Did the Maya actually collapse? Yes and no. There was a major change in lowland Maya society in the eighth and ninth centuries that some scholars have characterized as a collapse. It became described as a collapse in the mid-twentieth century by the most prominent Mayanists at the time. However, when Europeans began passing through Central America in the sixteenth century, there were likely millions of Mayas speaking numerous different Mayan languages, and that is still true today. So the answer from a historian’s perspective is a resounding no, there was not a collapse.

I would argue that there is not a scholarly consensus on what exactly happened that led to the reorganization of Maya society during the eight through tenth centuries. It appears to have been some complex combination of increased warfare, the collapse of sacred kingship, and perhaps also climate changes. The effects played out differently around the Maya world and at different rates, but it is especially recognizable archaeologically because of the abandonment of urban stone monument construction, carved stone stelae construction, changes in grave goods, and other changing material remains. Many areas in the central lowlands saw eventual population declines by like 60-90%. Therefore, some scholars have found it useful to characterize the enormous changes as a collapse to underscore how much of a break occurred with the past during this period. But the Maya did not disappear, but rather, they transitioned to new centers.

The period that came after is known as the Postclassic Period. There hasn’t been nearly as much research on this period as the Preclassic and Classic Periods. Moreover, the archaeological remains have been more difficult to uncover because the stone monuments and staele give way to more organic materials that decomposed long ago, or were destroyed by missionaries and colonial. It’s worth pausing here and considering the terminology, which draws from the rise and fall paradigm. It readily translates the idea that the Mayas followed a Roman trajectory with the Postclassic Period as one of decadence and decline--a dark age. This conception of the Postclassic Period has been rejected since the 1980s. New areas of power rose to prominence like in Northern Yucatan, Gulf Coast and Bay of Honduras trading communities, and in Highland Guatemala. Elaborate trade routes connected the Maya world to each other as well as to neighboring societies like Central Mexico. It was these fractured Maya societies that Europeans encountered and persisted in their resistance--as well as co-construction of empires and nation-states over the next 500 years.

But your question is really about the myth of the Maya collapse. Where did that come from? The idea has taken hold in popular culture: the Maya vanished at the end of the first millenium, leaving behind mysterious, inscrutable ruins to be “discovered.” Tourist guidebooks say “come to Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras and explore the mysterious ruins in the pristine jungles.” So what we really see is the erasure of the Maya, even though they are right there.

This process resulted from a combination of factors. I’m sure there are others, but here are a litany that I see as important. One is simply ignorance of Latin American history on the part of many foreigners. They visit Chichen Itza or Tikal on a vacation and are like… “omg where is everyone? The mosquitos are terrible here. I guess the Mayas really are gone. Well back to the beach.” If they were to turn off the highway and drive five minutes up the road, they would come to a Maya town filled with people speaking a Mayan language, buying and selling many of the same agricultural goods in a marketplace, worshipping a quaint colonial style church often made of stones from ancient pyramids, and living in fairly similar Maya buildings to the ones whose foundations they just saw at the ruins.

Plus you have all these wacky crackpot theories about aliens and 2012, adding to the sense that the Maya are mysterious. There has been much written about how this misinformation is racist because it takes away the agency of Indigenous people to build great societies on their own in the past, and gives it instead of otherworldly beings. To add my own take, I think that these theories act as distractions for both the public and scholars. It takes way more effort to debunk the false information than it does to spread it. It is difficult to run basic searches for the Maya without encountering these ideas. To your average layman who just wants to learn something, it is impossible to sift out fact from fiction.

But obviously, the reasons for the myth are deeper, also stemming from various historiographies that inadvertently erase Maya actors and perpetuate the myth of a “lost” people. For instance, because of the Classic Maya collapse debates outlined above, the “collapse” at the end of the first millennium gets projected forward in time. It becomes a stand-in for ALL of Maya history, eliding all the twists and turns that came in the second millenium.

I think a second historiographic cause comes from the continuing hold of the myth that European invasions and colonialism mostly eliminated Indigenous people through a combination of violence, disease, and genocide. People love to toss around the number that 90% of Indigenous people in the Americas died of disease. While a startling statistic, that idea erases all the nuance of that LONG process, often human-induced brutality. It perpetuates the idea that Indigenous people basically vanished. What the Classic Maya collapse mostly finished, the Conquest DEFINITIVELY finished. Though scholars have long rejected this conception of a swift conquest that eliminated Indigenous people, the idea lingers in popular culture.

A third historiographic reason is another myth that developed out of the conquest, that of mestizaje, or the idea that Spanish and Indigenous peoples mixed during the colonial period to form new mixed populations. The idea of mestizaje is the national identity--in some form or another-- and also to some extent the foundational myth of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. But there are still Indigenous people in those countries, and the conception that all citizens are a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous genes leaves out the millions of Africans and Afro-descended people, who lived out their lives in the region. The mestizaje infatuation that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century foiled with harmful practices put in place by the post-Revolutionary government in Mexico that actively worked to promote Spanish over Indigenous languages and European accomplishments over Indigenous ones. Consequently, Indigenous people experienced (and experience) discirmination for speaking Indigenous languages and wearing traditional dress. In a sense, one can’t be Mexican or Guatemalan and be Indigenous, because Indigenous peoples were either already gone because of the Conquest, already mixed with Europeans to make a nation of mestizos, or in need of transformation into citizens who could be productive and modern.

Fourth, the amount of scholarship published does not favor Maya groups after the Classic Period. Substantially more Mayanists study the Classic Period than any other period. The number of historians who study the colonial period pales in comparison to those who study the Modern nation-state period. Most colonial Latin American historians don’t study the Maya, but rather Central Mexico or the Andes. A lot of others are interested in slavery, borderlands, or the Atlantic World. There’s nothing wrong with the focuses of the field of history (they tend to develop organically anyway), but it also means that there is just less research done on the Maya in later periods. They only become an area of focus again during the Conquest, then the Caste War in Yucatan, and not again until the 20th century.

Finally, I’ll also indict historians in the erasure of the Maya. There has been this search for the “true” Maya, untouched by European ideas, power, or religion. Such a thing never existed. People can be Maya and Christian and a citizen of a republic and an iPhone user and live in a cinder block home that runs off renewable energy, while still being a Maya person. Historians’ search for the “authentic” Maya in historical sources like the Chilam Balams have not afforded many Indigenous groups with the luxury of being modern or capable of cultural change. There’s a tendency to see indigeneity as static, which is inadvertently very harmful to seeing modern Mayas.