OK. One subject at a time... as far as the
Mayans, there were actually 4 major, and different groups of people in, what now encompasses an area from Southern Texas, across to Southern Arizona, and all the way down into South America, from Peru across to Colombia. It is generally accepted that the Toltecs, who lived across the Northern part of the aforementioned area, were the first builders of large structures, and they built some very impressive, and sometimes strange structures, carved from solid rock and on a massive scale.
The Toltecs had mostly disappeared as a culture when the Olmecs next rose to prominance as builders, and it is possible that their culture was established by the Toltecs, except that the building style and general cultural practices were very different. The Olmecs largely occupied the area Northwest of the Yucatan Penninsula, where Cancun is located, known as Llanura Costera Del Golfo, and into the middle of Mexico, but the area Northwest of Cancun, along the Gulf of Mexico, was quite swampy, and not well suited for occupation. Even so, large metropolises were built there.
The Olmec cities appear to have had terra cotta drainage systems, except that most of the pieces were placed with the channel down, which makes little sense for carrying water. The Olmecs had abandoned their cities by the time the Spanish arrived.
The Aztecs built on, and controled, the area from Southwestern Mexico, down to the Sierra Madre Del Sur, and were the longest surviving culture. They built the most extravagant and intricately carved structures, and it was this group that was was in place when Cortez arrived and all but destroyed their culture.
The Maya posessed the largest area of any of the civilizations, and built the most impressively constructed stone buildings, but are most notable for the massive, perfectly round stone balls, which can be found all over Central and Northern South America, to this day. I have actually seen mountain peaks, jutting out from the dense jungle, with three gigantic stone balls together with a fourth on top of these.
How or why someone placed these solid rock spheres on a mountain peak, in the middle of the jungle is anybody's guess, but the largest concentration of them is in Costa Rica, and they are scattered about in a haphazard manner. There is one of these in front of the Capital Building, in Mexico City, which is 25 feet in diameter, and perfectly round, which cannot be duplicated today with modern technology.
It appears that all of these cultures were fully aware of the rotation of the Earth, the positions of all the visible stars and planets on any given day of the year, and the precursor of our modern calender system. Ours is Accurate to .052 and theirs was accurate to .087 ...pretty impressive for a suposedly backwards culture.
The large wheel-like stone which has the
Mayan calender carved on it, is the only one of it's kind, so far discovered, but it is suspected that all four cultures had identical calenders, as time seemed to be the most important thing to all of them.
The
Mayan stone calender is based on periods of time, consisting of Ka'tuns, which represents 7,200 days, which is the time that Jupiter and Saturn return to the same spot in the sky, after a synodic Cycle, or cycle of
the Sun. Twenty Ka'tuns formed a Bak'tun, which was 144,000 days, or 395 years, as the Aztecs explained it to the Jesuit priests who accompanied Cortez.
The base, or beginning date of the
Mayan Calender wheel is August 11, 3114 B.C., and it covers a period of 5,125.37 years, or what the
Mayans called "a Sun", and the Aztecs told the Jesuit priests that they were near
the end of the 5th Sun. Each Sun had ended with a catastrophe of Biblical scale, such as
floods, ice-ages, and
fire from the sky.
The Aztecs told the Jesuits that they had not built the cities that they still occupied, but that their ancestors had built them, and they no longer had the skills nor knowledge to accomplish such a task. In fact, many of the cities of all 4 cultures, had been all but abandoned by the time the Spanish arrived, and a large number were already taken over by the jungle.
The Aztecs and
Mayans did have written languages, mostly recorded in book form on folding papyrus pages, which folded like an accordian, but when the Jesuit Priests learned to read these books, they destroyed all that they could find as blasphemous, works written by the Devil, himself. One Priest managed to save 4 of these books, which tell the story of a small group of people who survived a great
flood at
the end of the last Sun, by getting into a massive tree that had fallen over in the jungle, and rotted out to form a large dugout canoe, of sorts, accompanied by many animals of the region.
Cortez's soldiers began killing many of the Aztecs who tried to stop the Priests from burning the books, and with their superior fighting skills and weapons, wiped out thousands of the Aztec people.
Upon hearing of this, the Maya began evacuating their cities, closest to the Aztec cities, thinking that the Gods had returned and were destroying the Aztecs in punishment for some offense, and the Maya wanted nothing to do with it. After the Aztec were decimated, or enslaved, the Spanish began spreading out, trying to find El Dorado, Cibola, and Quivira: Three of the seven so-far-mythical cities of gold, purported to be in the ares occupied by the 4 cultures, and the Maya abandoned all of their remaining cities and fled into the jungles.
None of the cities of gold were ever found, and few of the Maya, as well, and there are possibly still a few small tribes of their decendants still living, well hidden, in the vast jungles of South America.
Roman
The Maya were still occupying quite a few of their cities when
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