Overview

• Los Abuelos spans roughly 16 square kilometers in Guatemala’s Peten department, about 21 kilometers from the Uaxactun site.
• Excavations date the city to the Middle Preclassic period (800–500 BC), identifying it as one of the earliest Mayan ceremonial hubs.
• Researchers uncovered a 33-meter-high pyramid decorated with Preclassic murals alongside an engineered canal system.
• Two human-like sculptures of an “ancestral couple” dated 500–300 BC point to ritualized ancestor worship at the site.
• The joint Guatemalan–Slovak expedition’s findings challenge existing models of Preclassic social structures and hint at early Maya-Teotihuacan connections.