Archaeological Insights on the Contact Period Lowland Maya *

, Archaeological insights on the contact period lowland maya * DIANE Z. AND ARLEN F. CHASE (University of Central Florida) The reconstruction of the economic, religious, and socio-political organization of the pre-contact Maya is a pivotal goal for archaelogists working in Mesoamerica. A correct definition of Late Postclassic or Protohistoric Maya society is crucial to understan- ding, first, the dynamics of culture change and acculturation following the conquest and, second, the transformed culture of the contemporary Maya. The pre-contact Maya additionally provide the only connection between the historic accounts, both native and Spanish, and the earlier Classic Period Maya. If we cannot establish the relationship between pre-contact Maya of the archaeo logy and the immediately post-contact Maya as described ethnohistorically, it would be ridiculous to presume to comprehend the relationship between the Classic Period Maya and the Post- conquest Maya, given the separation in time of at least 500 years compounded by the problems of disease, famine, and the intro- duction of a new culture. Thus, a correlation of the ethnohistory and archaelogy for the contact period and a resolution between any differences in these bodies of data is clearly desireable and significant. Sources for studying the contact Period Maya are many and include archaeology, native documents, etnohistory, and ethnogra- phy. Archaeology of the Maya just before the advent of the Euro- peans was, in the past, limited to work at a few sites, in part * Acnowkledgements. The research at Santa Rita Corozal was funded during 1984 and 1985 by Grants BNS-8318531 and BNS-8509304 from the Na- tional Science Foundation. 13 due to a focus on the more spectacular and earlier Classic Period sites and finds. Recent efforts by a host of researchers has ex- panded the archaeological coverage to include a series of Late Postclassic sites in the Northern and Southern Lowlands (see A. Chase and P. Rice 1985 and J. Sablof f and E. W. Andrews V n.d.). Together these investigations are serving to provide a new and more comprehensive picture of the pre-contact Maya. There are problems in studying the contact Maya archaeolo- gically, not the least of which are the difficulties of locating sites and determining excavation loci; many Late Postclassic sites are marked by their low-lying architecture, in contrast to the earlier Classic Period sites, and are difficult to isolate based on surf ace investigation. Identification of key places noted in the ethnohistory have likewise proved problematic, particularly given the al- most invisible remains and the often vague descriptions of their locations. Native Maya documents are likewise not as plentiful or useful as might be wished. The majority of the precontact or early contact period pictoral texts or codices were burned at Mani by Bis- hop Landa. The remaining three codices (Madrid, Paris, Dresden) have yet to be thoroughly understood, although valiant attempts have been made (Thompson 1972a; Villacorta and Villacorta 1930). Post-contact Maya documents such as the various Chilam Balams provide pre-contact historical information in the form of cylcical histories and phrophecies (A. Chase n.d.). These are difficult to use, however, as their interpretation is open to question. There are a wide variety of historical documents available concerning the contact Maya. These include accounts of early ex- plorers which are significant in that they provide our first glympses of the Lowland Maya from European eyes, but disappointing in that the often describe very little of the native culture [see for example Cortes (1908) own descriptions]. •Slightly .later materials include bureaucratic documents such as census and tax lists (see Fariss 1984) and other materials such as the Relaciones de Yu- catán (1898-1900). Of the Historic Period documents, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán is perhaps the most detailed in its reference to Maya lifeways. Unfortunately all of these accounts were .written long after first contact between the Spanish and the Maya and thus describe an already modified culture due to acculturation and depopulation. Inherent in each is also all of the traditional problems of dealing with manuscript sources, in- 14 cluding individual biases and viewpoints. Perhaps not surprisin- gly, new archaeological data and interpretations can now be used chec the validity of certain ethnohtoric statements about the lowland Maya, and often with unexpected results. Ethnographies of the contemporary Maya obviously also have their place in reconstructions of the ancient pre-contact period Maya. It should be evident, ancestors. Reconstructions of pre-contact organization based solely on etnographic data are obiviously not correct (see for example Reina 1967). Archaeology and ethnohistory (together with the Maya documents), then, provide the bulk of the information used in reconstruction of contact period culture. While