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Relatively speaking, the Incas are recent history. One unfortunate consequence of the fame of the Incas is that they tend to crowd out the long and rich history of the region with its many kingdoms and civilizations that went before. Some pre-Inca cultures were incorporated into the Inca Empire, while others were ancient history by the time the Incas appeared on the scene. The oldest city now known in the Americas is that of Caral. It flourished at around the same time as the Egyptian pyramids were being built. The ruins of 'Sacred City of Caral-Supe' or simply 'Caral,' is...

The year 2021 ended with a major ‘peel’ for the site as LiDAR-equipped drones helped find 12 previously unknown small structures in Machu Picchu National Park which help identify the caretakers of the complex back in the 15th century. The LiDAR also revealed previously unknown canals that show how the Incas controlled water – a feat they believed was a ‘superpower’ granted to them by the gods. As described in a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team of researchers from the Center for Andean Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Wroclaw (Poland) University...

Researchers excavating 500-year-old graves in southern Peru have unearthed 192 human spines threaded onto reed posts. Describing this remarkable discovery in the journal Antiquity, the authors say this unusual assemblage of human vertebrae may have provided a means for indigenous people to reconstruct dead bodies damaged by European grave robbers. The skewered spines were recovered from burial sites in the Chincha Valley, where the local community was decimated by famine and disease epidemics following the arrival of Europeans. According to the researchers, the Chincha population declined from over 30,000 households in 1533 to just 979 half a century later, and...

Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments. The lead archeologist, Julio Abanto, told Reuters the 500-year-old tomb contained “multiple funerary bundles” tightly wrapped in cloth. He said those entombed were probably from the elite of Ruricancho society, a culture that once populated present-day Lima before the powerful Inca came to rule a sprawling empire across the length of western South America in the 1400s.

...the journal The Anatomical Record has published a study coordinated by Emiliano Bruner, who leads the Paleoneurology Group at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), that analyzes the distribution of certain craniovascular traits in four native populations from the late Holocene in the southernmost regions of South America.The sample includes 70 skulls, dated to between 200 and 3,000 years old, from populations of four regions in Argentina: the pampas (Buenos Aires), southern Andes (Salta), central Patagonia (Chubut), and southern Patagonia (Tierra del Fuego). The four groups do not present substantial differences although, as has been observed...

Scholars of pre-Columbian history have been trying to decipher something called the Grolier Codex ever since it was discovered by looters in a cave in Chiapas, Mexico back in the '60s.

It might seem counterintuitive, but tropical forest soils are, almost universally, terrible for farming. That’s due primarily to the insanely dense amount of life in these environments: In less alive forests, dead plant and animal matter has time to decompose and leach its nutrients into the soil. But in the tropical forest, huge numbers of insects, fungi, and bacteria devour any decomposing matter before it has a chance to enrich the soil. But people around the world live in tropical forests, and have had to figure out some way to make the soil actually productive. (The effects of the destruction...

The analyses drew from a DNA sample of a man that dated back 800 years and another from a woman that went back 1,500 years, both well before the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. The samples were collected from an archeological site in eastern Uruguay by co-corresponding author Gonzalo Figueiro, a biological anthropologist at the University of the Republic.The results of the analyses showed a surprising connection to ancient individuals from Panama—the land bridge that connects North and South America—and to eastern Brazil, but not to modern Amazonians. These findings support the theory proposed by some archeologists...

Archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a dwelling that was built up to 800 years ago during the Aztec Empire in the Centro neighborhood of Mexico City, Mexico, during works to modernize the area.The centuries-old abode was discovered by archaeologists and construction workers ahead of an initiative to update electrical power substations.The dwelling is believed to date from the late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200 to 1521) and would have been located on the border of two neighborhoods in the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, according to a statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History...

Archaeologists in Alabama have discovered the longest known painting created by early Indigenous Americans, a new study finds. Indigenous Americans crafted this 1,000-year-old record-breaking image — of a 10-foot-long (3 meters) rattlesnake — as well as other paintings, out of mud on the walls and ceiling of a cave, likely to depict spirits of the underworld, the researchers said.The cave has hundreds of cave paintings and is considered the richest place for Native American cave art in the American Southeast, the researchers said. To investigate its historic art, the team turned to photogrammetry, a technique that involves taking hundreds of...

