D Webster The Not So Peaceful Civilization A Review of Maya War

Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2000

The Not So Peaceful Civilization:
A Review of Maya War

David Webster

The first Maya encountered by Europeans in the early sixteenth century were
exceedingly warlike, but by the 1940s the earlier Classic Maya (AD 250–1000)
were widely perceived as an inordinately peaceful civilization. Today, in
sharp contrast, conflict is seen as integral to Maya society throughout its
history. This paper defines war, reviews the evidence for it in the Maya
archaeological record, and shows how and why our ideas have changed so
profoundly. The main emphasis is on the Classic period, with patterns of
ethnohistorically documented war serving as a baseline. Topics include the
culture history of conflict, strategy and tactics, the scope and range of opera-
tions, war and the political economy, and the intense status rivalry war of
the eighth and ninth centuries AD that contributed to the collapse of Classic
civilization. Unresolved issues such as the motivations for war, its ritual vs.
territorial aims, and sociopolitical effects are discussed at length.

KEY WORDS: Maya civilization; war; Maya archaeology; political economy; status rivalry.

INTRODUCTION

Early in the sixteenth century the Spaniards, already well established

throughout the Caribbean, began systematically to explore the mainland
of what we now call Mesoamerica. The first people they encountered were
Maya speakers, and the earliest contacts were typically bellicose. When

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they landed at the large town to Campeche on the east coast of Yucatan
(Fig. 1), the Spaniards of the 1517 de Co´rdoba expedition were initially
received in friendly fashion by the local lord, then forced to beat a hasty
retreat when numerous heavily armed men began to assemble. Farther
south, near the town of Champoton, where they were driven ashore by
lack of water, de Co´rdoba’s men were not so lucky. Apparently forewarned
of their approach, large number of Maya launched a morning attack. As
Bernal Diaz (1963, p. 23) reported,

Once it was daylight we could see many more warriors advancing along the coast
with banners raised and plumes and drums. . . . After forming up in squadrons
and surrounding us on all sides, they assailed us with such a shower of arrows and
darts and stones from their slings that more than eighty of our soldiers were
wounded. Then they attacked us hand to hand, some with lances and some shooting
arrows, and others with their two-handed cutting swords.

The unfortunate shore party suffered the loss of 50 men before they could
escape to their ships. Licking their wounds, the explorers sailed back to
Cuba, where they reported things never before seen in the New World—

dense populations of farmers who grew maize and other crops, large towns

with well-built masonry buildings, garishly decorated stone temples filled
with idols and other objects of fine workmanship (including tantalizing
traces of gold) where priests officiated at blood sacrifices and wrote in books,
and great lords who could quickly muster up thousands of fierce warriors.

Two years later Hernan Corte´s, on the first stage of his fateful expedi-

tion that resulted in the overthrow of the Aztec empire, made landfall on
the coast of Tabasco, a region of Chontal Maya speakers. Here, at a place
called Cintla where other Spaniards had been received peacefully the year
before, he found thousands of warriors concentrated in anticipation of his
arrival. The omnipresent Bernal Diaz (1963, p. 65) described the Maya
battle array this way:

All the men wore great feather crests, they carried drums and trumpets, their faces
were painted black and white, they were armed with large bows and arrows, spears
and shields, swords like our two-handed swords, and slings and stones and fire-
hardened darts, and all wore quilted cotton armor.

Fierce battles ensued with these Tabascan hosts, whose commanders sued
for peace only when Spanish cavalry charges proved irresistible. In subse-
quent parleys Corte´s discovered that the assembled forces represented eight
different ‘‘provinces’’ (large political units of some sort) and that their
leaders used painted books to keep track of their various contingents.

Newly victorious in Mexico, Corte´s in the mid-1520s dispatched his

lieutenants to subdue the Maya of highland Chiapas and Guatemala. There
they encountered impressive conquest states such as that of the Quiche´,
whose noble lineages ruled from well-fortified elite centers perched on

A Review of Maya War

Fig. 1. Map of the Maya region of Mesoamerica showing the sites mentioned in the text.

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ridges or escarpments, and who strongly resisted the invaders (Fox, 1978).
Apparently the sixteenth century Maya, while certainly not militarists on
a par with their highland Aztec contemporaries, were everywhere exceed-
ingly belligerent.

CONCEPTIONS OF MAYA WAR

Given participant accounts such as those of Corte´s, Bernal Diaz, and

many others, Mayanists long ago might reasonably have made the uniformi-
tarian assumption that all this was just the tip of the iceberg—that, as in
virtually all other early complex societies, war was an integral part of the
larger Maya cultural tradition from its beginnings. Instead, our conceptions
of Maya warfare have undergone a series of sudden and rather perverse
shifts. Early nineteenth century explorers such as John Lloyd Stephens and
Frederic Catherwood speculated that the ancient people who had inhabited
the ruins of Guatemala and Mexico, like other great civilizations, were
dominated by kings and warriors (Stephens, 1949). By the 1940s, however,
the Classic Maya (AD 250–800) had achieved the singular reputation of
being the only nonindustrial civilization not plagued by war and conflict,
despite the fact that warriors, weapons, and captives or sacrificial victims
were prominently displayed in their art. At this time it was widely believed
that Classic Mesoamerica more generally enjoyed peaceful conditions and
that such warfare as occurred was devoted to the capture of sacrificial
victims (Means, 1977). For reasons not well specified, these peaceful Classic
theocracies were subverted or degraded by Postclassic peoples, leading to
the violence and conflict the Spaniards encountered.

This was still the orthodox perspective, with some important dissenters

such as Robert Rands (1952) and Michael Coe (1962, 1966), until the early
1970s, at least with regard to the Maya. When I wrote my dissertation on
Maya war (Webster, 1972) there was only a sparse, scattered, and mostly
desultory literature on the subject. Today, in a startling turnabout, warfare
is all the rage. The Maya are often portrayed as compulsively warlike, and
warfare is a ubiquitous theme in books and journals. The impetus for this
new interest comes mostly from decipherments, as we shall see shortly,
and only a few field projects have been specifically designed to investigate
Maya war. I carried out one of the first (Webster, 1979), and similar research
has since been undertaken in the Dos Pilas region on the basis of original
work by Stephen Houston (1987, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997; Inomata,
1997) and at Yaxuna´ in northern Yucatan (Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler and
Freidel, 1998).

A Review of Maya War

CHRONOLOGY OF MAYA CIVILIZATION

Maya culture history is conventionally broken down into the following

time periods (slight variations on this chronology are preferred by some
Mayanists).

Paleoindian period

Before 7000 BC

Archaic period

7000–2500 BC

Early Preclassic period

2500–1000 BC

Middle Preclassic period

1000–400 BC

Late Preclassic period

400 BC–AD 250

Early Classic period

AD 250–600

Late Classic period

AD 600–800

Terminal Classic period

AD 800–1000

Postclassic period

AD 1000–approximately 1517

Contact/Colonial periods

Begin approximately AD 1517

Overturning the conventional wisdom of only a few decades ago, ar-

chaeologists have documented warfare over much of this range, beginning
with destruction levels, mass burials, and fortifications from Middle and
Late Preclassic times. War-related imagery is found in Early Classic art,
but most significant for this paper are the Late and Terminal Classic periods,
during which the number of centers and polities multiplied rapidly, regional
populations peaked, art and inscriptions were most abundant and wide-
spread, and Long Count dates provide an extremely detailed chronology.
As just noted, the nature of Classic warfare has long been an extremely
controversial issue.

Widespread disruption of Classic polities and demographic decline

occurred in the central and southern Lowlands roughly between AD
790 and 900 AD (a process usually labeled the Classic Maya ‘‘collapse’’).
There followed a long Postclassic interval during which polities were
most numerous and vigorous in the northern Lowlands. Postclassic
warfare has long been acknowledged on the basis of archaeological
evidence (e.g., the walled centers of Tulum and Mayapa´n), art (e.g., the
murals at Chiche´n Itza´), and, finally, indigenous oral and written histories
that emphasize struggles for supremacy among great families and factions,
centered especially on the successive regional capitals of Chiche´n Itza´
and Mayapa´n (e.g., see Marcus, 1992a). Many older Mayanists blamed
destabilizing and degrading Mexican or Mexicanized Maya influences
for the character of Postclassic conflict. Finally, there is the abundant
Contact/Colonial ethnohistoric evidence that is generally seen to reflect
a continuation of earlier Postclassic behaviors and beliefs. Like Maya
civilization itself, warfare changed dramatically through time in its inten-
sity, purposes, and cultural manifestations.

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GOALS OF THIS PAPER

My main purpose here is to provide a necessarily condensed overview

of what we presently know or can reasonably infer about Lowland Maya
warfare, and some of the reasons why there have been such pronounced
shifts in our perceptions of it. A second concern is to set Maya war in its
larger environmental, historical, social, and comparative contexts, so that
we can properly understand its significance. A final purpose is to address
unresolved issues concerning the motives, conduct, and effects of Maya war,
about which I express my own opinions. I make no pretense of providing a
complete bibliography. Much of the material presented is culled from my
own earlier writings on all these subjects (Webster, 1975, 1976a, b, 1977,
1979, 1993, 1998, 1999a). The main emphasis is on Late and Terminal Classic
war in the central and southern Maya Lowlands, a topic that pervades the
current literature. Well-described Contact and Colonial period war provides
a point of departure, and asides are directed to the Preclassic Maya and
the wider ethnographic and historic records.

LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENT

For thousands of years Maya speakers have occupied a vast region of

eastern and southern Mesoamerica that altogether measures about 324,000
km

(Fig. 1). Although this homeland lies entirely in the tropics there is

great variation in topography, climate, and vegetation. On the south, in
parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, lie the Maya
Highlands, at elevations from 800 to over 4500 m. More important for our
purposes are the Maya Lowlands, which cover about 250,000 km

. Because

of their lower elevations these lowlands are typically hotter and often more
humid than the highlands. Precipitation is strongly seasonal, with a general
dry season extending roughly from January to May. Annual rainfall in the
western Lowlands or in parts of Belize, where there are typically no rainless
months, can be as high as 4000 mm. In stark contrast, northwestern Yucatan
receives only about 500 mm annually. All regions are prone to striking
yearly variations and droughts are common. Measurements reported by
Lundell (1937, p. 6) over a 10-year period for the ancient Maya heartland
of Guatemala’s northern Pete´n region averaged 1762 mm but ranged from
990 to 2369 mm.

Some parts of the northern Lowlands are habitable year-round only

where natural collapse features (cenotes) expose the subsurface water table
or where deep wells or artificial water storage facilities can be constructed.
Wherever rainfall is abundant, especially in the south, east, and west, dou-

A Review of Maya War

ble- or triple-canopy, semideciduous tropical forests dominate recently un-
disturbed upland zones (of course virtually all forest is a human artifact),
interspersed with lower-lying bajos (seasonal or permanent swamps) and
grassy savannas. Northern forests tend to be lower and more thorny and
scrubby than the more well-watered southern ones, and conifer forests are
found at some high elevations, as in the Copa´n Valley of Honduras.

Much of the northern Yucatan Peninsula is a vast limestone shelf

that lacks substantial surface drainage. Large rivers concentrated along its
eastern, southeastern, and western margins provide routes of communica-
tion, but only a few are navigable for great distances, especially those in
Belize and the lower and middle reaches of the Usumacinta, Grijalva, and
Candalaria systems. A chain of large lakes just south of Tikal in northern
Guatemala was at the core of the Itza´ kingdom in 1697.

Many people who visit archaeological sites in the Maya Lowlands

come away with the impression of an exceedingly flat landscape, but the
topography is actually quite variable. The Maya Mountains in Belize rise
to elevations of over 1100 m, and the landscape in the heartland of Classic
Maya civilization around Tikal is quite hilly. Copa´n, on the southeast, is
located in a well-defined river valley surrounded by peaks as high as 1400
m. Around Piedras Negras, where I have recently been working, the highest
elevations are only several hundred meters, but the landscape is broken
up by extremely rugged karst features, including escarpments and conical
hills with very steep slopes.

Despite their locally distinctive settings, almost all ancient Lowland

Maya centers and polities were at elevations below 600 m (Tonina´, at 900
m, is the highest), and all shared basically the same set of staple cultigens,
most notably maize, beans, and squash, along with a wide variety of less
important plant species. Well-drained upland soils were (and are) most
attractive to farmers using simple hand tools, but they are typically thin,
fragile, and prone to nutrient depletion and erosion when cleared of natural
vegetation. Soils can be quite diverse over very small areas, however, and
the history of land use in a region was often extremely complex and had
major demographic and political consequences [e.g., see Sanders (1977)
for a general overview and Wingard (1996) for a Copa´n example].

Several features of this Lowland environment are closely related to

the conduct and motivations of war. There were strong seasonal constraints
on certain kinds of conflicts. Comparatively few physical barriers impeded
movement across the landscape, nor is it highly compartmentalized. Re-
source zones were fairly redundant compared to the highland regions of
Mesoamerica, and because there was no effective vertical zonation of ag-
ricultural production, there were few incentives to conquer or control zones
of different altitudes. Nor, as in the Highlands, were there concentrated

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mineral resources such as obsidian or metals that were objects of competi-
tion (exceptions include the salt-producing locales in the coastal lagoons
of northern Yucatan). Agricultural production, fundamental to agrarian
economies, was and is today locally prone to shortfalls due to uncontrollable
risks such as fires, droughts, storms, and insect infestations and is also
threatened in the long term by human-induced deforestation, soil depletion,
and erosion. Local soil variation creates ‘‘patchy’’ production and risk
effects, thus inviting local competition. Poor harvests, as we will see, were
linked to ethnohistorically documented wars. Finally, on the ideological
level, the dramatic seasonal transformations, along with unpredictable ag-
ricultural crises, profoundly influenced the Classic Maya worldview, in
which death, regeneration, and the control of disorder and chaos were
major themes.

