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History
The very first humans to inhabit the area now known as Guatemala were nomadic hunters. By around 1500 BC these nomads had settled into agricultural communities, farming maize, beans, squash and chillies - the staples of today's Central American diet - making pottery and building villages of thatched-roofed houses on the Pacific coast. These early famers are regarded as the first of the Maya , and it's thought that most people spoke a proto-Maya language. In the period after 1500 BC, known as the Preclassic , the population began to increase steadily throughout the Maya region (encompassing today's Guatemala and Belize, Mexico's Chiapas, Tabasco and Yucatán peninsula, and western El Salvador and Honduras).
There is little evidence that the early Maya were anything but subsistence farmers until more advanced cultures, the Mexican Olmec and Izapa , began to filter down the Pacific coast. These Mexican peoples were hugely influential on the Maya region, introducing the Long Count calendar, an early writing system and a polytheistic religion. Evidence of their sculptural skills can be seen at the Pacific coast sites around Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa and Abaj Takalik, and at the great urban centre of Kaminaljuyú , on the outskirts of Guatemala City, where there are substantial Preclassic temple mounds and granite stelae with calendric glyphs.
By the Middle Preclassic (1000-300 BC) a unified style of pottery and artefacts - including red and orange jars, dishes and stone metates (for grinding corn) - were to be found throughout the Guatemalan Maya lands. It is thought that increased harvests enabled more ambitious constructions to be undertaken, while initial astronomical studies were made. By about 400 BC the settlement of Nakbé in Petén had evolved into the most advanced centre in the northern lowlands, with a city boasting over eighty structures, including pyramids and the earliest recorded stelae in the region.
Real advances in architecture came in the Late Preclassic (300 BC-300 AD), when large pyramids and temple platforms were built at numerous sites throughout Guatemala in an explosion of Maya culture. The principal centres at this time were the cities of Kaminaljuyú, which dominated the central highlands, and the great early settlements in Petén: El Mirador, Nakbé, Uaxactún and Tikal. Traditionally, the early Maya were imagined as peaceful peasant farmers and traders, led by astronomer-priests, but in fact these new cities were bloodthirsty, warring rivals fighting for hegemony.
Of all the sites dating from this era, it is the colossal triadic structures of El Mirador that are the most astounding. Though almost entirely Late Preclassic, the temples are the highest ever built in the Maya world, rising over seventy metres above the forest and connected by a complex system of raised causeways to distant settlements. The scale of El Mirador - covering around sixteen square kilometres - was immense, and the city undoubtedly supported tens of thousands of inhabitants, including engineers, architects, farmers, labourers, and priests. This first great Maya city traded with centres as far away as the Golfo de Mexico, the Pacific and Caribbean coasts and the Guatemalan highlands.
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