the not so peaceful civilization: a review of maya war

Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2000

The Not So Peaceful Civilization:A Review of Maya War

David Webster1

The first Maya encountered by Europeans in the early sixteenth century wereexceedingly warlike, but by the 1940s the earlier Classic Maya (AD 250–1000)were widely perceived as an inordinately peaceful civilization. Today, insharp contrast, conflict is seen as integral to Maya society throughout itshistory. This paper defines war, reviews the evidence for it in the Mayaarchaeological record, and shows how and why our ideas have changed soprofoundly. The main emphasis is on the Classic period, with patterns ofethnohistorically documented war serving as a baseline. Topics include theculture history of conflict, strategy and tactics, the scope and range of opera-tions, war and the political economy, and the intense status rivalry war ofthe eighth and ninth centuries AD that contributed to the collapse of Classiccivilization. Unresolved issues such as the motivations for war, its ritual vs.territorial aims, and sociopolitical effects are discussed at length.

KEY WORDS: Maya civilization; war; Maya archaeology; political economy; status rivalry.

INTRODUCTION

Early in the sixteenth century the Spaniards, already well establishedthroughout the Caribbean, began systematically to explore the mainlandof what we now call Mesoamerica. The first people they encountered wereMaya speakers, and the earliest contacts were typically bellicose. When

1Department of Anthropology, 409 Carpenter Building, The Pennsylvania State University,University Park, Pennsylvania 16802.

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0892-7537/00/0300-0065$18.00/0 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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they landed at the large town to Campeche on the east coast of Yucatan(Fig. 1), the Spaniards of the 1517 de Cordoba expedition were initiallyreceived in friendly fashion by the local lord, then forced to beat a hastyretreat when numerous heavily armed men began to assemble. Farthersouth, near the town of Champoton, where they were driven ashore bylack of water, de Cordoba’s men were not so lucky. Apparently forewarnedof their approach, large number of Maya launched a morning attack. AsBernal Diaz (1963, p. 23) reported,

Once it was daylight we could see many more warriors advancing along the coastwith banners raised and plumes and drums. . . . After forming up in squadronsand surrounding us on all sides, they assailed us with such a shower of arrows anddarts and stones from their slings that more than eighty of our soldiers werewounded. Then they attacked us hand to hand, some with lances and some shootingarrows, and others with their two-handed cutting swords.

The unfortunate shore party suffered the loss of 50 men before they couldescape to their ships. Licking their wounds, the explorers sailed back toCuba, where they reported things never before seen in the New World—dense populations of farmers who grew maize and other crops, large townswith well-built masonry buildings, garishly decorated stone temples filledwith idols and other objects of fine workmanship (including tantalizingtraces of gold) where priests officiated at blood sacrifices and wrote in books,and great lords who could quickly muster up thousands of fierce warriors.

Two years later Hernan Cortes, on the first stage of his fateful expedi-tion that resulted in the overthrow of the Aztec empire, made landfall onthe coast of Tabasco, a region of Chontal Maya speakers. Here, at a placecalled Cintla where other Spaniards had been received peacefully the yearbefore, he found thousands of warriors concentrated in anticipation of hisarrival. The omnipresent Bernal Diaz (1963, p. 65) described the Mayabattle array this way:

All the men wore great feather crests, they carried drums and trumpets, their faceswere painted black and white, they were armed with large bows and arrows, spearsand shields, swords like our two-handed swords, and slings and stones and fire-hardened darts, and all wore quilted cotton armor.

Fierce battles ensued with these Tabascan hosts, whose commanders suedfor peace only when Spanish cavalry charges proved irresistible. In subse-quent parleys Cortes discovered that the assembled forces represented eightdifferent ‘‘provinces’’ (large political units of some sort) and that theirleaders used painted books to keep track of their various contingents.

Newly victorious in Mexico, Cortes in the mid-1520s dispatched hislieutenants to subdue the Maya of highland Chiapas and Guatemala. Therethey encountered impressive conquest states such as that of the Quiche,whose noble lineages ruled from well-fortified elite centers perched on

A Review of Maya War 67

Fig. 1. Map of the Maya region of Mesoamerica showing the sites mentioned in the text.

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ridges or escarpments, and who strongly resisted the invaders (Fox, 1978).Apparently the sixteenth century Maya, while certainly not militarists ona par with their highland Aztec contemporaries, were everywhere exceed-ingly belligerent.

CONCEPTIONS OF MAYA WAR

Given participant accounts such as those of Cortes, Bernal Diaz, andmany others, Mayanists long ago might reasonably have made the uniformi-tarian assumption that all this was just the tip of the iceberg—that, as invirtually all other early complex societies, war was an integral part of thelarger Maya cultural tradition from its beginnings. Instead, our conceptionsof Maya warfare have undergone a series of sudden and rather perverseshifts. Early nineteenth century explorers such as John Lloyd Stephens andFrederic Catherwood speculated that the ancient people who had inhabitedthe ruins of Guatemala and Mexico, like other great civilizations, weredominated by kings and warriors (Stephens, 1949). By the 1940s, however,the Classic Maya (AD 250–800) had achieved the singular reputation ofbeing the only nonindustrial civilization not plagued by war and conflict,despite the fact that warriors, weapons, and captives or sacrificial victimswere prominently displayed in their art. At this time it was widely believedthat Classic Mesoamerica more generally enjoyed peaceful conditions andthat such warfare as occurred was devoted to the capture of sacrificialvictims (Means, 1977). For reasons not well specified, these peaceful Classictheocracies were subverted or degraded by Postclassic peoples, leading tothe violence and conflict the Spaniards encountered.

This was still the orthodox perspective, with some important dissenterssuch as Robert Rands (1952) and Michael Coe (1962, 1966), until the early1970s, at least with regard to the Maya. When I wrote my dissertation onMaya war (Webster, 1972) there was only a sparse, scattered, and mostlydesultory literature on the subject. Today, in a startling turnabout, warfareis all the rage. The Maya are often portrayed as compulsively warlike, andwarfare is a ubiquitous theme in books and journals. The impetus for thisnew interest comes mostly from decipherments, as we shall see shortly,and only a few field projects have been specifically designed to investigateMaya war. I carried out one of the first (Webster, 1979), and similar researchhas since been undertaken in the Dos Pilas region on the basis of originalwork by Stephen Houston (1987, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997; Inomata,1997) and at Yaxuna in northern Yucatan (Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler andFreidel, 1998).


CHRONOLOGY OF MAYA CIVILIZATION

Maya culture history is conventionally broken down into the followingtime periods (slight variations on this chronology are preferred by someMayanists).

Paleoindian period Before 7000 BCArchaic period 7000–2500 BCEarly Preclassic period 2500–1000 BCMiddle Preclassic period 1000–400 BCLate Preclassic period 400 BC–AD 250Early Classic period AD 250–600Late Classic period AD 600–800Terminal Classic period AD 800–1000Postclassic period AD 1000–approximately 1517Contact/Colonial periods Begin approximately AD 1517Overturning the conventional wisdom of only a few decades ago, ar-

chaeologists have documented warfare over much of this range, beginningwith destruction levels, mass burials, and fortifications from Middle andLate Preclassic times. War-related imagery is found in Early Classic art,but most significant for this paper are the Late and Terminal Classic periods,during which the number of centers and polities multiplied rapidly, regionalpopulations peaked, art and inscriptions were most abundant and wide-spread, and Long Count dates provide an extremely detailed chronology.As just noted, the nature of Classic warfare has long been an extremelycontroversial issue.

Widespread disruption of Classic polities and demographic declineoccurred in the central and southern Lowlands roughly between AD790 and 900 AD (a process usually labeled the Classic Maya ‘‘collapse’’).There followed a long Postclassic interval during which polities weremost numerous and vigorous in the northern Lowlands. Postclassicwarfare has long been acknowledged on the basis of archaeologicalevidence (e.g., the walled centers of Tulum and Mayapan), art (e.g., themurals at Chichen Itza), and, finally, indigenous oral and written historiesthat emphasize struggles for supremacy among great families and factions,centered especially on the successive regional capitals of Chichen Itzaand Mayapan (e.g., see Marcus, 1992a). Many older Mayanists blameddestabilizing and degrading Mexican or Mexicanized Maya influencesfor the character of Postclassic conflict. Finally, there is the abundantContact/Colonial ethnohistoric evidence that is generally seen to reflecta continuation of earlier Postclassic behaviors and beliefs. Like Mayacivilization itself, warfare changed dramatically through time in its inten-sity, purposes, and cultural manifestations.

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GOALS OF THIS PAPER

My main purpose here is to provide a necessarily condensed overviewof what we presently know or can reasonably infer about Lowland Mayawarfare, and some of the reasons why there have been such pronouncedshifts in our perceptions of it. A second concern is to set Maya war in itslarger environmental, historical, social, and comparative contexts, so thatwe can properly understand its significance. A final purpose is to addressunresolved issues concerning the motives, conduct, and effects of Maya war,about which I express my own opinions. I make no pretense of providing acomplete bibliography. Much of the material presented is culled from myown earlier writings on all these subjects (Webster, 1975, 1976a, b, 1977,1979, 1993, 1998, 1999a). The main emphasis is on Late and Terminal Classicwar in the central and southern Maya Lowlands, a topic that pervades thecurrent literature. Well-described Contact and Colonial period war providesa point of departure, and asides are directed to the Preclassic Maya andthe wider ethnographic and historic records.

LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENT

For thousands of years Maya speakers have occupied a vast region ofeastern and southern Mesoamerica that altogether measures about 324,000km2 (Fig. 1). Although this homeland lies entirely in the tropics there isgreat variation in topography, climate, and vegetation. On the south, inparts of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, lie the MayaHighlands, at elevations from 800 to over 4500 m. More important for ourpurposes are the Maya Lowlands, which cover about 250,000 km2. Becauseof their lower elevations these lowlands are typically hotter and often morehumid than the highlands. Precipitation is strongly seasonal, with a generaldry season extending roughly from January to May. Annual rainfall in thewestern Lowlands or in parts of Belize, where there are typically no rainlessmonths, can be as high as 4000 mm. In stark contrast, northwestern Yucatanreceives only about 500 mm annually. All regions are prone to strikingyearly variations and droughts are common. Measurements reported byLundell (1937, p. 6) over a 10-year period for the ancient Maya heartlandof Guatemala’s northern Peten region averaged 1762 mm but ranged from990 to 2369 mm.

Some parts of the northern Lowlands are habitable year-round onlywhere natural collapse features (cenotes) expose the subsurface water tableor where deep wells or artificial water storage facilities can be constructed.Wherever rainfall is abundant, especially in the south, east, and west, dou-


ble- or triple-canopy, semideciduous tropical forests dominate recently un-disturbed upland zones (of course virtually all forest is a human artifact),interspersed with lower-lying bajos (seasonal or permanent swamps) andgrassy savannas. Northern forests tend to be lower and more thorny andscrubby than the more well-watered southern ones, and conifer forests arefound at some high elevations, as in the Copan Valley of Honduras.

Much of the northern Yucatan Peninsula is a vast limestone shelfthat lacks substantial surface drainage. Large rivers concentrated along itseastern, southeastern, and western margins provide routes of communica-tion, but only a few are navigable for great distances, especially those inBelize and the lower and middle reaches of the Usumacinta, Grijalva, andCandalaria systems. A chain of large lakes just south of Tikal in northernGuatemala was at the core of the Itza kingdom in 1697.

Many people who visit archaeological sites in the Maya Lowlandscome away with the impression of an exceedingly flat landscape, but thetopography is actually quite variable. The Maya Mountains in Belize riseto elevations of over 1100 m, and the landscape in the heartland of ClassicMaya civilization around Tikal is quite hilly. Copan, on the southeast, islocated in a well-defined river valley surrounded by peaks as high as 1400m. Around Piedras Negras, where I have recently been working, the highestelevations are only several hundred meters, but the landscape is brokenup by extremely rugged karst features, including escarpments and conicalhills with very steep slopes.

Despite their locally distinctive settings, almost all ancient LowlandMaya centers and polities were at elevations below 600 m (Tonina, at 900m, is the highest), and all shared basically the same set of staple cultigens,most notably maize, beans, and squash, along with a wide variety of lessimportant plant species. Well-drained upland soils were (and are) mostattractive to farmers using simple hand tools, but they are typically thin,fragile, and prone to nutrient depletion and erosion when cleared of naturalvegetation. Soils can be quite diverse over very small areas, however, andthe history of land use in a region was often extremely complex and hadmajor demographic and political consequences [e.g., see Sanders (1977)for a general overview and Wingard (1996) for a Copan example].

Several features of this Lowland environment are closely related tothe conduct and motivations of war. There were strong seasonal constraintson certain kinds of conflicts. Comparatively few physical barriers impededmovement across the landscape, nor is it highly compartmentalized. Re-source zones were fairly redundant compared to the highland regions ofMesoamerica, and because there was no effective vertical zonation of ag-ricultural production, there were few incentives to conquer or control zonesof different altitudes. Nor, as in the Highlands, were there concentrated

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mineral resources such as obsidian or metals that were objects of competi-tion (exceptions include the salt-producing locales in the coastal lagoonsof northern Yucatan). Agricultural production, fundamental to agrarianeconomies, was and is today locally prone to shortfalls due to uncontrollablerisks such as fires, droughts, storms, and insect infestations and is alsothreatened in the long term by human-induced deforestation, soil depletion,and erosion. Local soil variation creates ‘‘patchy’’ production and riskeffects, thus inviting local competition. Poor harvests, as we will see, werelinked to ethnohistorically documented wars. Finally, on the ideologicallevel, the dramatic seasonal transformations, along with unpredictable ag-ricultural crises, profoundly influenced the Classic Maya worldview, inwhich death, regeneration, and the control of disorder and chaos weremajor themes.

DEFINING WAR

Before going on I should make clear exactly what I think constituteswar, which tends to be an underspecified category of human behaviorin the anthropological literature. I define war as planned confrontationsbetween organized groups of combatants who share, or believe they share,common interests. Such groups represent political communities or factionsthat are prepared to pursue these interests through armed and violentconfrontations that might involve deliberate killing of opponents. Suchkilling is seen as socially acceptable and even desirable (i.e., it is not murder).Conflict may be initiated in many ways, but one of the participating groups,usually the attacker, seeks to maintain the status quo or, more often, toachieve an advantage in power relations. War so defined is not limited toany particular kind of polity or society and may occur on any scale.

Two important things about this definition are the variety of behaviorsthat it encompasses and that it grades into forms of violence that are notsocially sanctioned. Factions involved might be family members engagedin an intracommunity feud, ambitious warriors and their personal followersraiding for loot, or forces representing an entire community or polity (oralliances of these). Acts of war may be directed against external enemiesbut also can include civil wars, usurpations, and acts of lethal treacheryaimed at creating new political conditions. Illicit behaviors such as murdermay escalate into socially sanctioned feuding or rebellion. Two or morepolitical communities may be involved in protracted antagonism (warre inHobbes’s sense), or, as is frequently the case in nonindustrial societies, warmay coincide with a single campaign. In its more large-scale and conven-


tional manifestations most participants are anonymous to one another andcombat is highly impersonal.

As we shall see, many of these considerations apply to the Maya.

WAR IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD

Despite its ubiquity among complex societies, war is difficult to docu-ment archaeologically. We fortunately have many lines of evidence for theancient Maya, some very strong, others less so. Art (which most clearlyshows weaponry) and inscriptions are two obvious ones, and these arediscussed separately in a later section.

Fortifications

A few Postclassic fortifications such as the walls at Mayapan (Shook,1952) and Tulum (Lothrop, 1924) have long been recognized (see alsoArmillas, 1951). Subsequent research has documented more than 20 otherdefensive systems, or at least defensible constructions, at large Maya centersdating from Preclassic through Postclassic times. These typically consist ofone or multiple lines of barriers created by ditches, earthworks, and stonewalls, often originally strengthened with parapets and palisades of timberor other perishable materials. In some cases fortifications were integralto the original layout of a center [Mayapan and Chacchob (Pollock andStromsvik, 1935; Webster, 1979)], while elsewhere they were later additions[Becan (Webster, 1976) and Cuca (Webster, 1979)]. The most fundamentalconsideration seems to have been to defend the civic and elite residentialcores of centers [Uxmal (Kowalsk and Dunning, 1999) and Ek Balam (Beyand Ringle, 1997)], although occasionally large, nucleated residential zonesand populations were protected, as at Mayapan. Extensive boundary de-fenses were sometimes built to incorporate considerable amounts of hinter-land [Tikal (Puleston and Callender, 1967)]. Naturally strong positions [e.g.,the Punta de Chimino peninsula (Demarest et al., 1997) and the escarpmentsat Aguateca (Inomata, 1997)] were improved by artificial constructions.Under extreme threat ramshackle barriers were sometimes quickly erectedaround previously undefended site cores, as at Dos Pilas (Houston, 1987,1993; Demarest, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997).

Where they exist, fortifications tell us that particular centers werethreatened (if not actually attacked) and also hint at the scale of hostilities.For example, the huge earthworks at Becan presented very impressivevertical barriers and are 1.8 km in circumference. Obviously they were

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designed to withstand determined assaults or sieges by large forces andthey served this purpose for hundreds of years after their initial construc-tion, which most likely occurred at the end of the Late Preclassic. Somearchaeologists believe that the Punta de Chimino ditch and earthwork,which protect a community with heavy Preclassic occupation, are equallyearly (Houston, S., personal communication, 2000).

A little reflection shows, however, that no conclusions about war canbe drawn on the basis of the lack of fortifications for two reasons. First,such an absence may be more apparent than real. Very flimsy defenseswere highly effective given Maya military capabilities, and few traces ofsuch constructions might survive or be initially recognized. The Petexbatunregion around Dos Pilas provides a case in point. In 1978 Arthur Demarest(1978) cited the absence of fortifications there as indicative of a syndromeof very constrained forms of warfare. Much earlier Ian Graham had ob-served wall-like features at both Aguateca and Dos Pilas in the early 1960sbut apparently did not recognize their significance. Their full implicationsfinally became clear in the mid-1980s when Stephen Houston (1987, 1993)mapped Dos Pilas and other walled sites in the region and made plans tocarry out a war-focused project there (never realized because permissionwas not forthcoming). Ultimately and ironically, Demarest’s projects docu-mented these defenses more fully and revealed episodes of very severewarfare (Demarest et al., 1997; Inomata, 1997).

A second reason is that in many cultural traditions communities com-monly are not formally fortified even where warfare is rampant; the Basinof Mexico is a good Mesoamerican example (Hassig, 1999).

Settlement Distributions

Dispersed settlement in the form of small residential sites is foundaround many Classic Maya centers and has often been singled out asincompatible with patterns of intense warfare (e.g., see Rand’s commentsbelow). This is a weak argument, not only because the Maya clearly main-tained such patterns in the face of serious conflicts, but also because itoccurred elsewhere as well [e.g., Japan (Farris, 1999) and Hawai’i (Kirch,1984, 1990)].

At some centers where settlement is well documented there wereshifts in construction activity and occupation apparently related to unsettledpolitical conditions. For example, Mock (1998, pp. 114–115) notes that theColha population seems to have crowded around the central major groupsin the Terminal Classic, shortly before the center was briefly abandoned.I know of no examples from Classic times (except when polities ultimately


collapsed) of wholesale abandonment of dispersed sites and extreme nucle-ation in the face of attacks. This is not to say that such evidence will notappear. With better settlement samples and finer control of site chronolo-gies I think we might detect situational establishment of boundary zonesor large-scale abandonment of small sites that relate to intense hostilities.In some cases small outlying sites around major centers were walled, as inthe Dos Pilas region, or refuges were established, as at Aguateca.

Settlement research also sometimes reveals sudden shifts in ceramicor other artifact forms. To continue the Colha example, after a brief hiatusthe center was reoccupied by Postclassic people using new artifact assem-blages. Sabloff and Willey (1967) long ago maintained that similar data,along with ‘‘foreign’’ iconographic elements, indicated invasions of foreigninvaders on the western peripheries of the Lowlands. Other Mayanists suchas Stuart (1995, p. 316) doubt that such invasions occurred.

Destruction Episodes

Maya centers as early as Middle Preclassic times show evidence oflarge-scale, deliberate destruction of major architecture. As long ago asthe 1930s archaeologists uncovered palace contexts, as at Piedras Negras(Holley, 1983), that seem to have been abruptly abandoned and destroyed,but until recently these were not interpreted as war-related events. Currentresearch is turning up many such examples. At Aguateca the whole commu-nity seems to have suffered from a violent attack by external enemies(Inomata, 1997; Inomata and Stiver, 1998), while the destruction detectedat the recently excavated royal compound at Copan (Andrews and Fash,1992) appears more likely to me to be the result of internal power struggles.

The Maya commonly ‘‘decommissioned’’ or ‘‘killed’’ important struc-tures by wholly or partially destroying them, especially when they were tobe covered with later buildings, and such episodes have no implicationsfor war. Many so-called ‘‘termination’’ rituals, however, especially seen inlight of other evidence, such as associated mass burials, were apparentlythe result of violent desecration of temples, elite residences, and otherbuildings and monuments by enemies [e.g., at Yaxuna during the EarlyClassic (Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler and Freidel, 1998)].

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish ritual termination from outrightviolence. For example, William Fash (1989) determined that facade sculp-ture on elite Str. 9N-82C at Copan was deliberately burned, but the buildingstood long after this event. E. Wyllys Andrews and his colleagues discoveredthat the lintel of a major structure in the nearby royal compound had been

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purposefully burned to collapse the building. These seem like two verydifferent acts to me.

Skeletal Remains

From very early times the Maya kept human remains for variousreasons, including as trophies of dead enemies (as well as ancestors), apractice that is shown in Classic art and documented ethnohistorically (seebelow). Tombs and caches commonly yield disarticulated heads or otherbody parts or central burials lacking such parts. Mass burials of men ofmilitary age, plausibly related to warfare or subsequent sacrificial ceremon-ies, have been recovered from Late Preclassic contexts, as at Chalchuapa(Fowler, 1984), and the practice continued in Classic times as well. Evenmore interesting are the multiple burials of men, women, and childrenfound at Tikal (Laporte and Fialko, 1990), Yaxuna (Suhler and Freidel,1998), and elsewhere that are interpreted as the remains of royal/elitefamilies deposed and massacred by external or internal enemies. A dramaticexample is the ‘‘Skull Pit’’ at Colha, which yielded the severed heads of20 adults and 10 children of both sexes (Mock, 1998). Skulls had still-articulated vertebrae and apparently the skin was flayed from the faces ofsome victims. Following this event the building in which the skulls wereinterred was destroyed, as apparently was much of the rest of Colha.

Unfortunately no large skeletal series exists that exhibits more broadly-distributed patterns of possible war-related trauma. One of the best-ana-lyzed ones, from Copan, in fact shows few or no such injuries (Story, 1992,1997; Whittington, 1989), although given the paucity of war references inthe inscriptions of that center and its comparatively isolation far from themajor arenas of conflict, this is not surprising.

Most of the kinds of evidence cited above, of course, relate primarilyto the intense, destructive, and violent phases of war. The family feud, thesmall-scale raid, or the elimination of political enemies by treachery allwould leave very few and probably ambiguous traces, and we would bevery lucky to detect them. Indirect evidence, such as the regionalization ofceramic complexes in the Late Classic (Ball, 1993), reflects the fragmenta-tion of the political landscape and, by implication, both the backgroundconditions for conflict and the effects of it.

Fortunately, Contact period war is richly documented and serves as aconvenient benchmark from which to interpret patterns of earlier Classicwarfare.


WARFARE AND SOCIETY IN THE CONTACT PERIOD

Various Spaniards left eyewitness or second-hand accounts of conflictin Yucatan for the period from 1517 to 1546, when the colonial capital ofMerida was finally established. The most famous of these is Landa’s Rela-cion de Las Cosas de Yucatan, based heavily on information provided bythree Maya informants of high rank. Indigenous Maya scribes producedpost-Conquest documents of various kinds that recounted wars fought bothbefore and after the Spaniards arrived. Worth noting is that the last indepen-dent Maya kingdom—that of the Itza in northern Guatemala—was con-quered only in 1697, so we have records of intermittent campaigns andprotracted animosities over almost two centuries (Jones, 1998).

Sociopolitical Background

Northern Yucatan, which we know best, was populated by a populationvariously estimated as between 600,000 and 2,300,000 Maya just prior tothe conquest (I prefer the lower range). Overall population densities werequite low (less than 20 people per km2), consistent with ethnohistoric ac-counts of extensive systems of agriculture (but see McAnany, 1995; Fedick,1996). The most basic political unit prior to the Spanish conquest consistedof a small segment of territory ruled by a noble called a batab, assisted byvarious lesser officials and priests. Households of batabs (for simplicity’ssake I use the English plural form throughout this paper, rather than theMaya -ob, etc.) and other nobles and rich families formed the centralcommunity of the polity, with dispersed households of commoners scatteredover the surrounding countryside. Spatial delimitation of the batabship wasprobably not strictly territorial in the modern sense but, rather, extendedto the most distant plots of lands (themselves often very carefully marked)habitually cultivated by members of the polity, land being the principal re-source.

Details concerning the precolumbian batabship are sparse, but ac-cording to Matthew Restall (1997) it was the direct antecedent of theabundantly documented post-Conquest cah, which retained many facets ofearlier organization. The cah was a territorial, political, and social unitessential to Maya identity. Within the cah some resources were held incommon and families were organized into patrilineages (chibal). In anygiven region or batabship there were families of distinguished lineage whocollectively formed a noble class and dominated the highest offices. Noblesset much store by their lineage name and history, and maintained ties withhigh-raking maternal relatives, as Landa also reports for preconquest times.

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The elaborate households of Conquest period nobles were supportedby labor and goods produced by commoners, who formed the vast majorityof the population. Nobles also owned cacao plantations and engaged inlong-distance trade, both enterprises partly underwritten by the labor ofslaves. Some nobles also asserted separate descent from commoners andwere hedged about with an elaborate etiquette that emphasized their privi-leged rank. About 30 great families, most notably the Xiu, the Cocom, theChel, and the Pech, dominated events in various locales, and some of themwere traditional enemies for centuries, their great power struggles centralto Yucatecan historical narratives.

More controversial is political organization above the level of thebatabship in the early sixteenth century. The ethnohistorian Ralph Roys(1943, 1957) identified 16 ‘‘provinces’’ of three basic kinds (see also Marcus,1992a, 1993). The simplest consisted of loose alliances of batabships whoseleaders were generally not related to one another and whose cooperationwas based on mutual self-interest. A more cohesive arrangement involvedbatabships whose rulers were members of the same lineage. The mostcentralized provinces were dominated by an individual called a halach uinic(‘‘true man’’) who was a batab in his own right and to whom other batabswere subject. An example is Mani, which probably had a population ofabout 60,000 people and which was ruled from a central capital of thatname by a halach uinic of the Xiu lineage. In token of his supremacy thehalach uinic also used the title ajaw (‘‘lord’’ or ‘‘king’’—also frequentlyspelled ahav).

