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CHAPTER 1
Disentangling Conflict in Maya and Mesoamerican Studies
Meaghan M. Peuramaki-Brown, Shawn G. Morton, and Harri Kettunen
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
(Pratchett and Gaiman 1990, 39)
For decades prior to the 1980s, when our ability to read ancient texts became more fully developed, the narrative of the ancient Maya as peaceful stargazers dominated and even directed early studies based in ethnography, ethnohistory, art history, and archaeology (best exemplified in Morley 1946; see discussions in Sullivan 2014; Webster 2000; Wilk 1985). Alongside more general narratives surrounding the "noble savages" of the Americas (Deloria 1969; Otterbein 2000a), these biases served to limit earlier considerations of conflict in the ancient past. Since the 1980s, significant contributions to the study of ancient Maya — and, more generally, Mesoamerican — conflict have appeared in peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, and popular media. Although this volume is intended as a follow-up to previous scholarly contributions, such as Brown and Stanton's (2003) Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare and Orr and Koontz's (2009) Blood and Beauty, it is also unique. We present a conscious effort to consider a range of human conflict processes — from interpersonal violence and crime, to inter-group aggression and political instability, to institutional breakdown and the collapse of civilizations — and to include contributions for which archaeological materials, ancient and not-so-ancient text, and preserved images all serve as complementary touchstones.
While this volume presents new sources, new translations, and new interpretations, it also attempts to explore Maya — and comparative Mesoamerican — conflict through an emic (insider, subjective) approach alongside the more traditional etic (outsider, objective) perspective, both of which are critical to developing more social and holistic understandings of the complex, often multigenerational processes that make up conflicts (Gilchrist 2003). By including studies that intentionally adopt cognitive and experiential approaches alongside more operational considerations, this volume acts as a valuable counterpoint to its more etic predecessors. Thus while many treatments of conflict, including that of this volume, focus on the degree to which its prevalence, nature, and conduct varied across time and space, we explicitly attempt to understand how the Maya themselves — along with their Mesoamerican neighbors — understood and explained conflict, what they recognized as conflict, how conflict was experienced by various parties, and the circumstances surrounding conflict.
We are, as always, limited in our ability to fully achieve emic understandings of the past. This is the result of the physical limitations presented to us through the various disciplines encompassed in this volume, alongside the ever-present lack of a working time machine. Issues such as the psychology of conflict, including what it was like to live through periods of conflict or the beliefs that propel conflict (e.g., superiority, injustice, vulnerability, distrust, helplessness; see Eidelson and Eidelson 2003), are often within the untouchable realm for most scholars of history and prehistory, unless chance should have it that individuals recorded these thoughts and experiences for us to discover. To a degree, we might be able to take more modern experiences of conflict and project them onto the past; however, this is an extremely difficult and tentative task.
The aims of this introductory chapter are twofold. In the first half, we consider a brief history of conflict research in Maya and Mesoamerican studies and discuss the notion of conflict itself as a dynamic of emic and etic perspectives critical to understanding the concept as a process and total social fact — a common thread throughout the volume. We also elaborate on the three aforementioned categories of approaches (operational, cognitive, experiential) and consider how multiple theoretical frameworks demonstrate that conflict can, and in fact should, be viewed from a variety of angles. In the second half of the chapter, we introduce the structure of the volume and how individual contributions move forward our stated goals.
Why Study Conflict?
We live in an age that is said to be ahistorical. It is difficult to remember the past — or even acknowledge it — living as we do, focused on an "eternal present," driven by busy schedules and information overload, and wrapped up in anxieties about careers, family, health, the environment, terrorism, the future of the world. It can be both comforting and discouraging to know that many of the issues we confront today have been with us in different forms for a long time.
(Lucht 2007, xv–xvi)
Conflict. The term is pervasive across news headlines around the globe. "The Middle East Conflict." "The Syrian Conflict." "The Columbian Armed Conflict." "The Conflict in South Sudan." "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." Beyond the most recent headlines, terms such as class conflict, inner conflict, conflict resolution, conflict of interest, conflict diamond, and conflict tourism surround us throughout our daily lives — at home, at work, and at play.
