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:

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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

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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 consideration 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-

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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

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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

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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. In the last decade, climatologists have begun to understand the relationship between these recurrent phenomena in countries bordering the western Atlantic and the alternating cycles of the El Niño and La Niña events that are triggered by the sudden heating and cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean (Caviedes 2001: 4–6, 150–53). Dur- ing El Niño years, the waters of the western Pacific become warmer than normal. This warm water travels eastward and heats up the atmosphere off the west coast of South America, which absorbs more moisture than usual and triggers torrential downpours in normally arid Peru and Chile. There is a reciprocal cooling of waters in the Atlantic during El Niño years. Because the waters of the Atlantic are colder then, less moisture rises into the atmosphere, and there are fewer hurricanes in those years. Furthermore, with less moisture in the air to form clouds, countries in the Western Hemi- sphere that border the Atlantic receive less precipitation and in strong El Niño years may experience droughts. This scenario is reversed during La Niña years. A large pool of colder-than-normal water forms in the western Pacific, which is balanced by a warmer-than-normal Atlantic. The warm water fuels a larger number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlan- tic, many of which are stronger and more intense than those in normal years (Caviedes: 150). The warmer conditions in the Atlantic during La Niña years also bring plentiful rains to sub-Saharan Africa, where the more-luxuriant- than-normal vegetation fosters a proliferation of insects. Normally small populations of desert locusts (Schistocera gregaria) grow explosively and soon outstrip the plant resources in that region. They swarm and look elsewhere for food, traveling on strong air currents that flow from east to west during La Niña years, across the Atlantic, until they reach the Caribbean islands and the Yucatan peninsula (Caviedes: 159–64). Thus, some of the droughts that affect the Yucatan peninsula are related to the El Niño phe- nomenon, and the most intense hurricanes and plagues of locusts can be attributed to the La Niña effect. In normal years, when the rains come on time and in sufficient quan- tity to produce good harvests in the fall, there are two seasons when deaths have been most likely to occur in recent times. The first is in January and February, when cold winds sweeping down from the north can cause the temperature to plummet below 40 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Even today, Yucatecan homes are unheated, and the pole-and-thatch construction of houses that is common in the interior does not retain heat. The wind comes

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through the gaps between the poles in the walls, and any warm air that might accumulate rises to the roof. The old and the weak die from hypo- thermia and respiratory illnesses during these months.4 The second peak in mortality occurs in June, after the rains begin. The torrential rains carry the bacteria in human wastes that have accumulated on the ground during the preceding months of the dry season through the porous limestone into the water table below (Back 1985: 101; Díaz and Góngora Triay 1977: 414). Therefore, the water in the cenotes is heavily contaminated at this time of year; many people who drink it fall ill with dysentery, and some of them die. In the days before antibiotics and the establishment of clinics in many Maya towns, dysentery was a major cause of death during the summer (Díaz and Góngora Triay: 414). In earlier times, before the authorities in Merida began importing grain from abroad during droughts (Patch 1993: 221–23), famines brought a third peak in mortality in late summer (July and August). During pro- longed periods of drought and concomitant years of poor harvests, the stores of grain were exhausted before the current crop (if there was one) could be harvested, and malnutrition followed by death set in. It is those years that received the most attention in regional histories because of the great suffering and massive dislocations they caused. Although our description is largely drawn from twentieth-century observations of climate in the northern part of the Yucatan peninsula prior to 1970 (Vivó Escoto 1964), it is similar to a report on the climate of the city of Merida in the Relaciones historico-geográficas de la gobernación de Yucatán, written in 1579 (Garza et al. 1983: 1:69–70; English translation in Roys 1931: 345–47). Recent paleoclimatic studies of lake sediments in northern Yucatan (for example, Curtis, Hodell, and Brenner 1996; Hodell, Brenner, and Curtis 2000) indicate the same range of short-term variations in climate since 1500. In short, available data suggest that there were no significant differences in the climate of Yucatan in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ethnohistorical Records of Drought and Famine

The most accessible sources on Yucatecan droughts and famines are the works of historians, such as Eligio Ancona (1878–80), Diego López de Cogolludo (1688), and Juan Francisco Molina Solís (1904–13), and the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Edmonson 1986; Roys 1933), which mention years when crops were ruined by droughts, hurricanes, and plagues of locusts, driving the Maya into the forest to subsist on wild plants. Less accessible but equally useful sources are the reports of colonial officials to

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the Crown, describing the conditions in Yucatan during years when such disasters struck. They are listed in Farriss (1984: table 2.2). Ricardo Molina Hübbe (1941) has summarized much of this information in a book appro- priately titled Las hambres de Yucatán (The Famines of Yucatan), quoting passages from Ancona (1878–80), López de Cogolludo (1688), Molina Solís (1904–13), and the diary of Jean-Frédéric Waldeck (1838), who trav- eled in Yucatan during the famine of 1834–36 and had to hide his provisions from the desperate, starving Indians he met on his journey (Molina Hübbe 1941:30–31).5 Years of drought, severe hurricanes, and locusts show up in the historical record because of their destructive impact on the human populations who depend on good harvests for their survival. Without rainfall, food plants wither and die; hurricanes and locusts destroy fields of grain before they can be harvested. Not recorded in the histories are the changes wrought in village life as a famine gets underway and deepens, nor how the survivors regroup in the intervening years and carry on with their lives. Yucatecan historians have documented the most dramatic effects of famines, not the gradual weakening of the population or the individual strategies taken to recover from them. For that, a different kind of data is needed, one that permits a fine- grained analysis over a period of weeks or months. Such data exist, but have not been used for this purpose in Yucatan. They can be found in wills and records of people who died during the years leading up to, during, and after famines. Ethnohistorians have used wills as sources of information on kinship relations and patterns of inheritance, wealth, and landholding in the Maya area (Cline 1986; Hill 1989, 1998; Restall 1995, 1998; Thompson 1999: chap. 4), but not for determining the incidence, course, and severity of famines. This is not surprising, because Maya wills rarely if ever mention the cause of death (cf. Restall 1997: 246–47). They are primarily instruments for distributing property to heirs and for specifying the type and cost of funerals. Their potential for use in recognizing famines comes from their differential frequency over a period of years, not their form and content. However, in order to be useful for this purpose, wills from one place must exist in sufficient numbers for such patterns to be detectable. Three relatively dense collections of Maya-language wills have survived from the colonial period in Yucatan, and all of them target famine years identified by colonial historians (Restall 1997: 246–47). The earliest collection—comprising thirty-four wills—comes from Cacalch’en, a small Maya town about thirty-nine kilometers east of Merida, and refers to the years 1646–56 and 1678.6 According to López de Cogolludo (1688: bk. 7,

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chap. 6, and bk. 12, chap. 23) and Cook and Borah (1974: 115), a famine beginning in 1651 and lasting until 1653 was preceded by a yellow fever epidemic that began in 1648 and lasted for two years and was followed by a smallpox epidemic in 1654. A much larger corpus of 373 wills that refer to the years 1724–59 origi- nated in Tekanto, about fifty-four kilometers east of Merida (fifteen kilometers east of Cacalch’en).7 Several famines occurred during those years, including a very severe one in 1725–27 (Molina Solís 1904–13: 3:178–81), followed by an El Niño event in 1728 (Caviedes 2001: table 6.1), and another famine in 1747 that may also be related to an El Niño event (Caviedes 2001: table 6.1). The third collection of sixty-five wills was produced by residents of Ixil, about twenty-four kilometers northeast of Merida (thirty-three kilometers northwest of Cacalch’en and forty-two kilometers northwest of Tekanto), which can be dated to 1765–68.8 That period was characterized by a plague of locusts in 1765, followed by a hurricane in 1766 (Molina Hübbe 1941: 25–26). For several reasons, it is not possible to rely on wills alone as a mea- sure of the timing or intensity of famines. First of all, not everyone leaves a will. Infants and children do not have wills, and not all adults realize that they are dying in time to produce a will. Second, wills may be recorded months or even years before the testator dies, especially if there is substantial property to inherit. And third, wills are sometimes lost (Restall 1997: 247). Therefore, the number of wills that are produced in a year may not be an accurate record of how many people died in the same year. Fortunately, there is another type of data that can serve as an indepen- dent check on the reliability of wills as indicators of famines. The registros parroquiales (parish registers) of the Catholic Church in Merida contain records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths for many Maya communities in Yucatan, covering the centuries since 1545, when the Spaniards completed their conquest of the peninsula. The earliest records, which refer to Conkal, near Merida, cover baptisms, beginning in 1586 and ending in 1968. There are marriage records for 1586, but the longest sequence begins in 1611 and continues with some interruptions until 1952. The death records begin much later—in 1682—and run until 1924. The records from other towns begin in later years, and there are gaps in the data for some years.9 Two of the three towns for which there are substantial collections of wills also have death records covering some or all of the relevant years: Tekanto and Ixil. The death records for Cacalch’en begin in 1862, about two centuries after the latest will in the collection (1678). For this reason, we are not able to include Cacalch’en in our study of the reliability of wills for

