The Cities of the Maya
Between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries two great Mayan civilizations arose and declined in Central America.
In the dense rainforests of western Guatemala, and among the thin scrub that covers the infertile limestone plain of northern Yucatan, stand the dead cities of the Mayan civilization. More than a hundred sites of varying importance have been explored by modern archaeologists, and in the larger of them, in Copan and Palenque and Chichen Itza, in Uxmal and Tikal and Piedras Negras, the traveller sees not only the most impressive architecture and the most sensitive sculpture of all pre-Columbian America, but also the relics of a Neolithic civilization which at its height developed an astronomy and a mathematical system superior to any that existed in Europe prior to the Renaissance.
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