Ancient Maya Political Dynamics

1. Introduction

1 Introduction This book grew from a question that I pose to my students and that I asked myself when I began to study anthropology in college: What makes humans behave as they do? Social scientists, philosophers, moralists, political scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists have tried for many centuries to understand what makes humans tick: Is it our basic need for food, shelter and respect or efficiency in obtaining these things? Is it morality in the broadest sense, the idea that for most of us being a good person beats being a bad person? Or is it a constant desire for more power? Because the past makes the present and shapes the future, I go back in time to the Classic Maya civilization, one of the best-known and most-celebrated pre-Hispanic cultures of Central America, to investigate the larger question: How much did political power shape the lives and landscape of the Maya people? The goal of this book is not only to present a review of how archaeologists have reconstructed ancient Maya politics but also to engage with the methods they used to reconstitute politics and the debates they have encountered and tried to resolve. By bringing together all the different approaches and the various bodies of knowledge about ancient politics, I hope to provide the foundation for further studies that open new doors to the past. Maya culture is celebrated for its majestic ruins now hidden by jungle forests in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Mexico, for its sophisticated hieroglyphic writing system, and for its artistic masterpieces carved or painted on stone, shell, bone, and pottery. The historical trajectory of Maya culture is generally divided into three time periods from the Agricultural Revolution to the Spanish Conquest of the sixteenth century: the Preclassic , or Formative (1800 BC–AD 250); the Classic (AD 250–950); and the Postclassic (AD 950–1542) (Table 1.1). The most populous polities, the largest cities, and the most intense production of Maya art occurred during the 2 · Ancient Maya Political Dynamics Classic period. The Classic centuries are the focus of this book because we know most about them from the hundreds of hieroglyphic texts that have now been deciphered and the massive quantities of archaeological materials produced by excavation, surveys, and mapping carried out by numerous archaeological projects. The end of the Classic period is generally described as the Classic Maya collapse, but although this “collapse” involved major societal upheavals and changes, it did not cause a complete demographic collapse or the disappearance of Maya culture. Maya society and culture continued through the Postclassic period and are alive and well today in the flourishing communities of more than 5 million Maya speakers widely dispersed through eastern Mesoamerica (but especially concentrated in the Guatemalan highlands, the Chiapas highlands, and the lowland Yucatan peninsula). Rather than speaking of Maya culture as a “dead civilization,” we need to understand the incredible continuities and transformations that connect modern Mayas with their Classic-period ancestors. We know a great deal about Classic Maya culture and society, but its political sphere remains a contentious topic. It is often presented as polarized between two extremes: the centralized model that envisions regional , large-scale centralized states (Chase and Chase 1996; D. Chase et al. 1990; Haviland 1992, 1997; Marcus 1993; Adams 1986) and the decentralized model that proposes small-scale, weakly integrated polities (Demarest 1992; Houston 1993; Fox et al. 1996; Iannone 2002; Lucero 1997; Sharer and Golden 2004; Foias 2003; Runggaldier and Hammond in press; see also Chapter 4). However, these concerns with absolute classification into decentralized or centralized structures have been surpassed by an increasing awareness that Classic Maya polities were variable not only in size but also in structure (Chase and Chase 1996; Demarest 1996c; Fox et al. 1996; Iannone 2002; Marcus 1993, 1998; Pyburn 1997; Sharer 1991; see Chapter 4). Rather than essentializing the “Maya state,” we need to “enter” individual Maya cases and their internal complexities before seeking to understand how and why they differed from each other across time and space. A common adage in twentieth-century politics, “All politics is local politics” (O’Neill and Hymel 1995), has as much relevance for ancient times as it does today: to understand ancient politics, we need to begin from the local and move upward. Best known among this new scholarship is Joyce Marcus’s dynamic model, which argues that not only the Maya but all ancient civilizations cycled between periods of centralized powerful states (or...