If you buy something from a link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Chanel Vargas is a freelance writer, editor, and journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Growing up ...

Centuries before Monopoly, there was Patolli, a high-stakes Mesoamerican game of strategy and luck where players wagered crops and wealth as they raced their opponents around a cross-shaped board. The ...

It used to be thought that ancient Mesoamerican monuments were built and used predominantly by powerful leaders and ruling classes. Among the early Maya, however, the site of Aguada Fénix would have ...

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Researchers have launched Itiner-e, an interactive digital map tracing 300,000 kilometers of ancient Roman roads. The project reveals a far more extensive Roman network than previously believed, ...

A monumental complex built by the Maya around 3,000 years ago was modeled on a map of the cosmos, new fieldwork has revealed. A detailed survey of the Aguada Fénix site reveals that not only was the ...

How often do you think about the Roman Empire? For a team of international researchers who went all in and mapped the ancient Roman road system, the answer — truly — is every day. And now, anyone can ...

A new high resolution digital dataset and map—named Itiner-e—of roads throughout the Roman Empire around the year 150 CE is presented in research published in Scientific Data. The findings increase ...

Finding the oldest Maya site ever documented was only the beginning of archaeologist Takeshi Inomata’s discoveries. After locating the Aguada Fénix site buried in the jungle of southern Mexico in 2017 ...

The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica left behind a rich artistic legacy that continues to captivate and intrigue modern scholars and enthusiasts. Among the myriad of themes that Mesoamerican art ...