Also found were numerous fragments of figurines depicting a wide variety of human and animal forms.

Many were Strombus shells, a type of artifact unique to the first part of the middle Preclassic at Nakbe, Uaxactun, Tikal, and other sites where similarly dated deposits are located.

The demand for these materials, mainly from Kaminaljuyú, in the Central Highlands of Guatemala, whether for ideological or economic reasons, and the mechanisms of procurement, transportation, and distribution that met that demand, may have required the development of administrative and governmental organizations at an earlier stage in this region than in areas where those commodities were more readily available.

Fairly direct evidence of developing differences in social and economic status includes human incisors with inlaid disks of jadelike stone, found in deposits dating to about 2,800 years ago.

Archaeologists also found a middle Preclassic ceramic shard with a portion of an incised profile that displays the sloping forehead characteristic of later Maya elite society.

Other sites besides Nakbé and El Mirador were connected through this system of sacbeob, which extended for dozens of kilometers.

The results of these experiments have showed that chert was a very effective and durable stone to use for the cutting of limestone and other materials.

Excavations and research at Nakbe gives us a better understanding of the techniques that the Maya used to construct some of the most extraordinary structures of ancient times and the complications they had to endure along the way.

The famous Princeton Vase, illegally excavated, and often interpreted in terms of the Popol Vuh, probably also stems from the Nakbe region.

Late Preclassic artifacts have proved sparse throughout the site of Nakbe, perhaps because the settlement was rapidly eclipsed by the rise of El Mirador.

Nakbe remained virtually abandoned for a thousand years, until some late Classic Maya reoccupied the site.

These people established small communities in and around the ruins and left some fine examples of Classic ceramics, including the Princeton Vase, but they built no monuments of their own.