El Portón


El Portón is a site of the Preclassic Mesoamerican civilisation, literate and thought to be Maya.
It lies in the Salamá valley.
By 500 BCE, the inhabitants built terraces which allowed a more scalable population. They built temples. They dedicated the largest temple with "feasting, bloodletting, and burning of incence".
The inscriptions on a stele dateable via radiology to 400 BCE are likely in a Mayan language; if so, it is the earliest such attestation.