El Mirador
A Maya city at its height before the Classic period began
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El Mirador is a city complex deep in the rainforest of northern Guatemala, abandoned for nearly two thousand years and rediscovered only in the 1920s. The La Danta complex is by volume among the largest structures in the world. El Mirador shows that Maya civilisation reached city-state scale long before the Classic period, and that it collapsed and rose again — the collapse around 150 CE was as real as the more famous one in the ninth century. Lidar mapping from 2018 onward has revealed the area was far more densely built and linked by causeways raised across the swamps.
For children
Deep in the rainforest of Guatemala lies a city with some of the largest pyramids ever built in the Americas. It flourished centuries before the Maya cities most people know, and had been abandoned long before the Spanish arrived.
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