Only 4 Texts Remain from the Maya Civilization After Thousands Were Destroyed
Despite the fact that we are not very far removed from their heyday, we know very little about Maya civilization.
And it’s not because the Maya weren’t into recording their history.
The Maya were prolific writers and actually evolved from using scrolls to a form of folded paper called the codex right around the same time as the Romans, though each appears to be independent of the other.
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Maya glyphs and the records of the Spanish conquistadors themselves attest to thousands of these codices existing by the time the two cultures met in the 16th century.
But, due to their being destroyed by priests, conquistadors, ship raiders, and even time and mold, only about 22 codices, of which only four have Maya origin, exist today.
None of them are complete, and none have their original covers.
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And you might have noticed that the oldest one only goes back to 200-300 years before the Spanish conquest.
We know that the codices went back at least 800 years prior to that, so we’re essentially looking at the tip of a fingernail and trying to guess what the hand looked like.
And that’s how the soul of a culture gets erased from history…
See also: Burning the Maya Books: The 1562 Tragedy at Mani
The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. (Wikipedia)
Not really. Accounts from people who actually lived the first years of the arrival of Spanish to central America, such as that of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, portray in detail the executions and sacrifices. Remember that when the Spanish got there, there was more or less a system with a central empire (the Mexica) oppressing the surrounding nation (the Tlaxcala) through very brutal means, the latter having to supply vast amounts of humans for sacrifice rituals and for cannibalistic practices. It was brutal to the point that the Tlaxcala took the arrival of the Spanish as a prophecy, and joined the rather few (1000 at its peak) Spanish soldiers in a fight against the Mexica. When they ended up conquering the capital of the Mexica (Tenochtitlan, modern Mexico City), the Tlaxcala were so bloodthirsty against the Mexica that they carried out a large massacre that the Spanish unsuccessfully (given their few numbers) tried to stop (according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo).
For reference, in Mesoamerica there were monuments (whose name is Latinised to tzompantli) showing the skulls of human sacrifices or war captives, with the biggest monument's showcasing tens of thousands of skulls.
Edit: none of this should be used to excuse the erasure of culture and the atrocities commited by the Spanish on the different native American cultures over the following centuries