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 ...

This story appears in the January/February 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Where do babies come from? The Aztecs’ answer to the classic child’s question was that they came ...

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 ... artificial islands first built by the predecessors of the Aztecs from the mud of what was then a vast shallow ...

“The cultures believed that sap had healing properties.” Aztecs applied the sap to the breasts of nursing mothers to increase milk production. They also used the sap as a depilatory. Even ...

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 ...