˝ Tikal Facts ˝ Tikal & The Early Explorers ˝

  • Tikal National Park covers 576 km˛ or 222 mi˛.  It is a nucleus zone within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the fourth largest continuous tract of forest on the planet.  The Guatemalan Government declared Tikal a National Park in May of 1955, and a National Monument in 1970.  It was the first National Park established in Central America. On November 5th, 1979 it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO.

  • Tikal is located in a subtropical rainforest in an area called El Petén. It is one of the largest tracts of rain forest in this part of the world and is home to a wide variety of plants and animals. With pressure from loggers and oil companies, the future of El Petén as a whole is as of yet undecided.  However, a park system within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, if safeguarded, may be the answer to the region’s economic development based on ecotourism and non-timber forest production.  Together with the adjoining Biosphere Reserves of Montes Azules and Calakmul in Mexico and the Rio Bravo Conservation Area in Belize, this is the second largest continuous tract of forest in the American Continent, after the Amazon Jungle.  The Maya Jungle totals 5 million hectares.

  • UNESCO declared it a World Cultural Heritage site in 1979 and a World Monument in 1986, due to both its natural and cultural treasures.

  • Tikal is located in the Maya Lowlands, a broad area made up of limestone, not more than 600 meters (1924.80 feet) above sea level, which extends from the Petén in Guatemala- Heart and Cradle of Maya World- North to the Yucatan Peninsula in neighboring Mexico and East toward Belize.

  • The great ceremonial center is at 283 meters (907.86 feet) above sea level and was built upon low-lying lands named “bajos”. At its peak, in the Classic Period, Tikal covered an area defined by territorial markings of 120 km2 (74.57mi˛).

  • Tikal is accessed by a 64-kilometers (39.77mi˛) asphalt-paved road, which begins in the island city of Flores, the capital of the Department of El Petén.

  • In its hey day, according to Dr. Patrick Culbert, the central area of Tikal –of about 120 km˛ (74.57mi˛) - was home to about 60,000 people.  The Tikal dig revealed interesting dwelling patterns in the surrounding areas to the monuments, temples and plazas.  This was where the commoners lived.  Studies have revealed about 30,000 rural inhabitants lived there at the same time.  If both studies are taken into consideration we may comfortably say that Tikal’s population was approximately 90 thousand people during the Late Classic Period.  Tikal was one of the largest and most populated cities in the Late Classic Period in the Maya World.

  • Its original inhabitants abandoned Tikal after the year 900 A.D., date of the collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization in the Southern Maya Lowlands.  During the XVI century, Itzá pilgrims may have visited the site for ceremonial purposes.

  • Ambrosio Tut, a gum-sapper, first saw Tikal in the mid-nineteenth century, from the top of a sapodilla tree, observing various temples' roof combs in the distance.

  • Tikal was the name the Itzá Maya people knew the site by, it means “Place of Voices”.  Recently, the name glyph of Tikal was read by epigrapher David Stuart as Mutul, whose meaning is as of yet not known.  

During this first expedition artist Eusebio Lara made fanciful drawings of the stelae at Tikal’s Main Plaza.  Ambrosio Tut, a gum-sapper, had been the first to arrive at the site.  He reported his finding to Modesto Mendez.  A Guatemalan newspaper (La Gaceta) first published the report, which named the site Tikal, or Place of Voices in the Maya Itzá language.  The report was then published in the Berlin Academy of Sciences’ Magazine, in 1853.  Thus began an era of exploration, as many European and American treasure hunters and scientists arrived at the site.John Carmichael visited Tikal in 1869, 1890 and 1903.  In 1877 Gustave Bernouilli, from Switzerland, removed several of the lintels carved on sapodilla wood that adorned Temples IV and I, while on a botanic expedition.  These may now be appreciated in Basel’s Ethnological (Völkerkunde) Museum, except for 2 small fragments housed at the British Museum in London.Sir Alfred Percival Maudslay, who was the first man to draw a map of Tikal, took these 2 fragments to England.  Maudslay, who visited Tikal in 1881 and 82, was also the first ever to make photographs (the camera had been recently invented) at the site after removing the vegetation that had grown on the Grand Plaza for over 1,000 years.  He had all the necessary permits from the Guatemalan Government.  He made the Five Story Palace, in the Central Acropolis, his home while in Tikal.  Sir Alfred Maudslay’s contributions to Maya archaeology are numerous and far-reaching.  The Guatemalan Government asked him to field an expedition to a site on the Usumacinta River of which very little was known and authorized him to take the lintels of Macanche for their own protection.  (Macanche was later renamed Yaxchilan.) Maudslay spread awareness on the Maya civilization amongst the scientific community of his time, and convinced publishers Osbert Salvin and F. Ducane Godman to allow a valuable addition to the famous scientific series of the day.  This addition consisted on the 4 Maya Archaeology volumes added to Biologia Centrali Americana’s 87 volumes published in London at the end of the XIX Century.  In a retrospective view, we could comfortably say that Maudslay is the father of Maya Archaeology.  (Ian Graham, of the University of Harvard is currently writing Maudslay’s biography.)

 Shortly thereafter, Sylvanus Griswold Morley, of Carnegie Institution, made five visits to the site between 1914 and 1937.  He focused on the study and decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphs inscribed on monuments.According to an interview with Erwin Shook the dig at Tikal was scheduled to start in the 1940s.  However, the Social Revolution of 1944 in Guatemala delayed the project until 1956.

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