Altar in the Maya metropolis Tikal occupies conquest by a stranger

The Maya high culture is often imagined as a coherent empire. In fact, however, the Maya civilization Central America dominated for many centuries in the form of a smorgasbord of peoples and city-states, which shared a common language family. The first archaeological relics attributed to Maya are around 2000 BC. BC dated, the earliest known monumental buildings built them around a thousand years later.