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identifying famine years and will focus instead on the relationship between the wills and death records of Tekanto and Ixil.10 Cook and Borah (1971: 51) have questioned the accuracy of the death records in parish registers, pointing out that “Mexican parishes, except in the cities, were fairly large and required much riding by the curates to provide religious care. Children could be born, have died, and be buried, and older persons could have died and been buried before the curate appeared to record either baptism or burial.” On the other hand, Cook and Borah (51) admit that death records do “give clear indications of the periods of mass mortality from famine or epidemic,” which is our principal concern. Unlike deaths, wills were recorded and notarized by members of the town government, so their production was not dependent on the irregular appearance of an itinerant curate. The curate added a postscript describing the type of mass he had performed (sung or recited) and the fees that had been paid, but he did not generate the wills themselves (his postscript was in a different hand from that of the will itself). However, wills by their very nature cannot account for child deaths at all, and not every adult left a will. Therefore, they have the same drawbacks as death records, exclud- ing all children and some adults from their purview. Our solution to the first problem was to limit our comparison of the two data sets to adults. The second problem—the possible underrepresentation of adult deaths—is one we have no means of addressing. Nevertheless, as we show below, the generally congruent frequencies of wills and death records and the fact that their peaks correspond to famine years suggest that there is a positive relationship between famine cycles and both kinds of data.

Tekanto Wills and Death Records

The Documentos de Tekanto contain 412 wills, representing the period from 1661 through 1833. Within this collection is a dense cluster of 373 wills that blanket the years 1724–59. In addition, there are four wills from the end of the seventeenth century, an isolated will from 1714, sixteen wills scattered over the years between 1759 and 1800, and eighteen wills from the first thirty-three years of the nineteenth century. Because none of these years is represented by more than two wills, we have not included them in our sample. The vast majority of the wills are brief, formulaic attestations of belief in the Catholic Church (see the example in Appendix A). Only fifty-six wills refer to bequests of property to heirs.11 The kinds of property willed by wealthier members of the Tekanto community are described in detail by Philip C. Thompson (1999: chap. 4). They include three types of land—

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forest (kax), fields col( ), and house plots (solar)—livestock (horses, cattle, mules, and beehives), trees, clothing (dresses, petticoats, and shawls), jewelry, household items (trunks, padlocks, plates, silver spoons, and doors), and money. However, almost 85 percent of the people who left wills did not mention bequests, suggesting that they did not own anything of sufficient value to pass on to their children after they died. The value of their wills for our research lies in the fluctuations in their number from year to year, which are related to the number of deaths that took place in Tekanto during the same years, which can in turn be related to famine cycles over a period of almost four decades during the eighteenth century. The short, formulaic wills were probably recorded only a short time before the person died (in many cases on the same day) and for this reason are likely to be reliable sources of information for determining the frequency of death by month (table 1). Some of the longer wills were clearly drawn up well in advance of the testator’s death and are therefore less useful for estimating the date of death. All the wills in the Documentos de Tekanto were written in Maya, and the notaries (labeled in Spanish as escribano) had Maya surnames. Personal names were derived from the names of Christian saints, which are marked for gender in Spanish. In all but one case, where the name was illegible, it was possible to distinguish between testators and testatrices. Table 2 shows that over the thirty-six-year period represented by most of the wills, approximately equal numbers of men and women produced testaments (179 men versus 193 women), but only ten women (compared to forty-six men) bequeathed property in their wills during that time period. The wills do not mention the age of people at death. Tucked in among the wills for 1726 are two lists of people (totaling seventy-four) who died during the famine that year.12 They died so quickly and in such great numbers—as many as five a day—that the notaries did not have time to record wills for them, and the notaries themselves may have been too sick to carry out their notarial functions (one of the notaries died in August of that year). We treat those lists as death records, not wills, and group them with the official records in the parish registry in our discussion below. The registros parroquiales of the Catholic Church of Yucatan in Merida include a set of death records for Tekanto that cover the years 1747 to 1784,13 overlapping the Tekanto wills by thirteen years (1747–59) (table 3, fig. 4). In compiling our sample of death records, we limited our attention to those for the years 1747 through 1768, the last year for which we have both wills and death records from Ixil, with which we will compare our Tekanto data. The Tekanto death records are demographically more heterogeneous

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Table 1. Monthly variation in the number of Tekanto wills for 1724–59

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total 1724 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 3 1725 1 0 0 2 2 2 0 1 0 2 0 2 12 1726 1 1 0 1 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 6 1727 0 1 1 2 1 0 0 1 0 0 3 3 12 1728 4 1 5 0 2 2 0 0 1 1 0 0 16 1729 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 4 1730 2 3 1 6 4 8 0 0 2 0 0 0 26 1731 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 3 1732 1 0 1 1 1 1 2 0 0 1 0 0 8 1733 1 1 1 0 4 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 13 1734 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 3 1735 0 3 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 5 1736 0 1 0 0 2 0 3 0 0 1 0 0 7 1737 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 4 1738 1 0 0 2 3 0 1 1 0 0 2 0 10 1739 2 4 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 9 1740 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 3 1741 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 2 0 0 0 2 7 1742 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 5 1743 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 4 1 0 0 2 10 1744 1 1 2 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 14 1745 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 1 7 1746 1 1 2 0 1 1 0 0 2 1 0 0 9 1747 3 3 1 5 1 5 5 7 1 1 4 3 39 1748 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 2 0 1 0 7 1749 3 2 2 0 2 0 0 1 0 2 9 1 22 1750 0 2 0 1 0 1 1 1 3 0 2 1 12 1751 1 0 1 1 3 1 1 3 5 2 0 5 23 1752 0 1 2 2 0 0 0 0 3 0 1 3 12 1753 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 3 1 1 0 1 9 1754 5 0 1 1 3 1 0 3 0 1 0 0 15 1755 0 2 0 3 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 1756 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1757 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 3 2 7 1758 1 4 1 1 0 3 3 0 1 0 0 0 14 1759 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 Total 31 35 27 34 35 34 25 34 32 18 28 32 365

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Table 2. Yearly variation in the number of Indian men and women who produced wills from 1724 through 1759

Year Men Women Total 1724 1 2 3 1725 8 7 15 1726 5 1 6 1727 2 11 13 1728 6 11 17 1729 1 3 4 1730 13 12 25 1731 2 3 5 1732 3 5 8 1733 6 7 13 1734 1 2 3 1735 4 1 5 1736 2 5 7 1737 2 2 4 1738 3 7 10 1739 3 7 10 1740 0 3 3 1741 3 4 7 1742 2 3 5 1743 5 5 10 1744 8 6 14 1745 5 2 7 1746 3 6 9 1747 22 15 37 1748 4 4 8 1749 13 9 22 1750 5 7 12 1751 13 10 23 1752 7 5 12 1753 4 5 9 1754 8 7 15 1755 2 6 8 1756 0 0 0 1757 4 4 8 1758 8 6 14 1759 1 0 1 Total 179 193 372

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Table 3. Monthly variation in the number of Tekanto deaths in 1726 and 1747–68 (raw totals)

