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(GUATEMALA CITY) — Researchers using a high-tech aerial mapping technique have found tens of thousands of previously undetected Mayan houses, buildings, defense works and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Peten region, suggesting that millions more people lived there than previously thought. The discoveries, which included industrial-sized agricultural fields and irrigation canals, were announced Thursday by an alliance of U.S., European and Guatemalan archaeologists working with Guatemala’s Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation. The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have....

Used by the Maya for travel and transporting goods, the causeways were identified in the Mirador Basin, which lies in the far northern Petén region of Guatemala, within the largest tract of virgin tropical forest remaining in Central America. Also known as the Kan Kingdom, El Mirador is considered the cradle of Mayan civilization. Prior to its abandonment in 150 A.D., it was the largest city-state in the world both in size — 833 square miles — and population. It boasted the largest known pyramid in Central America, and was home to at least one million people. Researchers have known...

(Title was shortened. Add: "of the night sky from his bedroom ") A Canadian schoolboy appears to have discovered a lost Mayan city hidden deep in the jungles of Mexico using a new method of matching stars to the location of temples on earth. William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities. And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked. “I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched...

Who Really Discovered America? Did ancient Hebrews reach the shores of the North and South American continents thousands of years before Christopher Columbus? What evidence is there for Hebrew and Israelite occupation of the Western Hemisphere even a thousand years before Christ? Was trans-Atlantic commerce and travel fairly routine in the days of king Solomon of Israel? Read here the intriguing, fascinating saga of the TRUE DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA! William F. Dankenbring A stone in a dry creek bed in New Mexico, discovered by early settlers in the region, is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in the Western...

From the sky, the Mound of the Cross at Paquime, a 14th-century ruin in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, looks like a compass rose -- the roundish emblem indicating the cardinal directions on a map. About 30 feet in diameter and molded from compacted earth and rock taken near the banks of the Casas Grandes River, the crisscross arms point to four circular platforms. They might as well be labeled N, S, E and W...

Do three dog effigy pots excavated in Georgia in the 1930s at the Bull Creek Site and one from the Neisler Mound site represent the Chihuahua breed, a native dog of Mexico? Is the tribe most likely associated with these pots the Kasihta/Cussetta Creek Indians whose migration legends strongly suggest an origin in west Mexico, likely the state of Colima which is also known for similar dog effigy pots? Did the Kasihta raise Chihuahuas for food which they fattened up for this purpose as depicted by the pots and as recorded by early Spanish eye-witness accounts? Finally, does this evidence...

Mexico - The Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History have admitted that they have a second reference to the date 2012 as "end of the world" on a carved fragment found at an archaeological site in southern Mexico. Salt Lake Tribune reports that archaeologists have long acknowledged that reference to date 2012 as "end of the world" is found on a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco. But on Thursday, the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History announced that there is what appears another reference to the same date in an...

Okay … so the title of this blog is alarming, right? Well, yeah! Nobody in this country takes the charge of racist lightly – especially white Americans. That’s because white Americans have had the charge of racism beaten into their consciousness for more than six decades, now. [1] But, incredible as it may seem, just as soon as one charge of racism is laid to rest with the election of the first so-called post-racial President, another charge of racism rises to take its place. This time, we are told, the racists are those who believe that the Mayan culture teaches...

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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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...

LAKE JACKSON - Investigators say a Lake Jackson woman caused her husband's death by giving him a sherry enema, leading to alcohol poisoning. The enema caused his blood alcohol level to soar to 0.47 percent — almost six times the legal intoxication limit, a toxicology report showed Tammy Jean Warner, 42, was indicted on a charge of negligent homicide. She is also charged with burning the will of her husband, Michael Warner, a month before his death on May 21. Michael Warner, a 58-year-old machine shop owner, had a long history of alcoholism, but couldn't ingest alcohol by mouth because...