"Ten ancient skeletons have been unearthed in Mexico this week [Feb. 2018] including a baby of around one-month-old. Ritualistically deformed, in that their skull shapes and teeth had been altered, they were arranged in a spiral shape with interlocking arms - confirming that they were buried in some sort of ancient death ritual. Estimated to be over 2,400-years old, this occult discovery is creating a typhoon of ideas in the archeological world." Source: Ancient Origins (2018).
"According to a BBC report, archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), who are excavating the grounds of the Pontifical University of Mexico (UPM) in the borough of Tlalpan in southern Mexico City, discovered the skeletons under a building that once served as 'classrooms, chapel as well as dorm room for the priests.' Bone dating revealed the people once belonged to the Pre-Classical period in Mexico around 1600 BC, predating the rise of the Aztec Empire. The bodies had been 'buried with cajetes and tecomates - earthenware bowls and pots of various sizes' and some of them grasped 'stones or ceramic spheres,' according to the BBC."
Spanish only, unfortunately. Video shows the ruins of Zultepec / Tecoaque (see below).
"New research suggests an Aztec-allied town ceremonially disfigured the bodies of captive Spaniards [both men and women] during one of the worst defeats in the Spanish Conquest of 1519-21, experts said Wednesday." Source: Archaeology News Network (2019).
"The heads of the captive Spanish women were strung up on skull racks alongside those of men. An analysis of the bones revealed the women were pregnant, and in pre-Hispanic practice that may have qualified them as 'warriors.' Another sacrificial offering included one woman’s body that was cut in half near the remains of a dismembered child of 3 or 4."
Note: "The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the offerings were excavated at the Zultepec-Tecoaque site just east of Mexico City. Zultepec was an Aztec-allied town that in 1520 captured a convoy of about 15 male Spaniards, 50 women and 10 children, 45 foot soldiers who included Cubans of African and indigenous descent, and about 350 allies from indigenous groups in what is now Mexico. All were apparently sacrificed over the space of months."
Video from 2014. According to new research, the eruption occurred in 431 AD, earlier than previously believed.
"A new scientific study of an ice core sample from Greenland has demonstrated how the Central-American Ilopango mega-eruption wiped out an entire Maya area, 1,590 years ago. Oxford University archaeologist and lead author of the new research paper, Dr Victoria Smith, told Ars Technica that her radiocarbon analysis confirmed El Salvador's Ilopango mega-eruption occurred in 431 AD. She said the resulting ejection was '50 times bigger' than the May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens mega-eruption in southwestern Washington, USA, which was one of the greatest volcanic explosions ever recorded in the Americas." Source: Ancient Origins.
Video from 2013. Only decent aerial views of the lake I could find. Note the old date for the eruption.
Several (older) sources describe the Ilapongo eruption as the cause of a Maya "dark age," a 100-year decline in productivity which appears to have occurred in the region starting around 540 AD, but if the revised dating from this new research is correct, that theory is probably obsolete along with several others:
"It was hypothesized that this eruption caused the extreme weather events of 535–536 in Europe and Asia, but this is unlikely given the research published in 2020 that dates the eruption to 431 AD." (Wikipedia)
Ilapongo eruption covered at 2:02. Again, the date is probably wrong.
The eruption was disastrous but there seems to be some confusion in the sources I've seen about just how bad it was. Ancient Origins describes it as a "Maya Armageddon," but the Ars Technica article mentioned above says that it "affected only a small region." According to the original paper, the eruption only had a major impact on people living around 50 miles from the volcano. That's pretty bad, but for those outside of this zone the impact wasn't bad enough to have caused the whole Mayan society in the area to collapse:
"A few hundred kilometers away, in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize, people must have noticed the centimeter or so of ash that coated their homes, temples, streets, and fields, but the Maya heartland was spared [the eruption’s] worst impacts. The Maya expansion of the Classic Period carried on despite the devastation around Ilopango. However, we don’t yet have enough evidence to say how the local disaster affected the wider trade networks of which Chalchuapa was a part or how all those aerosols in the stratosphere affected the world’s climate in the years after the eruption." (Ars Technica)
"Reservoirs in the heart of an ancient Maya city were so polluted with mercury and algae that the water likely was undrinkable. Researchers found toxic levels of pollution in two central reservoirs in Tikal [see next video], an ancient Maya city that dates back to the third century B.C. in what is now northern Guatemala. New findings suggest droughts in the ninth century likely contributed to the depopulation and eventual abandonment of the city." Source: Science Daily.
"... A geochemical analysis found that two reservoirs nearest the city palace and temple contained toxic levels of mercury that UC researchers traced back to a pigment the Maya used to adorn buildings, clayware and other goods. During rainstorms, mercury in the pigment leached into the reservoirs where it settled in layers of sediment over the years."
Note: "...researchers said it is possible but unlikely the Maya used these reservoirs for drinking, cooking or irrigation." Apparently they had several other, unpolluted reservoirs available.
