SURVIVING SPANISH CONQUEST: YUCATEC

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSISTENCE

by

Christopher Adam Thrasher

B.A., The University of West , 2014

A thesis submitted to the Department of History College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities The University of West Florida In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2017

The thesis of Christopher Adam Thrasher is approved:

______Erin W. Stone, Ph. D., Committee Chair Date

______Matthew Pursell, Ph. D., Committee Member Date

______John E. Worth, Ph. D., Committee Member Date

Accepted for the Department/Division:

______Amy Cook, Ph. D., Chair Date

Accepted for the University:

______John Clune, Ph.D., Interim Dean, Graduate School Date

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... iv

ABSTRACT ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 A. Cosmology as a Structure: Dualism of Schemas and Resources ...... 5 B. Cosmology as a Worldview ...... 7 C. “Deep” Structures and the Persistence of Maya Social and Cultural Structures ...... 11 D. The Masses: Archaeology Restores Voices of Non-elites ...... 21 CHAPTER I. CONTEXTUALIZING HISTORY: A REVIEW OF MAYA SCHOLARSHIP ....23 A. Forgotten but never Lost ...... 26 B. Maya History Takes Shape ...... 34 C. Modern Foundations ...... 38 D. Picking up the Pieces (and Tying together Threads) ...... 44 E. Conclusion ...... 47

CHAPTER II. A CYCLICAL UNIVERSE: AN END IS A BEGINNING ...... 49 A. The “Collapse” Narrative ...... 53 B. New Approaches ...... 54 C. Kingdoms at War ...... 57 D. Ecological Pressures ...... 60 E. Conclusion: Changing Concepts of “Collapse” ...... 65 CHAPTER III. HIDDEN FROM VIEW: MAYA SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSISTENCE IN THE SHADOWS OF COLONIAL EMPIRE ...... 70 A. Maya Social and Cultural Structures under Spanish Rule ...... 73 B. and Oppression by the Spanish ...... 76 C. Conclusion ...... 86 CHAPTER IV. SMOLDERING INCENSE: THE LACANDÓN MAYA AND PRECOLUMBIAN WORLDVIEWS IN DECLINE ...... 88 A. The Lacandón Maya in Modernity: Ethnogenesis and a Culture Dwindling in the Jungle ...... 88 B. Agricultural Practices ...... 92 C. Lacandón Maya Ritual and Religion ...... 94 D. Conclusion: Intrusion by the Outside and the Decline of Tradition ...... 101 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGY IN MODERNITY ...... 108

REFERENCES ...... 111

FIGURE REFERENCES ...... 120

iii

LIST OF FIGURES 1. beach on the Yucatán Peninsula ...... 4

2. The Kukulcan temple at before excavation ...... 20

3. ’s alphabet ...... 25

4. Cenote Xtacumbilxunan, at Bolonchen, Yucatan ...... 27

5. The Conquest of Tenochtitlán ...... 31

6. An image by NASA showing the Yucatán Peninsula and Gulf of ...... 39

7. Portion of a Building Called Las Monjas at Uxmal...... 52

8. The Kukulcan temple serpent at Chichen Itza shortly after the March Equinox in 2009 ..78

9. Images from the , a Maya book from before the Postclassic period ...... 85

10. A Map of identified by of the Yucatán ...... 90

11. Lake Miramar in the Lacandón Jungle, 2007 ...... 94

iv

ABSTRACT

SURVIVING SPANISH CONQUEST: YUCATEC MAYA SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSISTENCE

Christopher Adam Thrasher After decades of bloody conflict, the Spanish eventually ripped away cultural and social independence from the Maya. Despite life under siege by Europeans, the

Maya did manage to persist culturally and socially. Many have explained their survival geographically. Maya territory was not at the center of the Spanish Empire. Nor was the region a ready source for material wealth and natural resources.

However, practical considerations do not adequately explain Maya persistence in the wake of contact with Europeans. This thesis highlights Maya social and cultural structures and how they contributed to Maya resilience. Thomas Sewell Jr.’s structural theory argued that

“surface” structures germinate from “deep” structures. Maya cosmology acted as a “deep” structure in the manner suggested by Sewell. Classic Maya adaptations to rapid transformation during the Terminal Classic period provided opportunities for the Postclassic Maya to act as agents during and after Spanish conquest, reconfiguring their social and cultural structures to respond to new circumstances. These processes continued for centuries—the Lacandón Maya of

Chiapas, continue to reproduce expressions of Maya social and cultural structures today.

As a result, this group provides a productive case study in the analysis of cosmology as a deep structure.

v

INTRODUCTION

A STUDY WITH STRUCTURE: INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

The first gods were perishable gods. Their worship came to its inevitable end. They lost their efficacy by the benediction of the Lord of Heaven, after the redemption of the world was accomplished, after the resurrection of the true God, the true Dios, when he blessed heaven and earth. Then was your worship abolished Maya men. Turn away your hearts from your (old) religion.1

In the forests of the Yucatán, the Maya constructed permanent settlements, massive physical monuments to their gods and a civilization that would last for centuries. This civilization endured conquests by its neighbors, periods of centralization and diffusion, site abandonment, relocation, and reorganization. However, contact with another civilization, alien to the Americas, challenged virtually every aspect of Maya life. Spanish invaders threatened the physical well-being of the Maya, their social and cultural structures, and the vitality of their cosmology. Despite this new adversary’s objective to destroy much of Maya social and cultural life, the Yucatec Maya preserved many elements of their cosmology. Vestiges of this cosmology can still be seen in today’s remaining indigenous groups in the Yucatán: beliefs in many gods or spirits, the centrality of ritual culture bearing great similarity to its pre-Columbian ancestors, and a special relationship to nature bound closely to the respect of unseen powers.

As a consequence of transformative events in the ninth and tenth centuries, the sixteenth- century Maya lived in a disparate, decentralized civilization broken into kingdoms and systems of alliance. This lack of centralization, coupled with limited utility of the Yucatán to the Spanish

Empire, rendered total conquest by the Spanish a lengthy and impractical venture. The Spanish exercised limited administrative control following their initial conquest of the Yucatán. And as

1 The Book of of Chumayel, ed. Ralph L. Roys, 1933 (Norman, OK: University of Press, 1967), 98. 1

can still be observed in present day indigenous groups of the Yucatán, the Spanish never entirely extinguished distinctly Maya social and cultural structures.

This thesis examines how, through their own agency, the Maya preserved their social and cultural structures during the Spanish conquest. The first chapter, “Contextualizing History: A

Review of Maya Scholarship,” looks at the history of indigenous studies in the Yucatán and

Mexico with a couple guiding questions. Early study of the Maya benefited from interest in ruins and the characteristics of the , rather than an interest in the Maya as secondary characters in the narrative of conquest by great men like Cortés. Since the 1950s, scholarship moved toward a synthesis of different types of evidence, a conjunctive approach, using biological data, textual and material analysis, and various other fields. Combined with the findings of epigraphers, scholars are presently reinvigorating distinctly Maya accounts of conquest and transformation. These narratives could portray Indians as active agents in the construction of colonial societies. Next, I explore the origins of Maya cultural and social persistence in the chapter entitled, “A Cyclical Universe: An End is a Beginning,” that elaborates on pre-contact Maya history. It is likely that the nature of Maya civilization itself at the time of contact with Europeans benefited the long-term survival of Maya cultural ways. “A Cyclical

Universe” observes another transformative period in Maya history, the Terminal Classic

“collapse,” an event or series of events around 900-1000AD which may have reconfigured in such a way that Spanish domination became unwieldy and inconsistent. The third chapter, “Hidden from View: Maya Social and Cultural Persistence in the Shadows of Colonial

Empire,” focuses on contact between the Maya and the Spanish, recounting Maya culture as observed by the Spanish and documented by archaeology. The majority of this chapter focuses

2

on Maya religion, alongside social and cultural identity. Each of these topics connected closely with Maya cosmology. Spanish conquest endangered these elements of Maya civilization, and, through the efforts of some extreme Spanish political and religious leaders, often directly challenged pre-Columbian beliefs. Figure 1 provides an example of locations where the Spanish might have taken their first steps in the Yucatán

The final chapter, “Smoldering Incense: The Lacandón Maya and Pre-Columbian

Worldviews in Decline,” leaps forward to more recent history in search of a productive case study. This chapter investigates a prominent indigenous group still residing in the Yucatán: the

Lacandón Maya of the Lacandón Forest in southern , Mexico. The Lacandóns face powerful threats to their way of life. Deforestation, intrusion by other indigenous groups, and— due to the efforts of capitalistic enterprises—greater connectivity to the surrounding world threaten with further transformation, relocation, or destruction. Fortunately, recent interest by scholars in the past century preserved many elements of Lacandón life through documentation in books and articles. Broad similarities to practices of the Maya may reflect successes of the Yucatán’s indigenous peoples to preserve elements of their culture that differ significantly from western culture. Though they are not native to the Lacandón Forest,

Lacandóns’ experiences may provide an important metric for observing indigenous cultural persistence through time. The cultural prosperity or decline of the Lacandón Maya and their peers will decide the answer to one more question: will pre-Columbian worldviews still exist in the Yucatán when the next century arrives?

These chapters collectively argue something new: that the transformation of the Maya during the Terminal Classic significantly improved the ability of the Postclassic Maya to endure

3

Spanish conquest both culturally and socially. These adaptations then provided opportunities for

Maya agents to preserve their heritage through instances of resistance or accommodation to the

Spanish “other.” Ultimately, these legacies of the Maya empowered some groups peripheral to the colonial system to continue producing, and reproducing, distinctly Maya social and cultural structures with Maya cosmology as a unifying core tying them to pre-contact antecedents.

Fig. 1. Cozumel beach on the Yucatán Peninsula, 2004.

4

Cosmology as a Structure: Dualism of Schemas and Resources William H. Sewell Jr. argued that structures “are constituted by mutually sustaining cultural schemas and sets of resources that empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action.”2 “Mutually sustaining cultural schemas” vary from one culture to the next, but are present and definable in indigenous societies. According to Sewell, structures are dualistic and must “be defined as composed simultaneously of schemas, which are virtual, and of resources, which are actual.”3 More plainly, structures are constituted by (1) sets of rules called schemas, and by (2) resources. In Sewell’s duality, these resources are the effect of schemas, and schemas are the effect of resources.4 In essence they impact and reinforce one another. Based on the work of Anthony Giddens, these schemas are generalizable procedures applied in different contexts or interactions, including in the enactment and reproduction of social life. In this sense, schemas are “virtual,” meaning they are irreducible to specific practices or locations spatially and temporally.5 Resources can be both human and nonhuman. Nonhuman resources are generally those animate or inanimate objects that “can be used to enhance or maintain power, including knowledge of the means of gaining, retaining, controlling, and propagating either human or nonhuman resources.” Though these definitions may generally be more helpful for the study of the elite, non-elites still control some measure of human and nonhuman resources.6

Cosmologies are belief systems holistically combining religions, myths, rituals, and the various schemas rooted in these religions, myths, and rituals. Cosmologies feature these

2 William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, IL: the University of Chicago University Press, 2005), 151. 3 Sewell, Logics of History, 136. 4 Sewell, Logics of History, Sewell offers the example of the Mass: the priest performs communion, providing as a resource “a sense of spiritual well-being,” which “demonstrates to the communicants the reality and power” of the system giving the priest power, “the rule of apostolic succession that made the priest a priest,” 136. 5 Sewell, Logics of History, 131, 132. 6 Sewell, Logics of History, 133. 5

“generalizable procedures” in the rituals and traditions actualizing stories of gods, men, creation, social relationships, and cosmological relationships to levels of existence. The preservation of

Maya cosmology depended upon the persistent reenactment of rituals and traditions through time despite periods of ecological, social, cultural, and political disaster. In Sewell’s dualism, schemas and structures depended on sustained reproduction over time. Resources served to regenerate the schemas engendering these resources. Schemas not empowered by resources and reproduction eventually faced abandonment. Inherent to Sewell’s dualism between resources and schemas, resources absent from cultural schemas would also disappear. These mutually sustaining cultural schemas and resources become Sewell’s structures when this relationship continues over a period of time. 7

In the Yucatán, both elite and non-elite Maya contributed to the preservation of distinctly

Maya cosmology. Indigenous societies reproduced their schemas and associated cosmological narratives through repetition and tradition, reinforcing narratives which defined relationships to nature and the community and granting meaning to all elements of nature, including man. The survival of Maya culture depended upon the effective use of nonhuman resources, like temples and material culture, as well as the application of human resources by the individual or by community leadership to continuously cultivate resources—both physical and spiritual.

Sewell asserted that agency within this context arose from consciousness of schemas, and manipulation of schemas, applying them to new contexts.8 Once an individual or group established agency, they could coordinate with or against others for any number of purposes with

7 Sewell, Logics of History, 137. 8 Sewell, Logics of History, 143. 6

an awareness of “one’s own and others’ activities.”9 In the Yucatán, the Maya used their schemas to work with and against the Spanish following contact, all the while reproducing and modifying their own schemas and cosmologies.10

Cosmology as a Worldview Cosmologies guided Maya societies and cultural production through history. For instance, Maya literature is preoccupied with cosmology, or the spirits and their interactions with various spheres of Maya existence as well as the natural world. The Book of Chilam Balam of

Chumayel11 wove together history and myth in accounts of creation, political history, and

Spanish interaction. But cosmology influenced more than Maya historical accounts and literature. Today, many people with a passing familiarity of the Maya have heard of the strong associations between Maya literature and astronomy.

Various Maya groups devoted their literature to understanding the movement of celestial bodies and recognized, as did many other cultures, the supremacy of the sun in the cosmos. The sun and its position shaped understandings of both space and time: “the spatial categories east and west” were “not distinguished from the temporal categories sunrise and sunset.”12 The use of cosmology, in this case the power of the sun to define space and periods of time simultaneously, gave purpose or definition to many different elements of nature and physical space. The Maya also “recognized each day and each larger time division as a deity, each with its own attributes

9 Sewell, Logics of History, 145 10 Though well received by many and considered “pathbreaking” by some, Sewell’s peers directed some minor criticisms at Logics of History, such as its relative exclusion of political and “intellectual” historians, drawing from social historians almost exclusively. See: David A Hollinger, “Review: Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation by William H. Sewell Jr.,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 1 (March 2008): 109-110; Daniel Little, “Review: Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation by William H. Sewell, Jr.,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 181-182; Eve Rosenhaft, “Review: On Geoff Eley and William H. Sewell Jnr,” Social History 34, no. 1 (February 2009): 74-79. 11 The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, ed. Ralph L. Roys, 1933 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967). 12 Anthony F. Aveni, The Sky in Mayan Literature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19. 7

subtly modified according to the other deities with whom it was in association.”13 Religion pervaded virtually all aspects of Maya life, including the communication of numerical value.

Gods were not only anthropomorphic. They represented numbers or historical periods, periods of time, and celestial bodies.14

Cosmologies also encompassed the creation stories granting purpose to the trees, the land, the animals, and the natural phenomena witnessed by indigenous peoples. Much knowledge of religion in Maya civilization, and many other pre-Columbian cultures, comes from the interpretation of art and iconography transmitting cosmological narratives through time. These visual representations blend cosmology and the ecological balance that was critical to the success of these societies.15

Just prior to contact with the Spanish, Yucatec Maya cosmology centered on the belief that the “world order” suffers a cycle of cataclysms and subsequent reconstructions. It has been theorized that celestial and temporal events were understood within this context. These events included the transmission of power between dynasties and the ending of discrete periods.16 Maya creation stories from this period frequently featured a crocodilian earth, represented by the crocodile Itzak Kab’ Ayin in the books of Chilam Balam.17 The earth formed from his back.

Flood imagery associated with the crocodile in narratives of creation, destruction, and renewal

13 Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517-1570 (New York, NY: Cambridge University, 1998), 145. 14 Gabrielle Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2009), eds. Leslie G. Cecil, and Timothy W. Pugh, 98. 15 Gordon R. Willey, Essays in Maya Archaeology (Albuquerque, NM: University of Press, 1987), 153, 154. 16 Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 84. 17 Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 87, 98. 8

represented the operation of the cyclical Maya universe.18 The behavior of the water cycle was an important feature of Maya cosmology, reflecting the delicate balance between Maya lives and their environment. One of the many rituals later observed by the Spanish supplicated the rain god

Chac to ensure favorable rains and harvests.19

In this situation, as in many others, belief inspired action. Indigenous cosmologies manifested real consequences in the application of these belief systems through traditions and practices constituting cosmological schemas. Cosmology shaped the totality of Maya experiences:

It appears that Mayan peoples have, and had in their pre-Columbian past, differing systems of timekeeping that they used in the separate provinces of their biological, astronomical, psychological, religious, and social realities, and that these various systems underwent a process of totalization with the overlapping intermeshing cycles of their calendars.20

The almanacs produced by the Maya elite provided structures for agents in elite social roles directing community resources, particularly labor. Planting and harvesting schedules and the timing of important rituals were developed according to the movements of heavenly bodies predicted by the almanacs and tables.21 These cultural artifacts were inextricably tied to religious and mythical narratives. But the Maya connected more than just cultural artifacts, and perceptions of time and space, to their cosmology. Cosmology helped define history and kingship.

18 Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 98. 19 John F. Chuchiak IV, “De Descriptio Idolorum: An Ethnohistorical Examination of the Production, Imagery, and Functions of Colonial Yucatec Maya Idols and Effigy Censers, 1540-1700,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 135, 136. 20 Aveni, The Sky in Mayan Literature, 37. 21 Aveni, The Sky in Mayan Literature, 84. 9

The present and the universe’s beginning were not the only temporal spheres over which indigenous cosmologies had power. Religion, myth, and history all combined in the story of

Kukulcan in Maya cosmology. Kukulcan was revered as a great-king figure, and may have some significance as a representation of a historical dynasty. Kukulcan acted as a mythical founding figure of the Maya civilization, coming from the nongeographic heavenly “East.”22 According to their mythology, Kukulcan was partly responsible for Maya cultural traditions, bringing multiple elements of culture, including writing, to the Maya people.23 Kukulcan’s origin in the “East” and his contributions to Maya culture helped inform and define the mythical origin of the Maya civilization spatially, temporally, and culturally.

In addition to defining time and history, cosmology manifested real consequences by directing the allocation of time, potentially the most valuable of all resources available to a social or cultural group. How agents of Maya communities chose to allocate their time was a powerful element of identity creation. Indigenous societies practiced narrative construction via tradition and ritual. Narratives granted meaning and place within the cosmos to the traditions and rituals defining indigenous societies. The ritual recitation of song-stories about Itzak Kab’ Ayin, the definition of solar cycles and numerical value through mythology, and the habitual transmission of narratives to the next generation were just a few examples of actions granting cosmology a very powerful and real impact: the direction, organization, and definition of human behavior. In many ways, cosmology acted as a “deep” structure.

22 Douglas T. Peck, “The Geographical Origin and Acculturation of Maya Advanced Civilization in ,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 130 (January-June 2002): 10. THIS SHOULD BE PAGE 10. 23 Peck, “The Geographical Origin and Acculturation of Maya Advanced Civilization in Mesoamerica,” 15. 10

“Deep” Structures and the Persistence of Maya Social and Cultural Structures

To say that cosmology is a “deep” structure depends on additional structural elements defined by Sewell. Deep structures are schemas underlying other structures. Those structures on the surface germinate from deep structures. Structures that are deep are often applied procedurally, or without an awareness that these structures are being used. In this way, “they are taken-for-granted mental assumptions.”24 Maya cosmology pervaded practically all aspects of life. By virtue of this totality of cosmology, its assumptions were “taken-for-granted” and deeply ingrained in the daily interpretation of events or experiences.

For instance, the Maya unabashedly assumed connection between nature and spirits, with limited separation between the terrestrial and spiritual realms. Healing and remedies provided a window into intersections between the physical and supernatural. Indigenous societies developed holistic understandings of the world around them combining natural science and spirituality with little, if any, distinction between the two. Observable, or presumed, powers of natural remedies provided a tie grounding everyday life to cosmological narratives projecting relationships between spirit, man, and nature. Human wellbeing, and its preservation, were inextricably tied to cosmology.

Tobacco, a plant with special healing and ritual properties in many indigenous American societies, grew in abundance throughout North and South America.25 In Mesoamerica, rituals intended to diagnose illness caused by angered spirits involved the ritual use of tobacco and divination. Also, tobacco was a physical “reminder that misfortune could be caused when

24 Sewell, Logics of History, 146. 25 Johannes Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 147-149, 151. 11

supernatural entities were displeased.” 26 The medicinal qualities or utility of some plants used by healers and religious leaders provided demonstrable powers tying material and immaterial culture. These powers were also associated with cosmological narratives connecting human experiences and meaning to plants, animals, and spirits. Blowing tobacco smoke could fumigate seeds. Tobacco juices could be used as insecticide and, in some cultures, tobacco was believed to be capable of assisting in birth or boosting fertility.27 The ritually reinforced relationship of tobacco to cosmology through “taken-for-granted” connections between spirits, man, and nature provided clear and convincing proof for the powers of spirits asserted in these narratives. The

Maya continuously mobilized human and nonhuman resources to reinforce healing and spiritual schemas, which in turn demanded continuous cultivation of the necessary plants and the passage of knowledge through training to new healing specialists over time.

