Kowoj

The Kowoj were a Late Postclassic Maya group and polity of the Petén lakes in northern Guatemala, active from about 1250 to the Spanish conquest. Their traditions traced them to Mayapan in Yucatán; its fifteenth-century collapse sent them south into Petén, where they settled Zacpetén on Lake Salpetén, Ixlu between the Salpetén and Petén Itzá lakes, and Topoxte on the Yaxha lagoon.

Kin to the Itza but political rivals, the Kowoj marked their towns with a distinctive C-shaped plaza temple assemblage inherited from Mayapan; in 1696 a Kowoj attack on the Itza capital Nojpetén burned nine temples. Earlier, in 1518, Juan de Grijalva's expedition clashed with Kowoj fighters at Chakán Putum on the Gulf coast.

With the Itza, the Kowoj held out against the Spanish until 1697, when Nojpetén's fall ended the last independent Maya polities of Mesoamerica.