Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize

2. Yucatan and Belize on the Eve of Conquest

29 two Yucatan and Belize on the Eve of Conquest The colonial and modern Maya are normally perceived as separated or different from the Maya known to tourists as the builders of temples and palaces in the jungle. My first step, then, is to try to bridge this gap in perception in two ways. I address Maya political and economic organization just prior to the Conquest, because Maya dynamics provided the context for Maya-Spanish interaction and affected the outcome. I also present new ideas on the stimulus for Maya warfare and on the widely accepted concepts of slavery and “human sacrifice.” What do these have to do with Christianity? Despite the fact that commercial exchange and “elite visiting among polities” was intensive in the centuries prior to the Conquest, few Postclassic cities and towns had defenses .1 Yet modern scholars have rarely questioned the rationale provided by the Spaniards on why the Maya carried out wars or why warriors were ultimately killed. Furthermore, the Spaniards used these judgments to justify the decisions they made in converting the Maya and in administering Maya communities . Such judgments also contributed to Spanish perceptions of Maya motivations. Native Maya States The first major attempt to elucidate the political geography of Yucatan was made by Ralph Roys.2 Although Roys expressed Maya domains of power rather too strictly in terms of territorial boundaries (map 2.1.a),3 his work is foundational.4 Geopolitical conditions across the Maya lowlands on the eve of Conquest5 are still not known with certainty, but ethnohistorians, historians , and archaeologists have proposed various scenarios as further documentary and archaeological information has come to light.6 The most fruitful of + + 30 Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize these have moved away from attempts at revising or detailing the boundaries originally proposed by Roys (maps 2.1.b–d show various proposed boundary revisions), and instead focus on how power was consolidated and changed hands over time among particular groups, and how this affected political and economic relationships among communities (fig. 2.1).7 Thus, there remain territorial implications, but lines drawn on the ground are not a viable expression of the range of fluctuating economic, political, and administrative relationships. Roys described the existence of native Maya states or territorial divisions, each known as a cuchcabal, or “jurisdiction.”8 The concept of “cuchcabal” (also rendered kuchkabal, kuuchkabal or kúuchkabal) has proved to operate on more levels than Roys originally envisioned, as we shall see. According to native traditions and archaeological evidence, two centers rose to prominence in the peninsula: Chichen Itza, formerly dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries , and Mayapan from about a.d. 1250 to a.d. 1450 (chap. 5, map 5.1). New evidence suggests that Mayapan may have been occupied earlier, and that Chichen Itza had declined by the 11th century.9 With its demise in the fifteenth century, it is Mayapan that became known to the Spaniards as the last major Maya “capital” on the peninsula. Roys noted that the Spaniards translated “cuchcabal” as “province” (provincia ) and that, until recently, the term—or, by extension, the assumption that a province represented well-defined territorial limits—had permeated ideas concerning the nature of Maya geopolitical units at the time of the Conquest .10 Most scholars, including Roys, seem to have used the term “province” with some hesitation, but the idea that territorial boundaries were at least expressed in some manner, if not as “provinces,” by the Maya of Yucatan and Belize , became entrenched. By “territorial boundaries,” I mean areas delimited on the ground in such a way that the delimitation itself provided the basis of the connection to a town. Whoever lived in the delimited space or derived produce from it was considered to be connected to the town (as a place) administratively and economically, probably through tribute. Many researchers writing today now question the idea that provinces existed in the way the Spaniards seem to have envisaged them, which is as units around which meaningful boundary lines on the ground could be drawn, and which could therefore be equated with Spanish colonial units.11 Caso Barrera, for example, recognizes the Spanish mindset but also refers to the various geopolitical units as señoríos, which can be translated as meaning the domain of a lord.12 The word señorío carries the sense of a focus on a person and those obligated to a person, rather than a focus on a...