In the jungles of northern Guatemala, archaeologists brushed away centuries of soil to uncover a small altar that shouldn’t have been there. It stood no taller than a toddler, its four painted faces ...

An ancient Mayan altar in Tikal, a 2,400-year-old city in Guatemala, evidences a quasi-imperial control system before the Spanish arrival.

Hand-carved arrowheads and jagged spears made of obsidian, a sharp rock formed by volcanic magma, are remnants of vast prehistoric trade networks that once cut across western North America.

Researchers have determined that an obsidian mirror believed to have been owned by the sixteenth-century English polymath John Dee originated in the Aztec world. Dee served as a scientific adviser ...

It is unclear exactly how the headdress, made of hundreds of long quetzal feathers and more than 1,000 gold plaques, ended up in Austria, where it is on display at a museum in Vienna. Historians ...