Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Maya civilization was a Mesoamerican civilization noted for its temples, glyphs, art, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system. It developed across southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. Its descendants today number well over 6 million people who speak more than twenty-eight surviving Mayan languages.
The Maya civilization existed from antiquity to the early modern period, with the Preclassic period beginning around 2000 BC. The first Maya cities developed around 750 BC, and the Classic period began around 250 AD. The last independent Maya city, Nojpetén, fell to the Spanish in 1697.
The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, and it is unique there in bearing narrative text. The Maya employed mathematics that included one of the earliest known instances of the explicit zero in human history. The hieroglyphic stairway at Copán is the longest surviving Maya text, made of 2,200 individual glyphs.
During the 9th century AD, the central Maya region suffered a major political collapse with cities abandoned and dynasties ending. No universally accepted theory explains it, but likely causes combine endemic internecine warfare, overpopulation that degraded the environment, and drought. The last Long Count date was inscribed at Toniná in 909.
The Spanish conquest was a lengthy series of campaigns beginning after 1511, when a wrecked caravel left survivors on the Yucatán coast. Pedro de Alvarado took the Kʼicheʼ capital Qʼumarkaj in 1524, and Francisco de Montejo completed the conquest of the northern Yucatán Peninsula in 1546. The last independent Maya city, Nojpetén, fell to Martín de Ursúa in 1697.
Maya cities grew organically around ceremonial and administrative centres surrounded by residential sprawl, often linked by causeways, and built with Neolithic technology and no functional wheel. A Classic-period city like Tikal spread over 20 square kilometres. The largest triadic pyramid was built at El Mirador, covering six times the area of Temple IV, the largest pyramid at Tikal.