Preconquest Guatemala
The present-day boundaries of Guatemala date only from 1838. During the colonial period and the early days of independence, the captaincy general of Guatemala consisted of the present-day republics of Central America — Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica — plus the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas. What is today Guatemala contained within its borders major centers of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization, although the Mayan culture area extended into present-day Honduras, Chiapas, and Yucatán in southeast Mexico. Presumably the first inhabitants of the region were nomadic hunters; archaeological evidence of permanent settlement dates from the second millennium BC. Settlements from that era have been excavated on the outskirts of present-day Guatemala City. in the country's Highlands, and in the hot rain forest area of northern Guatemala known as the Petén.
Although the earliest permanent settlements seem to have been in the Highlands. the most notable achievements of classic Mayan culture are to be found in the lowland areas. The so-called Old Empire, or classical period, which flowered in the first five or six centuries AD (though a minority of scholars place it 250 years later). was notable especially for its architecture, mathematics. and astronomy. Attempts to decipher the Mayan chronology traditionally depended on translations of the calendric symbols found in the Mayan ruins and on clues provided by Bishop Diego de Landa of Yucatán in the sixteenth century. The various readings of the symbols, however, do not coincide.
In the 1930s the Spinden and Makemson system, which placed the beginnings of the Mayan classic, or golden, age at A.D. 68, was the most popular. In the 1940s a system called the Goodman-Martinez Thompson calendar, which moved the date 250 years ahead to AD 317, became dominant. A more recent method of establishing the chronology uses radioactive carbon tests that confirm the ages of wood found in Mayan artifacts. These tests. which are increasingly being accepted, strongly favor the Spinden and Makemson calendar.
The Mayans did not develop a phonetic alphabet; they used instead only a limited system of hieroglyphics. Their number system was vigesimal rather than decimal (that is. based on the number 20 rather than 10) and lent itself to facile representation and manipulation. It was certainly more efficient than its Roman contemporary. The annual calendar was based on 18 months of 20 days each. with an extra five-day holiday period; the Mayans had made exact calculations. however, showing that the solar year is fractionally longer than 365 days. Their precise astronomical calculations enabled them to predict solar eclipses. Some observers assert that the ancient Mayan calendar was still in use in some rural areas of the country.
The ancient Mayan economy employed neither beasts of burden, metal tools, nor the wheel. Society was rigorously theocratic; only the ruling priestly class and their servants lived in the cities. which were the religious centers, and plots of farmland were owned by clans and families rather than individuals. Human sacrifices were used in the religion. and there were probably slaves — prisoners taken in the wars that went on among the various cities and states.
For reasons that remain obscure, the Mayan civilization of the Old Empire declined. Cities were abandoned. Various causes have been suggested disease. political revolution, war, the exhaustion of the soil — but they remain speculative. In later centuries neoclassical Mayan culture flourished in northern Yucatán ; this culture was not pure Mayan, however, but showed influences from central Mexico.
Meanwhile, invaders from Mexico penetrated and conquered the Guatemalan Highlands and intermarried with the local residents. Although one of these invading groups from Mexico, the Quiché, was for a time dominant in much of the Highlands, by the time the Spaniards arrived the various political entities in the Highlands were in a state of continuous war with each other. The Spaniards and their Mexican allies were at first regarded not as a threat by some city-states but rather as allies in these internecine wars, and it was not until the Spanish presence was well established that the Indians realized the danger that the Spaniards represented.
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