Public Lectures

In the first century CE, Teotihuacan became the capital of the area known today as Central Mexico. The city grew to include 100,000 people, drawing immigrants from Western Mexico, the Valley of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and the Maya region. Deborah Nichols will...

In the 1960s, Gordon Willey and a team of Harvard archaeologists led the investigation of Ceibal, a Maya site in Guatemala. Their research revealed that Ceibal was a very early settlement, one that predated the cities constructed in the heyday of Maya...

A rigged election and a political crisis among competing elites, middle classes, and rural workers: What could go wrong? The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began as a multilocal revolt against the 35-year regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz and evolved into a...

Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be...

Harvard University's 1650 charter founded a multicultural educational setting when it committed the new institution "to the education of the English and Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project...

The 1978 discovery of the Great Aztec Temple in downtown Mexico City riveted the international archaeological world. This monumental shrine dedicated to the Aztec war and rain gods had been buried beneath the city’s main plaza since the sixteenth-century...