Dance and Music in Maya Rituals: The Case of Tecum

Summary

According to the 16th-century Título K’oyoi, the K’iche’ captain Tecum participated in two elaborate ceremonies before leading his army into war against the Spanish conquerors. Both included dance and music and even though he later was killed in battle, Tecum somehow continued to dance until the present day, now taking part in the preparation and performance of the so-called Dance of the Conquest. This "fact" alone tells important things about the concepts and functions of dance and music in Maya society. The paper attempts to reconstruct the ritual elements, their "assembly plan," and some goals and meanings of the two pre-conquest ceremonies by means of both contemporary data and insights gained from the ethnomusicological study of the Conquest Dance as performed today in the Guatemalan highlands. The latter are particularly helpful as reminders of the processual character of rituals which is often based precisely on the performance of music and dance. In the case of Tecum one of the goals of such dynamism was and is, so the main thesis of the paper, the transformation of the dancer from one kind of being into another.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The dimensions of Rituality 2000 years ago and today   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage