Village of the Geek

New finds at a recently-rediscovered Maya city have pushed back the development of Maya culture by "several centuries," says the L.A. Times on May 5.

Archeologists excavating a 2,500-year-old Maya city in Guatemala have unearthed buildings and massive carvings indicating the presence of a royal metropolis of more than 10,000 people at a time when, scientists had previously believed, the Maya were only simple farmers.

New studies at the Cival site in the Peten jungle have unearthed the oldest known carved portrait of a Maya king and two massive stone masks of the Maya maize deity, discoveries indicating that the Maya developed a complex and sophisticated civilization hundreds of years earlier than previously believed. ...

[The work of Vanderbilt University archeologist Francisco] Estrada-Belli "is pushing back the time for the evidence of Maya state institutions by several centuries," said archeologist Elsa Redmond of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Cival is a Preclassic Period (c. 2000 BCE - 250 CE) city; it was found in the course of studying a Classic Period (beginning about 300 CE) Maya city in the area using satellite imaging and global positioning systems. (CE and BCE - Common Era and Before Common Era - are now preferred by archeolgists over their Christian-based equivalents of AD and BC - Anno Domini, or "the year of Our Lord," and Before Christ.)

The more we look, the more we learn.