Latest Mayan languages Stories

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A furious Guatemalan mob seized a man and a woman accused of stealing a child and burned them to death on the streets of a highland Mayan village on Wednesday, police said. A crowd of around 800 people snatched the couple from a jail in the village of Sumpango, 25 miles southwest of Guatemala City, where they were being held for attempting to kidnap a 7-year-old boy, police spokesman Isidro Ramos said. "The people ... took them out of the jail, beat them...

By Mica Rosenberg SIPACAPA, Guatemala (Reuters) - A Mayan protester lost his life trying to stop Guatemala's first 21st century gold mine from opening last year, and resistance may yet upset miners' dreams of a new gold belt in the troubled nation. Glamis Gold says its Marlin Mine, which opened in December in the arid western Guatemalan highlands, will be the Nevada-based company's largest and most profitable asset. The mine is set to produce an average of 250,000 ounces of gold and...

By Mica RosenbergRABINAL, Guatemala (Reuters) - It outlived the Spanish conquest and a crushing civil war and it survived decades of repression by the Guatemala government of the Maya heartland. Now the oldest drama in the Americas has been declared a global masterpiece.The Rabinal Achi is performed annually at a January festival. Anthropologists say it has been staged since 1400 and tells the story of the clash of two Mayan kingdoms 500 years earlier.The play, now sponsored by the...

By Mica RosenbergANTIGUA, Guatemala (Reuters) - Archeologists excavating a pyramid complex in the Guatemalan jungle have uncovered the earliest example of Mayan writing ever found, 10 bold hieroglyphs painted on plaster and stone.The 2,300-year-old glyphs were excavated last April in San Bartolo and suggest the ancient Mayas developed an advanced writing system centuries earlier than previously believed, according to an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.The glyphs date from...

By Mica RosenbergGUATEMALA CITY -- Buried in a tunnel deep in Guatemala's northern jungle, archeologists have uncovered the final and most elaborate wall of a 2,000-year-old Mayan mural, likened to the Vatican's Sistine Chapel by its finder.Archeologist William Saturno, of the University of New Hampshire, first discovered the sacred mural in the ruins of the city of San Bartolo in 2001 and this year excavated the "crown jewel" of the painting.The wall proves that the ancient Maya,...

(Corrects fifth paragraph to read: Gibson achieved fame with lucrative movies like the epic "The Patriot") A corrected repetition follows: By Tim Gaynor VERACRUZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Actor Mel Gibson, who turned a Latin script on the crucifixion of Christ into box office gold last year, is in Mexico to shoot his latest film: an action movie shot entirely in an ancient Mayan tongue. The star turned independent director was in the eastern state of Veracruz this week where he is to film...

By Tim Gaynor VERACRUZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Actor Mel Gibson, who turned a Latin script on the crucifixion of Christ into box office gold last year, is in Mexico to shoot his latest film: an action movie shot entirely in an ancient Mayan tongue. The star turned independent director was in the eastern state of Veracruz this week where he is to film "Apocalypto," a thriller set in an ancient Mayan settlement and shot in the Yucatec dialect. "It's set before the Conquest, so there are no...

By Catherine Bremer TACANA, Guatemala (Reuters) - Villagers mourned their dead on Tuesday and sprinkled lime over the mass graves of hundreds buried in huge mudslides, putting a seal on the latest tragedy to hit Guatemala's Maya Indians. At the edge of this town in the high mountains of western Guatemala, rescuers in the hamlet of Cua called off attempts to recover more victims from the mudslide that swallowed two churches, a school and a communal dining room on Thursday. "We pulled...

By Frank Jack Daniel PANABAJ, Guatemala (Reuters) - A Guatemalan village buried under tons of dirt and debris may be declared a Mayan mass grave as rescuers give up digging for the remains of up to 1,400 people killed in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Stan. After days of heavy rain, mud, rocks and trees crashed down a volcano's slopes and into the Maya Indian village of Panabaj as people slept early on Wednesday, covering it in a quagmire up to 40 feet deep in places. Some 1,400...

A thousand years ago, Mayan civilization collapsed. Today, a Space Age "situation room" in Panama is helping Central Americans avoid mistakes that doomed the Maya.Central America, that narrow land bridge between North and South America, represents less than 0.5 percent of Earth's land mass. But it is home to 7 or 8 percent of the world's species of plants and animals.That rain forest home, however, is assaulted by both nature and man: earthquakes, hurricanes, illegal logging and...