Maya places, A to Z. Places met in study or on a visit have a summary first.
No one list names every Maya site. New ones turn up each year. This list starts from the 266 sites with carved or painted texts in Peter Mathews's Site Names and Codes, which draws on the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Sites from these studies that Mathews does not name are added.
Tikal National Park covers 57,600 hectares of forest, wetland, and savanna (UNESCO). City size to find
Studied in
ANTH 345, all units. The course site
Themes
Water, with the zeolite filter at the Corriental reservoir (Tankersley et al., 2020, pp. 1, 5). Obsidian from El Chayal (Moholy-Nagy, 2011/2014, p. 35). The arrival from Teotihuacan in AD 378 (Houston et al., 2021)
Aoyama, K. (2007). Elite artists and craft producers in Classic Maya society: Lithic evidence from Aguateca, Guatemala. Latin American Antiquity, 18(1), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/25063083
Chase, D. Z., & Chase, A. F. (2017). Caracol, Belize, and changing perceptions of ancient Maya society. Journal of Archaeological Research, 25(3), 185–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-016-9101-z
Chinchilla Mazariegos, O. (2017). Art and myth of the ancient Maya. Yale University Press.
Hammond, N. (2026). Full reference to add. Cited for Calakmul and Dzibanché, p. 1471.
Houston, S., Román Ramírez, E., Garrison, T. G., Stuart, D., Escobedo Ayala, H., & Rosales, P. (2021). A Teotihuacan complex at the Classic Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala. Antiquity, 95(384), Article e32. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.140
Lentz, D. L., Dunning, N. P., Scarborough, V. L., Magee, K. S., Thompson, K. M., Weaver, E., Carr, C., Terry, R. E., Islebe, G., Tankersley, K. B., Grazioso Sierra, L., Jones, J. G., Buttles, P., Valdez, F., & Ramos Hernandez, C. E. (2014). Forests, fields, and the edge of sustainability at the ancient Maya city of Tikal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(52), 18513–18518. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1408631111
Moholy-Nagy, H. (2014). [Chapter on the lithics of Tikal]. In Z. X. Hruby, G. E. Braswell, & O. Chinchilla Mazariegos (Eds.), The technology of Maya civilization: Political economy and beyond in lithic studies. Routledge. (Original work published 2011). Chapter title to add. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315728858-11
Stuart, D. (2026). The four heavens: A new history of the ancient Maya. Princeton University Press.
Tankersley, K. B., Dunning, N. P., Carr, C., Lentz, D. L., & Scarborough, V. L. (2020). Zeolite water purification at Tikal, an ancient Maya city in Guatemala. Scientific Reports, 10, Article 18021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75023-7
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Ancient Maya city and protected tropical forests of Calakmul, Campeche. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1061
Webster, D., Gonlin, N., & Sheets, P. (1997). Copan and Cerén: Two perspectives on ancient Mesoamerican households. Ancient Mesoamerica, 8(1), 43-61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536100001565
Links checked November 6, 2026. Every source the site uses is also on the Sources page.
Further reading
Estrada-Belli, F., Balanzario, S., & Velásquez, E. (2024). The rise of the Kaanuˈl kingdom and the city of Dzibanche. Ancient Mesoamerica. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536122000207
FAMSI. Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies. https://www.famsi.org