Word: tikal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Maya crouch in the 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...
...hundred years, they spread north, east and south, until Maya cities & towns dotted an area of 125,000 square miles. No one knows the total number of settlements, but there were "countless" small ones, and at least 100 that were metropolitan enough to have temples, statues and hieroglyphs. Tikal, in Guatemala, may have had a population of 200,000 or more; its ruins cover several hundred acres, and include five temples, one of them over 200 feet high. Copan, in Honduras, has within its inner group of buildings a sizable stadium, sculptured stairways, terraces, pyramids. At Chichen Itza and Uxmal...