Restall believes, in contrast to Roys, that ‘‘provinces’’ are largely illu-sory, that there was little effective centralization above the level of thebatabship, and that halach uinic was an honorific title conferred on a particu-larly dominant batab who wielded comparatively little unilateral authority.To the extent that provinces existed, their boundaries, like those of theconstituent batabships, were fluid and frequently contested. SupportingRestall’s argument is the fact that the Spaniards did not describe royalpalaces among the sixteenth century Maya (i.e., residential establishmentsmuch more impressive than those of ordinary nobles or rich people). Inany case, it is clear that some halach uinics were powerful men who enjoyedwide support and who could mobilize many followers, and a central themeof Maya books and oral traditions is the great precolumbian confederationsdominated by the centers of Chichen Itza and Mayapan. My opinion isthat the Contact period Maya present us with a reasonable approximationof what Freid (1967) called a ‘‘stratified society’’—i.e., one characterizedby stratification but without effective development of political centralizationor those institutions that strongly reinforce this kind of social order (seealso Sanders, 1989, 1992).


Contact Period War

During early battles with the Spaniards Maya warriors exhorted oneanother to kill or capture the enemy ‘‘calachuni’’ (as Bernal Diaz wroteit). It seems safe to assume, therefore, that halach uinics commonly lednative contingents in the field, an interpretation consistent with Cortes’sassertion that he fought warriors from eight provinces. Batobs were militaryleaders as well, but the most specialized commanders were nacoms, warchiefs elected for 3-year terms from among the accomplished warriors ofthe most important towns. Landa reports that nacoms were expected towithdraw from normal life and remain celibate for the duration of theirterms and that, during an important annual festival called Pacum Chac,they were carried like idols to prominent temples, where offerings weremade to them and war dances were performed. Notable braves calledholcans were recruited and subsidized as a core military force, and thesemen often caused trouble even in the communities that paid them, especiallyafter hostilities ceased.

Even allowing for expectable Spanish exaggeration of enemy numbers,it is clear that very large contingents of troops, certainly numbering in thethousands, could be quickly mobilized. I believe that this indicates a militiapattern of recruitment—i.e., adult men in general were prepared to serveas warriors and kept their own weapons in their homes. The ‘‘squadrons’’observed by Bernal Diaz probably represented contingents drawn fromparticular batabships or cahs. Such militias, of course, would be most effec-tively mustered for defensive rather than offensive purposes. None of thefirst-hand accounts tells us much about how, or even whether, warriorsacted as disciplined formations in battle, but a standard tactic seems tohave been to try to eliminate enemy captains as noted above.

Although warriors were often gorgeously attired, their arms were madeof wood, stone, bone, hide, and fiber and, so, were primitive by Europeanstandards (Landa mentions copper ‘‘hatchets’’ but I find no descriptionsof their actual use). Long-distance weapons included atlatls, slings, andbows, and these were supplemented by various close-quarter weapons suchas thrusting spears and sword-like wooden implements edged with sharpstone blades. Shields, padded cotton armor, and helmets of wood or othermaterials provided protection.

Historically documented battles usually took place in the open, butthe Maya were also adept at throwing up stockades, barricades, and otherfield defenses. Although many settlements were undefended, the Mayahad a long tradition of fortifications, many of which are archaeologicallydetectable. Hernan Cortes (1986, p. 371) described one he saw in 1525this way:

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This town stands upon a high rock: one side of it is skirted by a great lake and theother by a deep stream which runs into the lake. There is only one level entrance,the whole town being surrounded by a deep moat behind which is a wooden palisadeas high as a man’s breast. Behind this palisade lies a wall of very heavy boards,some twelve feet tall, with embrasures through which to shoot their arrows; thelookout posts rise another eight feet above the wall, which likewise has large towerswith many stones to hurl down on the enemy . . . indeed, it was so well plannedwith regard to the manner of weapons they use, they could not be better defended.

Although primitive by European standards, such constructions as Cortesnotes were quite effective given the ‘‘paleotechnic’’ level of Maya arma-ment, especially the lack of artillery, and were particularly useful againstsurprise raids, a favorite form of attack.

Landa several times asserts that wars (he might better have said cam-paigns) were of short duration, particularly because of the resistance ofthe noncombatant men and women who necessarily had to haul provisionson their backs, given the lack of beasts of burden or wheeled vehicles.Human porters had to eat as well as warriors, so such a transport strategywas quite inefficient. Only where water transport was available, particularlyalong the coasts, could what Hassig (1992) calls the ‘‘friction of distance’’of Precolumbian warfare be overcome, but even canoes lacked sails andhad to be paddled. While operating in enemy territory there were only twooptions for war parties: carry your own food or live off the land—i.e., thecrops or food stores of your opponent. This same restriction made pro-longed sieges difficult. Protracted campaigns involving sizable forces wereprobably most feasible when mature crops of the enemy either were stillin the fields or had just been harvested.

Battles themselves were to some degree ritualized and choreographed,as no doubt were the preparations for them. If Spanish descriptions canbe trusted, ritual paraphernalia found in a camp hastily abandoned by anItza war party in 1631 included an ‘‘altar,’’ priestly clothing, incense burnersalong with the copal incense burned in them, wooden images, and three‘‘idols’’ in the form of animals (Jones, 1998, p. 50).

Most war captives were enslaved, but distinguished male captives wereusually sacrificed and body parts such as mandibles were kept as trophies.In Mesoamerican cultures generally there was a meritocratic dimension tosuccess in war, most comprehensively documented for the Mexica. Nacomsand holcans apart, we do not know whether ordinary Maya warriors whodistinguished themselves on the battlefield could rise much in social rank,but they were honored and feasted, and boasted of their accomplishments.

Postconquest documents reveal frequent antagonisms between cahs,and most conflicts were probably fought between batabships, includingthose putatively included in the same ‘‘provinces.’’ If halach uinics werereally as powerful as Roys suggests, then suppression of conflict among


their batab constituents must have been one of their most important respon-sibilities. As in highland Mexico, the northern Maya did not present acommon front against the European invaders. Jealousies among great fami-lies and desire to preserve their prerogatives led some Maya factions toally themselves opportunistically with the Spaniards (Restall, 1998).

Pretexts for war included revenge, capture of slaves, and control oftrade routes and the sources of valued materials, especially salt, which wasobtained from many sites along the northern coast. Land was a major causeof friction in postconquest cah documents, and quarrels over land incitedmany pre-Spanish conflicts as well. Recurrent agricultural shortfalls due todrought and other crises stimulated theft and trespass, which in turn trig-gered hostilities between polities. To the extent that martial feats andwarlike personae were culturally valued, these in themselves encouragedconflict.

We may safely attribute some features of Contact period warfare tothe earlier Classic Maya as well. Weapons were at all times sufficientlysimple that any handy Maya artisan could manufacture them from cheap,commonly available materials, and learn to wield them, although elitefighters probably possessed particularly handsome or symbolically chargedarms and were more adept in their use than the situational common soldier.The one exception to this rule is large war canoes, which certainly wereused in Postclassic times and possibly also by the Classic Maya. Presumablyonly leaders of high rank could afford to commission such vessels.

Other constants include the logistical limitations on the range andduration of operations and the close relationship between ritual and conflict.As in all complex agrarian societies, rulers and elites in both Contact periodand Classic societies made up only a tiny proportion of the population, soany sizable contingents necessarily included commoners [see Webster (1985,1998) and Hassig (1992) for extended discussions of these points]. Finally,with very few exceptions, Maya war was carried out between culturallysimilar, if not identical, antagonists. Despite such continuities, the ethnohis-toric record must be used carefully as a guide to Classic Maya war, whichin many ways was highly distinctive.

CLASSIC MAYA WAR AND SOCIETY

Given all the Contact period evidence, we might well marvel at thewidespread consensus developed by the 1940s that the Classic Maya wereinordinately peaceful. Actually, the attitude among Mayanists was not somuch outright denial as embarrassed confusion. Sylvanus G. Morley, thedean of Maya archaeology of the time, provides a good example. His

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immensely popular and influential book The Ancient Maya (Morley, 1946)contains a handful of short references to war. At one point he remarksthat there are no archaeological indications of wars or conquests associatedwith the Maya collapse and that

Old Empire (i.e., Classic period) sculpture is conspicuously lacking in the representa-tion of warlike scenes, battles, strife, and violence. True, bound captives are occasion-ally portrayed, but the groups in which they appear are susceptible of religious, evenastronomical interpretation, and warfare as such is almost certainly not implicated.(Morley, 1946, p. 70)

This comment strikes one today as rather odd because many of the monu-ments now featured as evidence for Maya war were known at the time,and earlier scholars such as the art historian Herbert Spinden (1913) hadidentified images of weapons and ‘‘memorials’’ to ‘‘success in war’’ (StephenHouston has also pointed out to me that in the 1930s M. Jean Genet madeseveral decipherments related to warfare).

Ironically, just before Morley’s book went to press the famous muralsof Bonampak (Miller, 1986) were discovered; these more than any otherimages contributed to the breakdown the ‘‘peaceful Maya’’ perspective. Infairness to Morely, he went on to speculate that there were ‘‘civil wars’’among Classic Maya polities and that captives pictured on monuments atTikal were slaves taken in warfare. In doing so he was not reasoningprimarily from the archaeological evidence but, rather, projecting ethnohis-torically known patterns back into the past.

Sometime later J. E. S. Thompson (1954, p. 81) ventured that

I think one can assume fairly constant friction over boundaries sometimes leadingto a little fighting, and occasional raids on outlying parts of a neighboring city stateto assure a constant supply of sacrificial victims, but I think the evidence is againstthe assumption of regular warfare on a considerable scale.

Thompson believed that Maya docility was deeply rooted in ‘‘character’’or ‘‘personality traits.’’ He admired the living Maya as ‘‘. . . exceptionallyhonest, good-natured, clean, tidy, and socially inclined’’—perfect exemplarsof ‘‘live and let live’’ except when provoked beyond endurance (Thompson,1954, p. 131). Thus oppressive elite demands for too much labor and taxat the end of the Classic period provoked a particular kind of warfare—peasant revolts—that ultimately overthrew them.

Of course at this time neither Morely nor Thompson nor anyone elsecould read noncalendrical Classic Maya hieroglyphs despite decades ofdetermined attempts at decipherment (Coe, 1992). Morley (1946, p. 262)was originally convinced, like John Lloyd Stephens, that the inscriptionsrecorded history, but later reversed his opinion:

The Maya inscriptions treat primarily of chronology, astronomy—perhaps onemight better say astrology—and religious matters. They are in no sense records of


personal glorification and self-laudation, like the inscriptions of Egypt, Assyria, andBabylon. They tell no story of kingly conquests, recount no deeds of imperialachievement; they neither praise or exalt, glorify nor aggrandize, indeed they areso utterly impersonal, so completely nonindividualistic, that it is even probablethat the name-glyphs of specific men and women were never recorded upon theMaya monument.

More than anything else this presumed esoteric, ahistorical content ofthe hieroglyphs, as the quote indicates, made the Maya seem unique, unlikeother civilizations. It heavily contributed to the then prevalent idea thatMaya polities were peaceful theocracies, dominated by priest-rulers whopresided over centers that were essentially vacant ceremonial places, builtand maintained by the devotion of common people (Becker, 1976)—acharming and utopian vision to which much of the general public is still at-tracted.

Not everyone neglected the topic of Classic period warfare, however.Robert Rand’s (1952) dissertation was one of the very few lengthy consider-ations of the topic. Rands (1952, pp. 5–6) observed that

some half dozen major types of evidence have been brought forward to supportthe belief that the Classic Maya were non-militaristic. These include their art,supposedly free of warlike motifs; their architecture and settlement patterning,supposedly vulnerable to attack; their cultural homogeneity, supposedly incompati-ble with intertribal warfare of the sort rampant in northern Yucatan a the time ofthe Spanish Conquest; and the supposed existence of their religiously-orientedculture and their national character or ethos dominated by strong tendencies tomoderation and orderliness.

Rands (1952, p. 64) believed instead that ‘‘evidences are strong for theexistence of fairly intensive patterns of warfare in the Classic Period,’’especially when segments of polities ‘‘revolted’’ to establish their indepen-dence. Even he, however, did not seriously buck the prevailing wisdom,and took the position that insofar as their art suggested, Classic Mayawar was not, like that of the Inka and Aztecs, motivated by acquisitionof ‘‘tribute or territorial gain’’ (Rands, 1952, p. 188). Only when convincingevidence of early fortifications emerged did some Mayanists begin tothink that something more serious might be going on, and even so, notuntil the inscriptions began to be comprehensible did the tide of opinionfinally turn.

The Sociopolitical Context of Classic Maya War

Despite the continuities already discussed between the Contact periodMaya and their Classic predecessors, we must also take into account manydifferences, as well as acknowledge serious gaps in our understanding ofClassic society. Here I provide only a brief overview, stressing those features

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most relevant for war; for more extensive discussions see Sabloff and Hen-derson (1993) and Lucero (1999). The principal concern is the Late Classicand Terminal Classic periods, during which evidence for war is very compel-ling. But first we must backtrack for a moment.

Preclassic Background

We now know that large centers and extensive polities, along withmany other features of the Lowland Maya Great Tradition previouslyattributed to Classic times, were actually present much earlier. By 300 BCKomchen in northeastern Yucatan, El Mirador and Nakbe in the northernPeten of Guatemala, and Cerros in northern Belize were all thriving places(Ringle and Andrews, 1990; Matheny, 1986; Hansen, 1998; Freidel, 1986a).Unfortunately we have no comprehensible texts for this early period, nordo we yet have a good grasp of settlement distributions, economic patterns,or regional demographic scales. Although Mayanists debate whether theseearly polities had social and political institutions comparable to those ofClassic times, there was obviously a considerable degree of political central-ization, massive use of labor for construction projects, and rituals andassociated symbols that generally prefigure later royal ones.

