Tribute Lists and Bureaucrats: Understanding Classic Maya Politics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I will explore how much we know about Maya politics during the Classic period (AD 250–950), in view of new perspectives that leave behind the centralization vs. decentralization debate. Rather than viewing Maya states as unitary, unchanging, and centralized or decentralized, new perspectives have revealed variation, multiple sources of political power, and important links between political administration, finance, and dynamics. When we think of states and political power, we conjure images of bureaucracies and taxes, with all their negative connotations. Nevertheless, all states require and extract revenues in the form of taxes, tribute, corvée labor, etc. And all states require a certain level of administrative staff to sustain itself. Here, we pursue the archaeological, artistic, and epigraphic evidence for both the political economy and administration of Classic Maya polities, with an emphasis on its variation across space and time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Regimes of the Ancient Maya   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35708.0