Kaminaljuyu (pronounced ; from Kʼicheʼʼ, "The Hill of the Dead") is a Pre-Columbian site of the Maya civilization located in Guatemala City. Primarily occupied from 1500 BC to 1200 AD, it has been described as one of the greatest archaeological sites in the New World, although the extant remains are distinctly unimpressive. Debate continues about its size, integration, and role in the surrounding Valley of Guatemala and the Southern Maya area. Kaminaljuyu, when first mapped scientifically, comprised some 200 platforms and pyramidal mounds. The site was largely swallowed up by real estate developments. A portion of the Classic Period center is preserved as a 0.5 square km parka fraction of the original ruins field size of around 5 km. Archaeological excavations The extant remains are distinctly unimpressive and are in a state of destruction with almost daily erasure of material. This is due to their location beneath urbanization and because they were constructed of hardened adobe, weaker than the limestone used to build in the Maya Lowlands. Over the past 100 years, more than fifty archaeological projects, large and small, have been mounted at Kaminaljuyu. In addition to excavations, scholars such as Alfred Maudslay and Samuel K. Lothrop have recorded sculptures and made maps of the site. In 1925 Manuel Gamio undertook limited excavations, finding deep cultural deposits yielding potsherds and clay figurines from what later was called the "Middle Cultures" of Mesoamerica (from 1500 BC to 150 AD). A decade later, the importance of the site was confirmed when a local football club began cutting away the edges of two inconspicuous mounds to lengthen their practice field, discovering an impressive buried structure. Lic. J. Antonio Villacorta C., the Minister of Public Education in Guatemala City, requested archaeologists Alfred Kidder, Jesse Jennings and Edwin Shook to investigate. Villacorta gave the site its name from a Kʼicheʼ word meaning "mounds of the ancestors." When first mapped scientifically by E. M. Shook over a period of decades from the 1930s on, at least half of which were from before the end of the Preclassic period (250 AD). Kidder, Jennings, and Shook's monograph, published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington – one of the most important archaeological research entities in the history of Maya scholarship – brought excited attention by scholars to the significance of the SMA. This excitement turned to consensus about the priority of high social and cultural developments in the