Tobacco and cacao also provided mechanisms through which Mesoamerican indigenous groups adapted pre- structures to new contexts. Tobacco and cacao possessed enormous ritual and social significance, acting as linchpins of some indigenous social schemas. Spanish invasion and colonization threatened pre-Hispanic indigenous structures. However, these structures were flexible rather than static, fitting Sewell’s structural theory28 and the power of agents to adapt schemas to new circumstances.

The Spanish broke up indigenous power centers, asserted their own ideas of land ownership, and remobilized the resources, both human and nonhuman, of Mesoamerica, establishing very real threats to the survival of indigenous peoples and their traditions. Tobacco

26 Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 80. 27 Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America, 152-155. 28 Sewell, Logics of History, 151. 12

and chocolate were just two of many physical connections to a past threatened by colonialism and potentially vulnerable to obliteration without careful preservation through continuous reproduction and allocation of resources.29 The ritual significance of tobacco and cacao provided one of many tools with which indigenous groups adapted their structures and schemas to a new context: life under Spanish rule. These goods served an important role as mnemonic devices, tying living memory to Maya traditions concerning deities, worship, and social structures.30

Since cosmology includes the totality of religion, myth, and ritual, those schemas associated with tobacco and chocolate were elements of Mesoamerican indigenous belief systems—their “deep” cosmological structures. The practices associated with tobacco, chocolate, and other ritual goods were passed down from generation to generation, much like material culture itself. “As the Spanish cleric Alarcón lamented, ‘superstitions’ accompany the objects that are ‘inherited by the children and descendants.’”31 Through reproduction and adaptation of schemas closely tied to tobacco and cacao use, indigenous peoples adapted and transformed elements of their cosmology in order to ensure its survival as well as their own.

It is worth noting that tobacco and chocolate schemas proved so malleable that these goods, soon flowing across the Atlantic, maintained some of their power as ritual objects of social schemas in the courts of . Ritual objects in Mesoamerica connecting “the individual body to the social body, and humans to divinity,” tobacco and chocolate became ingrained in

European fashion, social activity, and healing. In Spain, these goods and their use became associated with refinement and civility. They were also used to manipulate state of mind.

29 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 64. 30 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 64. 31 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 83. 13

Chocolate provided an uplifting force for low-spirits, and tobacco suppressed discomfort.32

However, few other elements of Maya culture proved as attractive to European minds.

Eager to destroy material culture representing elements of indigenous cosmology, and fueling the reproduction of religion, myths, and rituals of the Yucatec Maya, some Spanish friars in the Yucatán attempted to obliterate the painted hieroglyphic books of the Maya. These books preserved much Maya cosmology33 and “deep” structures, providing material and cultural support for the “surface” social structures of power used by indigenous rulers and elites. A great deal of information about Maya religion, albeit imperfect, comes from Relación de las cosas de

Yucatán, written by a rather extreme Franciscan friar Diego de Landa. According to his writings and their later reproductions, Landa found that the Maya continued to sacrifice humans, including children, to their gods even after converting to . Landa believed that these sacrifices occurred even in Christian churches. He later participated in the destruction of Maya hieroglyphic books, hoping that the extermination of non-Christian pre-Columbian belief systems in the Americas would end ritual sacrifice of humans and what he believed to be the perversion of Christianity by indigenous peoples.34 In order to protect their cosmology (and in effect their deep structures), the Maya adapted the contents of these books into new forms and scripts by exploiting education provided by the Spanish.35 The survival of Chilam Balam texts originating from, and named for, various locations in the Yucatán reflects the success of Maya efforts, though few of these works remain for scrutiny by scholars.

32 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 174. 33 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 134. 34 J. Eric S. Thompson, “The Civilization of the Mayas,” Anthropology Leaflet, no. 25 (1927): 25. 35 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 134, 135. 14

In addition to the use of mnemonic devices, the Maya pursued other methods of preserving their culture. Mesoamerica’s indigenous groups avoided or lessened persecution from

Spanish colonial authorities by “making necessary adjustments” to their practices.36 Indigenous groups observed by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon in the early-seventeenth century saw the combination of European cosmologies and indigenous cosmologies as “a logical amalgamation of beliefs and practices.”37

Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas broke up many of the structures binding indigenous groups together. The Spanish established political and religious institutions as competing structures to those already established in indigenous societies. The encomienda,38 repartimiento,39 and reducción40 sometimes threatened indigenous Maya structures.41 These institutions challenged indigenous structures by reorganizing human and nonhuman resources, and by reforming social traditions, ritual practices, and political structures of power. Spanish conquest and colonial institutions profoundly interrupted an important fixture of indigenous agency: communication within large, semi-organized systems of communities. Within Sewell’s framework, “the transpositions of schemas and remobilizations of resources that constitute

36 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 64. 37 Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, 80 38 Ronald W. Batchelder, and Nicholas Sanchez, “The Encomienda and the Optimizing Imperialist: An Interpretation of Spanish Imperialism in the Americas,” Public Choice 156, no. 1/2 (July 2013): “The encomienda was a royal grant that permitted the grantee (encomendero) to receive tribute in goods and labor services from the Indians comprising the encomienda.,” 46. 39 Batchelder and Sanchez, “The Encomienda and the Optimizing Imperialist,” “Distributions of Indians, to the original settlers to provide labor services for them,” 46. 40 Benjamin Keen, and Keith Haynes, A , 7th ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), indigenous towns created by the “resettlement of dispersed populations . . . to serve the ends of Spanish control and tribute collection, these towns were reorganized on the peninsular model, with municipal governments patterned on those of Spanish towns,” 111. 41 Minette C. Church, Jason Yaeger, and Jennifer L. Dornan, “The San Pedro Maya and the British Colonial Enterprise in : ‘We may have a perfectly harmless and well affected inhabitant turned into a designing and troublesome neighbor,’” in Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas (School for Advanced Research Press, 2011), eds. Matthew Liebmann, and Melissa Scott Murphy, 177. 15

agency are always acts of communication with others.”42 The Spanish conquest’s disruptions to communications within and between Maya communities and networks threatened to destroy

Maya schemas and inhibit the communication necessary for the passage of “deep” structures to future generations.

Indigenous groups adapted to some of the new Spanish structures established in the

Americas.43 These adaptations preserved some indigenous cultural independence. Indigenous groups resisted Spanish oppression, communicating some elements of their “deep” cosmological structure and “surface” structures, and creating new surface structures in the process. The Maya pursued various methods of preserving their heritage, in some cases moving their community rituals underground into the many caves of the Yucatán.44 Others voluntarily joined nucleated towns created through the policy of congregación, which moved Indians from disparate villages into reducciónes. Ideally, local indigenous leaders recruited by missionaries would persuade other families to settle in these new communities, begin planting, construct a church, and establish institutions familiar to Spanish settlement centered on a plaza—all without forced coercion.45

A crucial part of Sewell’s explanation of “deep” structures was their ability to undergo such transformation and to be adapted to new contexts. Cosmology is a deep structure in the sense that many of its assumptions are “taken-for-granted”. It is also a deep structure in that it underlies transformations of cosmological schemas into “surface” structures. Cosmological

42 Sewell, Logics of History, 145. 43 Church, Yaeger, and Dornan, “The San Pedro Maya and the British Colonial Enterprise in British Honduras,” 177. 44 Andrea Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 129. 45 W. G. Lovell, “The Real Country and the Legal Country: Spanish Ideals and Mayan Realities in Colonial ,” GeoJournal 26, no. 2 (February 1992): 181, 183. 16

schemas, Mesoamerican or otherwise, can be transformed into rituals, structures of power, and practices, like those of medicine in indigenous societies. Monarchs emulating legendary figures like Kukulcan attributed their status, power, and authority to their relationship to the cosmos, or in other words their appointment to positions of leadership by the gods.

Maya priests were granted great powers due to these spiritual or cosmological relationships. A “ sense that the future was fixed, and could be ‘read’ by those who had the skill to do so, meant that their social utility of the most esoteric knowledge could not be in doubt.”

Priests were responsible for reading the coming of the rains, which were unreliable in the

Yucatán. These privileged leaders with special access to ecological narratives could therefore deploy human resources by determining when agricultural fields should be cleared through slash- and-burn techniques.46

Priests were also important in the organization of large socio-religious rituals in which all levels of society participated. In Maya cosmology, all members of the community shared dependence on the gods for survival. Since everyone depended on the gods, everyone played some role in the organized or individualized efforts of communities to appease gods. The commoner’s level of interaction could vary: from gathering as spectators for the ritual sacrifice of life, ritually sacrificing a little blood through minor lacerations during the ceremony,47 to their ritual sacrifice by religious authorities or the community.48

Priests used their positions of responsibility to promote the well-being of the community, directing various rituals, including those meant to appease rain gods and ensure sufficient rainfall for the success of Maya subsistence systems. These agents used cosmological schemas to direct

46 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 146 47 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 147. 48 For examples see Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , in which accounts of Maya sacrifice are pervasive. 17

the use of human resources with the objective of cultivating nonhuman resources. The Maya lowland subsistence system focused on the cultivation of , a staple crop of this society and many others in the Americas with ritual as well as physical significance. Other crops and imports supplemented the dense population centers of the Maya lowlands.49 The success of these agricultural systems depended on sufficient rainfall, creating enormous significance and power for agents promising to secure adequate, predictable rainfall for the coming season. Even after the Spanish conquest and reorganization of Maya societies, Maya communities continued rituals to promote good rains and favorable harvests.50

In addition to the cultivation of nonhuman resources like agricultural products, Maya cosmology directed or encouraged the collection of other resources like stone and lumber. The

Maya constructed sometimes enormous pyramids (see Fig. 2) flanked by many smaller buildings including temples, in their sedentary population centers. Landa noted that these buildings were ubiquitous in the Yucatán, dotting the landscape wherever the Maya settled.51 These buildings had great significance to the Maya people as centers for ritual practices, homes for religious material culture. These physical structures undoubtedly served many other less obvious purposes that remain a mystery. The buildings themselves also inherently called to Maya cosmology through the inclusion of visual representations of various cosmological narratives.52 This visual culture provided a powerful means for cosmology to transcend the barrier of time through its

49 Willey, Essays in Maya Archaeology, 35, 36. 50 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 135, 136. 51 Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, in Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A , Alfred M. Tozzer ed. (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1941), 18, 171. 52 Thompson, “The Civilization of the Mayas,” 16, 17. 18

accessibility and adaptability for many generations of Maya who would continue to muse upon the meaning behind these stories.

Structures, as theoretically explored by Sewell, also enhanced the agency of participants in the various schemas composing these same structures. Sewell defined agency as possessing the capability to exert “some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree.”

Sewell supported the idea that all humans have some level of agency in their daily lives, but there are some individuals or groups that have exceptional control of social relationships and resources (human and nonhuman):53 “Agents are empowered by structures, both by the knowledge of cultural schemas that enables them to mobilize resources and by the access to resources that enables them to enact schemas.”54

Indigenous cosmologies and the “surface” structures built upon them bolstered the influence of privileged or “elite” social positions within indigenous communities. These “elite” could be kings, priests, special healers, or any other special member of community structures with exceptional power to manipulate social relations and resources. Agency “is collective as well as individual . . . Moreover, the extent of the agency exercised by individual person depends profoundly on their positions in collective organizations.”55

Indeed some Maya possessed enormous power to influence other members of their collective organizations. In some severe cases, this influence stripped both agency and life from uncounted numbers of other Maya. Priests and other religious leaders directed the sacrifice of others to the gods in propitiation during “the extremities of pestilences or quarrels, or droughts,

53 Sewell, Logics of History, 144, 145. 54 Sewell, Logics of History, 151. 55 Sewell, Logics of History, 145. 19

or other similar necessities.”56 Through a variety of methods, which in their very diversity credit the creativity of the Maya, religious authorities prepared and surrendered the lives, bodies, or various organs of sacrifices. Landa remarked harshly upon these proceedings, characterizing these sacrifices as flippant as the sacrifice of birds and invoking the names of two great Maya urban centers, Chichen Itza and Cozumel, as wicked sanctuaries “where they sent an infinite number of poor wretches for sacrifice—in one place by throwing down a precipice and in the other by taking out their hearts.”57

Fig. 2. The Kukulcan temple at Chichen Itza before excavation.

56 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 184. 57 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, “Forgetful of all natural piety and of every law of reason, they offered them sacrifices of human beings with as much readiness as if they were sacrificing birds and as often as the wicked priests or the chilans told them was necessary or as it was the desire of or appeared proper to the lords . . . Besides sacrificing in their towns they had those two wicked sanctuaries of Chichen Itza and Cozumel, where they sent an infinite number of poor wretches for sacrifice—in one place by throwing down a precipice and in the other by taking out their hearts,” 184. 20

The Masses: Archaeology Restores Voices of Non-elites

A privileged few guided ceremonies like those witnessed by Landa. There were many other forms of worship exercised by non-elites. Though the experiences of non-elites are critical to understanding what the Maya were like before the Spanish and how the Maya transformed, precious little was known about them until the development of new methods. A major obstacle for researchers in understanding indigenous structures is the lack of clear input from people who did not occupy privileged social roles. The elites speak more loudly across time than the rest of their communities, and elite concepts of cosmology may differ from that of non-elites. These elite voices can be accessed through the textual accounts remaining from the period, though these are very limited in number. Fortunately, the ascendency of household archaeology renders non-elite experiences visible. Archaeologists identified a need to explore religious or cosmological structures beyond their consequences as structures of authority for the elite and attempted to use analysis of ritual practices to understand the worldview of the non-elite.58

Material culture in caves, cenotes, temples, homes, and other locations provided important material for the analysis of non-elites.

Religion, social relationships, and power in indigenous societies shared cosmology as structural connective tissue. Though written records like those of Landa leave us with few perspectives from which to study the Spanish conquest and indigenous resistance, archaeology and its revelations make broad social trends, cultural trends, and non-elite experiences readable and communicable. In recent decades, scholars engaged indigenous voices more directly through remaining material cultural, weakening the dependence of the field on great-man narratives, and

58 Edward R. Swenson, “Competitive Feasting, Religious Pluralism and Decentralized Power in the Late Moche Period,” in Andean Archaeology III, eds. William H. Isbell, and Helaine Silverman (New York, NY: Springer Science + Media, LLC, 2006), 113-115. 21

other distorted forms of indigenous history seen through the lens of the conqueror. It is now clear that indigenous groups possessed significant autonomy for an extended period of time following conquest, and took many measures that preserved their culture intentionally or as an indirect benefit of gradual, selective acculturation. As a result, some indigenous groups in Central

America still preserve elements of ancient pre-Hispanic cultures.

22

CHAPTER I

CONTEXTUALIZING HISTORY: A REVIEW OF MAYA SCHOLARSHIP

In his “Incidents of Travel in , Chiapas, and Yucatán,” the author intimated his intention to make a more thorough exploration of the ruins of the latter country . . . Time and the elements are hastening them to utter destruction. In a few generations, great edifices, their facades covered with sculptured ornaments, already cracked and yawning, must fall, and become mere shapeless mounds. It has been the fortune of the author to step between them and the entire destruction to which they are destined; and it is his hope to snatch from oblivion these perishing, but still gigantic memorials of a mysterious people.59

From the moment of contact between the Maya and the Spanish, people wrote about this fascinating civilization with numerous temples, a diverse people, and a deep history extending far back in time. Many early histories of contact focused on conquistadors’ perspectives, providing little room for insightful recognition of groups indigenous to the New

World. Like the and the Inca, the Maya rapidly became more notable in public consciousness during the nineteenth century. Unlike studies of their peers which focused on

“great” men like Cortés and the conquistadors, Maya studies soon assumed forms relatively close to modern scholarship. By the early-twentieth century, professional archaeologists and anthropologists were preserving depth and breadth of Maya experiences over vast spans of time—mostly unhindered by the “great man” fallacy of history. The cleaving differences between early twentieth-century histories of the Maya on the one hand, and peer indigenous groups on the other, sprang out of the differences in the approaches of two early chroniclers: one who sought to preserve the history of the Maya and their civilization; and the other, who sought to glorify Cortés and the epic Spanish conquest of the New World.

59 John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, Victor Wolfgang von Hagen ed. (1843; repr., University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 1962), xxv. 23

Unfortunately, the Spanish destroyed many Maya textual accounts of Maya history and culture60 which could have provided an unimaginable number of revelations regarding indigenous life, worldviews, and concepts of the universe. For many decades, the bulk of primary source information about the Maya came from the work of Spanish bishop Diego de

Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. Landa spent many years in the Yucatán and committed his experiences to paper. However, Landa’s role was not just that of a spectator: he actively participated in the oppression of indigenous social and cultural life that conflicted with

Spanish Catholicism.

Landa’s notes covered everything from political division, social and cultural practices, linguistics, and architecture, to the repression of the Maya by the Spanish—including his own contributions. It is a familiar irony that Landa, who played no small part in the destruction of

Maya texts, preserved much of what scholars learned about Maya social, political, and religious customs, and the Maya itself61 (see Fig. 3). In describing Maya glyphs, Landa wrote

We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.62

In the centuries since Landa’s personal role in the destruction of indigenous texts and abuse of

Indians, scholars rediscovered (and began the arduous task of translating) other textual sources more directly representing Maya voices, history, and culture. The Books of Chilam Balam, the

Popol Vuh, and various literary sources opened a window into the rich mytho-history of the

Maya, preserving pseudo-historical stories of creation, social history, and political history. In

60 Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, in Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation, Alfred M. Tozzer ed. (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1941), 78. 61 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 78, 169. 62 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 169. 24

essence, it is only recently that the Maya transformed from a pre-historic society, with no language readable to scholars, into a historic one with literature of its own. In just the last thirty years, historians like Matthew Restall, Sarah Cline, and Susan Schroeder (to name just a few) explored race, culture, and broad narratives of Maya history using blended textual and material analysis. However, the strong foundation that modern historians built upon was established by archaeologists and anthropologists.

Fig. 3. Diego de Landa’s alphabet. 25

Since the 1950s, the methods and theory of professional academics transformed repeatedly. This chapter briefly reviews several of the notable transformations in relevant fields, provides context for some important trends, and evaluates the significance of new methods to

Maya studies. The intent is to establish a brief survey which will contextualize important new developments in scholarship that re-characterized interpretations of indigenous agency, the conduct of Spanish conquests, and both the efficacy and malleability of Maya social and cultural structures.

Forgotten but never Lost

For many decades, the world outside of the Yucatán forgot the Maya. Until explorations by individuals like John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852)63 and Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854)64 brought the Maya into popular consciousness, knowledge of this heterogeneous, politically divided civilization remained relatively unknown. Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, himself a scholar of the Maya, Aztecs, and others, attributed the beginning of American archaeology to Stephens’ adventures and “discoveries” in Mesoamerica.65 Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Yucatán captured nineteenth-century social and cultural practices of numerous Central American .

More importantly, Stephens and Catherwood visited many little-known Maya ruins throughout the Yucatán. A ten-month campaign,66 with extensive guidance by locals, revealed a peninsula teeming with edifices of an ancient and highly advanced civilization (see Fig. 4). The sites

63 Hagen, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, an American explorer, b. 1805, d. 1852, xix. 64 Hagen, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, companion of Stephens, Catherwood was a talented draftsman, lending visuals to Stephens’ prose, xi-xii; b. 1799, d. 1854, xi, xix. 65 Hagen, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, vii; Victor Wolfgang von Hagen even went so far as offer Stephens’ unique sequence of careers (lawyer, defender of Jackson, world traveler and Mesoamerican explorer) as proof of God: “Jackson, politics, streptococci, Egypt, Mayas; what a sequence, what an order, what a concourse of pre- established harmonies, what a linking of cause and effect, what a proof of God’s existence,” ix. 66 Hagen, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, xvi. 26

“discovered” by Stephens even included the famed Mayapán.67 The rest of the world may have forgotten the Maya, but the people of the Yucatán never lost the knowledge of this advanced civilization—or its architectural wonders.

Fig. 4. Cenote Xtacumbilxunan, at Bolonchen, Yucatan in Views of Ancient Monuments.

The general shape of Maya history remained unclear and unsettled upon the completion of Stephens’ book. Maya scholarship benefitted from more progressive beginnings than research of Maya contemporaries due to Stephens and Catherwood’s attention to Maya culture and

67 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, “We had received intelligence, however, of the ruins of Mayapán, an ancient which had never been visited, about eight leagues distant from Mérida, and but a few leagues aside from the road, by the haciendas, to Uxmal,” 78; Hagen, Incidents of Travel in the Yucatán, vol. 1, “It is a historical fact that in 1838 only three archaeological sites were known in the Maya area: Copán in Honduras; Palenque, three hundred miles to the northeast in Chiapas (Mexico); and Uxmal, of equal distance from that ruin, in Yucatán.,” xiii. 27

development. Many early studies of indigenous conquests in Mexico focused on the Aztecs, and suffered from a number of flawed trends or approaches like excessive focus and praise for conquistadors and poor attention to indigenous culture. William H. Prescott (1796-1859) wrote seminal histories of both the conquest of Mexico and the conquest of Peru. Prescott wrote The

History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843, the first of these two extensive volumes—The

History of the Conquest of Peru followed in 1847. The timing of Prescott’s Mexico made it a contemporary of Stephens’ and Catherwood’s explorations of the Yucatán. A comparison of The

History of the Conquest of Mexico and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán reveals stark differences in approach and narrative focus.

