At its height the Maya civilization covers more than 125,000 square miles across what is now Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize, a network of over forty city-states that grew out of small hunter-gatherer bands into builders of towering temple-pyramids, palaces, and astronomical observatories. This episode of Engineering an Empire examines that construction record at sites including Tikal, Palenque, and Chichén Itzá, looking at the hydraulic systems and agricultural engineering that let cities this size feed themselves in dense jungle terrain. The second half turns to the collapse, weighing the evidence for drought and overpopulation against political fragmentation among rival city-states and the possibility of outside invasion. No single cause gets declared the winner; instead the film lays out what archaeologists have found at the abandoned sites and lets the competing theories stand side by side. The throughline is engineering itself, how the same infrastructure that let the Maya flourish for centuries may have left them exposed when conditions turned against them.