DEFINING WAR

Before going on I should make clear exactly what I think constitutes

war, which tends to be an underspecified category of human behavior
in the anthropological literature. I define war as planned confrontations
between organized groups of combatants who share, or believe they share,
common interests. Such groups represent political communities or factions
that are prepared to pursue these interests through armed and violent
confrontations that might involve deliberate killing of opponents. Such
killing is seen as socially acceptable and even desirable (i.e., it is not murder).
Conflict may be initiated in many ways, but one of the participating groups,
usually the attacker, seeks to maintain the status quo or, more often, to
achieve an advantage in power relations. War so defined is not limited to
any particular kind of polity or society and may occur on any scale.

Two important things about this definition are the variety of behaviors

that it encompasses and that it grades into forms of violence that are not
socially sanctioned. Factions involved might be family members engaged
in an intracommunity feud, ambitious warriors and their personal followers
raiding for loot, or forces representing an entire community or polity (or
alliances of these). Acts of war may be directed against external enemies
but also can include civil wars, usurpations, and acts of lethal treachery
aimed at creating new political conditions. Illicit behaviors such as murder
may escalate into socially sanctioned feuding or rebellion. Two or more
political communities may be involved in protracted antagonism (warre in
Hobbes’s sense), or, as is frequently the case in nonindustrial societies, war
may coincide with a single campaign. In its more large-scale and conven-

A Review of Maya War

tional manifestations most participants are anonymous to one another and
combat is highly impersonal.

As we shall see, many of these considerations apply to the Maya.

WAR IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD

Despite its ubiquity among complex societies, war is difficult to docu-

ment archaeologically. We fortunately have many lines of evidence for the
ancient Maya, some very strong, others less so. Art (which most clearly
shows weaponry) and inscriptions are two obvious ones, and these are
discussed separately in a later section.

Fortifications

A few Postclassic fortifications such as the walls at Mayapa´n (Shook,

1952) and Tulum (Lothrop, 1924) have long been recognized (see also
Armillas, 1951). Subsequent research has documented more than 20 other
defensive systems, or at least defensible constructions, at large Maya centers
dating from Preclassic through Postclassic times. These typically consist of
one or multiple lines of barriers created by ditches, earthworks, and stone
walls, often originally strengthened with parapets and palisades of timber
or other perishable materials. In some cases fortifications were integral
to the original layout of a center [Mayapa´n and Chacchob (Pollock and
Stromsvik, 1935; Webster, 1979)], while elsewhere they were later additions
[Becan (Webster, 1976) and Cuca (Webster, 1979)]. The most fundamental
consideration seems to have been to defend the civic and elite residential
cores of centers [Uxmal (Kowalsk and Dunning, 1999) and Ek Balam (Bey
and Ringle, 1997)], although occasionally large, nucleated residential zones
and populations were protected, as at Mayapa´n. Extensive boundary de-
fenses were sometimes built to incorporate considerable amounts of hinter-
land [Tikal (Puleston and Callender, 1967)]. Naturally strong positions [e.g.,
the Punta de Chimino peninsula (Demarest et al., 1997) and the escarpments
at Aguateca (Inomata, 1997)] were improved by artificial constructions.
Under extreme threat ramshackle barriers were sometimes quickly erected
around previously undefended site cores, as at Dos Pilas (Houston, 1987,
1993; Demarest, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997).

Where they exist, fortifications tell us that particular centers were

threatened (if not actually attacked) and also hint at the scale of hostilities.
For example, the huge earthworks at Becan presented very impressive
vertical barriers and are 1.8 km in circumference. Obviously they were

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designed to withstand determined assaults or sieges by large forces and
they served this purpose for hundreds of years after their initial construc-
tion, which most likely occurred at the end of the Late Preclassic. Some
archaeologists believe that the Punta de Chimino ditch and earthwork,
which protect a community with heavy Preclassic occupation, are equally
early (Houston, S., personal communication, 2000).

A little reflection shows, however, that no conclusions about war can

be drawn on the basis of the lack of fortifications for two reasons. First,
such an absence may be more apparent than real. Very flimsy defenses
were highly effective given Maya military capabilities, and few traces of
such constructions might survive or be initially recognized. The Petexbatu´n
region around Dos Pilas provides a case in point. In 1978 Arthur Demarest
(1978) cited the absence of fortifications there as indicative of a syndrome
of very constrained forms of warfare. Much earlier Ian Graham had ob-
served wall-like features at both Aguateca and Dos Pilas in the early 1960s
but apparently did not recognize their significance. Their full implications
finally became clear in the mid-1980s when Stephen Houston (1987, 1993)
mapped Dos Pilas and other walled sites in the region and made plans to
carry out a war-focused project there (never realized because permission
was not forthcoming). Ultimately and ironically, Demarest’s projects docu-
mented these defenses more fully and revealed episodes of very severe
warfare (Demarest et al., 1997; Inomata, 1997).

A second reason is that in many cultural traditions communities com-

monly are not formally fortified even where warfare is rampant; the Basin
of Mexico is a good Mesoamerican example (Hassig, 1999).

Settlement Distributions

Dispersed settlement in the form of small residential sites is found

around many Classic Maya centers and has often been singled out as
incompatible with patterns of intense warfare (e.g., see Rand’s comments
below). This is a weak argument, not only because the Maya clearly main-
tained such patterns in the face of serious conflicts, but also because it
occurred elsewhere as well [e.g., Japan (Farris, 1999) and Hawai’i (Kirch,
1984, 1990)].

At some centers where settlement is well documented there were

shifts in construction activity and occupation apparently related to unsettled
political conditions. For example, Mock (1998, pp. 114–115) notes that the
Colha population seems to have crowded around the central major groups
in the Terminal Classic, shortly before the center was briefly abandoned.
I know of no examples from Classic times (except when polities ultimately

A Review of Maya War

collapsed) of wholesale abandonment of dispersed sites and extreme nucle-
ation in the face of attacks. This is not to say that such evidence will not
appear. With better settlement samples and finer control of site chronolo-
gies I think we might detect situational establishment of boundary zones
or large-scale abandonment of small sites that relate to intense hostilities.
In some cases small outlying sites around major centers were walled, as in
the Dos Pilas region, or refuges were established, as at Aguateca.

Settlement research also sometimes reveals sudden shifts in ceramic

or other artifact forms. To continue the Colha example, after a brief hiatus
the center was reoccupied by Postclassic people using new artifact assem-
blages. Sabloff and Willey (1967) long ago maintained that similar data,
along with ‘‘foreign’’ iconographic elements, indicated invasions of foreign
invaders on the western peripheries of the Lowlands. Other Mayanists such
as Stuart (1995, p. 316) doubt that such invasions occurred.

Destruction Episodes

Maya centers as early as Middle Preclassic times show evidence of

large-scale, deliberate destruction of major architecture. As long ago as
the 1930s archaeologists uncovered palace contexts, as at Piedras Negras
(Holley, 1983), that seem to have been abruptly abandoned and destroyed,
but until recently these were not interpreted as war-related events. Current
research is turning up many such examples. At Aguateca the whole commu-
nity seems to have suffered from a violent attack by external enemies
(Inomata, 1997; Inomata and Stiver, 1998), while the destruction detected
at the recently excavated royal compound at Copa´n (Andrews and Fash,
1992) appears more likely to me to be the result of internal power struggles.

The Maya commonly ‘‘decommissioned’’ or ‘‘killed’’ important struc-

tures by wholly or partially destroying them, especially when they were to
be covered with later buildings, and such episodes have no implications
for war. Many so-called ‘‘termination’’ rituals, however, especially seen in
light of other evidence, such as associated mass burials, were apparently
the result of violent desecration of temples, elite residences, and other
buildings and monuments by enemies [e.g., at Yaxuna´ during the Early
Classic (Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler and Freidel, 1998)].

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish ritual termination from outright

violence. For example, William Fash (1989) determined that fac¸ade sculp-
ture on elite Str. 9N-82C at Copa´n was deliberately burned, but the building
stood long after this event. E. Wyllys Andrews and his colleagues discovered
that the lintel of a major structure in the nearby royal compound had been

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purposefully burned to collapse the building. These seem like two very
different acts to me.

Skeletal Remains

From very early times the Maya kept human remains for various

reasons, including as trophies of dead enemies (as well as ancestors), a
practice that is shown in Classic art and documented ethnohistorically (see
below). Tombs and caches commonly yield disarticulated heads or other
body parts or central burials lacking such parts. Mass burials of men of
military age, plausibly related to warfare or subsequent sacrificial ceremon-
ies, have been recovered from Late Preclassic contexts, as at Chalchuapa
(Fowler, 1984), and the practice continued in Classic times as well. Even
more interesting are the multiple burials of men, women, and children
found at Tikal (Laporte and Fialko, 1990), Yaxuna´ (Suhler and Freidel,
1998), and elsewhere that are interpreted as the remains of royal/elite
families deposed and massacred by external or internal enemies. A dramatic
example is the ‘‘Skull Pit’’ at Colha, which yielded the severed heads of
20 adults and 10 children of both sexes (Mock, 1998). Skulls had still-
articulated vertebrae and apparently the skin was flayed from the faces of
some victims. Following this event the building in which the skulls were
interred was destroyed, as apparently was much of the rest of Colha.

Unfortunately no large skeletal series exists that exhibits more broadly-

distributed patterns of possible war-related trauma. One of the best-ana-
lyzed ones, from Copa´n, in fact shows few or no such injuries (Story, 1992,
1997; Whittington, 1989), although given the paucity of war references in
the inscriptions of that center and its comparatively isolation far from the
major arenas of conflict, this is not surprising.

Most of the kinds of evidence cited above, of course, relate primarily

to the intense, destructive, and violent phases of war. The family feud, the
small-scale raid, or the elimination of political enemies by treachery all
would leave very few and probably ambiguous traces, and we would be
very lucky to detect them. Indirect evidence, such as the regionalization of
ceramic complexes in the Late Classic (Ball, 1993), reflects the fragmenta-
tion of the political landscape and, by implication, both the background
conditions for conflict and the effects of it.

Fortunately, Contact period war is richly documented and serves as a

convenient benchmark from which to interpret patterns of earlier Classic
warfare.

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WARFARE AND SOCIETY IN THE CONTACT PERIOD

Various Spaniards left eyewitness or second-hand accounts of conflict

in Yucatan for the period from 1517 to 1546, when the colonial capital of
Merida was finally established. The most famous of these is Landa’s Rela-
cio´n de Las Cosas de Yucatan, based heavily on information provided by
three Maya informants of high rank. Indigenous Maya scribes produced
post-Conquest documents of various kinds that recounted wars fought both
before and after the Spaniards arrived. Worth noting is that the last indepen-
dent Maya kingdom—that of the Itza´ in northern Guatemala—was con-
quered only in 1697, so we have records of intermittent campaigns and
protracted animosities over almost two centuries (Jones, 1998).

Sociopolitical Background

Northern Yucatan, which we know best, was populated by a population

variously estimated as between 600,000 and 2,300,000 Maya just prior to
the conquest (I prefer the lower range). Overall population densities were
quite low (less than 20 people per km

), consistent with ethnohistoric ac-

counts of extensive systems of agriculture (but see McAnany, 1995; Fedick,
1996). The most basic political unit prior to the Spanish conquest consisted
of a small segment of territory ruled by a noble called a batab, assisted by
various lesser officials and priests. Households of batabs (for simplicity’s
sake I use the English plural form throughout this paper, rather than the
Maya -ob, etc.) and other nobles and rich families formed the central
community of the polity, with dispersed households of commoners scattered
over the surrounding countryside. Spatial delimitation of the batabship was
probably not strictly territorial in the modern sense but, rather, extended
to the most distant plots of lands (themselves often very carefully marked)
habitually cultivated by members of the polity, land being the principal re-
source.

Details concerning the precolumbian batabship are sparse, but ac-

cording to Matthew Restall (1997) it was the direct antecedent of the
abundantly documented post-Conquest cah, which retained many facets of
earlier organization. The cah was a territorial, political, and social unit
essential to Maya identity. Within the cah some resources were held in
common and families were organized into patrilineages (chibal). In any
given region or batabship there were families of distinguished lineage who
collectively formed a noble class and dominated the highest offices. Nobles
set much store by their lineage name and history, and maintained ties with
high-raking maternal relatives, as Landa also reports for preconquest times.

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The elaborate households of Conquest period nobles were supported

by labor and goods produced by commoners, who formed the vast majority
of the population. Nobles also owned cacao plantations and engaged in
long-distance trade, both enterprises partly underwritten by the labor of
slaves. Some nobles also asserted separate descent from commoners and
were hedged about with an elaborate etiquette that emphasized their privi-
leged rank. About 30 great families, most notably the Xiu, the Cocom, the
Chel, and the Pech, dominated events in various locales, and some of them
were traditional enemies for centuries, their great power struggles central
to Yucatecan historical narratives.

More controversial is political organization above the level of the

batabship in the early sixteenth century. The ethnohistorian Ralph Roys
(1943, 1957) identified 16 ‘‘provinces’’ of three basic kinds (see also Marcus,
1992a, 1993). The simplest consisted of loose alliances of batabships whose
leaders were generally not related to one another and whose cooperation
was based on mutual self-interest. A more cohesive arrangement involved
batabships whose rulers were members of the same lineage. The most
centralized provinces were dominated by an individual called a halach uinic
(‘‘true man’’) who was a batab in his own right and to whom other batabs
were subject. An example is Mani, which probably had a population of
about 60,000 people and which was ruled from a central capital of that
name by a halach uinic of the Xiu lineage. In token of his supremacy the
halach uinic also used the title ajaw (‘‘lord’’ or ‘‘king’’—also frequently
spelled ahav).

