Classic Maya Polities Of The Southern Lowlands

"Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory.The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period."

Foias argues that there is no single Maya political history, but multiple histories, no single Maya state, but multiple polities that need to be understood at the level of the lived experience of individuals. She explores the ways in which the dynamics of political power shaped the lives and landscape of the Maya and how this information can be used to look at other complex societies.

3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands presents the cutting-edge research of 25 authors in the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, art history, ethnohistory, and epigraphy. Together, they explore issues central to ancient Maya identity, political history, and warfare. The Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and southeast Mexico have witnessed human occupation for at least 11,000 years, and settled life reliant on agriculture began some 3,100 years ago. From the earliest times, Maya communities expressed their shifting identities through pottery, architecture, stone tools, and other items of material culture. Although it is tempting to think of the Maya as a single unified culture, they were anything but homogeneous, and differences in identity could be expressed through violence. 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands explores the formation of identity, its relationship to politics, and its manifestation in warfare from the earliest pottery-making villages through the late colonial period by studying the material remains and written texts of the Maya. This volume is an invaluable reference for students and scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists.

This volume presents the first history of the Classic Maya based on a combination of the Maya's own dynastic records and archaeological data.

Pathways to Complexity synthesizes a wealth of new archaeological data to illuminate the origins of Maya civilization and the rise of Classic Maya culture. In this volume, prominent Maya scholars argue that the development of social, religious, and economic complexity began during the Middle Preclassic period (1000–300 B.C.), hundreds of years earlier than previously thought. Contributors reveal that villages were present in parts of the lowlands by 1000 B.C., challenging the prevailing models estimating when civilization took root in the area. Combining recent discoveries from the northern lowlands—an area often neglected in other volumes—and the southern lowlands, the collection then traces the emergence of sociopolitical inequality and complexity in all parts of the Yucatan peninsula over the course of the Middle Preclassic period. They show that communities evolved in different ways due to influences such as geographical location, ceramic exchange, shell ornament production, agricultural strategy, religious ritual, ideology, and social rankings. These varied pathways to complexity developed over half a millennium and culminated in the institution of kingship by the Late Preclassic period. Presenting exciting work on a dynamic and poorly understood time period, Pathways to Complexity demonstrates the importance of a broad, comparative approach to understanding Preclassic Maya civilization and will serve as a foundation for future research and interpretation. Contributors: M. Kathryn Brown | Dr. George Bey III | Tara Bond-Freeman | Fernando Robles Castellanos | Tomas Gallareta Negron | E. Wyllys Andrews V | Anthony Andrews | David S. Anderson | Lauren Sullivan | Jaime J. Awe | James F. Garber | Mary Jane Acuña | William Saturno | Bobbi Hohmann | Terry Powis | Paul Healy | Richard Hansen | Donald W. Forsyth | David Freidel | Barbara Arroyo | Richard E. W. Adams A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

"Of the many mysteries surrounding ancient Maya civilization, none has attracted greater interest than its collapse in the eighth and ninth centuries AD. Until recently, speculations on the causes of the collapse have been more numerous than excavated sites in the area. But the past twenty-five years have produced many new findings. In this book, thirteen leading scholars use new data to revise the image of ancient Maya civilization and create a new model of its collapse--a general model of sociopolitical collapse not limited to the cultural history of the Maya alone"--Publisher's description

In the southern Maya lowlands, rainfall provided the primary and, in some areas, the only source of water for people and crops. Classic Maya kings sponsored elaborate public rituals that affirmed their close ties to the supernatural world and their ability to intercede with deities and ancestors to ensure an adequate amount of rain, which was then stored to provide water during the four-to-five-month dry season. As long as the rains came, Maya kings supplied their subjects with water and exacted tribute in labor and goods in return. But when the rains failed at the end of the Classic period (AD 850-950), the Maya rulers lost both their claim to supernatural power and their temporal authority. Maya commoners continued to supplicate gods and ancestors for rain in household rituals, but they stopped paying tribute to rulers whom the gods had forsaken. In this paradigm-shifting book, Lisa Lucero investigates the central role of water and ritual in the rise, dominance, and fall of Classic Maya rulers. She documents commoner, elite, and royal ritual histories in the southern Maya lowlands from the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic periods to show how elites and rulers gained political power through the public replication and elaboration of household-level rituals. At the same time, Lucero demonstrates that political power rested equally on material conditions that the Maya rulers could only partially control. Offering a new, more nuanced understanding of these dual bases of power, Lucero makes a compelling case for spiritual and material factors intermingling in the development and demise of Maya political complexity.

How did the ancient Maya rule their world? Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation and glyphic decipherment, the nature of Maya political organization and political geography has remained an open question. Many debates have raged over models of centralization versus decentralization, superordinate and subordinate status—with far-flung analogies to emerging states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Prudence Rice asserts that neither the model of two giant "superpowers" nor that which postulates scores of small, weakly independent polities fits the accumulating body of material and cultural evidence. In this groundbreaking book, Rice builds a new model of Classic lowland Maya (AD 179-948) political organization and political geography. Using the method of direct historical analogy, she integrates ethnohistoric and ethnographic knowledge of the Colonial-period and modern Maya with archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic data from the ancient Maya. On this basis of cultural continuity, she constructs a convincing case that the fundamental ordering principles of Classic Maya geopolitical organization were the calendar (specifically a 256-year cycle of time known as the may) and the concept of quadripartition, or the division of the cosmos into four cardinal directions. Rice also examines this new model of geopolitical organization in the Preclassic and Postclassic periods and demonstrates that it offers fresh insights into the nature of rulership, ballgame ritual, and warfare among the Classic lowland Maya.