Snake Queens and Political Consolidation: How Royal Women Helped Create Kaanul—A View from Waka’

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Our paper demonstrates the key role played by royal women of the Kaanul realm in fortifying and consolidating that realm’s power and hegemony in the seventh to eighth centuries CE. We draw upon archaeological, visual, and textual evidence from Waka’, including preliminary analysis of recently discovered Stela 51, and elsewhere across the realm. We address how the political actions of royal women served to consolidate the Kaanul realm, helping to create the so-called Golden Age of their Late Classic supremacy. These women anchored themselves materially and symbolically within the landscapes they ruled and established enduring bonds through blood and political maneuvering. In our view, these northerly women, and their contributions in this political consolidation work, have been under-examined. Embracing a feminist perspective, we seek to rectify that imbalance in scholarship. The implications of our findings are important not only for a more nuanced understanding of Late Classic political history but also have enduring significance for Indigenous women in the Americas today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33428