Kaminaljuyu (pronounced ; from Quiché, "The Hill of the Dead") is a Pre-Columbian site of the Maya civilization located in Guatemala City. Primarily occupied from 1500 BC to 1200 AD, it has been described as one of the greatest archaeological sites in the New WorldCoe (2005, p. 52)although the extant remains are distinctly unimpressive. Debate continues about its size, integration, and role in the surrounding Valley of Guatemala and the Southern Maya area.Kaplan, Jonathan 2011
Kaminaljuyu, when first mapped scientifically, comprised some 200 platforms and pyramidal mounds.Sharpe, Ashley E., Bárbara Arroyo, Javier Estrada, Gloria Ajú, and Emanuel Serech. “Dogs for the Gods, Fish for the Feast: The Ceremonial Role of Animals at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala.” Latin American Antiquity 33, no. 2 (2022): 223. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27362414. The site was largely swallowed up by real estate developments. A portion of the Classic Period center is preserved as a 0.5 square km parka fraction of the original ruins field size of around 5 square km.
Archaeological excavations
The extant remains are distinctly unimpressive and are in a state of destruction with almost daily erasure of material. This is due to their location beneath urbanization and because they were constructed of hardened adobe, weaker than the limestone used to build in the Maya Lowlands.
Over the past 100 years, more than fifty archaeological projects, large and small, have been mounted at Kaminaljuyu. In addition to excavations, scholars such as Alfred Maudslay and Samuel K. Lothrop have recorded sculptures and made maps of the site. In 1925 Manuel Gamio undertook limited excavations, finding deep cultural deposits yielding potsherds and clay figurines from what later was called the "Middle Cultures" of Mesoamerica (from 1500 BC to 150 AD).Gamio, Manuel (1926–27) Cultural Evolution in Guatemala. Art and Archaeology 22:202–222; 23; 16–32; 71–78; 129–133 A decade later, the importance of the site was confirmed when a local football club began cutting away the edges of two inconspicuous mounds to lengthen their practice field, discovering an impressive buried structure. Lic. J. Antonio Villacorta C., the Minister of Public Education in Guatemala City, requested archaeologists Alfred Kidder, Jesse Jennings and Edwin Shook to investigate. Villacorta gave the site its name from a Kʼicheʼ word meaning "mounds of the ancestors."
When first mapped scientifically by E. M. Shook over a period of decades from the 1930s on, at least half of which were from before the end of the Preclassic period (250 AD). Kidder, Jennings, and Shook's monograph, published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington – one of the most important archaeological research entities in the history of Maya scholarship – brought excited attention by scholars to the significance of the SMA. This excitement turned to consensus about the priority of high social and cultural developments in the South when Shook and Kidder published their report on Mound E-III-3,Shook and Kidder (1952) a "Miraflores" mound and the largest known thus far from the site, and which contained seven structures built onion-skin fashion over and around each other through time. Two extraordinarily rich royal tombs were found within the edifices, probably representing consecutive rulers during the "Miraflores" Preclassic apogee of Kaminaljuyu.
In the early 1950s Heinrich Berlin excavated a large mound in the ancient Preclassic core of the city. In the 1960s Pennsylvania State University undertook extensive excavations at Kaminaljuyu, under the direction of William T. Sanders and Joseph W. Michels. The processualist and unilineal cultural evolutionary theoretical orientation of the Penn State project were in sharp contrast to the Carnegie work before and to the historical, cultural-historical, sometimes epigraphy- and art-historically driven paradigm of Lowland Maya research after. In the 1990s, Marion Popenoe de Hatch and Juan Antonio Valdés conducted excavations in the southern districts of the site, and a Japanese team investigated a large mound near the modern archaeological park.
Emphases since the 1970s on Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts and discoveries of great sites in the northern Petén turned attention away from the SMA, and a long period ensued during which proponents of a Maya Lowlands origins for Maya civilization held sway. More recently, the debate was rejoined with discoveries along the southern Pacific coast of Mexico and in Guatemala that greatly antedate developments in the Lowlands.
Occupation history The known parts of Kaminaljuyu lie on a broad plain beneath roughly the western third of modern Guatemala City. Soils are rich because of frequent volcanic eruptions; volcanic ash in the form of hardened tuff reaches depths of several hundred meters in and around Kaminaljuyu, and deep clefts or barrancos mark the landscape.
There are many mysteries, in addition to size and scale, that likely will remain unanswered about Kaminaljuyu. These questions are mainly about the role of the city as the greatest of the Southern Maya area (SMA) in Preclassic times, particularly during the Miraflores period, c. 400–100 BC.See Kaplan (2002, pp. 318–319) for a discussion of the "Miraflores"; the term is placed within quotation marks because it also refers to a sculptural carving style from Kaminaljuyu, described by Parsons (1986). The SMA is long believed to have been seminal in the development of Maya civilization.
