Gordon R. Willey Lecture

Teotihuacan, one of the largest cities in the world over 1,500 years ago, stands today as a premier archaeological site and a powerful symbol of Mexico’s precolonial heritage. Despite its enduring fame and millions of annual visitors, much remains...

Transcript The 2022 Gordon R. Willey Lecture The story of Maya culture as a once-great civilization that built towering pyramids in the jungles of Central America was developed and popularized by national governments, anthropologists, and archaeologists...

Could the ancient city of Caral in Peru be the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere? Four Thousand Years Ago in Coastal Peru: America's First Civilization? Gordon R. Willey Lecture by Dr. Michael E. Moseley Professor in the Department of Anthropology at...

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...

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...

The earliest complex societies found in the Western Hemisphere developed under very different environmental conditions. The Maya, for instance, emerged in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, a region with high seasonal rainfall and rich...