The Maya civilization emerged circa 2000 BCE, and for centuries they ruled over an extensive territory in Central America. This Mesoamerican civilization was incredibly developed for the time, and ...
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 ...
At Ucanal, Guatemala, researchers, led by Dr. Christina T. Halperin, unveiled a Mayan political ritual involving burnt royal remains. This "fire-entering rite" symbolized regime shifts, supported ...
This story appears in the September 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. Your National Geographic Society membership helped fund recent excavations at Holmul and La Corona, Guatemala.
We are standing in a ravine in southern Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle. The temperature tops 100 degrees. Sonic waves of cicada song roll over us. Tropical birds squawk and screech incessantly. A few feet ...
Jade Skirt: Us Maya have really healthy diets. As well as the maize, beans and squash we grow to eat, we also produce cotton to make cloth and flowers for decoration. We hunt deer, fish and birds ...
When John [Lloyd] Stephens came here about 160 years ago, he speculated that the inscriptions contained royal history, that it was history written in stone. It turned out he was absolutely right.
Voiceover: Modern history has been shaped by conquest – the conquest of the world by Europeans. The Conquistadors led the way. A few hundred men came to the New World and decimated the native ...
Egypt’s carefully recorded lists of rulers run pharaoh after pharaoh for almost 3,000 years. Except, that is, for a century or so around 1640 B.C. when a new group came to dominate the kingdom ...
'They were musicians,' Rudolph said of her dad, songwriter Richard Rudolph, and mom, 'Loving You' singer Minnie Riperton Angel Saunders has been a writer at PEOPLE since 2023. She’s previously ...