Interestingly, many of these large centers were abandoned at the endof the Late Preclassic period and never substantially reoccupied. Presum-ably their former inhabitants contributed to the growth of Tikal, Calakmul,and other great capitals that were dominant during the Early Classic.Whether warfare was associated with this upheaval and population disloca-tion is unknown, but as we have already seen, destruction episodes, massgraves of probable war victims, and very large fortifications do clearly dateto Late Preclassic times.

The Classic Period Political Landscape

In the late 1950s epigraphers first identified ‘‘emblem glyphs,’’ andsome 40 or more are now known (Mathews, 1991; Marcus, 1992b). Theseglyphs are not toponyms but, rather, occur as parts of titles that are alsoassociated with personal names. The referent is not a place per se, but a‘‘holy lord,’’ or king, presumably associated with a political unit designatedby the emblem glyph, and by extension they probably refer to a wholepolity and/or its dynastic line (Culbert, 1991, pp. 140–144; Stuart, 1993, pp.325–326, 1995, p. 257). Early emblem glyphs appeared in the fifth centurybut they are most numerous after AD 650. Unfortunately not all major


centers can be associated with an emblem glyph, some have more thanone, and some glyphs are shared by more than one center. Nevertheless,emblem glyphs have proved invaluable in understanding the Maya politicallandscape, especially the war texts to which we will turn shortly.

By the seventh century there were hundreds of large and small Mayacenters, most concentrated in the central and southern Lowlands. Some ofthese, in regions such as northeastern Guatemala or northern Belize, werewithin a day’s walk of one another. Elsewhere distances were greater, buteven Copan, perhaps the most isolated of first-rank centers, is only a 3-day walk from its closest neighbor, Quirigua.

Centers and Polities

Mayanists long ago recognized that Classic Maya centers differed fromurban places in other parts of the ancient world, and also from Mesoameri-can cities such as Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan. At their cores lie impres-sive masonry temples, ball courts, royal palaces, ceremonial causeways,great plazas containing carved and inscribed altars and stelae, and some-times artificial reservoirs (Houston, 1998). Such conglomerations of largearchitecture may cover as much as several square kilometers, as in thecase of Tikal, but most are much smaller—typically less than one squarekilometer. Considerable numbers of people inhabited these site cores, butnot in anything like the urban densities found in highland Mexico or atthe Postclassic Maya city of Mayapan. Instead, residences of elites andcommoners radiate out from the central precincts, with settlement usuallybecoming more dispersed with distance. Around a few centers such asCopan there are impressive residential precincts that approach urban densi-ties over very small areas (Webster et al., 2000), and the same appears truefor the newly mapped peripheries of Palenque.

Most Mayanists agree that centers were essentially the establishmentsof rulers and their immediate families and retainers, less differentiatedfrom their rural hinterlands than many Old World cities, particularly interms of their economic functions. Sanders and Webster (1988), followingthe urban anthropologist Richard Fox (1977) call them regal-ritual centersand envision them as the hyptertrophied household and court facilities ofhereditary kings, many of which acquired their forms over centuries (seealso Ball and Tasheck, 1991). Rule emanated from these centers, at whichwas concentrated all of the necessary apparatus of royal display and sym-bolic presentation. Lesser elite people often lived in elaborate householdsof their own, as most clearly seen at Copan.

If centers, at least the largest ones, were capitals, how extensive were

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their polities? Most Mayanists would probably agree that the most durablepolitical unit was a single center with its resident dynasty surrounded by asmall hinterland—say, on average, 2000–3000 km2 in area. Some Mayanistshave called such small polities ‘‘city-states,’’ but most of them were probablyneither very urban nor very state-like in organization. A few ancient centers,especially Tikal, might have been considerably larger even early on, anddominated nearby neighbors of considerable size. What Mayanists argueabout is the ability of ambitious rulers to create what Martin and Grube(1995) call Maya ‘‘superstates’’—polities in which one powerful ruler con-trolled, especially through successful warfare—many subordinate politiesand kings.

As we shall see below such attempts were clearly made. There is noquestion that during the sixth and seventh century Tikal and Calakmulwere centers of enormous political and military gravity which attracted orotherwise drew other dynasties into larger contending coalitions. Some oftheir struggles are reviewed below, but no single ruler or dynasty seems tohave been able to impose central control and effective administration overa territorially large, multicenter polity for any appreciable time. It is alsopossible that rulers of small polities actively sought associations with largeones for reasons of their own, so we need not see hierarchical politicalrelationships as always imposed from the top down.

Like northern Yucatan in the early sixteenth century, the central andsouthern Classic Maya Lowlands were politically fragmented, and individ-ual polities probably had varied internal political arrangements. Unitingthem all was a shared (but by no means monolithic) Great Tradition ofart, architecture, literacy, religion, ritual, worldview, and etiquette, commu-nicated among and maintained by mainly elites. Writing was a basic elementof this tradition, and very recent linguistic research (Houston et al., 2000)strongly supports the idea that all Classic inscriptions were recorded in asingle prestige language ancestral to modern Ch’olti and Ch’orti.

Kings, Elites, and Commoners

Central to Classic Maya political organization was kingship, the institu-tion that we know best because of the propensity of Maya archaeologiststo dig in royal places and because most monuments and texts were commis-sioned by kings. From these texts and associated images epigraphers havereconstructed local dynastic sequences. Some of these are only a few genera-tions deep, but others extend back through more than 31 successive reigns(with some breaks), as at Tikal, where the founding dynasty seems to havebeen established sometime around the beginning of the third century AD


[see Harrison (1999) for the most recent review]. Kings styled themselvesas K’uhul Ajaw, or ‘‘holy lords,’’ and inherited their positions (mostly inthe male line), but not according to rigid rules of primogeniture and, aswe shall see below, not without political dissention and even violence.

Houston and Stuart (1996) have recently summarized what we knowabout Classic rulership. Kings were closely associated with divinities whenthey lived. They took god-names and personified gods in rituals, and theircenters and dynasties were identified with particular sets of patron deities.Kings commissioned images in which gods were thought to reside (at leastperiodically), erected houses for deities, and in some sense personallyowned or cared for god-bundles. Kings also owned specific buildings, whoseconstruction they presumably oversaw. Destroying or defiling such power-fully charged places or sacred objects of an enemy ruler was a majorsymbolic goal of Late Classic war.

During their lives rulers were personally responsible for maintainingcosmic order and the well-being of their realms and subjects, particularlythrough communication with gods and royal ancestors, aided by wayob[spiritual companions or coessences (see Houston and Stuart, 1989)]. Livingkings were highly sacred individuals, and when they died some of themappear to have been apotheosized as gods. Rulership thus had a pronouncedtheocratic dimension that reflected a basic postulate of Classic Maya culture:the moral order, the political order, and the natural order were one. Inscrip-tions reveal that some kings were ‘‘possessed’’ by other kings and carriedout rituals under the aegis of their patrons or overlords.

Maya kings initiated war and portrayed themselves as participatingpersonally in battles, presiding over ceremonies of political significancesuch as heir designation, and visiting and entertaining one another, aswell as lesser elites, at impressive feasts. They certainly consumed andredistributed elite status items that were widely exchanged among polities,although it is unclear how much rulers were involved in their productionor acquisition. People of very high rank, including the sons of rulers, wereartists who engaged in the production of polychrome pottery and otherstatus objects. Powerful cultural influences emanated from royal courts,setting aesthetic and behavioral standards for people of lower rank.

Kings were surrounded by lesser hereditary nobles, officials, and court-iers, many of whom held titles and displayed carved benches, altars, andfacade sculpture in their own impressive households. Maya nobles belowthe rank of king participated in very important rituals such as deity imper-sonation. Like kings, these great lords had direct or indirect access to thelabor and taxes of commoners. Although the ajaw title was restricted tokings and their very close relatives (Stuart and Houston, 1996, p. 295), itis possible that all high nobles were (or claimed to be) descended from living

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or dead kings. Both kings and subroyal nobles were probably polygynous,although this is not certain.

Most people in any polity—probably upwards of 90%—were farmerswho produced the standard range of Mesoamerican crops on the agriculturallandscape. There is no direct evidence for the slaves described in the ethno-historic literature. Upland swidden agriculture was a major cultivation strat-egy, but more intensive forms of production involved terracing and wetlanddrainage in some areas, although their contribution to the Maya economyand even their chronology is debated (for a review see Fedick, 1996). Inany case, by the late eighth century overall population densities for largeregions were very high—at least 100 people per km2 and, according tosome estimates, even higher (Culbert and Rice, 1990).

What We Do Not Know About the Classic Maya

Unfortunately art and inscriptions are mute about many importantfeatures of Classic society central to a detailed understanding of warfare.Maya kings and associated elites had leadership roles in negotiating foreignrelations, waging war, levying taxes or tribute, conducting rituals, and initiat-ing royal building projects. We know almost nothing, however, about theirmore fundamental leadership roles. My own suspicion is that Maya rulersand elites had few managerial functions in terms of the all-important subsis-tence economy, apart from extracting that proportion of it necessary tounderwrite their own activities. I also believe that the Classic Maya lackedanything we might consider well-developed bureaucracies, but other Maya-nists would disagree.

The most important things we do not know are how kings and elitesrelated to commoners and how people of any rank asserted claims to theagricultural landscape. If effective commoner organization existed only atthe nuclear or extended family household level and lacked kin connectionswith elites, most people must have been attached as clients to royal ornoble families and were comparatively powerless to resist their decisions.This was the system in Hawai’i (Webster, 1998). In these circumstancesordinary people might, however, have had considerable ability to moveabout the landscape and attach themselves opportunistically to specificelites or even polities precisely because they lacked local, corporate organi-zation.

Alternatively, commoner households might have been organized intolarger corporate lineages, with their own resources and communities andwith kin attachments to elite leaders, along the lines of the postconquestcah reviewed above or the Mexica calpulli (Hopkins, 1988; Sanders, 1989,


1992; McAnany, 1995). Such lineages comprised natural political factions.Although I do not have space to develop the theme, I think that the ‘‘housesociety’’ concept propounded by Levi-Strauss has considerable utility here(for a review see Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995).

High-born individuals would have formed a kind of elite network withresponsibilities to their lesser kinspeople, but also its own collective eliteself-interest. Common people in this case would have been more tied tospecific parts of the landscape, and hence more vulnerable to politicalcontrol, but also more capable of resisting royal demands and competingwith other similarly constituted factions. These two models cloud the issuesof to whom Maya divine kings were responsible and over whom they hadsome sort of jurisdiction. Were such relations defined in territorial or kinshipterms? Did kings have impeded or unimpeded rights over the labor andproducts of commoners? We simply do not know.

Even this short review shows that the Classic Maya differed in manyimportant ways from the Contact period Maya. Those differences mostgermane to the issue of war include much stronger Classic political central-ization, more powerful royal institutions, larger, more numerous, and moreclosely packed polities, and much higher population densities.

Classic Maya War as History

Uniquely among New World peoples, the Classic Maya created alogosyllabic writing system so sophisticated that by the eighth century ADit could accurately replicate speech. No readable codices (screen-fold, bark-paper books) of the period have survived, although archaeologists haverecovered fragments of several, but many artistic representations of themare known. Fortunately, thousands of hieroglyphic inscriptions were moredurably carved, modeled, or painted on monumental altars, stelae, thrones,building facades, lintels, and walls, tomb chambers, ceramic vessels, andobjects of bone and wood, forming an invaluable resource for epigraphers.Until the late 1950s inscriptions could not be deciphered, and the conven-tional wisdom among Mayanists, as Morley’s quote shows, was that theyreferred mainly to calendrical, astronomical, ritual, and religious themes.Compounding the problem was that there is a great deal of regional varia-tion in Maya texts and the art which accompanies them. Copan’s manyinscriptions, which contributed so powerfully to early concepts of the ClassicMaya, are associated with few overt references to war.

Effective decipherment of hieroglyphs began only in the late 1950s(Proskouriakoff, 1961) and, along with associated archaeological discover-ies such as imposing royal tombs (Ruz, 1973), revealed that the Classic

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Maya had dynasties of hereditary kings, that centers were royal capitals,and that warfare was commonplace. Since about 1980 a veritable flood ofnew data has emerged. As Schele and Miller (1986, pp. 14–15) state,‘‘Among the most common events recorded on Maya monuments are warand capture. . . . Warfare . . . gave rise to more varied depictions thanany other theme.’’ Epigraphic studies are now driving our understandingof Maya war more than archaeological research—a development with bothgood and bad consequences.

Inscriptions, coupled with iconography and highly accurate Long Countdates, provide us with a sort of warfare history based on the emblem glyphsassociated with the rulers of contending centers, names of kings, noblewarriors, captives, and other participants in conflicts or their ritual sequels,and information about associated behaviors such as tribute presentation.Remarkable insights are being derived from this record, and when I firststarted studying Maya war I never imagined that we would ever possessanything like it.

Before examining this historical trove, however, we should admit someof its current limitations. First, all known inscriptions referring to war werewritten only after the sixth century AD. Here I mean dated inscriptions thatrefer to roughly contemporaneous events. Some wars are known throughretrospective inscriptions; for example, one of the earliest securely docu-mented Classic Maya wars occurred between Tikal and Caracol in AD 562but is first mentioned in a Caracol inscription made 70 years later. Suchdeeply retrospective texts obviously present their own problems of interpre-tation. The initial two and a half centuries of the Classic period are thusstill prehistoric with regard to conflict, although there are early artisticdepictions of sacrificial victims and other war-related images (see Dixon,1982). How to explain this rather sudden enthusiasm for explicit war state-ments is an important issue briefly addressed below.

