ACHTUN TUNICHIL MUKNAL CAVE, Belize -- Xibalba was a Maya name for the underworld, home of the gods of death and disease. Caves, not the lofty pyramids left behind by the ancient Maya, were the ...

(a) Location of the Maya region in the Americas. (b) Geographical locations of Chichén Itzá and Tixcacaltuyub in the Yucatan Peninsula. (c) Stratigraphy for the chultún and the adjacent cave in which ...

The Maya created a complex calendar system to regulate their world — one of the most accurate of pre-modern times. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Archaeologists have uncovered fragmented skulls from a Guatemalan cave where people were sacrificed in a brutal Maya ritual to appease the rain god. The Cueva de Sangre, or "blood cave", was first ...

Ritual killing was a common part of religious sacrifice in the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. For decades, media depictions cast the victims of these acts as young women and adolescent girls. In ...

Scientists believe the people were sacrificed to appease the Mayan rain god, Chaac. Archaeologists working in northern Guatemala (formerly the Mayan city of Dos Pilas) recently discovered fragments of ...

After the Aztec conquest, Cortés marched south and passed through a Maya lake-city where a stranded Spanish horse was later remembered as a god—an eerie prelude to the final subjugation of the last ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In 1967, an underground cistern known as a chultun was discovered near a sacred body of water at Chichen Itza, an important ancient Maya city on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

The Mayan people may have preferred to sacrifice boys, a new study has discovered. The findings were made in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, which used to be home to the ancient city of Chichén Itzá. The ...

Baal worship involved roasting babies in a bronze bull. The Carthaginians drowned young children, IIRC. The Scandinavian Norse sacrificed every male living thing, leaving the bodies in sacred trees; I ...