I found this entertaining. Here's a short summation of the "big three" Meso-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Pre-ColumbianCivilizations
Pre-Columbian Civilizations
Pre-Columbian civilizations refers to American indigenous cultures before the European conquests starting in the sixteenth century. Usually it means Middle and South American peoples. For the inside story on the most famous gods, see Aztec Mythology.
Popular perception tends to lump these people together and gets rather tabloid and inventive see Mayincatec for the trope. In Real Life, the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs were three very distinct groups.
The Maya
The Maya were never a single unified civilization. They were divided into several city-states, much like classical Greece. When Europe was starting its Dark Age, the Maya reached a pinnacle of sophistication. They had sprawling cities, step pyramids, and a rich, vibrant culture; they even had an extensive body of literature, with Mayan writing being the only Mesoamerican writing preserved in quantity (the Olmec and Zapotec had writing before the Maya, but not much of it survives). Their cities were probably living places for the nobles and royals, with the poor living in villages surrounding the capitals. At the center was the temple, the aforementioned step-pyramid and likely the tallest building around, where every once in a while they'd sacrifice someone to appease the water god. The Maya are perhaps best remembered for their calendar system, which purportedly predicts the end of the world in 2012; they also used a base-20 number system. The Long Count system was used mostly to record history, with most people using the 52-year dating method to keep track of time. The consequences are poorly understood, since relatively few Mayan documents remain, but most scholars agree that a disaster was not predicted on this date. It is the start of the 13th b'ak'tun, which admittedly is supposed to be the final phase of the cycle, but certain inscriptions imply the Mayans did not believe the end of the world would be 2012, and zero inscriptions imply that they did. In all seriousness people are most likely going to be rather disappointed, since it is like going from December 31st 1999 to January 1st, 2000.
Around the year 900 they went into steep decline. Historians can't quite figure out why. Maybe their governing system collapsed, or maybe there was a famine, or maybe there was some kind of disease or something. Their descendants live in Mexico and Guatemala, but their civilisation has died out and their cities are abandoned.
Much like the Greeks, ethnic Mayans retain their languages and culture on a small scale; some Mayan temple sites are still venerated by individual Mayan villages in syncretistic fashion (see Inca, below) and the often-bloody tension between Mayans, Hispanic and Mestizo culture which came down from the north has never really gone away.
By the way, despite their portrayal in the film Apocalypto, the Mayans didn't sacrifice as many people as the Aztecs (it's a pretty low bar). They preferred to sacrifice captured royals and prisoners for the most part, which naturally led to a lot of wars. However, the Mayans were also very concerned with hygiene, and purification rituals mostly centered around self-sacrifice, usually by means of drawing a barbed thread through the tongue or the penis. Nor were they ignorant of climate or astronomy; their calendar was especially good at predicting eclipses. The Mayan Ballgame was an especially difficult combination of Basketball, Lacrosse, and Rollerball wherein either the captain of the winning team or the losing team got sacrificed; we're not sure which. This was apparently more in line with Gladiator Games, however.
The Aztecs
The Aztecs are most commonly described as Evil Incarnate, and to be fair they did kill people as part of their religion. Every month, that is, eighteen times a year, they'd have a big festival and party a bit, and then they'd have a human sacrifice. While fun for those on the right end of the knife, it did carry a deeper meaning. In Aztec Mythology, the gods are continually sacrificing themselves so that the universe can keep existing. So they felt indebted to the gods. Instead of praying, people would cut themselves with knives and cover some thorns with their blood, then put the thorns in the temple. The Aztecs themselves reported 80,400 sacrifices in a four-day period on one occasion, (but they probably fudged the numbers a lot, considering that to hit that number there would have to a sacrifice every 4 seconds for all four days.). Most likely, they sacrificed "only" a couple thousand a year. Fun fact: Each god had a specific sacrificial offering, and Quetzalcoatl's sacrifice consisted of butterflies and hummingbirds.
Now we've shooed the elephant out of the room, we can talk about the stuff people usually don't know about the Aztecs. Let's start with history. The Mexica (pronounced "Mesheeka") people migrated to southern Mexico in the 13th century, probably from Arizona, and settled there, soon founding the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan. They joined together into the Aztec Triple Alliance, known today as the Aztec Empire, in 1428. The Aztecs had a different way of looking at an empire; rather than seeing the lowest parts as something to be ruled from the top, they considered the top to be constituted of the parts. (No, that doesn't mean you get a room in the palace. Get back in the field and keep constituting.) They fell apart around 75 years later, with the Conquistadors allying themselves with the Aztecs' nemesis the Tlaxcala Confederacy and wiping them out.
