El Portón
Encyclopedia
El Portón is a site of the Preclassic
Mesoamerica
n civilisation, literate and thought to be Maya
.
It lies in the Salamá valley.
By 500 BCE, the inhabitants built terraces which allowed a more scalable population. They built temples (of earth). They dedicated the largest temple with "feasting, bloodletting, and burning of incence".
The inscriptions on a stele dateable via radiology to 400 BCE are likely in a Mayan language
; if so, it is the earliest such attestation.
Mesoamerican chronology
Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian , the Archaic , the Preclassic , the Classic , and the Postclassic...
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
n civilisation, literate and thought to be Maya
Maya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...
.
It lies in the Salamá valley.
By 500 BCE, the inhabitants built terraces which allowed a more scalable population. They built temples (of earth). They dedicated the largest temple with "feasting, bloodletting, and burning of incence".
The inscriptions on a stele dateable via radiology to 400 BCE are likely in a Mayan language
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
; if so, it is the earliest such attestation.