Photonics News No 9

Mexico and Central America are becoming increasingly popular tourist destinations. Crowds are not only drawn to the beaches of Acapulco and Cancun, but the old residential and cultural sites of pre-Columbian high cultures also attract millions of visitors to the region every year. The best known are the Aztecs, who ruled large areas of central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquistadors. Relatively speaking, a lot is known about the Aztec culture – albeit mostly from the point of view of the conquerors. The Maya, who inhabited the densely-forested mountains and plains of what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras, seem much more mysterious to us. Unlike the Aztecs, their heyday was long past when the first Europeans set foot in the region. Everything we know about them today, archaeologists and anthropologists have laboriously compiled over the last 150 years from the remains of cities abandoned long ago. No wonder, then, that every discovery reveals new insights into the Mayan people.