Long before the great Classic Maya cities rose from the jungle, a forgotten world of colossal monuments, towering pyramids, and rival chiefdoms was already shaping the foundations of Mesoamerican ...

National Geographic Explorer David Stuart has been critical to unraveling the mysteries of the Maya. In our latest Ask an ...

Skeletons buried near the ancient Maya city of Copán have revealed new clues about the collapse, but not total decimation, of the Maya civilization. A study of the genomes of seven people from the ...

New research suggests that explanations based only on climate may not fully account for the major decline of the lowland ...

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On the eve of the rise of the Maya civilization, people living in what’s now Belize turned a whole wetland into a giant network of fish traps big enough to feed thousands of people. We already know ...

A new study uses genome analysis to show the decline, not erasure, of the ancient Maya civilization. Researchers compared the genomes of seven skeletons to previously sequenced sets from across ...

Tourists explore the ‘Dome of the Cathedral’, the largest chamber in Grutas Tzabnah (Yucatán, Mexico), and the origin of Tzab06-1. The artificial well ‘La Noria’ now illuminates the cave. (Mark ...

The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya David Stuart Princeton Univ. Press (2026) Before the 1970s, ancient Maya history was impenetrable. The civilization’s grand ceremonial buildings and ...