Ancient America History

From best-selling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes this fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture, showing that such mass festivities have been indigenous to the West since the ancient Greeks.

In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.

Humans living in a dark, flooded world without sunlight - that’s what the gods of the Incas found upon their arrival. They terraformed waterlogged Earth to make it habitable again and built golden cities along the western half of South America connected by 25,000 miles of Inca road. Inca legends match the biblical Genesis but with incredible detail that tells a much fuller story. Creation did not involve making the sun and moon, and Earth out of nothing - it reworked what was already here.

Buildings are more like us than we realize. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents - gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen - as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die.

Around 2,000 years ago, the Maya people were raising pyramids to house their many gods and to bury their kings. This is just one of the special secrets uncovered by archaeologists in their stunning finds in parts of Central America. More than anything, the Maya left us with many questions. It’s the job of scientists and archaeologists to explain how a thriving people came to such a quick end. There are no simple answers, but we can discover so much with a shovel and brushes! Come, explore this fascinating civilization with us - and don’t forget your Indiana Jones hat!

Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, distinguished historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas - offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America? The iconoclastic historian's magnum opus, Who Discovered America? calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known "discoveries" of European explorers, including Christopher Columbus.

This first comprehensive work on women in pre-Columbian cultures describes gender roles and relationships in the Americas from 12,000 B.C. to the A.D. 1500s. Utilizing many key archaeological works, Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert redress some of the long-standing male bias in writing about ancient Native American lifeways. The authors pay particular attention to the problems of interpreting archaeological remains and the uses of historic and ethnographic evidence in reconstructing the past.

Ninety-six diverse stories about Ancient America are presented in Mysteries of Ancient America: Uncovering the Forbidden, Volume II. More evidence is reported that the erroneous archaeologist's term of "Hopewell" mound builders in the Ohio Valley were the Dakota Sioux Indians. More evidence is conferred that the giants in the Ohio Valley had their origins in ancient Babylon and were none other than the accounted giants in the Bible, known as the Amorites.

Volume One is the story of the trials and tribulations over many years of how the Old World—involving Norse men, Marco Polo, Portuguese, Aztecs, Mound Builders, etc—finally made the decision to seek out...the Indies..... in detail.

Ever wondered how Brazil became the country it is today? This audiobook is your chance to dive into its past, from the early indigenous civilizations to modern times. You’ll follow the stories of brave explorers, witness the fight for independence, and see how different cultures shaped Brazil along the way.

In the first part of this book, you will discover how the Inca civilization developed out of a number of preceding cultures in the Andes and Peruvian coast, how quickly the Incas were able to expand and why they needed to, how the empire was administered and how runners were able to take messages from one end of it to the other with remarkable speed....

This is the first English translation of a portion of Historia Antigua de Mexico, written originally in Spanish by celebrated Mexican historian Mariano Veytia. He relates the history, astronomy, and religious practices he discovered from the charts, diagrams, and paintings of the Native Americans. In addition, he presents an account of America'a first settlers, who left from the biblical Tower of Babel at the time of the confusion of tongues.

The Mayans maintained power in the Yucatan for over 1,000 years, and at the height of its Classical era, the city of Tikal was one of the power centers of the empire. Archaeologists believe Tikal had been built as early as the fifth or fourth century BC. Eventually it became a political, economic, and military capital that was an important part of a far-flung network across Mesoamerica.

In Central America, doctors of different colors came down out of the sky, mated with humans and begat 1,200 children. Nearby lived the Magic Wallas, a tribe of unusual Indians whom bullets could not touch. They flew through the sky, controlled the weather, and spoke the language of today’s Nordic extraterrestrials. In North America, a supernatural race befriended the Cherokee Indians and transported an entire village to another world. Flying machines empowered whichever Medicine Man possessed one, while giants produced children with humans.

Did a race of giant humans once roam the Biblical lands, Europe and North America? Over 300 historical accounts of giant human skeletons are presented for the first time. Massive human skeletal remains, burial mound types, symbolism, etymology, numerology and ceremonial centers are compared in the Biblical Levant, the British Isles and the Ohio Valley with stunning similarities.

Chichen Itza was inhabited for hundreds of years and was a very influential center in the later years of Maya civilization. At its height, Chichen Itza may have had over 30,000 inhabitants, and with a spectacular pyramid, enormous ball court, observatory and several temples, the builders of this city exceeded even those at Uxmal in developing the use of columns and exterior relief decoration. Of particular interest at Chichen Itza is the sacred cenote, a sinkhole was a focus for Maya rituals around water.

Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. The presence of these early New World people was established by distinctive stone tools belonging to the Clovis culture. But are the Clovis tools Asian in origin? Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative.

These are the true life tales of adventure and travel throughout Central America by John L. Stephens who employed Frederick Catherwood to create artistic renderings of their discoveries. First published in 1858, the world was amazed and intrigued by their travels.

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline.

People of the Sturgeon is a history of the lake sturgeon in Wisconsin's Lake Winnebago region, told through a fascinating collection of stories on the culture, art, and science surrounding this mysterious fish. From some of the earliest inhabitants of Wisconsin, the Menominee Indian Tribe, to the spearers who flock to frozen Lake Winnebago for the annual sturgeon spearing season, people have always been drawn to this ancient fish.