This lavishly illustrated book provides a photo record of numerous sites and objects left behind by the Maya and other pre-Columbian people in Guatemala, Jacques VanKirk and Parney Bassett-VanKirk settled in El Peten, Guatemala, in the early 1960s, started a guide service, and spent the next twenty years photographing both well-known and obscure ruins that they visited.

Many of the archaeological treasures have subsequently been stolen or destroyed, so that few if any records of them, other than the VanKirk's photographs, remain. The two hundred and twelve black-and-white and eighty-five color photographs, accompanied by informative, anecdotal text, will be of interest to armchair travelers, collectors, and archaeologists alike.