National Museum of Art, Mexico City. Following the fall of Tenochtitlan, an Aztec poet composed a searing account of the capture of the capital city. Written in the Nahuatl language, using the ...

This story appears in the November 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. On the edge of Mexico City's famed Zócalo plaza, next to the ruins of the Aztec sacred pyramid known as the Templo ...

Hygiene and ritual marked every moment of life for pregnant Aztec women ... story appears in the January/February 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Where do babies come from?

Was the 1521 surrender of the great Indigenous empire to the Spanish crown a triumphant conquest, an existential tragedy—or even a genocide? Generations of Mexican schoolchildren were taught the ...

The Aztec outnumbered the Spanish, but that didn't stop Hernán Cortés from seizing Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1521. This 18th-century oil painting, part of the Conquest of Mexico series ...

The Aztec, Olmec, and Maya of Mesoamerica are known to have made rubber using natural latex—a milky, sap-like fluid found in some plants. Mesoamerica extends roughly from central Mexico to ...

The ancient codex, composed around the time the Aztec Empire fell to Spanish conquistadors, features a story of a convulsion that lasted for up to five days, creating landslides and opening up a ...

This story was produced and published by National Geographic through a reporting ... with that same canal sediment and compost (in Aztec days they used human waste); covered the seedlings gently ...

Think “poinsettia” and you think “Christmas,” right? Well, think again. At the time of the first Christmas, the closest poinsettia to the little town of Bethlehem was 8,000 miles away ...

While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec, Maya, and Inca have been ... Archaeologist Gabriel Prieto, second from left, a National Geographic Explorer, excavates the coastal lot where ...