ANCIENT HISTORY
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO A MILLION MISSING MAYA?
Two thousand years before the birth of Christ, there lived a mysterious people called the Maya. Their culture rivaled that of ancient Greece and made astonishing achievements in architecture, art and science. Mayan civilization reached it's glorious heyday between the third and tenth centuries. A culture deeply influenced by natural forces.Then suddenly, they were gone! No-one knows for sure what actually happened to this civilization.
At the peak of the great Maya civilization, around AD800, the density of it's cities exceeded 2,000 people per square mile, similar to Los Angeles County today. By AD950, however, populations had declined as much as 95%. The collapse remains a dark mystery. Why did they stop building their splendid cities? Where did they all go?
Although the cities died, the people endured. Distinctive Maya faces still appear throughout Central America. They seem familiar to the friezes on ancient temples and pictures in our history books.
Early explorers mapped Belize unaware of the vast cities hiding just under their feet. Thousands of structures - some still taller than modern Belizean buildings - waiting patiently in the jungle. Excavated in the 20th century, they now testify about the ancient Maya civilization, which endured longer than the Roman Empire.
Over 600 hundred sites have been discovered to date in Belize. New artifacts and even major sites seem to be discovered on a regular basis. And excavation projects are taking place all over Belize today. While only a fraction of the known sites are open to the public, those that are accessible will provide more than a glimpse of how spectacular this civilization was and how much a part of Belize history it is.
In more recent times, it was in 1603 that the famed English pirate Peter Wallace (Black beard himself), set up a refuge for his crew and other dubious seafaring types at the mouth of the Belize river, which is where Belize City sits today. His means of income was to extract from the Spanish ships leaving Panama on their way home to Spain, some, not all of the precious cargo they had plundered form the Indians of South America. Poetic justice!
Later, when piracy turned out not to be the best of career paths, the pirates changed tack and became loggers extracting the precious hardwoods of the Belizean jungle for shipment to England to help power the industrial revolution that was beginning at that time.
We endeavor to inspire a sense of adventure and the tradition of exploration; we encourage people to actively learn about our world and creatively act to understand the humanitarian and environmental problems we face, simply by way of 'hands on' LAND ROVER driving experiences here in Belize.
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