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We visited lots of Mayan sites in both Mexico and Belize. Mostly official, but there are so many ruins scattered across the place many (especially the small) have been left untouched by officials. In Sartenaja some locals, less impressed by their forerunners (and understandably somewhat more pragmatic than some), had recycled the stone from local ruins to build sturdier houses after the last major hurricane (big, bag wolf style) blew away their flimsier homes.
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The Maya built a lot of heavy, stone edifices in some really big cities. Mostly temples for their gods (who seem a blood thirsty lot), palaces for a few privileged royals and nobles, and the odd tomb. They never worked out the arch or large lintels so interior spaces are (if they exist) small, not so comfortable, and pretty dark and damp. Never-the-less, quite the status symbol and clearly the result of a great deal of ego and slave labour.
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As with most current religions (it's all pretty much a theme), the gods would favour you if you showed sufficiant admiration and the afterlife was the one to go for. Mind you, not too many people were putting up their hands to move on. Lots of cities have a ballcourt on which a game was played between (one can only assume) highly motivated individuals or teams with the losers sacrified to the gods at the end.
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The Maya were pretty nifty carvers and recorded major events and information in sculpture, stone tablets and pictures. They developed a written language based on hieroglyphs. Although they used pigments a lot on the outside of buildings most have weathered off completely (of course). One place had a few rooms with beautiful, well preserved interior frescos of royal life at the time.
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