Mesoamerica: Did you mean...?

Trephination (also known as trepanning or burr holing) is a surgical intervention where a hole is drilled, incised or scraped into the skull using simple surgical tools. In drilling into the skull and removing a piece of the bone...

A belief in an afterlife was central to every major civilization of the ancient world and this encouraged the recognition of the reality of ghosts as the spirits of the departed who, for one...

Cochineal is a brilliant red dye extracted from the crushed bodies of parasitic insects which prey on cacti in the warmer parts of the Americas. The dye was an important part of trade in ancient Mesoamerica and South America and throughout...

The Mesoamerican civilizations represent a long continuum of complex societies that emerged independently in Central America and southern Mexico from roughly 1500 BCE to the early 16th century CE, prior to Spanish...

The Olmec world developed in the tropical lowlands of present-day Veracruz and Tabasco during Mesoamerica’s Formative period (c. 1500–400 BCE). Major...

Dogs have been a part of the history of human beings since before the written word. The ancient temple of Gobekli-Tepe in Turkey, dated to at least 12,000 years BCE, has provided archaeologists with evidence of domesticated...

The Spanish conquistadors might have gained a lasting reputation as the great gold-seekers of history, but they were actually far more successful in acquiring silver. Over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the Americas...

The term mythology comes from the Greek words mythos (“story of the people”) and logos (“word”) and so is defined as the spoken (later written) story of a culture. Modern scholars have divided myths...

Hummingbirds, called huitzillin ("wee-TZEEL-een") in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, are one of the most recognizable and striking species in the avian world. While these...

Dogs have played a prominent role in the lives of humans going back thousands of years and, more than any other domesticated animal, this role has remained relatively unchanged. In the present day, dogs serve...