A composite photograph of the front and back of the jade gouge shown with a centimeter scale. CREDIT: Les O’Neil, University of Otago An international team of archaeologists and geologists has found an extremely unusual example of jade in the Southwest Pacific, thousands of miles away from the nearest known geological source. The small green [...]
Rock-art has been discovered and recorded in forty sites in northeastern Guanajuato, Mexico, as part of an ongoing project carried out by researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The majority of the images were created by hunter-gatherers who occupied the area during the 1-5 centuries AD, but religious iconography and inscriptions were also discovered dating to the colonial era, as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ancient port site was used periodically between 800 B.C. and 1521 A.D. Explorers sit atop the ancient Maya pyramid at Vista Alegre. The pyramid stands 35-feet tall and may have been used by Maya lookouts to monitor approaching and departing canoes. (Credit: Image courtesy of Proyecto Costa Escondida Maritime Maya 2011 Expedition, NOAA-OER.) NOAA-sponsored explorers [...]
A roughly 1,000-year-old Maya sarcophagus, vestiges of an extinct tribe, the oldest tomb in Mesoamerica, dinosaur fossils and human remains dating from the early 8th century are some of the most noteworthy archaeological finds made in Mexico during 2010.
The skeletons of two dozen children killed in an ancient mass sacrifice have been found in a tomb at a construction site in Mexico. The find reveals new details about the ancient Toltec civilization and adds to an ongoing debate over ritualistic killing in historic Mesoamerica.
Archeologists say a giant, ornate carving of an Aztec god recently unveiled in downtown Mexico City could be a massive headstone in honor of one of the civilization’s last rulers.
At the famed Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, you can sit in the cafe, have a slice of basil pesto quiche, and gaze up at stunning evidence of the looting of the ancient world. The dining room is dominated by an 8-foot-tall carved limestone monument, or stela, of a Mayan king.
Archaeologists diving into a lake in the crater of a snowcapped volcano found wooden scepters shaped like lightning bolts that match 500-year-old descriptions by Spanish priests and conquerors writing about offerings to the Aztec rain god.
Today’s tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain. To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded.
Sunflowers were grown as a domesticated crop in Mexico more than 2,000 years ago, according to a new study. The new findings run counter to a theory that sunflower farming began in what is now the U.S. East and then trickled south into Mexico.
The remains, seated in an upright position in an unusual tomb and flanked by shells, pottery, vessels, and jade adornments, suggest a surprisingly diverse culture and complex political system in the influential Maya city of Copán around A.D. 650.
James O’Kon is using modern technology and forensic engineering techniques to uncover the mysteries of a vanished Mayan civilization. It began with a pile of rocks in the middle of the Usumacinta River deep in the rain forest between Mexico and Guatemala-the site of an ancient Mayan kingdom,
Approaching the Mayan ruins by dugout canoe, O’Kon, CE ’61, immediately realized the significance of the rock formation.
“That’s a bridge pier!” he declared.
The mystical skull was supposedly discovered on New Year’s Day of 1924, by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, an orphan from Port Colborne, Ont. Anna had been adopted by British adventurer and story-spinner Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who was excavating the Lubaantun ruins, looking for clues about the lost city of Atlantis.
A short drive from the main Maya ruins at Copán, a forested hillside holds a cluster of mounds that Peabody Museum archaeologists believe date from near the end of the great Maya civilization that once dominated the region.
The grisly find of the buried bones of 24 pre-Hispanic Mexican children may be the first evidence that the ancient Toltec civilization sacrificed children, an archeologist studying the remains said on Monday.
The bones, dating from 950 AD to 1150 AD and dug up at the Toltecs’ former capital Tula, north of present day Mexico City, indicated the children had been decapitated in a group.
An ancient burial site in Mexico contains evidence that Mixtec Indians conducted funerary rituals involving cremation as far back as 3,000 years ago.
The find represents the earliest known hints that Mixtecs used this burial practice, which was later reserved for Mixtec kings and Aztec emperors, according to researchers who excavated the site.
This web site provides some 250 19th and early 20th century drawings,
prints, and photographs, most rare or previously unpublished,
revealing how these Maya sites were imaged by early explorers and
scholars.
Archeologists have discovered the ruins of an 800-year-old Aztec pyramid in the heart of the Mexican capital that could show the ancient city is at least a century older than previously thought.
esidents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought, new research shows.
Oil refineries and power stations pumping acid air pollutants along Mexico’s Gulf coast threaten to erase carved stone murals at the pre-Aztec ruined city of El Tajin, a scientist said on Sunday.
Ancient Mexicans brought human sacrifice
victims from hundreds of miles (km) away over centuries to sanctify a
pyramid in the oldest city in North America, an archaeologist said on
Wednesday.
DNA tests on the skeletons of more than 50 victims discovered in 2004
in the Pyramid of the Moon at the Teotihuacan ruins revealed they
were from far away Mayan, Pacific or Atlantic coastal cultures.
Mexicans have long been taught to blame diseases brought by the Spaniards for wiping out most of their Indian ancestors. But recent research suggests things may not be that simple.
The University of Uppsala in Sweden has put its 1550 map of Mexico City
by Alonso de Santa Cruz on-line. The map is zoomable and allows people to add annotations to the map. The clarity is very good.
The discovery of the Monument 32in Tamtoc, eight meters long, four meters and a half high, a thickness of 32 centimeters and a weight between 10 and 12 tons, can generate radical changes in the concepts of the Mesoamerican culture, which might have had its origin here, in the potosinian Huasteca.
