For over a thousand years, the Maya built a civilization in the jungle – creating pyramids, sculptures and paintings. Then around 800 A. D. , they practically vanished. Scientific sleuth Dick Gill has spent nearly twenty years proving his theory that a devastating drought wiped out the Maya. The program follows Gill on a journey of discovery: to an archaeological site in Belize, where there is evidence of a sudden abandonment. With geologists as they take cores from a remote lake in Mexico’s Yucatan that shows evidence of an exceptional drought at the time of the Maya collapse. And visiting the slopes of the rumbling volcano of Popocatepetl, to search for evidence of an eruption that may have triggered a drought.