Careful, careful! We don't know what resources and methods the ancient Mayan civil engineers(!!) used, but simply because no archeological record of it survives. Also, the Mayans who (still!) live in the area today have no legends or community-memory that we can draw from. These relics from their ancestors are "ancient to them, also."

We certainly shouldn't assume that they didn't have record-keeping or, for that matter, blueprints. We simply don't know what they are. The jungles consume everything.

Nevertheless, this is an enormous and obviously-sophisticated civil engineering project that was so well planned and constructed that it has survived for thousands of years, even in soaking-wet and inhospitable jungle country. And it shows every indication of surviving for thousands of years more. Not exactly the doing of "shabby pagans."

After all, our interstate highway systems and World War II dams are having massive problems less than fifty years after they were first constructed . . .

If they could build such constructions, monuments, write,... and so on, they could have more than what we suspect. They could read/write, exchange, and build well. Fabulous ancient, but also completely unknown, civilization.
Jungle consumes all, as colonization did the same way.

However, let's look at Sumerians, they had all what we have today. They discovered materials that we still use today. Except Cola and Pepsi

Oh really? So is it not always true that "A==A"? or "1==1"? Or "1 + 1 = 2"? To go further, given a 2 dimensional drawing of a right triangle is it not always true that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 ? The price one pays for glibly denying any hard facts exist at all in order to support offhand default skepticism is that Laws do exist assuming one is aware of all the affecting conditions so such "thinking" is inconsistent with reality, and therefore, faulty. Since the scientific method is based on Mathematics and constantly is updated to confirm or deny the affecting conditions, it is indeed infallible.

Can a conclusion be mistaken sometimes? Yes, when the Rule of considering all the affecting conditions is either ignored or incomplete. However The Method itself is infallible.

...and blast furnaces, steel (let alone alloys like chrome-moly steel, tungsten steel, etc), plastics, internal combustion engines and cars, telephones, digital computers, widespread electrical power, electric lighting, concrete, paved roads, skyscrapers or any buildings higher than a few floors, and on and on and on...

Just FTR No! The jungle does not "consume all" it only alters form and covers up. The effect of something that existed versus something that never existed is by no means the same. If something like wood rots away it still alters the soil into which it rotted. Water, being far more damaging and dispersive, still maintains a record though it may be so widely dispersed as to be difficult or currently impossible to gather meaningful data, unless it is in the form of ice, limiting the dispersion.

Big Edit: After some thought. I figured I'd give a KISS answer to a post from someone who is outside looking in.

Where do I get my prejudiced Ideas and conclusions?

Because I am inside looking out. I get my attitude from Chicano and Mexicans that are my neighbors. That I attend their bbq's and drink beer with and converse in Spanish. Ever been to a La quisineta?

They are the ones who say that the past history of the Franciscan, Jesuit, arm of the Vatican did what they did and and consider themselves Aztecan even still.

Bet I do more hanging out with Mexicans than you do.

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious: the Mayans lived in a jungle country, and they were unknown to European civilizations except as perceived sources of gold. We know a lot more about desert people, frankly, because more of their writings survived in the dry heat. In the jungle, everything turns into fungus-covered goo.

It's an unfortunate reality in the study of history – ancient or not, actually – that so much information is simply lost. But we should always bear in mind, I think, that in a certain way these people were ... our colleagues. They undertook vast engineering exercises, and accomplished them. "How they did it" has been lost. "What they did" has not.

I take it you've never been to a real jungle, or a tropical almost-anywhere.

In a jungle environment, everything is constantly growing. Stick your walking-stick into the ground, turn to take a piss, and turn back around to find that the walking-stick has sprouted leaves. Wood rots away and promptly gets turned into fertilizer for the thousands of root systems that grow into it. Even stones can be split asunder by a tree root. No, "the jungle most-definitely does 'consume all!'"

Deserts, by comparison, are relatively static places. For instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls could and did survive there. Likewise the cuneiform writing that was pressed into pieces of mud that also survived. In a jungle, or even in the tropics, those Scrolls would have nourished an impressive variety of fungi, while the scraps of cuneiform would have quickly turned back into the mud from which they came. And this would have happened within weeks.

No, it is not always true. It would not be true in curved space such as near a black hole.

Though I haven't been able to verify this--I stay away from black holes for religious reasons.

Stuff like the "Baghdad Battery" make "good TV", but there are actually a few hypothesis as to what it actually is. The least sensational and probably the most plausible is that it was for storing a papyrus scroll. There is nothing else, from the period to corroborate the electroplating or battery hypotheses.

Similarly "aliens built the pyramids" and similar, are really not much more than titillating daytime TV pseudo science/history documentaries for mass consumption - created purely for commercial gain. Popular/modern thinking often can't get beyond the "they must have had an easy/efficient way?" approach. Many years of work and the "blood, sweat and tears" of thousands to build something, which was essentially useless, just doesn't compute.

The Incan did have record keeping, at the very least numbers and IMO likely at least some other 'written' data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

I find it hard to believe that a project as complex and well engineered as Machu Picchu wasnt blueprited in some way, at the very least a detailed scale model.

The Incan built Macchu Pichu, not the Mayan.

All we have of Mayan engineering (or Incan or Aztec or Mixtec for that matter) is the archaeological record.....

Macchu Pichu is from the 15th Century, it is not thousands of years old.

Moving on from Macchu Pichu and its South American home onto this jungle fad only brought up because somebody doesn't know the difference between the Mayan and the Incas...

Eventually time and the elements will destroy all evidence of human presence. While jungles can do it faster than some other climates, its not magic, and much evidence survives. Like all those stone cities built by the Mayan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Maya_sites

There is no assumption. The Mayan had writing for 2000 years. There are inscriptions on buildings and stelae plus few surviving codices

The only reason the dead sea scrolls survived was because they were sealed in earthenware jars then stored in caves.

The only reason we have so many cuneiform tablets is because of palace fires. Unfired clay tablets will disintegrate over time.

Properly cared for books/scrolls/codices in the tropics will not be destroyed in weeks.

Even if modern evidence is discounted (e.g. books seem to survive better than that in the modern world even with our dodgy paper) the Mayan kept codices over the entirety of their range. Which also included places like the Guatemalan highlands which is tropical savanna, not jungle. The Mayan books were so numerous that even after the conquistadors had destroyed many of them they were ordered destroyed by Bishop Diego de Landa in July 1562...a process which didn't stop until the last Mayan city was taken in 1697!

I mostly agree with what you've been posting on here enorbet. But do have a few minor niggles with the logic that high tech = widespread or massive environmental damage. Though it is possible that there is evidence of this that has not been found due to sea levels rising since the end of the last ice age.

Its also possible that if an ancient civilisation did have some high tech it limited the spread or use of that tech.

However, while I believe it is possible that some ancient civilisation made have developed some high tech it is likely that they tech was mostly theoretical. Its unlikely they had the high technology materials we have and extremely unlikely they had anything like the diversity of technologies we currently have.

I seem unable to find the reference to the jar but I'd guess its one of the 'omg how did they make that' jars which possibly show evidence of being turned on a lathe? There is that and a few other bits and pieces. Yes, they are mostly disputed by the archaeologists. Thanks to the knowledge I have of how things are in the background of archaeology I have some doubts.

I do not think that the Great Pyramid was built in 20 years. IMO the logistics don't work. Too many blocks, to much weight, not enough time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza

One of the major problems with modern archaeology is that it believes that its already got everything pretty much right. Maybe it has. But culturally archaeology acts as though anything that not fit with the current paradigm is heretical and wrong, and It then tends to act in a way that is anti-scientific.

To use an example- in the early 1990s Robert Schoch, a geology PhD did some more work on an older theory which is now known as 'Sphinx water erosion hypothesis'. It suggests that the weathering on the Great Sphinx and its enclosure show signs of prolonged and extensive rainfall weathering, and that due to climatic changes this weathering occurred somewhere in the period of 10,000-5,000 BCE.

This was attacked by people like Mark Lehner. It was first disputed not on the geological evidence, but on the basis that Egyptian history was already well known and this data does not fit, therefore its wrong. Zahi Hawass (at the time Chief Inspector of the Giza Pyramid Plateau) even banned Schoch from ever visiting the Giza pyramids again.

Thank you for the various and thorough corrections. I was speaking with too-broad of a brush ...

Unfortunately yes, willful destruction is also the enemy of archaeology. Many Egyptian records were destroyed by Romans who considered them to be "pagan." Or conquistadors. Or crusades. Or war. Most lately, the Islamic State.

But also the environment – moisture, jungle, plant growth. We have some of the things that people sought to preserve. Working papers and plans that might have given some indication of construction methods and of human organization might not have been seen as worth keeping, nor made of that-durable a material. As you said, ceramic objects survive because they became ceramics – not necessarily because anyone sought to keep them for all time. (Quite a few of them turned out to be receipts and accounting records – boring, everyday stuff to them, if not to us.) Scrolls, which were meant to be preserved, were carefully sealed-up and placed in a d-r-y cave in a d-r-y desert, where their main enemy is not moisture but hungry insects.

We know that we are in the presence of highly skilled and knowledgeable engineers, and surveyors, who knew how to place and to orient structures precisely over large distances, to build roadways between them, and to do all of the foundation and drainage work necessary to see to it that the structures would survive for centuries. We clearly see their work, but know little of their methods.

We also see sophisticated human organization. Thousands of workers, all of whom had to be fed. Means of communicating information over long distances, one way or the other. Timing and organization of many different groups of laborers – and experts. We have only scraps, in many cases, of what was done to make all that happen.

This leaves a vast amount of knowledge that is simply lost. Even in modern-day archaeological diggings, say of a sugar-cane plantation in Puerto Rico (where I actually was on-site), records have been discarded and many things that are unearthed (in this case, in a salty, windy climate with much rain) were goo, or puddles of salty rust.

To me, more fascinating than study of Egyptian Pyramids, say, is the study of the complexes which surrounded them: subordinate temples, yes, but also worker/slave housing. Speculation as to how the materials might have been transported to the site: it is theorized that they might have built a harbor for use in the Nile River's annual flood. But, no one can now go to "the Egyptian National Archives" and "read all about it." (In fact, the entire Egyptian (hieroglyphic) language was almost lost – until the Rosetta Stone was found, and until someone theorized that Coptic might be related to it.) This exploration of "the stories behind the story" are particularly fascinating to me. But, like everything else, the record is full of holes.

And I think that we have to remind ourselves that these were smart, sophisticated people, working within the technology of their day just as we do with ours. Such people were often callously described as "savages" by people who intended to conquer them and to plunder them.

there are many youtube videos about it, gods or things like that.
In the following videos, the arguments mentioned are so weak, scientifically, unfunded, and it is simply brain washing for gaining people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er9D00DXQQs

I rest my case. So much for Data Gathering when it does not fit in with the accepted dogma.

I am schooled in Riemannian Geometry which is why I specified "2 dimensional". Curved space is 3 dimensional and that was exactly my point. Many if not most Truths are conditional. That does not mean they have no value or are simply to be ignored as facts.

Similarly what a person can jump over on the Moon is different from what height is possible on Earth or any other planet but that is only context. The manner in which such forces are resolved is identical in all places.

sundialsvcs re: Jungle Consumption - That is conversion not consumption. That conversion leaves 'footprints" some of which we can now trace and more that we will be able to trace as technology and methodology improves with time. Obviously some may be forever lost but even a barebones map scrawled on a napkin is better than no map. More to the point many traces rule out a number of interpretations getting us considerably closer to what even can be real.