>>39354884Those same cities have burials with ethnically maya remains in them, sculptures and murals of brown people with distinctive maya facial features, etc.
As far as the cities being abandoned, What happened is starting around 800 AD, most large Maya city-states in the southern and central yucatan collapsed. In the preceeding century, there had been a series of massive wars. Maya politics during the late classic period (the classic being from 200AD to 900AD) was dominated by two royal dyansties who had their heads operating out of the city-states of Tikal and Calakmul respectively. Essentially, World-War-Maya had errupted, with each city-state and their allies, and cities who had lineage connections to each other went to war with each other. Eventually, Tikal and it's allies were able to defeat or turn all of calakmul's allies and then sacked calakmul.
This put a great deal of political and logistical pressure on the region, with many people being displaced and relocating to other cities, which swelled their population up, causing them to be overpopulated compared to what they would normally sustain. There was also a drought during this period, and Maya agriculture and political systems were highly rainfall dependent (In some cases, Maya royalty rested their authority on the ability to provide rain, mugh like CHina;s divine mandate). So you had the political pressure, overpopulation, droughts/strained agriculture, etc, all exacerbating each other, and as each city collapsed you further had more people being displaced and stressing other cities, etc.
Pic related shows most of this. You will also note how much of the large to metropoltic cities in the northern Yucatan survived this collapse, and indeed, coming out of it more powerful then ever as people relocated up there without causing the collapses they had further south
