Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos

2. Previous Reconstructions of Classic Maya Political Organization

chapter 2 Previous Reconstructions of Classic Maya Political Organization The Classic period (a.d. 179–948; see Table 1.1) political organization of the lowland Maya has been the subject of endless theorizing, modeling , and debate throughout the twentieth century (see reviews by Becker 1971:28–105, 1979; Willey 1986; Hammond 1991:14–18; Culbert 1991b; Marcus 1993; Lucero 1999; McAnany 2001; Iannone 2002; Webster 2002:Chap. 5). Early reconstructions have fallen into disfavor and then reemerged as more data are accumulated and intellectual currents shift. Debates have crystallized around polar positions on interrelated and generally scalar issues of size, centralization, hierarchy, autonomy , and stability of Maya polities in the Late Classic and through time. Lurking behind these arguments is the awareness that the Maya lowlands encompasses an area of some 250,000 to 300,000 square kilometers and intersite political relations, whether friendly or hostile, could have been maintained only by means of travel on foot or by watercraft through dense tropical forest and often difficult terrain. Early Thoughts Through the first quarter of the twentieth century, attempts to understand Classic Maya civilization broadly—political, social, economic, religious, and material aspects—consisted of descriptive syntheses of travelers’ reports, ethnographic analogies, and British structuralfunctionalism . During what Becker (1971) identified as an “Early Period ” of this endeavor, from 1838 to 1923, explorers such as Edward H. Thompson, Alfred Percival Maudslay, Teobert Maler, Cyrus Thomas, Alfred M. Tozzer, and Sylvanus Griswold Morley viewed Maya sites as complex “cities” characterized by grandiose palace and temple architecture and large, socially differentiated resident populations. An analogy was drawn between the Maya and the Greeks, based on the inference that they were both “artistic and intellectual people” and that, politically , “both were divided into communities or states that bickered and quarreled. There were temporary leagues between certain cities, but real unity only against a common enemy” (Spinden 1917:177). The end of this early interval corresponds roughly to the initiation of major projects in Maya archaeology by the Division of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which dominated the field for nearly half a century (see Special Section in Ancient Mesoamerica 1[2], 1990). The first of these Carnegie projects was Morley’s effort to record Maya inscriptions, which led him to the following enormously influential conclusion: The Maya inscriptions treat primarily of chronology, astronomy— perhaps one might better say astrology—and religious matters. They are in no sense records of personal glorification and selflaudation . . . . They tell no story of kingly conquests, recount no deeds of imperial achievement; . . . they are so utterly impersonal, so completely nonindividualistic, that it is probable that the nameglyphs of specific men and women were never recorded upon the Maya monuments. (Morley 1946:262) The anthropomorphic figures on the monuments bearing these inscriptions were judged to be peaceful gods, priest-astrologers, or calendar priests. Morley’s investigations led him to propose (1915, 1946) a highly centralized , even imperial, model of Maya civilization flourishing in two phases, an Old Empire (comprising sites in the southern lowlands; see also Gann and Thompson 1935:29–66) and a New Empire (comprising the later sites in the northern Maya lowlands). The Old Empire, now known as the Classic period, was regarded as exhibiting a high degree of homogeneity for roughly six hundred years, which at the time suggested “the presence of one supreme ruler over the area” (Bell 1956:437). Morley acknowledged the difficulties of explaining the consolidation and maintenance of such a unified political structure, because there seemed to be “no evidence of warfare as a nationalizing force” (Morley and Brainerd 1956:45). It is noteworthy that in his early synthetic work, The Ancient Maya (Morley 1946; Morley and Brainerd 1956:144), Morley noted that in the central and southern lowlands during the Classic period there may have been at least four “archaeological sub-provinces [that] corresponded roughly to a political unit of some sort.” These included central and northern Petén, Guatemala, plus adjacent Belize; the Usumacinta valley in the west; the southeastern area (centered on Copán); and the southwestern area (Río Pasión). In addition, “eastern Campeche and southern Yucatan formed a region apart.” Morley (1946:316–319; Morley and reconstructions of classic maya political organization 23 Brainerd 1956:267–270) also created a four-tiered hierarchy to classify Maya “religious centers according to their relative importance” based on areal...