The first-hand experiences of Stephens and Catherwood revealed much about the living descendants of the Maya, including their heterogeneity of culture and hinted at the depth in worldviews inspired by indigenous belief systems. Thanks to Catherwood’s renderings, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán preserved visual details of surviving ruins with great clarity while also introducing narratives of locals who preserved the knowledge of these structures and the Maya.

Since Stephens and Catherwood’s entry into Maya studies, Maya history has been approached with specific emphasis on indigenous peoples and indigenous spaces—like the temples and other remains hidden by the rainforest.

The History of the Conquest of Mexico, drawn extensively from Spanish textual sources, established a foundation for virtually all future scholarship studying the Spanish conquest of

Mexico. However, Prescott’s approach and the glaring imperfections in his analysis of the

Spanish conquests left much to be desired. Prescott’s efforts garnered high praise from his contemporaries: “Mr. Prescott’s temperament is more that of a poet than a philosopher . . . he

28

has skillfully preserved the romantic coloring which the old Spanish storytellers gave to the incidents and scenes they described.”68 Praise given to Prescott in his lifetime is indistinguishable from criticism that might be leveled today.

Prescott’s Mexico featured tales of romanticized conquest by the heroic Spanish. His prose gave riveting descriptions of indigenous life and culture as an antecedent to the epic conquest narrative which Prescott and many later writers found more captivating. In a sense, investigation of indigenous cultures has been central to histories of the conquests from the beginning. But Prescott’s interpretation of indigenous culture was typical in its prejudiced judgments of the indigenous people and its refusal to view indigenous groups in their own terms—practices hamstringing presentations of indigenous perspectives in many subsequent studies. For instance, Prescott noted that

One detestable feature of the Aztec superstition, however, sunk it far below the Christian . . . Cannibalism, under any form, or whatever sanction, cannot but have a fatal influence on the nation addicted to it. It suggests ideas so loathsome, so degrading to man, to his spiritual and immortal nature, that it is impossible the people who practise it should make any great progress in moral or intellectual culture.69

Practices found odious by Christian societies were condemned rather than evaluated for their significance and meaning to indigenous groups. To understand and appreciate indigenous practices and beliefs in their own context was an effort largely absent in Prescott’s research of

Latin American conquests. This is not the only issue with Prescott’s highly influential, but flawed, histories.

68 “History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas by William H. Prescott,” The North American Review 65, no. 137 (October 1846): 367. 69 William H. Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843; repr., Raleigh, N.C.: Generic NL Freebook Publisher, 1999), 22. 29

The History of the Conquest of Mexico fell into a familiar pitfall of histories written before the discipline became professionalized within academia: “Prescott subscribed to the Great

Man theory of history . . . Ostensibly uncritical of his sources and oblivious to the indigenous perspective, Prescott wrote overwhelmingly from the Spaniards point of view.”70 Prescott provided commentary of Indian culture, but did so almost exclusively to provide a character or worthy antagonist opposite the heroes in his epic narrative. The indigenous population rested opposite of Cortés’ triumphant, and seemingly inevitable, conquest in the New World (see Fig. 5 for a rendering of the Aztec capital’s fall). Later authors followed this trend as well. Jon Manchip

White’s Cortés and the Downfall of the : A Study in a Conflict of Cultures approached the conquest by devoting two of its four chapters almost exclusively to great men,

Cortés and Moctezuma. Also, like Prescott, White followed a much more literary tradition than typically found in anthropology—in his education, White studied both English and anthropology.71

The conquests of the Maya lacked a figurehead as popularly recognizable as Cortés, insulating early studies from at least one of the trends plaguing early history of the Aztecs. Up to the time of Stephens’ writing, information about the Montejo conquests in the Yucatán were scant and confusing.72 Also, parties interested in the Maya discovered fewer written materials available for study, slowing the growth of Maya studies. It was not until the nineteenth century that Diego de Landa’s work and several Maya sources became more widely available for

70 Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 7. 71 Jon Manchip White, Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire: A Study in a Conflict of Cultures (London: Hamish and Hamilton Ltd., 1971). 72 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1 30

Fig. 5. The Conquest of Tenochtitlán.

scrutiny by those who wished to decode the indigenous history and languages of the Yucatán.73

The availability of textual sources in the early-nineteenth century created a boom for textual studies.

Generally, increased emphasis on indigenous groups in later studies of Mexico and the

Yucatán expanded concepts of indigenous identity and perspective, but still revealed issues in estimation of indigenous agency. Narratives of conquest concerning Maya neighbors like the

Aztecs continued to emphasize narratives of rapid and inevitable decline. The interpretation of post-conquest Spanish policies in Charles Gibson’s The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of

73 William L. Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 182. 31

the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519-1810 argued that the Spanish adopted few elements of indigenous culture or practices. The Spanish emphasized their own culture “as if to deny their

[the Indians] provincial situation.”74

Gibson identified the exploitation of indigenous resources as the practice facilitating a mission of domination. Within the context established by Gibson, indigenous people and their descendants may have exercised little role in the development of the colonial system beyond the submission of their material or non-human resources, and their bodies as a source of labor for the

Spanish. At best, the indigenous peoples of Mexico established something of a holding pattern by stemming Spanish abuse through the court systems.75 Despite the shortcomings of his work,

Gibson’s The Aztecs under Spanish Rule fit more comfortably in the “Indianists” camp than that of the “Hispanists.” The latter emphasized the perceived positive cultural and agricultural contributions of Spain to the New World.76 The Aztecs under Spanish Rule focused on “what the

Spaniards did ‘to’ the Indians and little of what they did ‘for’ them.”77 The Aztecs under Spanish

Rule fits within the “conquest as loser history” trend in scholarship.78

Several of Gibson’s contemporaries showed favoritism to European culture by leaving out the role of the indigenous people in shaping colonial systems. For example, Jon Manchip

White’s Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire showed great preference for Spain, portraying the Spanish as the more refined counterpart of the Aztecs. “Of the two ruthless and

74 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519-1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 8. 75 Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 80. 76 Bailey W. Diffie, “Review: The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519-1810 by Charles Gibson,” Ethnohistory 12, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 65, 66. 77 Diffie, “Review: The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule,” Ethnohistory, 65. 78 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 5. 32

self-assertive sets of people, the Aztecs were certainly the more brutal and belligerent.”79 It took more time for study of the conquest of Mexico to view indigenous people as agents manipulating the systems around them to achieve their own goals. Today, much of the credit for the conquest of Mexico and other parts of the New World rests with the Indians. Indigenous peoples weaved

“their own conquest narratives but rarely as tales of subjugation,” establishing their own narratives of conquest that were points of pride even centuries later, “long after it should have been clear . . . that they themselves had been colonized.”80

In additional to physically controlling indigenous peoples, the Spanish devoted considerable resources to spiritually conquering the Americas. Studies promoting this spiritual aspect as the operative method of conquest fit within the “spiritual conquest” trend identified by

Susan Schroeder in Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk’s Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous

Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica.81 The progenitor of this approach, Robert Ricard’s 1966 book The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, found many followers.

“From the outset, the spread of Roman Catholicism was an immediate and pressing concern.” Christianity contributed greatly to Spanish identity, and provided “legal and moral justification for the conquest.”82 As in many other parts of the Spanish Empire, the Church in the

Yucatán, acting under guidance by the Council of the Indies, served as “an agent of cultural transformation,”83 spreading Christianity while also restricting indigenous cultural practices.84

79 White, Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire, 64. 80 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 322. 81 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, “The epic Spanish conquest, the spiritual conquest, and the conquest as loser history, or a nonevent,” 5. 82 Pablo Garcia and Kathleen Ann Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” in The Cambridge Histories of Religions in America, vol. 1 Pre-Columbian Times to 1790, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 177. 83 Garcia and Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” 178. 33

Some missionaries and secular authorities worked to repress local populations who did not accommodate the Spanish willingly. In extreme instances, officials like Landa interrogated and tortured Indians caught participating in certain practices, like sacrifice or “idol” worship, directed broad investigations, and carried out .85 The auto de fé was also applied as a tool against the Indians—many were reportedly tied to whipping posts and received as many as 200 lashes—to impress upon indigenous communities the power of Spain and the clergy.86

Spaniards’ emphasis eventually shifted to the ways indigenous groups shaped exchanges between themselves and the Spanish.87 Some indigenous elites engaged in missions of repression as well, becoming “an integral part of the exploitative system” themselves since their status became dependent upon the Spanish.88

Maya History Takes Shape

During the twentieth century, Maya studies followed a very different path than that of the nearby Aztecs. Though petty personal campaigns for glory marred many early efforts to write about the Maya for the public—some writers sought to “place the Maya on a cultural pedestal,” and others seemed to “delight in knocking them from it”89—other efforts between these ideological tensions repeatedly transformed Maya studies. Anthropologists visited the descendants of Maya peoples in the Yucatán, blending their observations of contemporary

84 John F. Chuchiak IV, “De Descriptio Idolorum: An Ethnohistorical Examination of the Production, Imagery, and Functions of Colonial Yucatec Maya Idols and Effigy Censers, 1540-1700,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 135, 136. 85 Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniards in Yucatán 1517-1670 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75, 76. 86 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 79. 87 Sarah Cline, “Review: Conquest and Aftermath: Center and Periphery in Colonial Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 27, no. 3 (1992): 246; see Robert Ricard’s The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Press, 1966). 88 Cline, “Review: Conquest and Aftermath,” 250. 89 Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” 187. 34

groups with increasing knowledge of the past. Early twentieth-century myths of the Maya as a noble, star-gazing civilization with little interest in warfare were shattered as more information became available, like the discoveries of cave paintings depicting battle scenes, and defensive formations in and around Maya settlements.90

As continued to chip away at the mysteries of Maya glyphics, it became apparent that the many stone edifices of the Maya depicted more than just calendrical or astronomical data.91 Epigraphers unearthed a language system, much of which became better understood in the 1960s and 1970s. By the twenty-first century, scholars deciphered perhaps more than 70% of Maya glyphs.92 Remnants of historical narratives carved into stone by the

Maya became central to an important and powerful transformation in academic epistemology. In the second-half of the twentieth century, the Maya transformed from a prehistoric civilization into a historic civilization with its own myths, ideologies, politics, and history. Indigenous narratives contained many insights into the Maya elite, particularly rulers and kings. These revelations extended to Maya social and cultural structures deeply rooted in cosmology: “The picture revealed was one of ‘holy lords’ who lived in a cosmologically defined universe, but who also carried out the activities and exercised the power of true kings.”93

Spatial knowledge of Maya settlements also transformed as archaeologists developed new methods which they applied in the 1950s. These methods garnered new information about

90 Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” 183. 91 Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” 183; Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), “At the end of the nineteenth century . . . the first glyphs deciphered were those which represented number and units of time (days, months, years, twenty- year periods, etc.) in the Maya solar, lunar, and Venus calendars . . . their early decipherment, unfortunately, also misled scholars into the belief that all Maya inscriptions concerned only calendrics, astronomy, and ritual,” 47. 92 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 48. 93 Demarest, Ancient Maya, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Heinrich Berlin, and others made breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s revealing associations between glyphs and Maya kingdoms, rulers, and dates for births, reigns, and deaths, 47. 35

Maya relationships to their environment, and established new concepts of socio-political stratification.94 Scholars peopled Maya landscapes with a greater variety of classes.95 Population centers contained not only the religious elite and political elite, but also a large number of peasants or commoners.96 The study of household mounds showed that the Maya organized themselves in part around the family household, often positioned around larger courtyards and plazas.97

New methods and epistemologies reconfigured Maya identity, and over time revealed the complexity of the term “Maya” itself. Matthew Restall explained that the term is anachronistic as the groups referred to as the “Maya” likely did not refer to themselves this way, though they did feel some shared belonging.98 This shared belonging, and geographic proximity, retained utility of the term, though it does overly simplify the identities of heterogeneous indigenous groups of the Yucatán.

Since the 1950s, professional archaeology passed through several methodological and theoretical transformations, or “shifting styles of interpretation,” albeit with numerous consistent practices or basic notions through time.99 To state just a couple theoretical revolutions in (very) brief: Processual archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s explored tensions between cultural systems and their adaptations to ecological circumstances, emphasizing the impact of non-

94 R.E.W. Adams and Norman Hammond, “Maya Archaeology, 1976-1980: A Review of Major Publications,” Journal of Field Archaeology 9, no. 4 (Winter, 1982): “For some years past it has been generally recognized that Classic Maya society was stratified and secular: the priest-peasant structure idealized by Thompson and Morley has failed to match the range of recent evidence demonstrating that a complex hierarchical composition existed,” 504. 95 Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” 184. 96 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 51. 97 Gordon R. Willey, “Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 8 (May 1990): 27. 98 Quetzil E. Castañeda, “‘We are Not Indigenous!’: An Introduction to the Maya Identity of Yucatán,” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 9, no. 1 (March 2004): 39. 99 Gary M. Feinman, “Thoughts on New Approaches to Combining the Archaeological and Historical Records,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4, no. ¾ (September 1997): 370. 36

cultural variables upon culture over human psychology.100 Works like New Perspectives in

Archaeology (1968), and an Archaeological Perspective (1972), both of which share Lewis R.

Binford as author or co-author, challenged existing methods and theory of Culture History.101

Post-Processual archaeology, a significant development in the 1980s, addressed many attacks, questions, and weaknesses of Processual archaeology. Ian Hodder and others revised accepted methods and theory of the “Processualists.”102 Post-Processual archaeologists railed against issues like an excessive focus on “functionalism and environmental adaptation,” arguing that archaeology had “become so rational it is dehumanized.”103 Post-Processual archaeology also broke down “established, taken-for-granted dichotomies,” and did not “espouse one approach or argue that archaeology should develop an agreed methodology.”104

Strong disagreements grew out of these competing theoretical frameworks between professional archaeologists. According to Lewis Binford, Hodder’s Reading the Past: Current

Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (1986) was “a little book with a little message being blown through a large horn with a loud noise.”105 Hodder responded in kind some years

100 Gilbert Kushner, “A Consideration of Some Processual Designs for Archaeology as Anthropology,” American Antiquity 35, no. 2 (April 1970): 127. 101 Feinman, “Thoughts on New Approaches to Combining the Archaeological and Historical Records,” 370. 102 Feinman, “Thoughts on New Approaches to Combining the Archaeological and Historical Records,” 370. 103 Barbara J. Little and Paul A. Shackel, “Post-Processual Approaches to Meanings and Uses of Material Culture in Historical Archaeology,” Historical Archaeology 26, no. 3 (1992): 5. 104 Stephen A. Mrozowski, “The Dialectics of Historical Archaeology in a Post-Processual World,” Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993): 106. 105 Lewis R. Binford, “Review: Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology by Ian Holder,” American Antiquity 53, no. 4 (October 1988): 875, “Holy-moley, Hodder, you have just discovered science through Collingwood . . . here we see Hodder singing two songs at once. He can interpret the past culturally because there are laws of cultural production. One wonders if this scientific position does not deny freedom and demean humanity. These were the very issues that processual archaeologists sought to learn about—those basic laws. Unlike processualists, however, Hodder does not think we need to learn; we seemingly already know these things and can thus proceed like Collingwood,” 876. 37

later, stating that Binford’s Debating Archaeology (1989) was “a big book with a big message blown through a small, sweet sounding horn.”106

For Mayanists, a focus on data interpretation and the development of broad understandings of indigenous societies characterized scholarship of the 1980s.107 Surveying everything from Maya origins and prehistory to volcanism in Central America and its effects on populations,108 scholars sought new and innovative ways to advance knowledge of the Maya, leaving Maya archaeology “at a crossroads.”109 It became apparent that there were many causes to significant changes in Maya civilization and equally numerous responses to the Spanish occupation rather than “a long monolithic period of cross-cultural interaction and social transformation.” 110

Modern Foundations

Study of the Maya surged since the second-half of the twentieth century. New developments in archaeology and the revelations brought by deciphering Maya glyphs transformed established interpretations of Maya history. Textual sources like the Books of

Chilam Balam and the revealed rich indigenous histories featuring a wealth of information about indigenous social, political, and religious lives. These sources also revealed some of the ways in which Maya agents resisted or accommodated the Spanish, incorporating

106 Ian Hodder, “Review: Debating Archaeology by Lewis R. Binford,” Journal of Field Archaeology 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): “The message is big because this book has biblical qualities in its claim to reveal the external world ‘in terms of itself’ or ‘in its own right,’” 383; “At times, Binford seems to accept the need for a priori knowledge and the pervasive influence of culture and paradigm in theory building. On the other hand, he states ‘I generally do not agree with a priori assumptions asserting that we know how culture works and how it is manifest in the archaeological record’ . . . Binford’s readers might be excused for feeling somewhat confused at this point . . . two opposite messages seem to be recommended at the same time,” 384. 107 David M. Pendergast, “Recent Research on Maya Lowlands Prehistory,” Latin American Research Review 19, no. 3 (1984): 232. 108 Prudence M. Rice, “Six Recent Works on the Maya,” Latin American Research Review 21, no. 2 (1986): 234. 109 Rice, “Six Recent Works on the Maya,” 234. 110 Joel W. Palka, “Historical Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change in Mesoamerica,” Journal of Archaeological Research 17, no. 4 (December 2009): 298. 38

these stories into cosmological narratives in which gods influenced history. While textual sources fall short in representation of non-elites, advances in archaeology made the lives of non- elites easier to access and analyze. Ethnohistory—which combined analysis of history and ethnographic data assembled by archaeologists and anthropologists—flourished, revising long- standing assumptions about the Maya and various periods in their history.

Fig. 6. An image by NASA showing the Yucatán Peninsula and Gulf of Honduras. 39

Archaeology provided useful data and analyses for the comparison of pre-contact and post-contact Maya. This comparison revealed important trends in Spanish colonial societies of

Central and South America and indicated ways in which the Maya socially and culturally accommodated the Spanish. Persistent elements of indigenous culture and indigenous resistance to Spanish acculturation also became clearer as the mechanisms by which the Spanish acculturated Indians discovered in the of the Yucatán peninsula (Fig. 6) became clearer.

Fortunately for those interested in indigenous perspectives of history and conquest, textual studies made great strides in the last half century due to the decipherment of Maya writing. The analysis of Maya texts provided critical direct representation of their societies with relatively little mediation by the Spanish. These sources allowed the Maya to be remembered through their own voices. In 1989, Stephen D. Houston, working with three basic questions about the archaeology of the Maya,111 emphasized a rapid shift in Maya studies. Though Maya archaeology had “traditionally been a prehistoric discipline,” by the late 1980s more emphasis rested “on ‘glyphs,’ the complex and partly undeciphered script of the ancient Maya.”112 Maya texts recorded history, social organization, mythical origins, and cultural values, transforming

Maya studies into a blended field of historical archaeology.

Houston reevaluated the study of Maya glyphs a decade later. Reviewing the implications of access to Maya glyphs and their symbolic meaning, Houston identified two major trends or results of greater scrutiny toward glyphs. First, the practice of decipherment developed its own

111 Stephen D. Houston, “Archaeology and Maya Writing,” Journal of World Prehistory 3, no. 1 (March 1989): “Where has Maya archaeology been? Where is it headed? And do we need a new set of conceptual approaches to advance the field?” 1. 112 Houston, “Archaeology and Maya Writing,” 1. 40

field of self-improvement among Mayanists the objective of which was to improve their

“sociological literacy.” Epigraphy became a critical and specialized academic discipline. 113

Second, glyphic knowledge improved to the point that the origins and use of script were understood well enough to advance several topics. Archaeologists developed more clearly outlined relationships of kingship to the divine, explored the nature of indigenous political economy, and investigated the arrangement of social bonds between Maya groups like elites and non-elites. However, Houston found that the findings of epigraphers were treated very cautiously. Distrust for the messages left by the Maya prevailed in many circles. For the most part, this hesitance stemmed from the primarily elite-oriented messages dominating much of the material left by the Maya.114 But this concern is omnipresent in documentary study of any culture with limited literacy and the value of these sources when combined with other lines of evidence should not be understated.

New syntheses of textual and material records signaled the important development of a new trend in Maya studies. Joyce Marcus deemed this a “conjunctive approach,”115 blending analysis by “surveyors, ethnohistorians, ceramicists, epigraphers, palynologists, human osteologists, faunal analysts, ethnobotanists, malacologists, chipped stone experts, and the like.”116 Through new perspectives engendered by glyphic studies and a conjunctive approach,

Mayanists presented a more complicated view of conquest and post-colonial development by incorporating indigenous influence on colonial systems. The conquest of indigenous civilizations

113 Stephen D. Houston, “Into the Minds of Ancients: Advances in Maya Glyph Studies,” Journal of World Prehistory 14, no. 2 (June 2000): 123, 124. 114 Houston, “Into the Minds of Ancients,” 123, 179. 115 Which Houston affirmed the success and value of, though he noted that this approach will not be a final arbiter of all disputes between sources: Houston, “Into the Minds of Ancients,” 179. 116 Joyce Marcus, “Where is Lowland Maya Archaeology Headed?” Journal of Archaeological Research 3, no. 1 (March 1995): 4. 41

is no longer considered as complete or as rapid as it had been in many earlier works (including

Prescott’s and Gibson’s), in many ways attacking the “conquest as loser history” trend.117 The field evolved, sheltering more complex understandings of successful resistance to Spanish domination and accommodation by indigenous groups.

