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Hello, the Maya people of Central America have an extraordinary history with roots 2 or 3,000

years BC.

For over a thousand years before the Spanish arrived in 1511, they created great cities in

Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, El Salvador and Belize.

Much of these are overgrown by jungle now, but their largest buildings remain.

Among the massive flat top pyramids, there are carved hieroglyphs, there are structures

arranged for astronomy and broadstone plazas.

The radical reduction of the Maya through war and disease to the Spaniards, when the Western

explorers in the Victorian times discovered what was going on there, they couldn't comprehend

that people near, living near the ruined cities were descended from those who built them.

But they are still there.

We'd meet you to discuss the Maya civilization in Elizabeth Graham, Professor of Mesoamerican

Archaeology at University College London, Matthew Restall, Edwin Earle, Sparks, Professor

of Latin American History and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, Benjamin

Vies, Eastern Arch research fellow in digital humanities at the University of Kent.

Elizabeth Graham, can you outline the range of places where the Maya lived then, and where

they lived now, than being, say, the first millennium?

In a sense, they're at Maya and are unusual because they occupy today the same places

that they did in the past.

...