| In 2000 BC fishing villages settled on Guatemala's
Pacific coast and became the vanguard of a great civilization known as the Mayans.
By AD 250, temple cities dominated the Guatemalan highlands and ushered in the
empire's golden age. At the turn of the millenium (1000 AD), the Mayan civilization
had collapsed due to causes unknown today. Disease, overpopulation, these are
some of the theories yet no one can say for sure. In 1523 when the Spaniard Pedro
de Alvarado came to conquer Guatemala, he found only remnants of the Mayan civilization,
a fractured land of warring tribes. Alvarado's men subjugated these tribes, enslaved
the people, and took their land. The subsequent arrivals of Spanish missionaries
who might have wanted to stop these crimes but could not, added their own form
of imperialism, religious in nature, which may have caused the most destruction
to what remained of living Mayan culture. These ruins stand like the tombstones
of a bygone empire. |