Arévalo and Las Charcas cultures
Kidder, Jennings, and Shook referred to Kaminaljuyu's artifacts as representative of what they called a "Middle Culture" which they believed represented the earliest phase of complex social and cultural development in Mesoamerica.They described this as "...the oldest known stage in the development of Mesoamerican civilization" (1946, p. 243). This reflected their conclusion about the great antiquity of developments at Kaminaljuyu and their belief that Kaminaljuyu was primordial for its cultural and social innovations. Since their work, investigations chiefly undertaken by scholars from the New World Archaeological Foundation on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico have greatly altered this view, deepening in time the incipience of complex social and cultural events in Mesoamerica. Cultures of this phase had a stable agricultural community organized probably as a simple chiefdom.
Over many years Shook and Kidder developed the Kaminaljuyu ceramic sequence, and it remains, with refinements by Shook and Marion Popenoe de Hatch, one of the most secure and reliable ceramic chronologies in Mesoamerica, although some doubts remain about the absolute dates due to a paucity of radiocarbon anchors (a revision by Inomata, et al. to the following chronology, based on Bayesian analysis, would push forward the ceramic phases by as much as 300 years, setting the Miraflores apogee to a 100 BC – AD 100 time frame). With Inomata, et al's revision in mind, the first significant settlement dates to the Arévalo phase, c. 900–800 BC, with indications of dense populations no later than c. 400 BC. By the end of the Las Charcas culture (800–350 BC), Kaminaljuyu was developing "religious and civic institutions."Shook (1951, p. 98) Scattered Las Charcas remains throughout the Valley of Guatemala mark a major occupation of the area at sites such as El Naranjo;See Arroyo (2007a, b) at this latter site, as well as at El PortónSee Sharer, Robert J. and David W. Sedat (1987) some 50 kilometers to the north and Takalik Abaj, about 130 kilometers to the west in the lower piedmont, plain uncarved upright shaft stones called stelae, mark the first appearance of a cult of time-reckoning and which became one of the bases for the institution of Maya kingship. The architecture of Middle Preclassic structures consisted of hardened adobe bricks that served, later, as foundations for raised platforms and pyramidal temples.
Excavations indicate that from early in the Middle Preclassic the community was large enough to produce heavy refuse deposits. Cotton was grown as well as maize; palaeobotanical research also has identified annonas, avocados, cacao, black beans, palm nuts, plums, and sapodilla (zapote blanco). Arboriculture developed – with groves of crop trees grown in terraces down to the edges of great ravines. Specialists practiced loom-weaving and were expert potters. Large-scale workshops for obsidian tool-making were spread around the ancient city. Religious practices that would later be further developed throughout Mesoamerica were elaborating during the early Middle Preclassic at Kaminaljuyu, including the erection of mounds to serve as substructures for small shrines or funerary/administrative temples,Sharpe, Ashley E., Bárbara Arroyo, Javier Estrada, Gloria Ajú, and Emanuel Serech. “Dogs for the Gods, Fish for the Feast: The Ceremonial Role of Animals at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala.” Latin American Antiquity 33, no. 2 (2022): 236. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27362414. the development of a complex pantheon of deities – probably based on some primordial mythology and cosmology of which the Popol Vuh represents a fragment – and euhemerism, an incensario and stela cult, and warfare to procure captives for royal sacrifice.
Many of the artifacts from Las Charcas not associated with burials were found in pits. There were principally two types of pits: shallow bowl-like pits and bottle-shaped pits. The shallow pits were possibly used for digging clay to be used in building and later to hold refuse. Carbonized avocado seeds, maize cobs and remnants of textiles, basketry, mats and rope fragments have been found in those that are bottle-shaped. It is thought these pits were used for cooking, storage and refuse containers.
Hand-modeled clay female figurines are also highly characteristic of Las Charcas culture. Those found at Kaminaljuyu are generally of reddish-brown clay and some have a white slip. The female figurines often depict pregnancy and are thought to have been offerings to promote fertility in the fields. Usually, the arms and legs of the figures are mere stumps but some attempt at a realistic body shape has been made. The head has received the most attention to detail. The nose was pinched into the relief and nostrils were made by punctuating the clay. The eyes and the mouth were formed by strategically applied lumps. The figurines often have earplug flares.
The "Miraflores" The apogee of Preclassic developments at Kaminaljuyu occurred during what scholars refer to as the "Miraflores" period – once a name for a Late Preclassic ceramic phase, now split into two, the Verbena and Arenal. Preclassic remains, particularly from this epoch, are extremely abundant at Kaminaljuyu; Shook and Kidder noted that in Mound E-III-3 "...an average of...200 sherds per cubic meter [were found...the mound] in its final stage [having] a volume of some 75,000 cu. m [yielding] the astounding total of approximately 15,000,000 fragments...[A]llowing 30 sherds to represent one vessel – a high average considering the abundance of small pre-Classic bowls...at least 500,000 complete vessels had been used, broken, and their fragments incidentally incorporated in the fill of this one mound."Shook and Kidder (1952, p. 46) What Kidder, Jennings, and Shook referred to as the Middle Cultures are now understood as the Middle Preclassic period, which lasted from 1000 to 400 BC, and the Late Preclassic period, dating from 400 BC to 250 AD.