alt Hacker NewsThis should be upvoted. A lot. The downvotes are ill-informed.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
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*cenotes
Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.