Tikal and other Maya cities required constant maintenance and care to keep the surrounding jungles at bay. Major temples, storage areas, at least ten water reservoirs and many palaces were clustered upon areas of higher ground and causeways were built all over to connect them over the swamps, particularly menacing during wet rainy seasons. Much of Maya art in Tikal and elsewhere has disappeared because of the ravages of the wet, tropical environment on such perishable materials like painted gourds and feathers.

Of the thousands of 1st millennium Maya bark-paper codices, not one has survived. Of innumerable wooden objects, only a handful did in Tikal, particularly a few massive wooden lintels with scenes of lords and their guardian deities, accompanied by lengthy hieroglyphic texts.

Rot was a persistent problem, together with fever outbreaks; many of the surrounding swamplands were unsuitable for agriculture, which forced local authorities to maintain strong, safe trade networks to ensure food supply from those areas that were – possibly, together with the ever-appealing search for captives to sacrifice, one of the main reasons why Maya cities went to war against each other.

Tikal gained local prominence particularly from the 1st century AD, the period when rich burials of prominent people start to become common – just as northern sites like El Mirador and neighboring Cival went into a period of decline from which they never completely recovered.

The depopulation and deterioration of these cities, slowly retaken by the forest, is in many ways a foretaste of the later Maya decline towards the end of the millennium and, as in the later period, the main driving force appears to have been ecological: excessive deforestation led to floods in humid periods and water stress during droughts in the cities that were least careful managing their resources. Others, like Tikal and Calakmul, only benefited from the loss of powerful rivals and the likely arrival of skilled immigrants.