Maya Civilization Origins Come Into Focus: Excavation Reveals More Complicated Story Than Previously Believed

Maya civilization, while well understood in terms of its religious structures, writing system and mathematical and astronomical developments, has long been shroud in mystery when it comes to understanding its origins.

For years, anthropologists have touted two main theories, one of which states that the civilization originated more or less independently in the jungles of modern-day Guatemala and southern Mexico. The other posits that it developed as the result of influences from the older Olmec civilization and its center of La Venta.

However, a team of researchers led by University of Arizona researchers Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan have found reasons to believe the story is not as simple as either hypothesis makes it out to be.

In their excavations of an ancient Maya site in Guatemala called Ceibal, the group found that the place actually predated the growth of La Venta as a major center by as much as 200 years. For this reason, the researchers argue in their study published in the journal Science, it’s doubtful that the Olmec city could really be called “the” prevailing influence over early Maya development.

“We have this idea of the origin of Maya civilization as an indigenous development, and we have this other idea that it was an external influence that triggered the social complexity of Maya civilization,” paper co-author and UA anthropology graduate student Victor Castillo said in a press release. “We’re now thinking it’s not actually black and white.”

What it does suggest, however, is that both cities, Ceibal and La Venta, were both players in a broader cultural shift that took place between 1,150 and 800 B.C.

“Basically, there was a major social change happening from the southern Maya lowlands to possibly the coast of Chiapas and the southern Gulf Coast, and this site of Ceibal was part of that broader social change,” Inomata said. “The emergence of a new form of society – with new architecture, with new rituals – became really the important basis for all later Mesoamerican civilizations.”