Imagine this area without trees - the land cleared for agriculture - the distant hills were used to quarry the stones used to build Copan.
With a river for transportation and fertile soil to farm the land, the sheer success
of the city eventually led to its demise, contamination of water supply, death, disease and rise of the medicine men, superstition and more disease.
There was little in the way of medical science as we know it at that time
although their calendar was more advanced than ours at that time - although curiously, theirs ends abruptly in the year 2012.  Why does time end in the Mayan calendar?