When most people think of ancient Maya civilization, they imagine godlike kings building towering pyramids and reveling in bloody human sacrifice. But commoners also played a significant role in the ...

The Classic Maya civilization grew to about 40 cities ... It is one of the most intricate of its kind in Mesoamerica. In fact ...

The enigmatic people who created the figures may have shared cultural traditions with neighboring Maya and other ancient ...

Image caption, Maya people were very clever. They invented the most well-developed system of writing in Mesoamerica, calendars that helped them to farm crops throughout the year and built cities ...

In fact they’re not hills at all but ancient pyramids, left to decay after the collapse of the Maya civilization a millennium ago. The site was a thriving settlement during the Classic Maya ...

The puppets, unearthed in El Salvador, have movable heads, strange facial expressions and may have been dressed for ritual roles.

The Maya people are remembered for amazing creations, like their spectacular buildings and beautiful objects made from jade, a rare and valuable material. They also invented groundbreaking ideas ...

During the Mirador field-research season, which runs from May to September, there are as many as 350 people in the ... studying the better-known Maya sites in Mesoamerica—such as Palenque ...

In its heyday from about A.D. 300 to 900, the Maya civilization boasted hundreds of cities across a vast swath of Central America. Now archeological sites, these once-flourishing cities extended ...

the most ancient known Mesoamerican civilization, which predated the height of Mayan civilization by about 1,000 years. This hypothesis is still subject to debate. In 1993, John Justeson and ...

Agriculture was long thought to be the biggest contributing factor toward the development of civilization in ancient Mesoamerica ... people who came before the Maya built canals in the wetlands ...