Ocomtún: A long-lost Maya city that was just discovered - BBC Travel

Ocomtún: A long-lost Maya city that was just discovered - BBC Travel ...Commonly considered one of the greatest civilisations in the Western Hemisphere, the Maya ruled over much of Central America during their peak between 200-900 CE. Perhaps best known for their towering pyramid temples and more than 40 grand cities carved out of stone – such as Tikal, Uaxactún and Copán – the Maya were also obsessive astronomers, brilliant mathematicians and prolific scribes. They kept detailed records of eclipses and solstices and aligned their cities' most important structures to the celestial movements. They invented the concept of zero roughly 1,000 years before Europeans and developed a calendar in the 1st Century BCE that was more accurate than the Julian calendar used across the UK, Europe and Asia for the next 1,700-2,000 years. They were one of the world's earliest civilisations to devise a system of writing (as early as 300 BCE) and went on to create thousands of paper books. They likely invented chocolate, the world's first ball game and rubber. ...In the 8th and 9th Centuries, the Maya started suddenly abandoning their cities and these once-great Mesoamerican metropolises constructed using highly sophisticated science and engineering techniques mysteriously fell apart. Šprajc and others have long pondered whether this was due to warfare, prolonged droughts, soil depletion, climactic change or a combination of factors, but by roughly 1,000 CE, Šprajc explained that almost every settlement in the central and southern Yucatán Peninsula – including Ocomtún – was abandoned.