Maya new discovery

A bit of Maya history:

Early Maya corn farmers had settled in Lamanai around 1500 B.C., and the first stone buildings appeared between 800 and 600B.C. During what is known as the late Pre-classic period (approximately 450 B.C. – A.D. 300) the city became one of the largest in the Maya area. Other centers outgrew Lamanai during the Classic age (A.D. 300-900), but it continued to expand, reaching its apogee in the seventh century. Then Lamanai began a slow decline. There was no clear break at the end of the Classic period. The inhabitants even built a small ball court (a stadium for the ritual ball game)when great cities such as Tikal, Copan, and Palenque were already ruins and until about A.D. 1200 they carried on repairing the fronts of some pyramids while the forest claimed the backs and sides. The life of Lamanai gradually shifted a mile to the south and the architecture became less ambitious. When the Spaniards arrived, the inhabitants were living in the sort of houses the Maya still build: oval thatched dwellings with stone or pole walls, raised on small platforms. In the late 1630s the Belize Maya through off Spanish rule. It is difficult to say what happened after that. Old world diseases struck hard at Indian populations throughout the Americas.

The remote ancestors of the Maya, like those of all American Indians, most probably discovered the New World by crossing a Bering land bridge from Asia between twelve and thirty thousand years ago.  At that time they were Nomadic hunters and gatherers. About nine thousand years ago, Mesoamericans invented agriculture, gradually developing food staples from wild corn, beans and squash. With faming came settled villages, population growth and societies of greater and greater complexity.

Maya civilization seems to have been stimulated initially by the Olmecs, an enigmatic people who built large monuments during the second millennium B.C. After Olmecs decline, many cultures emerged in Mesoamerica, influencing and interacting with each other as did the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans of the Mediterranean. The Maya have aptly been called the Greeks of the New World. They lived in city-states that differed widely in detail while sharing a rich cultural tradition. Their main achievements were cultural not political. They never built an empire. No two Maya cities were alike. Larmanai had bald pyramids with smoking altars open to the sky. Copan, in Honduras was low and spacious, a city of broad staircases and wide plazas full of statuary.

The ancient Maya, like their modern descendants, spoke some twenty related languages, but in Classic times the upper classes, scribes, priests, astronomers and rulers shared a hieroglyphic writing system and possibly a Mandarin speech. On stone monuments, painted walls and illuminated books they recorded their history and their knowledge. The ruins exhale a powerful sense of loss. From all the jewels of intellect and art produced in these jungles, only three hieroglyphic books survive.