From Polity to Regimes: Toward Recognizing Diversity in Ancient Maya Political Communities

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, we introduce the notion of “regime” to model and interpret ancient Maya political organization. We have long relied on “the polity” as a primary model to explain ancient Maya politics. However, this largely generalist core concept tends to homogenize—both temporally and geographically—the complex ancient political landscape as one populated by similar bounded political units recognized from within and without. In broad terms, “polity” best suits the study of how the Classic Maya society idealized and legitimated power relations rather than how they exercised them to create “political communities.” This theoretical lens thus recognizes but does not explain the diversity and dynamism of political communities that the archaeological record illuminates. We therefore propose to reintroduce perhaps the oldest term of political science: the “regime”; that is, “the realization of a polity.” We propose to go beyond the formal structure of political relations and the ideology of legitimacy to focus on practices of power. Simply put, studying regimes leads us to recognize variation among the “political communities” of the ancient Maya world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37347.0