Ancient History Civilization

My family and I are headed out of town on a much needed and deserved vacation.  We are cruising through Mexico making stops in Belize, Costa Maya, Cozumel, and the Bahamas!  I will have a TON of photos to post when I return.  I am so looking forward to touring the Mayan Ruins.
I will have [...]

The Aztecs
The term, Aztec, is a startlingly imprecise term to describe the culture that dominated the Valley of Mexico in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Properly speaking, all the Nahua-speaking peoples in the Valley of Mexico were Aztecs, while the culture that dominated the area was a tribe of the Mexica (pronounced “me-shee-ka”) called the Tenochca [...]

Maya codices (singular codex) are folding books stemming from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, written in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican paper, made from the inner bark of certain trees, the main being the wild fig tree or Amate (Ficus glabrata).
Paper, generally known by the Nahuatl word amatl, was named by the Mayas huun. The folding [...]

The Mexica made reference to at least two manifestations of the supernatural: teotl and teixiptla. Teotl, which the Spaniards and European scholars routinely mistranslated as god or demon, referred rather to an impersonal force that permeated the world. Teixiptla, by contrast, denoted the physical representations (idols, statues and figurines) of the t??tl as well as [...]

Chichén Itzá – El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulkan
“El Caracol” at Chichén Itzá has long been recognized as an astronomical observatory whose foundations are Maya and whose subsequent embellishments are Toltec. Perhaps the most significant alignments of this structure are those of its front door and its principal window, located just above it, both of [...]