In 738, Quiriguá’s ruler captured and decapitated Copán’s celebrated king, 18 Rabbit. His death ended one political...
Maya
Maya societies developed influential cities and intellectual traditions across Mesoamerica. Explore their history from ancient kingdoms through colonial upheaval to the survival of Maya communities today.
At Maní in 1562, Franciscan authorities used testimony, coercion, and local knowledge to expose Maya religious practices...
Ancient Mesoamerican rulers relied on far more than bodyguards. Palaces, armies, sacred authority, dynastic alliances, tribute, intelligence,...
The Dresden Codex transformed recurring lunar cycles into eclipse warnings, joining sophisticated Maya mathematics with divination, ritual...
Maya death rituals linked burial, ancestor worship, maize, jade, caves, tombs, and the underworld into a sacred...
Maya and Aztec food preservation was more than survival. Preservation and storing food helped sustain households, cities,...
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,...
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...
The so-called Mesoamerican “Dark Ages” were not true collapse, but periods of environmental stress and transformation that...
The Maya collapse was the outcome of environmental stress interacting with political structures organized around visible legitimacy...
The burning of history does not erase people, but it alters the conditions under which they must...
Tactics, weaponry, and the logistics of battle help answer questions about social conflict in the human experience....
In the 13th and 14th centuries, Mayapán was the largest Maya capital of the Yucatán Peninsula. Introduction...
The descendants of the ancient civilization still live throughout Central America. Introduction It’s not every day that...
Broken mirrors can be associated with bad luck, but for the ancient Maya, a cracked mirror was...
The ancient Maya thought that reality was not static but ever-changing. There were no strict boundaries between...
The dead did not vanish but were transformed. By Matthew A. McIntoshPublic HistorianBrewminate Introduction Across the high...
The quality and quantity of items inside a person’s house also depended on status in their society....
The skies and the gods were inseparable in Maya culture. Astronomers kept careful track of events. By...
Severe droughts between 800 and 1000 CE may have helped destabilize Classic Maya cities already strained by...
The sun loomed large in ancient Maya conceptions of the world. By Elizabeth Svoboda At the ancient...
The deity Itzamna was frequently credited with bringing the knowledge of the calendrical system to the ancestral...
In the 1920s, U.S. journalists and archaeologists turned the ancient Maya into a media mystery, using exploration,...
A number of important polities struggled for power, and rulers used steles to display their importance and...
The construction of Kukulcán (“El Castillo”), like other Mesoamerican pyramids, likely reflected the common practice by the...
Their architecture has become an important key to understanding their religious beliefs and culture as a whole....
This civilization lasted 3,500 years, from about 2000 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. At its peak, it included...