Restall believes, in contrast to Roys, that ‘‘provinces’’ are largely illu-

sory, that there was little effective centralization above the level of the
batabship, and that halach uinic was an honorific title conferred on a particu-
larly dominant batab who wielded comparatively little unilateral authority.
To the extent that provinces existed, their boundaries, like those of the
constituent batabships, were fluid and frequently contested. Supporting
Restall’s argument is the fact that the Spaniards did not describe royal
palaces among the sixteenth century Maya (i.e., residential establishments
much more impressive than those of ordinary nobles or rich people). In
any case, it is clear that some halach uinics were powerful men who enjoyed
wide support and who could mobilize many followers, and a central theme
of Maya books and oral traditions is the great precolumbian confederations
dominated by the centers of Chiche´n Itza´ and Mayapa´n. My opinion is
that the Contact period Maya present us with a reasonable approximation
of what Freid (1967) called a ‘‘stratified society’’—i.e., one characterized
by stratification but without effective development of political centralization
or those institutions that strongly reinforce this kind of social order (see
also Sanders, 1989, 1992).

A Review of Maya War

Contact Period War

During early battles with the Spaniards Maya warriors exhorted one

another to kill or capture the enemy ‘‘calachuni’’ (as Bernal Diaz wrote
it). It seems safe to assume, therefore, that halach uinics commonly led
native contingents in the field, an interpretation consistent with Corte´s’s
assertion that he fought warriors from eight provinces. Batobs were military
leaders as well, but the most specialized commanders were nacoms, war
chiefs elected for 3-year terms from among the accomplished warriors of
the most important towns. Landa reports that nacoms were expected to
withdraw from normal life and remain celibate for the duration of their
terms and that, during an important annual festival called Pacum Chac,
they were carried like idols to prominent temples, where offerings were
made to them and war dances were performed. Notable braves called
holcans were recruited and subsidized as a core military force, and these
men often caused trouble even in the communities that paid them, especially
after hostilities ceased.

Even allowing for expectable Spanish exaggeration of enemy numbers,

it is clear that very large contingents of troops, certainly numbering in the
thousands, could be quickly mobilized. I believe that this indicates a militia
pattern of recruitment—i.e., adult men in general were prepared to serve
as warriors and kept their own weapons in their homes. The ‘‘squadrons’’
observed by Bernal Diaz probably represented contingents drawn from
particular batabships or cahs. Such militias, of course, would be most effec-
tively mustered for defensive rather than offensive purposes. None of the
first-hand accounts tells us much about how, or even whether, warriors
acted as disciplined formations in battle, but a standard tactic seems to
have been to try to eliminate enemy captains as noted above.

Although warriors were often gorgeously attired, their arms were made

of wood, stone, bone, hide, and fiber and, so, were primitive by European
standards (Landa mentions copper ‘‘hatchets’’ but I find no descriptions
of their actual use). Long-distance weapons included atlatls, slings, and
bows, and these were supplemented by various close-quarter weapons such
as thrusting spears and sword-like wooden implements edged with sharp
stone blades. Shields, padded cotton armor, and helmets of wood or other
materials provided protection.

Historically documented battles usually took place in the open, but

the Maya were also adept at throwing up stockades, barricades, and other
field defenses. Although many settlements were undefended, the Maya
had a long tradition of fortifications, many of which are archaeologically
detectable. Hernan Corte´s (1986, p. 371) described one he saw in 1525
this way:

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This town stands upon a high rock: one side of it is skirted by a great lake and the
other by a deep stream which runs into the lake. There is only one level entrance,
the whole town being surrounded by a deep moat behind which is a wooden palisade
as high as a man’s breast. Behind this palisade lies a wall of very heavy boards,
some twelve feet tall, with embrasures through which to shoot their arrows; the
lookout posts rise another eight feet above the wall, which likewise has large towers
with many stones to hurl down on the enemy . . . indeed, it was so well planned
with regard to the manner of weapons they use, they could not be better defended.

Although primitive by European standards, such constructions as Corte´s
notes were quite effective given the ‘‘paleotechnic’’ level of Maya arma-
ment, especially the lack of artillery, and were particularly useful against
surprise raids, a favorite form of attack.

Landa several times asserts that wars (he might better have said cam-

paigns) were of short duration, particularly because of the resistance of
the noncombatant men and women who necessarily had to haul provisions
on their backs, given the lack of beasts of burden or wheeled vehicles.
Human porters had to eat as well as warriors, so such a transport strategy
was quite inefficient. Only where water transport was available, particularly
along the coasts, could what Hassig (1992) calls the ‘‘friction of distance’’
of Precolumbian warfare be overcome, but even canoes lacked sails and
had to be paddled. While operating in enemy territory there were only two
options for war parties: carry your own food or live off the land—i.e., the
crops or food stores of your opponent. This same restriction made pro-
longed sieges difficult. Protracted campaigns involving sizable forces were
probably most feasible when mature crops of the enemy either were still
in the fields or had just been harvested.

Battles themselves were to some degree ritualized and choreographed,

as no doubt were the preparations for them. If Spanish descriptions can
be trusted, ritual paraphernalia found in a camp hastily abandoned by an
Itza war party in 1631 included an ‘‘altar,’’ priestly clothing, incense burners
along with the copal incense burned in them, wooden images, and three
‘‘idols’’ in the form of animals (Jones, 1998, p. 50).

Most war captives were enslaved, but distinguished male captives were

usually sacrificed and body parts such as mandibles were kept as trophies.
In Mesoamerican cultures generally there was a meritocratic dimension to
success in war, most comprehensively documented for the Mexica. Nacoms
and holcans apart, we do not know whether ordinary Maya warriors who
distinguished themselves on the battlefield could rise much in social rank,
but they were honored and feasted, and boasted of their accomplishments.

Postconquest documents reveal frequent antagonisms between cahs,

and most conflicts were probably fought between batabships, including
those putatively included in the same ‘‘provinces.’’ If halach uinics were
really as powerful as Roys suggests, then suppression of conflict among

A Review of Maya War

their batab constituents must have been one of their most important respon-
sibilities. As in highland Mexico, the northern Maya did not present a
common front against the European invaders. Jealousies among great fami-
lies and desire to preserve their prerogatives led some Maya factions to
ally themselves opportunistically with the Spaniards (Restall, 1998).

Pretexts for war included revenge, capture of slaves, and control of

trade routes and the sources of valued materials, especially salt, which was
obtained from many sites along the northern coast. Land was a major cause
of friction in postconquest cah documents, and quarrels over land incited
many pre-Spanish conflicts as well. Recurrent agricultural shortfalls due to
drought and other crises stimulated theft and trespass, which in turn trig-
gered hostilities between polities. To the extent that martial feats and
warlike personae were culturally valued, these in themselves encouraged
conflict.

We may safely attribute some features of Contact period warfare to

the earlier Classic Maya as well. Weapons were at all times sufficiently
simple that any handy Maya artisan could manufacture them from cheap,
commonly available materials, and learn to wield them, although elite
fighters probably possessed particularly handsome or symbolically charged
arms and were more adept in their use than the situational common soldier.
The one exception to this rule is large war canoes, which certainly were
used in Postclassic times and possibly also by the Classic Maya. Presumably
only leaders of high rank could afford to commission such vessels.

Other constants include the logistical limitations on the range and

duration of operations and the close relationship between ritual and conflict.
As in all complex agrarian societies, rulers and elites in both Contact period
and Classic societies made up only a tiny proportion of the population, so
any sizable contingents necessarily included commoners [see Webster (1985,
1998) and Hassig (1992) for extended discussions of these points]. Finally,
with very few exceptions, Maya war was carried out between culturally
similar, if not identical, antagonists. Despite such continuities, the ethnohis-
toric record must be used carefully as a guide to Classic Maya war, which
in many ways was highly distinctive.

CLASSIC MAYA WAR AND SOCIETY

Given all the Contact period evidence, we might well marvel at the

widespread consensus developed by the 1940s that the Classic Maya were
inordinately peaceful. Actually, the attitude among Mayanists was not so
much outright denial as embarrassed confusion. Sylvanus G. Morley, the
dean of Maya archaeology of the time, provides a good example. His

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immensely popular and influential book The Ancient Maya (Morley, 1946)
contains a handful of short references to war. At one point he remarks
that there are no archaeological indications of wars or conquests associated
with the Maya collapse and that

Old Empire (i.e., Classic period) sculpture is conspicuously lacking in the representa-
tion of warlike scenes, battles, strife, and violence. True, bound captives are occasion-
ally portrayed, but the groups in which they appear are susceptible of religious, even
astronomical interpretation, and warfare as such is almost certainly not implicated.
(Morley, 1946, p. 70)

This comment strikes one today as rather odd because many of the monu-
ments now featured as evidence for Maya war were known at the time,
and earlier scholars such as the art historian Herbert Spinden (1913) had
identified images of weapons and ‘‘memorials’’ to ‘‘success in war’’ (Stephen
Houston has also pointed out to me that in the 1930s M. Jean Genet made
several decipherments related to warfare).

Ironically, just before Morley’s book went to press the famous murals

of Bonampak (Miller, 1986) were discovered; these more than any other
images contributed to the breakdown the ‘‘peaceful Maya’’ perspective. In
fairness to Morely, he went on to speculate that there were ‘‘civil wars’’
among Classic Maya polities and that captives pictured on monuments at
Tikal were slaves taken in warfare. In doing so he was not reasoning
primarily from the archaeological evidence but, rather, projecting ethnohis-
torically known patterns back into the past.

Sometime later J. E. S. Thompson (1954, p. 81) ventured that

I think one can assume fairly constant friction over boundaries sometimes leading
to a little fighting, and occasional raids on outlying parts of a neighboring city state
to assure a constant supply of sacrificial victims, but I think the evidence is against
the assumption of regular warfare on a considerable scale.

Thompson believed that Maya docility was deeply rooted in ‘‘character’’
or ‘‘personality traits.’’ He admired the living Maya as ‘‘. . . exceptionally
honest, good-natured, clean, tidy, and socially inclined’’—perfect exemplars
of ‘‘live and let live’’ except when provoked beyond endurance (Thompson,
1954, p. 131). Thus oppressive elite demands for too much labor and tax
at the end of the Classic period provoked a particular kind of warfare—

peasant revolts—that ultimately overthrew them.

Of course at this time neither Morely nor Thompson nor anyone else

could read noncalendrical Classic Maya hieroglyphs despite decades of
determined attempts at decipherment (Coe, 1992). Morley (1946, p. 262)
was originally convinced, like John Lloyd Stephens, that the inscriptions
recorded history, but later reversed his opinion:

The Maya inscriptions treat primarily of chronology, astronomy—perhaps one
might better say astrology—and religious matters. They are in no sense records of

A Review of Maya War

personal glorification and self-laudation, like the inscriptions of Egypt, Assyria, and
Babylon. They tell no story of kingly conquests, recount no deeds of imperial
achievement; they neither praise or exalt, glorify nor aggrandize, indeed they are
so utterly impersonal, so completely nonindividualistic, that it is even probable
that the name-glyphs of specific men and women were never recorded upon the
Maya monument.

More than anything else this presumed esoteric, ahistorical content of

the hieroglyphs, as the quote indicates, made the Maya seem unique, unlike
other civilizations. It heavily contributed to the then prevalent idea that
Maya polities were peaceful theocracies, dominated by priest-rulers who
presided over centers that were essentially vacant ceremonial places, built
and maintained by the devotion of common people (Becker, 1976)—a
charming and utopian vision to which much of the general public is still at-
tracted.

Not everyone neglected the topic of Classic period warfare, however.

Robert Rand’s (1952) dissertation was one of the very few lengthy consider-
ations of the topic. Rands (1952, pp. 5–6) observed that

some half dozen major types of evidence have been brought forward to support
the belief that the Classic Maya were non-militaristic. These include their art,
supposedly free of warlike motifs; their architecture and settlement patterning,
supposedly vulnerable to attack; their cultural homogeneity, supposedly incompati-
ble with intertribal warfare of the sort rampant in northern Yucatan a the time of
the Spanish Conquest; and the supposed existence of their religiously-oriented
culture and their national character or ethos dominated by strong tendencies to
moderation and orderliness.

Rands (1952, p. 64) believed instead that ‘‘evidences are strong for the
existence of fairly intensive patterns of warfare in the Classic Period,’’
especially when segments of polities ‘‘revolted’’ to establish their indepen-
dence. Even he, however, did not seriously buck the prevailing wisdom,
and took the position that insofar as their art suggested, Classic Maya
war was not, like that of the Inka and Aztecs, motivated by acquisition
of ‘‘tribute or territorial gain’’ (Rands, 1952, p. 188). Only when convincing
evidence of early fortifications emerged did some Mayanists begin to
think that something more serious might be going on, and even so, not
until the inscriptions began to be comprehensible did the tide of opinion
finally turn.

The Sociopolitical Context of Classic Maya War

Despite the continuities already discussed between the Contact period

Maya and their Classic predecessors, we must also take into account many
differences, as well as acknowledge serious gaps in our understanding of
Classic society. Here I provide only a brief overview, stressing those features

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most relevant for war; for more extensive discussions see Sabloff and Hen-
derson (1993) and Lucero (1999). The principal concern is the Late Classic
and Terminal Classic periods, during which evidence for war is very compel-
ling. But first we must backtrack for a moment.

Preclassic Background

We now know that large centers and extensive polities, along with

many other features of the Lowland Maya Great Tradition previously
attributed to Classic times, were actually present much earlier. By 300 BC
Komchen in northeastern Yucatan, El Mirador and Nakbe in the northern
Pete´n of Guatemala, and Cerros in northern Belize were all thriving places
(Ringle and Andrews, 1990; Matheny, 1986; Hansen, 1998; Freidel, 1986a).
Unfortunately we have no comprehensible texts for this early period, nor
do we yet have a good grasp of settlement distributions, economic patterns,
or regional demographic scales. Although Mayanists debate whether these
early polities had social and political institutions comparable to those of
Classic times, there was obviously a considerable degree of political central-
ization, massive use of labor for construction projects, and rituals and
associated symbols that generally prefigure later royal ones.

