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7 Power and Authority at Blue Creek In the previous chapters,I have summarized the public,residential,and agricultural components of Blue Creek and have dealt with some issues of trade and wealth.My intent has been to provide a case study of a single Maya city and some insight into its inner workings. However, I have only peripherally addressed one of the central issues in Maya archaeology, namely the nature of power in Maya society. Where I have addressed this topic, I have framed it in two constructs, control over resources using McAnany’s“first-arrivals”concept and how human agency, as viewed through a version of Wallerstein’s world systems theory,applies to the situation . I believe that once first arrivals established control over resources, power and authority in Maya polities developed through multigenerational interaction among lineages that controlled resources such as agricultural lands. This simplistic version is, of course, not entirely correct. For example, the firstarrivals view would imply that wherever we see the earliest occupation of Blue Creek, we would also see that later residents acquired significant multigenerational power, and this is not always the case. The earliest residents at Blue Creek were Middle Preclassic (Cool Shade complex, 1000–800 b.c.) residents of Chan Cahal. Yet, Chan Cahal does not show evidence of having become a major player in Classic period authority. Instead, components such as Kín Tan that were apparently not occupied for another six or seven hundred years assumed such roles. The question can be reexamined by considering which resources are important for the development of power, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. What is important is that control of resources at the beginning of the Classic period largely defined which lineages would have the opportunity to participate in the Classic period authority structure. Then human agency became critical in how authority structures developed. I cannot overstate the importance of human agency in the creation of power and authority.Agency is too often overlooked,especially by non–social scientists,in analyses of causation in complex society. For example, Jared Diamond’s celebrated 120 Chapter 7 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, begins with a description of Francisco Pizarro’s fateful and dramatic capture of Atahuallpa in front of an Inca army of 40 to 80 thousand men in 1532. Three hundred pages are then consumed explaining to the reader that this was caused by environmental determinism devoid of human agency.1 While Diamond’s version of environmental determinism does help set the stage for understanding the conquest of the New World, Pizarro had not only swords of steel but also nerves of steel. His action was one of the most dramatic examples of how human agency can change the course of history. So, while I am about to describe how I believe multigenerational lineages interacted at Blue Creek and elsewhere to create and reinforce their own power and authority , this is simply the social context for the actions of individual human beings . The Nature of the Maya City and Its Internal Political Economies: Integrating the Residential Components to the Core Area The scholars who object to the notion that Maya cities ever existed argue that the Maya were not an urban society. The problem with this approach remains that we cannot use models and definitions that were developed to be applied to other societies when examining the Maya. It does not matter whether we are trying to determine whether there were Maya cities or whether the Maya were a state or whether commoners or hinterlands were heterogeneous. Whenever we use definitions that simply do not fit the circumstances, these terms become impediments to understanding rather than tools for understanding. So, instead of trying to jam Blue Creek or the Maya in general into the nomothetic boxes of preexisting typologies , it is better and more useful to describe the Maya in their own terms. For example, earlier views of Maya sociopolitical organization held that a large, undifferentiated mass of “commoners,” usually stated to be more than 90 percent of the population, was ruled by a small group of royalty or elites, often as little as one percent of the population. At Blue Creek, as elsewhere, it is very clear that this simplistic situation never existed. Instead, Blue Creek consists of numerous residential components, each with its own distinct nature. While not all of these components have been identified yet, we have identified 8 to 10...

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