Conclusions
It is now widely acknowledged that warfare played an important role in cultural developments throughout Maya history, including from its earliest origins. Recent research at Middle Preclassic Ceibal in the southern Maya lowlands has shed light on the important role of warfare in the significant social changes that accompanied the emergence of inequality and settled villages.
The evidence from this early period consists of the remains of victims who were likely captured in raids and brought back to the home site for execution in public rituals that allowed the entire community to share in the battle experience, in this way encouraging cohesion and the formation of a shared group identity.Recent research at Classic period sites has shown that war had both ritual and material motivations. The capture and sacrifice of high-ranking enemies is attested to in numerous public monuments, and these acts allowed sites to establish dominance and exact tribute from subordinate sites. They also allowed victorious sites to install new royal dynasties and gain control over important trade routes. In fact, warfare is now implicated in the origins of royal dynasties at a number of sites in the Early Classic period, such as Tikal, Copan and Oxkintok. Regarding the Kaanul Snake kingdom, newly discovered hieroglyphic texts reveal that it forged an intriguingly complex web of political allegiances to dominate its foe Tikal. For the Terminal Classic period, the list of sites with evidence for collapse due to warfare continues to grow. During the Postclassic, meanwhile, archaeological evidence indicates that warfare played an important role in the emergence of the regional capital of Mayapan.
While there is still disagreement over fundamental aspects of Maya warfare, such as the scale of conflicts, who participated and who was targeted, evidence related to warfare has been rapidly accumulating in recent years, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate.
This suggests that we will soon be better placed to resolve some of these questions. LiDAR-based laser mapping surveys promise to give us a much better idea of the relationship of Maya centres with their hinterlands and thus the true extent of Maya polities. This will likely lead to the identification of previously unknown defensive features on the landscape and allow more systematic evaluation of the importance of territorial motivations for going to war. Strontium and oxygen isotope analyses of human remains are well advanced and have shown that sacrificial victims are often non-local. They have also shown that the founder of Copan's dynasty, whose skeleton bears injuries consistent with those of a warrior, likely came from Tikal, while Yax Nuun Ayiin I, a king from this latter site suspected of being the son of Teotihuacan's ruler, was local. Palaeodietary reconstructions based on carbon and nitrogen isotopes have shown the disruptions in food production and distribution wrought by warfare at Terminal Classic Piedras Negras, but have also shown the stability of food production systems in the face of endemic warfare at Late Post-classic Mayapan. Further developments in these areas, coupled with skeletal analyses of trauma and activity patterns, have the potential to provide further insights into who participated in warfare, especially the role played by commoners, which has implications for the size of the forces that could be marshalled. Advances in palaeoclimate reconstruction, AMS radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling are allowing for the development of more precise site chronologies and provide a firmer empirical basis with which to evaluate the roles of drought and overpopulation in causing war. Such research has shown that drought may have contributed to the collapse of a number of Classic period sites, including Chichen Itza, though whether it contributed to the endemic warfare of the Terminal Classic and Late Postclassic periods has yet to be demonstrated. Theoretical advances, meanwhile, have demonstrated the importance of culturally and historically situated interpretation in determining what constitutes evidence of warfare in the first place, as well as the meanings it had to the ancient Mayans impacted by it.