Also known as Mirador. Maya-region site listed in The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions "Sources of Sculpture and their Codes" and designated MRD (Graham and Mathews 1999).

El Mirador is a very large site situated in northern Peten, Guatemala, only a few kilometers from the border with Mexico. The site has still not been fully mapped but is almost certainly as large as, if not larger than, Tikal and Calakmul, the two largest Classic Maya sites. El Mirador boasts a number of gigantic pyramids, including Tigre and Danta, the latter being the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the New World with a height of more than 70 meters. The remarkable feature about El Mirador is its age and while there is evidence of a not inconsiderable population at the site in the Late Classic the large public buildings appear to be exclusively Late Preclassic in date. El Mirador is thus not only one of the largest Maya sites, it is also the earliest great Maya center and was the capital of a large state that occupied the Mirador Basin region. El Mirador was connected to the other great centers of the Mirador Basin such as Nakbe and Tintal with a series of causeways radiating out from El Mirador like the spokes in a wheel.

Over a dozen carved stone monuments are known from El Mirador, all Late Preclassic in date and all badly eroded and/or fragmentary in nature. Although a few retain evidence of once having borne incised hieroglyphic texts these were deliberately abraded in ancient times. A recently discovered bedrock sculpture found in a quarry in the La Muerta barrio of the site, however, contains the name and title of an Early Classic lord of the Snake Kingdom. The earliest examples of the Snake Emblem Glyph, later held by kings of Calakmul, come from El Mirador and other sites in the Mirador Basin and the kingdom ruled by El Mirador in the Preclassic appears to have been anciently named Kaan, “Snake”.

The Snake Kingdom of El Mirador flourished during the Late Preclassic but the site and Mirador Basin were suddenly and almost totally abandoned around AD 150. A small remnant population remained in the region during the Early Classic and while most of El Mirador was quickly overgrown by the encroaching jungle the site appears to have supported a not insignificant community for a few centuries after the collapse of the Mirador state. Warfare seems to have played a part in the ultimate downfall of this community and a large wall surrounding the western portion of the site appears to have been built at this time. One of the only documented battlefields of the ancient Maya world was found atop the Tigre pyramid where dozens of green obsidian spear points were found scattered atop debris indicating that the battle occurred after the pyramid had already fallen into disrepair. This suggests that the Teotihuacan-related forces of Siyaj K’ahk’ (of Tikal fame) overran this area likely some time in the late fourth century AD.

It wasn’t until the start of the Late Classic in the seventh and eighth century that a significant repopulation of the Mirador Basin occurred, although never approaching the levels seen during the Late Preclassic heyday of the site. El Mirador, along with Nakbe and other, smaller sites in the Mirador Basin, were places where the famous Codex-style ceramics were produced, among the most accomplished artistic traditions ever developed in the Maya world and featuring scenes of mythology and legendary history. The tall pyramids constructed by ancient Snake Kings made El Mirador and the other major sites of the Mirador Basin the focus of pilgrimage and ritual and many of the Preclassic monuments were found literally half covered with the shattered remains of Late Classic ceramic vessels.

This Late Classic reoccupation of El Mirador came to a sudden close shortly after AD 800 and within half a century the Mirador Basin was totally abandoned and even today no permanent communities are found within the region. One of the reasons for this is the lack of reliable, permanent water sources, a curious feature of the landscape given that the basin once supported permanent populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Research suggests that the Mirador Basin was once characterized by many shallow, grassy water holes today known as civales. While some remnant civales remain, many were silted up through massive erosion that accompanied the widespread deforestation that occurred in Precolumbian times. El Mirador’s Late Preclassic structures feature some of the most copious uses of stucco to cover and decorate the myriad large pyramids and other structures at the site and the necessity of burning large amounts of green wood to make stucco was clearly a major factor in this deforestation. Deforestation, massive erosion and changing climates may well have combined at the end of the Late Preclassic to make the Mirador Basin simply uninhabitable and El Mirador is currently providing much evidence on the major cultural collapses that affected lowland Maya civilization at the end of the Preclassic and Late Classic periods.

s.g.