Maya and Aztec food preservation was more than survival. Preservation and storing food helped sustain households, cities,...
Aztec
Before bolillos and pan dulce, Mesoamerica had masa. This essay traces how maize, wheat, ritual, conquest, and...
Ancient Mesoamerican farmers transformed forests, wetlands, slopes, and lakebeds into productive landscapes that sustained cities, rituals, markets,...
Obsidian shaped ancient Mesoamerican life through tools, trade, warfare, ritual sacrifice, elite display, and sacred meanings tied...
Women’s communities shaped Mesoamerican life through labor, ritual, healing, markets, kinship, and sacred memory across households, courts,...
Mesoamerican patriotism emerged through sacred cities, local homelands, ancestral memory, and civic identity long before modern nationalism...
Explore Mesoamerican cult traditions, from jaguar worship to Xipe Totec, and how ritual shaped power, belief, and...
Moctezuma II’s response to the Spanish conquest reveals how authority, belief, and uncertainty shaped decisions that contributed...
Aztec society rested on a powerful hierarchy in which noble pipiltin governed while commoner macehualtin sustained the...
In 1520, Aztec resistance shattered Spanish control of Tenochtitlan, forcing Cortés’s army into a deadly nighttime retreat...
The dead did not vanish but were transformed. By Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminate Introduction Across the high...
Many of the cities the Aztecs had subjugated were only too willing to join forces with the...
The Aztecs saw such time cycles as a mirror of the ancient cosmic cycles which, in Aztec...
The bouquets appear to have been part of a ceremony involving a large bonfire. Archaeologists have discovered...
After the fall of Tenochtitlan, the remaining Aztec warriors and civilians fled the city as the Spanish...
Chalchiutlicue brings fertility to crops and is thought to protect women and children. Introduction Chalchiuhtlicue (also spelled...
These texts excruciatingly detail the human horror and the treachery of a mass murder, now known as...
The sacred festivities date back to to the foundation of the city Tenochtitlan in the 14th century....
Day of the Dead rituals help people connect with their ancestors, which the Aztecs believed was key...
The more we learn about these cultures, the more we appreciate what was special about each of...
An archaeologist’s hip surgery prompts him to think of the experience of a Puebloan woman who survived...
Exploring the Aztecs, a Mesoamerican people who built a vast empire in what is today central Mexico...
The Aztec painted language operated at two levels – identifying glyphs and strategic placement and presentation. Writing...
Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis, but the Mexica brought it to...
The Spanish saw nothing of value in the indigenous culture and set out to systematically destroy everything...
The tlacuilo (codex painter) tradition endured the transition to colonial culture. Introduction Aztec codices (singular codex) are...
Aztec culture had complex mythological and religious traditions. Introduction The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican people of central...
The sculpture was recovered at the House of the Eagles, the meeting place of eagle and jaguar...
The Aztec empire existed more than 500 years after the Maya abandoned their great inland city-states. Introduction...
An almost life-size terracotta Aztec Eagle Warrior, one of the elite warrior groups in the Aztec military. 13-15th century...