"The oldest and largest Maya monumental structure on record has just been discovered after scientists [using LIDAR] shot millions of lasers from a plane to map an area in southern Mexico." Source: Live Science.
"At the newfound site, called Aguada Fénix, researchers found an artificial plateau measuring about 0.9 miles (1.4 kilometers) long, 0.2 miles (399 meters) wide and between 33 and 50 feet (10 and 15 m) high. And it likely served as a communal gathering place for the Maya."
Note: Aguada Fenix was unearthed in 2017. Located on a cattle ranch in Tabasco, Mexico, the site looks like a natural landscape, according to one of the researchers. Its discovery pushes back the date when the Maya began building ceremonial centers by around six or seven centuries, at least.
I'm not sure who produced this hilariously lurid documentary or when it was made.
"For a long time, it was commonly held by Mayanist [sic] experts that the 'pacific' Maya of Central America and southern Mexico did not practice human sacrifice (1). However, as more images and glyphs have come to light and been translated, it appears that the Maya frequently practiced human sacrifice in religious and political contexts." Source: Thought Company.
"Sacrifices played a vital part in Maya ritualism. Animals such as iguanas, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, peccaries, jaguars, and turkeys were occasionally sacrificed, and ... these offerings involved either whole animals -- alive, freshly killed, or cooked -- or in some cases only their hearts. But the supreme sacrifice was human life itself, and all too frequently humans were consigned to be slaughtered in the course of elaborate rituals." -- Maya, the Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization, Charles Gallenkamp, Third Revised Edition, 1985, p. 109.
(1) "The prevalent theory on the ancient Maya at the beginning of the 20th century held on to the notion that they had a predominantly peaceful society, idealizing the indigenous culture much like a noble savage. This view [was based on] poorly documented analysis of iconography and the content of Maya script." Source: Wikipedia.
Comment: The myth of the Noble Savage living a peaceful life in harmony with nature and his neighbors has the distinction of being wrong in every case that I'm aware of. It may not be the worst idea ever conceived, but it's definitely one of the most inaccurate.
"A ruthless Maya warrior queen may have ordered the building of an elaborate road more than 1,000 years ago to invade a distant city and to counter the rising power of another, archaeologists say." Source: Live Science.
"They think the queen of the Maya city of Cobá, Lady K'awiil Ajaw, may have ordered the road's construction around A.D. 680 so her armies could travel along it to conquer and take control of the city of Yaxuná, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the west, in what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
"Lady K'awiil Ajaw was one of the most powerful and warlike rulers of ancient Cobá, and carved stone monuments show her standing over captives, says archaeologist Travis Stanton of the University of California, Riverside."
This is called a "white road" because of the way it was constructed. According to Science Daily, "the road was as much an engineering marvel as the monumental pyramids the Maya erected across southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras. Although built over undulating terrain, the road was flat, with the uneven ground filled in with huge limestone boulders, and the surface coated with bright, white plaster. Essentially the same formula the Romans used for concrete in the third century B.C., the plaster was made by burning limestone and adding lime and water to the mixture."
This is one of several Maya roads which have been discovered using LIDAR over the years.
Video from April, 2020.Description of road network begins at 10:43.
"Most of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica such as the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Aztec cultures practiced some kind of taking of human trophies during warfare. Captives taken during war would often be taken to their captors' city-states where they would be ritually tortured and sacrificed. These practices are documented by a rich material of iconographic and archaeological evidence from across Mesoamerica." Source: Wikipedia.
Photo credit: "El Tajin Ballcourt Mural (Tom Aleto)" by Thomas Aleto from Riverside, PA - Tajin Sacrifice Scene. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. I think Aleto teaches anthropology at Bloomsburg University.
> Video from 2015. Ancient Apocalypse was a 2001 BBC documentary series.
Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:
"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.
"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:
"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)
Note: Megadroughts aren't uncommon and they can last for a long time. For instance, there was a 200-year megadrought in the Sierra Nevada in the 9th - 12th centuries. Parts of the western United States could be heading into one of these destructive dry spells right now.
"Researchers have found a 'graveyard' of about 60 mammoths ahead of the construction of an airport just outside Mexico City, according to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico." Source: Live Science.
"In addition to the ice age findings, researchers at the airport-construction site uncovered remains from an entirely different time period — pre-Hispanic times, when 15 humans were buried there, the INAH reported.
"...Scientists found the pachyderm bones — including those from male, female and young mammoths — at three sites within the airport's vicinity ... When the mammoths were alive during the last ice age, this area was on the shore of Lake Xaltocan. It's possible that these heavy animals got stuck in the mud there, and that human hunters took advantage of that, targeting the beasts there ..."
Note: Two more mammoth pits (around 15,000 years old) were discovered near this site last year:
Video from Nov. 2019.
"The ancient beasts were Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), a species that lived throughout North America during the Pleistocene epoch (which began 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago). The researchers did not find any remains of the furrier woolly mammoth, which lived farther north."