Why did the Maya Civilisation End?

A more appropriate term for this would be a decline or collapse. This was a slow process over hundreds of years which affected different areas in many differing ways.

The Maya people haven't disappeared, it's their cities which declined. There are an estimated 8,000,000 people of Maya heritage living today (approximately the same amount of people who lived in the cities at their height).

There is now a great deal of evidence that between 850AD and 1000AD there were a series of droughts. Droughts are not unusual to the Maya but one of the contributing factors to their decline at this time may be overpopulation and possible over-farming of the land. Warring city states cannot be ruled out as another contributing factor.

The question is why did the dispersed Maya never fully return to their once thriving cities? Perhaps it's simply that, like many of us, we get used to our new ways of life and our old ways become more foreign to us as time moves on. Within a generation the old Maya city ways will have become a memory.

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