In some cases, indigenous peoples contributed to the construction of new social and political structures as much as the Spanish themselves. Colonial control and economic success depended upon indigenous participation and the existing structures established by large civilizations like the Maya, Aztecs, and Inca. Pre-colonial indigenous structures provided a foundation from which to build colonial rule. Indigenous leadership and cooperation was critical to the success of early efforts. 118 However, Indians would eventually become a marginalized subclass within these colonial societies.

David Carrasco’s edited work History of the Conquest of portrayed Indians as active agents in conquest. Carrasco established context for the conquest using prehispanic history. Carrasco stated his intention, to

Alert readers to the complexity and diversity of several indigenous societies before the Spaniards arrived as well as the interlocking cultures and histories that went into motion beginning in 1492 and especially during the encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica.119

This objective is not unique to Carrasco and his books. To recognize indigenous individuals or groups as active agents manipulating new and existing social and cultural structures became the rule in indigenous studies rather than the exception. A wide variety of publications by diverse

117 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 5. 118 Elizabeth Graham, Grant D. Jones, and David M. Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest: Maya-Spanish Contact in Colonial ,” Science 246, no 4935 (December 1989): 1255. 119 David Carrasco, The History of the Conquest of New Spain (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), xii. 42

authors attempted to satisfy goals comparable to Carrasco’s own by focusing on the identity of indigenous peoples, exploring their formative experiences prior to contact and reviewing the relatively rapid reconfiguration of indigenous social and cultural structures beginning with

European contact.

Other works from 2000 - 2010 like Matthew’s and Oudijk’s Indian Conquistadors continued to revise concepts of indigenous agency and participation in conquest. Susan

Schroeder’s introduction to the volume analyzed previous trends in conquest scholarship and identified a new trend, the seeds of which can be seen in the efforts in many other scholars discussed in this chapter. Schroeder described a new perspective of “the Indians as the conquerors,”120 totally transforming their existence into active and powerful agents in the formation of a new colonial system.

The other essays in Indian Conquistadors evaluated why indigenous peoples allied with or fought for the Spanish in conquests subsequent to the subjugation of the Mexica. The indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica acted—and even identified themselves—as conquistadores.

Unlike the passive losers and submissive conquests presented by previous portrayals of Indians, these groups were very clearly a critical and indispensable part of “Spanish” conquests in

Mesoamerica.121 However, this is not to diminish the fact that in most cases the Spanish forced

Indian participation in the colonial system.

These scholars also emphasized indigenous motivations for committing to warfare against other Indians, noting indigenous pursuits for many of the same rewards that the Spanish valued like fame and fortune. The experiences of Indians as conquistadors and recognition of

120 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 5. 121 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 20. 43

indigenous motives to participate in conquest challenged the idea of Indians as secondary characters in New World conquest narratives: “The vast numbers of native participants, their profound importance at every level of military organization, and their geographic and temporal spread across Mesoamerica,” suggested that Indians were active agents manipulating new structures provided by the Spanish. In some cases, Indians powered campaigns of conquest.122

Inga Clendinnen’s Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 synthesized conquest narratives, settler and missionary experiences, and Maya perspectives.

Ambivalent Conquests used careful analysis of Spanish accounts and Maya sources to explore what the Maya did and “what they meant by what they did.”123 Clendinnen’s work represented the culmination of many scholarly trends discussed in this chapter: she sought indigenous voices gleaned from archaeology, Spanish sources, and Maya sources. Using this material, Clendinnen incorporated narratives from Maya perspectives into the larger narrative of conquest and brutal subjugation by religious and political authorities. Ambivalent Conquests captured how Maya agents adapted their own practices to new physical and social spaces presented by the Spanish.

The Maya used “Christian churches, church patios and church cemeteries” as venues for effigy worship and other indigenous practices. For the Maya, these Christian structures “conveniently echoed the traditional spaces of temple and temple courtyard.”124

Picking up the Pieces (and Tying together Threads)

This thesis does not retread campaigns of conquest in Yucatec Maya world, electing instead to focus on the resilience of the Maya during periods of transformation and the messy nature of controlling a heterogeneous rainforest civilization. The Terminal Classic Maya

122 Matthew and Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors, 320. 123 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, ix. 124 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 170. 44

transformations and their consequences for Maya social and spatial organization contributed greatly to the difficult situation facing Spanish clerical and administrative officials.

Archaeological narratives of the Maya universally identified a period of major change in the centuries preceding contact with the Spanish. Specifically, archaeology complicated assumptions that the Postclassic period was defined by decline and collapse. This revision is significant to this thesis as it recolors Yucatec Maya identity during contact with Spanish explorers and conquerors. Scholars stripped away much of the negative connotation associated with Maya

“decline.” A more positive evolutionary narrative replaced the idea of decay into a lesser

Postclassic civilization.

Change in characterization of the Postclassic Maya encountered by the Spanish has not been the only recent significant transformation for Maya studies. New or expanded practices in archaeology produced new knowledge of Maya life that textual sources rarely captured.

Household archaeology revolutionized the study of non-elites, providing a powerful tool for interpretation of Maya experiences at a more personal level than the grand and sweeping social or political landscapes previously articulated by scholars.

Settlement pattern research by individuals like Gordon Willey transformed Maya anthropology. By the 1990s, archaeologists discovered how advanced Maya agricultural production once was and how closely settlements were tied to methods of subsistence.125 An important addition to the toolkit of this field was household archaeology which proved transformative in its own right.126 These methods “led inevitably to the revision” of academic understandings of “ancient Maya demography, population distribution, and ecological

125 Willey, “Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology,” 26. 126 Fash, “Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization,” 188. 45

adaptations.” The use of these techniques also moved archaeologists away from large epicenters of the Maya and into the jungles where many settlements remained forgotten,127 greatly extending the domain of the Maya spatially. Settlement and household archaeology transformed a field previously dominated by “the study of temples, tombs, and kings.”128

Expanded study of households and settlements patched personal human interactions together into greater frameworks of social movement or the “social universe.” Household archaeology contributed valuable data, permitting “more nuanced and interpretive studies that seek to understand people, practices, and meanings in the past.” By Cynthia Robin’s estimation, household archaeologists recently began to lead the field of Maya archaeology “by peopling ancient living spaces . . . bridging longstanding disciplinary divisions between social and material analyses.”129 These practices may partly remedy concerns associated with increasing reliance on epigraphy. Household archaeology demonstrates “how all people in the past were more than just passive and anonymous actors,”130 extending analysis of the Maya beyond the narratives of the elite.

The study of the Maya continued to change and adapt to popular trends and new methods.

In 2003, Joyce Marcus noted the growing “elicitation of a greater variety of data from hieroglyphic texts,” and highlighted important fields that were relatively new at the time. Of special note, chemical and biological analysis provided new means of testing migrations of peoples, diets, and the impact of issues like socioeconomic division and warfare. 131 Marcus also

127 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 48, 49. 128 Cynthia Robin, “New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Research 11, no. 4 (December 2003): 334. 129 Robin, “New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology,” 308. 130 Robin, “New Directions in Classic Maya Household Archaeology,” 334. 131 Joyce Marcus, “Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Research 11, no. 2 (June 2003): 71. 46

found that Maya archaeology experienced division between different approaches without the division of archaeology itself into different programs. Three major trends within scholarship reflected shifting approaches. Archaeologists focused more intently on (1) “traditional anthropological topics such as the nature of political economies, the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchies . . . the everyday life of commoners,” (2) the “hard-science questions of wetland management, tropical deforestation . . . and the use of isotopic analyses to reconstruct both ancient diet and region of origin,” and (3) “postmodernist anthropology . . . seeking to make a contribution to agency, practice theory, performance, resistance, gender, and power.”132 This thesis incorporates works that fit within all three of these trends, but itself resembles more closely the latter of these trends as an examination of indigenous structures and the agency which reconfigured these structures.

Conclusion

Stephen’s remark concerning his own fortune in exploring Maya ruins proved prescient:

“It has been the fortune of the author to step between them and the entire destruction to which they are destined.”133 The number of Maya structures erased from memory is likely unknowable—as is the number of incredible discoveries that might have been possible had more evidence of Maya social and cultural structures survived. Over the centuries, frequent looting of

Maya structures and site deposits deprived scholars of a great deal of important data. Because of the promise of fame and fortune, “thousands of archaeological sites throughout the region have been plundered in order to acquire antiquities for the international art market.”134 Even if

132 Marcus, “Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology,” 71, 72. 133 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, vol. 1, 1843, xxv. 134 Shoshaunna Parks, Patricia A. McAnany, and Satoru Murata, “The Conservation of Maya Cultural Heritage: Searching for Solutions in a Troubled Region,” Journal of Field Archaeology 31, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 426. 47

recovered, the artifacts themselves provide much less data without examination in their original contexts.

Despite the many challenges of studying an ancient culture and the complicated phases of its history, Mayanists developed methods and theory equal to the task of “rediscovering” the

Maya. Scrutiny of the material record and translation of Maya glyphics counterbalanced the biased documents produced by the Spanish. Glyphic studies and both settlement pattern and household analysis reproduced some elements of original Maya context. The data gathered through these methods allowed clearer understanding of the extent to which the Maya changed— or remained consistent—in their social and cultural practices.

Maya studies became decidedly interdisciplinary, blending hard sciences, history, and traditional archaeology. Though the field suffered from difficulties in balancing and reconciling inconsistencies between sources, Maya studies experienced explosive growth in the twentieth century. This thesis builds on the labors of Mayanists to attempt something new: to evaluate

Maya cosmology as a “deep” structure, and explore what consequences adaptation of “surface” structures may have had for the acculturation and transformation of the Maya.

48

CHAPTER II

A CYCLICAL UNIVERSE: AN END IS A BEGINNING

This is the account of how all was in suspense, all calm, in silence; all motionless, still, and the expanse of the sky was empty . . . There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and were therefore called Gucumatz. By nature they were great sages and great thinkers. In this manner the sky existed and also the Heart of Heaven, which is the name of God and thus He is called.135

Typical interpretations of the Late Postclassic period136 depicted the Maya as disorganized, fragmentary, and experiencing a general trend of decline just prior to contact with the Spanish. But throughout the second-half of the twentieth century, Mayanists significantly revised this interpretation of the Postclassic period: “the Late Postclassic was a dynamic period.”137 The Maya developed new trade networks, new economic and social priorities and rapidly reconfigured their society spatially. Mayanists criticized tendencies in previous scholarship to base analyses of the Postclassic on negative contrasts to the Classic Maya.138

Many scholars accepted a clear delineation between the achievements of the Classic civilization and its descendents encountered by the Spanish. However, the Postclassic Maya expressed vibrant and complex culture, which, to their credit, some Spaniards recorded.139 Maya agents conscious of changing circumstances continuously adapted their structures to fit new realities, constructing new “surface” structures constructed with existing schemas and resources.

135 Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, trans. Delia Goetz, Sylvanus G. Morley, and Adrián Recinos (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 1950), 81, 82. 136 Thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries A.D. 137 Anthony P. Andrews, “Late Postclassic Lowland Maya Archaeology,” Journal of World Prehistory 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 35. 138 David Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation, eds. Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 13. 139 Andrews, “Late Postclassic Lowland Maya Archaeology,” 36. 49

Mayanists broke down and blurred the boundaries between the Terminal Classic140 and

Postclassic141 periods. Archaeological research supported this “blurring of the boundary between

Classic and Postclassic traditions,”142 indicating that a clear delineation in Maya sophistication between the Classic and Postclassic may be an inaccurate conclusion. Spanish visitors to the

Yucatán reported that the Maya constructed impressive networks between coastal towns. Despite the absence of significant nearby political capitals, markets formed by these networks thrived.

The Maya remained literate into the Colonial period despite the destruction of Maya books and codices. Scholars concluded that “thus, even for the Postclassic Period, the Maya region exhibits a mosaic of local adaptations, transformations, responses to political collapse, and environmental travesties.”143

As interpretation of the Terminal Classic period shifted away from abrupt, sudden change, scholars widely agreed that change came in many forms and progressed at variable rates.

The situations presented by evidence drawn from some cases like , Belize more appropriately reflected “a social transformation than a collapse.”144 When viewed within a transformation framework rather than collapse, site abandonment may more accurately be interpreted as a feature of widespread Maya social restructuring145 rather than a symptom of widespread collapse and decline (see Fig. 7 for an example of decayed physical structures).

140 Eighth through the tenth centuries A.D. 141 Tenth through the sixteenth centuries A.D. 142 Christopher R. Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” Journal of Field Archaeology 34, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1. 143 Marilyn A. Masson, “Maya Collapse Cycles,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 45 (November 2012): 18238. 144 Kevin R. Schwarz, “Eckixil: Understanding the Classic to Postclassic Survival and Transformation of a Petén Maya Village,” Late American Antiquity 20, no. 3 (September 2009): 414, 415. 145 Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 275. 50

Prejudice against the Postclassic Maya in favor of their antecedents complicated accurate comparison of Postclassic and Classic developments.146 Scholars previously used material evidence to emphasize a divide between the Maya of these two periods.147 However, scholars subsequently used material evidence to support arguments to the contrary. At numerous Maya sites, scholars located evidence indicating continuity between the Classic and Postclassic periods.148 Also, scholars concluded that the Maya “collapse” was “both variable and long-lived” and in many ways a more gradual period of transition from traditional Classic material culture to

Postclassic variations,149 affirming transformation narratives. With the enduring complexity and success of the Maya beyond the “collapse” as a new framework, textual and archaeological evidence revealed the resilience Maya social and cultural structures through time.

This chapter reevaluates the Maya “collapse” of the Terminal Classic period (eighth through tenth centuries AD). Estimating the adaptability of Maya social and cultural structures depends on accurate understanding of the challenges driving adaptation of these existing structures. The Maya encountered by the Spanish constructed vibrant societies whose value and complexity scholars severely underappreciated prior to advancements in archaeology and anthropology beginning in the 1950s. The Pre-Columbian Maya demonstrated their ability to adapt to radical ecological and cultural changes in environment. Though Maya culture did not remain in stasis in the intervening years between the tenth century and the arrival of the Spanish,

146 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “The Postclassic period has been characterized by a lack of finely carved monuments, a lack of tall impressive pyramids, a lack of slipped polychrome pottery, a lack of sumptuous tombs, and a lack of extremely large and densely populated centers,” 13. 147 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 13. 148 Schwarz, “Eckixil,” 415. 149 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 19. 51

the Terminal Classic period provided important insights into the capacity for this civilization to adapt, reorganize and reinvent itself. This chapter also shows how experiences of the Terminal

Classic Maya shed light onto the responses of their descendents to Spanish invaders and the resilience of Maya social and cultural practices.150

Numerous scholars challenged and revised problems in the study of the Postclassic Maya.

The most problematic challenges embedded in twentieth-century scholarship of the Postclassic included the poor representation of the Maya “collapse” and its consequences. Flawed comparisons between the Classic and Postclassic—according to criteria favoring the Classic— were also injurious to the legacy of the Maya. These comparisons negatively contrasted the

Postclassic Maya’s complexity, cultural and social structures, and diversity with the centralized, monument constructing Classic Maya.

Fig. 7. Portion of a Building Called Las Monjas at Uxmal.

150 For a strong review of Maya studies, from Spanish histories through 2005, see Chapter 3 of Demarest’s Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, 31-52. 52

The “Collapse” Narrative

Central to the idea of two discrete periods was the “collapse” narrative boasting of

Classic Maya superiority. Contemporary scholarship scrutinized the causes and severity of this

“collapse.” Despite past consensus of collapse, scholars now argue that the Maya civilization did not collapse, “although many zones did experience profound change.”151 Despite the oft repeated attribution of Maya collapse to one or more overarching factors, new scholars supporting

“collapse” or “decline” narratives favored a different interpretation of collapse causality.

Though various academic interpretations contested the mechanics of collapse through time, differential abandonment152 was a consistent feature of contemporary scholarship.

Mayanists often discussed site abandonment as the apparent result and evidence of collapse.

However, the abandonment or reconfiguration of Maya lowland sites varied greatly depending on region and specific challenges.153 Warfare, changes or disruptions in climate, and agricultural limitations that might come with life in the rainforest varied in intensity and relative significance depending on which Maya group or century scholars investigated.154 The totality of these issues over the eighth through the tenth centuries resulted in the transformative power of the Terminal

Classic period.155

151 James J. Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” Journal of Archaeological Research 15, no.4 (December 2007): 329. 152 Robert S. Santley, Thomas W. Killion, and Mark T. Lycett, “On the Maya Collapse,” Journal of Anthropological Research 42, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 123; Marilyn A. Masson, and Shirley Boteler Mock, “Ceramics and Settlement Patterns at Terminal Classic-Period Lagoon Sites in Northeastern Belize,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 374; William M. Ringle, George J. Bey III, Tara Bond Freeman, Craig A. Hanson, Charles W. Houck, and J. Gregory Smith, “The Decline of the East: The Classic to Postclassic Transition at Ek Balam, Yucatan,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “One thread linking developments in northern Maya archaeology over the past twenty-five years has been the recognition of the importance of regional diversity,” 485. 153 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 331. 154 Masson, “Maya Collapse Cycles,” 18238. 155 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 15. 53

New Approaches

That there was a collapse at all in the manner prescribed by Joseph Tainter156 is largely disputed in twenty-first century scholarship. Though much of the lowlands experienced waves of migration, periods of intense warfare, and changes in environmental sustainability “some sites did not collapse, many traditions continued, and new sites and traditions emerged in the

Postclassic period. In the broadest sense, then . . . there was no Maya collapse.”157 However, this does not lessen the significance of the Terminal Classic as a period of change.

Additions to the field since at least the early 1970s158 emphasized generational change or transformation of the Maya without necessitating general and rapid “collapse” 159 as previously conceived. The field turned to cyclical models in which collapse is rare160 and political or cultural change fits within the cycle of civilization.161 These cycles can incorporate minor collapses with more or less independent causality162 but all inflicting change within the system.163 Administrative or political control changed in many places. But elements of Maya

156 Refer to footnote 173. 157 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 331. 158 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 329. 159 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 329; “I use the term collapse as shorthand here to refer to the interval between the height of the Classic period and the subsequent Postclassic period . . . Due to cultural variation evident in this period, terms now used for it include “decline”, “transition”, “transformation,” and “crumble,” Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 331. 160 James Aimers, and Gyles Iannone, “The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context: Case Studies in Resilience and Vulnerability, ed. Gyles Iannone (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 31. 161 Nicholas P. Dunning, Timothy P. Beach, and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol: Collapse and Resilience in Lowland Maya Civilization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 10 (March 2012): 3654. 162 Arthur Demarest, “The Classic Maya Collapse, Water, and Economic Change in Mesoamerica: Critique and Alternatives from the ‘Wet Zone,’” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 178. 163 Aimers and Iannone, “The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, “A collapse in one adaptive cycle may stimulate changes in other adaptive cycles, both larger and smaller in size, such as increased exploitation (through immigration and a resulting larger labor force), conservation (the adoption of more productive and/ or sustainable agricultural practices), or reorganization (transformations aimed at making the system less prone to ‘release,’ or in other words, ‘collapse’),” 31. 54

culture survived well after the “collapse” and Spanish subjugation. Cycles of conquest and political reorganization were a regular feature of the Maya lowlands, 164 like the story of

Kukulcan the mythical Maya king. This was reflected in Maya cosmology as well which incorporated ecological cycles as drivers for change.165 Those communities that responded well to changing circumstances positioned themselves favorably to preserve their culture and traditions beyond the Terminal Classic period.166 The Maya established trade networks increasing the mobility of people along rivers and the coast,167 permitting easier movement of refugees during and after the Spanish conquest.168

The revisions brought by these new understandings of the Maya prompted a question which would shape future scholarship: “How useful is the concept of ‘collapse’ and how can it be applied consistently in our studies of past societies?”169 The term “collapse” is loaded, conveying a specific and unhelpful characterization of complex, slow processes. “Collapse” is a powerful term with specific implications, but it is misleading when referring to the transformations of the Terminal Classic. Many life ways remained malleable, able to transform into new configurations over the coming centuries.170 The Maya did not collapse in a generalized

164 Gabrielle Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2009), eds. Leslie G. Cecil, and Timothy W. Pugh, 84. 165 Vail, “Cosmology and Creation in Late Postclassic Maya Literature and Art,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 98; Douglas T. Peck, “The Geographical Origin and Acculturation of Maya Advanced Civilization in Mesoamerica,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 130 (January-June 2002): 130. 166 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 19. 167 Marilyn A. Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan: Postclassic Maya Archaeology at Laguna De On, Belize (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 22. 168 Elizabeth Graham, “Close Encounters,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 36. 169 Gyles Iannone, “Introduction: Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Study of Socioecological Dynamics,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 1. 170 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 274, 275. 55

sense though some of the western kingdoms did experience singular collapse events.171 Maya kingdoms were already decentralized with limited connective tissue, making general collapse an ungainly interpretation. “Highly varied phenomenon with population decline in many regions” characterized the period of transition between the Classic and Postclassic but some polities continued to flourish and adapt to new circumstances.172 Whether there was a collapse at all varies greatly between scholars—yet there is consensus that the Maya experienced far-reaching changes. Though a total generalized “collapse” is unlikely, some areas did experience profound changes like long-term population loss, leading to smaller collapses specific to particular sites or kingdoms.173

Many kingdoms “began to disintegrate into chaos . . . to fragment . . . or to reinvent themselves as militaristic enclaves.”174 Movement of peoples away from the great centers of the

Classic period and changes in priorities transformed the old regime styles and the construction of royal religious monuments, marking the end of one period and the beginning of the next.175

Consistent with differential abandonment, these processes varied regionally and in some cases

“commoner populations” appeared stable by comparison while the Maya elite reconfigured their

171 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 30; Arthur Demarest, “After the Maelstrom,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 104. 172 Demarest, “After the Maelstrom,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 120. 173 Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3652; In part, this difference in the Terminal Classic’s interpretation comes from varied uses of “collapse” and what the concept means in relation to Maya history. Some scholars confirm the collapse of the Maya by pointing to Joseph Tainter’s “Problem solving: Complexity, history, sustainability,” defining collapse as “a fundamental and pronounced decline in sociopolitical complexity taking place within two or three generations.” But this model has been questioned in its practical application to the Maya. Various approaches have been used to evaluate the changes in Maya lowland settlement and the “complex interrelationship of Maya populations and this lowland environment.” Panarchy theory has superseded Tainter’s model to a degree. 174 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 275. 175 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “The Classic Maya collapse is defined primarily by the end of erection of stone monuments with royal hieroglyphic inscriptions and the presumed coeval abandonment of many major architectural centers,” 13. 56

own culture during the Postclassic.176 Elite families refocused, bolstering mercantile activities, 177 and Maya societies relied less and less on kinship or hereditary rule. 178

Some of this reconfiguration involved changes that can be seen in the material record and architectural changes may hold important clues about movements of peoples.179 The Terminal

Classic period witnessed not only the weakening of elites but changes in aesthetics with the introduction of “numerous ‘foreign’ elements in architecture, sculpture, hieroglyphics,180 and ceramics possibly carried by migrating people.”181 The upkeep and construction of prestige buildings declined. However, Classic temple or ceremonial structures were not totally abandoned and maintenance of these structures did continue for centuries into the Postclassic.182 These structures continued to provide some services to Postclassic populations but again this varied regionally,183 supporting the differential abandonment concept.184

Kingdoms at War

Collapse narratives frequently discussed monocausal change brought on by warfare.

