he peninsula
of Yucatan, portions of the states of Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico,
Guatemala, and the northern part of Honduras. That branch of the Mayas
who called themselves the Itzas and who form the chief subject of this
work occupied the southern portion of Yucatan and the greater part of
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
into eight periods. The first seven of these periods we shall discuss
briefly in this opening chapter; the eighth will furnish the subject
matter for the remainder of the book. The dates given should be
regarded as merely approximate.

APPROXIMATE DATES PERIODS
PERIODS A.D.

I Migratory period ?-200
II Golden Age or Old Empire 200-600
III Colonization period 450-700
IV Transitional period 700-1000
V Renaissance or League period 1000-1200
VI The period of the Toltec mercenaries 1200-1450
VII Disintegration 1450-1541
VIII Period of wars with Spain 1519-1697

Before taking up our review of the first seven periods we must remind
ourselves that the prehistoric cultures of Middle America have a
certain unity, showing beyond doubt that they were all of a common
origin. It is impossible to tell at what epoch the Maya became separate
and distinct from the other highly cultured peoples