In popular imagination, the history of the Mayan Empire in present-day Mexico's Yucatan peninsula and Guatemala is linked chiefly with the history of the Spanish conquistadors and is likely to be conflated with the history of the Aztec Empire, which was located in another part of present-day Mexico. However, the evidence of archaeologically based analysis is that the Mayan civilization exerted extensive and distinctive influence through the Yucatan for centuries, starting with the third century AD.
Mayan cultural and political institutions were already organized and functioning when the Europeans arrived in the Yucatan. A recognizable Mayan identity has been dated from the third century AD and described as flourishing through the tenth century AD. However, Mayan civilization appears to have survived until the sixteenth-century encounter with the Spanish and to have persisted in a sense even after that into the modern period, with the descendants of the Maya surviving today as the principal ethnic subgroup of the Yucatan area. The institutions of the Maya were different from European institutions; for example, they apparently included routine human sacrifices, but the relevant point is that they were socially organized all the same. Evidence for the issue of human sacrifices has been deduced from observations of monumental decorative architecture, notably stelae that show a Mayan ruler known as 18 Rabbit wearing a belt decorated with "anthropomorphic heads (perhaps trophy heads of sacrificed enemies, perhaps supernatural beings)." (Any Eurocentric interpretation of that culture as barbaric on account of human sacrifice would do well to remember that through the sixteenth century and beyond the practice of burning heretics was part and parcel of the culture of European Christendom.)
Almost all of the knowledge about Mayan civilization has been derived and deduced from the evidence of monumental architecture characteristic of the c...