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total 1726 2 0 0 2 5 5 13 32 0 6 4 5 74 1747 2 3 1 7 0 3 7 7 3 0 3 5 41 1748 2 0 0 3 0 2 1 0 0 0 1 0 9 1749 5 2 2 1 2 0 0 2 0 2 8 2 26 1750 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 3 1 2 0 10 1751 0 0 1 1 4 1 1 2 5 2 0 4 21 1752 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 3 10 1753 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 2 1 0 0 1 7 1754 3 0 1 2 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 10 1755 0 3 0 3 1 1 1 2 0 1 0 0 12 1756 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 1 8 1757 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 4 1 0 3 2 12 1758 1 4 1 1 0 3 3 1 1 2 3 1 21 1759 0 1 0 1 1 0 2 0 9 5 10 14 43 1760 13 10 5 3 5 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 40 1761 1 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 7 1762 0 3 1 1 0 0 1 2 3 0 2 1 14 1763 0 2 0 1 2 1 2 0 2 1 0 3 14 1764 2 0 1 1 0 0 3 0 1 0 1 1 10 1765 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 1 5 1 3 2 18 1766 0 1 6 5 9 6 2 1 3 1 0 3 37 1767 4 4 1 9 1 6 3 1 2 1 0 2 34 1768 2 2 1 2 0 0 0 4 1 4 6 4 26 Total 40 40 28 45 33 32 42 64 42 32 51 55 504

than the wills, including Spaniards, mestizos, and mulattos, as well as Indi- ans, and both children and adults. For this reason, the number of deaths recorded per year is usually greater than the number of wills, but the pattern of highs and lows in both data sets is generally the same (fig. 4), except for 1759, when children accounted for more than half of the deaths,14 and six of the remaining nineteen people who died were not Indians. If children and non-Indians are subtracted from the death records, the difference between the two samples is less evident (table 4 and fig. 5).15 The principal remaining discrepancy between the samples concerns the year 1726, when seventy-four deaths were listed but only six wills were recorded. Three of the people who died in 1726 had already filed wills during the previous year (Petrona Bacab, Maria Ku, and Christobal May), and two other people who died in 1726 had already produced wills in the same

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Figure 4. Comparison of yearly variation in the number of wills and all recorded deaths in Tekanto (1747–68). Graph of data from tables 1 and 3

year (Damiana Camal and Buenaventura Couoh). Four people registered wills in 1726 but are not listed as having died during that year (Francisco Chan, Pedro Couoh, Antonio Ku, and Diego Na). Thus, only five of the seventy-four people who were listed as dying in 1726 had produced wills before they died. Sixty-nine people (93.2 percent) died without leaving wills. This contrasts with the situation in other years, when there was a much larger overlap between the number of wills and the number of deaths (table 4). Table 5 contains a possible explanation for the paucity of wills in 1726. The deaths were concentrated in two months: July (thirteen) and August (thirty-two). In no other year were so many deaths recorded for a single month (the maximum number of adult deaths in a month in other years was eight). Four notaries recorded wills in 1726. Joseph Chan had been the notary in 1724 and 1725 and continued through February 1726. He is not mentioned in any later wills, nor is his name on the list of deaths for that year, but he served again as a notary in 1741. Three other notaries officiated in Tekanto in 1726. Agustin Yx served as the notary for the wills of Fran- cisco Chan (dated 5 July) and Pedro Couoh (dated 16 July). He is never mentioned as a notary again, and his name appears on the list of people

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Table 4. Comparison of the number of Tekanto wills and death records for adult Indians in 1726 and 1747–59

Year Wills Deaths Overlap 1726 6 74 2 1747 39 40 34 1748 7 7 3 1749 22 24 20 1750 12 9 8 1751 23 19 18 1752 12 8 8 1753 9 7 6 1754 15 10 9 1755 8 11 5 1756 1 9 0 1757 7 11 7 1758 14 19 14 1759 1 15 1 Total 176 263 135

who died in 1726 (on 4 August). Juan Chan is mentioned as one of three notaries on Francisco Chan’s will (the others were Agustin Yx and Luis May). He disappears from the notarial record after that. Luis May’s name also appears on Francisco Chan’s will as a notary and as the only notary on Diego Na’s will (dated 2 September). His name is mentioned again as a notary in 1732 and 1736, so he was probably one of the survivors. However, he may have been too weak from hunger to record wills for the thirty-two people who died during August.16 There were also many deaths in 1747 (forty in all), but they were more evenly spread out across the months of the year (table 5). Perhaps for this reason, the number of wills and adult deaths were in close agreement (thirty- nine versus forty) (table 4). 1747 was an El Niño year (Caviedes 2001: 152, table 6.1); 1726 was not. An El Niño occurred two years later (Caviedes: 152, table 6.1), too late to have been the cause of the deaths in 1726. Another way of assessing the relationship between wills and death records is to consider the extent to which the people who produced the wills also show up in the death records.17 Table 4 shows that except for four years (1726, 1748, 1756, and 1759), the majority of testators are listed in the death records. In comparing the names of the testators with the names of people who died in the same year, we discovered some interesting discrepancies in the

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Figure 5. Comparison of yearly variation in the number of wills and adult deaths in Tekanto (1747–59). Graph of data from table 4

dates found in wills and death records of the same individuals. In 1747, a high mortality year, forty people died, and there were thirty-nine wills. There was also a large overlap between the wills and the death records for that year; we were able to match thirty-four of the thirty-nine testators with their death records. However, in sixteen cases, the dates on the wills followed the dates mentioned in the death records, suggesting that the wills were written after these people died. We suspect that because of the heavy demand for his services that year, the notary (Felipe Poot) fell behind in writing the wills and recorded the dates when they were notarized, not when they were dictated by the dying man or woman. This suggests a two- stage process in the production of some wills. First, the notary made notes of the wishes of the soon-to-be deceased. On a later date, the notary wrote the will based on his notes and notarized it, giving the date when it was completed.18 If the testator died in the meantime, his will would bear a date after his death. These discrepancies are usually small and rarely extend into the next month or calendar year (there was only one such case in 1747). The utility of wills for identifying famine periods is therefore not limited by such chronological inconsistencies, and the close agreement in the pattern of highs and lows of wills and deaths in figure 5 suggests that they are equally

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Table 5. Monthly variation in the number of adult Tekanto deaths in 1726 and 1747–68 (Indians only)

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total 1726 2 0 0 2 5 5 13 32 0 6 4 5 74 1747 2 3 1 6 0 3 7 7 3 0 3 5 40 1748 2 0 0 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 7 1749 4 2 2 1 2 0 0 1 0 2 8 2 24 1750 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 3 1 2 0 9 1751 0 0 1 1 2 1 1 2 5 2 0 4 19 1752 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 3 8 1753 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 2 1 0 0 1 7 1754 3 0 1 2 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 10 1755 0 2 0 3 1 1 1 2 0 1 0 0 11 1756 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 1 8 1757 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3 1 0 3 2 11 1758 1 4 1 1 0 3 3 0 1 1 3 1 19 1759 0 1 0 1 1 0 2 0 3 1 4 2 15 1760 1 1 2 1 3 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 12 1761 1 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 7 1762 0 3 1 1 0 0 1 1 3 0 2 1 13 1763 0 2 0 1 2 1 1 0 1 1 0 3 12 1764 2 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 8 1765 1 0 1 2 0 0 1 1 5 1 3 1 16 1766 0 1 6 5 9 5 2 1 2 1 0 2 34 1767 4 4 1 9 1 6 2 1 2 1 0 2 33 1768 2 2 1 2 0 0 0 4 1 4 6 3 25 Total 26 30 25 42 28 30 37 59 34 26 45 40 422

effective in pinpointing famine periods. Therefore, we think there may be some justification for supplementing the Tekanto death records with wills to extend the time series for famine cycles back to 1724 (fig. 6).19

Ixil Wills and Death Records

The Testaments of Ixil contain sixty-five wills that have been transcribed and translated by Restall (1995). The temporal range of these wills is much narrower (1765–68) than those from Tekanto (1714, 1724–59), which they follow by six years (table 6). There are other differences as well. First, state- ments about the type of posthumous mass that will be performed (sung or recited) and the fees that will be paid are incorporated into the wills themselves (see example in Appendix B), rather than relegated to the mar-

