When researching this topic, I realized that this title is not actually true. I found out that while the Mayan empire as we know it from our history books is gone, the actual Mayan people (or descendants, more accurately) are still alive and well in certain regions of South- and Central-America.
The Mayan’s have inhabited parts of South- and Central-America since roughly 1800 B.C. And when we say downfall of the Maya’s, we actually mean the downfall of their political system, which caused the Maya’s to pack up and leave. Effectively abandoning their city’s and thus leaving them to let go into ruins. All of this also didn’t happen at a certain time. It actually took a couple of hundred years for all of the Mayan cities to disappear. This happened in the period between 800 and 1000 A.D.
Another misconception we have about the Maya’s, is that it was one big group of people with one city. The most famous and well known one in this case being: Chichen Itza in the Yucatan region in Mexico. Those ruins are now a world heritage site. But believing that the Maya’s were just one group of people is wrong. There were actually a lot of small Mayan states which were centered around city’s. All of those states had their local leader, most of the time they were kings and followed a long and successful hereditary line. Those kings were often believed to mediate between God and the people.
The Mayans were also very widespread and should actually not be used as a single term, since there were a lot of different politics and environments that were considered to be part of the Mayan empire. They even had multiple languages being spoken within the different states of the whole empire. This is also why the Mayan cities fell and rose at different times. So when one city fell down, another one could be just starting to rise and gain inhabitants. This went one for very long, the last Mayan city to fall actually went way later than most people might think, as it went in 1697.
The most common way people think the Mayan empire fell is because of European warfare (the Spanish conquering a lot of the cities in South-America) and the disease the Europeans brought with them. But this is only partly true. While a lot of Mayans died when the Spanish were trying to rule over their land, a lot of political and environmental issues also contributed to the fall of their cities. Research of the earth showed that there was a severe multi-year drought between the years of 800 and 930 A.D. Since the kings of the cities relied on the reservoirs of their cities to draw in farmers, who provided for more food for the people, this was a catastrophe. Because there was no rainfall, the water levels dropped. This caused most of the crops to fail. No food for the people is obviously a sign of bad leadership, so most kings lost their power over this. This is also where the political problems come in. When there is no apparent leader, most cities fall into chaos. As did the Mayans. Most of them just left that particular city to start somewhere else, and the ruins of those cities are the ones we can still see today.
sources: https://www.livescience.com/why-maya-civilization-collapsed.html