Free Republic

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...

President Trump on Tuesday all but promised to pardon Joe Arpaio, the hard-line former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who became a national symbol of the campaign against undocumented immigrants, and whose round-’em-up raids have landed him in legal trouble. “I’ll make a prediction — I think he is going to be just fine,” an angry and defiant Mr. Trump told a campaign-style forum in Phoenix where he abandoned scripted remarks and launched into a half-hour tirade against the news media. “But I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy.” “But Sheriff Joe can feel...

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.

A dog called Maya is achieving celebrity status in Spain as she waits for her owner outside the doors of a hospital in Alicante, a vigil which has already lasted for six days. Despite the efforts of her owner’s father, Maya refuses to be led away or distracted from her duty, honouring the tradition of her Akita Inu breed, reputed to be among the most loyal dogs in the world. Last Sunday Maya’s owner, 22-year-old Sandra Iniesta, began feeling intense pain in her abdomen as she, her father and the dog were travelling to their Barcelona home by car after...

The ambitious Snake kings used force and diplomacy to create the most powerful alliance in their culture’s history. The ancient city of Holmul isn’t much to look at. To the casual observer it’s just a series of steep, forested hills in the middle of the jungle in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. The jungle here in the Petén Basin is thick and warm but drier than you might expect. And silent, except for the drum of cicadas and the occasional calls of howler monkeys. Take a closer look, and you may notice that most of these hills are arranged...

(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...

Researchers have confirmed that the Mayan pyramid excavated at the Acropolis of Toniná, Chiapas is one the largest pyramids ever discovered. Discovered in 2010, Emiliano Gallaga and his team began their excavation under the impression that the pyramid was built on the top of a hill. It was not until recently that they’ve managed to fully assess it and truly see what they’re working with. Wighing in at 75-meters tall with seven distinct districts all with their own purpose – such as Temples, palaces, markets, housing, administration – the magnitude of the Toniná pyramid compares even to that of the...

Like a good politician, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) repeatedly proves adept at inserting itself into national debates. When presidential candidate Ben Carson said he could not support a Muslim president, CAIR gathered reporters to express outrage and call on Carson to drop out of the race. When a 14-year-old Texas boy was detained for bringing what he said was a homemade clock to school that a teacher feared might be a bomb, a CAIR official expressed outrage and sat by the boy's side during news conferences and interviews. And in the immediate aftermath of the December 2 mass...

Nabil Sadoun made his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict clear during a 1993 interview.Asked about conflict with "the Jews," Sadoun described it as "the first priority for Muslim[s] until the Holy Land is liberated and the backbone of the Jews is broken." He invoked verse 5:82 of the Quran, calling it "God Almighty's most accurate description of" Jews: "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans."Several things were required to liberate Palestine, Sadoun said, including, "Raising the spirit of Jihad and struggle amidst the Palestinian people and the Muslim peoples," and unifying Muslim...

Traces of blood discovered on ancient arrowheads in Guatemala prove the Maya took part in bloody ceremonies to communicate with their gods. Bloodletting ceremonies involved piercing the earlobes, tongues and even genitals of willing participants and using the spilled blood to 'feed' their deities. The arrows were collected from five sites in the central American region, including a temple at Zacpetén where it's thought bloodletting ceremonies took place around 500 years ago.

Students stand on a temple at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archeological site in Tlaxcala state, Mexico Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. New excavations here, the site of one of the Spanish conquistadors' worst defeats in Mexico, are yielding new evidence about what happened when two cultures clashed, and the native Mexicans, at least temporarily, were in control. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was one of the worst defeats in one of history's most dramatic conquests: Only a year after Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico, hundreds of people in a Spanish-led convey were captured, sacrificed and apparently eaten. Excavations at a site just east...

Iconographic studies of Teotihuacan murals confirm the extension of the lineage of a ruler of the ancient city of Tikal, Guatemala, already revealed by epigraphists of the Maya area. The aforementioned investigation sums up to interpretations of Stele 31 of Tikal that relate to the dynastic line of Atlatl-Cauac ("Dart-thrower Owl"), possible ruler of Teotihuacan between 374 and 439 AD, and whose son, Yax Nuun Ayiin I, was seignior of Tikal. The emblem of this lineage would be represented by the image of a bird with a shield, observed in Teotihuacan murals, declared Dr. Raul Garcia Chavez, researcher at the...

Sacrificial burial deepens mystery at Teotihuacan, but confirms the city’s militarism Partially uncovered figurine, carved in jade, found in connection with three unbound, seated bodies and other objects at the top of the pyramid’s fifth stage (the offering was presumably made in the construction of the sixth stage), circa 350 AD. This object is notable in that it is carved from jade that originated in Guatemala, and appears to be Mayan in style. Other jade objects on top of the figurine are beads and earspools. A spectacular new discovery from an ongoing excavation at the Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon...

The jade artifact, which has cleft rectangles, incisions and a cone at its top, was discovered underwater in Veracruz, Mexico. Photo courtesy Professor Carl Wendt A mysterious corncob-shaped artifact, dating to somewhere between 900 B.C. and 400 B.C., has been discovered underwater at the site of Arroyo Pesquero in Veracruz, Mexico. Made of jadeite, a material that is harder than steel, the artifact has designs on it that are difficult to put into words. It contains rectangular shapes, engraved lines and a cone that looks like it is emerging from the top. It looks like a corncob in an abstract...

For hundreds of years the Mayans dominated large parts of the Americas until, mysteriously in the 8th and 9th century AD, a large chunk of the Mayan civilisation collapsed. The reason for this collapse has been hotly debated, but now scientists say they might have an answer - an intense drought that lasted a century. Studies of sediments in the Great Blue Hole in Belize suggest a lack of rains caused the disintegration of the Mayan civilisation, and a second dry spell forced them to relocate elsewhere.

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...

Sprajc and his team found the massive remains as they further explored the area around Chactun, a large Maya city discovered by the Slovenian archaeologist in 2013. No other site has so far been located in this area, which extends over some 1800 square miles, between the so-called Rio Bec and Chenes regions, both known for their characteristic architectural styles fashioned during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, around 600 - 1000 A.D. One of the cities featured an extraordinary facade with an entrance representing the open jaws of an earth monster. The site was actually visited in the 1970s...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Award-winning author, renowned poet and civil rights activist Dr. Maya Angelou has died. She was 86. Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines confirmed Angelou was found by her caretaker on Wednesday morning.

What started out as a convenient collaboration between Dr. Richard Terry, professor of soil science at BYU, and a group of BYU archaeologists, soon became a groundbreaking discovery. Trough the combined efforts of Dr. Terry, Dr. Bruce Dahlin from Howard University, their students, and archaeologists from around the world, they were able to disprove the long-held belief that the Maya depended on the elite class to tax and redistribute their food and other goods. After receiving a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation, Terry and his students met up with Bruce Dahlin and his students at the huge...