Although warfare is no longer viewed as a powerful single-cause for collapse in all places, warfare persists as a major cause for smaller collapse and reorganization in limited areas. A plethora of archaeological remains indicative of settlement defense construction points to periods

176 Schwarz, “Eckixil,” 414, 415; Previously, “Maya polities thrived on growth and expansion that funneled wealth to a small ruling elite topped by hereditary divine kings,” Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3654. 177 Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan, 22. 178 Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan, 24. 179 Schwarz, “Eckixil,” 418. 180 Gair Tourtellot, and Jason J. Gonzalez, “The Last Hurrah: Continuity and Transformation at ,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, Like the representations of warriors, aspects of indigenous conquest history, and glyphics, 68. 181 Tourtellot and Gonzalez, “The Last Hurrah,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 60. 182 Christopher R. Andres, and K. Anne Pyburn, “Out of Sight: The Postclassic and Early Colonial Periods at Chau Hiix, Belize,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 408. 183 Andres and Pyburn, “Out of Sight,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 409. 184 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 3. 57

or episodes of endemic warfare.185 Though this endemic warfare was not a new development of the Terminal Classic period, these periods of aggressive conflict left unique traces in the material record of Maya sites.186 Remains of settlement defenses like walls and palisades in the Maya lowlands demonstrated the development of patterns associated with warfare. For instance, in the eighth and ninth centuries the Maya constructed defensive walls at sites like and

Aguateca in “civic-ceremonial contexts to secure the epicenters of communities.”187

Warfare was closely tied to collapse and abandonment of some western regions.

Defensive construction permeated settlement networks even at the level of “small hamlets and agricultural field systems.”188 In the eighth century, endemic warfare led to the collapse of the

Petexbatún kingdom, leading to almost total abandonment “within little more than a half century.”189 The development of defenses during periods of aggressive warfare also demonstrated changing cultural priorities. In the eighth century, materials for the construction of defensive walls at Dos Pilas, which experienced a collapse event as well, came from a variety of sources. To provide for new defenses, the Maya ripped stone from “the facades of palaces, hieroglyphic stairways, a ballcourt, and even the funerary shrine of Ruler 2, Itzamnaaj

K’awiil.”190

185 For examples, see Matt O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought: Warfare, Settlement, Ecology, and Site Abandonment in the Middle Pasion Region,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context. 186 George L. Cowgill, “, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya,” in Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, eds. Norman Hammond, and Gordon R. Willey (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), 51. 187 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 10. 188 Demarest, “After the Maelstrom,” 118. 189 Matt O’Mansky, and Nicholas P. Dunning, “Settlement and Late Classic Political Disintegration in the Petexbatún Region, Guatemala,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 83; Demarest, “After the Maelstrom,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “A half dozen major centers, many minor centers, and high levels of population were reduced to less than 10 percent of earlier levels within a little more than half a century (A.D. 760 to 830),” 117. 190 O’Mansky and Dunning, “Settlement and Late Classic Political Disintegration in the Petexbatún Region, Guatemala,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 94. 58

In the absence of defensive walls at other locations, different types of material remains may also indicate periods of conflict. Items like arrowheads possessed both military and domestic value as hunting implements,191 making their value as an indicator of militarism ambiguous. The same can be said of blades and prismatic cores192 used for tool and weapon production.193 But the presence of combinations of these materials in large numbers or in conjunction with defensive structures may provide more definitive proof of increased warfare in some parts of the Maya lowlands.

Warfare provided an alternative explanation to political disintegration, disease, or insurmountable ecological challenges for some abandonment events.194 Though warfare is applied as a near monocausal explanation for abandonment or disintegration in some scholarly works, the role of endemic conflict does not extend universally to all or most other parts of the

Terminal Classic Maya world. 195 Also, the breakdown of existing alliances and the changing nature of conflict may have led to gradual site abandonment rather than sudden196 transformation. Careful scrutiny of archaeological data complicated genocide and annihilation narratives common in previous scholarship. Some sites where these annihilation events were thought to have happened featured many intact buildings and evidence of persisting, albeit

191 Schwarz, “Eckixil,” 424. 192 “Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 11. 193 Marilyn A. Masson, and Henry Chaya, “Obsidian Trade Connections at the Postclassic Maya Site of Laguna de On, Belize,” Lithic Technology 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 138. 194 Matt O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought: Warfare, Settlement, Ecology, and Site Abandonment in the Middle Pasion Region,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, This appears to be the reason for abandonment in the Pasion-Usumacinta River system, 173. 195 Cowgill, “Teotihuacan, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya,” in Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, 51. 196 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 13. 59

dwindling, populations.197 Classic Maya civilization already faced disruption and instability because of “internal processes.” 198 These processes likely included revolts by non-elites, expansionistic factional warfare, and those problems core to the ecological model of

“collapse.”199 A series of invasions or military catastrophes were not necessary for Maya agents to develop alternative forms of rule and worship, reconfiguring old schemas to produce structures more productive or beneficial in new circumstances.200

Ecological Pressures

While twentieth-century arguments for the “collapse” focused on the destruction of political or ideological systems,201 recent studies have devoted more attention to ecological factors.202 The relative power of ecology casts considerable doubts about warfare’s utility as a monocausal explanation for such a drastic period of change. Though warfare was a critical factor in abandonment or collapse of some lowland Maya zones, this explanation has been insufficient to cover the vast restructuring of Maya settlements and networks.203 Ecological narratives replaced or minimized some arguments based on warfare, disease, and resource or agricultural limitations.204

Geography probably exercised the most powerful impact on “collapse” and reconfiguration of Maya settlement patterns in the Terminal Classic period. Elevated interior

197 Joel W. Palka, “Ancient Maya Defensive Barricades, Warfare, and Site Abandonment,” Latin American Antiquity 12, no. 4 (Dec. 2001): 427, 429. 198 Tourtellot and Gonzalez, “The Last Hurrah,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 79. 199 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 13. 200 Tourtellot and Gonzalez, “The Last Hurrah,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 79. 201 Demarest, “The Classic Maya Collapse, Water, and Economic Change in Mesoamerica,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 177. 202 O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 158. 203 Demarest, “After the Maelstrom,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 120. 204 Santley, Killion, and Lycett, “On the Maya Collapse,” 125. 60

regions were generally more susceptible to drought than other Maya settlements,205 though even those near perennial water systems were not totally safe from changing environmental conditions. Drought inhibited the capabilities of Maya settlements, particularly those in the elevated interior, to reorganize and restore balance with the changing environment.206

Settlements without easy access to perennial water suffered greatly as drought significantly disrupted the normal practices of these lowland populations.207

Environmental changes in part resulting from indigenous practices also upset the stability of the Maya world, increasing its susceptibility to ecological changes. Drought, deforestation, difficulty accessing groundwater, rising sea levels, and rising groundwater tables208 weakened and disrupted Maya settlement patterns as well as existing social and cultural structures. These disruptions may have close relationships with changes in warfare and expansionistic enterprises of some Maya kingdoms. Disruptions to water access and resources may have exacerbated some conflicts of the nature central to some older militaristic interpretations of Maya collapse.209

Population growth stressed Maya agricultural practices like milpa farming, contributing to the existing or developing ecological challenges of the Terminal Classic. The cutting of forests exhausted nutrients210 and expanding populations may have pushed milpa farming beyond limits

205 Nicholas Dunning, David Wahl, Timothy Beach, John Jones, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, and Carmen McCane, “The End of the Beginning: Drought, Environmental Change, and the Preclassic to Classic Transition in the East- Central Maya Lowlands,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 126. 206 Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3652, 3653. 207 Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3654, 3655. 208 Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3653, 3655. 209 Cowgill, “Teotihuacan, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya,” in Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, “This postulated “heating up” of military conflict . . . may have played a major role in the Maya collapse. If, indeed, population growth and/ or utilization of the environment expanded beyond prudent limits, the spur may have been provided by militaristic competition,” 61. 210 Lori E. Wright and Christine D. White, “Human Biology in the Classic Maya Collapse: Evidence from Paleopathology and Paleodiet,” Journal of World Prehistory 10, no. 2 (June 1996): 149. 61

of efficiency and renewability.211 Development and growth stifled.212 Deforestation for timber and food production negatively impacted the environment, leaving the land vulnerable to soil erosion and upsetting the balance of water cycles.213

However, many scholars challenged explanations of the Maya collapse relying on the generalized ecological model, criticized in part for reliance on analogy to modern indigenous agricultural processes.214 Modern constraints impacted the practices of present-day Indians like focus on high-yield staples due to loss of land to capitalistic enterprises like coffee production.215

Further scrutiny revealed that many institutions and concepts believed to be surviving systems passed on by the Maya were actually forms of “adaptation and resistance . . . to European domination, acculturation, and aggression.”216 Swidden agriculture practiced by the Ancient

Maya likely left important flora intact due to the significant time and labor investments required to remove larger trees.217 The Maya likely established smaller farming plots and cultivated a different and less demanding assortment of crops.218 Ancient Maya agricultural practices were very different and probably based on “fixed plot variable fallow farming” which applied various stages of cultivation over “spatially discontinuous permanent fields.”219

Drought based ecological models also faced criticism. Scholars presented other areas like the southwestern Petén basin as counter-examples to drought-based explanations for collapse.

211 O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 164. 212 Santley, Killion, and Lycett, “On the Maya Collapse,” 124. 213 Dunning, Beach, and Luzzadder-Beach, “Kax and Kol,” 3653. 214 Wright and White, “Human Biology in the Classic Maya Collapse,” 150. 215 Wright and White, “Human Biology in the Classic Maya Collapse,” 153. 216 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 289. 217 Demarest, Ancient Maya, “The highly destructive “clear-cut” forest clearing used in milpa agriculture today would be difficult and costly without modern steel axes and chainsaws,” 132. 218 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 132. 219 Wright and White, “Human Biology in the Classic Maya Collapse,” 151; Demarest, Ancient Maya, “Early Studies of Maya civilization assumed that all agriculture was of the swidden type practiced by many Maya today. We now know Maya agriculture was more multifaceted, more productive, and less destructive,” 131. 62

The southwestern Petén had favorable access to water but provides an example of early collapse.220 It is evident that some areas like Petexbatún in the Petén basin were abandoned for cultural221 reasons or because of civil unrest rather than ecological reasons.222 Like warfare, drought and ecology cannot be relied upon as a simplified monocausal explanation for Maya

“collapse” or decline.223

Ecological studies have re-ordered common assumptions about the Maya, including the assumption that “the lowland environment is . . . a largely static background.”224 The assemblage of more data showed that the Maya developed within a dynamic environmental context subject to cyclical and random flux. Also, this context “experienced considerably greater human modification than was realized several decades ago.”225 As a result of this dynamic situation, many Maya settlements were abandoned as communities relocated for one reason or another.

Some moved to higher ground226 while others moved to perennial water sources. These movements can be traced through analysis of material and textual records. Household archaeology, hieroglyphics, and burial remains—which supply biological and material evidence—provide data points from which to draw conclusions about changing populations and developing Maya culture.227 The Postclassic Maya more frequently founded settlements in

220 Demarest, “The Classic Maya Collapse, Water, and Economic Change in Mesoamerica,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 178. 221 O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 159. 222 O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, “In AD 761 rebelled against Dos Pilas and defeated K’awiil Chan K’inich, sending the region into a period of endemic warfare,” 168. 223 O’Mansky, “Collapse without Drought,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 158. 224 Dunning, Wahl, Beach, Jones, Luzzadder-Beach, and McCane, “The End of the Beginning,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 108. 225 Dunning, Wahl, Beach, Jones, Luzzadder-Beach, and McCane, “The End of the Beginning,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 108. 226 Aimers and Iannone, “The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 34. 227 Tourtellot and Gonzalez, “The Last Hurrah,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 62, 73. 63

coastal areas or along rivers, tying the Maya much more closely to their neighbors through trade and cultural exchange.228 This movement toward the coasts and waterways probably had important consequences for later contact with the Spanish. Access to waterways may have made some of the Maya more accessible to maritime powers like the Spanish. However, growing disparity in Maya political structures and authority as well as increasing mobility/ fluidity of populations along these waterways probably made universal subjugation more problematic. The dynamism of the Yucatec Maya deprived the Spanish of centralized political structures upon which colonial administrations could be more easily and more rapidly constructed. 229

What followed the Terminal Classic Maya was in some ways a more successful rather than inferior civilization. The Postclassic Maya, though less centralized than their predecessors and relatively disinterested in the grand monument building of the Classic Maya were robust and economically formidable.230 The Spanish encountered Maya who were led by governing bodies rather than single individuals, featured vibrant interregional economic connectivity, and were organized by “fortified hilltop, island, or peninsular centers,” rather than “large but dispersed cities intermingled with the complex Classic . . . subsistence systems.”231

228 Andrews, “Late Postclassic Lowland Maya Archaeology,” 58. 229 Darcy Lynn Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas: Indentifying Continuity and Change in Early Colonial Maya Household Production,” in Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do, eds. John G. Douglass and Nancy Gonlin (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 407. 230 Demarest, Ancient Maya, “Viewed in objective economic terms, many Postclassic states were larger and more successful than their flamboyant Classic-period antecedents,” 277. 231 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 278; “Ancient Maya urban communities are assumed to consist of two principal components: a central precinct and a surrounding supportive area associated with the nucleated zone. The latter is sometimes referred to as the community’s ‘sustaining area’ . . . Beyond these lie what can be designated ‘true rural’ areas, which are lower in population density and more disengaged from the nucleated centers in daily life,” R.E.W. Adams, H. R. Robichaux, Fred Valdez Jr., Brett A. Houk, and Ruth Mathews, “Transformations, Periodicity, and Urban Development in the Three Rivers Region,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 329. 64

Changing priorities rather than sudden doom may set the Postclassic Maya apart from their ancestors.232 Less reliance on agriculture and an increased focus on trade left many clues about transformative indigenous relationships. Maya sites were repositories of material culture reflecting “the increased volume of long-distance trade goods” and cultural exchange demonstrated by the “foreign influences displayed in mural art.”233 Changing priorities and political economies may be responsible for radical societal reorientation and conceivably impacted political organization and ideology. The decrease in construction of great religious monuments which has been mislabeled as a cue that the Classic Maya were the superiors of their

Postclassic descendents may even reflect a decentralization of Maya religion or general secularization of their society.234 Yet new construction did not halt in all parts of the Maya world and renewal of existing structures continued in places like Chau Hiix.235 This particular site remained an active center for centuries and “maintained a significant population in the years immediately preceding Spanish contact.”236

Conclusion: Changing Concepts of “Collapse”

Contemporary scholarship favoring alternatives to the “collapse” narrative usually use the term “collapse” consistently with the definition presented by James J. Aimers. Academic articles outlining this period of decline and reorganization typically use “collapse” as a reference to the period between the Classic Maya at their height, and the Postclassic period beginning in

232 Demarest, Ancient Maya, “What had disappeared was the unique Classic-period combination of theater-state politics and divine kingship with a complex rain forest adaptation that had evolved for over two millennia in the southern lowlands. The end of Classic civilization took with it the magnificent (but costly) legitimating monuments, architecture, and art of these theater-states,” 275, 276. 233 Andrews, “Late Postclassic Lowland Maya Archaeology,” 58. 234 Andrews, “Late Postclassic Lowland Maya Archaeology,” 59. 235 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 2. 236 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 2. 65

approximately 750 A.D.237 At this time, “the Maya Lowlands environment” exhibited

“metastable tendencies” through periods of stability “punctuated by episodes of significant change.” The most likely explanation for the transformations of this period involved reinforcing cascades and confluences of both natural and human-generated changes. 238

The Maya “collapse” diversified their society, enabling the development of new political systems,239 trade networks,240 and the movement of populations away from large centers.241

Though some scholars have suggested decentralization or “privatization” of religion, consistencies have been observed in practices of Maya separated by large distances.242 Vessels of the Late Postclassic period used for burning incense were found in multiple sites and exhibited different styles while sharing some similarities.243 These commonalties suggested persistent cultural connections between Postclassic societies. When the Spanish arrived, they met resilient lowland societies which had survived a period of transformation and reconfiguration. Changes in

Maya cultural and social structures, though spurred on by the significant events of the Terminal

Classic “collapse,” were evolutions of existing traditions.244 These structures also persisted beyond contact with the Spanish. Some places like the archaeological site at Chau Hiix bear few

237 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 331. 238 Dunning, Wahl, Beach, Jones, Luzzadder-Beach, and McCane, “The End of the Beginning,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 125. 239 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 25, 26. 240 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 23. 241 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 25. 242 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 22, 23. 243 Susan Milbrath, James Aimers, Carlos Peraza Lope, and Lynda Florey Folan, “Effigy Censers of the Chen Mul Modeled Ceramic System and their Implications for Late Postclassic Maya Interregional Interaction,” Mexicon 30, no. 5 (October 2008): 104. 244 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 26. 66

archaeological indicators of Spanish presence,245 indicating that some Maya were able to persist with relatively little Spanish interference for long periods after conquest.

A more nuanced and complex interpretation of Maya history developed from careful and critical analysis of clues in the material record. Issues like warfare and environmental change are important cornerstones of contemporary analysis though environmental factors have occasionally

“been controversial.”246 Environmental factors and site abandonment were pivotal in expanding knowledge of change in both non-elite and elite experiences. Some institutions like “divine kingship and many of the well-known markers of elite culture” disappeared or transformed.247

Administrative structures and leadership changed across the Maya world. The diversity of resulting institutions reflected “the uneven ability of centers to make this transition” and

“suggests differences in the organization of Maya communities.”248

It is important to note that the myriad challenges which disrupted Maya social and cultural structures are clues to the robustness of Maya social and cultural heritage. The Terminal

Classic “collapse,” “decline,” or transformation serves as an important reminder that the Maya had a rich history of their own prior to contact with Europeans. Centuries of change, decline, and revival preceded Spanish invasion of the New World. Pre-contact Maya history is difficult to clearly categorize by periods or events “in part because perturbations in these times have been more recently detected,” and “in part because both the archaeological and paleoenvironmental

245 Andres and Pyburn, “Out of Sight,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “The evidence at hand suggests Chau Hiix was inaccessible enough to avoid Spanish visits and that activity at the site was little affected by Spanish presence in the region,” 405, 406. 246 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 348. 247 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 350; Demarest, Ancient Maya, 275; Prudence M. Rice, Arthur A. Demarest, and Don S. Rice, “The Terminal Classic and the “Classic Maya Collapse” in Perspective,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, “Along with cessation of the stelae-altar complex and hieroglyphic texts, there was also a decline of polychrome ceramics, sumptuous burials, and apparent abandonment of many of the Classic southern cities,” 2. 248 Andres, “Architecture and Sociopolitical Transformation at Chau Hiix, Belize,” 19. 67

records from earlier times have been obscured by later changes.”249 Despite these issues, it is clear that the Maya possessed the capability to modify ancient patterns, developing new institutions that could better cope with new circumstances250 while preserving cultural and social structures within these new institutions—many of which bore the marks of Maya cosmology.

