The Library of Congress presents The Cultures and History of the Americas, an online exhibition featuring fifty highlights from the more than 4,000 rare books, maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection.

This exhibition explores several themes, including the pre-Columbian cultures of Central America and the Caribbean as revealed in sculpture, architecture, and language; encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples; the growth of European Florida; and piracy and trade in the American Atlantic.

This exhibition is a preview of the permanent Kislak space to open in the Northeast Galleries of the Thomas Jefferson Building in 2006.

Explore objects from various areas of the Art Institute of Chicago's permanent collection to enrich visitors' understanding of their content, style, and historical context. The collection includes sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles created by Native Americans, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan, and the Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs of ancient Mesoamerica - the geographical area comprising New Mexico, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Includes lesson plans for the classroom, maps, glossary, books, and art projects for the home.

Journey through history to get the complete story behind the tasty treat that we crave in Chocolate, an exciting new exhibition developed by The Field Museum.

You'll begin in the rainforest with the unique cacao tree whose seeds started it all. Visit the ancient Maya civilization of Central America and discover what chocolate meant nearly 1,500 years ago. Then travel forward in time and northward to the Aztec civilization of 16th-century Mexico, where cacao seeds were so valuable they were used as money. Discover chocolate's introduction into the upper classes of European society and its transformation into a mass-produced world commodity.

This online exhibit and bibliography is a collaborative project of Tarlton Law Library and the Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas. A detailed overview of Aztec and Maya law as it existed at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica is supplemented by an annotated bibliography of resources on Mexican legal history, Aztec and Maya law, and related works on Aztec and Maya history, archaeology, and cultural studies. To limit the scope of the exhibit and the bibliography, the sections on Maya law will principally focus on the Maya who inhabited what is now the country of Mexico. In following the preferred terminology of Mayanist scholars, "Maya" will be the standard term used to refer to the Maya people and their legal system. The term "Mayan" will refer solely to the diverse group of languages spoken by the Maya people.

Hundreds of earthenware pots and other Precolumbian artifacts from ancient West Mexico are now part of the collections of Wake Forest University's Museum of Anthropology.

The objects, most dating from 300 B.C. to 400 A.D., were donated to the museum in May. The collection of 1,040 pieces includes 162 complete ceramic vessels, ceramic figurines, greenstone beads and necklaces, obsidian spear and arrow points, knives, and grinding stones.