This sacred site was one of the greatest Mayan centres of the Yucatán peninsula. Throughout its nearly 1,000-year history, different peoples have left their mark on the city.
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Tikal, or Yax Mutal, was an important city in the empire of the Maya from 200 to 900 A.D. The Mayan ruins have been part of a national park in Guatemala since the 1960s, and in 1979 they were named a UNESCO World Heritage site.
In the highlands of the Yucatan, a few Maya cities, such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapán, continued to flourish in the Post-Classic Period (A.D. 900-1500).
Chichen Itza, in the north, became what was probably the largest, most powerful and most cosmopolitan of all Maya cities. One of the most important cities in the Guatemalan Highlands at this time was Q'umarkaj, also known as Utatlán, the capital of the aggressive K'iche' Maya kingdom.
Nakbe in the Petén Department of Guatemala is the earliest well-documented city in the Maya lowlands, where large structures have been dated to around 750 BC.
A MYSTERIOUS MAYAN PLACELamanai was once a major city of the Maya civilization, located in the north of Belize, in Orange Walk District. The site's name is pre-Columbian, recorded by early Spanish missionaries, and documented over a millennium earlier in Maya inscriptions as Lam'an'ain.
The Spanish conquistadores arrived in the early 1500s and the last independent Mayan city, Nojpeten (in present-day Guatemala), fell to Spanish troops in 1697. The ancient cities were largely forgotten until the 19th century, when their ruins started to be uncovered by explorers and archeologists.
Mayan society at its peakAmong the most important Maya cities were Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Copán, and Calakmul. But though the Maya shared a society, it was not an empire. Instead, city-states and local rulers vacillated between peaceful coexistence and wrestling for control.
The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought (a megadrought) brought about the Classic Maya collapse. Paleoclimatologists have discovered abundant evidence that prolonged droughts occurred in the Yucatán Peninsula and Petén Basin areas during the Terminal Classic.
The Aztecs were Nahuatl-speaking people who lived in central Mexico in the 14th to 16th centuries. Their tribute empire spread throughout Mesoamerica. The Maya people lived in southern Mexico and northern Central America — a wide territory that includes the entire Yucatán Peninsula — from as early as 2600 BC.
The oldest and largest known monument built by the Mayan civilisation has been found in Mexico. Called Aguada Fénix, it is a huge raised platform 1.4 kilometres long.
The term “Maya,” while describing the Maya people as a larger cultural unit, also refers to the Mayan language family. The Maya don't actually speak Mayan. Rather, they speak Tsotsil, Mam, K'iche' or any of the various languages in the Mayan language family.
Chichen Itza was the dominant Maya city-state during the end of the Classic period and the Post-classic period. It is the home of many famous structures including: El Castillo - A pyramid and temple built to the Maya god Kukulkan.