It was long thought that the ancient stone pyramid temples of the Maya were built by their royalty.

Now it turns out any number of different factions among the Maya - nobles, priests and maybe even commoners - may have built temples, scientists now suggest.

The fact that different groups had the will and the power to build temples suggests "the Maya could choose which temples to worship in and support; they had a voice in who succeeded politically," said researcher Lisa Lucero, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.