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Bernal Díaz del Castillo Map of the principal entry routes and battle sites of the conquest of Guatemala The conquistadors were all volunteers, the majority of whom did not receive a fixed salary but instead a portion of the spoils of victory, in the form of precious metals, land grants and provision of native labour. Many of the Spanish were already experienced soldiers who had previously ...
Satellite view of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Maya civilization occupied the Maya Region, a wide territory that included southeastern Mexico and northern Central America; this area included the entire Yucatán Peninsula, and all of the territory now incorporated into the modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. [4]
Tikal (/ tiˈkɑːl /; Tik'al in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, [2] found in a rainforest in Guatemala. [3] It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It is located in the archeological region of the Petén ...
Kaminaljuyu (pronounced / k æ m i n æ l ˈ h uː j uː /; from Kʼicheʼʼ, "The Hill of the Dead" [1]) is a Pre-Columbian site of the Maya civilization located in Guatemala City. Primarily occupied from 1500 BC to 1200 AD, [ 2 ] it has been described as one of the greatest archaeological sites in the New World [ 3 ] —although the extant ...
The city of Tikal, later to be one of the most important of the Classic Period Maya cities, was already a significant city by around 350 BC, although it did not match El Mirador. [21] The Late Preclassic cultural florescence collapsed in the 1st century AD and many of the great Maya cities of the epoch were abandoned; the cause of this collapse ...
During the Early Classic period, the Maya cities of Tikal and Kaminaljuyu were key Maya foci in a network that extended into the highlands of central Mexico; [8] there was a strong Maya presence at the Tetitla compound of Teotihuacan. [9] The Maya city of Chichen Itza and the distant Toltec capital of Tula had an especially close relationship. [10]
The history of Guatemala traces back to the Maya civilization (2600 BC – 1697 AD), with the country's modern history beginning with the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in 1524. By 1000 AD, most of the major Classic-era (250–900 AD) Maya cities in the Petén Basin, located in the northern lowlands, had been abandoned.
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]