certain authors have attempted to directly translate ethnohistoric statements into Post- classic or Classic Period Maya fact, rigorous scientific methodo- logy clearly requires more controlled comparisons and or assump- tions, particularly given the changes that Maya society went through mmediately following first European contact. In the following sections contact Maya society will be reviewed first from the perspective of the written post-contact record and then from the archaeological perspectives of two contact period sites: Santa Rita Corozal in Belize and Tayasal in Guatemala. Following these necessarily brief presentations, interpretations, conclusions, and problems concerning the nature of pre-contact Maya society will be addressed. MAYA SOCIETY AT CONTACT: ETHNOHISTORY A synthesis of the ethnohistoric view of Maya society at the time of contact can best be found in the various works of Ralph Roys. Roys work was concerned with the nature of Maya society prior to European contact and provides us with what has become the accepted view of the pre-contact Maya. For this paper, three areas of contact society are of prime interest: political organization, settlement pattern, and religious organization. What Roys does not discuss can generally be found in the work of Bishop Landa who wrote his relación circa A.D. 1566 (Tozzer 1941). Roys (1957, 1965), using a variety of sources, reconstructed the political organization of the pre-contact Yucatan Peninsula, archaeo- logically known as the Northern Lowlands. At the time that first Europeans were shipwrecked along the coast, there were appa- 15 rently at least 16, and up to 19, cuchcabals or «jurisdictions». These were independent territories, each of which had its own internal political organization and all of whom apparently con- sidered themselves to be Maya. The Yucatan Peninsula had pre- viously been under the dominion of a single site, Mayapan, but this multepal reportedly fell apart ca. AD 1450 (Roys 1927: 4). There were apparently differing internal organizations within the provinces. Roys (1957: 6) distinguishes three. In the first, found in such cuchcabals as Cepech, Mani, and Sotuta, a halach uinic or «real man» ruled the entire territory. He resided in the capital city of the cuchcabal and doubled as the batab for that city. There were batabs or local rulers below him in each of the other towns within the territory. In the second kind of political organization, found in such cuchcabals as Ah Canul and perhaps Cupul, rather than a halach uinic, governing was carried out by a series of batabs, all or most of whom belonged to the same lineage and who appear to have acted more or less in unison as a council. In the third type of territory, such as the cuchcabal of Chakan, there were only loose confederations of groups of towns. There are a number of other political ofices which were rea- dily transformed into useful positions in colonial society (Roys 1957: 6,7), The batab was the head of each town. There was a war chief or nacom. There were deputies for the batabs called ah kulels as well as ah cuch cabs or heads of wards or barrios in a town. Roys notes that the smallest political organization in the post-contact period was the cuchteel or ward. Not only were there slightly different organizations within the territories, but there were also apparently differing degrees of cooperation and warfare between them (see D. Chase n.d.). Ob- viously, these three kinds of political organization and the in- tegration between them should be visible in the archaeological record, particularly in the associated settlement patterns. Intra-town (or site) settlement is difficult to tackle from the ethnohistory. Landa very clearly describes the situation as he finds it: their dwelling place was as f ollows: — in the middle of the town were their temples with beautiful plazas, and all around the temples stood the houses of the lords and the priests, and then (those of) the most important people. Thus came the houses of the richest and of those who were held in the hightest estimation nearest to these, and at the outskirts of the town were the houses of the lower class (Tozzer, 1941: 62). 16 There are, however, alternative possibilities, particularly in the intermixing of classes within the town by cuchteel, for as Roys (1965: 664) noted, «...we know that many towns were divided into barrios, or wards; it is altogether probable that the power- ful head of each barrio lived in his own district, as we know he did in colonial times». All of the descriptions of Maya towns are significantly post-contact and it may be that archaeology will eventually provide a final solution to the problem of their actual organization. Religion was clearly important to the pre-contact Maya, but was also among the first aspects of the native culture that colonial clergy sought to change. In their zeal to missionize and des- troy paganism, much of traditional Maya religious culture was left unrecorded.

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