“Deep” structures of the Maya persisted beyond the radical changes of the “collapse.”

Though many lowland populations abandoned their homes and migrated, Classic Maya cultural practices survived into and beyond the Postclassic period.251 Changes in academic methodology reshaped accepted interpretations of the Maya “collapse” previously supported by academia. The advancement of Maya studies radically reshaped the relationship between the Classic and

Postclassic by blurring the divide between the two and focusing on commonalities.252 Some previous analysis of the Maya “collapse” concluded the superiority of the Classic period and scope of disruption by relying on circular logic. Scholars produced proofs or arguments supporting Maya “collapse” in part by contextualizing evidence in relation to this “end”—the rapid decline of Maya culture into a subpar form—rather than observing the evidence in its own context.253 The adaptations of the Maya to challenges of the Terminal Classic period defined and reconfigured the civilization encountered by the Spanish and provided opportunities for Maya agents to preserve social and cultural structures with a distinct Maya character. A new cycle in

249 Dunning, Wahl, Beach, Jones, Luzzadder-Beach, and McCane, “The End of the Beginning,” in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, 107. 250 Demarest, Ancient Maya, 295. 251 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 12. 252 Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, 12; “The research preferences of individual scholars also may have played a role in negative characterizations of the Postclassic Maya,” Chase and Chase, “Hermeneutics, Transitions, and Transformations in Classic to Postclassic Maya Society,” 14. 253 Cowgill, “Teotihuacan, Internal Militaristic Competition, and the Fall of the Classic Maya,” in Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, 63. 68

Maya existence was about to begin in which the heterogeneous Maya experienced ethnogenesis and Maya agents chose to resist, ignore, or accommodate the Spanish.

69

CHAPTER III

HIDDEN FROM VIEW: MAYA SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSISTENCE IN THE SHADOWS OF COLONIAL EMPIRE

It is justly permitted on the part of God . . . they may begin to be tormented in this life and to suffer a part of hell, which they deserve with the wearisome services, which they continually are giving to the devil, with their very long fasts and abstinences and vigils, with incredible offerings and presents of their property and effects with continual shedding of their own blood . . . with the lives of their neighbors and brothers.254

Transformed by a period of rapid social, political, and ecological change, the Maya of the

Yucatán reorganized their societies rapidly, changing their religious, social, political, and economic priorities. The Maya world was populated by many different ethnicities255 with different variations of shared social and cultural structures256 and each demonstrating identities distinct, but similar, to those from other Maya socio-political groups. As a result of various transformations, household and community rituals became more important as fewer religious monuments were constructed. Maya centers favored group rule, replacing hereditary divine kingship.257 Elite and wealthy families increasingly focused on mercantile investments, bolstering a circum-Yucatán canoe trade.258 During the Postclassic period, many Maya

254 Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, in Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation, Alfred M. Tozzer ed. (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1941), 185. 255 Quetzil E. Castañeda, “‘We are Not Indigenous!’: An Introduction to the Maya Identity of Yucatán,” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 9, no. 1 (March 2004): For the purpose of this thesis, “ethnicities” refers to the many distinct social and cultural groups with a shared sense of belonging often lumped together as “the Maya,” 39. 256 Leslie G. Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2009), eds. Leslie G. Cecil, and Timothy W. Pugh, 3; A note on structures: Maya social and cultural structures encompassed everything from agricultural practices, relationships between men and women, religious practices, political organization, and so forth. They are also the values and traditions considered distinctly Maya, as opposed to Spanish, Aztec, or belonging distinctly to any other group. 257 James J. Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” Journal of Archaeological Research 15, no.4 (December 2007): 350; Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 275. 258 Marilyn A. Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan: Postclassic Maya Archaeology at Laguna De On, Belize (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 22. 70

abandoned their old homes259 and relocated to coastal settlements with better access to new trade networks and rivers. These settlements often expanded existing sites or were constructed upon the remains of earlier settlements.260

These Postclassic period adaptations protected Maya life ways during the Colonial period. Maya later fled from the Spanish by using these networks261 or relocated because of changing living conditions and a rapidly changing environment.262 The diffusion of political power increased Maya community autonomy, preventing the Spanish from assuming direct control of a centralized political system. But perhaps most culturally significant the household and community orientation of Maya rituals safeguarded Maya religion and concepts of the universe, hiding them from hateful Spanish eyes. Maya religious practices were central to virtually every aspect of life before the Spanish conquest and afterward. As a “deep” structure cosmology continued to provide meaning to many structures modified or invented by the Maya during the Colonial period.

As diverse as the Maya themselves were their responses to European contact and attitudes toward the inclusion of the Spanish “other” into Maya cosmology and structures.263

Both prior to contact and afterwards Maya worldviews were heterogeneous with great regional

259 Aimers, “What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands,” 331. 260 Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan, 15. 261 Elizabeth Graham, “Close Encounters,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2009), eds. Leslie G. Cecil, and Timothy W. Pugh, 36. 262 Rani T. Alexander, “Maya Settlement Shifts and Agrarian Ecology in Yucatán, 1800-2000,” Journal of Anthropological Research 62, no. 4 (Winter 2006): Maya relocated due to changes in population density, changes in practices or usage strategies, changes in soil, climate or vegetation, and because of new “political and economic policies that encourage overexploitation or sustainability,” 450. 263 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, Broadly, the Maya “worldviews” were culturally organized collections of social memories and concepts rendering experiences communicable and comprehensible, 4; Cosmology refers to concepts of the universe and creation that give meaning or purpose to many elements of nature, including human experience. The Spanish brought with them a cosmology of their own with Christianity at its heart. The Maya incorporated these visitors, and sometimes the concepts of the universe accompanying them, into their own understanding of the universe, time, space, and religion. 71

variation.264 Various groups chose to incorporate or resist the Spanish, their worldview,265 values, and economic priorities. The material record revealed the consequences of these choices through discoveries of religious figurines and iconography in caves and buildings used for worship.266 Textual records like court documents, the writings of the Spanish, and the Books of

Chilam Balam also revealed these consequences.267

The majority of this chapter reviews the more negative impacts of conquest upon the

Maya. Responses to the harsh treatment of indigenous peoples by some Spanish missionaries more clearly demonstrated some forms of resistance to changes dictated by conquest. This is not to say that no Spaniard ever performed good deeds in the New World out of sincere interest in helping Indians spiritually or physically. Though there is much evidence that many Maya sought to preserve their own culture and reject that of the Spanish, plenty of other Maya adopted

Christianity and seemed to welcome Spanish visitors. These Maya accepted “a great initiation of

Christianity” and suggested that their peers should “receive and welcome the coming to the cah268 of those older brothers of ours . . . bring out a great reception for the coming into your communities, the coming to your cah, of the request that you be Christians on this very day!”269

Numerous letters to the King of Spain ostensibly written with the participation of Maya leaders

264 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 3. 265 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 4. 266 For iconography in caves, refer to Andrea Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest; for Diego de Landa’s account, see Tozzer; religious figurines or effigy censers, see John F. Chuchiak IV, “De Descriptio Idolorum: An Ethnohistorical Examination of the Production, Imagery, and Functions of Colonial Yucatec Maya Idols and Effigy Censers, 1540-1700,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest. 267 The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, ed. Ralph L. Roys, 1933 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 166. 268 Matthew Restall, Maya (Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 1998), “The self-governing municipal community (village or town) of the Yucatec Maya; included both residential core and concomitant lands; primary focus of Maya identity along with the chibal,” which was “the Maya patronym-group, lineage, or extended family.” 235. 269 The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin, in Matthew Restall’s Maya Conqistador (Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 1998), 133. 72

(the batabob, or community governors)270 called for more friars to join colonial efforts in the

Yucatán. Many of these letters came from communities that wrote favorably of “a noble record of cooperation with the Spaniards and a ready acceptance of Christianity.”271 It appears that tensions existed between many friars who saw themselves as protectors of Indians against the abuses of economenderos and soldiers determined to break indigenous spirits through brutality and force.272

Maya Social and Cultural Structures under Spanish Rule

Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar, spent time in the Yucatán and wrote of his experiences in the 1560s. Though the Maya were diverse and largely decentralized, Landa recorded the presence of multiple discreet political systems or states during the Late Postclassic273 period.

Landa’s textual account of his experiences in the Maya Yucatán indicated that these groups were somewhat connected through their previous association under the League of Mayapán, though by the time of conquest there were sixteen distinct northern Yucatán states.274 Landa noted that these groups shared a language but had noticeable differences in dress and behavior particularly between the Maya of the coast and the Maya of the interior.275

The colonial Maya benefited from a legacy of diverse political systems.276 Regional diversity through periods of conquest, centralization, decentralization, and upheaval greatly

270 Restall, Maya Conquistador, 151. 271 Restall, Maya Conquistador, 152, 154. 272 Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniards in Yucatán 1517-1670 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52, 53. 273 A note on periodization: Terminal Classic period, eighth through tenth centuries AD; Postclassic period, mid- tenth through mid-sixteenth century AD; Colonial period, mid-sixteenth through early-nineteenth century AD. 274 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 2. 275 Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, 18. 276 Lisa J. Lucero, “Classic Lowland Maya Political Organization: A Review,” Journal of World Prehistory 13, no. 2 (June 1999): 213. 73

enhanced the abilities of the Maya to continue their autonomy in some places.277 The Spanish constructed colonial systems on top of existing indigenous structures, incorporating the communities of the Maya in the Yucatán as building blocks for the region’s colonial foundation.278 No pre-contact center or structure for governance existed that the Spanish could use as a platform for rapid centralization of colonial administration throughout the peninsula.

Significant administration depended on the myriad Maya communities. The Maya continued to administer themselves in many of these communities, experiencing relatively little Spanish interference compared to some of the Maya’s contemporaries.279 This limited form of governance allowed the Colonial Maya to influence the rate of change to their social and cultural structures even in places more heavily leaned upon by the Spanish.280

Initially, the Spanish focused on the extraction of resources and other forms of wealth from their colonies. However, the Yucatán did not possess great mineral wealth like gold or silver. Thus, the Spanish developed a tribute system extorting labor, agricultural products, and other goods from the Maya.281 To sustain labor demand the Spanish extracted Indian slaves from the Yucatán, many of whom came from the Montejo family’s conquests in 1527, 1531, and

1537.282 However, this tribute system was not unfamiliar or new to the Maya and likely based on existing economic structures. The Maya previously developed tribute systems moving labor and

277 Darcy Lynn Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas: Indentifying Continuity and Change in Early Colonial Maya Household Production,” in Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 407. 278 Elizabeth Graham, Grant D. Jones, and David M. Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest: Maya-Spanish Contact in Colonial Belize,” Science 246, no 4935 (December 1989): 1255. 279 Graham, Jones, and Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest,” 1255. 280 Graham, Jones, and Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest,” 1255. 281 Graham, Jones, and Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest,” 1255. 282 John F. Chuchiak IV, “Forgotten Allies: The Origins and Roles of Native Mesoamerican Auxiliaries and Indios Conquistadores in the Conquest of Yucatán, 1526-1550,” in Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, ed. Laura E. Matthew and Michael R. Oudijk (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 178-182. 74

goods produced by agriculture, animal husbandry, and textile production from non-elites to the elite.283 Maya economic and social systems revolved around household or local production in and around communities. The Spanish had limited interest in the specific operation of these local systems, though this approach changed once religious conversion became a greater priority.

Maya cultural and social structures survived through the limited but significant level of autonomy left in communities during the Colonial period.284 This limited autonomy provided the

Maya with opportunities to manage change. But these opportunities varied depending on the level of authority exercised by the Spanish. At best communities could almost chart their own course into this new Colonial period by influencing the level of political, social, and cultural change in their own structures.285 As a result many Maya practices of production and land ownership continued with considerable consistency into the Colonial period.286

Though there were some disruptions to old Maya structures, the nature of the new colonial system and its economy also allowed the elite to retain some powers.287 Initial periods of limited Spanish oversight enshrined some elements of Maya social and cultural practices, structures, and relationships within colonial organization. The necessity for stable indigenous self-government288 brought some reliance on Maya elites. Once fighting concluded with particular groups of Maya the Spanish might rely on indigenous leaders “as agents for the collection and delivery of what the new masters saw as their due.” 289By extension, this relationship empowered Maya elites like the nobility and religious castes to navigate the

283 Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas,” 407, 408. 284 Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas,” 408. 285 Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas,” 408. 286 Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas,” 407. 287 Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas,” 407. 288 Matthew Restall, “He Wished It in Vain”: Subordination and Resistance among Maya Women in Post-Conquest Yucatán,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (Autumn 1995): 581. 289 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 38. 75

Colonial period by incorporating the Spanish and their culture into Maya traditions.290 Maya elite modified their manners, dress, and material culture during the Colonial period,291 capitalizing on their ability to remain involved in colonial leadership and to be socially flexible.

Maya Religion and Oppression by the Spanish

Though the Yucatán lacked material wealth292 it possessed much stone. Landa noted that this stone was not good for delicate carvings but the Maya put it to excellent use in constructing the many buildings scattered across the Yucatán. The Maya constructed religious monuments and temples seemingly everywhere (see Fig. 8). Ritual architecture, centers of Maya social and religious ritual reenactment, typically occupied the center or spaces near the center of Maya sites.293 As the Maya relocated through time, they continued building these structures in new settlements.294 Temples were surrounded by plazas and houses of the elites,295 many of whom shared multiple functions as political and religious leaders.296

In worship of their gods, the Maya performed a variety of sacrifices including blood offerings, the burning of incense, self-mutilation, fasting, and the sacrifice of humans or other animals. According to Landa, a particularly disturbing form of sacrifice involved mutilation of the penis. Men lined up in a row and “holes were made in the virile member of each one obliquely from side to side.” Thread was passed through these holes, linking the participants

290 Andrea Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 129. 291 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, The adoption of distinctly Spanish dress, symbols, and manners maintained the effects of “social distancing” between the elites and others, 132. 292 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 18. 293 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 11. 294 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 18, 171. 295 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 62. 296 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 112. 76

together. The blood that flowed from these men was used to anoint material representations of religious figures.297

The Maya offered more than blood to their gods, sacrificing slaves and members of their communities as well. Some ceremonies even included the sacrifice of children. The methods used to sacrifice humans varied from execution by bow and arrows, removal of the heart with a knife, dropping someone from a height,298 or decapitation.299 Throwing victims into cenotes, pit- like openings in the ground exposing groundwater, was also typical in some locations as a means of divination or placating nature following a natural disaster.300 On rare occasions victims might return to the surface alive and carrying prophecies. For a particular ceremony, the hearts of warriors were removed and their bodies afterwards flayed. Finally, their bodies were dismembered for ritual consumption.301 Evidently, sacrifices of people continued well after conquest despite Spanish discouragement,302 which may demonstrate the success of the Maya to preserve one of the most repugnant practices to the Spanish for some time: “No Spaniard whether friar, settler or bishop, could tolerate human sacrifice, with or without Christian embellishments, among Indians living under Spanish rule.”303

In addition to sacrifice, the Maya practiced other forms of worship to their gods. In Maya societies, women also engaged in religious devotion, though Landa noted that women did not

297 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 114. 298 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, Death by arrows: “In this way they made his whole chest one point like a hedgehog of arrows;” by knife: “The Chacs seized the poor victim, and placed him very quickly on his back upon that stone, and all four held him by the legs and arms, so that they divided hi in the middle. At this came the executioner, the Nacom, with a knife of stone, and struck him with great skill and cruelty a blow between the ribs of his left side under the nipple, and he at once plunged his hand in there and seized the heart like a raging tiger and snatched it out alive,” 119; throwing victims into wells: “Sometimes they threw living victims into the well of Chichen Itza, believing they would come out on the third day, although they never appeared again,” 120, 121. 299 Tozzer, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 116. 300 Tozzer, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 181, 182. 301 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 180, 181. 302 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 182. 303 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 98. 77

Fig. 8. The Kukulcan temple serpent at Chichen Itza shortly after the March Equinox in 2009.

participate in temple rituals. He argued that women were regarded as unclean and therefore could not participate in blood sacrifice. But Maya men and women performed many rituals in the home rather than temples, often involving the worship of effigy censers and other material culture.

Maya women offered presents to these religious items, making sacrifices of “cotton stuffs, of food and drink” and burning incense.304

304 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 128, 129. 78

The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel recorded the general reception of the Maya to

Spanish efforts to curb indigenous religion, and establish social, political, and economic domination:

When Christianity was introduced by the real Christians. Then with the true God, the true Dios, came the beginning of our misery. It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife with purse-snatching, the beginning of strife with blow-guns, the beginning of strife by trampling on people, the beginning of robbery with violence, the beginning of forced debts, the beginning of debts enforced by false testimony, the beginning of individual strife, a beginning of vexation, a beginning of robbery by violence. This was the origin of service to the Spaniards and priests, of service to the local chiefs, of service to the teachers, of service to the public prosecutors by the boys, the youths of the town, while the poor people were harassed… It was the Antichrist on earth, the kinkajous of the towns, the foxes of the towns, the blood-sucking insects of the towns, those who drained the poverty of the working people. But it shall still come to pass that tears shall come to the eyes of our Lord God. The justice of our Lord God shall descend upon every part of the world, straight from God upon Ah Kantenal, Ix Pucyola, the avaricious hagglers of the world.305

Though the Spanish intended to Christianize the Indians, their efforts appeared to have an unintended consequence: the movement of Maya traditions underground or to the periphery of

Spanish oversight. Closely following the conclusion of the reconquista, the Spanish conquest of the New World derived legal and moral justification from Christianity. An important dimension of endeavors in the New World was the “spiritual conquest” or the struggle to bring the Indians to Christianity.306 All expeditions included priests who would spread the faith among local populations.307 Through policies like congregación, the Spanish encouraged Indian relocation to nucleated towns, or reducciónes, where Spanish religious authorities closely monitored and

305 The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 79. 306 For a review of the spiritual conquest, notable literature, and trends, see Pablo Garcia, and Kathleen Ann Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” The Cambridge History of Religions in America (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 177; and Sarah Cline, “REVIEW: Conquest and Aftermath: Center and Periphery in Colonial Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 27, no. 3 (1992): 244-253. 307 Pablo Garcia, and Kathleen Ann Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” The Cambridge History of Religions in America (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 177. 79

evangelized indigenous populations.308 However, there were never enough missionaries to match the task of converting the entire Yucatán. As a result, many communities remained on the periphery of Spanish oversight regardless of rapidly increasing numbers of Christian churches.309

Some efforts did bear fruit. For instance, the Maya incorporated Jesus into the pantheon of Maya religious figures as “the guardian of our souls.”310

Despite Landa’s optimism about attempts to Christianize the Maya, public “idolatry” continued for centuries.311 The Maya kept religious material symbols everywhere—in their homes, their milpas,312 and in their temples. Landa recorded as much while emphasizing the staggering number of “idols.”313 Maya religion included many forces of nature and deities, often represented with animalistic figures, effigy censers, or other material culture.314 Seemingly anything would be represented by Maya effigies: “They had such a great quantity of idols that even those of their gods were not enough; for there was not an animal or insect of which they did not make a statue, and they made all these in the image of their gods and .”315

Court testimony over the centuries documented instances of Maya ritual practices using this religious material culture, demonstrating that effigy worship continued for many years.

