The Pre-Columbian Belize history is the period from initial indigenous presence, across millennia, to the first contacts with Europeans - the

Pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...

or ''before Columbus'' period - that occurred on the region of the

Yucatán Peninsula The Yucatán Peninsula (, also , ; es, Península de Yucatán ) is a large peninsula in southeastern Mexico and adjacent portions of Belize and Guatemala. The peninsula extends towards the northeast, separating the Gulf of Mexico to the north ...

that is present day

Belize Belize (; bzj, Bileez) is a Caribbean and Central American country on the northeastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a wate ...

. Belize's history begins with the Palaeoindians. They were

nomad A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the po ...

ic people that arrived in the Asia to the Americas migration across the frozen Bering Strait, perhaps as early as 35,000 years ago. In the course of many millennia, their descendants settled in and adapted to different environments in the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

, creating many cultures in North America,

Central America Central America ( es, América Central or ) is a subregion of the Americas. Its boundaries are defined as bordering the United States to the north, Colombia to the south, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. ...

, and

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

. The

Mayan Mayan most commonly refers to: * Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Mayan languages, language family spoken ...

culture emerged in the lowland area of the

and the highlands to the south, in what is now southeastern

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

, Guatemala, western Honduras, and

. Between about 2500 BC and AD 250, the basic institutions of Mayan civilization developed. The peak of this civilization occurred during the Classic Period, which began about AD 250. Many aspects of this culture persist in the area despite nearly half a millennium of European presence. All evidence, whether from archaeology, history, ethnography, or linguistics, points to a cultural continuity in this region. The descendants of the first settlers in the area have lived there for at least three millennia.Bolland, Nigel (1993). "Belize: Historical Setting". I
''Guyana and Belize: Country Studies''
(Tim Merrill, editor),

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

Federal Research Division The Federal Research Division (FRD) is the research and analysis unit of the United States Library of Congress. The Federal Research Division provides directed research and analysis on domestic and international subjects to agencies of the Unit ...

. ''This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

.''

Archaic period (c. 8,000—2,500 BC)

During the late Archaic period (circa 3000 BC), some hunting and foraging bands settled in small farming villages along the coast of what is now Belize. While hunting and foraging continued to play a part in their subsistence, these farmers domesticated crops such as maize, beans, squash, and chili peppers, which are still the basic foods in Central America. Farmers engaged in various types of agriculture, including labor-intensive irrigated and ridged-field systems and shifting

slash-and-burn Slash-and-burn agriculture is a farming method that involves the cutting and burning of plants in a forest or woodland to create a field called a swidden. The method begins by cutting down the trees and woody plants in an area. The downed veget ...

agriculture. Their products fed the civilization's craft specialists, merchants, warriors, and priest-astronomers, who coordinated agricultural and other seasonal activities with a cycle of rituals in ceremonial centers. These priests, who observed the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars, developed a complex mathematical and calendrical system to coordinate various cycles of time and to record specific events on carved

stela A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), wh ...

Maya civilisation

Preclassic period (c. 2500 BC—250 AD)

During the Preclassic period, the settlements along the coast grew and spread west into the interior.

Emerging information from western Belize suggests that ceramic-using populations may have been in place as early as ca. 1200 B.C. at
Cahal Pech Cahal Pech is a Maya site located near the town of San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize. The site was a palatial, hilltop home for an elite Maya family, and though the most major construction dates to the Classic period, evidence of continuo ...
and perhaps elsewhere (Awe 1992; Clark and Cheetham 2002; Garber et al. 2004; Healy and Awe 1995). While these complexes, termed "Cunil" at Cahal Pech and "Kanocha" at Blackman Eddy, remain to be broadly documented across the Belize River Valley, they are the earliest established ceramic technologies recorded in western Belize.

