Why is my fbx importing as many different pieces from Maya?

Hi all,

I made a mesh in Maya to import into Unity. What I want to do with it is use it as a particle emitter. I’ve done this several times with no problem but today Unity broke my mesh up into different components, even though they’re combined and merged in Maya. Any idea why this is and what I can do to fix it? (you can ignore snowman2 and 3, they were attempts using different export settings, and neither of them came over properly either)

OK I’m answering my own question just in case anyone else runs into that, and it is embarrassing.

Delete your history in Maya before exporting! Simple but forgotten step