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Figure 6. Graph of yearly variation in the number of wills and/or all recorded deaths in Tekanto (1724–68). Data from tables 1 and 3

gins of the text as notes, as in the wills from Tekanto. Second, the Ixil wills routinely mention the parents of the testators and testatrices, information that is lacking in the Tekanto wills (compare appendixes A and B). As we explain below, this information can be helpful in searching for overlaps between the wills and the death records. Third, more than two-thirds of the Ixil wills (44 of 65) mention bequests, compared with only 15 percent of the Tekanto wills (56 of 373), suggesting that the people of Ixil (or at least those who produced wills during those years) were better off than the people of Tekanto. The additional information in Ixil wills, even the purely formulaic ones, makes them richer sources of data about life in an eighteenth-century Maya community in Yucatan, which is reflected in Restall’s (1995) insight- ful commentary on the wills from this town. On the other hand, the death records from Ixil for 1765–6820 are much more difficult to interpret than the ones from Tekanto. The records for the first eight months of 1765 are in excellent condition (table 7). After that, the pages containing the records for the rest of that year and the beginning of 1766 are largely illegible because the ink has eaten the paper away. The names and dates of the deceased can no longer be read, but it is still possible to estimate the number of deaths for those years because traces of the

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Table 6. Monthly variation in the number of Ixil wills for 1765–68

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total 1765 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1766 9 2 3 4 2 1 1 3 1 1 4 3 34 1767 4 0 0 0 3 3 3 1 1 2 4 4 25 1768 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 Total 14 2 3 4 5 4 4 4 2 3 9 7 61

Table 7. Monthly variation in the number of Ixil deaths in 1765–68 (raw totals)

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total 1765 6 5 5 4 4 7 9 11 — — — — 51 1766 — — — 1 2 0 3 1 0 0 0 1 8 1767 5 0 5 0 3 1 3 1 1 3 6 5 33 1768 1 — — — — — — — — — — — 1 Total 12 5 10 5 9 8 15 13 1 3 6 6 93

notations that accompany each record in the left margin are still visible and therefore countable. There are six records per page on the “good” pages and traces of an equal number of notations on each of the sixteen damaged pages. A record of the death of Geronimo Tec on 7 February at the end of one of the pages gives us an approximate beginning of the sequence for 1766. His will—dated 15 February 1766—is in the Testaments of Ixil. The notary must have dated it after Tec died (or perhaps the date of the death record was 17 February). On a previous page, there is a reference to a Phelipe Coba; the date is not legible, but a man with that name produced a will with 12 January 1766 as its date. If they were the same person, this record would fall at or near the beginning of the series for 1766. The name of Pedro Couoh appears a few pages earlier without a legible date. The will of someone with the same name is dated 28 November 1765. If he is the person mentioned in the death record, his name would be one of the last in the series for 1765. In this way, we have approximated where the records for 1765 ended and those for 1766 began. The end of the page that follows the one containing a record of Geronimo Tec’s death on 7 or 17 February mentions the death of a Buena- ventura Yam in April (the day is not legible), for whom the Testaments of Ixil has a will dated 4 April 1766. After that, the pages are in better condition, and it is not necessary to estimate the number of wills for the rest of

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Table 8. Number of adult and child deaths noted in still legible records for Ixil for 1765–68

Year Adults Percent Children Percent Total 17651 27 50.0 27 50.0 54 17662 15 93.7 1 6.2 16 1767 27 79.4 7 2.1 34 17683 1 100.0 0 0.0 1 1. Death records for January through August 2. Death records for May through December plus scattered legible records for January and February 3. A single record in January

Table 9. Estimated number of Ixil adult and child deaths for 1765–67 based on the percentages shown in table 8

Year Adults Children Total 1765 51 51 102 1766 39 3 42 17671 27 7 34 1. These are the actual figures because the death records are not damaged.

1766 and subsequent years using vestiges of marginal notations on damaged pages. The last of the sequence of legible records for 1765 is dated 25 August. By then, fifty-four people had already died in that year. We estimate that an additional forty-eight people died in the remaining four months of the year, based on the number of damaged pages (eight) and the marginal notations on them. Thus, our total estimate for the year is 102 deaths (tables 8 and 9).21 Our estimate for 1766 is forty-two, based on the same criteria involving seven damaged pages (tables 8 and 9). Table 8 shows that exactly half of the people whose deaths were recorded during the first eight months of 1765 were children.22 Assuming that children represented the same proportion of deaths during the last four months of the year, we estimate that fifty-one adults died throughout the year (table 9). Using the same assumption, we estimate that thirty-nine adults died in 1766 (table 9). Table 10 compares the figures for wills and deaths in the four years and shows the number of wills that have counter- parts in the death records. It is clear from tables 8 and 10 that 1765 was a high mortality year for Ixil, comparable to 1726 for Tekanto, not only in the

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Table 10. Comparison of the number of Ixil wills and death records for adult Indians in 1765–68

Year Wills Deaths Overlap 1765 5 51 2 1766 34 39 6 1767 25 27 18 1768 1 1 1 Total 65 118 27

large number of deaths, but also in the significant discrepancy between the number of wills and recorded deaths (six wills versus seventy-four deaths in Tekanto and five wills versus fifty-one deaths in Ixil) (compare tables 4 and 10). We suspect that with so many people dying in Ixil in 1765, the notary was not able to keep up with the demand for wills, as was clearly the case in Tekanto in 1726. This may not, however, be the complete explanation for the large discrepancy between the number of wills and recorded deaths in Ixil in 1765. More than half of the people who are listed in the legible death records for that year (both adults and children) are described as indios hidalgos, whereas none of the testators in 1765 and later years are classified as indios hidalgos. Thus, the overlap we see between the wills and the death records comes from people who were Indians, but not indios hidalgos. The principal indio hidalgo family in Ixil had the surname Pech. Their ancestors were given the special status of indio hidalgo, which exempted them from paying tribute, because they cooperated with the Spaniards during the Conquest. Of the fifty-four deaths that are legible in the records for 1765, twenty-eight were of people (both adults and children) with the surname Pech, whereas none of the wills in the Testaments of Ixil were produced by people with the Pech surname. Their wills must have been archived in another place and have not come to light.23 The high concentration of people named Pech in the death records is striking. With their higher status and undoubtedly greater wealth, they should have been less susceptible to disease or famine in 1765 than their lower-status neighbors, but that seems not to have been the case.

Analysis of High Mortality Years

In table 3, 1726, 1747, 1759, 1760, 1766, and 1767 stand out as high mortality years in Tekanto and are therefore prime candidates for further con-

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sideration. We have grouped 1759 and 1760 together in our analysis because the deaths cluster in four consecutive months that span the two years, and we treat 1765 through 1767 as a unit to facilitate comparison with the high mortality figures in Ixil for the same years. Our analysis takes both the month-to-month and year-to-year variation in the number of deaths into account, as well as the historical and climatological information available to us, in identifying the cause(s) of high mortality in the targeted years.

The Famine of 1725–27 The rains failed in 1725, resulting in a drought and subsequent famine that lasted until 1727 (Ancona 1878–80: 2:412; Molina Solís 1904–13: 3:178– 81). The extant sequence of death records for Tekanto began twenty years later and those for Ixil an additional twenty years beyond that. Fortunately, the deaths in 1726, at the height of the famine, are listed on two sheets of paper among the wills from Tekanto, which cover the years 1724 to 1759. That list permits us to assess the month-by-month impact of the famine on the people of Tekanto in 1726. The year 1726 seems to have begun quietly with two deaths in Janu- ary (table 3). No one died in February or March. The two deaths in April echo the number for January. Then, in May and June, the number increases to five, followed by thirteen deaths in July and rising to thirty-two deaths in August. There were no deaths in September, and the numbers taper off after that, with six deaths in October, four deaths in November, and five deaths in December. The grim total for the year was seventy-four deaths, the largest number of deaths recorded for Tekanto during the period under consideration. Such a high mortality figure should have been accompanied by a con- comitantly large number of wills. In fact, however, fewer wills were produced in 1726 than 1725 (six versus twelve), the first year of the drought (table 1). We have already explained this discrepancy in terms of notarial overload. There were so many deaths in 1726 that the notaries had time only to compile the list of the people who died in that year, and they themselves may have been too weak from hunger to carry out their normal duties. Table 3 suggests that the poor harvest in 1725 yielded only enough food to sustain people during the first half of 1726. By July, the situation was becoming desperate, and the number of deaths increased sharply, culmi- nating in an average of more than one death per day in August. The total for July and August—forty-five deaths—is an obvious sign of famine. The new crop (if there was one) could not be harvested until several months hence, and without stockpiled reserves from the previous year, people were dying.

