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What destroyed the ancient Mayan civilization that built sophisticated calendars and ruled the Yucatan peninsula for millennia? The answer may be as simple as they cut down the trees. That's the theory from new scientific research developed in large part through University of Alabama in Huntsville satellite analysis technology, Vice President for Research Dr. John Horack says. The "satellite archaeology" technology and its uses in Central America were in the briefing package prepared for President Obama to take to the Conference of the Americas summit, Horack said... The Mayan findings will be presented to the Society of American Archaeologists meeting...

A labyrinth filed with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves--some underwater-have been uncovered on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, archaeologists announced recently. The discover has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the underground complex--or vice versa. According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife.

It is known that the fragments of this enigmatic sculptures were placed into the buildings during the second part of the Late Pre- Classic Period (Phase Ruth 200 BC - 150 AD), which is when the early Mayan culture was florishing. Therefore this sculpture must have been carved before this time. There are two possibilities, it was carved at the start of the early Mayan era, or a little earlier, when the changes in Tak'alik Ab'aj from the Olmec era to the Mayan era was taking place, what is called the transition period. Could it be that the early Mayan...

In early May I went to the Guerrero highlands to see the celebrations that take place during the Catholic Holy week, which coincides with the beginning of the spring planting season. The people in several mountain towns practice a type of Catholicism that incorporates religious beliefs and rituals that pre-date the arrival of Europeans. The most spectacular of these rituals are the Tigré fights. Men in the village of Acatlan dress in jaguar costumes and box each other as a kind of sacrifice to the rain god, Tlaloc. (The goggle-like eyes on their headgear match ancient depictions of both Tlaloc...

Known by the scientific name Vanilla tahitensis, Tahitian vanilla is found to exist only in cultivation; natural, wild populations of the orchid have never been encountered... "All the evidence points in the same direction," Lubinsky said. "Our DNA analysis corroborates what the historical sources say, namely, that vanilla was a trade item brought to Tahiti by French sailors in the mid-19th century. The French Admiral responsible for introducing vanilla to Tahiti, Alphonse Hamelin, used vanilla cuttings from the Philippines. The historical record tells us that vanilla – which isn't native to the Philippines – was previously introduced to the region...

Earliest evidence of tar used as waterproofing material was found in Veracruz and is more than 3,500 years old. Olmeca cultures that inhabited the Gulf of Mexico vicinity used it to protect soil, terracotta or wooden constructions, floor and wall covering, boat sealant, as well as glue. Earliest remains of containers with tar are those recovered in the municipality of Hidalgotitlan, Veracruz, as part of El Manati archaeological project. Containers found by INAH archaeologists may have been used to heat up tar... Contemporary inhabitants of the Gulf coast vicinity still use tar to flatten the entrance of their houses, patios,...

- Survival groups around the world are gearing up and counting down to a mysterious date that has been anticipated for thousands of years: Dec. 21, 2012. Across the United States, Canada and throughout Europe, apocalyptic sects and individuals say that is the day that the world as we know it will end, ABCnews.com reports. Ancient Mayan societies, known for their advanced mathematics and astronomy, followed a "long count" calendar that lasted 5,126 years. When their charts are translated to the Gregorian calendar, the international standard used today, time runs out on Dec. 21, 2012. Believers say there are other...

Analysis of Rare Textiles From Honduras Ruins Suggests Mayans Produced Fine Fabrics An analysis of textile fragments excavated from a 5th century Mayan tomb in Honduras, some of the few surviving textiles from the Mayan civilization, revealed high quality fabrics produced by highly skilled spinners and weavers. Newswise — Very few textiles from the Mayan culture have survived, so the treasure trove of fabrics excavated from a tomb at the Copán ruins in Honduras since the 1990s has generated considerable excitement. Textiles conservator Margaret Ordoñez, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, spent a month at the site in...

The victims of human sacrifice by Mexico's ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed, archeologists said on Tuesday... Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves, known as "cenotes." The caves served as a source of water for the Mayans and were also thought to be an entrance to the underworld. Archeologist Guillermo de Anda from the University of Yucatan pieced together the bones of...