Since 1980, the number of studies of conflict among the ancient Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors has risen dramatically (a small sample of such studies includes Brown and Stanton 2003; Chase and Chase 1989; Demarest et al. 1997; Dillon 1982; Freidel 1986; Hamblin and Pitcher 1980; Inomata 1997, 2014; Johnston 2001; Marcus 1992b; Miller 1986; Nahm 1994; Pohl and Pohl 1994; Redmond and Spencer 2006; Vázquez López, Valencia Rivera, and Gutierrez González 2014; Webster 1993, 1998, 1999, 2000), although the Aztec have long drawn such fascination primarily as a result of significant ethnohistoric accounts from the Conquest period (see Hassig 1995). Why has conflict become such a focus in Mesoamerican studies, particularly of the Maya, when prior to the end of the twentieth century CE it was largely avoided? The most obvious reasons are disciplinary-based, internal to modern Western approaches to the material past (e.g., archaeology, epigraphy, iconography). Conflicts, in particular violent events of interference, are "real" processes that can leave telltale signs within the physical record of the past, including dramatic shifts in human behavior (Saunders 2004). We tend to believe that we can easily define conflict as disruption or discord within the white noise that is peace. When this disruption takes the form of violence, involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill, it becomes more visible in the archaeological record (Vencl 1984).
Other explanations are more broadly and historically contingent. As Wilk (1985, 307) noted in the mid-1980s, "archaeological discourse has a dual nature: at the same time that it pursues objective, verifiable knowledge about the past, it also conducts an informal and often hidden political and philosophical debate about the major issues of contemporary life." Post–World War II archaeology focused heavily on the peaceful nature of the Maya, perhaps as a direct reaction against and escape from the reality that many soldier-scholars had recently faced. A noticeable increase in the number of American scholars dealing with the topics of collapse and warfare in the 1960s to 1970s is suggested by Wilk (1985) to be a reflection of US involvement in Vietnam. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the eventual dissolution of the British Empire and the Soviet Union — both a series of large-scale, long-term events serving as a culmination of multigenerational conflicts (Gluckman 1955, 1963) — increased interest in conflict and even collapse among scholars the world over focused on Mesoamerica and the Maya. Perhaps even the origin of archaeology as a discipline, within the realms of military and nationalistic pursuits, foreshadowed our inevitable interest in past conflict (Evans 2014; Trigger 2006).
Finally, we must consider that this fascination is not entirely our own but is shared with the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica. The textual corpus of the Maya region and its neighbors, at least that portion recorded on (semi-) public stone monuments, shows a similar concern with conflict. In general, this typically includes events that embroil rulers against their neighbors, such as inter-site or inter-dynastic conflict involving armed engagements (militarism, conquest, and coercion) (Kettunen 2012). While the database associated with Kettunen's Corpus Epigraphy project is continually developing, we are currently able to note at least 117 different Maya monuments that specifically discuss warfare. Of these, there are 166 individual references to acts of physical domination or violence, representing 98 "events of interference" (see below), either part of the same or diverse conflict processes. References to warfare in the hieroglyphic corpus include verbs such as chuk- "to capture" or "to tie up," jub- "to overthrow," ch'ak- "to chop, destroy," pul- "to burn," nak- "to fight," as well as the so-called star-war glyph that appears to refer to large-scale warfare. The most common of these references in the corpus of Maya inscriptions is the verb chuk- and its passive form chuhkaj "was captured." However, we must be careful when interpreting these records, as they are in many cases abundant in one geographic area and all but absent in another. This is especially the case with the pul- verb, which is a characteristic feature in the rhetoric of the Eastern Lowlands around Naranjo but practically nonexistent elsewhere, except for a few rare references beyond that region (Kettunen 2015).
In addition to these verbs, there are indirect references to aggression in Maya texts. One of these is och ch'e'n "cave entering," which may be a reference to entering a city with armed forces. Another phrase is nahbaj uk'ik'el witzaj ujolil, or the "pooling" of blood and "mountaining" (i.e., piling up) the skulls of enemies (?), as well as na'waj, or the "presentation" of captives. Besides verbs, we have nouns and compound nouns that are associated with warfare, including baak "captive," to'k' pakal "flint-shield," or "army"— appearing frequently in the phrase jubuy uto'k' upakal, or "defeating the army"— and titles such as the guardian (captor) of so-and-so (ucha'n ...) and "he of so-and-so many captives" (aj ... baak). In addition to these references, we have military titles and military offices in the corpus, including baah te', baah to'k', baah pakal, ch'ahom ajaw, lakam, sajal, yajaw k'ahk', and yajaw te'. The precise meaning and function of these titles is still under debate, and in the end, some of them may not have direct military associations. Other nouns include to'k' "flint," pakal "shield," and ko'haw "helmet." Kettunen (2014) has expanded this list by attempting to identify more subtle terminology and imagery related to warriors, weaponry, armor, strategies, tactics, and military geography, along with political motivations as presented in both the ancient corpus and colonial documents.