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By 1727, the number of Tekanto wills had returned to the total for 1725 (twelve), suggesting that the famine was coming to an end (table 1). Unfor- tunately, there are no death records for that and subsequent years until 1747, so we are not able to analyze the monthly variations in deaths for the last year of the famine nor the yearly fluctuations in the number of deaths between 1726 and 1747.

The El Niño of 1747 The second highest death toll (forty) of adult Indians in Tekanto occurred in 1747, which was also the year when the largest number of wills (thirty- nine) were produced (tables 1 and 5). The overlap between wills and deaths was very high in that year as well (thirty-four of thirty-nine wills) (table 4). According to Caviedes (2001: table 6.1), 1747 was an El Niño year. Droughts are more likely in Yucatan during such years because the cooler than normal waters of the Atlantic generate fewer hurricanes in the summer and fall. Patch (1993: 218) mentions a crop failure caused by a drought in 1747. Evidently, the impact of this drought on Tekanto was less severe than the one in 1725–27, for there were only seven adult Indian deaths in Tekanto in 1748, one of the two lowest yearly mortality figures in our sample (table 5). Furthermore, the drought seems to have lasted for only one year. Appar- ently, only multiyear droughts were regarded as serious enough to receive the attention of Yucatecan historians (Farriss 1984: 61, table 2.2).

A Possible Epidemic in 1759–60 Table 3 indicates that, in Tekanto, forty-three people died in 1759 and forty people in 1760. Of these eighty-three people, fifty-one children accounted for more than half the deaths, which were clustered in November and Decem- ber of 1759 and January and February of 1760. This pattern of so many children dying during the coldest months of the year suggests an epidemic of some kind, probably a respiratory illness such as influenza or whooping cough. When the child deaths are subtracted (table 5), the remaining adult deaths are distributed more evenly across the other months of the years, implying that the adults were not as susceptible to the disease.

The Famine of 1765–68 A plague of locusts in 1765 consumed the harvest for that year (Farriss 1984: 61, table 2.2), and a hurricane destroyed crops in 1766 (Roys 1933: 143). The death records for Ixil suggest that the people of that town were deeply affected by these two natural disasters occurring in quick succession. As explained above, we have estimated that 102 people died in Ixil in 1765 (about half of them children), 42 people in 1766 (only three children), and

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34 people in 1767 (including seven children). Damage to the records did not permit us to assign the deaths that occurred between August 1765 and April 1766 to specific months. Only one will is dated to 1765, the year with the highest apparent frequency of deaths, perhaps for the same reason that wills were underrepre- sented in 1726 in Tekanto, namely that the notaries were overwhelmed by the number of deaths. Thirty-four wills were produced in 1766 and twenty- five wills in 1767, tracking closely the number of deaths recorded for those years (table 10), but not the people who actually died (because of damage to the pages). Table 3 shows that 1766 and 1767 were also high mortality years in Tekanto, with thirty-seven and thirty-four deaths, respectively, compared with the mean of twenty-two deaths in the twenty-three-year sample. The two towns are not far from each other and therefore may have been equally affected by the locusts in 1766 and the hurricane in 1767. The sequence of wills ends abruptly in 1759 and therefore is not relevant for these years.

Discussion

We have shown that the highest frequencies of deaths in table 3 correspond to years when a variety of disasters occurred: droughts, locusts, hurricanes, and epidemics. Multiyear famines—caused by droughts, locusts, and/or hurricanes—leave a distinctive signature in death records and wills. The number of deaths is often greater in the second year than the first and is usually concentrated in July and August, when the stores of food from previous years have been exhausted and before the new crops can be harvested. In very high mortality years, the number of wills may actually be much fewer than normal because the notaries do not have time to record them or because people die before they have time to dictate them. Epidemics have a different signature: they strike during the cold months (November— February) and affect children more than adults. Contrary to expectation, tables 3 and 7 reveal no clustering of deaths in June—the month when intestinal parasites produce dysentery today—in any year during the eighteenth century. We suspect that this difference is a result of two factors. First, the freshwater lens floating on salt water below the limestone shelf that composes the Yucatan peninsula was probably much thicker before modern pumping methods facilitated its use in industry and irrigation (Doehring and Butler 1974). Second, the much lower population in the peninsula in colonial times meant that less human waste washed into the aquifer at the beginning of the rainy season. With more freshwater in the aquifer and fewer microorganisms being swept into it by rain, the water

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brought up from the wells would have been less polluted with intestinal parasites than it is today. This may be why there was no increase in the number of deaths in June. Table 3 shows that two of the lowest mortality years in our sample (nine deaths in 1748 and seven deaths in 1761) immediately followed years of exceptionally high mortality (forty-one deaths in 1747 and eighty-three deaths in 1759–60). In colonial Tekanto, as in early modern Europe (Flinn 1981: 20–21; Livi-Bacci 1997: 54), famines and epidemics weeded out the weakest and most vulnerable members of the community—the old and the very young; those who survived were more resilient and less likely to die during the year following a crisis, when the mortality dropped to a lower than normal level. “Crises, in other words, both brought forward and delayed some of the mortality of the post-crisis period” (Flinn 1981: 21). The high mortality years must have wrought havoc on both the individual and the community. In an agrarian society, where daily tasks were rigidly segregated by sex (Farriss 1984: 132–34), the loss of a man or a woman would have seriously disrupted households. The death of a husband meant that the surviving spouse had to depend on her male relatives to supply much of the food for her household, whereas the loss of a wife might leave the surviving spouse with no one to prepare his food or care for their children. Remarriage was one strategy for coping with the death of a spouse. Marriage records included in the registros parroquiales of the Catholic Church in Merida allow us to examine marriage and remarriage behavior. The marriage records for Tekanto postdate the period represented by the wills and death records that have been the subject of this study, and the marriage records for Ixil predate it. We discuss the Ixil marriage records here, along with those from Huhi, a small town south of Tekanto.24 The Ixil marriage records refer to the years 1644–1703.25 We include the Huhi marriage records in this discussion because they refer to the years 1669–1755 and are therefore more closely aligned with the years represented by the wills and death records examined in this paper. The two sets of marriage records provide a clear picture of how widows and widowers regrouped after the death of their spouses during major famines and epidemics.26 Table 11 shows that the number of widow and widower remarriages increased markedly in the aftermath of a severe famine or epidemic. The number of first marriages for both bride and groom appears in column 2, the number of marriages in which either the bride or the groom (but not both) has not been married before appears in column 3, and the number of marriages involving both a widow and a widower appears in column 4. Also included are the number of marriages recorded in each year and the

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Table 11. Ixil remarriage data for 1644–1703. Data courtesy of Philip C. Thompson

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) First First Re- Total Marriage Marriage Marriage Total Total Widows/ Year (both) (one) (both) Marriages Individuals Widowers % 1644 12 1 4 17 34 9 26 1645 12 3 3 18 36 9 25 1646 23 1 11 35 70 23 32 1647 21 0 9 30 60 18 30 1648 36 1 3 40 80 7 9 1649 19 4 8 31 62 20 32 1650 19 6 5 30 60 16 27 1651 8 3 5 16 32 13 41 1652 9 4 3 16 32 10 31 1653 31 7 15 53 106 37 34 1654 43 2 7 52 104 16 15 1655 3 1 21 25 50 43 86 1656 4 1 5 10 20 11 55 1657 7 3 4 14 28 11 39 1658 28 5 9 42 84 23 27 1659 11 4 3 18 36 10 28 1660 14 1 7 22 44 15 34 1661 12 2 17 31 62 36 58 1662 14 1 7 22 44 15 34 1663 11 1 9 21 42 19 45 1664 9 0 0 9 18 0 0 1665 7 1 4 12 24 9 38 1666 6 1 5 12 24 11 46 1667 5 0 2 7 14 4 28 1668 9 2 3 14 28 8 29 1669 4 0 3 7 14 6 43 1670 9 2 9 20 40 20 50 1671 12 0 3 15 30 6 20 1672 3 0 1 4 8 2 25 1673 24 1 6 31 62 13 21 1674 15 1 7 23 46 15 33 1675 6 1 3 10 20 7 35 1676 12 1 4 17 34 9 26 1677 17 1 1 19 38 3 7 1678 10 1 8 19 38 17 45 1679 14 0 2 16 32 4 13 1680 14 0 3 17 34 6 18 1681 18 2 3 23 46 8 17

