This article presents a major breakthrough in Maya art and archaeology, revealing the sophisticated way that Maya artists animated ancient artworks. There is a lot of excitement surrounding the...
Researchers in Mexico have discovered a vast ancient building buried beneath the Main Plaza at the ancient capital of Monte Albán. Monte Albán is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site located in...
The President of Mexico has written a letter to Pope Francis asking for an apology over the Catholic Church’s role in the brutal repression of indigenous people during the Spanish conquest of the...
The Spider Woman of Teotihuacan continues to be one of the most mysterious figures of ancient Mexican culture. She is also known as the Great Goddess, but since 1983 Spider Woman has become the most...
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 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...
Archaeologists excavating the world’s earliest mammoth traps in Mexico have now recovered the bones of 200 mammoth skeletons , in total, leading them to call the area where they were found “mammoth...
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...
More than 4000 pieces of rock art, the majority being petroglyphs, have been recorded at the site of Boca de Potrerillos in Nuevo León, Mexico. This is considered one of the most important rock art...
In Mexico , researchers have for the first time ever discovered previously unknown Mesoamerican mural minerals. The mercury sulfate and iron oxide were found in wall paintings in one of the most...
The Maya city of Cobá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is a spectacular spread of tree-locked pyramid-temples and raised causeways connecting strings of other satellite Maya settlements. Now, a re-...
New research supports the idea that the Clovis-first theory is outdated. Two studies published in the journal Nature provide more evidence that the peopling of the Americas took place well before 13,...
Experts in Mexico have discovered what they believe to be the oldest ocher mines in all the Americas. They date back an astonishing 10-12,500 years ago. The discovery is helping researchers to better...
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...
Archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia ( INAH ) have confirmed the discovery of an ancient stone map carved into a volcanic rock in Colima , Mexico dating from between...
An international team of researchers has investigated the earliest humans in Central America and how they adapted over time to new and changing environments, and how those changes have affected human...
The largest and oldest monumental pre-Maya structure has been identified in Mexico revealing an ancient culture that thrived without a centralized government or elite classes. A team of...
Bones of more than 60 mammoths have been unearthed at the location of a new Mexican international airport. Last November I wrote an Ancient Origins news article about anthropologists from Mexico ’ s...
Mexico is perhaps most well-known, archaeologically speaking, as the home of the Aztec civilization. Yet, before the arrival of the Aztecs, another sophisticated civilization, the Olmecs , ruled the...
Texas in the USA is distinctive with a unique history. This American state was once part of the Spanish Empire and the San Antonio Missions and Catholic churches were built by Spanish religious...
When Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they saw magnificent treasures of the ancient civilization. The wonders of pyramids, gold, and silver...
In Mexico , two ancient ball courts have been found in a remote highland area. This is forcing experts to rethink how an important ballgame and cultural practice emerged in ancient Mexico. The...
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...