Conversely these records also showed the efforts of the Spanish to disrupt Maya social and

308 Garcia and Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” 178. 309 Garcia and Myers, “Spanish Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” 180. 310 The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 125. 311 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, “[Cortés] preached to them on the vanity of their idols, and persuaded them to worship the cross, placing it in their temples with an image of Our Lady, and it was thus that public idolatry ceased,” 14. 312 John F. Chuchiak IV, “De Descriptio Idolorum: An Ethnohistorical Examination of the Production, Imagery, and Functions of Colonial Yucatec Maya Idols and Effigy Censers, 1540-1700,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 141. Milpas were the fields used for cultivation of agricultural products by the Maya. Many rituals were associated with these plots of land. 313 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, “They had a very great number of idols, and of temples, which were magnificent in their own fashion. And besides the community temples, the lords, priests, and the leading men had also oratories and idols in their houses, where they made their prayers and offerings in private,” 108. 314 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 135, 136. 315 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 110. 80

cultural practices. Through the legal system, the Spanish persecuted Maya discovered engaging in pagan rituals incorporating pre-Hispanic gods. The Maya often represented these gods by crafting effigy censers,316 colored stones, and wooden or clay images. The majority of these images were made of clay.317 Wooden effigies seemed to carry greater significance as inherited property or vessels.318 The Maya hid these materials from the Spanish, storing them in caves, forests, and milpas.319

Some Maya were unfortunate to be caught by the Spanish during rituals utilizing this material culture. In 1674 the Spanish recorded the testimony of a Maya man, Antonio Chable, who had been caught with a large group of other Maya offering sacrifices to material images of

Maya deities. Brought before an ecclesiastical judge, Chable recounted engaging in a large-group ritual to improve harvests and satisfy the rain god Chac.320 Chable confessed to the worship of effigy censers representing gods relevant to agriculture, crop production, and rainfall.321 Spanish clergy examined material images used by the Maya and interpreted Maya gods as demons or devils.322 Some less humanitarian Spanish friars strongly discouraged the use of effigies through methods like “the hoist.” If these Spaniards found Indians to have “idols,” the Indians might be bound by their wrists and hoisted off of the ground with stones gradually added to their feet until

316 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 136. 317 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, “They had some idols of stone, but very few, and others of wood, and carved but of small size but not as many as those of clay,” 110. 318 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, “The wooden idols were so much esteemed that they were considered as heirlooms and were (considered) as the most important part of the inherited property,” 111; Tozzer: these wooden idols could contain ashes of people and might take human shape when used in sacrifice, 111. 319 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 141. 320 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 135, 136. 321 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 136. 322 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 136. 81

the victim confessed to possessing more of these items. If no confession was made, Indians were sometimes flogged and splashed them with hot wax until satisfaction was given.323

The Maya preserved many elements of their social and cultural structures through the reenactment of rituals associated with virtually every aspect of Maya life.324 Maya deities were present and active everywhere, including in the protection and success of milpas.325 The private household and the milpa326 ritual traditions pervasive in these communities facilitated the retention of Maya culture. Many milpas were owned and operated by individuals or by the community,327 making the ritual culture associated with these plots and agriculture much more personal than the large scale rituals associated with the Aztecs or Classic Maya. In contrast to elite and priest experiences, these smaller-scale rituals were much more difficult for the Spanish to detect and interfere with than their large-scale public ritual counterparts.328 Despite the harsh methods of torture used by more extreme officials, some indulgence seems to have been showed

“towards individual or highly localised idol-worship.”329

Some variations of these practices continue today among the indigenous groups of Latin

America through the passage of oral stories and rituals from generation to generation.

Contemporary social and cultural structures of the Maya reflected past understandings of the universe that were adapted through time to new circumstances.330 Old knowledge and practices

323 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 74. 324 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 4. 325 Laura Caso Barrera, and Mario Aliphat Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto: Three Production and Exchange Systems in the Southern Maya Lowlands, XVI-XVII Centuries,” Journal of Latin American Geography 5, no. 2 (April 2006), 41. 326 Barrera, and Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto,” 40; Milpas were land cleared for agricultural purposes. These plots were targets of the Spanish when they decided to burn Maya resources and force relocation. 327 Barrera, and Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto,” 40. 328 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 129. 329 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 98. 330 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 6. 82

provided frameworks for cultural hybridization through the incorporation of new knowledge, including the arrival of the Spanish with their religion, symbols, and cosmology. The records of amalgamated traditions that continued into the present demonstrated the growing syncretism between Spanish and Maya worldviews.331 In fact, the Maya rapidly incorporated the Christian cross into their own rituals,332 though their usage may not have always matched Spanish intent.

The Maya may have incorporated crucifixion into their sacrificial practices. Victims were either tied or nailed to crosses and sometimes the heart of a victim was removed. But the entire cross with victim still attached might be thrown into a cenote depending upon the ritual.

Reportedly, crucifixion too occasionally involved the use of children, like some of the Maya’s other methods of ritual sacrifice.333 Francisco Camal testified that “another sacrifice was made within the cemetery of the church at the foot of a cross to some idols and demons which were there.” He stated that a boy named Ah Tuz was nailed to a cross, lifted, and then lowered again to have his heart removed while the boy was still living. The Maya present during the ceremony offered Ah Tuz’s heart to their “idols.” Antonio Pech recorded the crucifixion of two girls, tied to crosses, raised, then lowered and untied for their hearts to be removed and offered to the gods.

In both cases, the bodies of the children were allegedly tossed into cenotes afterwards.334

However, it is unclear how often crucifixion was used or living bodies thrown into cenotes.335

Despite Spanish attempts to destroy pre-Columbian Maya practices utilizing effigies,

“pagan” rituals continued for centuries and Maya communities continued to conceal their

331 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 9. 332 Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 182. 333 Tozzer, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 116. 334 Tozzer, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 116. 335 See Clendinnen, “Assent,” in Ambivalent Conquests. 83

religious material culture.336 Many Maya communities remained outside of careful surveillance by Spanish friars and other colonial religious officials. Maya who did live under more careful scrutiny still maintained many ritual practices, though these increasingly incorporated Catholic rituals as well.337 Some of the Maya incorporated holy events like the Catholic Holy Week into their own practices.338 In these modified forms, traditional pre-Columbian cultural and social structures based around ritual practices survived colonialism.339 Some traditions persisted into the present among remaining indigenous groups like the modern Lacandón Maya albeit in much changed forms.340

Larger public ritual culture also persisted for many decades in a reduced form in the sense that they were smaller and more difficult to detect. Both the continuity and change of

Maya religious beliefs and practices can be seen in cave art produced after the conquest when

Maya groups literally moved some of their practices underground.341 The tradition to incorporate new gods and representatives of natural forces permitted new adaptations to indigenous cosmology,342 like inserting elements of Catholicism into indigenous practices and iconography.

These caves displayed numerous symbols like horses with riders but also included the Spanish double-headed eagle and Christian crosses.343

Spanish visitors to the New World brought with them numerous symbols. The Spanish used the double-headed eagle, a symbol of authority in many Western cultures, in their Hapsburg

336 Inga Clendinnen, “Yucatec Maya Women and the Spanish Conquest: Role and Ritual in Historical Reconstruction,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 435. 337 Graham, Pendergast, and Jones, “On the Fringes of Conquest,” 1257. 338 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 14. 339 Clendinnen, “Yucatec Maya Women and the Spanish Conquest,” 436. 340 See the works of Jon McGee for specific examples, including his work Life, Ritual, and Religion Among the Lacandón Maya (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1990). 341 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 129. 342 Chuchiak, “De Descriptio Idolorum,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 137. 343 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 131. 84

heraldry. Following contact, the symbol of the double-headed eagle was integrated into indigenous visual vocabularies in numerous areas outside of the northern Maya lowlands.344 Its varied usage by the Maya reflected the diversity of Maya societies and their responses to Spanish

Fig. 9. Images from the Dresden Codex, a Maya book from before the Postclassic period.

contact. The eagle or double-headed eagle represented various indigenous guardians, became a fixture of elite iconography, and symbolized some deities.345 The double-headed eagle was also spread as graffiti scratched into the walls of prehispanic buildings and reproduced more formally

344 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 115. 345 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 115. 85

in more permanent symbols like those in churches or architecture.346 Though cave art may reflect forms of indigenous resistance, the reproduction and modification of these European symbols also demonstrated the selective acculturation of Spanish themes and images into Maya iconography (see Fig. 9 for examples of indigenous artistic styles).

Conclusion

The Spanish colonial system sometimes pervasively and rapidly reorganized Maya communities as in the case of Tipu. The community became a base of operations from which the

Spanish responded to revolts by the Dzuluinicob and in 1567-1568. Ritual architecture, centers of Maya social and religious reenactment, typically occupied the center or spaces near the center of Maya sites.347 But the Spanish reorganized the community of Tipu spatially, building new physical structures centered around a new plaza, and moved other Maya from other communities into Tipu, altering its demographics.348 Tipu was one of many communities reorganized by the Spanish. Colonial strategies included the development of nucleated towns.349 The physical and social arrangements of these towns more closely resembled late twentieth-century Maya practices than those of the pre-contact Maya.350

Change was inherent in Maya societies. Some of the biggest Postclassic changes included less emphasis on kinship or hereditary rule, greater economic focus on household production,351 and less religious monument construction. These changes likely increased the autonomy of Maya

346 Stone, “Colonial Cave Art in the Northern Maya Lowlands,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 116. 347 Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 11. 348 Graham, Jones, and Pendergast, “On the Fringes of Conquest,” 1256. 349 Clendinnen, “Yucatec Maya Women and the Spanish Conquest,” 432. 350 Cynthia Robin, “Gender, Farming, and Long-Term Change: Maya Historical and Archaeological Perspectives,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 3 (June 2006): 412. 351 Masson, In the Realm of Nachan Kan, 24. 86

communities and diversity of religion while also ensuring the continuation of Maya practices at a community level.

Perhaps a more clear and effective form of resistance to Spanish rule was the flight of many Maya away from new semi-European systems, though relocation occurred for many reasons. These reasons could include consideration of “changing population densities, political economic policy, and uneven globalization.”352 The Maya developed several strategies to maintain their mobility. These strategies frustrated colonial authority, political consolidation, and labor control. The Maya moved temporarily between towns and outlying agricultural plots seasonally, made more permanent relocations to other towns or new settlements, or fled beyond the existing scope of colonial authority.353

In some ways the early Spanish colonial system in the Yucatán operated by establishing broad goals or priorities for Maya communities. The Maya responded to Spanish colonization and new mandates with a remarkable degree of autonomy, preserving the Postclassic heterogeneous heritage of the Maya. Within the systems of abuse and exploitation established by the Spanish, Maya men and women demonstrated the ability to act as agents, preserving important aspects of their pre-contact social and cultural structures while adapting these structures to new circumstances. In some cases, the Maya resisted changes or practices that they were not willing to suffer under—albeit with varied results. The fractured and limited nature of colonial rule in the Yucatán allowed the Maya to continue many of their own practices while incorporating and acculturating to this new Spanish “other” physically, socially, and culturally.

352 Alexander, “Maya Settlement Shifts and Agrarian Ecology in Yucatán, 1800-2000,” 450. 353 Alexander, “Maya Settlement Shifts and Agrarian Ecology in Yucatán, 1800-2000,” 450. 87

CHAPTER IV

SMOLDERING INCENSE: THE LACANDÓN MAYA AND PRECOLUMBIAN WORLDVIEWS IN DECLINE

Some cultures are stronger and more resistant to change than others. The Lacandón Maya have retained their traditional dress, appearance, rituals, and mythology after almost 500 years by Hispanic society . . . As exemplified by rites such as the balché and the mek’chul, the Lacandón continue to practice the rituals and worship the gods of their prehispanic ancestors.354

The Lacandón Maya in Modernity: Ethnogenesis and a Culture Dwindling in the Jungle

Occupying a unique rainforest biome, the Lacandón Maya are an object of study for historians, anthropologists, and those interested in preservation of sensitive ecosystems. The unique location and survival methods of the Lacandón Maya unite many different fields of study in the Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico. But according to trends studied by various anthropologists, the valuable and precious culture of the Lacandón Maya may be in the twilight of its years. As a result of their Maya heritage and the challenges currently threatening survival of Lacandón culture, the Lacandón Maya provide an important case study for this thesis.

The Lacandóns likely migrated to their current location, the Lacandón Jungle in the southeastern Chiapas rainforest, from the Yucatán Peninsula within the last few centuries.355

Originally, Ch’ol-speaking natives inhabited the Lacandón Jungle and were referred to as the

Lacandón by the Spanish. Forced relocation of these peoples by the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into reducciónes356 resulted in much unpopulated land within the jungle.

354 R. Jon McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1990), 131. 355 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, x, 1. 356 Alfred M. Tozzer, A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.: London, 1907), Spanish religious authorities recognized that conversion would be drawn out by the diffuse settlements of Indians, 12; Indians were relocated (sometimes forcibly) into nucleated settlements (reducciónes—or “reductions”) which could be more closely monitored by the Spanish, more easily Christianized, and more effectively molded into Europeanized groups. 88

Yucatec peoples (a map of Maya peoples according to language can be seen in Fig. 10) began moving into the jungle over the course of the sixteenth century.357 Following the murder of two priests (one of whom was Dominican friar Domingo de Vico)358 and some tens of Christianized

Indians by the Acala and the Ch’ol Lacandóns in 1555,359 the Spanish raided the original occupants of the Lacandón Jungle. By the 1580s, the Spanish pushed many of the Ch’ol

Lacandón and neighboring groups out of the rainforest. One of the strategies used by the Spanish to push indigenous peoples out over the next century involved burning as many of the milpas— which provided both subsistence and ritual spaces—and granaries of indigenous communities as possible.360 Also, the Spanish continued some expeditions into the Lacandón Jungle to

Christianize Indians. Antonio Marjil de Jesus, Lazaro de Mazariegos and Blas Guillen pursued the Lacandóns in 1695: “We exhorted them again, and made them understand that we had come only to draw them from their heathen ways that they might not go to hell like their forefathers.”361

By the eighteenth century, the former inhabitants of the Lacandón forest were completely removed to Guatemala. Much of the forest was left uninhabited, permitting the continued migration of other groups to this territory.362 The new inhabitants of the Lacandón Jungle

357 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 24. 358 Laura Caso Barrera and Mario Aliphat Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto: Three Production and Exchange Systems in the Southern Maya Lowlands, XVI-XVII Centuries,” Journal of Latin American Geography 5, no. 2 (April 2006): 40. 359 Tozzer, A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones, 12. 360 Barrera and Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto,” 40. 361 Alfred M. Tozzer, trans., A Spanish Manuscript Letter on the Lacandones, in the Archives of the Indies at Seville (1912; repr., Labyrinthos: Culver City, CA, 1984), 7. 362 Barrera and Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto,” 41. 89

developed new and unique cultures while preserving elements of their own social and cultural traditions.363 These Maya lived beyond the “frontier of colonial powers,” preventing direct

Fig. 10. A Map of Maya peoples identified by languages of the Yucatán.

363 Bruno Baronnet and Mariana Ortega Brena, “Rebel Youth and Zapatista Autonomous Education,” Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 4 (July 2008): 114. 90

Spanish subjugation364 and affording these groups time to intermingle and change. Displaced

Maya groups and their interactions within inter-indigenous trade networks “led to inter-ethnic Maya acculturation and the ethnogenesis of Lacandon culture.”365 This chapter refers to the descendants of groups merging during this period in the relative isolation afforded by the

Lacandón Jungle as the Lacandón Maya, or the Lacandóns.

The Lacandón Maya may not be accurately described as direct descendents of the Maya civilization. It is probably more appropriate to label them as a unique culture that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the coming together of various indigenous groups fleeing into the Lacandón Jungle. Their modern identity is likely the result of ethnogenesis of these constituent groups over time. R. Jon McGee, an anthropologist who spent extensive time among the Lacandón Maya in the twenty-first century, built a body of work focused on exploring

Lacandón Maya culture. McGee’s analysis of a Lacandón Maya ritual song made comparisons to elements of other Maya societies and their myths. These comparisons referenced the Lacandóns’ pre-contact inheritance without characterizing the Lacandóns as a definitively direct, unadulterated connection to the Maya civilization: “As the analysis of this song demonstrates, traditional Lacandón religion does continue to incorporate many elements of pre-Hispanic Maya beliefs. At the same time, it will also be shown that the Lacandón are not an isolated island of pure Maya belief, but are very much part of a pan-Indian symbolic tradition.”366 The Lacandóns shared a number of gods—Kisim, , K’in, Caak, K’uk’ulkan (Kukulcan), and —with the Yucatec Maya and other groups from the time of conquest. K’uk’ulkan, who appeared as a

364 Joel W. Palka, “Agency and Worldviews of the Unconquered Lacandon Maya,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2009), eds. Leslie G. Cecil and Timothy W. Pugh, 263. 365 Palka, “Agency and Worldviews of the Unconquered Lacandon Maya,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 261. 366 R. Jon McGee, “Metaphorical Substitution in a Lacandon Maya Ritual Song,” Anthropological Linguistics 29, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1. 91

giant feathered serpent, and Xtabay, “a seductive young ,” were particularly clear connections to Yucatec Maya worldviews and supernatural beliefs.367

Agricultural Practices

The Lacandón Maya possessed effective and environmentally sustainable methods of subsistence in the rainforest. Slash and burn techniques combined with the use of a cyclical system of planting and forest regeneration established a reliable source of food without permanently damaging the environment. This system also attracted and provided food for animals migrating through the region that might be used for game.368

The Lacandóns advanced their agricultural spaces through a number of stages. In what is called the kor stage, the milpas, or cleared fields, support a variety of crops.369 Kor is the

Lacandón word for the herbaceous stage devoted to growth of many different crops. Corn is the primary food grown, dominating over half of the field.370 After some years of productivity, the field is allowed to go fallow, but fruits, sources of rubber, and other plants with utility are still planted in this phase. These fallow fields are called acahual in Spanish. The acahual fields are special because they attract game animals, providing an important source of animal protein for communities without the need for wide ranging hunting patterns. 371 Later, the fallow fields will be planted with fruit trees and afterwards the rainforest will be allowed to reclaim the space.372

367 Joel W. Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005), 248. 368 James D. Nations and Ronald B. Nigh, “The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandon Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture,” Journal of Anthropological Research 36, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 15, 17. 369 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 2. 370 Stewart A. W. Diemont and Jay F. Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management: Sustainable Design for Subsistence and Environmental Restoration,” Ecological Applications 19, no. 1 (January 2009): 256, 258. 371 Nations and Nigh, “The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandon Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture,” 15, 17, 18. 372 Diemont and Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management,” 256, 264. 92

The success of agricultural systems applied by indigenous peoples in the southern Maya

Lowlands also demonstrated the potential for these systems to establish stability and support development of strong economic bonds. Prior to Spanish raiding of the region, indigenous communities were able to sustain economic systems of exchange and tribute based on agricultural products.373 In Mesoamerica, cacao and annatto were important crops traded extensively between communities that were parts of different indigenous groups.374 Indigenous groups proved capable of sustaining large, stable populations in the rainforest while also devoting resources to products with economic, marketable value. The practices of the Lacandón

Maya reveal a lasting legacy of effective food and resource production that still have special utility, providing useful models for modern farmers who wish to preserve rainforests. Using the methods of the Lacandóns, “farmers can grow a diverse forest that would theoretically support mammals while growing food and raw materials for their own needs.”375 Adaptation of some

Lacandón fallowing methods could also accelerate soil and biodiversity recovery in deforested areas harmed by excessive logging.376 In these very important ways, indigenous models remain adaptable, leaving potential for future reconfigurations—if the Lacandón and their peers are given time.

373 Darcy Lynn Wiewall, “Arrobas, Fanegas, and Mantas: Indentifying Continuity and Change in Early Colonial Maya Household Production,” in Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 407, 408. 374 Barrera and Fernandez, “Cacao, Vanilla, and Annatto,” 40, 41, 47. 375 Stewart and Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management,” 264. 376 Stewart and Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management,” 264. 93

Fig. 11. Lake Miramar in the Lacandón Jungle, 2007.

Lacandón Maya Ritual and Religion

Remarkably, the Lacandón Maya present a unique opportunity to study an indigenous culture divided by at least two different approaches to Christianity, acculturation, and assimilation. A north/south dichotomy divided some of the Lacandón Jungle’s (Fig. 11) inhabitants. The north, those Lacandón communities in or near Naja/ Naha, chose to retain non-

Christian traditions. These communities rejected missionary activity in order to better preserve their own traditions.377

377 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 6. 94

The rest of the Lacandóns, and to a greater degree some of the Lacandón youth, chose to adopt Christianity and many other facets of European or “Western” culture:

There is an almost overwhelming desire on the part of the young people to acculturate to the Mexican way of life… They have discarded their native tunic and men’s long hair styles; they have donned sun glasses; and, in general, they desire to throw off all their old ways without considering whether some of these, such as certain social restraints, may not be important to their survival.378

However, it is unclear when the bulk of this Christianization occurred. Alfred M. Tozzer wrote in

1912 that the remaining Lacandóns “resisted all attempts of the Spaniards to Christianize them.”379

Naja Lacandón Maya cosmology includes a pantheon of gods with various domains or roles in nature and the afterlife. A few of the most notable gods include Hachäkyum, Sukunkyum,

Mensäbäk, Kisim, and Äkyantho. Upon death the soul travels to the underworld to be judged by

Sukunkyum, guardian of the sun and the older brother of the Lacandóns’ chief deity Hachäkyum.