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Table 11. Continued

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) First First Re- Total Marriage Marriage Marriage Total Total Widows/ Year (both) (one) (both) Marriages Individuals Widowers % 1682 10 0 2 12 24 4 16 1683 10 0 4 14 28 8 29 1684 22 0 1 23 46 2 4 1685 9 0 4 13 26 8 31 1686 29 0 4 33 66 8 12 1687 9 2 4 15 30 10 33 1688 18 1 5 24 48 11 22 1689 13 0 3 16 32 6 19 1690 34 0 6 40 80 12 15 1691 24 1 3 28 56 7 13 1692 17 0 4 21 42 8 19 1693 15 6 44 65 130 94 72 1694 30 1 6 37 74 13 18 1695 20 3 5 28 56 13 23 1696 12 1 4 17 34 9 26 1697 13 0 6 19 38 12 32 1698 17 0 4 21 42 8 19 1699 21 1 6 28 56 13 23 1700 28 0 12 40 80 24 30 1701 15 0 4 19 38 8 21 1702 20 0 7 27 54 14 26 1703 1 0 0 1 2 0 0

total number of widows and widowers who remarried in a given year. The percentage of individuals remarrying after the death of a spouse spiked dramatically to 86 percent in 1655 and to 72 percent in 1693, following the severe epidemics and famines of 1648–53 and 1692–93 (Farriss 1984: 61).27 Likewise in Huhi, although the number of individuals marrying in any given year was much smaller than in Ixil, the percentage of individuals remarrying after the death of a spouse spiked following the famines and epidemics of 1692–93 and 1725–27, as well as the famine of 1730. We tested the significance of the frequencies of individuals remarrying at these times using chi-squared tests of the significance of difference. We used the raw frequencies of widows/widowers remarrying versus other individuals marrying for the first time during years grouped into three categories: (1) those immediately preceding the epidemic and/or famine,

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(2) those when the epidemic or famine took place, and (3) those immediately following the disaster(s). Our research hypothesis was that widow/ widower marriages would be more common during the years of the disaster or during the years immediately following it or both than during the previous years. In Ixil, we found that the hypothesized pattern was indeed present for the years surrounding the famines combined with epidemics in 1648–53, 1692–93, and 1699–1700 and the epidemic alone in 1659 (Farriss 1984: 61). The frequency differences were highly significant for the combined calamities of 1692 and 1693 (chi-squared = 85.242, with two degrees of freedom; P<.0001). The situation for the famine and epidemic of 1648 to 1653 was less extreme, but it should probably still be regarded as a real difference (chi-squared = 5.964, with two degrees of freedom; P=.05). The other two cases tested, while conforming to the hypothesized pattern, were not significant at the .05 level. There is, however, no question about the reality of the pattern. When the data from all four disaster episodes are combined to achieve larger sample sizes, the frequencies of widows/widowers remarrying during and immediately following calamitous events are significantly greater than would be expected by chance alone (chi-squared = 13.222, with one degree of freedom; P=.0003). In Huhi we found that the hypothesized pattern was also present for the years surrounding the famines combined with epidemics in 1692–93, 1699–1700, and 1725–27 and the famines alone in 1730 and 1742 (Farriss 1984: 61). The frequency differences were highly significant for the combined calamities of 1725–27 (chi-squared = 10.716, with two degrees of freedom; P=.005), which included the high-mortality year for which we have death records from Tekanto (1726). The situation for the famine of 1730 was significant as well (chi-squared = 5.649, with two degrees of freedom; P=.006). The three other cases tested, while conforming to the hypothesized pattern, are not significant at the .05 level. The situation for the famine of 1742 is interesting in that although only one widow married during the famine year, this individual was the only widow or widower to marry during an eight year period that began in 1738. When the data from all four disaster episodes are combined to achieve larger sample sizes, the frequencies of widows or widowers remarrying during and immediately following calamitous events are significantly greater than would be expected by chance alone (chi-squared = 8.148, with one degree of freedom; P=.004). If the data for the 1742 famine are not included, the frequencies become even more significant (chi-squared = 11.112, with one degree of freedom; P=.0008). Sometimes both parents died in an epidemic or famine, leaving young children with no one to care for them. They might be adopted by relatives

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or other people in the community. The term tzen pal was used for both adopted and foster children (Arzápalo Marín 1995: 196). Four wills in the Documentos de Tekanto and three wills in the Testaments of Ixil mention bequests to adopted or foster children. It is possible that, in some cases, the tzen pal who was named as a beneficiary in a will was actually the illegiti- mate child of the testator (e.g., Restall 1995: 90–95), although this seems unlikely when the testator was a woman (e.g., Restall: 29–31). A beneficiary with the same surname as a male testator who was labeled as a tzen pal rather than a son (mehen) or daughter (ix mehen), may have been a niece or nephew orphaned during an epidemic or famine (e.g., Restall: 106–9). The institution of adoption or fosterage must have provided a safety net for children who lost their parents. On the community level, we have already discussed the impact of high mortality years on record-keeping and the workload of notaries. Other institutions affected include the town council, the administration of church property, and traditional medicine. The functions of the town council would have been interrupted if its members were among the dead or dying, although their departure may have opened up opportunities for younger, less experienced members of the elite. In Ixil, where many of the men who died in 1765 were hidalgos, their deaths may have cleared the way for ambi- tious commoners to move into positions of responsibility. The same would have been true of the sodalities of the church, which managed its estates. And the loss of shamans meant that there would be no one to tend the sick and perform agricultural rites in the future. Finally, Tekanto and Ixil are not the only towns in the Yucatan peninsula with death records extending back into colonial times (although they are the only communities known to us whose wills overlap their death records chronologically). The range of many sets of death records begins in the late sixteenth century and continues into the late eighteenth century and beyond. An analysis of those records could extend our knowledge of the impact of natural disasters on the human population of the Yucatan peninsula in both space and time.28 With data from more towns it would be possible to determine whether a drought was a local or regionwide phe- nomenon and permit the creation of a historical time series against which climatologists could evaluate global weather patterns in the past, as has been done for China and Japan (Caviedes 2001: 210–12). Under careful scrutiny, the death records of the Yucatan peninsula could be just as valu- able sources of information on the “human implications of climatic fluctuations” (Caviedes: 259) as the flowering dates of cherry trees in Japan and monsoon failures in China.

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Appendix A

A Typical Will from Tekanto (transcribed and translated by Victoria Bricker)

cimi salbador camal Salvador Camal died.

tu kaba dios yumbil y dios mehenbil y dios espiritu santo In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,

tu kaba yx ah bolon pixan ca cilich colelbil ti suhuy santa maria and in the name of the Our Blessed Lady who is Virgin Saint Mary,

bin y oheltob tu lacal uinicob yanil yn tixtamento yn tokyah than all men are going to know that my last will and testament exists.

cen salbador camal uay tekanto tu mektan cahil ca yumilan I who am Salvador Camal here in Tekanto in the jurisdiction of our father

ah bolon pixan san agustin uay tekanto blessed [literally, nine souls] Saint Augustine here in Tekanto.

ah cimilon ix tac lacal And we are all mortals.

ti ma inu ohel ua yx bin cimcen yn yanil tin ch’apahal yn yanil For I do not know if I am going to die from this illness of mine.

bay ocanil tinu ol ca cilich na ti santa yglesia Thus I believe in our Blessed Mother who is the Holy Church.

lay bin tocic yn pixan ti u lobol balob This will snatch my soul away from wicked things.

hele en 2 de diciembre de 1744 años Today on December 2, 1744 years.

tin tan cen felipe pot ess.no Before me, Felipe Poot notary.