CANCUN, Mexico - On a neighborly sightseeing jaunt Thursday with the leaders of Mexico and Canada, President Bush said the three were working to improve vital relationships that can better the lives of all their people. Mexican President Vicente Fox treated Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to an hour-long tour of the ancient Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza before they began two days of talks amid spring breakers in this Caribbean resort city. "This is a good start to a very important series of discussions," Bush said, standing alongside the other two with the massive pyramid called "El...

Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday. Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday...

Mayan leaders will spiritually "cleanse" ancient ruins in Guatemala after a visit by US President George Bush, unpopular because of foreign policies going back to Central America's civil wars. The leaders said they would hold a spiritual ceremony to restore "peace and harmony" at the Mayan ruins of Iximche after Bush tours the site on Monday. "No, Mr Bush, you cannot trample and degrade the memory of our ancestors," said indigenous leader Rodolfo Pocop during a press conference. "This is not your ranch in Texas." "We've burned this flag for what the Yankee did all over the world."

President Bush’s most recent trip to Latin America has brought with it the standard anti-U.S. protests. Most of these being nearly identical to the ones that are regularly held on weekdays in the United States where participants are not actually missing work, American flags are lit on fire, and rioters hold poorly spelled signs and scream in broken English. By some estimates, the most recent protest in Bogata drew as many as 250-300 Third Worlders who took time out of their busy schedules of chewing coca leaves, kidnapping for ransom, and playing soccer with rolled up rags on dirt lawns,...

The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class. Archaeologists suspected that a wide clearing at the center of the ruins of Chunchucmil might have been a market, not a ritual plaza. Rock alignments peeking above the surface seemed to outline the positions of stalls and regular pathways; the rock...

Seven years ago, there was mass preparation for Y2K, alleged by some to be the end of the world. Believers scurried to save water and canned foods just in case the new millennium brought the immense devastation theories speculated. Again, we are faced with the timeless question of whether our world will endor not. The highly intelligent Ancient Mayan civilization developed an intricate calendar which anticipated the end of their Great Cycle of the Long Count-better known as the apocalypse-on Dec. 21, 2012.

Chemical residues found in soil from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula indicate that ancient Mayans traded food in marketplaces, a practice long considered unlikely by archaeologists... [yet] archaeologists have long recognized that the cities were home to more people than the local agricultural capacities could have supported... So for years, archaeologists looked for evidence of advanced farming practices that could have ramped up agricultural capacities beyond what archaeologists can observe, thus sustaining the populations. The idea that Mayans might have imported food and other goods wasn't taken seriously because most archaeologists thought that the Maya elite had a system whereby underlings were...

Remnants of Mayan human sacrifices can still be seen in cave in Belize ~~~snip~~~ This cave, Actun Tunichil Muknal, "Cave of the Stone Sepulchre," leads about a half-mile underground to one of the few Mayan sacrificial sites in the world that is virtually untouched, with skeletal remains from 14 individuals and 1,400 artifacts that date back as far as 2,000 years. Opened only nine years ago, its location is a local secret, hidden deep in a jungle preserve in the Cayo District of Belize. Visitors are granted access only with guides certified by the National Institute of Archaeology, and even...

Maya rulers' growing demand for animals of symbolic value may have caused a decline in big game, like jaguars, in ancient Latin America, a new study suggests. Faced with environmental problems and doubts about their ability to provide for their followers, the Maya elite may have ordered more hunting of large mammals whose meat, skins, and teeth provided proof of power and status, the study says. Kitty Emery, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has studied 80,000 animal bones found in 25 Maya trash mounds to map the effects of ancient hunting on animal populations over 4,000...

Mayan leaders announced that priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after US President George W. Bush visits next week. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a national association of indigenous people and peasant farmers, said Thursday. Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled...

NEW research suggests that climate change led to the collapse of the most splendid imperial dynasty in China’s history and to the extinction of the Maya civilisation in Central America more than 1,000 years ago. There has never been a satisfactory explanation for the decline and fall of the Tang emperors, whose era is viewed as a highpoint of Chinese civilisation, while the disappearance of the Maya world perplexes scholars. Now a team of scientists has found evidence that a shift in monsoons led to drought and famine in the final century of Tang power. The weather pattern may also...

Nothing draws a crowd more than the showing of the country’s most precious jewel. That’s right, the jade head, formally known as Kinich Ahau, the Mayan Sun God, went on display at the Museum of Belize... The jade head was unearthed at Altun Ha in 1968. It was found lying among the remains of this elderly adult male believed to have been an important ruler of the site during his lifetime. Archaeologists suspect that before this Mayan leader died sometime between 600 to 650 AD, he commissioned an artist to create the large carved object that represents the Maya sun...