Second, inscriptions of all kinds are short and caption-like, so there areno narratives comparable, say, to the Iliad. Third, war-related inscriptionsalmost always present the perspectives and intentions of the royal (andoccasionally other high ranking) individuals who commissioned them (al-though, interestingly, not always of the winners). Recorded events mustthus be understood in the context of their elite motivations, which are notalways clear, and of course are susceptible to self-serving distortion orat least omission. For example, confrontations between two centers aresometimes only recorded at one of them, usually the ostensible victor.Thus the sacrifice of the thirteenth ruler of Copan at Quirigua in AD 738,probably during a dynastic squabble, is recorded only at Quirigua. Suchinconsistencies clearly show elite concern with putting the best face onmilitary or political reverses.


A related difficulty is that this top-down perspective does not tell usdirectly about the motives, purposes, and functions of war, which leaderswere actually present in the field, or any details concerning the numbersof combatants, who they were, and how they were recruited, where battlestook place, how contingents were organized, or what kinds of strategiesand tactics were employed. Some war-related events appear to take place insupernatural contexts and might have had mainly mythical or metaphoricalsignificance (Stuart, 1995, p. 300).

There is also much regional variation in war texts. They are abundantat some centers, such as Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and Caracol, sparseelsewhere, as at Copan, and absent at others. Classic texts of any kind arecomparatively rare or lacking entirely in sites in the northern Lowlands.Compelling evidence for war in the form of fortifications, as at Becan, ordestruction episodes, as at Yaxuna, must consequently be interpreted inthe absence of texts, or even much art. Finally, some war-related glyphsremain undeciphered, others are poorly understood, and inscriptions areoften damaged or incomplete, leading to premature claims and disputes.For example, Schele and Freidel (1990) postulated an extremely importantwar early war between Tikal and Uaxactun in AD 378, while Stuart (1995,pp. 326) maintains that the evidence they cite has no such implication.

Bearing in mind these lacunae and uncertainties, let us turn to someglyphic expressions of war, relying heavily on David Stuart’s (1995, pp.291–329) summary, which I think is the best available and which itselfbenefits from the work of many other scholars.

War-Related Glyphs

Stuart notes, interestingly, that there is no glyph that literally means‘‘to wage war.’’ About a dozen others, however, have direct war-relatedmeanings or commonly occur as parts of longer war statements; these arerendered phonetically in the list below [Stuart (1995, p. 311) is adamantthat meanings of glyphs must be derived from their phonetic values, andnot from interpretations of the pictorial elements that make them up]. Theorthography of the listed terms varies according to specific epigraphers anddate of publication; here I follow Stuart. Stephen Houston offered his owncomments while reading a draft of this paper, and I have included themalongside Stuart’s interpretations.

(1) Chuk: ‘‘To capture’’ or ‘‘to tie up’’; the most commonglyph (or, according to Stephen Houston, ‘‘tograb’’ or ‘‘to seize’’).

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(2) Bate’el: ‘‘Warrior’’ (Houston thinks that this is a prob-lematical interpretation).

(3) Bak, or baak: ‘‘Prisoner’’ or ‘‘captive’’; often used in a posses-sive form, as ‘‘his captive,’’ with numbers spec-ified.

(4) Ch’ak: ‘‘To chop’’; probably referring to sacrifice afterwar events.

(5) Pul: ‘‘To burn’’; this glyph is often found in connec-tion with captives and might sometimes also re-fer to particular places that were burned (delib-erate destruction?).

(6) Tok’ pakal: ‘‘Flint shield’’; a term that somehow refers gen-erally to the essence of war as a royal endeavorand/or an object used in war-related ceremonies(Houston thinks that this glyph has a more spe-cific reference).

(7) Hub: To ‘‘fall,’’ ‘‘collapse,’’ or ‘‘fail’’ (as in the failureof a military campaign).

(8) Patan: ‘‘Tribute’’ or ‘‘service/work’’; this is a fairly rareterm often attached to numbers and sometimesseems to refer to tribute exacted or being of-fered after war events.

(9) Ikats: ‘‘Burden’’ or ‘‘load’’; sometimes used with ex-pressions for ‘‘payment,’’ as possibly in paymentof tribute. Sometimes used in the possessedform (yikats).

(10) Yubte: A very rare classical Yucatecan glyph for ‘‘trib-ute mantle’’ identified on a Peten polychromevessel by Stephen Houston.

To this list we should add two others. Sajal is one of the few apparentlyhereditary titles we know for Classic Maya officials or courtiers who arein some way subordinates of kings. Particularly common on the westernperipheries of the Maya Lowlands, the title is usually held by men, and royalinscriptions sometimes associate individual kings with numerous sajals, asat Yaxchilan. Sajals commonly appear in war statements (e.g., as captivesor captors) and are often assumed to have had military functions (Stuart,1993, pp. 330–331).

Perhaps most significant of all is the frequently occurring but controver-sial ‘‘shell-star’’ or ‘‘earth-star’’ glyph, usually taken to indicate a war eventof unusual consequence, as in Caracol’s apparent conquest of Tikal in AD562 (the earliest known example). Some epigraphers (Schele and Freidel,1990; Schele and Matthews, 1991) think that ‘‘earth-star’’ events were major


territorial wars timed with regard to particular points in the cycle of theplanet Venus (often associated with war in Mesoamerica) and signaled thedefeat of one polity by another. Stuart cautions that we do not yet under-stand the exact import of this glyph. Whether or not such events are signifi-cantly associated with the Venus cycle is much debated (Nahm, 1994; Aveniand Hotaling, 1994; Hotaling, 1995). Nahm found no war–Venus associa-tions in Colonial documents.

Implications of Texts

Inscriptions that contain one or several of the glyphs above, along withemblem glyphs and associated art, yield many insights about Maya war.Without going at length into specific examples at the expense of the generalreader, major themes of texts, taken broadly to include hieroglyphs, dates,and art, include the ‘‘victory’’ (in some sense or another) of one center, orgroup of allied centers, over another, the taking of captives, particularlyby kings but also by other elite warriors, the subsequent humbling, mutila-tion, and sacrifice of such captives, the linkage of war to ceremonies suchas heir-designation, the failure of war efforts, the destruction of the buildingsor ritual paraphernalia of enemies, the bestowal of gifts by rulers on warriorswho have distinguished themselves in battle, and the presentation of pay-ments or tribute.

Success or failure in war was quite possibly correlated in the Mayamind with the efficacy of the personal ways (Maya plural � wayob) ofpowerful leaders (Houston and Stuart, 1996). Military reverses, understand-ably, are seldom recorded by the defeated themselves, except on retrospec-tive monuments in which later victories appear more glorious as a result.

In some other parts of Mesoamerica warfare themes are only implicitlyand indirectly conveyed (as at Teotihuacan) but in the Maya Lowlandsthey are very explicit and often highly personalized statements essential toroyal presentation. A particularly good set of examples comes from EarlyClassic Tikal and Uaxactun. Whether or not Teotihuacan-inspired warsoccurred in the region during the fourth century, warfare imagery on stelaeis clear (Miller, 1999, pp. 94–99). Stela 5 at Uaxactun shows a warriorgarbed and armed in Teotihuacan style. One hundred fifty years later theTikal king Sayah Chan K’awil commissioned Stela 31, on which he associ-ated himself with war symbols and depicted his own father dressed as aTeotihuacan warrior. Stela 31 is one of the earliest monuments to blatantlyblend the ideology of war with that of rulership.

Monuments celebrating war events were most often set up at thecenters of the ostensible victors, but they also (particularly in the form of

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hieroglyphic stairways) were imposed on the losers. Many were positionedwhere they could be seen by the public at large, but they were probablyaimed at elite people who could best understand their texts, dates, andimagery and internalize the intended messages. Named and titled individu-als featured on monuments are most often kings, their captives, associatedwarriors, and occasionally royal wives. In the accompanying texts rulersare sometimes credited with the capture of large numbers of enemies (asmany as 20, but usually fewer). Especially interesting are nonroyal victimsof wars. For example, Stela 12 at Piedras Negras records one ‘‘Holy Shield’’as a such a victim and identifies him as a yajawak, ak, which Houston(personal communication, 2000) thinks is a war title.

Whether statements of royal captive-taking should be understood liter-ally (as personal battlefield exploits) or to pertain more generally to captivestaken by the king’s warriors and dedicated to him is often unclear. Onesuch obvious presentation is shown on the Kimbell Panel (Miller, 1999, p.156). Here a subordinate warrior presents three captives to a dominantfigure on a throne—probably the Yaxchilan ruler Shield Jaguar 2. Thescene is accompanied by a text reading nawaj u ba:k ti y-ajaw, which meanssomething like ‘‘his captives are dressed (?) for his lord’’ (Houston, S.,personal communication, 2000). Stela 12 at Yaxchilan’s hereditary enemyPiedras Negras has a very similar captive presentation theme.

Because Classic Maya rulers appear to have been spiritually responsi-ble for the well-being of their polities and control of chaos in the cosmos,images of kings subduing enemies might also have a metaphorical meaning,if, as seems likely, enemies themselves were conceptualized as sources ofdisorder. Even kings whose centers recorded few or no war events hadthemselves portrayed in military garb, as, for example, Yax Pasah, the lastruler of Copan (Fash, 1991; Baudez, 1994; Webster, 1999b). Long-deadkings were also shown in war regalia on monuments commissioned by laterrulers, and what are taken to be war symbols derived from the great highlandMexican metropolis of Teotihuacan are conspicuously featured on monu-ments at Uaxactun, Tikal, Copan, and elsewhere [see Stuart (1998) for adiscussion of possible Teotihuacan meddling in the dynastic affairs of Tikal].Clearly kings were preoccupied with their ideological associations with war,however we understand their actual participation.

Particularly intriguing are the presentation and tribute themes de-picting textiles, ceramics, feathers, cacao, shells, and probably jades. Tributescenes have only recently been recognized and hint at some of the motiva-tions for Classic warfare (Schele and Miller, 1986; Stuart, 1995, pp. 352–370;Reents-Budet, 1994, p. 257). Tribute statements are sometimes directlyassociated with war glyphs, as on Naranjo Stela 12. In one scene of thefamous Bonampak murals, which of course feature warfare, a tribute bundle


shown near the ruler’s throne is labeled as containing 8000 cacao beans(Miller, 1999, p. 172).

Some monuments show successful warriors being ‘‘adorned’’ or pre-sented with gifts such as feathers (headdresses?) by their patron rulers,much as Mexica warriors received mantles, ear flares, or other insignia asmarks of rank and favor from their king. Tribute bundles are conspicuousfeatures of Maya art, particularly on polychrome vase paintings, and tributeterms such as patan are linked to named individuals (at least in one caseto a woman) who might either owe tribute or literally be tribute. Suchindividuals might also be hostages as used elsewhere in Mesoamerica toguarantee the political complaisance of client or subordinate polities.

Tribute events can sometimes be correlated with wider conflicts. Forexample, Stuart (1995, p. 391) illustrates a monument from Palenque appar-ently depicting the Palenque king Akul Anab III (the only monument fromhis reign) unloading tribute. This event might have taken place at thenearby enemy center of Tonina, where inscriptions celebrate the captureof Akul Anab III’s immediate royal predecessor, Kan Hok’ Chitam II.

Before leaving the topic of texts, two further points must be brieflyaddressed: Who initiated Classic Maya wars? and In whose interests werethey fought? Inscriptions obviously stress royal initiatives, and there is littledoubt that wars served mainly elite purposes (more about this below). Onthe royal level, wars were no doubt undertaken to keep subordinates inline or, alternatively, to assert independence and create new dynasties andpolities. Most Mayanists would probably agree that by the seventh or eighthcentury AD there were no ‘‘private’’ wars (intrapolity factional competitionexcepted) in which some social groups could unilaterally start a war withoutthe consent of the ruler and his advisors. Indeed, suppression of such privateacts of aggression is a hallmark of effective political centralization. We donot know whether Maya kings maintained personal retinues of warriors attheir households, as did some Polynesian chiefs.

All this is not to say that aggressive wars were always in the interestsof, or even seen as desirable by, the rulers who began them. Like theircounterparts the world over, Classic Maya kings were undoubtedly some-times spurred into belligerent actions by their subordinates, including lesserelites and even commoners. A king whose territory was raided, whosesubjects were seized as captives, and whose crops were carried off (all ofwhich happened in Contact period times) probably had to take action tocounteract the political pressure engendered by such chaos and disordereven if the risks were high. Less clear is whether rulers who were somehow‘‘possessed’’ (as clients, lesser allies, or subordinates) by more dominantkings could act unilaterally or be forced to participate in wars not to theirliking or advantage.

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The Culture History of Classic Maya War

Because warfare events are often associated with dates that can berelated to the Julian calendar, they can be arranged into a chronologicalseries (although some uncertainties always exist because of deeply retro-spective dates, etc.). There are probably hundreds of inscriptions that useone or more of the war referents listed above, but many are comparativelyuninformative. Some are duplicates or incomplete, some lack emblemglyphs, while others refer to as yet unidentified centers, and some have noassociated dates. Disregarding these, it is still possible to assemble a fairlylarge sample of inscriptions for which the protagonist centers are knownand for which Long Count dates are available. Schele and Mathews (1991)made the first such compilation of the political geography of Maya war.More recently Mark Child (1999) has made another one for inscriptionsthat contain the verbs ‘‘to chop,’’ ‘‘to fall,’’ and ‘‘to capture.’’ His listincludes 107 war events involving 28 centers; the earliest event occurredin AD 512, and the latest in AD 808, with a distinctly accelerating trendtoward the end of the Classic period and a peak around AD 800.

