Rapaz’s isolation has allowed it to guard an enduring archaeological mystery: a collection of khipus, the cryptic woven knots that may explain how the Incas — in contrast to contemporaries in the Ottoman Empire and China’s Ming dynasty — ruled a vast, administratively complex empire without a written language.
Archaeologists in Guatemala have unearthed a 1,600-year-old tomb that is believed to be the final resting place of a Mayan king.A well-preserved tomb believed to be the final resting place of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala, scientists announced last week.
One approach defines a Hispanic or Latino as a member of an ethnic group that traces its roots to 20 Spanish-speaking nations from Latin America and Spain itself (but not Portugal or Portuguese-speaking Brazil). The other approach is much simpler. Who's Hispanic? ...
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico already has many of its monuments on Unesco´s list of protected sites. Now the government is asking for international recognition for the country's cuisine.
Deforestation left nothing to hinder ancient floodwaters on the desert plain, researchers find. Modern Peru could learn from the civilization's collapse, they say.
MEXICO CITY -- Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.
4.4 Million-Year-Old Primate Helps Bridge Evolutionary Gap
Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago in the woodlands of East Africa. She spent most of her time in the trees. She stood about 4 feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had long arms, short legs, and a grasping big toe that was perfect for clambering branch to branch. She ate in the trees, raised her offspring in the trees, slept in the trees.
MACAS, Ecuador -- Several hundred Shuar Indians wearing black war paint and toting wooden spears reinforced a highway blockade that police failed to break up earlier in a bloody melee that left one Indian dead and at least 40 police injured.
Wise Latina. The catchphrase of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings has taken on a life of its own, spawning T-shirts, note cards, dog jerseys and even thongs.
British archaeologists say a rise in temperatures helped fuel the empire, giving access to more cultivable, fertile land, and thus food surpluses that freed the Incas to expand and conquer.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A collection of slavery records newly available over the Internet may help thousands of people trace their families back to Africa through St. Croix, a former slave-trading hub in the Caribbean.
THE CULEBRA CUT, Panama — You can’t leave Aldo Rincón alone for a moment. As a small knot of scientists and visitors dressed in hard hats and orange safety vests milled around on the banks of the Panama Canal, chatting about the $5 billion expansion program now under way to widen the storied canal and so accommodate the ever-fatter freighters that ply the planet’s seas, Mr. Rincón, 30, quietly pulled a few digging tools from his backpack.
Faced with a simmering crisis over dozens of deaths in the quelling of indigenous protests last week, Peru’s Congress this week suspended the decrees taht had been issued over plans to open large parts of the Peruvian Amazon to investment. Senior officials said they hoped this would calm nerves and ease the way for oil drillers and loggers to pursue their projects.
TARAPOTO, Peru -- The Aguaruna Indians have a well-earned reputation as warriors. In pre-Columbian times they successfully resisted Inca subjugation. And during Peru's 1995 border war with Ecuador, they served as guides for the army.
It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia’s long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.
CUSCO, Peru — From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.
MEXICO CITY -- The director of Harvard's Peabody Museum said he wants to return about 50 ancient carved Mayan jade pieces to Mexico, almost a century after a U.S. consul dredged the artifacts from the sacred lake at the ruins of Chichen Itza.
EARLY in the last century, Argentina was one of the world's 10 richest countries. Its fabled beef and other farm exports were building an industrial economy. In 1928, it had more cars than France and more telephone lines than Japan. The dream of its Spanish founders — to transform a wild land tucked near the bottom of the world into a great country of European culture and education inhabited by white-skinned people — was coming true.
The radio reporters huddled in a corner of the Red Cross tent , waiting for the wounded to arrive on stretchers. They wanted details of the injuries. They were not disappointed.