"The Maya are the only pre-Columbian culture whose texts have been preserved up to our time in the thousands. They reveal the Maya to have been a people like all others. In the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the area was the most populous in the world and the city-states waged wars against each other," says Kettunen. Kettunen explains that there are quite human reasons why the idealised image of the Maya arose. An early authority on Maya studies, the British archaeologist Eric Thompson had experienced two world wars. "He wanted to believe that the world had had at least...

A major royal tomb has been unearthed beneath the principal pyramid in the western center of Waka'. The discovery was made by Dr. Héctor Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, co-director of the Waka' Project, and his student, Juan Carlos Melendez. This marks the second royal tomb discovered at Waka'. In the spring of 2004, SMU archaeologist David Freidel and his students discovered a queen's tomb more than 1,200 years old and dating to the Late Classic period of Maya civilization. The new tomb was discovered in a different pyramid and dates to the Early Classic period between...

Andrew L. DemarestThe remains of a Maya king, Kan Maax, who was killed about A.D. 800 in Cancuén with dozens of his royal associates and courtiers. Despite the puzzling slaughter, the bodies were treated with respect. Archaeologists and forensic experts in Guatemala have made a grisly discovery among the ruins of an ancient Maya city, Cancuén. In explorations during the summer, they found as many as 50 skeletons in a sacred pool and other places, victims of murder and dismemberment in a war that destroyed the city and, it seems, served as a beginning of the collapse of the...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - Scientists working at the Copan archaeological site in western Honduras said Sunday they have unearthed the 1,450-year-old remains of 69 people, as well as 30 previously undiscovered ancient Mayan buildings. Copan, about 200 miles west of Tegucigalpa, the capital, flourished between A.D. 250 and 900, part of a vast Mayan empire which stretched across parts of modern-day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The site was eventually abandoned, due at least in part to overpopulation, historians believe. Seiichi Nakamura, one of a team of Japanese scientists working alongside Honduran counterparts, said the human remains likely belong...

MEXICO CITY (AP) - It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number. Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods. For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased...

Mystery of 'chirping' pyramid decoded Philip BallAcoustic analysis shows how temple transforms echoes into sounds of nature El Castillo's strange echoes have fascinated visitors for generations © Punchstock A theory that the ancient Mayans built their pyramids to act as giant resonators to produce strange and evocative echoes has been supported by a team of Belgian scientists. Nico Declercq of Ghent University and his colleagues have shown how sound waves ricocheting around the tiered steps of the El Castillo pyramid, at the Mayan ruin of Chichén Itzá near Cancún in Mexico, create sounds that mimic the chirp of a bird...

Professor says Mayan calendar does not portend Earth’s doom By Steve Reeves January 01, 2003 TUSCALOOSA | Does our planet have only a scant 10 more years of existence left? Some people believe the ancient Mayan calendar suggests the end of the world will come on Dec. 21, 2012. But University of Alabama professor Enrique Gomez is not among them. “The world won’t end in 2012," laughed Gomez, who teaches in UA’s astronomy and physics department. “I can assure you of that." Gomez, a native of Mexico City, said he is much more interested in Mayan culture and how the...

TULUM, Mexico - Antonio Burks took a couple of steps, then leaped over some crumbled stone to get closer to the place the Mayans used to worship thousands of years ago. As he smiled the way only he can, the University of Memphis point guard offered his opinion of the history he was skipping about with the rest of his Tiger teammates. ''To me,'' Burks said, ''this kind of looks just like the projects.'' Sunday was off day for the Tiger basketball team on their exhibition trip to Cancun. So John Calipari hired a bus and rode 90 minutes south...

Translations of hieroglyphs on the staircase of a pyramid in Guatemala reveal details of a superpower struggle between two city-states at the peak of the Mayan civilisation. The 1300-year old hieroglyphs support theories that the Mayan world was riven by battles between two major powers, rather than smaller-scale clashes between multiple rival dynasties. "It's rare that you find a new monument and it fills in such a large blank spot about the history of a region," says Arthur Demarest, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, who has led research at Dos Pilas in northern Guatemala, where the staircase was found....