A favorite for adventure travel and jungle tours, The Mundo Maya - or Mayan World - is an area of roughly 300,000 square kilometers (116,000 square miles) in Central America, covering the whole of Belize and Guatemala and parts of Honduras, El Salvador and the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. All over this area the ancient Mayans left evidence of their existence in the form of limestone constructions.
the classic Mayan period
Ancient Mayan history dates back over 2,000 years ago, however new discoveries reveal even more ancient constructions. The oldest Mayan construction found to date was discovered recently in San Bartolo, Guatemala. It seems to date back to the year 300 BC, but there are still many temples, stellae and tombs hidden under the thick jungles of Mesoamerica.
The ancient Classic Period is dated from 250 to 900 AD. Anything before that is called pre-classic and anything afterwards is post-classic. In the Pre-Classic Period Mayan settlements were formed and the first limestone temple constructions were built. The Classic Period saw the peak of architecture, constructions and inscriptions all throughout the Mayan world.
To summarize classic Mayan history is as good as impossible. If science is really honest, it has to admit that it has no clue. You can, however, divide Mayan archaeology into two streams: Traditional, mainstream archaeology and something you might want to call a more recent, spiritual archaeology.
Whereas mainstream Mayan archaeology started back in the late 1800's, when the first Western archaeologists (like Maudsley, Mahler, and Thompson) started studying the ancient culture, a more recent idea on Mayan archaeology started to grow about 40 years ago.
Mainstream archaeology believes that the Maya had a highly developed but brutal civilization, in which wars were fought over power and territory in a system of casts, where slaves were forced to build temples for their priests and kings and an elite ruled over the poor with a polytheist religion.
The more recent stream of Mayan archaeology thinks of the ancient Maya as a more peaceful people that were in close contact with nature and the universe. In this philosophy, the temples were built not for god worshipping or elite housing, but for observation of the universe and alignment with universal cycles.
Both streams agree on the fact that around 900 AD there came an abrupt end to the Mayan Classic period. Some think it was war or the lack of a powerful figure that ended this advanced civilization, others say the Maya had to destroy their environment to keep up with a growing number of citizens and constructions, where still others claim the Mayans understood that their cycle had come to an end and abandoned their cities without leaving a trace of their continuation.