At the northern sites, the pottery is now believed to have come somewhat later. At the

Cuello Cuello is a Maya archaeological site in northern Belize. The site is that of a farming village with a long occupational history. It was originally dated to 2000 BC, but these dates have now been corrected and updated to around 1200 BC. Its inhab ...

site, from perhaps as early as 1000 BC, jars, bowls, and other dishes found there are among the oldest pottery unearthed in Mesoamerica. The site, five kilometers west of

Orange Walk Orange marches are a series of parades by members of the Orange Order and other Protestant fraternal societies, held during the summer months in various Commonwealth nations, most notably Ulster. The parades typically build up to 12 July ce ...

, includes platforms of buildings arranged around a small plaza, indicating a distinctly Mayan community. The presence of shell, hematite, and jade shows that the Maya were trading over long distances as early as 1500 BC. The Mayan economy, however, was still basically subsistence, combining foraging and cultivation, hunting, and fishing.

Cerros Cerros is an Eastern Lowland Maya archaeological site in northern Belize that functioned from the Late Preclassic to the Postclassic period. The site reached its apogee during the Mesoamerican Late Preclassic and at its peak, it held a populati ...

, a site on

Chetumal Bay Chetumal Bay is a large bay of the western Caribbean Sea on the southern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is located in northern Belize and southeastern Mexico. Geography The mouth of Chetumal Bay is directed southward and buffered by the ...

, was a flourishing trade and ceremonial centre between about 300 BC and AD 100. It displays some distinguishing features of early Mayan civilisation. The architecture of Mayan civilisation included temples and palatial residences organised in groups around plazas. These structures were built of cut stone, covered with stucco, and elaborately decorated and painted. Stylised carvings and paintings of people, animals, and gods, along with sculptured stelae and geometric patterns on buildings, constitute a highly developed style of art. Impressive six-feet-high masks decorate the temple platform at Cerros. These masks, situated on either side of the central stairway, represent a serpent god.

Classic period (c. 250—900 AD)

Altún Ha

The Maya were skilled at making pottery, carving jade,

knapping Knapping is the shaping of flint, chert, obsidian, or other conchoidal fracturing stone through the process of lithic reduction to manufacture stone tools, strikers for flintlock firearms, or to produce flat-faced stones for building or facing w ...

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and sta ...

, and making elaborate costumes of feathers. One of the largest carved jade objects of Mayan civilisation was found in a tomb at the classic period site of Altun Ha, thirty kilometers northwest of present-day

Belize City Belize City is the largest city in Belize and was once the capital of the former British Honduras. According to the 2010 census, Belize City has a population of 57,169 people in 16,162 households. It is at the mouth of the Haulover Creek, w ...

. Usually stated to be the head of the sun god,

Kinich Ahau Kinich Ahau (Kʼinich Ajaw) is the 16th-century Yucatec name of the Maya sun god, designated as God G when referring to the codices. In the Classic period, God G is depicted as a middle-aged man with an aquiline nose, large square eyes, cross-eye ...

, it is actually quite unlike this deity, save for the square and squinting eyes. Settled at least as early as 200 BC, the Altún Ha area at its peak had an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. At the beginning of the second century AD, the inhabitants built their first major structure, a temple. The visitor today sees a group of temples, priests' residences, and other buildings around two adjacent plazas. In the vicinity, there are hundreds of other structures, most of which are still unexcavated. The Maya continued to rebuild some of the temples until almost the end of the ninth century. Excavations at Altun Ha have produced evidence suggesting that a revolt, perhaps of peasants against the priestly class, contributed to the downfall of the civilisation. People may have continued to live at or to visit the site in the postclassic period, even though the ceremonial centres were left to decay. Some rubbish found at Altún Ha shows that people were at the site in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perhaps to reuse the old structures or undertake pilgrimages to the old religious centre. The recorded history of the centre and south is dominated by

Caracol Caracol is a large ancient Maya archaeological site, located in what is now the Cayo District, of Belize. It is situated approximately south of Xunantunich, and the town of San Ignacio, and from the Macal River. It rests on the Vaca Plateau ...

, where the inscriptions on their monuments was, as elsewhere, in the Lowland Maya aristocratic tongue Classic Ch'olti'an. North of the

Maya Mountains The Maya Mountains are a mountain range located in Belize and eastern Guatemala, in Central America. Etymology The Maya Mountains were known as the ''Cockscomb'' or ''Coxcomb Mountains'' to Baymen and later Belizeans at least until the mid-2 ...