Child notes that this is a biased and extremely incomplete samplebecause so many inscriptions are unreadable or have been lost and becausewar events frequently went unrecorded. In addition, fully 48 of the refer-ences come from just three sites—Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and DosPilas—all in the Petexbatun/Usumacinta regions of the western Maya Low-lands. Nevertheless, Child’s work shows how abundant the textual resourcesare and how informative they can be about processes through time.

Where there are many dates for a specific center it is possible to formsome idea about the periodicity of war events—or at least those importantenough to be recorded. Recently (Webster, 1998, p. 29) I calculated thatYaxchilan was involved in some sort of major conflict about every 13 years,based on information compiled by Hassig (1992, pp. 219–221). Similarly,Naranjo seems to have been involved in eight war events during a single4-month period in AD 799 (Stuart, 1995, pp. 359–361). Where both (orseveral) protagonists are identifiable, it is possible to piece together anarrative of conflict and its attendant political and economic consequencesover many years, as the following example shows.

The Tikal/Caracol Wars. Archaeologists have reconstructed a compli-cated sequence of warfare events between the major centers of Caracoland Tikal and their allies in the eastern Maya Lowlands over more than250 years (Chase and Chase, 1989, 1994, 1996, 1998; Martin and Grube,1995; Harrison, 1999). Tikal lies about 82 linear km northwest of Caracol,and Naranjo, another participant, is situated between them. The wars in-volving these sites are particularly interesting because of their apparent


economic (territorial?) and demographic consequences. Implications fromthe art and inscriptions found on stelae, altars, and building facades havebeen checked against and augmented by the abundant archaeological dataavailable for the antagonist centers.

According to the Chases, a major war of the ‘‘earth-star’’ variety inAD 562 was recorded on Altar 21 (a monument set up long after the event).Although the glyph identifying the victor is no longer legible (Martin andGrube, 1995, p. 44), the Chases believe it was clearly Caracol, which hadprobably engaged in earlier hostilities with Tikal in AD 556. Significantly,the Caracol king who ascended the throne in AD 553 did so under thepatronage of a Tikal ruler, so one purpose of the conflict might have beento assert Caracol’s independence from the dominant dynasty. In any case,the formerly vigorous Tikal subsided into hieroglyphic anonymity for about130 years after this defeat, while the Caracol kingdom somehow capitalizedmaterially on its conquest and went through a phase of massive expansion.Later war events involving Caracol were recorded in the seventh and earlyeighth centuries. Successful conflicts were fought with Naranjo, whose rulerhad taken the throne under the auspices of a Calakmul king in AD 546,and a hieroglyphic stairway was set up to commemorate Caracol’s victoryat the defeated center. Under its ruler Hok Kauil, Caracol was also em-broiled in a cluster of less well-understood wars, probably also involvingTikal and its allies, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. On one ofhis monuments Hok Kauil celebrates his taking of eight captives fromdifferent sites, and his descendants fondly remembered him as a greatwarrior. These are some of the latest iconographically attested militaryengagements recorded on Classic Maya monuments, although certainly notthe last wars. Caracol’s central precincts show signs of burning at the endof the ninth century.

Similar long-term hostilities can be traced for many other regions andsites as well, especially for the western Maya Lowlands, where Palenque,Tonina, Pomona, Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and many lesser centers re-peatedly fought with one another. Perhaps the richest information comesfrom the Petexbatun region on the upper reaches of the Usumacinta River,where the kings of Dos Pilas built an expansive kingdom, only to see itdissolve in the eighth century (Mathews and Willey, 1991; Houston, 1993;Demarest, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997). Some of the most convincing evi-dence for fortifications and for actual military attacks and abandonmentcome from this region, and particularly from Aguateca, where an apparentelite refuge was sacked and burned at the beginning of the ninth century(Inomata, 1997).

Although many wars were fought among closely juxtaposed and nodoubt traditional enemies, others reflect intense, long-term geopolitical

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antagonisms between distant major rivals such as Tikal and Calakmul (Mar-tin and Grube, 1995). These two centers seem to have dominanted largercoalitions that contended with each other for at least 150 years, supported(and apparently sometimes betrayed) by their allies and proxies as militaryfortunes changed. Martin and Grube call these coalitions ‘‘superstates,’’but as yet we do not understand the exact nature of the relationships amongallies or the degree to which, or even if, a putatively dominant capitaland dynasty such as Calakmul could unilaterally command the actions of‘‘subordinate’’ polities. Nor do we know exactly what Tikal or Calakmulstood to gain in these prolonged struggles, apart from the discomfiture ofits enemies.

The Tikal/Caracol conflicts outlined above apparently were part ofthese larger hostilities, which came to a head in AD 695 when Tikal seemsto have captured and killed the Calakmul king. At any rate, no more war-related inscriptions were erected at Calakmul after this time, although theresidual effects of the great early confrontations clearly still affected localeighth century conflicts. Similar networks of competing centers are nowalso known for the northern Maya Lowlands where inscriptions are moresparse, such as that involving Coba, Yaxuna, and Chichen Itza (Robles andAndrews, 1985; Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler and Freidel, 1998).

Even this brief review makes clear how important the conclusionsdrawn from texts are. Nowhere else in the Precolumbian New World dowe have such an imposing and detailed record of warfare (and much else)conveyed to us in the words and images of the participants over such along period. Admitting all this, there are some unfortunate consequences.The very richness and promise of inscriptions and art have focused archaeo-logical attention on those centers, mostly in the central and southern Low-lands, where texts are most abundant and/or likely to be recovered. In effectwe are viewing Classic Maya war through a restricted set of archaeologicalpeepholes. Many sites either lack such texts or have inscriptions that makefew references to war, as at Copan. If we wish to know about war at suchpolities, we will have to investigate it by other means.

Similarly, the imposing center of Becan, whose fortifications I describedmany years ago, lies just north of Calakmul, the greatest belligerent centerof Maya geopolitics in the seventh century. Caracol’s military history ismuch discussed, but always with reference to its historically documentedallies and enemies to the south. Becan simply does not figure in theseanalyses, not because it is unimportant strategically or otherwise, but be-cause it (as well as most nearby centers in this region) lacks inscriptionsand art. Excavations recently undertaken at Yaxuna and other northerncenters are, however, supplying independent confirmation of Classic Mayawars, so this imbalance will be corrected in the long run.


The Scope and Range of Classic Maya Military Operations

The Classic Maya faced the same logistical constraints as their Contactperiod descendants, which in turn affected three vital and interrelateddimensions of war: (1) how large fighting contingents were, (2) how farfrom their bases they could operate, and (3) how long they could stay inthe field on a particular campaign.

Some archaeologists have maintained that only Maya elites fought inwars, an interpretation based heavily on art and inscriptions, which certainlyemphasize high-ranked individuals. Freidel (1986b, p. 107), for example,stated that war was ‘‘a prerogative of the elite and fought primarily by theelite . . . the bulk of the population was neither affected by, nor participatedin, violent conflict.’’ This kind of war implies, however, tiny numbers ofcombatants. Hassig (1992, p. 77) concluded that only about 600–1000 elitemen could have been mustered even by Tikal, one of the largest ClassicMaya polities, and by the same reasoning Copan, for which our demographicreconstructions are better (Webster et al., 1992; Webster et al., 2000), couldhave fielded perhaps 500–600 men in the late eighth century. I grant theimprecision of such estimates, but they are reliable in order of magnitudeterms. Even if elite contingents from several different allied polities could beconcentrated, maximum forces in the 3000- to 5000-man range are indicated.

My own opinion is that while some kinds of engagements were carriedout only by elite warriors, others certainly involved commoners as well, asseems to be the case for the sixteenth century Maya. Moreover, somefortifications, even quite early ones dating to the Early Classic or LatePreclassic periods, were built on a scale suggesting large numbers of attack-ers (Webster, 1976b; Puleston and Callender, 1967). We will return toanother argument concerning the vulnerability of small forces shortly.

Unfortunately the inscriptions do not record where battles were fought.Even fortifications indicate merely that a particular center was threatened,not necessarily that it was attacked, so only where there is clear evidenceof war-related violence, as at Aguateca, can we be sure of the location ofa battle. But what kind of distances might be indicated? Some time ago Imeasured linear distances between 16 paired protagonist Classic centersand came up with a range of 19 to 109.5 km, with a mean of 57.8 km(Webster, 1998, p. 31). Interestingly, the upper end of the range is justabout the distance (108 km) between Tikal and two of its major enemies,Calakmul and Dos Pilas. Even more far-flung conflicts are indicated. Twicearound the turn of the seventh century Calakmul attacked Palenque, acenter located fully 240 linear km to the west (Martin and Grube, 1995, p.45). These are impressive distances, and of course real on-the-ground travelwould involve longer ones. Roys (1943, p. 67) believed that Contact period

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engagements were often fought along roads or trails that extended betweencontending centers. Assuming that Classic Maya conflicts took place nearthe boundaries between two polities, the distances cited might be halved.

Hassig (1988, p. 67) has carefully considered the issue of how fast largeMesoamerican forces could move on foot, particularly if carrying their ownprovisions and weapons, and concludes that 19–32 km is a reasonable ratefor an 8-hr day. This estimate seems reasonable for the Maya Lowlands.In 1525 Hernan Cortes and a force of several thousand men moved fromthe Akalan capital of Itzam K’anak to the northern shores of Lake PetenItza—a linear distance of about 155 km—in approximately 5 to 6 days(Jones, 1998, pp. 29–39). Even if the first contingents to reach the lakeshore were just the vanguard of this little army, they still averaged at least25–30 km per day. Rapid progress is not surprising because these Spaniardsand their Indian followers were led by local guides along a good road,minimally obstructed by rivers and marshes, during the height of the dryseason. Depending on terrain and season, a general daily mean of 25 kmfor ancient Maya overland travel is an acceptable rate. Armed forces couldhave moved appreciable distances quickly if campaigns were well plannedand if, as seems likely, a well-established network of roads and paths wereavailable. Even the most distant antagonist centers listed above were withinabout a 2-week walk of each other under optimal conditions, and mostwere within 4 to 6 days.

That being said, the other major logistical bottleneck was food. Asnoted above, warriors might have carried their own supplies or been accom-panied by porters who did so. Either system is very inefficient and wouldhave limited the duration of campaigns, in my estimation, to 2-weeks orless, counting travel time each way and the hostilities themselves. Prolongedsieges were clearly impractical. One way out of this impasse would havebeen to time operations to coincide with the period just before or justafter the harvest, when stocks of maize, beans, and other provisions wereaccessible in enemy fields or storehouses. If sufficient supplies were seizedin this way, a large force could spend a considerable amount of time inhostile territory.

A solution to these logistical problems was to prepare staging areas,through either conquest or alliance, that were closer to the main enemycenter. A dramatic example is Yaxuna, attached to its dominant ally Cobaby a 100-km-long causeway, but located only 20 km south of Coba’s principalenemy, Chichen Itza. Just as obvious is the possible relevance of Naranjoin the Tikal/Caracol wars. Only 36 km from Tikal, Naranjo could well haveserved this strategic purpose for Caracol forces, along with other centersin the upper Belize Valley. Tikal might have exerted influence over thisregion to forestall such attacks [see Ball and Taschek (2000) for evidence


of Tikal influence there]. If forces from Calakmul (i.e., instead of those ofits allies and proxies) did attack faraway Palenque, they certainly hadto use friendly bases in the Palenque region. Charles Golden (personalcommunication, 1999) believes that La Pasadıta served a similar role inthe wars between Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras, played out on a ruggedlandscape where rapid overland movement was channeled along valleysystems that could be controlled by outlying subordinate centers.

Mayanists disagree about the seasonal timing of campaigns. Eventhough war events are often dated precisely, the dates do not necessarilyclosely accord in time with battles. For example, a ‘‘chop’’ event referringto a sacrifice might have occurred long after the battle in which the victimwas captured. Nahm (1994) concluded from his analysis of war events thatthere were few wars during planting time in May, none during harvest frommid-September to the end of October, and then an upsurge in Novemberand December. Conflicts that did fall squarely in the June–September rainyseason tended to be shorter than those undertaken during the drier months.This conclusion generally supports Roy’s (1943, p. 67) observation that theContact period Maya made war most often between October and January.Hotaling (1995, Figs. 4 and 5) illustrates a somewhat similar pattern andMarcus (1992b, Table 11.1) detected a later dry season tendency.

As in all other agrarian societies, it was costly and inefficient to detachlarge numbers of farmers from the land during the cultivation (i.e., rainy)season, a time when food stocks were also low. Heavy rainfall in the centraland southern Maya Lowlands made paths or roads most difficult to useand rivers and marshes most difficult to cross at this time. Of course thedry season itself presented another problem—finding drinking water forlarge numbers of men. Actually there was probably a good deal of sea-sonal flexibility in scheduling, depending on the nature of the conflict,the forces assembled, and the spatial demands of a particular campaign.For example, an internal factional struggle that took place within a smallregional polity would not be constrained by seasonal considerations,nor would the large-scale mobilization of common warriors for localdefensive purposes.

