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The Maya area within Mesoamerica. The Maya (/ ˈ m aɪ ə /) are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica.The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region.
The Maya civilization developed in the Maya Region, an area that today comprises southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. It includes the northern lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula and the Guatemalan Highlands of the Sierra Madre , the Mexican state of Chiapas , southern Guatemala ...
Maya also migrated to other Central American countries like Mexico, but a large amount migrated to the United States. Today, Maya have settled in places like San Francisco, Miami, and the Great Plains. Providence, Rhode Island, also became a prominent destination for many Maya people during the Guatemalan Civil War. [8]
The Maya Region is firmly bounded to the north, east, and southwest by the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean, respectively. [1] [2] It is less firmly bounded to the west and southeast by 'zones of cultural interaction and transition between Maya and non-Maya peoples.' [3] [2] The western transition between Maya and non-Maya peoples roughly corresponds to the Isthmus of ...
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.
Southernmost sites of the Southern Maya area. Maya scholarship long has considered the ancient Maya in a temporal and geographic sense to have come into being, thermometer-fashion – as things began to “warm up,” socially and culturally – at the “bottom,” that is, in Southern Mesoamerica, in the Early Preclassic period: events and processes coalesced on the Pacific coast of what is ...
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]
The Maya site of Bonampak, famous for its preserved temple murals, became known to the outside world when Lacandóns led American photographer Giles Healy there in 1946. A few Lacandon continue their traditional religious practices today, especially in the north around Lakes Naja and Mensabok.