BC, and the Late Preclassic period, dating from 400 BC to 250 AD. In its "Miraflores" heyday, enormously eclectic sculptures were placed around the city, in plazas, and in front of platforms and temples. Brightly colored murals and giant masks adorned the sides of edifices. Monuments included effigies of toads, bats, owls, jaguars, and serpents; particularly important was the Principal Bird Deity, a symbol of celestial power often invoked in the iconography of kingship. Early versions of other Classic Maya deities were depicted, including the maize god, the Hero Twins, and a merchant god. The sculptural eclecticism is another indication of the Preclassic cosmopolitan and "international" character of Kaminaljuyu, the role of "port-of-trade" or "gateway" capital continuing through Classic times despite a major change of cultural traditions and, possibly, ethnic affiliation at the end of the Preclassic. Sacred Kingship Enormous thrones and stelae attest to the might and splendor of "Miraflores" Kaminaljuyu. Stela 10, a fragment of a gigantic throne, is carved with a decapitation narrative scene showing a ruler masked and attired to impersonate an underworld jaguar deity wielding a flint axe over what likely was a kneeling captive; the head of a jaguar deity floats to the right of the ruler/protagonist, invoked by the burning of blood in a sacrificial plate. The similarly gigantic Monument 65 is carved, on the front, with three seated, throned rulers, each one framed by two bound, kneeling, nude captives, each ruler and his paired victims vertically positioned within a lower, a central, and an upper register. Almost annually, fragments of once very large sculptural monuments are found in Guatemala City often during unregulated municipal demolition and construction. Many monuments were carved with Preclassic hieroglyphic texts (Kaplan 2011), underscoring the fact that, as Coe observes, "the elite of [Kaminaljuyu] were fully literate at a time when other Maya were perhaps just learning that writing existed." Hydraulics In the last twenty years, archaeologists have studied sophisticated water control systems in the southern precincts of "Miraflores" Kaminaljuyu, indicating an extensive bureaucracy and concomitant social hierarchy must have been in place to supervise and maintain the hydraulics. These systems date to the "Miraflores" and endured through to the end of the Preclassic. Esperanza cultures and a Teotihuacán Intrusion? Two major mounds excavated by Kidder, Jennings, and Shook contained tombs probably representing rulers from the Esperanza period. In Mound A the tomb is associated with a pit