Seventh Century Star Wars: Reassessing the Role of Warfare in Shaping Classic Period Maya Society in the Southern Lowlands

Summary

At the time that Forest of Kings was written, Mayanists were unsure of how impactful Maya warfare actually was. Did it serve symbolic and ritual purposes like the Aztec flower-wars? Or, was Maya warfare actually waged for territorial gain? Forest of Kings was one of the first books to situate Maya conflict as warfare for territorial control. But, the depth and nature of this control as well as the way in which warfare articulated with and affected broader Maya society could not be answered in the hieroglyphic record. While hieroglyphs were used to frame the situational dynamics of Maya politics in Forest of Kings, at the time of the book’s publication only limited archaeological data existed that could be used to complement the epigraphy. Twenty-five years later, this situation has changed. This paper examines Maya warfare and political history from the perspective of Caracol, Belize, using archaeological and newer hieroglyphic data to supplement the history of the ancient Classic Period Maya so admirably documented by Schele and Freidel in 1990.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contextualizing Maya History and Archaeology Part II: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Forest of Kings   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage