"Where did the Ancient Roman civilization go?"
"They're eating gelato and drinking espresso at the cafe."
Ever heard of Massada? For two years, 900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. And the Romans, where are they now?
Tony: You're looking at 'em, asshole.
I always liked that scene. It argues that the mafia think of themselves as heirs to the violent Roman empire.
It's all so entertaining for the pop historians.
No, the Mayanists are absolutely adamant that the Mayan people are right there, living in the same place their ancestors lived. Scholars today are some of the most vociferous in pointing this fact out.
The problem is the people who write the textbooks, the popular science books, the newspaper articles, who generally decline to forward this answer to the popular sphere. Those are the people who just can't accept the idea that maybe civilization isn't a one-way road to greater and greater heights, to no end of frustration for the subject matter experts who know that to be the case.
Or maybe they know, but care more for the greater dramatic effect, like we can witness in normal news everyday.
People have consistently shoot themselves in the foot with droughts after removing the forest for a few generations. Is happening right now in several parts of the planet.
These aren't technically incompatible; for a better-understood example, you can look at Turkey, which speaks the language of the long since dead Turks that conquered it without leaving any demographic impact. It would be accurate to say that the Turks completely disappeared from Turkey, at the same time that the region continues to speak Turkic languages.
I think an analogous situation holds in Hungary.
Turkic kingdoms ruled much of Anatolia for over a millennia, so Turkic languages spread rapidly due to it's prominence among that elite.
Based on genetics, there were only a couple thousand Turkic people that lead the initial settlement.
Languages can spread (and die out) rapidly. Look at the sinicization of Manchuria in the 19th century.
I don't really see why that would mean that Mayan didn't spread through elite diffusion?
There is a close genetic affinity between ancient and modern Mayans [0] that doesn't exist between Anatolian Turks and Turkmen, or Magyars and Khanty.
The Mayans never died out - they remained in the Yucatán and what is now Guatemala to this day, and weren't fully conquered until the early 1700s.
Furthermore, the language has always been alive and well because Spanish and Mezito settlers never tried settling in much of the Mayan region, because of how late they were conquered. Even today, Mayan groups like EZLN/Zapatistas have strong autonomy (and the guns to back it).
It's also had an impact in the US, as most undocumented immigrants from Guatemala tend to be ethnic Mayans from the highlands, and can barely speak Spanish because Guatemala puts almost no money in rural development. This has drastically clogged the immigration court system as the number of Mayan-English translators is extremely limited (I think UIUC is the only university that still teaches modern Mayan due to it's training contract with the CIA).
Both facts can coexist. Mayan people ruled over other several smaller cultures. Former slaves adopt the cultural habits of their rulers, sometimes for a lot of time after the ruler has gone. Afroamericans in USA that descend from slaves still use the English, as their language. Think about it.
Or maybe ancient Greece, with its city-state structure is the better comparison.