 1960s, scholarly opinion was that the ruins of Maya centres were not true cities but were rather empty ceremonial centres where the priesthood performed religious rituals for the peasant farmers, who lived dispersed in the middle of the jungle. [11]
Nakbe is located in the Mirador Basin, in the Petén region of Guatemala, approximately 13 kilometers south of the largest Maya city of El Mirador. Excavations at Nakbe suggest that habitation began at the site during the Early Formative period (c. 1400 BC) and continued to be a large site until its collapse during the Terminal Formative period ...
Tayasal is a Maya archaeological site located in present-day Guatemala. It was a large Maya city with a long history of occupation. Tayasal is a corruption of Tah Itza ("Place of the Itza"), a term originally used to refer to the core of the Itza territory in Petén. [ 1 ]
Yaxha (or Yaxhá in Spanish orthography) is a Mesoamerican archaeological site in the northeast of the Petén Basin in modern-day Guatemala.As a ceremonial centre of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, Yaxha was the third largest city in the region and experienced its maximum power during the Early Classic period (c. AD 250–600).