The history of Belize dates back thousands of years. The Maya civilization spread into the area of Belize between 1500 BC to 1200 BC and flourished until about 1000 AD. Several Maya ruin sites, including Cahal Pech, Caracol, Lamanai, Lubaantun, Altun Ha, and Xunantunich reflect the advanced civilization and much denser population of that period. The first recorded European incursions in the region were made by Spanish conquistadors and missionaries in the 16th century. One attraction of the area was the availability of logwood, which also brought British settlers.
Belize was not formally termed the "Colony of British Honduras" until 1862. It became a crown colony in 1871. Subsequently, several constitutional changes were enacted to expand representative government. Internal Self-Government was granted in January 1964. The official name of the territory was changed from British Honduras to Belize in June 1973, and full independence was granted on 21 September 1981."Background Note: Belize". U.S. Department of State (August 2008). This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
Ancient Maya civilization
The Maya civilization emerged at least three millennia ago in the lowland area of the Yucatán Peninsula and the highlands to the south, in what is now southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, western Honduras, and Belize. Many aspects of this culture persist in the area despite nearly 500 years of European domination. Prior to about 2500 BC, some hunting and foraging bands settled in small farming villages; they domesticated crops such as corn, beans, squash, and chili peppers. A profusion of languages and subcultures developed within the Maya core culture. Between about 2500 BC and 250 AD, the basic institutions of Maya civilization emerged. The peak of this civilization occurred during the classic period, which began around 250 AD.Bolland, Nigel. "Belize: Historical Setting". In A Country Study: Belize (Tim Merrill, editor). Library of Congress Federal Research Division.
The recorded history of the center and south is dominated by Caracol. The inscriptions on the monuments there are in the Lowland Maya aristocratic tongue Classic Ch'olti'an. North of the Maya Mountains, the inscriptional language at Lamanai was Yucatecan as of 625 AD.Michael P. Closs, The Hieroglyphic Text of Stela 9, Lamanai, Belize , 13 from Closs, 1987 The last date recorded in Ch'olti'an within Belizean borders is 859 in Caracol, stele 10. Yucatec civilisation, in Lamanai, lasted longer.
Farmers engaged in various types of agriculture, including labor-intensive irrigated and ridged-field systems and shifting slash-and-burn agriculture. Their products fed the civilization's craft specialists, merchants, warriors, and priest-astronomers, who coordinated agricultural and other seasonal activities with 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 stelae.
The Maya were skilled at making pottery, carving jade, knapping flint, and making elaborate costumes of feathers. The architecture of Maya civilization included temples and palatial residences organized in groups around plazas. These structures were built of cut stone, covered with stucco, and elaborately decorated and painted. Stylized carvings and paintings, along with sculptured stelae and geometric patterns on buildings, constitute a highly developed style of art.
Belize boasts important sites of the earliest Maya settlements, majestic ruins of the classic period, and examples of late postclassic ceremonial construction. About five kilometers west of Orange Walk, is Cuello, a site from perhaps as early as 2,500 BC. Jars, bowls, and other dishes found there are among the oldest pottery unearthed in present-day Mexico and Central America. Cerros, a site on Chetumal Bay, was a flourishing trade and ceremonial center between about 300 BC and 100 AD. One of the finest carved jade objects of Maya civilization, the head of what is usually taken to be the sun god Kinich Ahau, was found in a tomb at the classic period site of Altún Ha, thirty kilometers northwest of present-day Belize City. Other Maya centers located in Belize include Xunantunich and Baking Pot in Cayo District, Lubaantún and Nimli Punit in Toledo District, and Lamanai on Hill Bank Lagoon in Orange Walk District.
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 cay and coastal swamp regions. But in the 10th century, Maya society suffered a severe breakdown. Construction of public buildings ceased, the administrative centers 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. These sites ceased being ceremonial and civic centers. The decline of Maya civilization is still not fully explained. Rather than identifying the collapse as the result of a single factor, many archaeologists now believe that the decline of the Maya was a result of several complex factors and that the decline occurred at different times in different regions.
Conquest and early colonial period
Pre-Columbian Maya societies and the conquest Many Maya remained in Belize when the Europeans arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Archaeological and ethnohistorical research confirms that several groups of Maya peoples lived in the area now known as Belize in the 16th century. The political geography of that period does not coincide with present-day boundaries, so several Maya provinces lay across the frontiers of modern Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Spain soon sent expeditions to Guatemala and Honduras, and the conquest of Yucatán began in 1527. Though the Maya offered stiff resistance to Spanish "pacification", diseases contracted from the Spanish devastated the indigenous population and weakened its ability to resist conquest. In the 17th century, Spanish missionaries established churches in Maya settlements.
