The Maya Empire, centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala, reached the peak of its power and influence around the sixth century A.D. The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar-making and mathematics, and left behind an astonishing amount of impressive architecture and …

Two thousand years ago, the ancient Maya developed one of the most advanced civilizations in the Americas. They developed a written language of hieroglyphs and invented the mathematical concept of zero. With their expertise in astronomy and mathematics, the Maya developed a complex and accurate calendar system.

• The Mayans developed an advanced language and writing system as well as books.
• The Fabled Mayan Calendar: Their most famous invention.
• Mayan astronomy was incredibly accurate.
• Mayan art was both beautiful and ominous.
• Mayan Medicine was surprisingly advanced.
• Mayan agriculture was highly advanced for the time.

Mayan Technology Remarkably, the ancient Maya managed to build elaborate temples and great cities without what we would consider to be essential tools: metal and the wheel. However, they did use a number of other “modern” innovations and tools, especially in the decorative arts.

The ancient cities were largely forgotten until the 19th century, when their ruins started to be uncovered by explorers and archeologists. Today, the Maya continue to reside in their ancestral homelands in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.

A major drought occurred about the time the Maya began to disappear. And at the time of their collapse, the Maya had cut down most of the trees across large swaths of the land to clear fields for growing corn to feed their burgeoning population. They also cut trees for firewood and for making building materials.

Chemical signatures from sediments in lake cores reveal that the centuries-long drought during the fall of Classic Maya civilization was worse than researchers had imagined. For centuries, the Maya people relied on rain to keep them alive.

Maya astronomer-priests looked to the heavens for guidance. They used observatories, shadow-casting devices, and observations of the horizon to trace the complex motions of the sun, the stars and planets in order to observe, calculate and record this information in their chronicles, or “codices”.

Based on these measurements, the researchers found that annual precipitation decreased between 41% and 54% during the period of the Maya civilisation’s collapse, with periods of up to 70% rainfall reduction during peak drought conditions, and that relative humidity declined by 2% to 7% compared to today.

Researchers have generally believed that only towards the very end of the Classic period, increasing droughts would have reduced food supplies, in turn escalating tensions between Maya kingdoms and resulting in violent warfare that is believed to have precipitated their decline.