Show Notes
Forget everything you thought you knew about the ancient Maya. Cracking their mysterious hieroglyphs didn't just reveal boring calendars, it exposed a cutthroat, Game of Thrones-style world of rival superpowers, Tikal and Calakmul.
Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor David Stuart to uncover tales of powerful female warlords, dark pilgrimages to the underworld, and the secret jungle "whiteboard" of an ancient mathematician.
MORE The Maya Collapse Listen on Apple Listen on Spotify
The Olmec: Mother of Mesoamerican Civilisations Listen on Apple Listen on Spotify
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Ancients
Why did Emperor Constantine abandon Rome to build a spectacular new capital from scratch? In the year 312 a bloody civil war and a miraculous heavenly vision changed the Roman world forever.
It's one of history’s most compelling cold cases. What happened to the Ninth Legion, a crack unit of 5,000 Roman soldiers who vanished from the historical record without a trace?
Two thousand years ago, centuries before the Vikings, there was another Scandinavia. An Iron Age world.
Before Boudicca, another British leader brought the Roman war machine to a grinding halt. Meet Caratacus; the cunning King of the Britons who spent seven years outmaneuvering the empire. Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Miles Russell to uncover the forgotten story of this charismatic guerrilla fighter. From leading fierce resistance in Wales to his betrayal, capture, and a life-saving speech in Rome, Caratacus was Britain’s ultimate escape artist.
The frozen continent of Antarctica was once a land of forests, rivers and thriving ecosystems. And millions of years before humans ever existed it was home to a whole host of ancient creatures, from the first sharks to the earliest marsupials.