, the inscriptional language at

Lamanai Lamanai (from ''Lama'anayin'', "submerged crocodile" in Yucatec Maya) is a Mesoamerican archaeological site, and was once a major city of the Maya civilization, located in the north of Belize, in Orange Walk District. The site's name is pre-Columb ...

on Hill Bank Lagoon in Orange Walk District was Yucatecan as of 625 CE. Other Mayan centres located in Belize include

Xunantunich Xunantunich () is an Ancient Maya archaeological site in western Belize, about 70 miles (110 km) west of Belize City, in the Cayo District. Xunantunich is located atop a ridge above the Mopan River, well within sight of the Guatemala bord ...

and Baking Pot in Cayo District, Lubaantún an
Nimli Punit
in

Toledo District Toledo District is the southernmost district in Belize, and Punta Gorda is the District capital. It is the second most developed region in the country (according to the Human Development Index (HDI)). The district has a diverse topography whic ...

Xunantunich

, meaning "Lady of the Rock," was occupied perhaps as early as 300 BC, but most of the architecture there was constructed in the late classic period. As in all the lowland Mayan centres, the inhabitants continually constructed temples and residences over older buildings, enlarging and raising the platforms and structures in the process. The views are breathtaking from Xunantunich's "El Castillo," which, at 128 feet, is the one of the tallest man-made structures in Belize. Canaa (Sky Palace), located at Caracol, measures 140 feet and is Belize's highest man-made structure. Lamanai, less accessible to tourists than Altun Ha or Xunantunich, is an important site because it provides archaeological evidence of the Mayan presence over many centuries, beginning around AD 150. Substantial populations were present throughout the classic and postclassic periods. Indeed, people living in the area were still refacing some of the massive ceremonial buildings after the great centres, such as

Tikal Tikal () (''Tik’al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-C ...

in neighbouring Guatemala, had been virtually abandoned in the tenth century.

Late classic period

In the late classic period, it is estimated that between 400,000 and 1,000,000 people inhabited the area that is now Belize. People settled almost every part of the country worth cultivating, as well as the cayes and coastal swamp regions.

Postclassic period (c. 10th—early 16th century)

In the tenth century, Mayan society suffered a severe breakdown. Construction of public buildings ceased, the administrative centres lost power, and the population declined as social and economic systems lost their coherence. Some people continued to occupy, or perhaps reoccupied, sites such as Altun Ha, Xunantunich, and Lamanai, but these sites ceased being splendid ceremonial and civic centres. At the end of the postclassic period, the area that is now Belize included three distinct Maya territories:

Chetumal Province {{use dmy dates, date=August 2021 {{Use British English, date=August 2021 {{Infobox former country , native_name = ''u kuchkabal Chetumal'' (Yucatec Maya language, Yucatecan Mayan) , conventional_long_name = Province of Chetumal ...

, which encompassed the area around

Corozal Bay Corozal Bay is an inlet of Chetumal Bay, indenting northern Belize. Several resort areas are located on the coast of the bay, most notably Corozal Town. The New River (Belize) flows north into the bay. The town of Consejo is located north-northea ...

; Dzuluinicob Province, which encompassed the area between the New River and the

Sibun River The Sibun River (Xibun River, formerly Sheboon River) is a river in Belize which drains a large central portion of the country. The Sibun ( Xibun) were ancient Maya people who inhabited the region. The headwaters of the Sibun River are located ...

, west to Tipu; and a southern territory controlled by the Manche Ch'ol Maya, encompassing the area between the Monkey River and the

Sarstoon River The Sarstoon River ( es, link=no, Río Sarstún) is a Central American river that forms part of the international border between Belize and Guatemala. The river's source lies in Guatemala's Alta Verapaz Department. It flows eastward, serving as ...

References

Readings

* * * {{Pre-Columbian 01 History of Belize by period