The ancient Maya who populated the Yucatan Peninsula in the first millennium AD believed that there were three ways for the living to enter Xibalba, the world of the dead: through deep caves, through...
A new scientific study of an ice core sample from Greenland has demonstrated how the Central-American Ilopango mega-eruption wiped out an entire Maya area, 1,590 years ago. Oxford University...
A shipwreck identified in the Gulf of Mexico has thrown a light on a forgotten and dark episode in Mexican history. Archaeologists have identified a 19th-century slave ship. Before it sank, this...
In 1952, deep within the smoldering cedar and mahogany forests of southern Mexico , and after four years of arduous toiling, the archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier finally finished removing the...
There’s overdue pushback these days on the notion that civilization began in the Americas when Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492. In fact, the Maya people built one of the world’s most...
Researchers have developed a unique experiment to determine the universality of certain emotional expression in the human face. It has long been debated by experts whether emotional expressions can...
Chichen Itza is an ancient Maya city located in the northern part of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The city is thought to have been founded around the 6th century AD. Nevertheless, it only rose to...
Reservoirs in the heart of an ancient Maya city were so polluted with mercury and algae that the water likely was undrinkable. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found toxic levels of...
The coiled snake headdress is a significant artifact connected with Maya women, both ancient and modern. Images of ancient Maya women wearing this distinctive headdress have been found carved on...
The Mesoamerican ball game is the oldest known team sport in the world. It was practiced by ancient Pre-Columbian cultures of Central America and played almost a millennium before the establishment...
The Maya civilization was a Mesoamerican civilization that was located in Central America. The beginnings of the Maya civilization have been dated to the 2 nd millennium BC. Around the 9 th century...
By Lawrence Goodman / Brandeis University Associate professor of anthropology Charles Golden and his colleagues have found the long-lost capital of an ancient Maya kingdom in the backyard of a...
What we see is not always what we expect, whether from nature or man-made. This is often true with archaeological remains of cities or human settlement, when new discoveries shed unexpected light on...
Ancient Maya civilization thrived for thousands of years beneath the cover of tropical forest in Central America, but once their civilization disappeared, so did much of the evidence of it. For a...
In May 2018, heavy machinery excavating outside the city of Coban, in the highlands of Guatemala , sliced into a large earthen mound that was found to contain millions of parts from Classic Maya...
The discovery of an ancient Maya vase painted with hieroglyphs is the longest Pre-Columbian text ever found in Belize and is offering new information about this once powerful civilization including...
The Aztec or Mexica calendar wheels have been a source of fascination for centuries. It was not just a way to keep time - it was a complete philosophy of time in which every day had a religious...
Archaeologists at a major Maya site in Guatemala have been forced to rethink an important find. What was initially believed to be a tomb has turned out to be a steam bath. This is very important as...
How does a story one is told, or that one has read in a textbook, become irrefutable historical fact? Everyone knows the Mayans were a terrifying civilization, steeped in long range calendars,...
The Maya were a polytheistic people who believed in a multitude of gods and goddesses. The deities of the Maya pantheon governed every aspect of nature and human life and were quite complex...
In a monumental archaeological discovery, whose magnitude hasn’t been seen in decades, an aerial survey over northern Guatemala revealed tens of thousands of Maya structures, including pyramids,...
The ancient Maya city of Uxmal is located in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It was one of the regional capitals during the Maya Late Classical period and is considered today to be one of the most...
Archaeologists digging in Mexico's Palenque ruins have uncovered a mask believed to represent the 7th-century Maya ruler K'inich Janaab Pakal, commonly known a ‘Pakal the Great’ - one of ancient...
There is a cave in southern Mexico where the distant past, more recent past, and the present intertwine. It is referred to as the Cave of Ancestors, where locals continue to honor their distant...
