Word: mayapan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Yucatan bush and the Guatemalan-Honduran jungles. They were already in ruins when Hernando Cortes marched into Mexico 400 years ago to teach Montezuma's Aztecs a Spanish lesson. The names of those deserted cities echo with a kind of distant, mournful music: Tikal, Copan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Mayapan...
Morley believes that the great Mayan cities were slowly abandoned, one after the other, principally because of crop failures, partly because of epidemics, social disintegration, wars. The last great city founded was Mayapan, about A.D. 1000. It was sacked by local rivals some 450 years later. Within another century Cortes and his Spaniards appeared. Their conquest of the Maya lands was difficult and protracted, for the Maya were degenerate but they were stubborn...
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