Kaminaljuyu Stela 10

Anonymous / highland Maya court of Kaminaljuyu · Late Preclassic on conventional dating (c. 400 BC-AD 200); the excavated deposit's own stratigraphy leaves a later, Early Classic date arguable · Kaminaljuyu (Guatemala) · history

composition: contested

witness: three carved fragments excavated in 1955 and 1957; their stratigraphic relationship to securely Late Preclassic floors is itself disputed in the excavators' own field notes

A fragmentary carved stone monument from Kaminaljuyu, a highland Maya center now within Guatemala City, bears one of the largest known bodies of early Maya hieroglyphic and calendrical text, including day-signs and a dripping-scroll motif closely paralleled on the Chocola Monument roughly 80 kilometers away, evidence that highland centers, not only the northern lowlands, were active participants in the early development of Maya writing; a 2005 epigraphic study classifies the script with the Lowland Mayan tradition rather than the separate epi-Olmec script and points to Ch'olan-Tzeltalan speakers as likely innovators, but the fragments' own excavated stratigraphy is ambiguous enough that specialists have argued for dates anywhere from the Late Preclassic to the Early Classic period, so its placement within that span is presented here as debated rather than fixed.