War in the West: History, Landscape, and Classic Maya Conflict (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ancient Maya Warfare: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Socio-Political Strategies among the Maya from the Classic Period to the Present, 2014
Ancient Maya armed conflicts have recently been studied extensively. This article builds both on earlier and on innovative research, examining the topic from the point of view of traditional disciplines, such as archaeology, epigraphy, iconography, and Colonial history, but also introducing a new actor -military sciences. Notwithstanding the progress in the field of Maya epigraphy and the advancement in the co-operation between different disciplines, we are still lacking a thorough analysis of ancient Maya armed conflicts. The article seeks to bring together all potential disciplines relevant to the study of ancient Maya warfare and invites scholars in the future to accumulate further data and prospective research questions on the topic. The article calls for interdisciplinary co-operation between different branches of learning, including military sciences -and its sub-branches, such as military geography. As regards the motivation of war, some theories stress economic over ideological factors and ritualistic captive-taking over political motivations. One of the strategies of any military force in the world is to secure captives and/or to 'inactivate' the enemy leaders. It is quite possible that this was the case with the ancient Maya as well. The author argues that the primary motivations of ancient Maya warfare were political and economic -rather than religious or ideological, with the caveat that motivations for warfare almost certainly varied between the elite and the commoners.
in Unlearning the Language of Conquest, edited by Four Arrows (Don Jacobs), 2006
Perhaps the ultimate price we all pay for diminishing the female's power and position in society is war, the great corporate money-machine and ideological tool of fascism. This chapter reveals the relationship between patriarchal culture and war. Discussion of this relationship has typically been suppressed in one of two primary ways. The previous chapter addressed the first way: simply curtail any discussion about the power of Indigenous women in peaceful, traditional Indigenous society. The second way is to re-create history so as to make the world believe that Indigenous cultures were not at all peaceful in the first place. The latter has been a primary occupation for a number of authors for some time. For example, in 2003, St. Martin's Press published Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlank's book, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, co-authored with Katherine E. Register. Like a number of other academic books, such as those referred to in the introduction, this one attempts to demonstrate that waifare today is far less prevalent than it was in ''primitive" cultures. It argues that the assumptions and the actions of early Indigenous People resulted in patterns of violence throughout the world, and that awareness of these P'!tterns in concert with recognizing the advantages of modern technology increases the ability for humans to avoid war in the future. An admirable goal, but their anecdotal evidence contradicts larger bodies of evidence about war in pre-contact cultures. In fact, their "evidence" simply replicates the self-authorizing mythology in which the majority of Americans have been thoroughly steeped. From images of the caveman dragging his mate into a cave afte1· crushing the head of an opponent with a club to memories of Saturday morning television programs depicting blood-thirsty savages, Americans do not need "more awareness" about Indigenous violence. As previous chapters have shown, popular literature, Hollywood movies, and school textbooks have done an ample job of getting the average person to see ancient cultures as having been prone to violence and war. A large body of research, however, opposes claims that war and belligerence were very prevalent in Indigenous cultures. A day spent looking at the Human Resources Area Files demonstrates this clearly. HRAF, an internationally PEACEFUL VERSUS WARLIKE SOCIETIES II I 3 5
3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands, 2022
As an archaeologist whose research is in southeastern Mexico and Central America, I often am asked: "What is it like to work in South America?" Some 35 years into my career, the follow-up question is still even more exasperating: "Why did the Maya disappear?" When I try to explain that the people I live among and work with each year are not extinct, have not gone anywhere, and would be surprised to learn that they have disappeared, I am usually met with either incomprehension or a sly smile that implies, "You know what I mean and are avoiding my question." Sadly, I do not have a definitive explanation for the Classic Maya Collapse and I do understand the misconceptions behind the interchange. I also know that for very many of the indigenous people I have worked with over the years, "Maya" would not be the first word that springs to mind when choosing a label for their own identity. This confusion underscores several basic questions. Who were and are the Maya? Who gets to define what "Maya" means? What are the different characteristics that are salient to the definition? For most Americans and Europeans, "Maya" principally refers to the builders of the ancient stone pyramids of Yucatan and northern Central America (together all too often misidentified as "South America"), who carved complicated monuments with enigmatic hieroglyphic texts, and who were eventually overwhelmed by noxious jungle foliage that grows faster than kudzu in Alabama. The more enlightened realize that the ancient Maya were indigenous Americans, while the more prejudiced and hidebound cannot possibly believe that Indians were capable of such achievements on their own without the assistance of lost tribes or really lost ancient aliens.
Maya Worldviews at Conquest.pdf
Maya Worldviews at Conquest examines Maya culture and social life just prior to contact and the effect the subsequent Spanish conquest, as well as contact with other Mesoamerican cultures, had on the Maya worldview. Focusing on the Postclassic and Colonial periods, Maya Worldviews at Conquest provides a regional investigation of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Maya ideology, landscape, historical consciousness, ritual practices, and religious symbolism before and during the Spanish conquest. Through careful investigation, the volume focuses on the impact of conversion, hybridization, resistance, and revitalization on the Mayans’ understanding of their world and their place in it. The volume also addresses the issue of anthropologists unconsciously projecting their modern worldviews on the culture under investigation. Thus, the book critically defines and strengthens the use of worldviews in the scholarly literature regardless of the culture studied, making it of value not only to Maya scholars but also to those interested in the anthropologist’s projection of worldview on other cultures in general.
Lethal encounters: warfare and virtual ideologies in the Maya area
Most inter-societal encounters are fairly peaceful, or at least non-violent. However, the third space where encounters take place also includes hostile activities between different people. These encounters create a space where different “ideologies” clash and generate a non-symmetrical third space. This text shall discuss such lethal encounters in the Maya area. Warfare has an intimate relationship with ideology, power and inter-societal encounters in Mayanist studies. In the mid 20th century it was the belief in the lack of warfare that dominated since people during the Classic period (A.D. 250-900/1100) were seen as peaceful time worshippers. For example, Proskouriakoff (1955) made a contrast between a militant Postclassic period (A.D. 900/1100-1540) and a peaceful Classic period. More recently, the Classic period rulers in the Maya area have been described as warring and blood-thirsty shaman kings whose primarily goal and ideology was to hunt down enemies who would become sacrificial victims to feed the kings’ ancestors and cosmos in general. Webster (1993) has labeled these ideas the Killer King Complex. For this group of researchers, war was primarily an elitist ritual practice which did not involve the “commoners.” Warfare was used as a way to legitimize an ideology, which usually is not distinguished from cosmology. Therefore, Ringle (1999) questions the legitimation models since they do not describe how legitimation can create belief and legitimation must therefore be based on earlier beliefs. Rice (2004) has recently put forward a new synthesis of the royal ideology during the Classic period. Still, this view relates to shared norms among a widespread population of elites. Warfare is still in the “ideological” models, although not as dominant as in the Killer King Complex. Many are those who now are trying to piece together a political history of the Classic period from epigraphic and iconographic remains, often following Martin and Grube’s (1995, 2000) “super-power” model. In these attempts, warfare, as seen in epigraphy and iconography, is crucial, sometimes combined with archaeological traces of fortifications, massburials, termination rituals or other patterns of destruction that potentially could be the result of warfare between regional powers. Ideology is still part of the general background of warfare. However, economical or political motives are far more common as explanations (maybe apart from the termination rituals). Still, when ideology is mentioned, it is heavily entwined with the royalty and their need to express and exercise power related to warfare.
UNLEASHING MAYA WARFARE: INQUIRY INTO THE PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF WAR-MAKING
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2023
Across many decades of Maya archaeology, the study of war has typically been focused on its geopolitical, systemic, evolutionary, and structural implications. We argue these approaches stand to benefit from deeper interrogations of practice. Such a perspective shifts scholarly attention toward the ways in which Maya peoples prepared for and engaged in combat, and how they administered the outcomes of war. Deploying this approach requires the study of tactics, strategy, fortifications, materiel, landscape, embodiment, and a host of other related factors. With the issue of practice at the forefront of our analysis, we demonstrate how the study of war has been "blackboxed" in Maya archaeology, then undertake a comparative analysis to highlight how digging into the details of past martial practice enriches debates in Mesoamerican studies regarding the role of war in the rise and disintegration of states.