At the height of the Mayan empire 1,400 years ago, the city of Tikal in modern-day Guatemala was a bustling metropolis the size of London during the Middle Ages. But when the Spanish conquistadors ...

This story appears in the September 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. Your National Geographic Society membership helped fund recent excavations at Holmul and La Corona, Guatemala.

When most people think of ancient Maya civilization, they imagine godlike kings building towering pyramids and reveling in bloody human sacrifice. But commoners also played a significant role in the ...

The film explores the history and culture of the ancient Maya civilization, tracing its origins to around 1500 BC in southern Mexico and Guatemala. It highlights the Maya's advancements in ...

Chichén Itzá, "the mouth of the well of the Itzás," was likely the most important city in the Yucatán from the 10th to the 12th centuries. Evidence indicates that the site was first settled as ...

FOR DECADES, scholars have argued about what caused the so-called Maya collapse. Several million Maya lived in southeastern Mexico and northern Central America in the early 800s. A hundred years later ...

The peak of La Danta—one of the world's largest pyramids—pokes through the forest canopy. "All this was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago," says archaeologist Richard Hansen. "It's like finding ...

In its heyday from about A.D. 300 to 900, the Maya civilization boasted hundreds of cities across a vast swath of Central America. Now archeological sites, these once-flourishing cities extended ...