When the Spanish conquered the Maya empire in the 16th century, they forced their new subjects to convert to Christianity and speak and write in Spanish. But long before the Maya used the Roman ...

The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script, carved on monuments, painted on pottery, and drawn in handmade bark-paper books. For ...

This project, run by Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has a lofty goal: record and disseminate information about all known ancient Maya inscriptions and their associative art. On ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... A vertical column of 10 glyphic words, uncovered last year in ruins in Guatemala, is unreadable even by the most expert scholars, but they know what it means ...

When Martha Macri was growing up in Vinita, Okla., her father liked to teach her words in Cherokee. On Sundays they would visit a full-blood uncle who had a copy of the famous syllabary invented by ...