Seibal, 1964–1968

After the Harvard excavations at Altar de Sacrificios ended, Gordon Willey and his colleagues moved operations 75 miles up river to Seibal, Guatemala in 1964 with an interest in the Classic Maya collapse. Seibal was an ideal place for such a study since many of its stelae dated to the end of the ninth century, after many Maya sites had already been abandoned. They worked at Seibal until 1968 . There, with the help of Ledyard Smith, Ian Graham, and several students, Willey did a settlement survey and mapped the center of Seibal, excavating eleven structures at the site and testing several house groups.

Willey and his team concluded that Seibal was an extensive city in the Preclassic that experienced a hiatus in the Early Classic, was conquered by Dos Pilas in A.D. 735, and fluoresced as a ceremonial center in the Terminal Classic during what was later identified as two more waves of conquest or intrusion. From the iconography and hieroglyphs, Willey and his colleagues determined that Seibal had a connection to the central Mexican site of Teotihuacan.

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