Post by brillbilly on Oct 6, 2011 4:58:24 GMT 10
Just north of Tikal, in Petén, northern Guatemala, lies the Mirador Basin region, a 2,156 square kilometers (525,100 acre) of pristine tropical rainforest surrounding the oldest and largest Maya pyramids, city and temple complexes in the Americas.
It contains among other sites to El Mirador, the largest ancient city of the Mayan world and Tintal the second largest.
The five major cities in the basin are: El Mirador, Tintal, Xulnal, Nakbé and Wakná.
But there are at least 26 more cities, dating from the pre-classic 1000 BC to 300 AD, (In El Mirador an early uncorrected carbon date from a filling in El Tigre complex,
of 1480 BC (beta 1964) is not associated with known ceramics of this period and would have been considered erroneous except that several other samples have been recovered from throughout the site from this general time period, including Zea Mais (Corn) from 2,700 BC in Lake Puerto Arturo, nearby.
(Matheny and Matheny 1991) (Wahl, 2004), this suggests that a period of substantial burning may have occurred at that time), making it the first organized political and economic state in the American Continent that shares the same Kan Ahau emblem glyph, (The Kan Kingdom),
with all the other sites in the Mirador Basin, at the same time than the Olmec Culture, earlier thought as the first true civilization,
there are archeological proof that the Maya in Mirador developed a writing, astronomical, agricultural, economical, warfare, and all the needed skills that made the Maya, the most developed and complicate society, thousands of years before previously thought,
confirmed by the findings in two preclassic sites near the Mirador Basin, San Bartolo with its Preclasssic Murals and Cival with its giant Stucco Masks.
The grandest Mayan city of all, a 15-square-mile collection of buried temples and pyramids, is called El Mirador, or "The Lookout," in Spanish. El Mirador, was linked by limestone causeways to dozens of smaller cities, which at times battled other Mayan regions for supremacy.
El Mirador provides the richest undisturbed laboratory on the origins of the Maya civilization and its earliest kingdoms, culture, history and environment,
and the reasons of the collapse of a civilization of nearly one million people, walls enclosed strategic sectors of the ceremonial center,
so there is some evidence to suggest that war aimed at the attack of ceremonial centers concerned some lords in the Preclassic.
However, these defensive works are still a rarity in early Maya centers. Indeed, fortifications do not become a commonplace until the Terminal Classic period, nearly a thousand years later.