Dec 17, 2015 | The Americas
The Petex-Batún is the most inaccessible and rarely-visited region of Guatemala. Today it is lightly populated, and yet more than 1,500 years ago Maya rulers jockeyed for supremacy as they created immense cities here. During the 1990s mounting evidence indicated that...
Dec 2, 2015 | The Americas
The Ychsma people ruled a large area of Peru, until the Inca conquered it just 63 years before the Spanish Conquistadors came and pillaged Peru in 1470. Now four Ychsma culture mummies — three women and one man— were unearthed by a team of archaeologists at Huaca...
Nov 11, 2015 | The Americas
Deep in the remote southern area along the border with Guatemala, recent excavations have exposed remains of pyramids and cities that until recently, were nearly impossible to reach. Hieroglyphic texts found here are changing our knowledge of the Maya by revealing...
Oct 22, 2015 | The Americas
Five hundred years ago the first contact between the great civilizations of Mesoamerica and Europe was just beginning. But it did not begin with Cortes’ landing in Mexico in 1519. Eight years earlier, a small lifeboat from a shipwrecked Spanish vessel drifted...
Oct 14, 2015 | The Americas
Who was Frederick Catherwood? Here’s the incredible story… One day in 1839, English explorer Frederick Catherood and American explorer John Lloyd Stephens climbed the crumbling steps of the pyramids in the Maya city of Copán. The pyramids had been...
Oct 8, 2015 | The Americas
The Toltecs are the most mysterious and controversial group from ancient Mesoamerica. The interpretation of their importance to the greater cultural traditions of the region have ranged from seeing them as the “mother culture” from which all others sprang, to a group...
