Climatic Signatures in Yucatecan Wills and Death Records

Climatic Signatures in Yucatecan Wills and Death Records Victoria R. Bricker, Tulane University and University of Florida Rebecca E. Hill, Tulane University Abstract. Dense collections of eighteenth-century wills and death registers from Tekanto and Ixil, two towns in northern Yucatan, represent hitherto unexplored sources for documenting the relationship between natural disasters and mortality patterns among the Yucatecan Maya during colonial times. They provide detailed, sometimes daily, records of the impact of famines caused by multiyear droughts, hurricanes, and plagues of locusts on the agrarian population of the peninsula, which supplement the brief, impressionistic accounts of historians. Introduction The Yucatecan Maya live on a peninsula lying between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea (fig. 1) in a region where droughts, famines, hurricanes, and plagues of locusts have been frequent causes of misery and death. Droughts and famines are mentioned in Maya historical and ritual texts, including those that make up the pre-Columbian Dresden and Paris codices (Love 1994: 30, 32; Thompson 1960: 269–71) and the colonial Books of Chilam Balam (e.g., Gordon 1913), some of which can be dated, as well as in the books of colonial Spanish historians (e.g., López de Cogo- lludo 1688). Hurricanes and plagues of locusts are referred to in colonial Maya and Spanish sources, but glyphs for these scourges have to-date not been identified in pre-Columbian Maya texts. These sources can be useful for pinpointing the years when such calamities befell the Yucatecan Maya, and they describe—sometimes in graphic detail—people moving into the forest in search of roots and wild plants after their crops have failed and their reserves have been exhausted (López de Cogolludo 1688: bk. 6, chap. 9, and bk. 10, chap. 17; Roys 1933: Ethnohistory 56:2 (Spring 2009) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2008-057 Copyright 2009 by American Society for Ethnohistory Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/56/2/227/254015/EH056-02-01BrickerFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 228 Victoria R. Bricker and Rebecca E. Hill Figure 1. Map of the Yucatan peninsula 122n5). Such accounts contain only generalizations and are therefore not very useful for understanding the effects of a famine at the local level, which only day-by-day or month-by-month records such as wills and death registers can provide. In what follows, we flesh out one part of the history of natural disasters in the Yucatan peninsula by focusing on the Maya living in two towns during the eighteenth century whose dense surviving collections of wills and long sequences of death records permit a fine-grained Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/56/2/227/254015/EH056-02-01BrickerFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Climatic Signatures in Yucatecan Wills and Death Records 229 analysis of the impact of disease and drought on the community, family, and individual over a period of forty-five years (1724–68). In our consider- ation of Maya adaptive responses to disasters, we also discuss evidence of higher rates of widow and widower remarriage during the years following an epidemic or famine. A more general outcome of our research is the dem- onstration of the usefulness of wills and parish registers as proxy data for identifying regional weather patterns during the colonial period. The Climate of Yucatan The Yucatan peninsula is a limestone shelf separating the Gulf of Mexico in the west from the Caribbean Sea in the east (fig. 1). There are no surface streams in the northern part of the peninsula that can be used for drinking water and irrigation; rainwater percolates through the porous limestone into a lens of fresh water that in many places floats on top of salt water (Back 1985: 101; Doehring and Butler 1974: 593). Sinkholes known as cenotes (from Maya dzonot) perforate the limestone crust here and there, giving access to the fresh water below. “The cenotes vary greatly in size and shape, but the cylindrical type with nearly vertical walls is most common. The greatest density of these forms is found in the north-central and northeastern part of the peninsula. In this area almost every important Maya ceremonial center and many present-day villages are located near the edge of a cenote where drinking water can be obtained” (Tamayo and West 1964: 99). The climate of Yucatan is tropical, with well-demarcated rainy and dry seasons. The rainy season begins in May and lasts through October; the rest of the year, from November through April, is predominantly dry, although some rain may fall during the winter months, when “northers” (nortes) coming down from Canada and the United States bring stormy weather. September is the month when the most rain falls in the northern part of the peninsula. In most of the region, there are actually two maxima during the rainy season, one in June, after which the rains diminish for several weeks, followed by a larger one in September (fig. 2). (On the west coast, the average rainfall increases more smoothly to its peak in September [fig. 3]). The second maximum coincides with the height of the hurricane season in Sep- tember. Were it not for the hurricanes, the northern part of the peninsula would be dry like the arid parts of Mexico (Vivó Escoto 1964: 195). These maxima seem to play a role in the timing of the rainmaking ceremonies (ch’a chac) performed by the Maya of Yucatan today. Some towns schedule these ceremonies for the early part of the summer to ensure that the rains will nourish the young plants in their initial stages of growth. Bricker witnessed such a ceremony in Hocaba on 18 July 1971. Four rain- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/56/2/227/254015/EH056-02-01BrickerFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 230 Victoria R. Bricker and Rebecca E. Hill Figure 2. Average annual rainfall measurements from Merida and Izamal (Hoare 1996–2008) making ceremonies are performed in this town every summer, the first on the eastern side of town, the second in the north, the third in the west, and the fourth in the south. They usually take place on alternate Sundays in June and July. The one she saw was the last in the sequence for that year and was located at the southern end of town. The ceremony ended in a downpour, the perfect answer to the shaman’s prayers!1 Bricker had another opportunity to observe a rainmaking ceremony in 1979, when she was carrying out fieldwork in Ebtun, a few kilometers west of Valladolid. This ceremony took place on 17 June and was clearly also timed for the first rainfall maximum. On the other hand, the people of Chan Kom, about twenty-five kilometers southwest of Ebtun, responded to the unusually dry conditions during the summer of 1930 by scheduling their only rainmaking ceremony for the year in the first week of September (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 138, 263–65). They were clearly hoping to benefit from the second maximum of rain.2 Different strategies are also used for determining when maize should be planted in the spring. In the western part of the peninsula, the Maya plant their seeds during the last week in April, anticipating that the rainy season will begin early in May,3 whereas in the central and eastern parts Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/56/2/227/254015/EH056-02-01BrickerFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Climatic Signatures in Yucatecan Wills and Death Records 231 Figure 3. Average annual rainfall measurements from Champoton and Escarcega (Hoare 1996–2008) of the peninsula, Maya farmers wait until the first heavy rains have fallen before planting their corn (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 245, 295). Both strategies entail some risk. In some years, the rains do not come until the third or fourth week of May, too late for the seeds that were planted at the end of April to germinate. On the other hand, the first heavy rains may be just a teaser. Several weeks may elapse before the rains begin in earnest, and a second planting may be necessary. The Yucatecan Maya plant several varieties of corn that afford some protection from the uncertain timing of the rains. There are slow-growing varieties (x nuc nal, “big ear of corn”) that take three months to mature and reach two meters in height and a quick-growing variety (x mehen nal, “small ear of corn”) that only reaches a height of about one and a half meters and can be harvested after two months (Bricker, Po’ot Yah, and Dzul de Po’ot 1998: 194). As their name implies, the cobs of the slow-growing varieties are larger and have more rows of kernels than the quick-growing variety, so their yield is greater. But the quick-growing variety can be planted if the rains come late, which means that at least some corn can be harvested at the end of the growing season. The Motul dictionary, compiled between Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/56/2/227/254015/EH056-02-01BrickerFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 232 Victoria R. Bricker and Rebecca E. Hill 1573 and 1617, mentions an even faster growing variety called peeu that matured in only forty days and was planted in colonial times, which must have served as a hedge against famine (Arzápalo Marín 1995: 638). Droughts occur with some frequency in the Yucatan peninsula, as do hurricanes and plagues of locusts.

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