Interestingly, many of these large centers were abandoned at the end

of the Late Preclassic period and never substantially reoccupied. Presum-
ably their former inhabitants contributed to the growth of Tikal, Calakmul,
and other great capitals that were dominant during the Early Classic.
Whether warfare was associated with this upheaval and population disloca-
tion is unknown, but as we have already seen, destruction episodes, mass
graves of probable war victims, and very large fortifications do clearly date
to Late Preclassic times.

The Classic Period Political Landscape

In the late 1950s epigraphers first identified ‘‘emblem glyphs,’’ and

some 40 or more are now known (Mathews, 1991; Marcus, 1992b). These
glyphs are not toponyms but, rather, occur as parts of titles that are also
associated with personal names. The referent is not a place per se, but a
‘‘holy lord,’’ or king, presumably associated with a political unit designated
by the emblem glyph, and by extension they probably refer to a whole
polity and/or its dynastic line (Culbert, 1991, pp. 140–144; Stuart, 1993, pp.
325–326, 1995, p. 257). Early emblem glyphs appeared in the fifth century
but they are most numerous after AD 650. Unfortunately not all major

A Review of Maya War

centers can be associated with an emblem glyph, some have more than
one, and some glyphs are shared by more than one center. Nevertheless,
emblem glyphs have proved invaluable in understanding the Maya political
landscape, especially the war texts to which we will turn shortly.

By the seventh century there were hundreds of large and small Maya

centers, most concentrated in the central and southern Lowlands. Some of
these, in regions such as northeastern Guatemala or northern Belize, were
within a day’s walk of one another. Elsewhere distances were greater, but
even Copa´n, perhaps the most isolated of first-rank centers, is only a 3-
day walk from its closest neighbor, Quirigua´.

Centers and Polities

Mayanists long ago recognized that Classic Maya centers differed from

urban places in other parts of the ancient world, and also from Mesoameri-
can cities such as Teotihuaca´n and Tenochtitlan. At their cores lie impres-
sive masonry temples, ball courts, royal palaces, ceremonial causeways,
great plazas containing carved and inscribed altars and stelae, and some-
times artificial reservoirs (Houston, 1998). Such conglomerations of large
architecture may cover as much as several square kilometers, as in the
case of Tikal, but most are much smaller—typically less than one square
kilometer. Considerable numbers of people inhabited these site cores, but
not in anything like the urban densities found in highland Mexico or at
the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapa´n. Instead, residences of elites and
commoners radiate out from the central precincts, with settlement usually
becoming more dispersed with distance. Around a few centers such as
Copa´n there are impressive residential precincts that approach urban densi-
ties over very small areas (Webster et al., 2000), and the same appears true
for the newly mapped peripheries of Palenque.

Most Mayanists agree that centers were essentially the establishments

of rulers and their immediate families and retainers, less differentiated
from their rural hinterlands than many Old World cities, particularly in
terms of their economic functions. Sanders and Webster (1988), following
the urban anthropologist Richard Fox (1977) call them regal-ritual centers
and envision them as the hyptertrophied household and court facilities of
hereditary kings, many of which acquired their forms over centuries (see
also Ball and Tasheck, 1991). Rule emanated from these centers, at which
was concentrated all of the necessary apparatus of royal display and sym-
bolic presentation. Lesser elite people often lived in elaborate households
of their own, as most clearly seen at Copa´n.

If centers, at least the largest ones, were capitals, how extensive were

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their polities? Most Mayanists would probably agree that the most durable
political unit was a single center with its resident dynasty surrounded by a
small hinterland—say, on average, 2000–3000 km

in area. Some Mayanists

have called such small polities ‘‘city-states,’’ but most of them were probably
neither very urban nor very state-like in organization. A few ancient centers,
especially Tikal, might have been considerably larger even early on, and
dominated nearby neighbors of considerable size. What Mayanists argue
about is the ability of ambitious rulers to create what Martin and Grube
(1995) call Maya ‘‘superstates’’—polities in which one powerful ruler con-
trolled, especially through successful warfare—many subordinate polities
and kings.

As we shall see below such attempts were clearly made. There is no

question that during the sixth and seventh century Tikal and Calakmul
were centers of enormous political and military gravity which attracted or
otherwise drew other dynasties into larger contending coalitions. Some of
their struggles are reviewed below, but no single ruler or dynasty seems to
have been able to impose central control and effective administration over
a territorially large, multicenter polity for any appreciable time. It is also
possible that rulers of small polities actively sought associations with large
ones for reasons of their own, so we need not see hierarchical political
relationships as always imposed from the top down.

Like northern Yucatan in the early sixteenth century, the central and

southern Classic Maya Lowlands were politically fragmented, and individ-
ual polities probably had varied internal political arrangements. Uniting
them all was a shared (but by no means monolithic) Great Tradition of
art, architecture, literacy, religion, ritual, worldview, and etiquette, commu-
nicated among and maintained by mainly elites. Writing was a basic element
of this tradition, and very recent linguistic research (Houston et al., 2000)
strongly supports the idea that all Classic inscriptions were recorded in a
single prestige language ancestral to modern Ch’olti and Ch’orti.

Kings, Elites, and Commoners

Central to Classic Maya political organization was kingship, the institu-

tion that we know best because of the propensity of Maya archaeologists
to dig in royal places and because most monuments and texts were commis-
sioned by kings. From these texts and associated images epigraphers have
reconstructed local dynastic sequences. Some of these are only a few genera-
tions deep, but others extend back through more than 31 successive reigns
(with some breaks), as at Tikal, where the founding dynasty seems to have
been established sometime around the beginning of the third century AD

A Review of Maya War

[see Harrison (1999) for the most recent review]. Kings styled themselves
as K’uhul Ajaw, or ‘‘holy lords,’’ and inherited their positions (mostly in
the male line), but not according to rigid rules of primogeniture and, as
we shall see below, not without political dissention and even violence.

Houston and Stuart (1996) have recently summarized what we know

about Classic rulership. Kings were closely associated with divinities when
they lived. They took god-names and personified gods in rituals, and their
centers and dynasties were identified with particular sets of patron deities.
Kings commissioned images in which gods were thought to reside (at least
periodically), erected houses for deities, and in some sense personally
owned or cared for god-bundles. Kings also owned specific buildings, whose
construction they presumably oversaw. Destroying or defiling such power-
fully charged places or sacred objects of an enemy ruler was a major
symbolic goal of Late Classic war.

During their lives rulers were personally responsible for maintaining

cosmic order and the well-being of their realms and subjects, particularly
through communication with gods and royal ancestors, aided by wayob
[spiritual companions or coessences (see Houston and Stuart, 1989)]. Living
kings were highly sacred individuals, and when they died some of them
appear to have been apotheosized as gods. Rulership thus had a pronounced
theocratic dimension that reflected a basic postulate of Classic Maya culture:
the moral order, the political order, and the natural order were one. Inscrip-
tions reveal that some kings were ‘‘possessed’’ by other kings and carried
out rituals under the aegis of their patrons or overlords.

Maya kings initiated war and portrayed themselves as participating

personally in battles, presiding over ceremonies of political significance
such as heir designation, and visiting and entertaining one another, as
well as lesser elites, at impressive feasts. They certainly consumed and
redistributed elite status items that were widely exchanged among polities,
although it is unclear how much rulers were involved in their production
or acquisition. People of very high rank, including the sons of rulers, were
artists who engaged in the production of polychrome pottery and other
status objects. Powerful cultural influences emanated from royal courts,
setting aesthetic and behavioral standards for people of lower rank.

Kings were surrounded by lesser hereditary nobles, officials, and court-

iers, many of whom held titles and displayed carved benches, altars, and
fac¸ade sculpture in their own impressive households. Maya nobles below
the rank of king participated in very important rituals such as deity imper-
sonation. Like kings, these great lords had direct or indirect access to the
labor and taxes of commoners. Although the ajaw title was restricted to
kings and their very close relatives (Stuart and Houston, 1996, p. 295), it
is possible that all high nobles were (or claimed to be) descended from living

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or dead kings. Both kings and subroyal nobles were probably polygynous,
although this is not certain.

Most people in any polity—probably upwards of 90%—were farmers

who produced the standard range of Mesoamerican crops on the agricultural
landscape. There is no direct evidence for the slaves described in the ethno-
historic literature. Upland swidden agriculture was a major cultivation strat-
egy, but more intensive forms of production involved terracing and wetland
drainage in some areas, although their contribution to the Maya economy
and even their chronology is debated (for a review see Fedick, 1996). In
any case, by the late eighth century overall population densities for large
regions were very high—at least 100 people per km

and, according to

some estimates, even higher (Culbert and Rice, 1990).

What We Do Not Know About the Classic Maya

Unfortunately art and inscriptions are mute about many important

features of Classic society central to a detailed understanding of warfare.
Maya kings and associated elites had leadership roles in negotiating foreign
relations, waging war, levying taxes or tribute, conducting rituals, and initiat-
ing royal building projects. We know almost nothing, however, about their
more fundamental leadership roles. My own suspicion is that Maya rulers
and elites had few managerial functions in terms of the all-important subsis-
tence economy, apart from extracting that proportion of it necessary to
underwrite their own activities. I also believe that the Classic Maya lacked
anything we might consider well-developed bureaucracies, but other Maya-
nists would disagree.

The most important things we do not know are how kings and elites

related to commoners and how people of any rank asserted claims to the
agricultural landscape. If effective commoner organization existed only at
the nuclear or extended family household level and lacked kin connections
with elites, most people must have been attached as clients to royal or
noble families and were comparatively powerless to resist their decisions.
This was the system in Hawai’i (Webster, 1998). In these circumstances
ordinary people might, however, have had considerable ability to move
about the landscape and attach themselves opportunistically to specific
elites or even polities precisely because they lacked local, corporate organi-
zation.

Alternatively, commoner households might have been organized into

larger corporate lineages, with their own resources and communities and
with kin attachments to elite leaders, along the lines of the postconquest
cah reviewed above or the Mexica calpulli (Hopkins, 1988; Sanders, 1989,

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1992; McAnany, 1995). Such lineages comprised natural political factions.
Although I do not have space to develop the theme, I think that the ‘‘house
society’’ concept propounded by Le´vi-Strauss has considerable utility here
(for a review see Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995).

High-born individuals would have formed a kind of elite network with

responsibilities to their lesser kinspeople, but also its own collective elite
self-interest. Common people in this case would have been more tied to
specific parts of the landscape, and hence more vulnerable to political
control, but also more capable of resisting royal demands and competing
with other similarly constituted factions. These two models cloud the issues
of to whom Maya divine kings were responsible and over whom they had
some sort of jurisdiction. Were such relations defined in territorial or kinship
terms? Did kings have impeded or unimpeded rights over the labor and
products of commoners? We simply do not know.

Even this short review shows that the Classic Maya differed in many

important ways from the Contact period Maya. Those differences most
germane to the issue of war include much stronger Classic political central-
ization, more powerful royal institutions, larger, more numerous, and more
closely packed polities, and much higher population densities.

Classic Maya War as History

Uniquely among New World peoples, the Classic Maya created a

logosyllabic writing system so sophisticated that by the eighth century AD
it could accurately replicate speech. No readable codices (screen-fold, bark-
paper books) of the period have survived, although archaeologists have
recovered fragments of several, but many artistic representations of them
are known. Fortunately, thousands of hieroglyphic inscriptions were more
durably carved, modeled, or painted on monumental altars, stelae, thrones,
building fac¸ades, lintels, and walls, tomb chambers, ceramic vessels, and
objects of bone and wood, forming an invaluable resource for epigraphers.
Until the late 1950s inscriptions could not be deciphered, and the conven-
tional wisdom among Mayanists, as Morley’s quote shows, was that they
referred mainly to calendrical, astronomical, ritual, and religious themes.
Compounding the problem was that there is a great deal of regional varia-
tion in Maya texts and the art which accompanies them. Copa´n’s many
inscriptions, which contributed so powerfully to early concepts of the Classic
Maya, are associated with few overt references to war.

Effective decipherment of hieroglyphs began only in the late 1950s

(Proskouriakoff, 1961) and, along with associated archaeological discover-
ies such as imposing royal tombs (Ruz, 1973), revealed that the Classic

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Maya had dynasties of hereditary kings, that centers were royal capitals,
and that warfare was commonplace. Since about 1980 a veritable flood of
new data has emerged. As Schele and Miller (1986, pp. 14–15) state,
‘‘Among the most common events recorded on Maya monuments are war
and capture. . . . Warfare . . . gave rise to more varied depictions than
any other theme.’’ Epigraphic studies are now driving our understanding
of Maya war more than archaeological research—a development with both
good and bad consequences.

Inscriptions, coupled with iconography and highly accurate Long Count

dates, provide us with a sort of warfare history based on the emblem glyphs
associated with the rulers of contending centers, names of kings, noble
warriors, captives, and other participants in conflicts or their ritual sequels,
and information about associated behaviors such as tribute presentation.
Remarkable insights are being derived from this record, and when I first
started studying Maya war I never imagined that we would ever possess
anything like it.

Before examining this historical trove, however, we should admit some

of its current limitations. First, all known inscriptions referring to war were
written only after the sixth century AD. Here I mean dated inscriptions that
refer to roughly contemporaneous events. Some wars are known through
retrospective inscriptions; for example, one of the earliest securely docu-
mented Classic Maya wars occurred between Tikal and Caracol in AD 562
but is first mentioned in a Caracol inscription made 70 years later. Such
deeply retrospective texts obviously present their own problems of interpre-
tation. The initial two and a half centuries of the Classic period are thus
still prehistoric with regard to conflict, although there are early artistic
depictions of sacrificial victims and other war-related images (see Dixon,
1982). How to explain this rather sudden enthusiasm for explicit war state-
ments is an important issue briefly addressed below.

Second, inscriptions of all kinds are short and caption-like, so there are

no narratives comparable, say, to the Iliad. Third, war-related inscriptions
almost always present the perspectives and intentions of the royal (and
occasionally other high ranking) individuals who commissioned them (al-
though, interestingly, not always of the winners). Recorded events must
thus be understood in the context of their elite motivations, which are not
always clear, and of course are susceptible to self-serving distortion or
at least omission. For example, confrontations between two centers are
sometimes only recorded at one of them, usually the ostensible victor.
Thus the sacrifice of the thirteenth ruler of Copa´n at Quirigua´ in AD 738,
probably during a dynastic squabble, is recorded only at Quirigua´. Such
inconsistencies clearly show elite concern with putting the best face on
military or political reverses.

A Review of Maya War

A related difficulty is that this top-down perspective does not tell us

directly about the motives, purposes, and functions of war, which leaders
were actually present in the field, or any details concerning the numbers
of combatants, who they were, and how they were recruited, where battles
took place, how contingents were organized, or what kinds of strategies
and tactics were employed. Some war-related events appear to take place in
supernatural contexts and might have had mainly mythical or metaphorical
significance (Stuart, 1995, p. 300).

There is also much regional variation in war texts. They are abundant

at some centers, such as Yaxchila´n, Piedras Negras, and Caracol, sparse
elsewhere, as at Copa´n, and absent at others. Classic texts of any kind are
comparatively rare or lacking entirely in sites in the northern Lowlands.
Compelling evidence for war in the form of fortifications, as at Becan, or
destruction episodes, as at Yaxuna´, must consequently be interpreted in
the absence of texts, or even much art. Finally, some war-related glyphs
remain undeciphered, others are poorly understood, and inscriptions are
often damaged or incomplete, leading to premature claims and disputes.
For example, Schele and Freidel (1990) postulated an extremely important
war early war between Tikal and Uaxactun in AD 378, while Stuart (1995,
pp. 326) maintains that the evidence they cite has no such implication.

Bearing in mind these lacunae and uncertainties, let us turn to some

glyphic expressions of war, relying heavily on David Stuart’s (1995, pp.
291–329) summary, which I think is the best available and which itself
benefits from the work of many other scholars.

War-Related Glyphs

Stuart notes, interestingly, that there is no glyph that literally means

‘‘to wage war.’’ About a dozen others, however, have direct war-related
meanings or commonly occur as parts of longer war statements; these are
rendered phonetically in the list below [Stuart (1995, p. 311) is adamant
that meanings of glyphs must be derived from their phonetic values, and
not from interpretations of the pictorial elements that make them up]. The
orthography of the listed terms varies according to specific epigraphers and
date of publication; here I follow Stuart. Stephen Houston offered his own
comments while reading a draft of this paper, and I have included them
alongside Stuart’s interpretations.

(1) Chuk:

‘‘To capture’’ or ‘‘to tie up’’; the most common
glyph (or, according to Stephen Houston, ‘‘to
grab’’ or ‘‘to seize’’).

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(2) Bate’el:

‘‘Warrior’’ (Houston thinks that this is a prob-
lematical interpretation).

(3) Bak, or baak:

‘‘Prisoner’’ or ‘‘captive’’; often used in a posses-
sive form, as ‘‘his captive,’’ with numbers spec-
ified.

(4) Ch’ak:

‘‘To chop’’; probably referring to sacrifice after
war events.

(5) Pul:

‘‘To burn’’; this glyph is often found in connec-
tion with captives and might sometimes also re-
fer to particular places that were burned (delib-
erate destruction?).

(6) Tok’ pakal:

‘‘Flint shield’’; a term that somehow refers gen-
erally to the essence of war as a royal endeavor
and/or an object used in war-related ceremonies
(Houston thinks that this glyph has a more spe-
cific reference).

(7) Hub:

To ‘‘fall,’’ ‘‘collapse,’’ or ‘‘fail’’ (as in the failure
of a military campaign).

(8) Patan:

‘‘Tribute’’ or ‘‘service/work’’; this is a fairly rare
term often attached to numbers and sometimes
seems to refer to tribute exacted or being of-
fered after war events.

(9) Ikats:

‘‘Burden’’ or ‘‘load’’; sometimes used with ex-
pressions for ‘‘payment,’’ as possibly in payment
of tribute. Sometimes used in the possessed
form (yikats).

(10) Yubte:

A very rare classical Yucatecan glyph for ‘‘trib-
ute mantle’’ identified on a Pete´n polychrome
vessel by Stephen Houston.

To this list we should add two others. Sajal is one of the few apparently

hereditary titles we know for Classic Maya officials or courtiers who are
in some way subordinates of kings. Particularly common on the western
peripheries of the Maya Lowlands, the title is usually held by men, and royal
inscriptions sometimes associate individual kings with numerous sajals, as
at Yaxchila´n. Sajals commonly appear in war statements (e.g., as captives
or captors) and are often assumed to have had military functions (Stuart,
1993, pp. 330–331).

Perhaps most significant of all is the frequently occurring but controver-

sial ‘‘shell-star’’ or ‘‘earth-star’’ glyph, usually taken to indicate a war event
of unusual consequence, as in Caracol’s apparent conquest of Tikal in AD
562 (the earliest known example). Some epigraphers (Schele and Freidel,
1990; Schele and Matthews, 1991) think that ‘‘earth-star’’ events were major

A Review of Maya War

territorial wars timed with regard to particular points in the cycle of the
planet Venus (often associated with war in Mesoamerica) and signaled the
defeat of one polity by another. Stuart cautions that we do not yet under-
stand the exact import of this glyph. Whether or not such events are signifi-
cantly associated with the Venus cycle is much debated (Nahm, 1994; Aveni
and Hotaling, 1994; Hotaling, 1995). Nahm found no war–Venus associa-
tions in Colonial documents.

Implications of Texts

Inscriptions that contain one or several of the glyphs above, along with

emblem glyphs and associated art, yield many insights about Maya war.
Without going at length into specific examples at the expense of the general
reader, major themes of texts, taken broadly to include hieroglyphs, dates,
and art, include the ‘‘victory’’ (in some sense or another) of one center, or
group of allied centers, over another, the taking of captives, particularly
by kings but also by other elite warriors, the subsequent humbling, mutila-
tion, and sacrifice of such captives, the linkage of war to ceremonies such
as heir-designation, the failure of war efforts, the destruction of the buildings
or ritual paraphernalia of enemies, the bestowal of gifts by rulers on warriors
who have distinguished themselves in battle, and the presentation of pay-
ments or tribute.

Success or failure in war was quite possibly correlated in the Maya

mind with the efficacy of the personal ways (Maya plural

⫽ wayob) of

powerful leaders (Houston and Stuart, 1996). Military reverses, understand-
ably, are seldom recorded by the defeated themselves, except on retrospec-
tive monuments in which later victories appear more glorious as a result.

In some other parts of Mesoamerica warfare themes are only implicitly

and indirectly conveyed (as at Teotihuacan) but in the Maya Lowlands
they are very explicit and often highly personalized statements essential to
royal presentation. A particularly good set of examples comes from Early
Classic Tikal and Uaxactun. Whether or not Teotihuacan-inspired wars
occurred in the region during the fourth century, warfare imagery on stelae
is clear (Miller, 1999, pp. 94–99). Stela 5 at Uaxactun shows a warrior
garbed and armed in Teotihuacan style. One hundred fifty years later the
Tikal king Sayah Chan K’awil commissioned Stela 31, on which he associ-
ated himself with war symbols and depicted his own father dressed as a
Teotihuacan warrior. Stela 31 is one of the earliest monuments to blatantly
blend the ideology of war with that of rulership.

Monuments celebrating war events were most often set up at the

centers of the ostensible victors, but they also (particularly in the form of

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hieroglyphic stairways) were imposed on the losers. Many were positioned
where they could be seen by the public at large, but they were probably
aimed at elite people who could best understand their texts, dates, and
imagery and internalize the intended messages. Named and titled individu-
als featured on monuments are most often kings, their captives, associated
warriors, and occasionally royal wives. In the accompanying texts rulers
are sometimes credited with the capture of large numbers of enemies (as
many as 20, but usually fewer). Especially interesting are nonroyal victims
of wars. For example, Stela 12 at Piedras Negras records one ‘‘Holy Shield’’
as a such a victim and identifies him as a yajawak, ak, which Houston
(personal communication, 2000) thinks is a war title.

Whether statements of royal captive-taking should be understood liter-

ally (as personal battlefield exploits) or to pertain more generally to captives
taken by the king’s warriors and dedicated to him is often unclear. One
such obvious presentation is shown on the Kimbell Panel (Miller, 1999, p.
156). Here a subordinate warrior presents three captives to a dominant
figure on a throne—probably the Yaxchila´n ruler Shield Jaguar 2. The
scene is accompanied by a text reading nawaj u ba:k ti y-ajaw, which means
something like ‘‘his captives are dressed (?) for his lord’’ (Houston, S.,
personal communication, 2000). Stela 12 at Yaxchila´n’s hereditary enemy
Piedras Negras has a very similar captive presentation theme.

Because Classic Maya rulers appear to have been spiritually responsi-

ble for the well-being of their polities and control of chaos in the cosmos,
images of kings subduing enemies might also have a metaphorical meaning,
if, as seems likely, enemies themselves were conceptualized as sources of
disorder. Even kings whose centers recorded few or no war events had
themselves portrayed in military garb, as, for example, Yax Pasah, the last
ruler of Copa´n (Fash, 1991; Baudez, 1994; Webster, 1999b). Long-dead
kings were also shown in war regalia on monuments commissioned by later
rulers, and what are taken to be war symbols derived from the great highland
Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan are conspicuously featured on monu-
ments at Uaxactun, Tikal, Copa´n, and elsewhere [see Stuart (1998) for a
discussion of possible Teotihuacan meddling in the dynastic affairs of Tikal].
Clearly kings were preoccupied with their ideological associations with war,
however we understand their actual participation.

Particularly intriguing are the presentation and tribute themes de-

picting textiles, ceramics, feathers, cacao, shells, and probably jades. Tribute
scenes have only recently been recognized and hint at some of the motiva-
tions for Classic warfare (Schele and Miller, 1986; Stuart, 1995, pp. 352–370;
Reents-Budet, 1994, p. 257). Tribute statements are sometimes directly
associated with war glyphs, as on Naranjo Stela 12. In one scene of the
famous Bonampak murals, which of course feature warfare, a tribute bundle

A Review of Maya War

shown near the ruler’s throne is labeled as containing 8000 cacao beans
(Miller, 1999, p. 172).

Some monuments show successful warriors being ‘‘adorned’’ or pre-

sented with gifts such as feathers (headdresses?) by their patron rulers,
much as Mexica warriors received mantles, ear flares, or other insignia as
marks of rank and favor from their king. Tribute bundles are conspicuous
features of Maya art, particularly on polychrome vase paintings, and tribute
terms such as patan are linked to named individuals (at least in one case
to a woman) who might either owe tribute or literally be tribute. Such
individuals might also be hostages as used elsewhere in Mesoamerica to
guarantee the political complaisance of client or subordinate polities.

Tribute events can sometimes be correlated with wider conflicts. For

example, Stuart (1995, p. 391) illustrates a monument from Palenque appar-
ently depicting the Palenque king Akul Anab III (the only monument from
his reign) unloading tribute. This event might have taken place at the
nearby enemy center of Tonina´, where inscriptions celebrate the capture
of Akul Anab III’s immediate royal predecessor, Kan Hok’ Chitam II.

Before leaving the topic of texts, two further points must be briefly

addressed: Who initiated Classic Maya wars? and In whose interests were
they fought? Inscriptions obviously stress royal initiatives, and there is little
doubt that wars served mainly elite purposes (more about this below). On
the royal level, wars were no doubt undertaken to keep subordinates in
line or, alternatively, to assert independence and create new dynasties and
polities. Most Mayanists would probably agree that by the seventh or eighth
century AD there were no ‘‘private’’ wars (intrapolity factional competition
excepted) in which some social groups could unilaterally start a war without
the consent of the ruler and his advisors. Indeed, suppression of such private
acts of aggression is a hallmark of effective political centralization. We do
not know whether Maya kings maintained personal retinues of warriors at
their households, as did some Polynesian chiefs.

All this is not to say that aggressive wars were always in the interests

of, or even seen as desirable by, the rulers who began them. Like their
counterparts the world over, Classic Maya kings were undoubtedly some-
times spurred into belligerent actions by their subordinates, including lesser
elites and even commoners. A king whose territory was raided, whose
subjects were seized as captives, and whose crops were carried off (all of
which happened in Contact period times) probably had to take action to
counteract the political pressure engendered by such chaos and disorder
even if the risks were high. Less clear is whether rulers who were somehow
‘‘possessed’’ (as clients, lesser allies, or subordinates) by more dominant
kings could act unilaterally or be forced to participate in wars not to their
liking or advantage.

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The Culture History of Classic Maya War

Because warfare events are often associated with dates that can be

related to the Julian calendar, they can be arranged into a chronological
series (although some uncertainties always exist because of deeply retro-
spective dates, etc.). There are probably hundreds of inscriptions that use
one or more of the war referents listed above, but many are comparatively
uninformative. Some are duplicates or incomplete, some lack emblem
glyphs, while others refer to as yet unidentified centers, and some have no
associated dates. Disregarding these, it is still possible to assemble a fairly
large sample of inscriptions for which the protagonist centers are known
and for which Long Count dates are available. Schele and Mathews (1991)
made the first such compilation of the political geography of Maya war.
More recently Mark Child (1999) has made another one for inscriptions
that contain the verbs ‘‘to chop,’’ ‘‘to fall,’’ and ‘‘to capture.’’ His list
includes 107 war events involving 28 centers; the earliest event occurred
in AD 512, and the latest in AD 808, with a distinctly accelerating trend
toward the end of the Classic period and a peak around AD 800.

