Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Constant Warfare
Because of this, Jared Diamond says in Collapse, Maya cities remained small without archaeological evidence of royally managed food storage and trade that characterized ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. Yet Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and irresolvable, primarily because limitations of food supply and transportation made it impossible for any Maya principality to unite the whole region in an empire, the way the Aztecs and Inca did.
The intensity of the warfare is evident in recent discoveries of massive fortifications surrounding many Maya sites; vivid depictions of warfare and captives on stone monuments, and the translation of Maya writing, much of which proved to consist of royal inscriptions boasting of conquests. Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals. There were wars of all kinds: between separate kingdoms; attempts of cities within a kingdom to secede; and civil wars resulting from frequent violent attempts by would be kings to usurp the throne. All depicted on monuments.
This warfare, the repeated occurrence of longs droughts, and the resulting lack of corn, hastened the Maya collapse. Hundreds of skeletons recovered from Copan, one of the more prosperous kingdoms, show inhabitants’ health, both peasants and nobles, deteriorating from 650-850. Because Copan’s king was failing to deliver on his promises of rain and prosperity in return for the power and luxuries, he was blamed for these difficulties. The last writing involving any Copan king is 822.
The population at the peak of the Classic period is estimated at between 3 million and 14 million people, but there were only about 30,000 people at the time that the Spanish arrived. When Cortes passed through in 1524-25, his army nearly starved because they found so few villages from which to acquire corn. He passed within a few miles of the ruins of the great Classic cities of Tikal and Palenque, but heard or saw nothing of them because they were covered by jungle and almost nobody was living in the vicinity.
The intensity of the warfare is evident in recent discoveries of massive fortifications surrounding many Maya sites; vivid depictions of warfare and captives on stone monuments, and the translation of Maya writing, much of which proved to consist of royal inscriptions boasting of conquests. Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals. There were wars of all kinds: between separate kingdoms; attempts of cities within a kingdom to secede; and civil wars resulting from frequent violent attempts by would be kings to usurp the throne. All depicted on monuments.
This warfare, the repeated occurrence of longs droughts, and the resulting lack of corn, hastened the Maya collapse. Hundreds of skeletons recovered from Copan, one of the more prosperous kingdoms, show inhabitants’ health, both peasants and nobles, deteriorating from 650-850. Because Copan’s king was failing to deliver on his promises of rain and prosperity in return for the power and luxuries, he was blamed for these difficulties. The last writing involving any Copan king is 822.
The population at the peak of the Classic period is estimated at between 3 million and 14 million people, but there were only about 30,000 people at the time that the Spanish arrived. When Cortes passed through in 1524-25, his army nearly starved because they found so few villages from which to acquire corn. He passed within a few miles of the ruins of the great Classic cities of Tikal and Palenque, but heard or saw nothing of them because they were covered by jungle and almost nobody was living in the vicinity.
