One of the greatest detective stories in all of archaeology, it has never been told in depth on television before. With glorious footage of Mayan temples and art, this documentary was many years in the making and culminates in the fascinating account of this once magnificent ancient civilization’s ingenious method of communication.
Pages from the Dresden Codex, one of only four Maya books known to have survived the Conquest, track the planet Venus and helped a 19th-century scholar decipher the Maya calendar and astronomy.
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 centuries, scholars considered it too complex ever to understand — until recently, when an ingenious series of breakthroughs finally cracked the code and unleashed a torrent of new insights into the Mayas’ turbulent past.
By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.