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All over Guatemala are the vestiges of cultures that flourished before the arrival of the Spanish. In the Pacific lowlands are great sculptures of animals, and massive stone heads. In the highlands stand the ruins of ceremonial and defensive cities. Spread across the jungles of the Petén are Mayan centers so numerous that they are still being rediscovered.
The older the remains, the more mysterious they are. The highland cities are the least unknown, for in some cases they were still occupied when the Spanish began their conquest. The Maya had a system of hieroglyphic writing, which along with intensive excavations of Mayan ruins, gives some idea of their history and way of life. Kaminaljuyu, near Guatemala City, is a puzzle because of the many similarities in the architectural and ceramic styles with those of Teotihuacan, an important center far to the north in central Mexico. Strangest of all are the sculptures around Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa in the Pacific lowlands, found apart from anything that would give clues as to where the people who made them came from, or what became of them.
Only the hazy outline of the development of these civilizations can be traced. Some time around 2500 B.C., descendants of the peoples who had migrated across the Bering Strait from Asia began to settle in small communities along the shores of rivers and lakes in Mesoamerica. Gradually, they turned from hunting game and collecting wild plants to a more stable way of life based on the cultivation of food crops. The greatest achievement of these early farmers, and the basis of all later development, was the domestication of corn from a wild plant to a new species that produced a surplus of food. For only when there were repeated abundant harvests could time and labour be set aside to carve sculptures and build monuments, and to create writing and numerical system.
Scenes from Guatemala.
guatemala.geo@yahoo.com
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