as mentioned previously, mayan history is almost entirely mythical. this is pieced together by looking at glyphs in a dead language and building guesses on archaeological remains. we can come up with broad concepts and forces that shaped the society, but attempts to be specific are foolish. that said, i look at the tent cities today in california, and i wonder what role that inequality might have played in the movement of people out of the cities and into the forest. and, let's be clear about this - the society didn't evaporate. it didn't fly off into space. they didn't all die on the spot. they left the cities, they abandoned urbanism, and they took up life in the jungle, instead. that sounds crazy, but don't we see that in the united states today, as late capitalism makes urban civilization an impossibility for wide swaths of the population, who are forced to live in parks and subsist in the wild, instead? is that really what happened? and, will it happen again?