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Appendix B

A Typical Will from Ixil (transcribed and translated by Victoria Bricker)

cimi nicolasa tec en 28 de marso de 1766 a.s Nicolasa Tec died on March 28, 1766 years.

tu kaba ds yumbil y dios espiritu santo In the name of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit,

ox tul personas hun tulil d.s uchuc tumen tu sinil ma ix pimobi three persons are one God Almighty and Omnipotent.

lay bin ylabac u hunil yn takyah than tin testamento The document of my last will in my testament shall be seen.

hi bicil tenil cen nicolasa tec uy ix mehen mar.n tec Inasmuch as I am Nicolasa Tec, the daughter of Martin Tec,

uy alen maria coba ah cahnalen uay tu mektan cahil the daughter of Maria Coba, I am a resident here in the jurisdiction

ah bolon pixan sa bernaber yxil lae of this blessed [literally, nine souls] Saint Bernabel Ixil.

bacac ix cimil in cah lae Although I am dying,

toh uol tin nat yl tin pucsikal uet sihci lae my heart and my reasoning are content, as is natural.

bay xan lic ix uoktic yn ba ti ca pixanil yum padre cura Likewise, I supplicate our fortunate Father priest curate

ca u mansen tu payal chi ychil u misa to remember me in a prayer in a mass.

bay xan uolah mucul yn uinicil ychil santa yglesia lae Likewise, I want my body to be buried in this Holy Church.

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bay xan bin dzabac u limosnail misa uac ppel tumin Likewise, the mass fee shall be given: six gold coins.

bay xan patcaan yn cah tu bal yn ba lae Likewise, I declare these possessions of mine:

bay xan hun ppel ch’en y tanbuh solal cin dzaic ti ynu al juan chan Likewise, one well with half a house plot I give to my son, Juan Chan,

y hun ac kax yan tu chikin tix culix with one forest plot that exists to the west of Ix Culix;

u tzayal chikin lae agus.n yam ti nohole andres yam its western neighbor is Agustin Yam; to the south is Andres Yam.

y hun ppel boch’ u tial ynu abil pet.na chan And one shawl is for my granddaughter, Petrona Chan.

bay xan he ix lay ch’en y solal yn cahlic lae Likewise, here is this well and house plot where I live,

yan u hahal than rosa coyi ynu etel this is a true statement, with Rosa Coyi.

uchic yn mul mantic lay solal y ch’en y lae This house plot and well that I purchased jointly,

cin patic tun tu kab ynu al juan chan I leave then in the hands of my son, Juan Chan.

u cacah y ca bin xuluc u cuxtalob hunhun tul tiob lae . . . and their lives will end, each one of them.

lay u chun licil in uacuntic hun tul al mehen anderez cob aluasias This is the reason I appoint one nobleman, Andres Cob, as executor.

lay bin tan oltic u katic misa It is he who will take care of requesting a mass.

tu tan batab y jusias Before the chief and justices:

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joseph pech ad.es diego may ad.es Joseph Pech magistrate, Diego May magistrate,

capp.n d.n yg.o tec batab Captain Don Ignacio Tec, chief.

pablo tec ess.no Pablo Tec notary.

antt.o tec fran.co canul antt.o pech pedro canul regir.sob lae Antonio Tec, Francisco Canul, Antonio Pech, Pedro Canul, these town councilors.

dijose esta misa resada y lo firme He said this prayed mass, and I signed it.

fr juan de hoyos Friar Juan de Hoyos.

Notes

We are grateful to Philip C. Thompson for his assistance with some of the details in the article, to Harvey M. Bricker for his advice on the map and the graphs, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript. 1 According to Clifford Brown (personal communication to Victoria Bricker, 1 March 2006), the rainmaking ceremony of Telchaquillo, which is also in the western part of the peninsula, was carried out on 23 July in 2005. 2 The same was true of the rainmaking ceremony that was performed in Sotuta in 2005, which took place on 17 August in that year (Clifford Brown, personal communication to Victoria Bricker, 27 February 2006). 3 Eleuterio Po’ot Yah, personal communication to Victoria Bricker, 15 June 1987. 4 Philip C. Thompson, personal communication to Victoria Bricker, 6 August 2003. 5 These passages have been translated into English by Gill (2000: 304–9). 6 These wills are on the first thirty-four pages of the Libro de Cacalch’en (also known as the Libro de los Cocomes) that contains the records of the municipal council of Cacalch’en. It was once owned by William Gates (Tozzer 1921: 204), but the present whereabouts of the original Libro is unknown. We consulted facsimile copies of these pages in the Latin American Library at Tulane University. Other facsimile copies of the entire Libro are in the Tozzer Library at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (Weeks 1990: 207). 7 These wills are part of the Documentos de Tekanto, a collection of around 550

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documents from the municipal records of the town of Tekanto, which are now in the Archivo Notarial del Estado in Merida, Yucatan (Thompson 1999: 1). They were microfilmed by Philip Thompson in 1975, who listed all the documents by date in Appendix 1 of his book on Tekanto (Thompson: 315–33). The collection also includes four wills from the late seventeenth century (1661, 1679, and 1696?), one will from the second decade of the eighteenth century (1714), sixteen wills from the last four decades of the eighteenth century (1764, 1766– 67, 1769–70, 1772, 1776, 1788, 1793, 1795, and 1798–99), and eighteen wills from the first half of the nineteenth century (1803–5, 1807–10, 1812, 1814–15, 1817, 1819, and 1833). They are more scattered in their chronological distribu- tion and therefore less appropriate for our study than the ones dated to 1724–59. Victoria Bricker has transcribed all the wills in this collection. We are grateful to Thompson for lending us his microfilmed copies of the Documentos de Tekanto. 8 Restall (1995) has transcribed and translated these wills, which he calls the Tes- taments of Ixil. They are part of the Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona collection in the Biblioteca del Estado de Yucatán in Merida. We are grateful to John Chu- chiak for making facsimile copies of the original documents available to us. Colonial Maya wills can also be found in other collections of documents (or individually), but in fewer numbers, representing the towns of Bokoba (two), Chicxulub (one), Cuncunul (one), Dzan (two), Ebtun (nine), Homun (one), Iza- mal and its environs (ten), Kanxoc (one), Mani (two), Motul (one), Pustunich (one), Sicpach (five), Tehaas (one), Tekax (one), Ticul (one), and Tiho (Merida) (five) (Restall 1998: 146, table 6.1; see figure 1 for location of towns). 9 Parish clergy began recording baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials during the sixteenth century, although the content of these records is noted to have varied among dioceses (Cook and Borah 1971: 49). The recording of this information in registers was prescribed by the First Mexican Provincial Church Council of 1555 and the Third Mexican Provincial Church Council of 1585 (Cook and Borah: 49). The earliest Yucatecan death records known to us come from the parish register of Peto and are dated to 1642. 10 Culhuacan in the Valley of Mexico has a comparable series of sixty-five Nahuatl testaments from the years 1572–99 (Cline and León-Portilla 1984; Cline 1986). More than half of them were written in 1580 (fourteen wills) and 1581 (twenty wills), which coincided with the major epidemic of 1576–81 in Central Mexico (Gibson 1964: 136, 138). No other year in the sequence was represented by more than two wills. The epidemic was described as a “great cocoliztli . . . the symptom most frequently mentioned is nosebleed; various terminal dates [are] given in the late 1570’s, but reported in the Actas de cabildo as not yet completed in 1581” (Gibson: 449). It now seems that this cocoliztli was an indigenous hemorrhagic fever, a virus that was probably carried by rodents, like the hanta virus that suddenly showed up on the Navajo reservation in 1993 (Acuna-Soto et al. 2002: 361). The epidemic was preceded by a severe drought; an El Niño occurred in 1578, followed by a more-active-than-normal hurricane season in 1579 (Caviedes 2001: 152). The Culhuacan death records microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints begin in 1737, more than fifty years after the period in question (roll #612223). However, we know that the population of Culhuacan declined from 2,541 in 1580 to 1,750 in 1595, representing a drop of about 31 percent in fifteen years (Cook and Borah 1960: 60).

