If you've ever visited Cancun or Playa del Carmen in Mexico, then you’ve likely heard about the Mayans. They are the indigenous culture that ruled southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Conventional wisdom has it that Maya kingdoms vanished into history following an agricultural crisis created by severe, prolonged drought. But new research led by Brandeis anthropologist Charles ...

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 ...