Strategy and Tactics

We are almost totally in the dark about how the Classic Maya plannedcampaigns and comported themselves in battle. Both issues obviously de-pend on what kinds of political communities were involved and what themotivations and purposes behind a particular confrontation were. Identifi-able Classic weaponry is seldom recovered from archaeological contexts

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but is frequently depicted in art. It was basically the same as that used bythe Contact period Maya, with the exception of the bow and quilted cottonarmor (and possibly the sling), which were late innovations. Schele andFreidel (1990) proposed that the atlatl was introduced from highland Mex-ico in the fourth century AD and inaugurated a new kind of lethal, territorialconflict in the Tikal/Uaxactun wars. I doubt that long-distance missilesrevolutionized Maya war in this way. More probably opposing forces dis-charged several volleys of darts, then closed rapidly with one another andfought with thrusting, stabbing, and crushing weapons (mace-like objectsare found in archaeological deposits). Once engaged, discipline was proba-bly fairly loose and prominent warriors no doubt tried to distinguish them-selves with personal feats of bravery. Unlike later Spanish/Maya confronta-tions, neither side held much of a technical or tactical advantage overthe other.

Some battles were almost certainly carefully choreographed eventsinvolving large numbers of men on both sides and fought on the landscapebetween contending centers (but closer to the defending site). This was thedominant form of large-scale conflict among the Aztecs and their enemies(Hassig, 1999) and was common among other agrarian states [see thediscussion of Greek hoplite warfare by Raaflaub (1999)]. Battles of thiskind were usually decided when one force enveloped or broke the ranksof the other, whereupon the defeated side fled the field. Casualties werenot necessarily high on such occasions. Enemy centers were generallynot much damaged in this kind of warfare, although sometimes templesor other strong points were defended and desecrated or destroyed (anAztec glyph for conquest shows a burning temple). Such battles werein a sense ‘‘arranged’’ and did not depend on surprise. Fortune favoredthe side that could field the largest number of combatants, one of theadvantages undoubtedly enjoyed by the multipolity Maya alliances de-tected in the inscriptions. Despite the formal and to some degree ritualizeddimensions of such set-piece battles, they could have major territorialand political effects.

Early literature on Maya warfare often emphasized the swift raid car-ried out by small numbers of men, a scenario attractive because it wasconsistent with the presumed participation of only elite warriors, thecapture of sacrificial victims, and the ritual motivations of Classic war.I have always had difficulty envisioning how such raids worked (exceptalong navigable waterways). If the intention was merely to capture low-ranked people for slaves or sacrifice, carry off a small quantity of maizeor other booty, or harass an enemy, then raids could effectively bedirected at the dispersed, outlying, farming population on the bordersof a neighboring polity (this seems to have been Thompson’s conception).


There is not much glory or profit in this kind of war, however, and amore obvious motivation was to kill or capture high-ranking enemies(especially rulers), to despoil their temples, palaces, and ritual parapherna-lia, to in some sense dominate an enemy polity, and even perhaps todrive away or annihilate its royal family. In these respects the raid asa strategy is extremely problematical.

Raids are not typically casual or impulsive acts. Even among tinyegalitarian communities, they sometimes require years of preparation andplanning [see Flannery (1998, pp. 94–95) for a New Guinea example].Success depends on surprise (usually predicated on a small, highly mobilestriking force), maximum destruction in a very short time, and then rapidand well-organized withdrawal, for it is during the aftermath of a raid thatattackers are most vulnerable. It has always been difficult for me to envisionhow this strategy of attack could be effective against Late Classic enemycenters. Such places were typically surrounded by a screen of settlementsor farmsteads extending out for several kilometers or more. Many suchsettlements must have been located along the major roads, and duringtimes of open hostility (virtually constant by the eighth century for manypolities), these approaches must have been guarded—a practice well-knownfor the Contact period Maya. Risk of early detection was high, and raiderscaught deep in enemy territory were extremely exposed, especially if, as Imaintained above, there was a militia organization to Maya war that allowedlarge numbers of local warriors to be quickly mobilized. Even if a raidingparty reached the core settlement of an enemy polity and wreaked a certainamount of havoc, their successful withdrawal would be very difficult. Tothe extent that raids were a dominant strategy, they would work best wherepolities were small and closely juxtaposed.

All this being said, raids might nevertheless have been very effectivein cases of status rivalry war (a topic discussed below). Swift political coups,as opposed to pitched battles, lend themselves to raid-like strategies becauseattacks can be launched from within a polity with the complicity of localleaders. Similarly, factions within a polity might themselves enlist raidersfrom outside in internecine struggles. Such conflicts might well have in-volved only small numbers of elite warriors and would explain some of theevidence for desecration and mass killing of local kings and elites.

Where large-scale fortifications exist, as at Becan, one obvious tacticwas to concentrate large numbers of the surrounding population withinthem to resist attacks. Such systems are spacious enough to accommodateall or most of the members of a local polity and, indeed, would not beeffective without large numbers of defenders. Where fortifications are smallor absent, many noncombatants must have fled their homes and hiddenfrom attackers—a tactic well recorded for the Contact and Colonial periods.

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War as Ritual

Early literature on Classic Maya war (such as it was) tended to empha-size its ritual dimensions, especially human sacrifice. Well-documented pat-terns of sacrifice that occurred widely in Mesoamerica during the sixteenthcentury no doubt contributed to this view, as did the warriors, weapons,and sacrificial scenes depicted on Classic monuments. Also, as we alreadysaw, intermittent, small-scale ritual warfare could be conveniently accom-modated within the then prevalent ‘‘vacant ceremonial center’’ and ‘‘priest-theocrat’’ models of Classic settlement and society.

As more evidence for conflict accumulated in the 1970s, there simulta-neously developed a set of rather dichotomous interpretations: Classicwarfare was motivated either by ritual or by territorial aggrandizement. Afew Mayanists, myself included, believed that from its Preclassic beginningsMaya war had fundamental material and political motivations, but mostemphasized more ideological and ritual conflicts. Arthur Demarest (1978)concluded that Maya wars were usually severely constrained and limitedbecause they were fought between ethnically and culturally similarantagonists who abided by mutually understood conventions. StephenHouston pointed out to me that enemies in Classic Maya art are depictedwith Maya physiognomies, whereas in some other traditions they areshown phenotypically (and possibly metaphorically) as ‘‘foreigners.’’Enigmatic exceptions are the Cacaxtla murals in highland Mexico, appar-ently painted by Maya artists but showing Maya warriors defeated byhighlanders (Miller, pp. 179–182). In those exceptional cases when suchunderstandings did not exist, much more serious or ‘‘unlimited’’ formsof warfare broke out, thus accounting for early massive fortificationssuch as those at Becan and Tikal.

Others came down more squarely on the side of ritual. Linda Schele(1984, pp. 44–45), noting an apparent absence of place names in war texts,concluded that wars, although frequent, seldom had territorial objectivesbut did provide the occasions for human sacrifice and personal bloodletting.Shortly thereafter, Schele and Miller (1986, p. 220) asserted that ‘‘commem-orations of war activity in Maya art show that . . . the capture of sacrificialvictims was its fundamental goal. . . .’’ David Freidel (1986b), building onthe earlier ideas of Demarest, opined that kings and elites at all majorcenters shared a single common ‘‘charter of political power.’’ War washighly stylized and choreographed, and contributed to the homeostaticmaintenance of scores of independent ‘‘peer-polities.’’ Occasional violentwars might shatter these cultural constraints, especially when foreignersfrom Teotihuacan meddled in Tikal politics and introduced new weaponsin the midfourth century. Generally, however, wars only became destructive


and overtly aggrandizing in territorial and political terms in the TerminalClassic period (Freidel has more recently documented extremely violentand destructive levels of Early Classic war at Yaxuna and, presumably, nolonger maintains this position).

What I find puzzling about such views is the unnecessary contrastbetween ritual and materialist motivations for war. No such dichotomyexisted in some other Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Aztecs andthe Contact period Maya themselves. Virtually all wars anywhere, eventhose fought between culturally dissimilar peoples, are conventionalized insome ways, and I know of no ancient military traditions in complex societieselsewhere that did not combine ritual with the goal of strategic, political,or material advantage (see Raaflaub and Rosenstein, 1999). For example,during the Shang and Zhou periods of ancient China, ‘‘warfare was anintegral and essential part of the religious system. It could almost be claimedthat the state and the social order were entirely dependent for their exis-tence on war and sacrifice’’ (Yates, 1999, pp. 8–9). Numerous texts forthese periods make it clear, however, that sacrifice, divination, and propercomportment on the battlefield coexisted with the fundamental goals ofterritorial conquest, protection of frontiers, and elimination of enemy poli-ties and dynasties (Keightley, 1999; Shaughnessy, 1999).

Unfortunately Classic Maya inscriptions do not provide comparableinformation about the goals of war. Despite the asserted primacy of ritualexpressions in Maya texts, David Stuart (1995, p. 314) notes that ‘‘deciph-ered war events are not explicit in emphasizing ritual over more materialmotivations.’’ What we see instead are numerous representations of ritualevents related to the war process, such as sacrifice of important enemies,extraction of tribute, rewarding of successful warriors, and desecration ofenemy royal regalia. Battle scenes suggest that sacred images were carriedinto the field on litters, and warriors are sometimes shown dressed incostumes associated with deities (Miller, 1999, pp. 182–183). None of thistells us directly about how wars were more generally carried out or whattheir objectives were. Only when other kinds of archaeological informationare available are we able to discern the effects of war more directly, andas previously cited examples show, it is increasingly likely that many ClassicMaya polities, rulers and other elites profited politically and economicallyfrom it, at least in the short run—a pattern that I think began much earlier.

There is also an important ideological paradox related to war. Becausethe political and rhetorical ‘‘style’’ of Classic Maya rulership focused soheavily on the king’s personal ability to suppress discord and chaos, it iseasy to appreciate the ideological capital he derived from successful war.More difficult to understand from our perspective are the effects of defeatand subordination. Was a king who lost a war ideologically and ritually

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devalued, as well as politically diminished? What does it mean to be asubordinate divine king? We have no answers to these questions.

The Political Economy of Classic Maya War

Assuming that kings and elites initiated wars, what did they hope togain, and what did they stand to loose? If commoners were involved, whatmotivated them to fight? These issues broadly fall under the heading ofpolitical economy, as does war motivated by status rivalry.

Wars are costly, and not necessarily profitable even for the winners.As Eric Wolf (1999) recently pointed out, historically documented nation-states typically had economies that were built around war or the expectationof it. Indeed, the whole Western concept of political economy has its rootsin fifteenth and sixteenth century European states whose exchequers hadto fund large professional armies, navies, and systems of fortification. Norwere some ancient societies very different. Raaflaub (1999, p. 142) notesthat the Parthenon, including its monumental gold and ivory statue ofAthena, cost less in monetary terms than a single contemporary 9-monthsiege in the interminable wars of Athens. Unfortunately we have no Mayahistorian in the mode of Thucydides to enlighten us about the costs ofClassic period wars, but they certainly paled by comparison.

An anonymous reviewer of this paper brought up the issue of whetherthe Classic Maya had professional armies. If by professional we mean simplythat there is a core of men who are unusually skilled in war by trainingand experience, who are commonly called up to take part in conflict, andwho derive unusual benefits from it, then the answer is probably yes (i.e.,Maya noble warriors). If instead we mean permanently mobilized militaryunits that are specially trained and equipped, strategically located, possessedof their own command structure, subsidized by the king or polity, and whoidentify themselves as military specialists, then I think the answer is no. Itis the latter kind of military component that is so expensive to maintain.

There are, of course, many kinds of costs and gains—political andsocial as well as economic. Compared to Old World states, the economiccosts of Maya war were minimal unless a polity were abjectly defeated(and even then tribute might be light). Because kings did not maintainprofessional armies or navies in the Old World sense, they did not haveto underwrite the production of expensive and sophisticated weapons, andthere are few signs that they invested in complex systems of border fortifica-tions, which of course would have to be garrisoned. Indeed, Classic Mayawars in the seventh and eighth centuries might have occurred at a highfrequency precisely because they did not require a large military infrastruc-


ture or royal expenditures. Given a core force of nobles accustomed towar and a large armed commoner population who could be situationallymobilized, warfare closely resembled that of Polynesian and other nonstatesocieties, as I have elsewhere argued (Webster, 1998). Certainly taxationto support war did not lie heavily on the Maya commoner.

Political and social costs and gains are more difficult to assess becauseof our poor knowledge of Classic Maya social organization and intersiterelations. We know that success in war established at least situationalcontrol over other dynasties—possibly one source of the pattern of‘‘owned’’ or ‘‘possessed’’ rulers. During the expansion of the Dos Pilaspolity, for example, king Jaguar Paw of Seibal was captured by the DosPilas ruler (Stuart, 1995, pp. 324–325). Instead of being sacrificed as somany royal captives were, he was apparently retained as the Seibal kingbecause inscriptions suggest that at intervals over the next 10 years hecarried out ceremonies under the apparent aegis of his captor.

Kings no doubt spent much time and effort in maintaining good rela-tions with allied or subordinate centers. Dynastic intermarriage, gift ex-change, and visits of royal people or their deputations (all well documented)must frequently have been motivated by strategic political/military con-cerns—i.e., to create and maintain a geopolitical landscape that securedthe integrity of one or several polities and made them more effective whenhostilities broke out. No doubt subordinate rulers received rewards, tangibleor otherwise, from dominant ones in the great coalition struggles outlinedabove. But what about costs and gains within a local polity?

