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The Maya Region is traditionally divided into three cultural and geographic, first order subdivisions, namely, the Maya Lowlands, Maya Highlands, and the Maya Pacific. [6] [note 5] The Region's internal borders, like some of its external ones, are not usually precisely fixed, as they are rather demarcated by 'subtle environmental changes or transitions from one zone to another.' [7] [8 ...
"Maya" is a modern term used to refer collectively to the various peoples that inhabited this area, as Maya peoples have not had a sense of a common ethnic identity or political unity for the vast majority of their history. [2]
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.
The Lowlands have been deemed the 'most central [subdivision of the Maya Region] to the story of Maya civilisation,' with tentative estimates placing the region's population in circa AD 800 at 2–10 million, and 17 of the largest 19 ancient Maya cities located in the region. [25] [26] [note 13]
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]
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 ...
The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of ...
Geologic mapping and dating of rocks in the Maya Mountains have 'led to a variety of interpretations and eventually to puzzling discrepancies between reported field relations, age of fossils, and geochronologic data.' [35] An early 1955 study divided the Mountains' sedimentary rocks into Macal and Maya series or formations, but these were ...