War in the Land of True Peace: The Fight for Maya Sacred Places
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War in the Land of True Peace: The Fight for Maya Sacred Places
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Overview
For the ancient and modern Maya, the landscape is ruled by powerful entities in the form of geographic features like caves, mountains, springs, and abandoned cities—spirits who must be entreated, through visits and rituals, for permission to plant, harvest, build, or travel their territories. Consequently, such places have served as points of domination and resistance over the millennia—and nowhere is this truer than in Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip, the subject of Brent K. S. Woodfill’s War in the Land of True Peace. This strategic region with its wealth of resources—fertile soil, petroleum, and the only noncoastal salt in the Maya lowlands—is the site of some of the most sacred Maya places, and thus also the focus of some of the signal struggles for power in Maya history. In War in the Land of True Peace Woodfill delves into archaeology, epigraphy, ethnohistory, and ethnography to write the biographies of several of these places, covering their histories from the rise of the Preclassic Maya through the spread of transnational corporations in our time. Again and again the region, known since Spanish conquest as Vera Paz, or True Peace, has seen incursion by a foreign group—including the great Maya cities of Tikal and Calakmul, the Hapsburg Empire, Guatemalan military dictatorships, and contemporary corporations—seeking to expand its power. Each outsider, intentionally or not, used the Maya need for access to these places to ensure loyalty. And each time, local Maya pushed back to reclaim the sacred places for their own. From early struggles to remove foreign influence to present-day battles over land tenure and indigenous-run ecotourism parks, this book documents a continuity in Maya culture over several thousand years—and illuminates the world view, with its sense of personhood and religion so different from the West’s, that informs this enduring culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806167282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 07/20/2020 |
| Pages: | 322 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d) |
About the Author
Brent K. S. Woodfill is Assistant Professor at Winthrop University and Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Ritual and Trade in the Pasión-Verapaz Region, Guatemala.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"A Curious Reverence for Localities"
The focus of this book is the archaeology, history, and ethnography of the long swath of relatively flat land at the base of the Guatemalan highlands in the modern departments of El Quiche and Alta Verapaz (figure 1.1). Today it forms the central part of the Northern Transversal Strip, an area important for agriculture, transportation, and resource extraction that extends across the republic from Mexico to Belize. The strip owes its name to one of three highways planned to cross the republic from east to west; the others are the Central Transversal Strip (today the Inter-American Highway) and the Southern Transversal Strip between the mountains and the Pacific coast.
Multiple rivers flow out of the foothills of the Guatemalan highlands into the Northern Transversal, depositing thick layers of soil that is fertile and volcanic in the Chixoy Valley and relatively poor everywhere else. This soil collects in seasonal swamps and broad floodplains that stretch northward toward the Yucatan peninsula, and the limestone bedrock that underlies these deposits occasionally erupts through them, forming ridges, foothills, and pyramidal haystack karst.
The zone is exceedingly hot and humid — apart from the hills and ridges, the altitude is between 160 and 200 meters above sea level and the average temperature is 27°C (81°F), although temperatures regularly top 38°C (100°F). It receives up to 4,300 millimeters of rain per year (SEGEPLAN 1996, 18; Aguilar 2004, 38–40; Willey et al. 1975, 13–14), making it one of the wettest parts of the Maya world. Because of this, the water level fluctuates dramatically throughout the year — the Pasión River around Cancuen rises and falls over 8 meters depending on the local and upriver rain patterns, and the water table drops about the same amount in the Nueve Cerros region at the height of the dry season, making permanent water sources difficult to come by.
With its combination of limestone bedrock, rivers, and heavy rain, the area contains countless caves, some of which will be described in detail in the following chapters. There are also several well-known lakes and ponds, including Lake Lachua, which has the distinction of being one of the country's deepest lakes — with its maximum depth of 224 meters, its bottom is actually below sea level.
While the term "Northern Transversal Strip" is relatively new, it is useful as the general term for the region in earlier time periods. This designated zone refers to the whole area at the base of the highlands, one that crosscuts multiple modern departments, Colonial ethnic groups, and Classic city- states, but is still united by the similar geography and interregional interactions. The region, as seen in the following chapters, has been important both before and after the Spanish conquest as a transportation route as well as a source of multiple commodities — cacao, achiote, and salt in the past, and petroleum, palm oil, and cardamom today.