Child notes that this is a biased and extremely incomplete sample

because so many inscriptions are unreadable or have been lost and because
war events frequently went unrecorded. In addition, fully 48 of the refer-
ences come from just three sites—Yaxchila´n, Piedras Negras, and Dos
Pilas—all in the Petexbatu´n/Usumacinta regions of the western Maya Low-
lands. Nevertheless, Child’s work shows how abundant the textual resources
are and how informative they can be about processes through time.

Where there are many dates for a specific center it is possible to form

some idea about the periodicity of war events—or at least those important
enough to be recorded. Recently (Webster, 1998, p. 29) I calculated that
Yaxchila´n was involved in some sort of major conflict about every 13 years,
based on information compiled by Hassig (1992, pp. 219–221). Similarly,
Naranjo seems to have been involved in eight war events during a single
4-month period in AD 799 (Stuart, 1995, pp. 359–361). Where both (or
several) protagonists are identifiable, it is possible to piece together a
narrative of conflict and its attendant political and economic consequences
over many years, as the following example shows.

The Tikal/Caracol Wars. Archaeologists have reconstructed a compli-

cated sequence of warfare events between the major centers of Caracol
and Tikal and their allies in the eastern Maya Lowlands over more than
250 years (Chase and Chase, 1989, 1994, 1996, 1998; Martin and Grube,
1995; Harrison, 1999). Tikal lies about 82 linear km northwest of Caracol,
and Naranjo, another participant, is situated between them. The wars in-
volving these sites are particularly interesting because of their apparent

A Review of Maya War

economic (territorial?) and demographic consequences. Implications from
the art and inscriptions found on stelae, altars, and building fac¸ades have
been checked against and augmented by the abundant archaeological data
available for the antagonist centers.

According to the Chases, a major war of the ‘‘earth-star’’ variety in

AD 562 was recorded on Altar 21 (a monument set up long after the event).
Although the glyph identifying the victor is no longer legible (Martin and
Grube, 1995, p. 44), the Chases believe it was clearly Caracol, which had
probably engaged in earlier hostilities with Tikal in AD 556. Significantly,
the Caracol king who ascended the throne in AD 553 did so under the
patronage of a Tikal ruler, so one purpose of the conflict might have been
to assert Caracol’s independence from the dominant dynasty. In any case,
the formerly vigorous Tikal subsided into hieroglyphic anonymity for about
130 years after this defeat, while the Caracol kingdom somehow capitalized
materially on its conquest and went through a phase of massive expansion.
Later war events involving Caracol were recorded in the seventh and early
eighth centuries. Successful conflicts were fought with Naranjo, whose ruler
had taken the throne under the auspices of a Calakmul king in AD 546,
and a hieroglyphic stairway was set up to commemorate Caracol’s victory
at the defeated center. Under its ruler Hok Kauil, Caracol was also em-
broiled in a cluster of less well-understood wars, probably also involving
Tikal and its allies, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. On one of
his monuments Hok Kauil celebrates his taking of eight captives from
different sites, and his descendants fondly remembered him as a great
warrior. These are some of the latest iconographically attested military
engagements recorded on Classic Maya monuments, although certainly not
the last wars. Caracol’s central precincts show signs of burning at the end
of the ninth century.

Similar long-term hostilities can be traced for many other regions and

sites as well, especially for the western Maya Lowlands, where Palenque,
Tonina´, Pomona´, Yaxchila´n, Piedras Negras, and many lesser centers re-
peatedly fought with one another. Perhaps the richest information comes
from the Petexbatu´n region on the upper reaches of the Usumacinta River,
where the kings of Dos Pilas built an expansive kingdom, only to see it
dissolve in the eighth century (Mathews and Willey, 1991; Houston, 1993;
Demarest, 1993; Demarest et al., 1997). Some of the most convincing evi-
dence for fortifications and for actual military attacks and abandonment
come from this region, and particularly from Aguateca, where an apparent
elite refuge was sacked and burned at the beginning of the ninth century
(Inomata, 1997).

Although many wars were fought among closely juxtaposed and no

doubt traditional enemies, others reflect intense, long-term geopolitical

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antagonisms between distant major rivals such as Tikal and Calakmul (Mar-
tin and Grube, 1995). These two centers seem to have dominanted larger
coalitions that contended with each other for at least 150 years, supported
(and apparently sometimes betrayed) by their allies and proxies as military
fortunes changed. Martin and Grube call these coalitions ‘‘superstates,’’
but as yet we do not understand the exact nature of the relationships among
allies or the degree to which, or even if, a putatively dominant capital
and dynasty such as Calakmul could unilaterally command the actions of
‘‘subordinate’’ polities. Nor do we know exactly what Tikal or Calakmul
stood to gain in these prolonged struggles, apart from the discomfiture of
its enemies.

The Tikal/Caracol conflicts outlined above apparently were part of

these larger hostilities, which came to a head in AD 695 when Tikal seems
to have captured and killed the Calakmul king. At any rate, no more war-
related inscriptions were erected at Calakmul after this time, although the
residual effects of the great early confrontations clearly still affected local
eighth century conflicts. Similar networks of competing centers are now
also known for the northern Maya Lowlands where inscriptions are more
sparse, such as that involving Coba´, Yaxuna´, and Chiche´n Itza´ (Robles and
Andrews, 1985; Freidel et al., 1998; Suhler and Freidel, 1998).

Even this brief review makes clear how important the conclusions

drawn from texts are. Nowhere else in the Precolumbian New World do
we have such an imposing and detailed record of warfare (and much else)
conveyed to us in the words and images of the participants over such a
long period. Admitting all this, there are some unfortunate consequences.
The very richness and promise of inscriptions and art have focused archaeo-
logical attention on those centers, mostly in the central and southern Low-
lands, where texts are most abundant and/or likely to be recovered. In effect
we are viewing Classic Maya war through a restricted set of archaeological
peepholes. Many sites either lack such texts or have inscriptions that make
few references to war, as at Copa´n. If we wish to know about war at such
polities, we will have to investigate it by other means.

Similarly, the imposing center of Becan, whose fortifications I described

many years ago, lies just north of Calakmul, the greatest belligerent center
of Maya geopolitics in the seventh century. Caracol’s military history is
much discussed, but always with reference to its historically documented
allies and enemies to the south. Becan simply does not figure in these
analyses, not because it is unimportant strategically or otherwise, but be-
cause it (as well as most nearby centers in this region) lacks inscriptions
and art. Excavations recently undertaken at Yaxuna´ and other northern
centers are, however, supplying independent confirmation of Classic Maya
wars, so this imbalance will be corrected in the long run.

A Review of Maya War

The Scope and Range of Classic Maya Military Operations

The Classic Maya faced the same logistical constraints as their Contact

period descendants, which in turn affected three vital and interrelated
dimensions of war: (1) how large fighting contingents were, (2) how far
from their bases they could operate, and (3) how long they could stay in
the field on a particular campaign.

Some archaeologists have maintained that only Maya elites fought in

wars, an interpretation based heavily on art and inscriptions, which certainly
emphasize high-ranked individuals. Freidel (1986b, p. 107), for example,
stated that war was ‘‘a prerogative of the elite and fought primarily by the
elite . . . the bulk of the population was neither affected by, nor participated
in, violent conflict.’’ This kind of war implies, however, tiny numbers of
combatants. Hassig (1992, p. 77) concluded that only about 600–1000 elite
men could have been mustered even by Tikal, one of the largest Classic
Maya polities, and by the same reasoning Copa´n, for which our demographic
reconstructions are better (Webster et al., 1992; Webster et al., 2000), could
have fielded perhaps 500–600 men in the late eighth century. I grant the
imprecision of such estimates, but they are reliable in order of magnitude
terms. Even if elite contingents from several different allied polities could be
concentrated, maximum forces in the 3000- to 5000-man range are indicated.

My own opinion is that while some kinds of engagements were carried

out only by elite warriors, others certainly involved commoners as well, as
seems to be the case for the sixteenth century Maya. Moreover, some
fortifications, even quite early ones dating to the Early Classic or Late
Preclassic periods, were built on a scale suggesting large numbers of attack-
ers (Webster, 1976b; Puleston and Callender, 1967). We will return to
another argument concerning the vulnerability of small forces shortly.

Unfortunately the inscriptions do not record where battles were fought.

Even fortifications indicate merely that a particular center was threatened,
not necessarily that it was attacked, so only where there is clear evidence
of war-related violence, as at Aguateca, can we be sure of the location of
a battle. But what kind of distances might be indicated? Some time ago I
measured linear distances between 16 paired protagonist Classic centers
and came up with a range of 19 to 109.5 km, with a mean of 57.8 km
(Webster, 1998, p. 31). Interestingly, the upper end of the range is just
about the distance (108 km) between Tikal and two of its major enemies,
Calakmul and Dos Pilas. Even more far-flung conflicts are indicated. Twice
around the turn of the seventh century Calakmul attacked Palenque, a
center located fully 240 linear km to the west (Martin and Grube, 1995, p.
45). These are impressive distances, and of course real on-the-ground travel
would involve longer ones. Roys (1943, p. 67) believed that Contact period

100

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engagements were often fought along roads or trails that extended between
contending centers. Assuming that Classic Maya conflicts took place near
the boundaries between two polities, the distances cited might be halved.

Hassig (1988, p. 67) has carefully considered the issue of how fast large

Mesoamerican forces could move on foot, particularly if carrying their own
provisions and weapons, and concludes that 19–32 km is a reasonable rate
for an 8-hr day. This estimate seems reasonable for the Maya Lowlands.
In 1525 Hernan Corte´s and a force of several thousand men moved from
the Akalan capital of Itza´m K’anak to the northern shores of Lake Pete´n
Itza´—a linear distance of about 155 km—in approximately 5 to 6 days
(Jones, 1998, pp. 29–39). Even if the first contingents to reach the lake
shore were just the vanguard of this little army, they still averaged at least
25–30 km per day. Rapid progress is not surprising because these Spaniards
and their Indian followers were led by local guides along a good road,
minimally obstructed by rivers and marshes, during the height of the dry
season. Depending on terrain and season, a general daily mean of 25 km
for ancient Maya overland travel is an acceptable rate. Armed forces could
have moved appreciable distances quickly if campaigns were well planned
and if, as seems likely, a well-established network of roads and paths were
available. Even the most distant antagonist centers listed above were within
about a 2-week walk of each other under optimal conditions, and most
were within 4 to 6 days.

That being said, the other major logistical bottleneck was food. As

noted above, warriors might have carried their own supplies or been accom-
panied by porters who did so. Either system is very inefficient and would
have limited the duration of campaigns, in my estimation, to 2-weeks or
less, counting travel time each way and the hostilities themselves. Prolonged
sieges were clearly impractical. One way out of this impasse would have
been to time operations to coincide with the period just before or just
after the harvest, when stocks of maize, beans, and other provisions were
accessible in enemy fields or storehouses. If sufficient supplies were seized
in this way, a large force could spend a considerable amount of time in
hostile territory.

A solution to these logistical problems was to prepare staging areas,

through either conquest or alliance, that were closer to the main enemy
center. A dramatic example is Yaxuna´, attached to its dominant ally Coba´
by a 100-km-long causeway, but located only 20 km south of Coba´’s principal
enemy, Chiche´n Itza´. Just as obvious is the possible relevance of Naranjo
in the Tikal/Caracol wars. Only 36 km from Tikal, Naranjo could well have
served this strategic purpose for Caracol forces, along with other centers
in the upper Belize Valley. Tikal might have exerted influence over this
region to forestall such attacks [see Ball and Taschek (2000) for evidence

A Review of Maya War

101

of Tikal influence there]. If forces from Calakmul (i.e., instead of those of
its allies and proxies) did attack faraway Palenque, they certainly had
to use friendly bases in the Palenque region. Charles Golden (personal
communication, 1999) believes that La Pasadı´ta served a similar role in
the wars between Yaxchila´n and Piedras Negras, played out on a rugged
landscape where rapid overland movement was channeled along valley
systems that could be controlled by outlying subordinate centers.

Mayanists disagree about the seasonal timing of campaigns. Even

though war events are often dated precisely, the dates do not necessarily
closely accord in time with battles. For example, a ‘‘chop’’ event referring
to a sacrifice might have occurred long after the battle in which the victim
was captured. Nahm (1994) concluded from his analysis of war events that
there were few wars during planting time in May, none during harvest from
mid-September to the end of October, and then an upsurge in November
and December. Conflicts that did fall squarely in the June–September rainy
season tended to be shorter than those undertaken during the drier months.
This conclusion generally supports Roy’s (1943, p. 67) observation that the
Contact period Maya made war most often between October and January.
Hotaling (1995, Figs. 4 and 5) illustrates a somewhat similar pattern and
Marcus (1992b, Table 11.1) detected a later dry season tendency.

As in all other agrarian societies, it was costly and inefficient to detach

large numbers of farmers from the land during the cultivation (i.e., rainy)
season, a time when food stocks were also low. Heavy rainfall in the central
and southern Maya Lowlands made paths or roads most difficult to use
and rivers and marshes most difficult to cross at this time. Of course the
dry season itself presented another problem—finding drinking water for
large numbers of men. Actually there was probably a good deal of sea-
sonal flexibility in scheduling, depending on the nature of the conflict,
the forces assembled, and the spatial demands of a particular campaign.
For example, an internal factional struggle that took place within a small
regional polity would not be constrained by seasonal considerations,
nor would the large-scale mobilization of common warriors for local
defensive purposes.

