K’ahk’ Uti’ Witz’ K’awiil knew his history. For 11 generations, the Mayan ruler’s dynasty had ruled Copan, a city-state near ...

Ancient DNA reveals how Mayan civilisation collapsed - Maya civilisation population decreased vastly during late Classic period ...

Today, more than 30 Mayan languages exist and are spoken by at least six million people worldwide. Although some, like Chicomuseltec and Choltí, have disappeared or are close to extinction, others, ...

Those rulers went on to achieve peak power roughly between the years 550 and 800. Royal art and writing at Tamarindito and other Classic Maya sites misleadingly suggest that kings wielded absolute ...

The foreign ruler who seems to have taken over Ucanal (and probably several other Maya kingdoms) was a military strongman called Papmalil (a non-Maya name) who, according to the title he gave ...

An ancient ruler embodied by the Mayan god of corn in the underworld can be seen on an astonishingly well-preserved stone disk recently extracted from the Temple of the Sun in Mexico. The figure ...

For a brief period one of those city-states prevailed and became the closest thing to an empire in Maya history. It was ruled by the Snake kings of the Kaanul dynasty, which until just a few ...

Mayan artifacts reproduced by Zacatecas-born master sculptor Manuel Palos. Sign up below to get Mission Local’s free newsletter, a daily digest of news you won’t find elsewhere. Sign up The Mission ...

Archaeologists have uncovered new stucco reliefs at the ancient Maya city of Dzibanché, providing fresh insights into the Kaanu'l dynasty, also known as the "Snake Kings," who ruled parts of ...

The mysterious discovery in Guatemala of burned human remains and thousands of rich but ruined ornaments—supposedly what’s left of a Maya city’s royal rulers—may be rare and direct ...

In 250, as the Roman Empire began to fall apart in Europe, Mayan civilization was steadily gaining in power and sophistication. Over the next six centuries, the Maya built a network of cities that ...

open image in gallery Maya royalty: an image of a ninth-century Maya ruler (a king of the city state of Machaquila in what is now Guatemala) gives some idea of what the probable conqueror of ...