Victorious kings clearly benefited from the prestige and renown oftheir personal military feats and the subjection, humiliation, and destructionof enemies. These in turn bolstered their own claims to efficacy and legiti-macy, and dampened internal opposition. Leaders must motivate peopleto follow them, however, especially in such a potentially lethal enterpriseas war, and war itself provides the opportunity to do so. Many years agoI suggested (Webster, 1977; see also Ball, 1977) that successful warfareamong the Preclassic Maya, as in other complex societies, provided re-sources that promoted the interests of upwardly mobile elite segments.Land or other booty could be used to reward military followers outsidethe traditional network of kin-relations, thus creating new power factionsand strengthening the emergent institution of kingship. If this view is cor-rect, the process began long before Late Classic times, but the tributereferences now showing up in the inscriptions may well signal such redistri-bution in the more mature sociopolitical settings of the seventh–eighthcenturies. Where polities were closely juxtaposed, such as Tikal and Caracol,victors quite possibly could have advantageously extracted food, labor,and perhaps even relocated populations, which is essentially the Chases’s

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argument. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine, given the friction ofdistance, how Calakmul could have so directly benefited from the defeatof distant Palenque.

Among the sixteenth century Mexica and their allies in highland Mex-ico, there was a complex feedback system of rewards that benefited peopleof different political and social stations. Successful wars brought tribute ofmany kinds (including labor) to royal capitals, where it funded the enormoushouseholds of rulers as well as state projects such as the construction oftemples and irrigation systems. Aztec kings incurred heavy political costs,however, and bestowed estates, offices, and coveted military ranks, alongwith their perquisites in the form of insignia and status symbols, on noblewarriors. Most commoners received no such rewards, and those of excep-tional ability who did so seldom rose far in the sociopolitical hierarchy.

By Late and Terminal Classic times a watered-down version of thiskind of meritocratic system probably existed among the Maya as well.Whatever the details of redistribution of wealth and honors, the primaryrecipients must have been the noble warriors who closely supported rulersand who distinguished themselves in battle. Unfortunately no Maya rulerswere conquerors on the scale of the Aztec kings, and so frequent warfaredid not provide comparable revenues. They thus faced a dilemma: How toreward supporters, especially in defensive or inconclusive wars that simplymaintained the political status quo? Existing inscriptions and art emphasizethe honorific aspects of redistribution. As wars became more intense andless ‘‘profitable,’’ distinguished warriors to whom kings were politicallyindebted had to be placated with comparatively intangible rewards—a zero-sum game that undermined dynastic power. This brings us to the subjectof status-rivalry war.

Status Rivalry War

In January of 1695 Spanish priests visiting NojPeten, the capital ofAjaw Kan Ek’, ostensible ruler of the Itza polity, noticed that much of thetown had been burned down a few months before (Jones, 1998, pp. 205–206). One day a flotilla of canoes landed on the shore and disembarkedtwo chiefs who, accompanied by an armed retinue in full war regalia,proceeded to stroll with impunity about the town. As it turned out theelder of these chiefs, his face blackened by warpaint, was AjKowoj, thevery noble who in alliance with the uncle of Ajaw Kan Ek’ was responsiblefor the recent destruction. Ajaw Kan Ek’ and his own followers seem tohave kept a prudently low profile during the visit of their belligerent neigh-bor, nominal subordinate, and possible relative. This fascinating anecdote


provides a dramatic introduction to the issue of status rivalry war amongthe Classic Maya.

We saw earlier that after AD 600 there was a sudden appearance ofexplicit war-related inscriptions and an increase in artistic depictions ofwar. David Stuart (1995, pp. 328–329) proposes that during Early Classictimes the Tikal polity was very dominant and that, although its influencewas partly spread through warfare, wars were fought mainly against muchsmaller polities and victories did not merit glyphic reference. Eventually,however, many new polities established their independence. Whether ornot war was part of this process, references to war became essential to themaintenance of political sovereignty and to the expression of royal identityin these new kingdoms.

More recently I developed the theme of status rivalry war somewhatdifferently (Webster, 1998, 1999a; see also Pohl and Pohl, 1994). My mainpoint is that we need not envision the motivations for war only in termsof the ritual/material dichotomy referred to above—a complicated perspec-tive that I can only briefly summarize here.

By Late Classic times, and particularly by the eighth century, thecentral and southern Maya Lowlands were packed with polities of differentscales, each with its local dynasty of specific origin and kinship affiliations,historical depth, and prestige. This was also the time of highest populationdensity (Culbert and Rice, 1990) and increasing human-induced stress onfragile tropical ecosystems (Rice, 1993). Over several centuries royal/elitepolygyny, the proliferation of dynasties and their cadet branches, intermar-riage among royal and elite families, the high status of elite women, andtendencies toward bilateral descent together created a political landscapeof almost unimaginable complexity and inherent ambiguities—the condi-tions for intense status rivalry [see Viel (1999) for an example of how thismight have worked at Copan on a dynastic level].

By status rivalry war I mean overt competition for the restricted titles,offices, honors, and privileges that were the symbolic correlates of rank,status, and authority. Many of these things were of course valued for nonma-terial reasons, but more importantly they provided access to the mostfundamental sources of wealth in any complex agrarian society—rights ofdisposal over land and the products and labor of farming households. Thesein turn structured power relations. Acquiring, maintaining, and augmentingsuch claims were the central political interests of highly ranked individualsand their factions. Hereditary rank conferred valued rights but could becounterbalanced by achievement—most significantly mobilization of fol-lowers and use of force for political ends.

Conflict of this kind is abundantly evident in the Maya ethnohistoricrecord. Spanish pressure on the Itza at the end of the seventeenth century,

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for example, partly provoked the factional conflict described at the begin-ning of this section. Unfortunately similar situations are only dimly reflectedin Classic inscriptions (Pohl and Pohl, 1994). Few leaders anywhere, natu-rally, are inclined to raise public monuments recording the messy andsometimes embarrassing details of ursupations, political treachery, or inter-necine bickering, and this was particularly so for Maya kings, whose royallegitimization was so heavily invested in maintenance of social and cosmicorder [although such struggles might have been recorded in books, as wasdone elsewhere in Mesoamerica by the Mixtecs (Boone, 2000, p. 107)].We can, however, piece together some indirect evidence for the royaldimensions of such conflicts, sometimes even from the absence of certainkinds of data.

Long periods during which royal monuments were not erected, as atTikal (see above), may signal political disarray after military defeats asmuch as external domination. One can only imagine the internal squabblingfor power that occurred after Tikal’s defeat at the hands of Caracol in AD562 and the maneuvering that eventually led to the resurgence of a localdynasty toward the end of the seventh century. Shorter suggestive interrup-tions in dynastic sequences have been noted at other major centers, includ-ing Piedras Negras and Palenque. There are rare references to abdications,and we even have evidence of displaced ruling factions. During the seventhcentury a refugee Tikal king and his supporters seem to have been welcomedby the Palenque king and might even have taken part in local wars, nodoubt scheming all the while to reclaim their own political birthright. Andwe already saw that there are mortuary and desecratory archaeologicalcorrelates of such conflicts, including the possible massacre of defeatedroyal families.

In any given Maya polity the number of effective elite ‘‘players’’ insuch status rivalry wars was tiny, and this seems to bolster the argumentsmade by those who think only elites were warriors. If commoners had littleto gain, what motivated them to fight, apart from a general interest in thewell-being of their kingdom and local dynasty? I think one answer is thatthey lacked the ability to resist effectively elite demands for military serviceand risked more by refusing participation than by acquiescence, especiallysince most wars were probably not very lethal. In internecine struggles,moreover, elites who could mobilize commoner followers might well havebeen able to reward them with land. And by the eighth and early ninthcenturies, when wars became very intense, demands of commoners them-selves threatened by land shortages and other stresses might well haveprompted conflicts. However mysterious commoner motivations might beto us, remember that most Aztec farmer-conscripts also reaped no benefits,except the satisfaction of doing what their state and worldview expected


of them. Edgerton (1995) provides a fascinating account of the Asante warsin late nineteenth century Africa, during which armies composed largelyof slaves fought fiercely against the British even though they could expectfew, if any, rewards from their masters.

However the ancient Maya chose to think about their wars and howeverritualized they might seem from our perspective, there is no doubt thatthey functioned to maintain or expand political systems, eliminate enemies,establish political dominance or strategic advantage, acquire and redistrib-ute basic resources and populations, and facilitate the upward mobility ofindividuals and factions.

WAR AND THE MAYA COLLAPSE

Between roughly AD 780–900 many polities in the central and southernLowlands experienced severe disruption—what archaeologists have longcalled the ‘‘Classic Maya collapse.’’ We now know that this process wasfar more complicated, protracted, and variable than previously believed(to the extent that some Mayanists disavow the term ‘‘collapse’’ entirely)and I can comment only briefly on its relationship to war here.

Original conceptions of the dynamics of the Classic collapse derivedfrom the phased cessation of dated monuments erected at various centersand stratigraphic evidence showing that major building projects ceased atabout the same time. Thus the last dates at Palenque occur in the finaldecades of the eighth century, at Copan around AD 822, and at Tikal atAD 869. Signaled most directly by such evidence is the failure of theinstitution of kingship, its attendant dynastic families and royal courts, andthe apparatus of centralized rule. Impressed by the apparent suddennessof royal collapse, some Mayanists invoked one form of war, peasant upris-ings or rebellions, to explain it (Thompson, 1954; Hamblin and Pitcher,1980).

In some polities dynastic collapse was accompanied by the compara-tively sudden disappearance of lesser elites and the commoner population,as at La Milpa (Hammond et al., 1998) and apparently at Piedras Negras,where I am currently working. Elsewhere, at Copan, there was continuedelite activity for a century or two after the kings lost their power and amore gradual decline of the hinterland population [this is a controversialscenario to some Mayanists; see Webster et al. (2000) for new data anda detailed discussion]. Some centers even show indications of continuedmonumental construction (Pendergast, 1985, 1986).

No historical process of such complexity is easily reduced to a singlecause, and many factors contributed to this widespread deterioration. Al-

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though Mayanists have traditionally seen the whole Late Classic period asthe mature stage of Maya civilization, David Stuart (1993) suggests thatwe should instead regard the seventh and eighth centuries as intervals ofprotracted collapse, in the sense that Maya political institutions, popula-tions, and their economic underpinnings were increasingly threatened anddisrupted. The conspicuous interpolity warfare apparent in the inscriptionsis one symptom of this time of troubles, and status-rivalry war probablybecame most serious and disruptive at the end of the Late Classic. Stuart(1993, p. 336) notes that increasing warfare and territorial assertions duringthe Late Classic seem to have undermined the institution of kingship, evenas royal discourse became most strident and assertive and royal constructionprojects became more ambitious. Centers in some regions, particularly onthe western margins of the Lowlands such as Dos Pilas, Seibal, Aguateca,Yaxchilan, Pomona, and Piedras Negras, have yielded so many war texts(supplemented by other archaeological data) that we can appreciate howintimately interpolity war was associated with their collapse. At Copan, incontrast, conflict was probably internal (Webster, 1999b).

CONCLUSION

Mayanists have often been out of step with larger comparative anthro-pological and historical interpretations, and usually wrongly so. Classicinscriptions were supposed to be ahistorical, and turned out to be anythingbut. Centers were envisioned as vacant ceremonial places and are nowrevealed as political capitals and dynastic courtly places. Star-gazing theo-cratic leaders have been replaced by hereditary kings. And most importantlythe ‘‘peaceful Maya’’ were not peaceful at all.

There are three ironies here. At a time when it has become politicallycorrect and fashionable to blame war among nonstate societies generallyon the invidious and baleful influences of expanding states, the Maya proveto have been warlike to their deepest Preclassic roots. At a time whenanthropological fashion and political correctness assert the uniqueness ofeach society or cultural tradition and downplay comparisons, the Mayamore and more resemble other well documented ancient complex societies.Finally, in an epistemological climate in which many scholars insist thatarchaeological evidence is so malleable that it can be used to bolster anyfond ideas we choose to have about the past, Mayanists have been forcedby the stuff we find to reject our own cherished models. On all these issuesI think the Mayanists, for a change, have got it right.

All this has been a long time in coming, though, and as I maintainedin an earlier article (Webster, 1993), the grudging acceptance that the


Maya were seriously warlike tells us as much about the enterprise of Mayaarchaeology as it does about the ancient people we study. Long afterevidence for war was reasonably clear, rear-guard scholarly actions empha-sizing ritual war were fought to preserve cherished conceptions of theClassic Maya as a unique civilization. This phase of debate appears to beover, and warfare of many kinds, including conflicts with fundamentaleconomic, social, demographic, and political consequences, is now almostuniversally admitted. Such consensus, however, was only achieved afterClassic inscriptions were deciphered, suddenly rendering the long-recog-nized military motifs in Maya art comprehensible.

War is, to be sure, difficult to document in the archaeological record.But as many recent projects have shown, its purely archaeological manifes-tations are evident if we look for them. Fortifications are recognized incenters and regions where they were putatively absent. ‘‘Termination ritu-als’’ are increasingly seen as violent desecration. Episodes of burning anddestruction are attributed to sacking of temples and palaces. Abandonmentof whole centers and in some cases whole regions is linked to conflict. Yetmost such interpretations had to wait until it became evident that the Mayathemselves had left us an abundant, if admittedly ambiguous and partial,written record of their own warlike proclivities and behaviors. What wouldwe have concluded about war had Maya texts proved indecipherable? Howmuch earlier might we have recognized evidence for it if, like John LloydStephens standing in the ruins of Copan so long ago, we had simply madethe uniformitarian assumption that the Classic Maya resembled other greatcivilizations in many things, war included?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Stephen Houston for his many insightful com-ments on this paper, which also benefited from information available inthe preliminary version of his overview of Maya glyphic studies submittedto Journal of World Prehistory. Two anonymous reviews also helped meto clarify some points.

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