Piracy along the coast increased during this period. In 1642, and again in 1648, pirates sacked Salamanca de Bacalar, the seat of Spanish government in southern Yucatán. The abandonment of Bacalar ended Spanish control over the Maya provinces of Chetumal and Dzuluinicob. Bacalar was not refounded until 1729.
Between 1638 and 1695, the Maya living in the area of Tipu enjoyed autonomy from Spanish rule. But in 1696, Spanish soldiers used Tipu as a base from which they pacified the area and supported missionary activities. In 1697 the Spanish conquered the Itzá, and in 1707, the Spanish forcibly resettled the inhabitants of Tipu to the area near Lake Petén Itzá. The political center of the Maya province of Dzuluinicob ceased to exist at the time that British colonists were becoming increasingly interested in settling the area.
Colonial rivalry between Spain and the United Kingdom In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain tried to maintain a monopoly on trade and colonization in its New World colonies, but northern European powers were increasingly attracted to the region by the potential for trade and settlement. These powers resorted to smuggling, piracy, and war in their efforts to challenge and then destroy Spain's monopoly. In the 17th century, the Dutch, English, and French encroached on Spain's New World possessions.
Early in the 17th century, in southeastern Mexico and on the Yucatán Peninsula, English buccaneers began cutting logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), which was used in the production of a textile dye. English buccaneers began using the coastline as a base from which to attack Spanish ships. Buccaneers stopped plundering Spanish logwood ships and started cutting their own wood in the 1650s and 1660s. However, buccaneers did not found permanent settlements. A 1667 treaty, in which the European powers agreed to suppress piracy, encouraged the shift from buccaneering to cutting logwood.
The first permanent British settlement in what is now Belize was founded in the late 1710s on Cayo Cosina, following the destruction by the Spanish of earlier British logging settlements in the Laguna de Términos region west of the Yucatán. During the winter of 1717–1718 the notorious pirate Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach, harassed shipping sailing to and from the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico while sailing in the Bay of Honduras. In April 1718, at Turneffe Atoll, Blackbeard captured the sloop Adventure and forced its captain David Herriot to join him. Blackbeard then made Israel Hands captain of the Adventure and began sailing for North Carolina.
Conflict continued between Britain and Spain over the right of the British to cut logwood and to settle in the region. During the 18th century, the Spanish attacked the British settlers whenever the two powers were at war. The Spanish never settled in the region, however, and the British always returned to expand their trade and settlement. The 1763 Treaty of Paris conceded to Britain the right to cut logwood but asserted Spanish sovereignty over the territory. When war broke out again in 1779, the British settlement was abandoned until the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 allowed the British to again cut logwood in the area. By that time, however, the logwood trade had declined and Honduras Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) had become the chief export.
The British were reluctant to set up any formal government for the settlement for fear of provoking the Spanish. On their own initiative, settlers had begun electing magistrates to establish common law as early as 1738. In 1765 these regulations were codified and expanded into Burnaby's Code. When the settlers began returning to the area in 1784, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard was named superintendent to oversee the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras. The 1786 Convention of London allowed the British settlers to cut and export timber but not to build fortifications, establish any form of government, or develop plantation agriculture. Spain retained sovereignty over the area.
The last Spanish attack on the British settlement, the Battle of St. George's Caye, occurred two years after the outbreak of war in 1796. The British drove off the Spanish, thwarting Spain's last attempt to control the territory or dislodge other settlers. Then the limits of the settlement were extended over a hundred miles southward to the Sarstoon River.
Despite treaties banning local government and plantation agriculture, both activities flourished. In the late 18th century, an oligarchy of relatively wealthy settlers controlled the political economy of the British settlement. These settlers claimed about four-fifths of the available land; owned about half of all slaves; controlled imports, exports, and the wholesale and retail trades; and determined taxation. A group of magistrates, whom they elected from among themselves, had executive as well as judicial functions. The landowners resisted any challenge to their growing political power.
The situation changed when the Spanish territories around Belize became the new independent states of Mexico and the Federal Republic of Central America. In 1825 Mexico was officially recognized by Britain and in 1826 abandoned any claims over Belize. Shortly thereafter, the créole elite of Belize invented a legend to support an alleged British past: a Scottish buccaneer called Peter Wallace would have settled in the region as early as 1638 and given his name to the Belize River.
Slavery in the settlement (1794–1838)