Mesoamerican History

For more than one thousand years, the Maya people dominated areas of Central America and modern-day Mexico and made important advances in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Then, after the Spanish occupation in the sixteenth century,...

Many ancient civilizations are described as mysterious, but none provide as many puzzles and unanswered questions as the Olmecs. These people arrived in lands near the Gulf of Mexico around 1500 BCE, and they brought with them entirely new concepts in...

The Toltecs are one of the most mysterious and little understood of all the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica. This culture was venerated by later civilizations such as the Aztecs, and even today, “Toltec knowledge” is used as a kind of shorthand for...

The Zapotecs formed one of the most important of the pre-Columbian civilizations. For one thousand years, their main city of Monte Albán was one of the largest and most sophisticated in Mesoamerica. Building this city was an astonishing engineering...