Cival is an ancient Maya city in northeastern Peten, located 7 km north of the ancient city of Holmul. It owes its name to a sinkhole near its main hill. It was first visited in 1911 by Raymond E. Merwin.

During his explorations of Holmul for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Merwin photographed an early carved stela labeling it ‘Cival’ which later could not be located by British explorer Ian Graham, who returned to the site on behalf of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Harvard University in the 1980s. On that occasion, Graham mapped the main plaza and the site’s largest buildings. He noted its approximate locationon a mule-train road between Holmul and the Paso Benchuga logging camp, 55 km north of the present day town of Melchor. Following on Ian Graham’s recommendation, in the summer of 2001, Guatemalan archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli re-discovered the site, in spite of the mule-train no longer existing by spotting it on a LANDSAT satellite image. That same year, during the explorations Estrada-Belli’s Holmul Archaeological Project a stela was found partly hidden by a large looters’s trench in the main plaza’s eastern building. Later Nikolai Grube, with the assistance of explorer Marco Gross, recorded the monument and identified it as the missing stela from Merwin’s photo, i.e. Cival Stela 2. (Description taken from Cival page on the website of Maya Archaeology Initiative.)