The subjective differences between various terms describing conflict are important. Languages can and do reflect the changes societies undergo; they naturally evolve over time under "normal" circumstances, and when change is rapid or traumatic, as is often the case with conflict, new words and phrases or secondary meanings of existing words and phrases often tell their own story of impact and change. In Ch'olti, lacael may indicate either a war or plague, the outcomes of each presumably thought of as broadly similar (Boot 2004, 8). Likewise, to "take in war" may be likened to the hunting of animals by the term colom (Boot 2004, 41). In K'iche', ch'o'j and its related terms may be used to indicate variations on an impassioned or angry dispute, while labal and its related terms clearly link the concept of "war" with the qualities of "badness" and "barbarism" (Christenson n.d., 24, 68). In Ch'ol, modern speakers borrow from the Spanish guerra to describe inter/intra-state conflicts or warfare (Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzmán 2011, 60). In Mopan, speakers distinguish between "warfare" (in the modern Western sense) and other conflicts by using the term guerra, while p'isb'aj and its related terms are used to indicate general conflicts or fights, and lox refers to small skirmishes or fistfights (residents of Maya Mopan, Stann Creek District, Belize, personal communication to M. Peuramaki-Brown and S. Morton, 2015; Hofling 2011, 662). Interestingly, guerra is a loanword from Germanic (Vandal/Visigoth) warra, as are some other war-related words in Spanish — in a similar way as the word was borrowed from Spanish to Mayan languages — perhaps reflecting the difference of native warfare as opposed to a "foreign" type/style of warfare. It would be foolish to expect any less variability in the ancient past. Thus the language of conflict is a critical focus in this volume.
Returning to considerations of conflict as process and total social fact, peace and negotiation are equally part of the equation, as are periods of coexistence (liminal events, discussed below), and they should be expressly included in our examinations whenever possible. While less frequent to be sure, the ancient Maya also felt compelled to record events and interactions that likely served to ameliorate or suppress the threat of conflict and maintain the peace. On Altar 21 from Caracol, the inauguration of Yajaw Te' K'inich is supervised and sponsored by the Tikal king Wak Chan K'awiil (Martin and Grube 2008, 89). On Altar 5 from Tikal, the Tikal lord Jasaw Chan K'awiil and a lord from Maasal cooperated in a joint exhumation ritual despite a long history of conflict between these two centers (Martin and Grube 2008, 37, 47). The affirmation of political domination and cooperation, while perhaps preserving the peace, could similarly be seen to foment discord. In 556 CE, three years after witnessing the inauguration of Yajaw Te' K'inich, Tikal "axed" Caracol (Martin and Grube 2008, 89) — an event that foreshadows a series of attacks and counterattacks so significant that we have taken to using the eventual fall of Tikal at the hands of its longtime rival Calakmul and its allies (Caracol included) as the marker for the end of the Early Classic period in the late sixth century CE. Such an example highlights the importance of perspective and the reality that lines between conflict and peace are not so easily drawn, as is often believed. In pointing to these issues, it is not our intention to undermine existing contributions to the study of conflict among the ancient Maya but rather to emphasize that the study of conflict, both cross-culturally and through time, may benefit from more nuanced approaches than are typically employed, an issue this volume explicitly attempts to address.
Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare (Brown and Stanton 2003) was the first comprehensive edited volume on warfare in Mesoamerica and acted as a watershed to previous studies by putting them in comparative context. What the volume may have lacked in specificity (being regionally broad), it more than made up for by showcasing the diverse ways Mesoamerican researchers, Mayanists included, were identifying and interpreting the material remains of warfare. As Brown and Stanton (2003, 2) point out, terms used to denote forms of violent aggression, along with other conflict-related concepts, are notoriously ill-defined. Confounded by arguments over motivation, scale, and even basic human nature, the task of succinctly defining such terms is daunting (Simons 1999). The editors unified the various chapters through use of the shared terms aggression and conflict, leaving particular examples to the discretion of the individual authors. This use of the broad term conflict belies the fact that the associated volume discussions were much narrower. As noted above, existing literature on the topic reveals that, despite significant and detailed treatments of acts and concepts that might be subsumed under the category of conflict in ancient Mesoamerica, a narrow semantic field dominates this discourse, specifically, discussions of "warfare" and related aspects of physical "violence" (Hassig 1992; Webster 2000). While both terms are frequently treated in the literature, there has historically been little attempt to define these concepts in a meaningful way, with the result being the discouragement of more nuanced, culturally relevant, or emically derived discussions of these subjects and overall processes of conflict.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica"
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