HISTORY OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST OF YUCATAN AND OF THE ITZAS

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what is now the Department of Peten in Guatemala.

A few decades ago it was the fashion to credit the aboriginal peoples
of America with a civilization of enormous antiquity. But the whole
trend of modern scientific investigation tends to prove that the
American continent was one of the last parts of the world to be settled
and that, at the time of the Spanish conquest, the aboriginal cultures
were certainly not more than three thousand or so years old. Even this
estimate should be understood to include centuries of migratory
shiftings and centuries of development along lines which eventually led
to the erection of the earlier types of high culture in Middle and
South America. Roughly speaking, the time of Christ coincides with the
period at which the earliest high cultures in this hemisphere began to
flourish.

For the sake of convenience we shall follow the chronology suggested by
Mr. Morley (1915) and divide the pre-Columbian history of the Maya race