Long before more famous empires such as the Maya, a civilisation called the Olmec were building an impressive legacy. Commonly referred to by experts as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica ...

Each stela depicts a sumptuously bedecked king, and the monoliths are covered in hieroglyphs that, once deciphered, illuminated our view of Maya life. During the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in ...

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 ancestors of the Ancient Maya used an ingenious method of food collection that enabled their population to grow.

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 ...

Tikal, one of the most powerful Maya city-states, became a rival in this network. Previous discoveries — such as the famous ...

When Hansen came to the Mirador basin as a graduate student in 1979, scientists had been studying the better-known Maya sites in Mesoamerica—such as Palenque and Copán—for more than a century.

The Maya civilisation began long ago in a place called Mesoamerica. This huge area is made up of Mexico and part of Central America. As far back as 3500 years ago millions of Maya people lived in ...

Tikal And Teotihuacan: Two Influential Ancient Mesoamerican Cities Tikal, an ancient city-state deep in the jungle of ...

Most accounts of the history of chewing gum take us back a couple of millenia to the Mayans of Mesoamerica who tasted the sap of the sapodilla tree and discovered that it did not disintegrate in the ...

Mesoamerica: During the 5th and 6th centuries BC, the ancient Olmec civilization was coming to an end in Mexico. At the about same time, the Mayan civilization was rapidly expanding in Honduras ...

The mangroves of the Mesoamerican Reef were once at the fringe of the ancient Maya civilization. I contemplated slipping a souvenir into my pocket—with such a lode here, what possible harm?