Mesoamerican ballgame: Did you mean...?

The Templo Mayor or Great Temple (called Hueteocalli by the Aztecs) dominated the central sacred precinct of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Topped by twin temples dedicated to the war god Huitzilopochtli and...

Maya religious beliefs are formed on the notion that virtually everything in the world contains k'uh, or sacredness. K'uh and k'uhul, similar terms which are used to explain the spirituality of all inanimate and animate things...

The Day of the Dead, known in Spanish as Día de los Muertos, is a holiday that celebrates life and honors the dead through traditions, food, decorations, and activities intended to sustain the connections between the living and...

The Jade Museum (Spanish: Museo del Jade y de la Cultura Precolombina) in San José, Costa Rica houses the world's largest collection of ancient jade from the Americas. With nearly 7,000 pieces in its collection...

This gallery includes seven digital reconstructions of ancient monuments around the world, from Rome to and Mexico. They depict what these monuments may have looked like when they are created, by overlaying...

The Mesoamerican Terminal Classic period (c. 800-925) saw one of the most dramatic civilization collapses in history. Within a century or so the flourishing Classic Maya civilization fell into a permanent decline when...

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...

The Aztecs of ancient Mexico measured time with a sophisticated and interconnected triple calendar system which followed the movements of the celestial bodies and provided a comprehensive list of important religious festivals...

Over the course of several millennia, textiles were the primary form of aesthetic expression and communication for the diverse cultures that developed throughout the desert coasts and mountain highlands...

The Maya hieroglyphic writing system was a sophisticated combination of pictographs directly representing objects and ideograms (glyphs) expressing more abstract concepts such as actions, ideas and syllabic sounds. Maya writing has...