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In the tradition of\xa0Lost City of Z\xa0and\xa0In the Kingdom of Ice, former\xa0San Francisco Chronicle\xa0journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the\xa0remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome\u2014and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their\xa0masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as \u201cperhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published\u201d and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology.\xa0

By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya\u2019s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live.

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