Flos said:
All I know is what we discussed in Spanish class, but I was taught that the major Maya civilization vanished and that there were cities completely abandoned. While there will still smaller groups of Maya around, the civilization had peaked and fizzed out and nobody's quite sure what happened because we lost most of their books because of the (goddamn) Spanish.
A friend also swears that there's a Maya symbol that looks like an astronaut. I have yet to look this up myself.
There are a few cases in history of whole cities becoming abandoned, Chichen Itza was abandoned and rebuilt a couple of times for example, but this isn't mysterious. War, revolts, famine, pestilence and even just immigration have all been well documented the whole world over and within South America as well.
It is true that the Mayans had many of these before the Spanish turned up but I wouldn't say the culture vanished off the face of the earth. Even with the fall of the ruling classes during the 1400's, which led to the return of city states without a unified leader, the culture was still there right up till the conquest by the Spanish. In fact this actually was what led to the Mayan culture being able to resist the Spanish for almost 200 years as there was no single 'head' to cut off. Well this and a lack of gold, which made the Mayan city states less of a priority target.
The Terminal Classic period is interesting to look at, and yes lots of the data about this period has been lost or destroyed. Most believe the above mentioned war, poverty, pestilence and famine was why the large city states of this era collapsed. Too many people in one place led to environmental collapse and further famine.
