Explorers of the early nineteenth century, such as John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, speculated that Maya society had been dominated by kings and warriors, just as other ancient civilisations had been.
In addition, violent activities are frequently mentioned in early colonial accounts. Yet despite this, Mayanist interest in these themes has been lacking until quite recently.1 Classic period Maya society (c.
250-1000 ce) was depicted in some popular works as comprising peaceful theocracies governed by priests from vacant ceremonial centres. Violence and warfare, when they did occur, were assumed to be limited largely to ritually motivated human sacrifice and raids for acquiring sacrificial victims, and did not include material motivations such as territorial gain. However, the tide began to turn with the discovery of the Bonampak murals, decipherment of hieroglyphs and demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff that Classic period monuments often record the military exploits of Mayan rulers.[394] [395] Additional evidence came from field studies, some of which documented the construction of defensive fortifications early in Maya history.Since approximately 1980 the pace of research into violence has increased considerably. Interest in the many iconographic depictions of sacrifice and war has burgeoned. A growing number of archaeological projects have been aimed explicitly at investigating the material evidence of such activities, such as defensible settlement patterns, defensive architecture, deliberate destruction of structures and monuments, artefact assemblages that suggest rapid abandonment, abrupt changes in material culture and weapons. Maya burial patterns are also figuring in arguments for the occurrence of violence.
Despite a rapidly accruing body of data and the growing recognition of warfare's importance in cultural developments throughout Maya history, there is still much disagreement over a number of fundamental aspects of Maya warfare, such as who participated, how it was conducted, the scale of conflicts and what the motivations were. This chapter provides a brief synthesis of our current knowledge and controversies in the field. New findings produced by a diverse array of methods and specialists are placed side by side and situated within their chronological and regional context. As comprehensive reviews of the study of Maya war are available elsewhere,[396] the goal here is instead to fill in areas that have seen recent advances, in particular new archaeological evidence on the Pre-classic roots of Maya warfare, epigraphic advances showing the complexity of geopolitics during the Classic in particular involving the Kaanul Snake kingdom, Post-classic mass burials and contact period war among the Maya and between the Maya and the Spanish. First, however, I begin with a brief overview of who the Maya are, the geographic region they have inhabited for over three thousand years, the periods under study and general patterns in how they conducted warfare.
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