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Tagged “guatemala”

• MUST READ

  La Danta, El Mirador

  How does a society with no metal, no wheeled transport and no draft animals move roughly 2.8 million cubic metres of stone in a seasonal swamp with no rivers — and do it centuries before the Classic Maya were supposed to be capable of organising anything on that scale?

  c. 300 BCE - 150 CE (Late Preclassic), at a site occupied from the 6th century BCE and at its peak in the 3rd century BCE · El Mirador, Petén Department, GuatemalaAdded August 2026
• 

  Tikal Temple I

  How do you bury a king with a 3.9-kilogram jade necklace and a bundle of inscribed bones at the bottom of a hole, then raise fifty-five metres of limestone on top of him — and cut the doorway lintels from a wood that is still holding thirteen centuries later?

  c. 732 CE (Late Classic), raised after the death of Jasaw Chan Kʼawiil I in 734 and completed under his son · Tikal, Petén Department, GuatemalaAdded August 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  Tikal Temple V

  Why raise 57 metres of solid limestone — the second-tallest thing at Tikal — to carry a summit room less than a metre deep, sealed behind a rear wall nearly five metres thick?

  c. 650-700 CE (Late Classic); radiocarbon centres on c. 700 CE, while associated ceramics point to the reign of Nuun Ujol Chaak in the second half of the 7th century · Tikal, Petén Department, GuatemalaAdded August 2026