The sun descends into the underworld at night where Sukunkyum cares for it and then carries it from west to east. Those who have led a good life and have not committed murder or incest will be sent to the house of Mensäbäk, the god of rain.380 However, “if a soul has committed incest or murder, then Sukunkyum gives it to Kisim, the god of death, who tortures it with red hot irons and freezing water.”381 Hachäkyum is the creator god for much of nature in the Lacandón cosmology. He created the jungle and animals. With his wife’s help, humans were also created.382

378 Phillip Bear and William R. Merrifield, Two Studies on the Lacandones of Mexico (Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma: Norman, OK, 1971), x. 379 Tozzer, A Spanish Manuscript Letter on the Lacandones, in the Archives of the Indies at Seville, 2. 380 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 64, 65; Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 248. 381 McGee, Life, Ritual and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 65. 382 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 248; McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 65. 95

Despite efforts by Spanish missionaries to suppress its use, some of the Lacandón Maya continued to practice the production and consumption of balché, a key drink in the reproduction of their cosmology. Balché drink is a mildly alcoholic beverage produced by the indigenous peoples and used in rituals associated with various non-Christian deities. Balché was critical to ritual practices of the Lacandóns, as drinking balché conferred “the ritual purity necessary to participate in ceremonies where the gods are present in a god house.”383 Ritual participants who consumed the balché drink frequently did so to the point of nausea.384

The god houses in which balché drink was consumed were pole-and-thatch structures frequently located near a man of high status, or “a senior male religious specialist.”385 Special dugout logs for making balché drink were kept near the god houses. Balché drink was made from balché tree bark with sweeteners added to it—generally honey or sugar gathered from sugar cane.386 Just as Postclassic Maya women may not have been permitted in temple rituals, 387

Lacandón women traditionally were not allowed in a god house and therefore probably did not take part in balché production.388 By the 1990s, there were three god houses remaining in Naja,

“two of which are owned by two men who are so old and infirm they can no longer maintain them.”389

The balché rituals in which Lacandóns consumed the drink and made offerings to the gods formed a basic structure for a variety of other rites including the nahwah, a ceremony involving nahwah offerings. This ceremony appeared to be an adaptation of sacrificial practices

383 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 73. 384 McGee, “Metaphorical Substitution in a Lacandon Maya Ritual Song,” 105. 385 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 249. 386 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 250. 387 Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, 128, 129. 388 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 80. 389 R. Jon McGee, and Belisa Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the ,” A Journal of Women Studies 20, no. 2 (1999): 180. 96

of the Lacandóns’ ancestors. The nahwah offerings were “ceremonial usually filled with beans or meat.”390 Ritual consumption of corn-based products including nahwah, representative of flesh, and k’uxu, a red dye symbolizing blood, mimicked ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.391

Anthropomorphic figurines of humans made from rubber or tree sap were burned on ceremonial boards with incense. The figures would, upon destruction, become messengers to the gods invoked by the particular ritual and prayers made during the ritual.392

The Lacandon believe that Hachäkyum and his wife made human beings from clay and kernels of maize. Maize, therefore, is the substance of human flesh as well as their staple foodstuff. Thus, in a symbolic sense, when feeding nahwah to the god pots and later eating it themselves, the Lacandon are consuming the substance of their own flesh in a form of ritual cannibalism.393

The symbolic meaning of this ritual cannibalism may derive meaning from, and mimic, stories of the gods consuming people and blood. Prayers affirming respect and memory of the gods accompany the nahwah proceedings.394 Also, the use of substitutes like nahwah for human and animal sacrifice may be an adaptation following oppression by Spaniards who did not tolerate human sacrifice regardless of whether or not Christianity was at its core.395 The nahwah ceremonies could be strong evidence for the adaptability and manipulation of indigenous schemas rooted in cosmology but transformed for new circumstances. The character of this ceremony is also not unlike the Eucharist, the ritual consumption of the body and the blood of

Jesus Christ. This use of nahwah is also an example of mutually-sustaining cultural schemas and resources: the Lacandóns applied resources to sustain cultural structures (rituals), and these

390 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 84. 391 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 85. 392 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 257. 393 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 88. 394 McGee, Life Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 76-79, 88, 89. 395 Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniards in Yucatán 1517-1670 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 98. 97

cultural structures demanded the continuous cultivation of particular resources through milpas.

By turn, the cultivation of milpas invoked entire other sets of mutually-dependent social and cultural structures and resources.

Another important item consistently present in Lacandón ritual was the god pot. These god pots, or u lakil k’ul in the Lacandón Maya language,396 each had the molded face of a god on its surface. During rituals, the god pots were thought to be living receptacles for the god whose face was on the pot and offerings were sometimes made by placing them in the mouth of the god.397 Lacandóns frequently burned incense inside the god pots and food offerings were made to the gods by placing nahwah or other foods in the vessel. The Lacandóns made these sacrifices to boost agricultural yields, fight sickness, increase human fertility, sustain the gods, and maintain the cosmos.398 Also, if balché was placed in the god pot as an offering, participants would also consume balché themselves in imitation.399

These god pots are very important to the study of Maya groups and change over time.

The god pots provide a recognizable artifact which archaeological study could compare to older

Maya artifacts to reveal similarities in usage, character, and production. God pots from Yucatán can be found dating back to the Postclassic Period and god pots from the Classic Period were found in the ruins of Palenque.400

The Naja Lacandón Maya provided a modern example of Amerindian cosmology’s pervasiveness in all aspects of life in their societies—“in the Lacandón world view, life is not

396 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 251. 397 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 49, 50. 398 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 251. 399 McGee, “Metaphorical Substitution in a Lacandon Maya Ritual Song,” 217. 400 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 49. 98

divided into sacred and profane: both are inextricably intertwined.”401 Preserving this culture presented the Naja Lacandóns with challenges that may be similar to those created by contact between Europeans and the New World in the 1500s. As other peoples mixed with the Naja and the “modern world” began penetrating through the protection offered by the rainforest, a culture with lineage to the pre-Columbian past began changing more rapidly. Studies by anthropologists and scholars from various fields offered helpful insight into the forms of resistance and adaptation made by the Lacandón communities.

Some of this resistance took shape in the cosmological narratives constructed by the

Lacandón in which there were separate gods for the Lacandóns and for foreigners: Hachäkyum and a plethora of other gods with various roles represent nature and creation; Äkyantho, the god of the foreigners—whose worship became prominent in the eighteenth century402—was responsible for non-Indians as well as “foreign animals and objects . . . so horses, cattle, pigs, metal tools, guns, and medicines” rested within Äkyantho’s domain.403 The longevity of amalgamated Maya practices and traditions maintained pre-Columbian structures like polytheism. The Lacandón Maya established mythological narratives to incorporate their shared history with pre-Columbian indigenous groups and the Spanish. Though these practices represent examples of persistence, the survival of Maya ritual and religion should not overshadow the many pervasive changes that the Spanish successfully forced upon some indigenous communities or that other indigenous groups willfully incorporated into their own culture with the guidance of Spanish missionaries. By incorporating foreign peoples and their cultures as a distinctly separate part of Lacandón cosmology, the Lacandón could more effectively identify

401 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, xii. 402 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya,” 249. 403 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 21-23. 99

traditional elements of their way of life versus newer adaptations and influences using polytheistic cultural structures.

Traditional stories passed down by the Lacandón also explained why they possessed different technology from Hispanicized Indians. In Lacandón Maya cosmology, many non-

Lacandón goods introduced in some form by the Spanish or their allies were controlled by these other groups because of Lacandón failures or vices, in particular laziness.404 According to their cosmology, Äkyantho gave various technologies, including guns, to the Lacandóns and foreigners. The Lacandóns failed to take care of these gifts and subsequently lost them, requiring their acquisition through trade. It is not clear if Äkyantho and his role was an adaptation of an earlier god of merchants or if Äkyantho was invented in the eighteenth century when his use in ritual became prominent.405 Joel W. Palka argues that religious practices may have changed considerably during the centuries following the conquest. The significance of Äkyantho and the inclusion of a flood story in Lacandón cosmology may actually reflect the influence of

Christianity and Europeans.406 The modern conception of Äkyantho may owe as much to outside influence as to older indigenous cosmology.

Resistance to Christianity in the twenty-first century appeared to be limited to this particular community (the Naja Lacandóns) and their cosmological expressions of difference.

Labeling non-Indian goods and technology as items under the influence of a foreign god allowed the Naja Lacandóns to take some control over their perceived relationship to outside influence in both the past and the present. By reproducing the belief that these items were lost by the

Lacandón Maya as a result of their own failure to care for these gifts of Äkyantho, the Lacandóns

404 Leslie G. Cecil, “Introduction,” in Maya Worldviews at Conquest, 10. 405 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 249. 406 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 272. 100

asserted their responsibility for being unable to produce these technologies. In this way, the

Lacandóns defined themselves as an equal people to Europeans within Lacandón Maya cosmology. Since both groups were given these gifts by Äkyantho, the inability to produce advanced technologies is not a result of advancing more slowly or in different ways than

Western cultures. Within Lacandón Maya cosmology, no other group is responsible for the

Lacandóns’ need to acquire these special goods through trade. The responsibility for this falls completely on their own society’s shoulders.

McGee concluded that the Lacandóns continued to provide a glimpse of a very old culture despite their willingness to embrace technology and adapt to changes in their surroundings. The Lacandóns even preserved practices of bloodletting and sacrifice, albeit transformed into a symbolic system utilizing tamales, human figurines, and red vegetable dye.407

Many changes to Lacandón culture were superficial and despite larger changes like those in settlement patterns—from isolated settlements to small villages— “traditional patterns and social symbols have remained unchanged.”408

Conclusion: Intrusion by the Outside and the Decline of Tradition

The Lacandón Maya were afforded the benefits of isolation due to the lack of interest shown in the region by colonial and national authorities for centuries. However, expansion of commercial lumbering and livestock production in the twentieth century threatened the natural isolation of the rainforest. Exposure to modern cultures and their enormous demand for resources challenged traditional practices and structures. The Lacandón Maya retreated from many of their established communities during the middle of the twentieth century, fleeing further into the

407 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 130, 131. 408 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 130. 101

dense rainforest that protected them for centuries. Lacandón settlements were further disrupted when the Mexican government relocated them to three areas—reservations where the Lacandón

Maya were still subject to increasing pressures from other groups.409 In addition to more frequent contact with capitalistic groups like logging companies and ranches, perhaps as many as 60,000

Tzeltal and Ch’ol Indians settled in the Lacandón Jungle when it was opened up to colonization in the 1940s.410 Fleeing encroaching lumber teams and disease, outside indigenous groups flooded into the area, radically altering the sustainability of the Lacandóns’ life ways.411 One of the most unique aspects of Lacandón life was the success of their subsistence method. The invasion of the Lacandón Forest by other Indian groups whom favored cattle over subsistence farming threatened Lacandón agricultural models. Through their grazing and trampling on developing trees, cattle disrupted natural growth of the rainforest and the suppression of unwanted plants.412

Deforestation also disturbed the subsistence model of the Lacandón Maya. As much as

2% of the rainforest was cut down each year. Less forest cover resulted in decreased availability of game animals that provided valuable sources of protein.413 As the natural systems that the

Lacandón Maya are accustomed to become damaged, the survival of this indigenous group hinges increasingly on adaptation to very different ways of life, eroding the traditions preserved

409 Nations and Nigh, “The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandon Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture,” 3. 410 Nations and Nigh, “The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandon Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture,” 2, 3. 411 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 3-5. 412 Nations and Nigh, “The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandon Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture,” 3, 19. 413 Stewart and Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management,” 254. 102

in this Lacandón Forest for centuries: “Capitalism is slowly but surely creeping up into the mountains to engulf indigenous notions of community in general.”414

The construction of a road through the Lacandón Jungle in 1979 transformed the priorities of many of the Lacandóns from subsistence to commercial production and wage labor.415 Roads brought connections to new markets. For many indigenous communities in

Yucatán and Chiapas, the shift to commercial systems altered gender roles. Men transitioned into wage labor roles outside their communities. Women devoted more of their time and energy to producing arts and crafts for sale. Some women began aiding men in activities traditionally confined to men like the production of arrows or handling of money.416 Women began working primarily to produce goods that could be sold for profit, engaging in a commercial system in which indigenous arts and crafts were valued.417 For women among other Maya groups who held more closely to tradition, their choice not to participate resulted in “a loss of income, independence, and power” that Lacandón women seized for themselves by transforming traditional structures.418

According to McGee and Belisa Gonzalez’s “Economics, Women, and Work in the

Lacandón Jungle,” the mek’chul which educated the community about gender roles and reinforced these roles had not been celebrated in more than a decade.419 The mek’chul ceremony initiated Lacandóns into adulthood. Lacandóns made payment to the gods as a sign of thanks for allowing their child to make it to adulthood. The ceremony involved offerings to the gods chosen

414 Susanna Rostas, “A Grass Roots View of Religious Change amongst Women in an Indigenous Community in Chiapas, Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 18, no. 3 (July 1999): 328, 336-337. 415 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 175. 416 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 184. 417 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 175, 186, 187. 418 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 175. 419 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 181. 103

based on the sex of the young adult, reinforcing gender roles through the tools associated with traditionally masculine or feminine work.420 Lacandón cosmology promoted the ancillary relationship of women to men. During the mek’chul ritual, women taught their daughters the tools that would be very useful to them, including brooms, the loom, and various other tools useful in the preparation of food or in weaving.421 The absence of this ceremony helped traditional gender roles to erode as women assumed new and different responsibilities.

The decline of rituals and traditions reinforcing more strict gender roles provided some benefits to Lacandón Women. Though the traditional culture of the Lacandón Maya is disappearing, the decline of traditional rituals and the transition to a commercial model meant the expansion of female agency. 422 Similar trends in other indigenous groups have provided the expansion of female agency across Chiapas.423 The lack of religious prescriptions of particular work allowed women to pursue other roles in their communities more freely424 and to take a more active role in reshaping their social and cultural structures.

The most visually apparent change in Lacandón Maya communities can be seen in the construction of their homes. Available technologies and materials dramatically altered the makeup of these homes. By the 1980s, the Lacandóns replaced many of their thatched-roof huts with “wooden-walled huts with cement floors and tin roofs.”425 The rise of commercialism in the

Lacandón Forest increased the amount of money moving into the area. The Lacandóns adorned more and more of their homes with satellite dishes since Lacandón men and women began

420 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 99. 421 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 180. 422 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 177. 423 Rostas, “A Grass Roots View of Religious Change amongst Women in an Indigenous Community in Chiapas, Mexico,” 328, 336, 337. 424 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 178. 425 McGee, Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya, 38. 104

earning enough money to purchase them. Television and larger time commitments to distant labor or commercial production distracted the Lacandón Maya from more traditional forms of storytelling. McGee and Gonzalez lamented that “all our attempts to elicit myths from young men met with only general responses indicating a vague familiarity with the story outlines and the suggestion that we talk to their fathers.”426 Western culture contributed to some breakdown in traditional oral culture, making this century “a critical time for research into these practices.”427

The Naja Lacandón Maya also faced challenges presented by limited genetic diversity.

Limited acceptance of outsiders, Indian or otherwise, over the previous centuries resulted in inbreeding—Charles Bell referred to the Naja as “a small inbreeding clan of beautiful forest people.”428 The Naja were not the only group of Lacandóns suffering from this practice.

Instances of inbreeding in the Lacandón Jungle were recorded as early as 1958. One group of

Lacandóns splitting from another group turned to incest in desperation.

A group of about 50 Maya settled on the Rio Jataté at San Quintin. These Lacandóns separated from another group in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. The San Quintin

Maya suffered from very low numbers and had very little communication with other groups in the Lacandón Jungle. The lack of connections to other communities made new additions to the

San Quintin community very rare. When visited in 1958, the San Quintin group had been reduced to ten members. Observers noted that “inbreeding and brother-sister incest relations were practiced in a desperate attempt to propagate their kind.”429 As G. Albin Matson and Jane

426 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 181. 427 Stewart and Martin, “Lacandon Maya Ecosystem Management,” 255, 256. 428 Charles Bell, “Lacandón Journals,” Grand Street, no. 50 (Autumn 1994): 213. 429 G. Albin Matson and Jane Swanson, “Distribution of Hereditary Blood Antigens among American Indians in Middle America: Lacandón and Other Maya,” American Anthropologist 63, no. 6 (December 1961): 1311. 105

Swanson published their study of the San Quintin Maya and other Lacandón Maya in 1961, the ultimate fate of the San Quintin Maya was not known at the time of their study’s publication.

While the Naja Lacandón Maya continued to preserve non-Christian traditions into the

1980s, fewer Naja Lacandóns maintained these traditions in the decades that followed. By the turn of the century, the majority of Lacandóns became Christian or simply abandoned the traditions associated with their cosmology.430 The traditional life ways of this unique group nearly died out. The slow death of these traditions would not entirely be the fault of outside influence. More Lacandóns chose to embrace rather than resist the new systems created by new connections to the outside world. Part of the problem resulted from the shift to wage labor and commercial focus. Fewer people worked the fields, resulting in breakage of many traditions related to agricultural rituals and yearly cycles431 as resources (including time investment) were diverted away from the reproduction of traditional practices. Younger men increasingly relied on wage labor, limiting time that might otherwise be spent reenacting and preserving rituals:

The religious leaders who maintained the community’s spiritual life in 1980 are infirm with age and unable to continue their duties. Their middle-aged sons and daughters, brought up in a traditional religious atmosphere, know most of the religious practices. However, with two exceptions, this generation of adults has made no effort to practice the rituals or teach the myths to their children. The men who have the knowledge to take on their fathers’ ritual duties are busy with their commercial enterprises . . . Because no cadre of younger men has stepped forward to take the place of the elders, children and young adults have received little or no instruction in the belief system practiced by their grandparents.432

The Lacandóns were not spiritually conquered by missionaries or broken by a history of forced relocation—the population of the Naja increased by as much as 50% in the time since

McGee visited their communities in the 1980s and retained much of its social and cultural

430 Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya, 247. 431 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 181. 432 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 181. 106

structures. Like the loss of Äkyantho technological gifts, the Lacandóns failure to care for their traditions is mostly responsible for the loss of these structures: “people in Nahá have simply let their traditions disappear from neglect.”433 Will Lacandón variations of pre-Columbian worldviews still exist when the next century arrives? The future looks uncertain. Some adapted forms of Maya social and cultural structures may survive—so long as some indigenous communities continue to reproduce elements of their cultural heritage while adapting to new circumstances, much like their ancestors (united as they were through a shared sense of belonging) had been doing since before the Spanish arrived in the New World. Otherwise,

Lacandón Maya schemas with distinctly Maya elements may face the abandonment described by

Thomas Sewell, Jr. if modern and future Lacandóns do not empower by resources and reproduction these same schemas.

433 McGee and Gonzalez, “Economics, Women, and Work in the Lacandon Jungle,” 181. 107

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGY IN MODERNITY

Structures and the agents empowered by them provided opportunities to apply ancient schemas to new contexts.434 In the case of Amerindians, cosmologies were structures capable of change to fit the new contexts created by transformation, political disintegration (as well as reformation), and European invasion. Numerous pre-Columbian cosmologies continued to exist in some form, surviving for centuries among indigenous groups able to maintain some level of autonomy and isolation from “Western” influence. The Yucatec Maya and their descendants provide a prime example.

The Terminal Classic period radically transformed Maya societies. Many social and cultural practices incorporating Maya cosmology remained consistent through this period of change and into the Postclassic period. However, connections between Maya groups became less centralized as the Maya abandoned larger settlements in favor of new locations closer to perennial water sources and new trade networks. Economic priorities changed as large temple construction shrunk and the Maya established new political systems that were not dependent on the rule of one dynastic ruler.

As a result, the Spanish encountered an indigenous civilization spatially and politically disparate, limiting the ability of early colonial leadership to rapidly consolidate power. Also, the nature of Maya communities spread throughout the forest and capable of sustaining themselves nutritionally and economically presented considerable difficulties to Spanish missionaries seeking to conquer the Yucatán spiritually. Despite oppression by religious, legal, and political leaders abetted by some indigenous elites, the Maya continued to practice social and cultural traditions utilizing material cultures and uniquely Maya symbols. The continued reproduction of

434 Sewell, Logics of History, 143. 108

indigenous schemas using available resources—which were in turn were cultivated through ritually active milpa sites—maintained the connection of the Colonial Maya to the symbols and deeper cosmologies of their ancestors.

Not all Maya were afforded the protection of isolation. The conflict that began in 1555 robbed the Ch’ol Maya of the Lacandón Jungle of their homes. However, this chain of events presented new opportunities for Yucatec Maya—fleeing from the north—to settle in relative seclusion from the outside world for several centuries. Within the Lacandón Jungle, new Maya cultures grew out of the “deep” structures which they carried. The Naja Lacandón Maya adapted their pantheon of gods to include foreigners and their technologies within the domain of

Äkyantho. The song-stories of Lacandón Maya cosmology provided narratives explaining why foreigners possessed advanced technologies like firearms and special metals. These narratives provided cosmological reasons for these differences, incorporating narratives of deities and moral lessons. The reproduction of these narratives passed traditionally from one generation to the next explained why the Europeans had the ability to reproduce advanced technologies while the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no way to acquire them except through trade. The

Lacandóns also reproduced sacrificial cultural traditions through the use of nahwah, god pots, and the burning of incense, adapting practices with roots as deep as the Classic Maya to new social and cultural realities.

Indigenous cosmologies provided “deep” structures with the power to transcend time and offer powerful resistance to foreign domination—like Spanish efforts to destroy indigenous culture. When presented with new contexts by dramatic changes in political, social, and religious environments, indigenous peoples used their agency to successfully adapt and intertwine their

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own cosmological schemas with those presented by Spanish rule. These adaptations provided for the survival of Maya belief systems. Although these systems transformed, they remained intelligible representations of ancient assumptions about human relationships to nature and other levels of existence consummate with pre-Columbian indigenous cosmology. The “surface” structures based on indigenous cosmologies determined the social and cultural organization of new indigenous communities. Eventually, adapted social and cultural structures granted Maya cosmologies the ability to transcend the death of indigenous mastery over the Americas.

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FIGURE REFERENCES

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