Strategy and Tactics

We are almost totally in the dark about how the Classic Maya planned

campaigns and comported themselves in battle. Both issues obviously de-
pend on what kinds of political communities were involved and what the
motivations and purposes behind a particular confrontation were. Identifi-
able Classic weaponry is seldom recovered from archaeological contexts

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but is frequently depicted in art. It was basically the same as that used by
the Contact period Maya, with the exception of the bow and quilted cotton
armor (and possibly the sling), which were late innovations. Schele and
Freidel (1990) proposed that the atlatl was introduced from highland Mex-
ico in the fourth century AD and inaugurated a new kind of lethal, territorial
conflict in the Tikal/Uaxactun wars. I doubt that long-distance missiles
revolutionized Maya war in this way. More probably opposing forces dis-
charged several volleys of darts, then closed rapidly with one another and
fought with thrusting, stabbing, and crushing weapons (mace-like objects
are found in archaeological deposits). Once engaged, discipline was proba-
bly fairly loose and prominent warriors no doubt tried to distinguish them-
selves with personal feats of bravery. Unlike later Spanish/Maya confronta-
tions, neither side held much of a technical or tactical advantage over
the other.

Some battles were almost certainly carefully choreographed events

involving large numbers of men on both sides and fought on the landscape
between contending centers (but closer to the defending site). This was the
dominant form of large-scale conflict among the Aztecs and their enemies
(Hassig, 1999) and was common among other agrarian states [see the
discussion of Greek hoplite warfare by Raaflaub (1999)]. Battles of this
kind were usually decided when one force enveloped or broke the ranks
of the other, whereupon the defeated side fled the field. Casualties were
not necessarily high on such occasions. Enemy centers were generally
not much damaged in this kind of warfare, although sometimes temples
or other strong points were defended and desecrated or destroyed (an
Aztec glyph for conquest shows a burning temple). Such battles were
in a sense ‘‘arranged’’ and did not depend on surprise. Fortune favored
the side that could field the largest number of combatants, one of the
advantages undoubtedly enjoyed by the multipolity Maya alliances de-
tected in the inscriptions. Despite the formal and to some degree ritualized
dimensions of such set-piece battles, they could have major territorial
and political effects.

Early literature on Maya warfare often emphasized the swift raid car-

ried out by small numbers of men, a scenario attractive because it was
consistent with the presumed participation of only elite warriors, the
capture of sacrificial victims, and the ritual motivations of Classic war.
I have always had difficulty envisioning how such raids worked (except
along navigable waterways). If the intention was merely to capture low-
ranked people for slaves or sacrifice, carry off a small quantity of maize
or other booty, or harass an enemy, then raids could effectively be
directed at the dispersed, outlying, farming population on the borders
of a neighboring polity (this seems to have been Thompson’s conception).

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There is not much glory or profit in this kind of war, however, and a
more obvious motivation was to kill or capture high-ranking enemies
(especially rulers), to despoil their temples, palaces, and ritual parapherna-
lia, to in some sense dominate an enemy polity, and even perhaps to
drive away or annihilate its royal family. In these respects the raid as
a strategy is extremely problematical.

Raids are not typically casual or impulsive acts. Even among tiny

egalitarian communities, they sometimes require years of preparation and
planning [see Flannery (1998, pp. 94–95) for a New Guinea example].
Success depends on surprise (usually predicated on a small, highly mobile
striking force), maximum destruction in a very short time, and then rapid
and well-organized withdrawal, for it is during the aftermath of a raid that
attackers are most vulnerable. It has always been difficult for me to envision
how this strategy of attack could be effective against Late Classic enemy
centers. Such places were typically surrounded by a screen of settlements
or farmsteads extending out for several kilometers or more. Many such
settlements must have been located along the major roads, and during
times of open hostility (virtually constant by the eighth century for many
polities), these approaches must have been guarded—a practice well-known
for the Contact period Maya. Risk of early detection was high, and raiders
caught deep in enemy territory were extremely exposed, especially if, as I
maintained above, there was a militia organization to Maya war that allowed
large numbers of local warriors to be quickly mobilized. Even if a raiding
party reached the core settlement of an enemy polity and wreaked a certain
amount of havoc, their successful withdrawal would be very difficult. To
the extent that raids were a dominant strategy, they would work best where
polities were small and closely juxtaposed.

All this being said, raids might nevertheless have been very effective

in cases of status rivalry war (a topic discussed below). Swift political coups,
as opposed to pitched battles, lend themselves to raid-like strategies because
attacks can be launched from within a polity with the complicity of local
leaders. Similarly, factions within a polity might themselves enlist raiders
from outside in internecine struggles. Such conflicts might well have in-
volved only small numbers of elite warriors and would explain some of the
evidence for desecration and mass killing of local kings and elites.

Where large-scale fortifications exist, as at Becan, one obvious tactic

was to concentrate large numbers of the surrounding population within
them to resist attacks. Such systems are spacious enough to accommodate
all or most of the members of a local polity and, indeed, would not be
effective without large numbers of defenders. Where fortifications are small
or absent, many noncombatants must have fled their homes and hidden
from attackers—a tactic well recorded for the Contact and Colonial periods.

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War as Ritual

Early literature on Classic Maya war (such as it was) tended to empha-

size its ritual dimensions, especially human sacrifice. Well-documented pat-
terns of sacrifice that occurred widely in Mesoamerica during the sixteenth
century no doubt contributed to this view, as did the warriors, weapons,
and sacrificial scenes depicted on Classic monuments. Also, as we already
saw, intermittent, small-scale ritual warfare could be conveniently accom-
modated within the then prevalent ‘‘vacant ceremonial center’’ and ‘‘priest-
theocrat’’ models of Classic settlement and society.

As more evidence for conflict accumulated in the 1970s, there simulta-

neously developed a set of rather dichotomous interpretations: Classic
warfare was motivated either by ritual or by territorial aggrandizement. A
few Mayanists, myself included, believed that from its Preclassic beginnings
Maya war had fundamental material and political motivations, but most
emphasized more ideological and ritual conflicts. Arthur Demarest (1978)
concluded that Maya wars were usually severely constrained and limited
because they were fought between ethnically and culturally similar
antagonists who abided by mutually understood conventions. Stephen
Houston pointed out to me that enemies in Classic Maya art are depicted
with Maya physiognomies, whereas in some other traditions they are
shown phenotypically (and possibly metaphorically) as ‘‘foreigners.’’
Enigmatic exceptions are the Cacaxtla murals in highland Mexico, appar-
ently painted by Maya artists but showing Maya warriors defeated by
highlanders (Miller, pp. 179–182). In those exceptional cases when such
understandings did not exist, much more serious or ‘‘unlimited’’ forms
of warfare broke out, thus accounting for early massive fortifications
such as those at Becan and Tikal.

Others came down more squarely on the side of ritual. Linda Schele

(1984, pp. 44–45), noting an apparent absence of place names in war texts,
concluded that wars, although frequent, seldom had territorial objectives
but did provide the occasions for human sacrifice and personal bloodletting.
Shortly thereafter, Schele and Miller (1986, p. 220) asserted that ‘‘commem-
orations of war activity in Maya art show that . . . the capture of sacrificial
victims was its fundamental goal. . . .’’ David Freidel (1986b), building on
the earlier ideas of Demarest, opined that kings and elites at all major
centers shared a single common ‘‘charter of political power.’’ War was
highly stylized and choreographed, and contributed to the homeostatic
maintenance of scores of independent ‘‘peer-polities.’’ Occasional violent
wars might shatter these cultural constraints, especially when foreigners
from Teotihuacan meddled in Tikal politics and introduced new weapons
in the midfourth century. Generally, however, wars only became destructive

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and overtly aggrandizing in territorial and political terms in the Terminal
Classic period (Freidel has more recently documented extremely violent
and destructive levels of Early Classic war at Yaxuna´ and, presumably, no
longer maintains this position).

What I find puzzling about such views is the unnecessary contrast

between ritual and materialist motivations for war. No such dichotomy
existed in some other Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Aztecs and
the Contact period Maya themselves. Virtually all wars anywhere, even
those fought between culturally dissimilar peoples, are conventionalized in
some ways, and I know of no ancient military traditions in complex societies
elsewhere that did not combine ritual with the goal of strategic, political,
or material advantage (see Raaflaub and Rosenstein, 1999). For example,
during the Shang and Zhou periods of ancient China, ‘‘warfare was an
integral and essential part of the religious system. It could almost be claimed
that the state and the social order were entirely dependent for their exis-
tence on war and sacrifice’’ (Yates, 1999, pp. 8–9). Numerous texts for
these periods make it clear, however, that sacrifice, divination, and proper
comportment on the battlefield coexisted with the fundamental goals of
territorial conquest, protection of frontiers, and elimination of enemy poli-
ties and dynasties (Keightley, 1999; Shaughnessy, 1999).

Unfortunately Classic Maya inscriptions do not provide comparable

information about the goals of war. Despite the asserted primacy of ritual
expressions in Maya texts, David Stuart (1995, p. 314) notes that ‘‘deciph-
ered war events are not explicit in emphasizing ritual over more material
motivations.’’ What we see instead are numerous representations of ritual
events related to the war process, such as sacrifice of important enemies,
extraction of tribute, rewarding of successful warriors, and desecration of
enemy royal regalia. Battle scenes suggest that sacred images were carried
into the field on litters, and warriors are sometimes shown dressed in
costumes associated with deities (Miller, 1999, pp. 182–183). None of this
tells us directly about how wars were more generally carried out or what
their objectives were. Only when other kinds of archaeological information
are available are we able to discern the effects of war more directly, and
as previously cited examples show, it is increasingly likely that many Classic
Maya polities, rulers and other elites profited politically and economically
from it, at least in the short run—a pattern that I think began much earlier.

There is also an important ideological paradox related to war. Because

the political and rhetorical ‘‘style’’ of Classic Maya rulership focused so
heavily on the king’s personal ability to suppress discord and chaos, it is
easy to appreciate the ideological capital he derived from successful war.
More difficult to understand from our perspective are the effects of defeat
and subordination. Was a king who lost a war ideologically and ritually

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devalued, as well as politically diminished? What does it mean to be a
subordinate divine king? We have no answers to these questions.

The Political Economy of Classic Maya War

Assuming that kings and elites initiated wars, what did they hope to

gain, and what did they stand to loose? If commoners were involved, what
motivated them to fight? These issues broadly fall under the heading of
political economy, as does war motivated by status rivalry.

Wars are costly, and not necessarily profitable even for the winners.

As Eric Wolf (1999) recently pointed out, historically documented nation-
states typically had economies that were built around war or the expectation
of it. Indeed, the whole Western concept of political economy has its roots
in fifteenth and sixteenth century European states whose exchequers had
to fund large professional armies, navies, and systems of fortification. Nor
were some ancient societies very different. Raaflaub (1999, p. 142) notes
that the Parthenon, including its monumental gold and ivory statue of
Athena, cost less in monetary terms than a single contemporary 9-month
siege in the interminable wars of Athens. Unfortunately we have no Maya
historian in the mode of Thucydides to enlighten us about the costs of
Classic period wars, but they certainly paled by comparison.

An anonymous reviewer of this paper brought up the issue of whether

the Classic Maya had professional armies. If by professional we mean simply
that there is a core of men who are unusually skilled in war by training
and experience, who are commonly called up to take part in conflict, and
who derive unusual benefits from it, then the answer is probably yes (i.e.,
Maya noble warriors). If instead we mean permanently mobilized military
units that are specially trained and equipped, strategically located, possessed
of their own command structure, subsidized by the king or polity, and who
identify themselves as military specialists, then I think the answer is no. It
is the latter kind of military component that is so expensive to maintain.

There are, of course, many kinds of costs and gains—political and

social as well as economic. Compared to Old World states, the economic
costs of Maya war were minimal unless a polity were abjectly defeated
(and even then tribute might be light). Because kings did not maintain
professional armies or navies in the Old World sense, they did not have
to underwrite the production of expensive and sophisticated weapons, and
there are few signs that they invested in complex systems of border fortifica-
tions, which of course would have to be garrisoned. Indeed, Classic Maya
wars in the seventh and eighth centuries might have occurred at a high
frequency precisely because they did not require a large military infrastruc-

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107

ture or royal expenditures. Given a core force of nobles accustomed to
war and a large armed commoner population who could be situationally
mobilized, warfare closely resembled that of Polynesian and other nonstate
societies, as I have elsewhere argued (Webster, 1998). Certainly taxation
to support war did not lie heavily on the Maya commoner.

Political and social costs and gains are more difficult to assess because

of our poor knowledge of Classic Maya social organization and intersite
relations. We know that success in war established at least situational
control over other dynasties—possibly one source of the pattern of
‘‘owned’’ or ‘‘possessed’’ rulers. During the expansion of the Dos Pilas
polity, for example, king Jaguar Paw of Seibal was captured by the Dos
Pilas ruler (Stuart, 1995, pp. 324–325). Instead of being sacrificed as so
many royal captives were, he was apparently retained as the Seibal king
because inscriptions suggest that at intervals over the next 10 years he
carried out ceremonies under the apparent aegis of his captor.

Kings no doubt spent much time and effort in maintaining good rela-

tions with allied or subordinate centers. Dynastic intermarriage, gift ex-
change, and visits of royal people or their deputations (all well documented)
must frequently have been motivated by strategic political/military con-
cerns—i.e., to create and maintain a geopolitical landscape that secured
the integrity of one or several polities and made them more effective when
hostilities broke out. No doubt subordinate rulers received rewards, tangible
or otherwise, from dominant ones in the great coalition struggles outlined
above. But what about costs and gains within a local polity?

