Enlarge / An artist’s sketch of what the 300-200 BCE temple complex at San Bartolo looked like in its heyday. (credit: Stuart et al. 2022) Amid rubble buried beneath a Maya pyramid in Northern Guatemala, archaeologists found a broken bit of plaster with a glyph painted on it. A bar-and-dot symbol for the number “7” […]
Enlarge / Scarlet macaws (credit: Abul Az Abu Jamil) Centuries ago, indigenous South Americans brought live parrots hundreds of kilometers across the Andes Mountains, then raised them in captivity in the Atacama Desert, according to a recent study. The Atacama is one of the last places you’d look for tropical parrots. It’s the world’s driest […]
Enlarge / This painted vessel, which depicts a bird, is one of two found in the ambassador’s grave. (credit: Cambridge University Press) The bones of a Maya ambassador suggest a life of privilege but not necessarily comfort and ease, even though he was a high-ranking official born into a powerful family. His skeleton also finishes […]
Last month, archaeologists in Mexico City unearthed the eastern façade of a tower of skulls near the 700-year-old site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the former Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. It’s a morbidly sensational find, but it’s also a potential treasure trove of information about the people who died at Tenochtitlan […]
(charge: Gerardo Aguirre-Díaz) Maya culture had been blossoming to its golden era in which a volcano erupted at the southern border of the Maya area, at what is now El Salvador. Tens of yards of debris and ash buried the thickly populated, rich farming valleys across the Ilopango caldera. Aerosols smashed into the stratosphere from […]