The Mayan culture emerged 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.

[2] While hunting and foraging continued to play a part in their subsistence, these farmers domesticated crops such as maize, beans, squash, and chili peppers, which are still the basic foods in Central America.

Their products fed the civilization's craft specialists, merchants, warriors, and priest-astronomers, who coordinated agricultural and other seasonal activities with a cycle of 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 site, five kilometers west of Orange Walk, includes platforms of buildings arranged around a small plaza, indicating a distinctly Mayan community.

[1] Stylised carvings and paintings of people, animals, and gods, along with sculptured stelae and geometric patterns on buildings, constitute a highly developed style of art.

One of the largest carved jade objects of Mayan civilisation was found in a tomb at the classic period site of Altun Ha, thirty kilometers northwest of present-day Belize City.

Some rubbish found at Altún Ha shows that people were at the site in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perhaps to reuse the old structures or undertake pilgrimages to the old religious centre.

[1] The recorded history of the centre and south is dominated by Caracol, where the inscriptions on their monuments was, as elsewhere, in the Lowland Maya aristocratic tongue Classic Ch'olti'an.

As in all the lowland Mayan centres, the inhabitants continually constructed temples and residences over older buildings, enlarging and raising the platforms and structures in the process.

Lamanai, less accessible to tourists than Altun Ha or Xunantunich, is an important site because it provides archaeological evidence of the Mayan presence over many centuries, beginning around AD 150.

Indeed, people living in the area were still refacing some of the massive ceremonial buildings after the great centres, such as Tikal in neighbouring Guatemala, had been virtually abandoned in the tenth century.