Mayas were ruled by kings and priests unlike the Incas who were ruled by an established government. The civilization built great city states. Mayas gradually reduced or disappeared while the Incas were swept away by the Spanish colonization.

The Aztecs were Nahuatl-speaking people who lived in central Mexico in the 14th to 16th centuries. Their tribute empire spread throughout Mesoamerica. The Maya people lived in southern Mexico and northern Central America — a wide territory that includes the entire Yucatán Peninsula — from as early as 2600 BC.

Maya builds towering temples and elaborate palaces, Aztec build their capital city Tenochtitlan on an island, while Inca constructed stone temples without using mortars, yet the stone fit together so well that a knife would not fit between the stones. The Maya used two calendars.

Maya historians have generally settled on a combination of three main factors which could have caused the Maya collapse: warfare between city-states, overpopulation, and drought. The factors were not always contemporary or found all together in a single city.

There were Aztec garrisons on the Maya frontier, and very likely plans to attack. But then the Aztecs themselves were attacked – by the Spaniards. However, if by “the Aztecs” we can include surviving warriors from the regions of Mexico that were part of the Aztec Empire, then the answer is yes.

Do The Maya Still Exist? Descendants of the Maya still live in Central America in modern-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico. The majority of them live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal.

The history of chocolate can be traced to the ancient Mayans, and even earlier to the ancient Olmecs of southern Mexico. The word chocolate may conjure up images of sweet candy bars and luscious truffles, but the chocolate of today is little like the chocolate of the past.

Martín de Urzúa y Arizmendi

What is certain is that the Mayans didn’t disappear in the aftermath of the collapse. Instead, cities in the northern lowlands region, such as Chichen Itza and later Mayapan (both located in present-day Yucatan, Mexico), rose to prominence.

The Maya had a system of serfdom and slavery. However, unwanted orphan children became slaves and were sometimes sacrificed during religious rituals. Slaves were usually sacrificed when their owners died so that they could continue in their service after death.

Scientists Uncover New Clues. The mysterious epidemic that devastated Aztecs may have been food poisoning. In 1545, an unknown disease struck the Aztec Empire. Over the next five years, the disease—then called “cocoliztli,” or “pestilence”—killed between seven and 17 million people.

In 1520, the Aztec Empire was destroyed by a smallpox infection. The disease killed many of its victims and incapacitated others. It weakened the population so they were unable to resist Spanish colonizers and left farmers unable to produce needed crops.

The Aztecs were conquered by Spain in 1521 after a long siege of the capital, Tenochtitlan, where much of the population died from hunger and smallpox. Cortés, with 508 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala, and eventually other Aztec tributary states.

Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language. Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years.

What Wiped Out the Aztecs? Scientists Find New Clues. Salmonella could be partially to blame for a 16th century epidemic that killed millions. From 1545 to 1550, Aztecs in what is today southern Mexico experienced a deadly outbreak.

Cortés’s microscopic secret weapon He got it in the form of a smallpox epidemic that gradually spread inward from the coast of Mexico and decimated the densely populated city of Tenochtitlan in 1520, reducing its population by 40 percent in a single year.

In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on temple altars, the Aztecs likely also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. An Atztec human sacrifice atop the Mesoamerican temple pyramid.

The traditional explanation for Aztec human sacrifice has been that it was religious—a way of winning the support of the gods for success in battle. Victories procured even more victims, thus winning still more divine support in the next war.

He suggested that, because the Aztecs had lacked large domesticated animals such as cattle or pigs, they had resorted to cannibalism to meet their need for protein. “That the scale of human sacrifice was very large, we know,” Dr. Furst said. “The Aztecs carried sacrifice to a much greater degree than anybody else.

“[The Aztecs were] a culture obsessed with death: they believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.

There is universal agreement that some Mesoamerican people practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism, but there is no scholarly consensus as to its extent.