The Maya, like other indigenous peoples of the Americas, are descendants of the original Asian immigrants to the Americas who crossed the Bering land bridge before it was submerged about 10,000 BC when the polar ice cap melted. As the North American continent was still glaciated, these earliest Americans must have made their way along the western seaboard to the tropical climate of Central America. There they settled and, largely isolated from the rest of the world, developed the unique culture which partly survives to this day. 

The Maya inhabit present-day Chiapas in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and small portions of Honduras and El Salvador. This area is dominated by two great mountain ranges, reaching elevations as high as 9,500 feet in Guatemala, where the skyline is punctuated by thirty-six volcanoes, the tallest of which rises to an awesome 13,845 feet; three of the volcanoes are active. In the mountains, where most of the Maya live, temperatures generally range between 55 and 85 year round, but are colder in the higher elevations and warmer on the coasts. The first Europeans in Guatemala named it the Land of Eternal Spring. 

Pure Maya constitute about 60% of the population; most of the remainder, called ladinos, is of mixed European and Mayan descent, but there is also a small, purely European, minority. These groups tend also to be socio-economic markers: poor, middle-class, and wealthy respectively, though many ladinos are also poor and some are wealthy. Until about fifty years ago virtually the entire population was Catholic but evangelical Protestant missionaries have established a strong presence in recent decades and about 40% of the population is now Protestant. 

The pre-Columbian Maya can be traced back to about 2000 B.C. Time and terrain combined to divide the parent language of these people into numerous, mutually unintelligible descendant languages. More than twenty of the thirty Mayan languages identified by the conquering Spanish survive today and only those Mayans who have any schooling at all (about half) also speak Spanish. The art and architecture of their forebears continues to astound the modern tourist, both in its scale and its complexity (browse to www.nationalgeographic.com and search "Guatemala"). Some pre-Columbian literature, notably a work called Popol Vuh (F1465 .P813) has survived. The Maya of the classic period (c. A.D. 200–900) had developed a system of writing (using glyphs, not letters), had attained high levels of sophistication in mathematics (using a system based on twenties, rather than our decimal system) and astronomy, and had a calendar nearly as accurate as our own. Numerous regional kingdoms made up the political landscape before the arrival of the Spanish. 

After the conquest, the Maya became the underclass and were much abused. Today the legacy of poverty, illiteracy, and exploitation continues to challenge even the best-intentioned programs designed to ameliorate the conditions in which they live.