Empire at Chichen Itza Revisited

Summary

In the chapter on Chichen Itza within the Forest of Kings, Schele and Freidel masterfully redirected a half century of research that had largely pressed the foreignness of the site. Instead, they revealed the city’s Maya impulses and explored how Classic period strategies of conquest warfare transformed to integrate a type of inclusive diversity. Their suggestions of Chichen’s willingness to incorporate their enemies into a grander regional system redefined Epiclassic conversations over Maya or Toltec dominance, offering a new model for Epiclassic Maya cities that drew from Classic period kingship but were less concerned with one, unified vision of identity. In particular, their model for militant strategies may be extended beyond the regional to distant lands outside of Mesoamerica. By coupling economic strategies that used the military for trade and the acquisition of exotic prestige goods with the integrative model of Schele and Freidel, we can better see how the city not only had aspirations for regional dominance, but made calculated efforts to use its military for economic purposes in lands much further away. Evidence for the military’s economic functions comes from the deposition of exotic goods throughout the site and the visual evidence recorded in murals and sculpture.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage