And destroyed this vast civilization?

I think the Mayan civilization had fallen long before the arrival of the Spaniards, whose guns and germs laid low such later civilizations as the Aztec of Mexico and the Inca of Peru.

What emerged and existed when Spaniards arrived was kind of a microcosm of the much larger and more vibrant earlier societies.

the culture and civilization had not disappeared. In fact, the culture still has not disappeared. There are still a few million descendants of the Mayan civilization living in Latin America. Some of them speak Spanish, but many speak a Mayan dialect. There are Catholic Mayans who incorporate Mayan religious beliefs into Catholicism, but others follow some of the old Mayan gods and beliefs without a Christian influence. In Mexico, the Mayan descendants are among the poorest people in the country and are often looked down on by other Mexicans.

All one has to do is look at a Mayan calendar to know they were an advanced civilization. I've always thought the indigenous peoples in the Americas lived in peace and harmony with the earth for millennia.

Then we came.

The Maya of the Classic Period so altered their environment that it’s one of the things that led to their collapse.
Indigenous peoples were violent, they made war and killed just like we do, but there was a different motivation behind it.

Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble.

you speak of. Civilizations that were built up like the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas, not so much. It was the tribal societies farther north in North America who were more harmonious with nature. That was necessity because they were more closely dependent on nature than people who lived in the cities of empires. Tribal societies were more conscious of the sources of their food, water, and shelter and of the need to respect them, which is reflected in the religious beliefs of some tribal nations of North America.

As for harmony with each other, indigenous people of the Americas, whether tribal or living in empires, made war on each other, and developed alliances and trade agreements like any other people. There were established customs of diplomacy that the majority of tribal nations followed, similar to our own diplomatic customs. Diplomatic delegates were supposed to be immune from attack or killing regardless of any hostilities between the nations that they represented. It was expected that they would receive hospitality when on a mission. If they were mistreated or killed while on a mission, which happened sometimes, that was grounds for war in retaliation. Disrespect for diplomatic messengers was one of the causes of hostilities between colonists and Native people in northeastern North America.

It raised my awareness of that civilization and I have in my life visited some of the sites. The history is so fascinating. I look forward to learning more about these sites that haven’t been formally recorded in history.

If one thing is true about archaeology and anthropology, western cultures are very good at devaluing and minimizing the skills, abilities, and accomplishments of non-western cultures.

anthropology and archaeology were Eurocentric and discounted other cultures and their achievements. The reason for the passage of NAGPRA was that archaeologists were robbing graves of Native Americans in order to classify them by cranial size as an "inferior race."

My interest in cultures, anthropology, and archaeology began in childhood. I can remember, as a child in the 1950s, reading articles that claimed to identify 4 races in the world and to rank them from superior to inferior according to intelligence, present abilities, and past achievements. Caucasian, of course, was ranked the highest. Even as a child I recognized that it was BS.

Arch and anthro have outgrown those heavily biased and inaccurate ideas.

I am not in any way excusing the ethnocentrism of the "western" world, but ethnocentrism is a human trait that can be found in many parts of the world. There are Asian nations and cultures that feel superior to other Asian cultures and to Europeans and Americans. Ethnocentricity is alive and active on Africa, too.

But among scientists, reason should prevail.