Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos

Preface

preface I propose here that Classic Maya political organization is best understood by means of the direct-historical approach, that is, by retrodicting elements of Postclassic and early Colonial period organization back into the Classic period. I hypothesize that Classic (and also Preclassic) Maya geopolitico-religious organization was structured by Maya calendrical science, particularly the intervals of approximately twenty years (k’atun) and 256 years, or thirteen k’atuns (may ‘cycle’). By analogy with Postclassic and early Colonial period Yucatán, Mexico, Classic sites hosting the may for 256-year periods were capitals of territories in which k’atun seats rotated among other dependent sites. Portions of the elaborate ceremonies carried out when the Postclassic calendrical cycles ended and began anew can be recognized in the images and inscriptions on Classic-period carved monuments at Tikal, Guatemala, and other southern lowland sites. May and k’atun seats can be identified archaeologically by the erection of stelae commemorating k’atun endings and shared distinctive architectural complexes associated with the celebration of these calendrical observations. In addition, the may hypothesis provides insights into the nature of rulership, ballgame ritual, and warfare among the Classic lowland Maya. My interpretation of the role of the 256-year k’atun round, or may, in Classic Maya political history had its origins in several circumstances— most of them outgrowths of my own history in the field of Maya archaeology —in which I found myself in the mid-1990s. The immediate impetus for writing this book was a need to incorporate textual and iconographic information from the carved monuments around the central Petén lakes into an understanding of the Terminal Classic period in the region. This began as a fairly easily delimited effort to establish the Terminal Classic terminus post quem of Proyecto Maya-Colonial’s investigation of the Postclassic and Colonial period histories of the Maya in this area. As I inventoried the relatively few and poorly known late stelae and altars at sites around the lake basins, I realized the impor- tance of comparing them to the better-known corpus of late monuments at Tikal. I embarked on this task during a time of rampant arguments about socalled segmentary states and endemic warfare in the southern lowlands. Having spent most of my professional archaeological career working at sites in the shadow of Tikal, I found the hypothesized existence of scores of small, warring, weakly independent polities and segmentary states utterly improbable. I was convinced there had to be a better explanation of Maya political organization. At the same time, I began to question whether the “evidence” for endemic warfare could be as much a matter of epigraphers’ interpretations as empirical fact. And I also realized that direct-historical analogy has never been fully exploited as a basis for explaining Classic Maya political geography, particularly in Petén. So I challenged myself to come up with something that seemed more reasonable . The result is this book. The past seven years have seen an unending series of revisions and expansions of my earlier thinking, and I have had to review literature I last read as a graduate student one and a half k’atuns ago. During this same period, stunning advances in Maya hieroglyphic decipherments have provided desperately needed insights into Maya dynasties and dynastic politics while at the same time also—thankfully—“failing to discon- firm” my thesis, in the neutral terminology of statistical hypothesis testing. Continuing in this Popperian vein, and using the principle of Occam’s razor, I believe the may model of Maya political organization is the simplest theory that accounts for all the evidence, and none of the evidence currently available to me contradicts it. In particular, I have been gratified to see increasing evidence for, and archaeologists’ acceptance of, centralized and regional-state models. Numerous colleagues have generously read and commented on earlier drafts of these ideas about the may, and their reactions were variations of the following: “interesting idea, but calendrical ceremony was merely one device in a much larger toolkit that Maya kings could manipulate to achieve their ends.” Maybe. I suspect, however, that the lingering reluctance to embrace calendrical models of political organization , such as the may model, is a legacy of reaction against much earlier reconstructions of Maya society. These reconstructions, advanced during the early twentieth century by Spinden, Morley, Thompson, and others , simplistically characterized the Maya as gentle philosophers and astronomer -priests, living in “vacant cities” and “obsessed with time.” But the Maya...