A few short years later, nothing would remain of the Aztec Empire... except for the capital city, and the name of the future country, and a few of the festival days; and the canals were turned into boulevards, and the stones of the temples and palaces which were recycled into... er, cathedrals and government buildings. However, most of the regional towns were rebuilt in the Spanish style. Today, the Zocalo in Mexico city marks the site of the great plaza of Tenochtitlan; a few original sculptures can be seen in the foundation stones. Oh, and the Mexica who survived the conquest and converted to Christianity told the Spaniards where to go next, since the Aztecs had a longstanding unfulfilled claim on El Salvador.
A few Spaniards wanted to keep the pyramids and turn them into churches, what with the view and all, but most of them were literally plastered with blood and gore, so only the long-abandoned ones remain. To be fair, the Spaniards were no pikers *
well, not that kind of pikers
: entire tribes would be slaughtered under the policy of "convert or die"; and given the apparent collapse of the Aztec ideology who were already the bane of other tribes in the region, they had no want of willing converts.
The Aztecs had a heavily agrarian society, with several rather successful farming methods used, and were also one of the first civilizations to implement mandatory education for all children (although, strange to say, they had no true writing system; however, it's highly likely that their system of pictograms would have become a true logographic script if not for the unfortunate incident with the Spaniards). Their stratified society allowed for some social climbing, but the noble-commoner distinction was often difficult to cross. Commoners were allowed their own land and possessions, however, and were often quite active in the marketplace. The other main part of Aztec society was warfare. Some of their gods required an enemy to be sacrificed in the temple, so they had to have wars a lot. Sometimes they had Flower Wars, which were apparently mock wars, though historians aren't sure. In any case, every male commoner was given basic military training, and noble children were trained more thoroughly. A commoner could take a prisoner for sacrifice in order to become a professional warrior, which was a useful means of social climbing.
The Incas
The Incas were particularly unlike the Mayincatec image. For one, they lived nowhere near the Mayas and Aztecs, but in South America, specifically the Andes. The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu, or The Four States, and it was indeed effectively four distinct states, what would today likely be called a federation. Rather than military conquest, the Incas believed in diplomatic acquisition, and they brought many tribes under their rule.
Entrance to the nobility was based on merit as determined by some sort of Inca SAT-equivalent. They were very bureaucracy- and business-oriented, as they pretty much had to be to rule an empire that large. Even their marriages were strictly a business deal. The Incas believed in equality, that All Men Must Work In Order To Live, and every citizen even nobility paid tribute in the form of some manual labor as a public service.
They built a highway system and remarkably stable stone structures, given the unstable geology of the region possibly due to their propensity to build things out of ginormous stone blocks carved to exacting specifications. Much of the imperial capital of Cuzco is still standing and in use today, along with thousands of terraces and granaries. They used these to take advantage of the region's unique climate that allowed them to grow different crops at a different elevations throughout the Andes, and export them only a short distance to market, so that Imperial runners could bring fresh fish to Cuzco every day, along with mail, despite the lack of a wheel or written language.
Moreso than any other culture in the region, the Inca chose to survive and adapt to Spanish conquest, with the last Inca Emperor instructing his citizens to convert to Christianity and worship Inca traditions on the side, which some Quechua people continue to do today. Their language and much of their agrarian lifestyle has also survived. They were aided in this by the mountainous nature of the region which left the Spaniards dependent on Inca infrastructure and foodstuffs, and protected the Inca from wholesale slaughter. The Inca system of manual labor as a public service, paid for in coca leaf also survives in Peru. *
(Chewing the leaves helpfully kept workers energized, and is considerably tolerated, leading to no small amount of Values Dissonance when a revolt by coca growers led to the election of Bolivia's first Indian president.)
It helps that Inca Beliefs were a little easier to reconcile with European values than, say, the Aztecs'.
There were actually hundreds of cultures that existed in the area at various times, but people don't care about them because they never had empires. The NASCAR Nazca are an example of one of these. So are the Olmecs, known mostly for carving massive heads out of stone and being considered the Precursors to later Meso American civilizatons.
And then again, there are these giant stone balls in Costa Rica.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Pre-ColumbianCivilizations
really
