Who Are the Maya?
The Maya are the largest group of indigenous peoples inhabiting modern-day southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and western Honduras, numbering approximately 6 million people.
Thirty-two distinct yet related Mayan languages have been identified. The most common today is Yukateko, which is spoken in the Yucatan Peninsula. The speakers of Yukateko referred to themselves as ‘Maya' at the time of the arrival of the Spanish, but the term did not apply to any other group. The ancient Maya were never unified politically under a single empire. Instead, the Maya territories were organised into mutually competing city-states. Some of the larger cities, such as Tikal and Calakmul, which may have been inhabited by as many as 100,000 people at their peak during the Classic period, did exert some level of control over a number of subordinate sites. While we do not know whether the ancient Maya conceived of themselves as being related, extensive archaeological research has documented close cultural and genetic ties extending back several millennia.Maya history may be broken down into time periods, as shown in Table 9.1. The initial colonisation of the Americas took place during the Palaeoindian
Table 9.1 Principal Maya time periods
| Palaeoindian Archaic Early Preclassic Middle Preclassic Late Preclassic Early Classic Late Classic Terminal Classic Postclassic Colonial | Before 7000 BCE 7000-2000 BCE 2000-1000 BCE 1000-400 BCE 400-250 CE 250-600 CE 600-800 CE 800-1000 CE 1000-approximately 1517 Approximately 1517-1821 |
display immense cultural as well as genetic variability. The two best-known Mesoamerican groups are the Maya and Nahua, the latter commonly referred to as the Aztec in popular works, though many more groups are present now and have been in the past.
Despite the region's great diversity its peoples share a number of common cultural aspects including the following: the belief that the world went through several failed creations before the current one; the belief that objects could have souls; the playing of games in ball courts with rubber balls; and the prominent place of corn, beans, squash, chilli peppers and cacao in the diet. The roots of many of these shared traits are often traced back to the Olmec, the makers of the colossal head stone sculptures at sites near the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.Commonalities in the conduct of warfare are also apparent. As elsewhere, there were a number of important material as well as ritual motivations. Owing to the lack of draft animals, controlling large areas was logistically difficult; polities tended to wield hegemonic as opposed to territorial control. Rather than annihilate or directly administer opposing city-states, war was usually aimed at subordinating them to establish schemes of tribute,[397] though these conventions sometimes broke down into more destructive conquest warfare, especially among the Terminal Classic period Maya. The oldest evidence for raiding and conquest in the region closely aligns with the first appearance of settled villages and states, respectively, providing support for models stressing the key role of warfare in the advent of socio-political complexity.
Trophy taking and human sacrifice were practised throughout Mesoamerica and were intimately connected with warfare. Evidence from art, colonial documents and human remains indicates that trophies commonly included the head or parts of it, especially the facial skeleton and mandible, while long bones were sometimes made into musical instruments. With regard to human sacrifice, it is widely acknowledged that the capture of live victims to be brought back home for execution in public ceremonies was an important goal of warfare. The remains of sacrificial victims are often encountered in large mass graves recovered from public ceremonial spaces. Strontium and oxygen isotope analyses routinely find that these individuals are non-local, while elevated frequencies of healed injuries indicate that prior exposure to violence was common. The humiliation, torture and execution of captives in public ceremonies had a variety of religious and social motivations. They commemorated the feats of leaders and warriors while also allowing non-combatants to share a common experience with them. Thus, while warfare waged against outside groups allowed for the pursuit of strategic goals such as gaining control over important trade routes, the commemorations that followed encouraged cohesion and the formation of a shared identity within the group.
More on the topic Who Are the Maya?:
- The Maya
- Colonial Period Maya Warfare
- Preclassic Period Maya Warfare
- Early Classic Period Maya Warfare
- Terminal Classic Period Maya Warfare
- Postclassic Period Maya Warfare
- Ritual Violence among the Ancient Maya
- Recent Advances in the Archaeology of Maya Warfare
- Late Classic Period Maya Warfare
- 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.
- Pre-Columbian Maya (pre-1502) ritual practices encompassed a range of violent acts generally glossed by the catch-all term ‘sacrifice', including bloodletting and other forms of self-inflicted injury,