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The Maya civilization (/ ˈ m aɪ ə /) was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. It is known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script). The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas .
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 social basis of the Classic Maya civilization was an extended political and economic network that reached throughout the Maya area and beyond into the greater Mesoamerican region. [54] The dominant Classic period polities were located in the central lowlands; during this period the southern highlands and northern lowlands can be considered ...
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.
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]
It was only the great Maya megacities (some with populations between 30,000 and 180,000) and their spectacular pyramid-building traditions that declined (first, by around 900AD in the south of the ...
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 ...
Cobá took its place in Maya culture no earlier than 100 B.C., and enjoyed a continuous life as a city until about 1,200 A.D. Known as the “city of chopped water,” the site may have had up to ...