Maya, indigenous people of Mexico and Central America

Maya mīˈə, Span. mäˈyä [key], indigenous people of S Mexico and Central America, occupying an area comprising the Yucatán peninsula and much of the present state of Chiapas in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, parts of El Salvador, and extreme western Honduras. Speaking a group of closely related languages (with an outlier, Huastec, spoken in the Pánuco basin of Mexico), the population of Maya today is over 4 million.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• The Twentieth Century
• Independence Period
• Colonial-Period Maya
• Maya Prehistory
• Bibliography

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