Arroyo de Piedra is a

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, ...

Maya Maya may refer to: Civilizations * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (Ethiopia), a popul ...

archaeological site An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology a ...

in Guatemala located approximately 2-3 km east/northeast of

Dos Pilas Dos Pilas is a Pre-Columbian site of the Maya civilization located in what is now the department of Petén, Guatemala. It dates to the Late Classic Period, and was founded by an offshoot of the dynasty of the great city of Tikal in AD ...

and 3 km west of

Tamarindito Tamarindito is an archaeological site of the Maya civilization located along an escarpment in the Petén department of Guatemala. The city was the capital of the Petexbatún region of the southwestern Petén during the Early Classic period but ...

. The site dates to the middle half of the

Classic period Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of prehispanic Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian (first human habitation until 3500 BCE); the Archaic (before 2600 BCE), the Preclassic or Formative (2500 BCE –&nbs ...

. While initially a center of some regional importance, with the rise of Dos Pilas, Arroyo de Piedra was subsumed as a secondary center within the Petexbatun region. The

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

of Arroyo de Piedra is different from that of Dos Pilas and nearby Aguateca, but bears similarities to Tamarindito.

Hieroglyph A hieroglyph ( Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatoni ...

ic data shows that together Arroyo de Piedra and Tamarindito formed an independent polity prior to the establishment of Dos Pilas by

Tikal Tikal () (''Tik’al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-C ...

. It appears that Arroyo de Piedra was abandoned during the 8th century following the collapse of Dos Pilas and the disintegration of the polity centered there.

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