In spite of its importance, however, the region has always been viewed as a place outside the "civilized" world by those who depended on these resources and routes. It was brought under Spanish control at the end of the seventeenth century, making it one of the last parts of Latin America to be colonized. The Spaniards relocated many of the Indigenous inhabitants, virtually emptying it of human presence apart from the occasional outlaw, outcast, explorer, or rugged entrepreneur. In the twentieth century, it became a refuge for poor Maya families escaping the harsh conditions of the large plantations established throughout the northern highlands and, soon after, the intensification of the Guatemalan civil war. The war followed them there, unfortunately, and the region became one of the hottest zones in the 1970s and '80s. Today it is a major transportation route for the narcos who use the rivers and land routes to transport drugs to the United States.
This seemingly contradicting dependence on and distancing from the region by more urban areas appears to predate the Spanish conquest. Only one Classic Maya city in the region, Cancuen, had a strong hieroglyphic tradition, and its public monuments set its ruling dynasty apart from its neighbors by focusing on the journey of its founder from the urban southern lowlands to the site in order to establish an outpost there to control trade through the zone. Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, the other great city in the Northern Transversal, in contrast, is one of the oldest cities in the Maya world (Woodfill et al. 2015) but has no recorded history. Even its probable emblem glyph, which appears multiple times at Palenque as well as at Río Azul and Copan, is constructed in such a way that scholars are still not sure if it refers to a real or a mythical place (Tokovinine 2013; pers. comm., 2011).
Cultural Logics as Multigenerational Connective Tissue
On first glance, the past and present of the Northern Transversal have little in common. Today, it is a patchwork of villages, fincas, and dusty towns crisscrossed by paved highways, dammed rivers, electric wires, and pipelines. The Classic cities are in ruins, small villages and dusty towns scattered atop and around them. The native trees and animals have been largely replaced by African palm and cattle. Anthropologist Brent Metz (2006, 56) has gone so far to state about the contemporary Maya that "their ancestors in the 1930s, much less in the 1530s, would scarcely recognize ... them today."
In addition to the jarring cultural, economic, and political changes that have occurred over the millennium and a half that is the focus of this book, the multiple migrations to and from the region further complicate direct comparisons. What is surprising, then, is that in spite of the differences from one time period to the next, the same issues and struggles remain constant. This is partially because of the fundamental utility of the region throughout much of the history of human occupation of the New World — it has been and will likely always be a strategic zone because of its agricultural potential and the relative ease of moving through it. Many of the crops have changed, but they rely on the same soil and climate, and contemporary vendors and semitrucks still follow in the footsteps of Tikaleño merchants.
The Maya of today, as much as the Maya of the past, view the earth and unique places in the landscape as central foci of religious practice and group identity, so now as much as then, the sacred places discussed here become fields where identity and power relations are negotiated. This is rooted in something Edward F. Fischer (2001, 15) calls "cultural logics."
Different cultures ... are marked by different logics of internal organization. This is not to deny that cultures are dynamic and porous or to claim that other cultures are incapable of the sort of formal logical reasoning characteristic of the Western tradition. ... Cultural logics are not hard-and-fast rules (although they may appear solidified in particular schemas that lend themselves to formal modeling), but dynamic, shared predispositions that inform behavior and thought. Cultural logics cannot predict particular actions, but they do lend a sense of regularity and continuity to behavior through post hoc analysis.
Fundamentally, Fischer argues that there are threads that persevere through generations that influence the way members of specific cultures view the world, act upon it, interact with others, and find solutions to problems. When Metz and others (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2001; Q. Castañeda 1996; Gabbert 2006) write against our discipline's reliance on the monolithic inevitability of cultural determinism, they have overcorrected. The Maya and other Indigenous groups have been contextualized within the contemporary world system at the expense of understanding "commonalities in their socialization, structural position in society, and even the nature of their agency and intentionality" (Fischer 2001, 13). Like Victoria Bricker (1981), he sees cultural logics "not as determinant in and of itself but as a resource ... that plays into the ongoing construction of agency and structure" (Fischer 2001, 14).
