Discover El Mirador

El Mirador was occupied during the Middle and Late Preclassic period, from approximately 1000 BC to 250 AD—predating the great Classic Maya cities of Tikal, Palenque, and Copán by several centuries. At its peak it may have housed between 80,000 and 200,000 people and was the dominant political entity in the Maya world. The site covers more than 26 square kilometers, contains over 850 mapped structures, and was interconnected by 13 elevated sacbe causeways—white limestone roads 40 meters wide and up to 5 meters high linking El Mirador to subordinate cities across the basin.

Richard Hansen of Idaho State University, who has led excavations since the 1980s, describes El Mirador as the first state-level society in the Western Hemisphere—a fully organized political entity with a capital, subordinate cities, a road network, an agricultural system, and monumental religious architecture, all a thousand years before Classic Maya civilization. The Mirador Basin contains at least 26 known ancient cities; only 14 have been substantially studied. El Mirador was identified from the air in the 1930s and systematic investigation began only in the 1960s.