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Pizzigoni (2007: 3) points out that “a strength of the Culhuacan testaments is that they were a unified collection from their very inception,” as was also true of the ones from Cacalch’en, Ixil, and Tekanto. Other large corpora of Nahuatl testaments (e.g., Pizzigoni 2007 for the Toluca Valley, Reyes et al. 1996 for Mexico City, and Rojas Rabiela, Rea López, and Medina Lima 1999–2002) were obtained from scattered sources. In aggregate, they can be useful for identifying high mortality years in a region (e.g., Rojas Rabiela, Rea López, and Medina Lima: 1:26), but not for fine-grain analysis of the course of an epidemic or famine in a single community. The same is true of the known Mixtec testaments (Terraciano 2001: 9, 405n40). Other studies of testaments outside the Maya area include Horn (1998), Kellogg (1998), Pizzigoni (2002), and Wood (1998). 11 Of the thirty-nine wills excluded from the study, all but two mention bequests. 12 The notary identified the cause of death for the people named on these pages as vih (famine) at the top of the first list. 13 We have worked from copies of these records microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that appear on roll #0648051–14. 14 The deaths of children are recorded only for the years 1758 through 1760. Chil- dren died in great numbers during the winter of 1759–60. 15 Children are identified in the death records aspárvulo , párvula, or criatura. The records do not label individuals systematically in terms of their casta (i.e., as español or española, “Spanish”; mestizo or mestiza, “mestizo”; mulato or mulata, “mulatto”; or indio or india, “Indian”). Indians can be recognized by their Maya surnames. In general, Spanish surnames mark individuals as non-Indians. More difficult to classify are the indios hidalgos, who belonged to three families in Tekanto: one with a Maya surname (Chan) and two with Spanish surnames (Castro and Miranda) (Thompson 1999: 154, table 6–1). We have included them in table 3 because the Documentos de Tekanto contain wills from members of the Chan and Castro families that were recorded in Maya, notarized by a man with a Maya surname, and witnessed by members of the Indian town government. Indios hidalgos were “exempted from tribute payment and labor service as a reward for aiding the Spaniards in the conquest” (Thompson: 155). They had a higher status in the colonial caste system because they did not pay tribute. 16 It is possible that the notary who made the list of dead intended to write out formulaic wills for them at a later date. Lacking evidence of those wills, we assume that he was unable to do so. Notaries were not always incapacitated to this extent during high mortality years (see note 10). 17 We used several criteria for linking the wills to the death records. The most obvious criterion is the match of names in the two types of documents. If the will mentions the date of death, that information may be helpful in locating the death record of that individual. The death records usually give the name of the spouse of the deceased, if he or she was married. The wills rarely mention the name of the spouse, but if they do, and the names of the spouses in the two types of documents are the same, the link is strengthened. Wills produced by women may not mention the husband explicitly, but his surname can be inferred if she names her children as recipients of bequests, because they inherit their surname from their father. For example, the Testaments of Ixil contain a will attributed to Juana Tun that is dated 1 July 1767. No Juana Tun is listed in the death records

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for Ixil, but the death of a woman named Maria Tun is recorded for 9 July 1767, along with the name of her husband, Bernardino Chim. Juana Tun does not mention her husband in her will, but she does bequeath property to her daughter, Juana Chim, who has the same surname as Bernardino Chim, the husband of Maria Tun in the death records. Because the dates of the will and the death record both fall in early July and the woman’s husband’s surname in the death record agrees with her daughter’s surname, it is likely that the same woman is the subject of both documents and that one of the instances of her first name is in error or that she had two Christian names—Juana and Maria—with one mentioned in her will and the other in her death record. In the case of a single adult or a child, the names of the parents are mentioned in the death records. This information is not relevant for the Tekanto wills, which do not refer to the testator’s parents, but it is for the Ixil wills, which identify their parents. It was useful for determining that the Manuel Cob responsible for a 1765 will (month and day effaced) was not the same Manuel Cob whose death was recorded on 16 July 1765. Although they were both bachelors, the parents of the one whose will is part of the Testaments of Ixil were Josef Cob and Dominga Ek, whereas the parents of the Manuel Cob in the death records were Pasqual Cob and Martha Canul. 18 Felipe Poot continued to serve as the notary in 1748, when there were only seven adult deaths and an equal number of wills. The dates on the wills of the three testators who died that year all followed the recorded dates of their deaths, in one case by more than two weeks. We suspect that Felipe Poot was less dili- gent in carrying out his duties than other notaries in the town government of Tekanto. For example, Agustin Canche, the man who served as notary in 1751, wrote eighteen wills for people who died in that year. The dates on fourteen of those wills were also the dates recorded for their deaths in the parish register. The remaining four wills bore dates preceding the testators’ deaths by one or two days. Agustin Canche’s record suggests that he was a more conscientious civil servant than Felipe Poot. 19 We are aware of three sets of population estimates for Tekanto in the eighteenth century. According to Patch (1993: 254), Tekanto had 668 indios de confesión (people old enough to receive the sacrament of confession) in 1700, from which he estimates a total Indian population of 1,116. Another estimate is based on the number of textiles (patíes and mantas) that the Indians of Tekanto were required to supply as repartimiento textil, a form of tribute. Patch calculates that the 380 textiles assigned to Tekanto in 1716 would have been levied on 2,018 Indians. The third estimate is based on the number of indios de confesión in Tekanto in 1785. In that year, Tekanto’s total population was approximately 1,032, of which 716 were Indians and 316 members of other castas (españoles, mestizos, and mulatos) (Thompson 1999: 30, table 1–8). The latest estimate of Tekanto’s Indian population is substantially lower than the two earlier estimates (716 versus 2,018 and 1,116), suggesting a 30.6 percent decline in the Indian population of Tekanto since 1700 and a 65 percent decline since 1716, in which a series of famines, including the terrible one in 1726, must have played a role. 20 These records were also microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They are on roll #0648198, which is labeled “Conkal 1682–1802.” 21 Restall (1995: 15) has estimated an Indian population of 1,500 for Ixil in the 1760s, which is larger than Patch’s (1993: 254) estimate of 1,217 in 1700 and

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smaller than his estimate of 3,292 for 1716. A mortality of 102 people on a base of 1,500 is 6.8 percent. 22 We have classified as a “child” anyone labeled as criatura, párvulo, párvula, or muchacho in the Ixil death records. The age of párvulos and párvulas is not specified in those records, but the age range of people classified as criatura is (from three weeks to six years). Thus, párvulos and párvulas were probably at least seven years old. The records describe one of the people who died as a muchacho de onse años (eleven-year-old boy), implying that párvulos and párvu- las were no older than ten years. The age of two of the five single people soltero( and soltera) was recorded as fifteen years (quince años). From this we infer the following age categories: criatura (three weeks to six years), párvulo/a (seven to ten years), and muchacho/a (eleven to fourteen years). Different classifications may have been used in other parts of the Spanish empire. For example, Cook and Borah (1979: 249) say that “an adult in the California missions was anyone of either sex above the approximate age of 7–8 years, the division being that customary in much of the reporting of the time in the Spanish world.” A few pages later, they report that “a parvulo was a person up to the age of 7 or 8 years and is the nearest we can approach numerically to an infant in the data as they come to us” (Cook and Borah: 265). However, elsewhere they define párvulos as “children, usually those under age 12–15” and muchachos/muchachas as “male and female children; in colonial Spanish reporting of population, usually the age group 8–15” (Cook and Borah 1971: 447). They do not mention criaturas at all. 23 According to Cook and Borah (1971: 49–50), the Third Mexican Provincial Church Council of 1585 decreed that the baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials of Indians were “to be recorded in one set of books; the Hispanic population might be recorded in a separate set or might be handled, in turn, in one set for Spaniards and another for Negroes and people of mixed blood.” The same principle seems to have been applied to wills (but not death records) in Ixil. Because the indios hidalgos belonged to a separate (and higher) social stratum than Indians (indios), their wills were kept together, apart from those of Indians. However, the deaths of indios hidalgos were recorded in the same book as those of people who were classified as Indians. 24 Patch (1993: 256) provides a rough population estimate of 133 individuals in Huhi based on repartimiento textiles in 1716. 25 We are grateful to Philip C. Thompson for his generosity in permitting us to include his marriage data from Ixil in this article. 26 “Marriage registers undoubtedly recorded all of the marriages that took place since only a priest could perform such a rite, but not all couples married” (Cook and Borah 1971: 51). 27 According to Philip C. Thompson (personal communication to Victoria Bricker, 29 February 2000), “One problem is, of course, that if both the husband and wife die, no one remarries, and their deaths are not captured by this kind of data.” Furthermore, he points out that “paradoxically, a really bad death spike (killing . . . both husband and wife) would have less of an effect on the data than a moderate spike which only took one spouse.” 28 As would an analysis of the fluctuations in grain prices over time, as Florescano (1969) has demonstrated for Central Mexico. See also Livi-Bacci (1997: 85).

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