Cultural logics, like other types of heritage, are passed down, modified, and redefined from generation to generation, but only if they continue to resonate with the actors working within the cultural system (e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Dawkins 1989, 192). As Fischer and Henderson (2003, 46) note, "the present is filtered through an understanding of the past and even novel actions reference shared notions of a common history. ... History is an accumulation of events over time, junctures with larger systems ... and the actions of intentional cultural actors."
While Maya society has been radically transformed, one part of their deep cultural logics has continued to be, for many Maya, a cornerstone of their lives within the larger world — the human covenant with the natural and spiritual world. This is based on the fundamental belief that the human and supernatural worlds are intertwined and interdependent, and just as we are dependent upon the rain and the sun for our continued survival, so are they dependent upon us. Periodic offerings of appropriate sustenance provided through ritual action are, thus, necessary for the covenant to be upheld and for the world to maintain its balance. This covenant is manifested throughout the ceremonial and spiritual lives of the Maya and is present in the physical record throughout history. It is possible to identify a practically unbroken chain of evidence for the continued importance of this covenant, as depicted in ancient monuments, discussed in the Colonial period documents (e.g., de Landa 2013; Gallego 2000; Tedlock 1996), and observed and documented in ritual practice today (e.g. Vogt 1993; Adams and Brady 2005; Scott 2009; Demarest and Woodfill 2011; Woodfill 2014a). And it is this covenant that is the connective tissue that brings this book together.
The Living Landscape
For the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, religion and landscape are inseparable. The cosmos is, as in myriad other cultures around the world, divided into three levels — the earth we inhabit, the heavens above us, and the Underworld below. Unlike in the Christian worldview, however, their gods and mythological figures regularly move among these layers fluidly. The sun descends into the Underworld at twilight, just as we do once we become ancestors to be worshipped by our families after we die.
Caves, hills, and even archaeological sites are sacred places on the Maya landscape as in other regions of the Americas. In the Andes, for example, the Quechua word wak'a is used to describe "any material thing that manifested the superhuman: a mountain peak, a spring, a union of streams, a rock outcrop, an ancient ruin, a twinned cob of maize, a tree split by lightning. Even people could be [wak'as]" (Salomon 1991, 17). Their continued survival was dependent upon ritual action, however, and if they stopped receiving offerings, they would be deactivated and become fundamentally inert and inactive parts of the landscape (Wilkinson 2017, 302).
For the Q'eqchi' and other Maya groups, the landscape is similarly densely populated with persons unseen by the Western eye. As an archaeologist working in the Maya world, however, one quickly becomes aware that there are no profane places to conduct an investigation. The sites we choose are part of the living and lived-in landscape and continue to be visited by ritual specialists and pilgrims, singled out for offerings, and called to in ceremonies.
Not surprisingly for a project run by an archaeologist who is writing a book about the importance of these sacred places in the larger struggles for colonization and autonomy, my team regularly works with and consults with elders, landowners, and spiritual leaders to minimize the negative effects that our presence has on local religious practice. We regularly participate in these ceremonies, descending into caves, climbing atop hills and salt domes, and bushwhacking through ruined Classic cities to burn offerings to the ancestors, the embodiments of the sacred calendar, and the spirits of the Earth.
Earth Gods, Earth Spirits, and the Tzuultaq'a
These last entities the Q'eqchi' call tzuultaq'as — a compound noun made up of tzuul ("mountain") and taq'a ("valley"), underscoring the importance of the landscape and their place in it. For the sake of convenience, I will use the term "tzuultaq'a" to refer to Maya earth spirits throughout history. While the term is specifically Q'eqchi', Wilson (1995) convincingly argues that the underlying concept has been actively redefined since at least the Spanish conquest, and therefore would be flexible enough to accommodate the changes that occurred here. The Colonial period Manche Ch'ol who populated the region at the time of the Spanish conquest (see chapter 4) were similarly "without idols, [and] revered a variety of dramatic natural features — rapids, caves, mountains, etc." (Villagutierre Soto-Mayor 1983, 101n397). Other Maya groups and generations have conceptualized parallel earth spirits — Kawak, angel, witz, santo, dueño, mam, yum witz, witz-hok, witz-ailik (e.g., Thompson 1930, 57; Vogt 1964; Watanabe 1992; Montejo 2004, 242–43) — the "witz" in many of these beings deriving from a common Mayan word for mountain.
In sum, the identification of powerful earth spirits is a relatively stable aspect of Maya worldview that continues to be relevant. It has survived the rise and collapse of Classic Maya civilization, the multiple attempts to convert the Maya to Catholicism and various Evangelical sects, and occasional violent efforts by the state to stamp out "pagan" beliefs. Informants of J. Eric S. Thompson (1930, 56) explained their permanence in the Maya worldview in the following way: the Christian God "is so remote that little attention is paid him. He has to look after the whole world, whereas the old Maya gods are essentially local."
Tzuultaq'as as the Embodiment of Sacred Places
The tzuultaq'as are spirits who live in and are physically manifested by the sacred mountains, caves, lakes, rivers, and archaeological sites that dot the Maya landscape. Ximénez (1930, 19, translation mine) recorded an edifying exchange between priests and Maya informants during the process of colonization: "The priests asked 'to whom do you offer these sacrifices?' They responded: 'to the very high and uneven mountains and ridges and the dangerous passes and the crossroads, and to the great rapids of the rivers,' because they understood that these lived and multiplied and that from them all of their sustenance came and the things necessary for human life."
The tzuultaq'as both stand for and own the land the Maya work and inhabit. They are actors in countless local tales and have the power of life and death over everything in their domain. Among the Q'eqchi', the tzuultaq'as exist in two different spaces simultaneously. They are physically manifested in unique features in the landscape — caves, mountains, springs, lakes, or archaeological ruins, but they also appear in dreams, where they reveal their identities and make their desires known. They can also occasionally appear as elders who can be encountered while traveling (Permanto, pers. comm., 2017).
Unlike Andean and North American concepts of a generalized earth deity, the tzuultaq'as are "specifically territorialized" (Ybarra 2010, 106) — they are rooted to one place and have bounded domains. This can be Highly problematic for the Q'eqchi' and other Maya groups when they move into A new place, since they are fundamentally trespassing on the land of an unidentified tzuultaq'a who can be slow in revealing himself or herself. Fortunately, they are all considered to be one large family who are in rather constant communication with one another, so people can return to make offerings to their old tzuultaq'a, who can pass messages and goodwill to the new one (Grandia 2012, 75).
Rituals to the Tzuultaq'as
The tzuultaq'as are the primary recipients of Maya rituals to maintain the covenant between the human and supernatural realms. According to the Colonial religious document the Popol Vuh, the gods wiped out or otherwise punished their previous attempts at creating humans when they proved incapable of honoring them with ceremonies and gifts, providing a rather strong impetus for us to do so. As long as humans want to live and live well, they have to give respect and sustenance to the gods, the earth, the ancestors, and other spirits. They are powerful but precarious — like the Andean wak'as, they will leave if neglected (Adams and Brady 2005, 305; Permanto 2015, 191-92) and might weaken or die if all the trees are cut down on their hill (Permanto 2015, 190).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Part I. Introduction,
1. "A Curious Reverence for Localities",
2. Power, Ritual, and the Living Landscape,
3. The Precolumbian History of the Northern Transversal Strip,
4. The Colonial and Early Republican History of the Northern Transversal Strip,
5. The Reoccupation of the Northern Transversal and the Shadow of Violence and Commerce,
Part II. Case Studies,
6. Archaeological Sites as Sacred Geography: Cancuen and Salinas de los Nueve Cerros,
7. The Candelaria Caves,
8. The Cave of Hun Nal Ye,
9. Other Sacred Places in the Northern Transversal Strip: San Juan Hill, Oxlaju' Ha', Juliq', and B'omb'il Pek,
Part III. Sacred Geography as Contested Space,
10. Manifesting Foreign Hegemony in Local Ritual Practice,
11. The Struggle for Local Autonomy through the Lens of Ritual and Sacred Geography,
12. Conclusions, Challenges, and Hopes for the Future,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,