Bibliographic Essay

The most comprehensive reviews of the archaeology of ancient Maya warfare are provided by David L. Webster: ‘The Not So Peaceful Civilization: A Review of Maya War', Journal of World Prehistory 14.i (2000), 65-119; ‘Ancient Maya Warfare', in K.

Comprehensive reviews of Postclassic period warfare are not presently available, though useful starting points are Marilyn A. Masson and Carlos Peraza Lope, Kukulcan's Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapdn (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), and Prudence M. Rice and Don S. Rice (eds.), The Kowoj: Identity, Migration, and Geopolitics in Late Postclassic Pet'en, Guatemala (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009).

For detailed treatments of colonial period war, see the following: Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Grant D. Jones, The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); John F. ChuchiakIV, ‘The Burning and the Burnt: The Transformative Power of Fire, Smoke, and Flames in Conquest and Colonial Maya Ritual, Warfare, and Diplomacy', in V. Tiesler and A. K. Scherer (eds.), Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2018).

Edited volumes with a significant focus on Maya war are Andrew K.

For edited volumes dealing with sacrifice and violence more broadly, see Leonardo Lopez Lujan and Guilhem Olivier (eds.), El Sacrificio humano en la tradition religiosa Mesoamericana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia/Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2010); Heather Orr and Rex Koontz (eds.), Blood and Beauty: Organized Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2009); Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina (eds.), New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice and Ritual Body Treatments in Ancient Maya Society (New York: Springer, 2007); and Elizabeth H. Boone, Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984).

Diverse theories have been proposed to explain patterns of Maya warfare. Webster's materialist model emphasises population pressure and status rivalry (‘Warfare and Status Rivalry: Lowland Maya and Polynesian Comparisons', in G. Femman and J. Marcus (eds.), Archaic States (Santa Fe, CA: School of American Research, 1998), pp. 311-52) as driving war, which in turn played an important role in socio-political evolution (‘Warfare and the Origin of the State', American Antiquity 40.4 (1975), 464-71). The earlier view that Maya warfare was largely limited to participation by elites (e.g. David A. Freidel, ‘Maya Warfare: An Example of Peer-Polity Interaction', in C. Renfrew and J. Cherry (eds.), Peer-Polity Interaction and Sociopolitical Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 93-108) is increasingly being supplanted as archaeological evidence of large-scale consequences accumulates (e.g. Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, ‘Caracol, Belize and Changing Perceptions of Ancient Maya Society', Journal of Archaeological Research 25.1 (2017), 185-249). Charles Golden and Andrew K. Scherer (‘Territory, Trust, Growth, and Collapse in Classic Period Maya Kingdoms', Current Anthropology 54.4 (2013), 397-435) argue that direct interaction with rulers through public rituals such as sacrifice, and participation in communal activities such as warfare, helped to strengthen the polity by building trust, and that when growth in population and territorial extent made widespread participation in such trust-building activities no longer feasible, the polity began to splinter.

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