Holy lords and holy lands: territory in Classic Maya inscriptions

Summary

One of the significant challenges in dealing with indigenous classification systems is establishing continuities and discontinuities between Pre-Contact, Colonial, and Modern situations. The present paper addresses this question with respect to the concept of territory among the Ancient Maya, specifically, the speakers of Ch’olan and Yukatekan languages. It considers the corpus of Classic period inscriptions from the Southern Maya Lowlands as well as sixteenth and seventeenth century documents and dictionaries from a wider region. Textual sources indicate that the term kab "land" referenced political and ritual landscapes and would be distinct from lum "earth" which carried agricultural connotations. At the same time, Classic period texts were ambivalent to how political institutions such as the royal court and its subjects were linked to kab. Moreover, nearly all place names in the inscriptions apparently did not belong to the kab or lum categories. These findings are of direct relevance to understanding Ancient Maya territories based on archaeological evidence. The results caution against applying indigenous toponyms to spatial entities of certain scale and using terms with territorial connotations (e.g. "kingdom") in reconstructing Ancient Maya political geography.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Lowland Maya Territories: Local Dynamics in Regional Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage