Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos

9. Conclusion

chapter 9 Conclusion My working definition of political organization has been “the hierarchically structured offices or roles of power and authority existing within, between, and among polities and their elites, whereby goaloriented decisions about internal/external relations (including relations with the supernatural realm) and allocation of resources (human, material , and ideational) are made and implemented.” And my concern has been to determine the nature of the political organization of the Classic lowland Maya: the structure of its power relations and the decisionmaking functions within that structure. Several lines of evidence support the proposition that Classic lowland Maya political organization is best explained through direct-historical analogy to arrangements described in the Postclassic and Colonial period indigenous and ethnohistorical literature. The may—a 256-year, thirteen-k’atun calendrical cycle—was the key geopolitical device that structured power relations from the Preclassic period onward. The may model proposes that during the Classic period there existed multiple “capitals” throughout the Maya lowlands, each a sacred city that seated the may and thereby shouldered responsibility for ensuring cosmic continuity , for a period of 256 years. Within the realm dominated by each cycle seat, or may ku, were numerous subsidiary sites that had similar responsibilities for seating the k’atun for periods of twenty years within that cycle. May cycles—along with shorter temporal cycles folded in them, longer cycles (the b’ak’tun) within which they operated, and the overarching Mesoamerican principle of quadripartition—provided a mytho-religious charter for the structure of regional roles of power and authority. Acknowledging the imperative of recursive calendrical cycling in Maya geopolitico-ritual organization does not mean retrogression to simplistic early models of the Maya as peaceful farmers ruled by stargazing priests in empty towns. Although calendrical cycles established an underlying structure for political events, they did not determine 276 maya political science them mechanistically. Maya kings were individual agents with an impressive arsenal of tools of statecraft, including the ability to muster labor and tribute to construct buildings, plant and harvest crops, conduct trade, wage war, and organize ballgames. They likely had a host of advisers —other nobles, family members, priests, councils of rulers of subordinate cities—to assist in decision making. That some may or halfmay intervals discussed in the preceding chapters were not always precisely 256 or 128 years, but sometimes 236 or 130, demonstrates the administrative flexibility in kings’ agency. Similarly, variations in architectural programming, and even in acceptance of which k’atuns mark the beginning and ending of cycles, reveal temporal and regional variability. The may, then, was neither a singularly inviolable determinant of kingly action nor a mere ideoritual flourish. Rather, the may model acknowledges that cosmic cycling and quadripartition were operational principles that established the deep structure of the Maya world. Evidence to support the extended duration of this organizational system can be drawn from various sources: epigraphic, linguistic, iconographic , architectural, archaeological, historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic. Historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data established the outlines of the calendrico-quadripartite model, traces of which lingered at least into the eighteenth if not the twentieth century. In northern Yucatán, these traces include quadripartite rotation of town leaders and their twenty-year terms and perhaps the jetz’ luum ceremony (Thompson 1999). Bishop Landa’s sixteenth-century account is especially illuminating. At one point he noted carved monuments at the Late Postclassic capital of Mayapán, commenting that the “lines of the characters which they use”—their hieroglyphic inscriptions on stelae—were worn away by rain, and the Maya living nearby said they “were accustomed to erect one of these stones every twenty years” (Tozzer 1941:38–39). In other words, Mayapán, with at least thirteen sculptured and twenty-five plain stelae (Morley 1920:574–576; Proskouriakoff 1962b:134–136), had revived the Late Classic k’atun-ending stela cult as part of the public celebrations accompanying its seating of the may. (The plaza floor around Structure 162, the Castillo, was reconstructed thirteen times, presumably every k’atun [Pugh 2001b:253], suggesting that such refurbishing was also part of may ceremonies.) Postclassic codices also echo the imagery of Late Classic stelae in the Tikal region: page 34a of the Madrid Codex (see Fig. 8.3), one of the Wayeb’ pages, shows the Kawak yearbearer wearing a jaguar pelt and headdress and scattering. A blue-painted ancestor is seated above in a cartouche, surrounded by dots, reminiscent of the...