Victorious kings clearly benefited from the prestige and renown of

their personal military feats and the subjection, humiliation, and destruction
of enemies. These in turn bolstered their own claims to efficacy and legiti-
macy, and dampened internal opposition. Leaders must motivate people
to follow them, however, especially in such a potentially lethal enterprise
as war, and war itself provides the opportunity to do so. Many years ago
I suggested (Webster, 1977; see also Ball, 1977) that successful warfare
among the Preclassic Maya, as in other complex societies, provided re-
sources that promoted the interests of upwardly mobile elite segments.
Land or other booty could be used to reward military followers outside
the traditional network of kin-relations, thus creating new power factions
and strengthening the emergent institution of kingship. If this view is cor-
rect, the process began long before Late Classic times, but the tribute
references now showing up in the inscriptions may well signal such redistri-
bution in the more mature sociopolitical settings of the seventh–eighth
centuries. Where polities were closely juxtaposed, such as Tikal and Caracol,
victors quite possibly could have advantageously extracted food, labor,
and perhaps even relocated populations, which is essentially the Chases’s

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argument. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine, given the friction of
distance, how Calakmul could have so directly benefited from the defeat
of distant Palenque.

Among the sixteenth century Mexica and their allies in highland Mex-

ico, there was a complex feedback system of rewards that benefited people
of different political and social stations. Successful wars brought tribute of
many kinds (including labor) to royal capitals, where it funded the enormous
households of rulers as well as state projects such as the construction of
temples and irrigation systems. Aztec kings incurred heavy political costs,
however, and bestowed estates, offices, and coveted military ranks, along
with their perquisites in the form of insignia and status symbols, on noble
warriors. Most commoners received no such rewards, and those of excep-
tional ability who did so seldom rose far in the sociopolitical hierarchy.

By Late and Terminal Classic times a watered-down version of this

kind of meritocratic system probably existed among the Maya as well.
Whatever the details of redistribution of wealth and honors, the primary
recipients must have been the noble warriors who closely supported rulers
and who distinguished themselves in battle. Unfortunately no Maya rulers
were conquerors on the scale of the Aztec kings, and so frequent warfare
did not provide comparable revenues. They thus faced a dilemma: How to
reward supporters, especially in defensive or inconclusive wars that simply
maintained the political status quo? Existing inscriptions and art emphasize
the honorific aspects of redistribution. As wars became more intense and
less ‘‘profitable,’’ distinguished warriors to whom kings were politically
indebted had to be placated with comparatively intangible rewards—a zero-
sum game that undermined dynastic power. This brings us to the subject
of status-rivalry war.

Status Rivalry War

In January of 1695 Spanish priests visiting NojPeten, the capital of

Ajaw Kan Ek’, ostensible ruler of the Itza´ polity, noticed that much of the
town had been burned down a few months before (Jones, 1998, pp. 205–

206). One day a flotilla of canoes landed on the shore and disembarked

two chiefs who, accompanied by an armed retinue in full war regalia,
proceeded to stroll with impunity about the town. As it turned out the
elder of these chiefs, his face blackened by warpaint, was AjKowoj, the
very noble who in alliance with the uncle of Ajaw Kan Ek’ was responsible
for the recent destruction. Ajaw Kan Ek’ and his own followers seem to
have kept a prudently low profile during the visit of their belligerent neigh-
bor, nominal subordinate, and possible relative. This fascinating anecdote

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provides a dramatic introduction to the issue of status rivalry war among
the Classic Maya.

We saw earlier that after AD 600 there was a sudden appearance of

explicit war-related inscriptions and an increase in artistic depictions of
war. David Stuart (1995, pp. 328–329) proposes that during Early Classic
times the Tikal polity was very dominant and that, although its influence
was partly spread through warfare, wars were fought mainly against much
smaller polities and victories did not merit glyphic reference. Eventually,
however, many new polities established their independence. Whether or
not war was part of this process, references to war became essential to the
maintenance of political sovereignty and to the expression of royal identity
in these new kingdoms.

More recently I developed the theme of status rivalry war somewhat

differently (Webster, 1998, 1999a; see also Pohl and Pohl, 1994). My main
point is that we need not envision the motivations for war only in terms
of the ritual/material dichotomy referred to above—a complicated perspec-
tive that I can only briefly summarize here.

By Late Classic times, and particularly by the eighth century, the

central and southern Maya Lowlands were packed with polities of different
scales, each with its local dynasty of specific origin and kinship affiliations,
historical depth, and prestige. This was also the time of highest population
density (Culbert and Rice, 1990) and increasing human-induced stress on
fragile tropical ecosystems (Rice, 1993). Over several centuries royal/elite
polygyny, the proliferation of dynasties and their cadet branches, intermar-
riage among royal and elite families, the high status of elite women, and
tendencies toward bilateral descent together created a political landscape
of almost unimaginable complexity and inherent ambiguities—the condi-
tions for intense status rivalry [see Viel (1999) for an example of how this
might have worked at Copa´n on a dynastic level].

By status rivalry war I mean overt competition for the restricted titles,

offices, honors, and privileges that were the symbolic correlates of rank,
status, and authority. Many of these things were of course valued for nonma-
terial reasons, but more importantly they provided access to the most
fundamental sources of wealth in any complex agrarian society—rights of
disposal over land and the products and labor of farming households. These
in turn structured power relations. Acquiring, maintaining, and augmenting
such claims were the central political interests of highly ranked individuals
and their factions. Hereditary rank conferred valued rights but could be
counterbalanced by achievement—most significantly mobilization of fol-
lowers and use of force for political ends.

Conflict of this kind is abundantly evident in the Maya ethnohistoric

record. Spanish pressure on the Itza´ at the end of the seventeenth century,

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for example, partly provoked the factional conflict described at the begin-
ning of this section. Unfortunately similar situations are only dimly reflected
in Classic inscriptions (Pohl and Pohl, 1994). Few leaders anywhere, natu-
rally, are inclined to raise public monuments recording the messy and
sometimes embarrassing details of ursupations, political treachery, or inter-
necine bickering, and this was particularly so for Maya kings, whose royal
legitimization was so heavily invested in maintenance of social and cosmic
order [although such struggles might have been recorded in books, as was
done elsewhere in Mesoamerica by the Mixtecs (Boone, 2000, p. 107)].
We can, however, piece together some indirect evidence for the royal
dimensions of such conflicts, sometimes even from the absence of certain
kinds of data.

Long periods during which royal monuments were not erected, as at

Tikal (see above), may signal political disarray after military defeats as
much as external domination. One can only imagine the internal squabbling
for power that occurred after Tikal’s defeat at the hands of Caracol in AD
562 and the maneuvering that eventually led to the resurgence of a local
dynasty toward the end of the seventh century. Shorter suggestive interrup-
tions in dynastic sequences have been noted at other major centers, includ-
ing Piedras Negras and Palenque. There are rare references to abdications,
and we even have evidence of displaced ruling factions. During the seventh
century a refugee Tikal king and his supporters seem to have been welcomed
by the Palenque king and might even have taken part in local wars, no
doubt scheming all the while to reclaim their own political birthright. And
we already saw that there are mortuary and desecratory archaeological
correlates of such conflicts, including the possible massacre of defeated
royal families.

In any given Maya polity the number of effective elite ‘‘players’’ in

such status rivalry wars was tiny, and this seems to bolster the arguments
made by those who think only elites were warriors. If commoners had little
to gain, what motivated them to fight, apart from a general interest in the
well-being of their kingdom and local dynasty? I think one answer is that
they lacked the ability to resist effectively elite demands for military service
and risked more by refusing participation than by acquiescence, especially
since most wars were probably not very lethal. In internecine struggles,
moreover, elites who could mobilize commoner followers might well have
been able to reward them with land. And by the eighth and early ninth
centuries, when wars became very intense, demands of commoners them-
selves threatened by land shortages and other stresses might well have
prompted conflicts. However mysterious commoner motivations might be
to us, remember that most Aztec farmer-conscripts also reaped no benefits,
except the satisfaction of doing what their state and worldview expected

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111

of them. Edgerton (1995) provides a fascinating account of the Asante wars
in late nineteenth century Africa, during which armies composed largely
of slaves fought fiercely against the British even though they could expect
few, if any, rewards from their masters.

However the ancient Maya chose to think about their wars and however

ritualized they might seem from our perspective, there is no doubt that
they functioned to maintain or expand political systems, eliminate enemies,
establish political dominance or strategic advantage, acquire and redistrib-
ute basic resources and populations, and facilitate the upward mobility of
individuals and factions.

WAR AND THE MAYA COLLAPSE

Between roughly AD 780–900 many polities in the central and southern

Lowlands experienced severe disruption—what archaeologists have long
called the ‘‘Classic Maya collapse.’’ We now know that this process was
far more complicated, protracted, and variable than previously believed
(to the extent that some Mayanists disavow the term ‘‘collapse’’ entirely)
and I can comment only briefly on its relationship to war here.

Original conceptions of the dynamics of the Classic collapse derived

from the phased cessation of dated monuments erected at various centers
and stratigraphic evidence showing that major building projects ceased at
about the same time. Thus the last dates at Palenque occur in the final
decades of the eighth century, at Copa´n around AD 822, and at Tikal at
AD 869. Signaled most directly by such evidence is the failure of the
institution of kingship, its attendant dynastic families and royal courts, and
the apparatus of centralized rule. Impressed by the apparent suddenness
of royal collapse, some Mayanists invoked one form of war, peasant upris-
ings or rebellions, to explain it (Thompson, 1954; Hamblin and Pitcher,
1980).

In some polities dynastic collapse was accompanied by the compara-

tively sudden disappearance of lesser elites and the commoner population,
as at La Milpa (Hammond et al., 1998) and apparently at Piedras Negras,
where I am currently working. Elsewhere, at Copa´n, there was continued
elite activity for a century or two after the kings lost their power and a
more gradual decline of the hinterland population [this is a controversial
scenario to some Mayanists; see Webster et al. (2000) for new data and
a detailed discussion]. Some centers even show indications of continued
monumental construction (Pendergast, 1985, 1986).

No historical process of such complexity is easily reduced to a single

cause, and many factors contributed to this widespread deterioration. Al-

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though Mayanists have traditionally seen the whole Late Classic period as
the mature stage of Maya civilization, David Stuart (1993) suggests that
we should instead regard the seventh and eighth centuries as intervals of
protracted collapse, in the sense that Maya political institutions, popula-
tions, and their economic underpinnings were increasingly threatened and
disrupted. The conspicuous interpolity warfare apparent in the inscriptions
is one symptom of this time of troubles, and status-rivalry war probably
became most serious and disruptive at the end of the Late Classic. Stuart
(1993, p. 336) notes that increasing warfare and territorial assertions during
the Late Classic seem to have undermined the institution of kingship, even
as royal discourse became most strident and assertive and royal construction
projects became more ambitious. Centers in some regions, particularly on
the western margins of the Lowlands such as Dos Pilas, Seibal, Aguateca,
Yaxchila´n, Pomona, and Piedras Negras, have yielded so many war texts
(supplemented by other archaeological data) that we can appreciate how
intimately interpolity war was associated with their collapse. At Copa´n, in
contrast, conflict was probably internal (Webster, 1999b).

CONCLUSION

Mayanists have often been out of step with larger comparative anthro-

pological and historical interpretations, and usually wrongly so. Classic
inscriptions were supposed to be ahistorical, and turned out to be anything
but. Centers were envisioned as vacant ceremonial places and are now
revealed as political capitals and dynastic courtly places. Star-gazing theo-
cratic leaders have been replaced by hereditary kings. And most importantly
the ‘‘peaceful Maya’’ were not peaceful at all.

There are three ironies here. At a time when it has become politically

correct and fashionable to blame war among nonstate societies generally
on the invidious and baleful influences of expanding states, the Maya prove
to have been warlike to their deepest Preclassic roots. At a time when
anthropological fashion and political correctness assert the uniqueness of
each society or cultural tradition and downplay comparisons, the Maya
more and more resemble other well documented ancient complex societies.
Finally, in an epistemological climate in which many scholars insist that
archaeological evidence is so malleable that it can be used to bolster any
fond ideas we choose to have about the past, Mayanists have been forced
by the stuff we find to reject our own cherished models. On all these issues
I think the Mayanists, for a change, have got it right.

All this has been a long time in coming, though, and as I maintained

in an earlier article (Webster, 1993), the grudging acceptance that the

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Maya were seriously warlike tells us as much about the enterprise of Maya
archaeology as it does about the ancient people we study. Long after
evidence for war was reasonably clear, rear-guard scholarly actions empha-
sizing ritual war were fought to preserve cherished conceptions of the
Classic Maya as a unique civilization. This phase of debate appears to be
over, and warfare of many kinds, including conflicts with fundamental
economic, social, demographic, and political consequences, is now almost
universally admitted. Such consensus, however, was only achieved after
Classic inscriptions were deciphered, suddenly rendering the long-recog-
nized military motifs in Maya art comprehensible.

War is, to be sure, difficult to document in the archaeological record.

But as many recent projects have shown, its purely archaeological manifes-
tations are evident if we look for them. Fortifications are recognized in
centers and regions where they were putatively absent. ‘‘Termination ritu-
als’’ are increasingly seen as violent desecration. Episodes of burning and
destruction are attributed to sacking of temples and palaces. Abandonment
of whole centers and in some cases whole regions is linked to conflict. Yet
most such interpretations had to wait until it became evident that the Maya
themselves had left us an abundant, if admittedly ambiguous and partial,
written record of their own warlike proclivities and behaviors. What would
we have concluded about war had Maya texts proved indecipherable? How
much earlier might we have recognized evidence for it if, like John Lloyd
Stephens standing in the ruins of Copa´n so long ago, we had simply made
the uniformitarian assumption that the Classic Maya resembled other great
civilizations in many things, war included?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Stephen Houston for his many insightful com-

ments on this paper, which also benefited from information available in
the preliminary version of his overview of Maya glyphic studies submitted
to Journal of World Prehistory. Two anonymous reviews also helped me
to clarify some points.

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