Found in a cave in Mexico in 2012, the 10th- through 13th-century bones may have been displayed in a ritual tower of craniumsA decade ago, a large, jumbled mass of human remains was found in a cave in Frontera Comalapa, a town in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. Given the state’s struggles with drug cartels, violent infighting, and reported human trafficking and forced prostitution, authorities opened up an investigation into the apparent gruesome crime. The results are finally in—and it turns out the cave wasn’t actually a crime scene. Instead, the 150 skulls found there...

Stone spheres are found on the small island of Isla del Caño and the Diquís Delta, where over 300 stone Petrospheres have been previously identified from the Diquís culture.The Diquís culture emerged in the Valley of the Rio Grande de Térraba, where they established complex social, economic, and political systems to govern their society.During the Chiriquí Period between AD 800 – 1500, many settlements grew into large communities around the alluvial lands of the Térraba River and its main tributaries, constructing large structures using round-edged boulders, paved areas, burial sites, and circular or rectangular mounds with stone walls.The Diquís reached...

The volume and variety of objects hidden in the sealed tunnel under Teotihuacan's ornate Feathered Serpent Pyramid has shattered records for discoveries at the ancient city, once the most populous metropolis of the Americas and now a top tourist draw just outside modern-day Mexico City. ...100,000 artifacts from the tunnel have been cataloged so far, ranging from finely-carved statues, jewelry, shells, and ceramics as well as thousands of wooden and metallic objects that mostly survived the passage of time intact. ...100-meter-long (330 ft) tunnel, which ended in three chambers directly under the pyramid's mid-point. ...which is tall enough in most...

Full title: Four ancient skulls unearthed in Mexico suggest that North America was a melting pot of different peoples and cultures 10,000 years ago The first humans to settle in North America were more diverse than previously believed, according to a new study of skeletal fragments. US scientists analysed four skulls recovered from caves in Mexico that belonged to humans that lived sometime between 9,000 to 13,000 years ago. The researchers were surprised to find a high level of diversity, with the skulls ranging in similarity to that of Europeans, Asian and ...

U.S. anthropologists hypothesize that ancestors of aboriginal people in South and North America followed High Arctic route Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed. The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Stone tools and other artifacts unearthed from an archaeological dig at the Cooper’s Ferry site in western Idaho suggest that people lived in the area 16,000 years ago, more than a thousand years earlier than scientists previously thought. The artifacts would be considered among the earliest evidence of people in North America. The findings, published today in Science, add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pacific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor, said Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and...

Native Americans' use of fire to manage vegetation in what is now the Eastern United States was more profound than previously believed, according to a Penn State researcher who determined that forest composition change in the region was caused more by land use than climate change... Over the last 2,000 years at least, according to Abrams -- who for three decades has been studying past and present qualities of eastern U.S. forests -- frequent and widespread human-caused fire resulted in the predominance of fire-adapted tree species. And in the time since burning has been curtailed, forests are changing, with species...

Who are the first Americans? In the 1920s and 30s, discoveries made near Clovis, NM suggested a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that dates back nearly 13,200 years ago. But new evidence may actually point to Texas as a possible origin. Archaeologist Wilson W. "Dub" Crook has found that may just change the way we see history.

Today's hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes. Led by University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist Melanie Miller, a chemical analysis of a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together tested positive for at least five plant-based psychoactive substances. They included dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmine, key active compounds in ayahuasca, a mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the Amazon jungle... Miller's analysis of a scraping from the fox-snout pouch and...

Guatemalan ‘potbelly’ sculptures suggest people knew about magnetism more than 2,000 years ago HEADS UP Colossal stone heads from an ancient Guatemalan site contain magnetic fields on the right temple and cheek, spots that apparently held special significance for makers of the New research provides the first detailed look at how these sculpted body parts were intentionally placed within magnetic fields on large rocks. The researchers studied 11 potbelly sculptures, six heads and five bodies, now displayed in a Guatemalan town. At least 127 such sculptures have been found at sites in Mesoamerica, an ancient cultural region that runs from...