For hundreds of years, Andean people recorded information by tying knots into long cords. Will we ever be able to read them?

Politicians and institutions sometimes used the glories of the past empires of the Inca, Aztec or Maya to form a new brand of nationalism after countries won their independence from Spain. In Peru and ...

The Aztec Empire may have ended centuries ago, but its presence is far from gone. It lingers in temple ruins, place names, and bits of language and folklore. Walk through Mexico City nowadays, and you ...

The discovery also sheds light on how the Aztec society evolved — introducing more standardized religion and control before the empire fell in 1520 — by showing how obsidian use changed over time. The ...

Hernán Cortés, having overthrown Aztec Mexico, seized a cache of gold ... The volume of all the gold in the Inca Empire would have been almost 14 times greater than all the gold then in Europe ...

A network of traveling merchant-spies were essential to the expansion of the Aztec Empire. In ancient Mesoamerica, an elite class of merchants helped build the Aztec Empire. How? By mastering the ...

(The Aztecs, meanwhile, ruled in Central Mexico, and the P'urhépecha empire prevented them from amassing territory to the north and west.) Arturo Peña Romano Medina/Getty Images The P'urhépecha ...

The discovery also sheds light on how the Aztec society evolved — introducing more standardized religion and control before the empire fell in 1521 — by showing how obsidian use changed over time.

It was roughly 10 times the size of the Aztec Empire and had twice its population. Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools ...