The Department of Petén, where I do my archaeological work, is the largest and northernmost department of the Republic of Guatemala. Bordered by Mexico to the north and west and by Belize to the east, Petén encompasses a range of environments—mountains, savannas, swamps, and, best known, the seasonal rain forests of the Maya Lowlands.
Near the end of the last glacial maximum, when the Americas were first being settled, Petén was cooler and drier than it is today, with savannas and scrub instead of dense forests and seasonally flooded wetlands. 1
As elsewhere in North and South America, the first human beings in the Maya Lowlands were nomads—called Paleoindians by archaeologists—who lived by hunting large and small game as well as collecting wild plants. For many years, scholars believed that the earliest Paleoindians participated in a common archaeological culture called the “Clovis culture” after the site in New Mexico where it was first identified.
The Clovis culture appears in the archaeological record around 13,500 years ago, and has been identified all over North America and as far south as Venezuela. 2 Calling Clovis an “archaeological culture” doesn’t imply linguistic unity or a single way of life. Instead, it refers to one shared technology: a kind of leaf-shaped blade knapped from chert, fluted at the base to be hafted into a spear or dart shaft.
A few Clovis points have been found in Belize and the Guatemalan Highlands. While it now seems that there were even earlier archaeological cultures than Clovis—Monte Verde, an ancient campsite on the coast of Chile, is probably about a thousand years older—very few Paleoindian artifacts of any kind have been found in Petén, and none (so far) that clearly predate Clovis.
As the world warmed and the enormous glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, the water that had been locked up in those glaciers re-entered the hydrological cycle. Beginning around 11,500 years ago, a warmer, wetter climate made it possible for various kinds of forests to colonize the Maya Lowlands; today, the grasslands that once covered the region are preserved in southern Petén, which is still drier than the rest of the department.
The megafauna that had roamed those plains—mammoths, mastodons, horses—were driven to extinction, probably by a combination of climate change and overhunting. In the emerging ecological order, the descendents of Paleoindian settlers adapted to local environments, in part by hunting smaller animals. This new cultural phase, the Archaic period, began around 10,000 years ago and was characterized by a diversification of local technologies and subsistence economies.
One adaptation was to cultivate and gradually domesticate food plants, a solution arrived at with different species in different parts of the Americas. In Mesoamerica, gourds, beans, and especially maize emerged as the major cultigens.
The process is much better attested in the drier highlands of western Mesoamerica than in the Maya Lowlands, where organic material preserves poorly. Still, work in the Tehuacan 3 and Oaxaca 4 Valleys of Mexico suggests a gradual transition during the Archaic period from cultivation as a supplement to foraging to a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle. In northern Belize, pre-Maya people were raising corn and producing stone tools distinct from later, Maya blades as early as 2500 B.C.
Preclassic Maya Civilization
The succeeding Preclassic period saw the development and full flowering of the civilizational traditions associated with later, “Classic” Maya culture. 5
The earliest forms of these traditions emerged on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala during the so-called Early Preclassic period, between about 1800 and 1000 B.C. Ceramic vessels appeared first, around 1800 B.C., probably as fancier versions of gourds or baskets to be used in ritual settings. Later, between 1700 and 1500 B.C., differences in the size of communities and houses suggest the emergence of social ranks, although not the kind of dramatic inequality that characterized later Maya societies.
These coastal peoples were in contact with the Izapan and Olmec civilizations, in the Guatemalan Highlands and the Gulf Coast of Veracruz. It’s impossible to say for sure, since writing had not yet been invented, but the Early Preclassic people of Izapa and the Pacific Coast probably spoke one or more very early Mayan languages.
It was during the Middle Preclassic (1000-300 B.C.) that Maya culture spread to the Lowlands. It’s uncertain whether the local descendents of Archaic populations adopted a Maya cultural “package” including maize and root crop cultivation, pottery making, and religious ideas, or whether Mayan-speaking colonists moved in and displaced them.
Either way, distinctively Maya temples and ritual caches were being constructed in Petén almost from the beginning of this period—at Nakbé, in northern Petén, by around 750 B.C., and at Seibal, in the west, as early as 900 B.C. While Lowland Maya centers participated in long-distance exchange of precious items like Spondylus shell from the coasts and jadeite from the Guatemalan Highlands, their increasing social complexity appears to have been a local development, not something imposed on them from the outside.
During the Late Preclassic period, beginning around 300 B.C., that growing social complexity gave rise to the institution of divine kingship, with a corresponding rigidity in social stratification and the centralization of political power.
Throughout Petén, sites settled in the Middle Preclassic, or even earlier, developed into major civic-ceremonial centers with masonry architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions in a script derived from the earlier (and still undeciphered) epi-Olmec script of the Gulf Coast. At the site of San Bartolo, in northern Petén, painted murals dated to the Late Preclassic show the coronation of a mythic ruler.
The few surviving Late Preclassic inscriptions cannot yet be read, making it difficult to say anything for certain about the social history of the period. Still, Late Preclassic rulership clearly set the pattern for Maya political structures, and more than one later Maya dynasty claimed to have been founded during this time.
The site of El Mirador, in the Mirador Basin at the northern edge of Petén, was apparently both the largest and the most populous Preclassic city in the Maya Lowlands, with its temple pyramids among the biggest structures of the ancient world.
Late Preclassic Maya civilization left its mark not just on the political systems and the architectural landscape of the Lowlands, but on their environment as well. Preclassic farmers preferred to settle along the margins of perennial wetlands—civales in Spanish—which offered water, fertile soils, and a rich variety of floral and faunal resources.
Since the Lowlands experience pronounced rainy and dry seasons each year, having a year-round source of drinking water was critical to civilization. Yet as the population grew, and as monumental constructions required ever more firewood to burn limestone for stucco, clearing the forested uplands near those civales for agricultural land and fuel left soils vulnerable to erosion. Much as in the hypothetical example in my first installment those soils tended to wash downhill, at once degrading the quality of farmland and silting up the civales.
Late Preclassic farmers compensated by constructing artificial reservoirs, but a period of drought around A.D. 100 inflicted a blow on the densely populated cities of the Mirador Basin, from which they were unable to recover. Similar environmental stresses probably led to the abandonment of other Preclassic sites, including San Bartolo, in a first Maya collapse.
At other sites in Petén, lower populations and better water management meant that those sites survived and became refuges for people displaced by ecological disturbance. As a result, political power not only shifted to new centers of power, but may have become more concentrated in the hands of existing elites at those centers.
These political and demographic changes produced a new phase of Maya civilization, the Early Classic period, conventionally dated from A.D. 250 to 600.
The Classic Period
For much of the Early Classic, the most powerful of these newly vigorous city-states was Tikal, in northern Petén, about 23 kilometers east of El Zotz, the site where I work. Monumental construction at Tikal dates back to at least 350 B.C., but the first “holy lord” (k’uhul ajaw) of the Tikal Dynasty, Yax Ehb Xook, probably came to power around A.D.
100, as El Mirador was on the wane. 6
During the Early Classic period, Yax Ehb Xook’s successors at Tikal, like lords at other centers in the Southern Lowlands, dedicated stelae—inscribed stone monuments—to celebrate important stations in the Maya Long Count calendar, analogous to decades and centuries in our own. Some of these show rulers trampling on captive lords from other sites, indicating that the Early Classic period was far from peaceful and that war was an important means by which kings established their authority.
Maya centers in the Lowlands and Highlands and on the Pacific Coast were increasingly involved in trade with the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, the capital of a powerful state with its own civilizational tradition.
A remarkable group of inscriptions from Tikal, Uaxactun, and other sites suggests that Teotihuacan sought to bring the Maya Lowlands under its sway. In A.D. 378, a war leader called Sihyaj K’ahk’ (“Fire is Born”) arrived at Tikal, on the same day that Tikal’s ruler Chak Tok Ich’aak died of unspecified but probably unnatural causes.
He had arrived at El Perú, west of Tikal, eight days before, and the Maya inscriptions give him the title ochik’in kaloomte’, “western overlord.”
Possible portraits of Sihyaj K’ahk’ show him dressed in the costume of a Teotihuacano warrior. There is very good reason to believe, then, that he came east from Teotihuacan to conquer Tikal, even though he could himself have been Maya or had existing connections to a Maya kingdom.
But Sihyaj K’ahk’ was not himself the king of Teotihuacan. That position apparently belonged to someone else, called “Spearthrower Owl” by epigraphers after the Maya glyphs for his name. Spearthrower Owl had an infant son, Yax Nuun Ahiin—possibly by marriage to a woman from Tikal—and it was this child that Sihyaj K’ahk’ installed on the throne of Tikal.
Sihyaj K’ahk’ then conquered nearby Uaxactun, possibly murdering its ruling family for good measure, and crowned or accepted the submission of vassal kings at other sites including El Zotz and El Perú.
Later in life, Yax Nuun Ahiin in turn arranged the takeover of Copan, in the extreme southeast of the Maya world, crowning a king from the site of Caracol named K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ and sending him south to found a new dynasty.
K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ used the same “western overlord” title as Sihyaj K’ahk’ and later kings of Tikal, implying ideological ties to Teotihuacan, if implying ideological ties to Teotihuacan, if not necessarily actual vassalage.
For the rest of the Classic period, even after Teotihuacan itself collapsed, the trappings of Teotihuacano authority remained a vital part of Maya political culture. One inscription from Tikal even seems to record that Teotihuacan sent a god effigy—Waxaklajuun U Baah Kan, “Eighteen-Headed Snake” or “Eighteen Snake Images”—to the new ruling house in A.D. 416.
In the mid-sixth century A.D., Kan rulers began encroaching on Tikal’s alliances with sites to the southeast, installing a vassal lord at Naranjo in A.D. 546. In 562, they killed the Tikal king Wak Chan K’awiil in a war and obliged his former client king at Caracol to switch allegiance to the Kan dynasty.
For the next 130 years, until 692, Tikal produced no inscribed monuments, or at least none that have survived. This “Tikal Hiatus” roughly corresponds to the boundary between the Early Classic (A.D. 250-600) and Late Classic (600-830) periods. Based on the lack of inscriptions at Tikal, it was once thought that Maya civilization as a whole had suffered a kind of mini-collapse in this period. In fact, as subsequent excavations have shown, it was during the Tikal Hiatus that the Kan dynasty and its allies reached their peak of power and artistic creation.
The site of Calakmul, in southern Campeche, had been ruled by an independent dynasty for centuries, but in the early seventh century the Kan kings made it their new capital. From this base, they set out to reinforce their dominion over the Maya world. They married ladies of the Kan house to rulers all over the Lowlands, personalizing political ties.
After a branch of the Tikal dynasty founded a new capital, Dos Pilas, in the western Petexbatun region of Petén, the Kan ruler Yuknoom Ch’e’n attacked it in 650 and forced its boy-king, Bajlaj Chan K’awiil, to pledge loyalty to him. When Bajlaj Chan K’awiil’s brother Nuun U Jol Chahk, the king of Tikal, attacked Dos Pilas in 672, Yuknoom Ch’e’n came to his vassal’s aid, defeating Tikal five years later. Concerning the massacre of Tikal captives, an inscription at Dos Pilas records that “their heads were piled up into a mountain; their blood was pooled.”
Nuun U Jol Chahk may have survived that battle, but by 681 he had died and been succeeded by his son, Jasaw Chan K’awiil. Yuknoom Ch’e’n of Calakmul died not long afterwards, well into his eighties, and his son Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ took the throne. Inevitably, the new generation of holy lords would have to fight their fathers’ wars over again.
The war came in 695, and this time Tikal came out on top: in a set of two wooden lintels installed in a temple at Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil recorded the “fall” of his enemy’s “flint and shield” and celebrated his capture of one of Calakmul’s gods, a giant jaguar effigy the Kan forces had carried into battle with them. One of the lintels shows Jasaw Chan K’awiil seated on a litter with the captive image.
The other lintel shows him dressed as a Teotihuacano warrior, this time in the company of the victorious war god Waxaklajuun U Baah Kan: an enormous, multi-headed serpent covered in jewels and quetzal feathers, perhaps the very same idol his ancestor Yax Nuun Ahiin had received from his father in Teotihuacan.
Jasaw Chan K’awiil lived until at least A.D. 727. His son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil, took the throne in 734, and continued his father’s program of aggression abroad and monumental construction at home in Tikal.
In the 730s and 740s, he fought a series of successful wars against Calakmul and its allies, capturing more enemy gods and breaking Calakmul’s hegemonic power over the Lowlands. Yet neither king was ever able to restore Tikal’s control over the breakaway kingdom of Dos Pilas, even though the Petexbatun region fragmented into a collection of tiny, warring kingdoms in the late eighth century.
Nicholas Carter was born in Houston, Texas. He received his BA in philosophy from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. He the attended the University of Texas in Austin where he earned an MA in Latin American Studies, specializing in the study of the Mayan civilization. There he studied with Dr. David Stuart. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in archaeology at Brown University, where he studies under Dr. Stephen Houston.
2. Pearson, Georges, and Joshua Ream. 2005. Clovis on the Caribbean Coast of Venezuela. Current Research in the Pleistocene, vol. 22, pp. 28-31.
3. Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. 1967. The Prehistory of the Tehuacan Valley, Vols. 1-5. Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology and University of Texas Press, Austin.
4. Marcus, Joyce, and Kent V. Flannery. 1996. Zapotec Civilization: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. Thames and Hudson, New York.
5. My discussion of Maya civilization is mainly derived from the following archaeologically rigorous but accessible works:
Houston, Stephen D., and Takeshi Inomata. The Classic Maya. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
McKillop, Heather. The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. W. W. Norton and Co., New York.
Webster, David. The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. Thames and Hudson, New York.
6. Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. Second edition. Thames and Hudson, New York.
Near the end of the last glacial maximum, when the Americas were first being settled, Petén was cooler and drier than it is today, with savannas and scrub instead of dense forests and seasonally flooded wetlands. 1
As elsewhere in North and South America, the first human beings in the Maya Lowlands were nomads—called Paleoindians by archaeologists—who lived by hunting large and small game as well as collecting wild plants. For many years, scholars believed that the earliest Paleoindians participated in a common archaeological culture called the “Clovis culture” after the site in New Mexico where it was first identified.
The Clovis culture appears in the archaeological record around 13,500 years ago, and has been identified all over North America and as far south as Venezuela. 2 Calling Clovis an “archaeological culture” doesn’t imply linguistic unity or a single way of life. Instead, it refers to one shared technology: a kind of leaf-shaped blade knapped from chert, fluted at the base to be hafted into a spear or dart shaft.
A few Clovis points have been found in Belize and the Guatemalan Highlands. While it now seems that there were even earlier archaeological cultures than Clovis—Monte Verde, an ancient campsite on the coast of Chile, is probably about a thousand years older—very few Paleoindian artifacts of any kind have been found in Petén, and none (so far) that clearly predate Clovis.
As the world warmed and the enormous glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, the water that had been locked up in those glaciers re-entered the hydrological cycle. Beginning around 11,500 years ago, a warmer, wetter climate made it possible for various kinds of forests to colonize the Maya Lowlands; today, the grasslands that once covered the region are preserved in southern Petén, which is still drier than the rest of the department.
The megafauna that had roamed those plains—mammoths, mastodons, horses—were driven to extinction, probably by a combination of climate change and overhunting. In the emerging ecological order, the descendents of Paleoindian settlers adapted to local environments, in part by hunting smaller animals. This new cultural phase, the Archaic period, began around 10,000 years ago and was characterized by a diversification of local technologies and subsistence economies.
One adaptation was to cultivate and gradually domesticate food plants, a solution arrived at with different species in different parts of the Americas. In Mesoamerica, gourds, beans, and especially maize emerged as the major cultigens.
The process is much better attested in the drier highlands of western Mesoamerica than in the Maya Lowlands, where organic material preserves poorly. Still, work in the Tehuacan 3 and Oaxaca 4 Valleys of Mexico suggests a gradual transition during the Archaic period from cultivation as a supplement to foraging to a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle. In northern Belize, pre-Maya people were raising corn and producing stone tools distinct from later, Maya blades as early as 2500 B.C.
Preclassic Maya Civilization
The succeeding Preclassic period saw the development and full flowering of the civilizational traditions associated with later, “Classic” Maya culture. 5
The earliest forms of these traditions emerged on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala during the so-called Early Preclassic period, between about 1800 and 1000 B.C. Ceramic vessels appeared first, around 1800 B.C., probably as fancier versions of gourds or baskets to be used in ritual settings. Later, between 1700 and 1500 B.C., differences in the size of communities and houses suggest the emergence of social ranks, although not the kind of dramatic inequality that characterized later Maya societies.
These coastal peoples were in contact with the Izapan and Olmec civilizations, in the Guatemalan Highlands and the Gulf Coast of Veracruz. It’s impossible to say for sure, since writing had not yet been invented, but the Early Preclassic people of Izapa and the Pacific Coast probably spoke one or more very early Mayan languages.
It was during the Middle Preclassic (1000-300 B.C.) that Maya culture spread to the Lowlands. It’s uncertain whether the local descendents of Archaic populations adopted a Maya cultural “package” including maize and root crop cultivation, pottery making, and religious ideas, or whether Mayan-speaking colonists moved in and displaced them.
Either way, distinctively Maya temples and ritual caches were being constructed in Petén almost from the beginning of this period—at Nakbé, in northern Petén, by around 750 B.C., and at Seibal, in the west, as early as 900 B.C. While Lowland Maya centers participated in long-distance exchange of precious items like Spondylus shell from the coasts and jadeite from the Guatemalan Highlands, their increasing social complexity appears to have been a local development, not something imposed on them from the outside.
During the Late Preclassic period, beginning around 300 B.C., that growing social complexity gave rise to the institution of divine kingship, with a corresponding rigidity in social stratification and the centralization of political power.
Throughout Petén, sites settled in the Middle Preclassic, or even earlier, developed into major civic-ceremonial centers with masonry architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions in a script derived from the earlier (and still undeciphered) epi-Olmec script of the Gulf Coast. At the site of San Bartolo, in northern Petén, painted murals dated to the Late Preclassic show the coronation of a mythic ruler.
The few surviving Late Preclassic inscriptions cannot yet be read, making it difficult to say anything for certain about the social history of the period. Still, Late Preclassic rulership clearly set the pattern for Maya political structures, and more than one later Maya dynasty claimed to have been founded during this time.
The site of El Mirador, in the Mirador Basin at the northern edge of Petén, was apparently both the largest and the most populous Preclassic city in the Maya Lowlands, with its temple pyramids among the biggest structures of the ancient world.
Late Preclassic Maya civilization left its mark not just on the political systems and the architectural landscape of the Lowlands, but on their environment as well. Preclassic farmers preferred to settle along the margins of perennial wetlands—civales in Spanish—which offered water, fertile soils, and a rich variety of floral and faunal resources.
Since the Lowlands experience pronounced rainy and dry seasons each year, having a year-round source of drinking water was critical to civilization. Yet as the population grew, and as monumental constructions required ever more firewood to burn limestone for stucco, clearing the forested uplands near those civales for agricultural land and fuel left soils vulnerable to erosion. Much as in the hypothetical example in my first installment those soils tended to wash downhill, at once degrading the quality of farmland and silting up the civales.
Late Preclassic farmers compensated by constructing artificial reservoirs, but a period of drought around A.D. 100 inflicted a blow on the densely populated cities of the Mirador Basin, from which they were unable to recover. Similar environmental stresses probably led to the abandonment of other Preclassic sites, including San Bartolo, in a first Maya collapse.
At other sites in Petén, lower populations and better water management meant that those sites survived and became refuges for people displaced by ecological disturbance. As a result, political power not only shifted to new centers of power, but may have become more concentrated in the hands of existing elites at those centers.
These political and demographic changes produced a new phase of Maya civilization, the Early Classic period, conventionally dated from A.D. 250 to 600.
The Classic Period
For much of the Early Classic, the most powerful of these newly vigorous city-states was Tikal, in northern Petén, about 23 kilometers east of El Zotz, the site where I work. Monumental construction at Tikal dates back to at least 350 B.C., but the first “holy lord” (k’uhul ajaw) of the Tikal Dynasty, Yax Ehb Xook, probably came to power around A.D.
100, as El Mirador was on the wane. 6
During the Early Classic period, Yax Ehb Xook’s successors at Tikal, like lords at other centers in the Southern Lowlands, dedicated stelae—inscribed stone monuments—to celebrate important stations in the Maya Long Count calendar, analogous to decades and centuries in our own. Some of these show rulers trampling on captive lords from other sites, indicating that the Early Classic period was far from peaceful and that war was an important means by which kings established their authority.
Maya centers in the Lowlands and Highlands and on the Pacific Coast were increasingly involved in trade with the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, the capital of a powerful state with its own civilizational tradition.
A remarkable group of inscriptions from Tikal, Uaxactun, and other sites suggests that Teotihuacan sought to bring the Maya Lowlands under its sway. In A.D. 378, a war leader called Sihyaj K’ahk’ (“Fire is Born”) arrived at Tikal, on the same day that Tikal’s ruler Chak Tok Ich’aak died of unspecified but probably unnatural causes.
He had arrived at El Perú, west of Tikal, eight days before, and the Maya inscriptions give him the title ochik’in kaloomte’, “western overlord.”
Possible portraits of Sihyaj K’ahk’ show him dressed in the costume of a Teotihuacano warrior. There is very good reason to believe, then, that he came east from Teotihuacan to conquer Tikal, even though he could himself have been Maya or had existing connections to a Maya kingdom.
But Sihyaj K’ahk’ was not himself the king of Teotihuacan. That position apparently belonged to someone else, called “Spearthrower Owl” by epigraphers after the Maya glyphs for his name. Spearthrower Owl had an infant son, Yax Nuun Ahiin—possibly by marriage to a woman from Tikal—and it was this child that Sihyaj K’ahk’ installed on the throne of Tikal.
Sihyaj K’ahk’ then conquered nearby Uaxactun, possibly murdering its ruling family for good measure, and crowned or accepted the submission of vassal kings at other sites including El Zotz and El Perú.
Later in life, Yax Nuun Ahiin in turn arranged the takeover of Copan, in the extreme southeast of the Maya world, crowning a king from the site of Caracol named K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ and sending him south to found a new dynasty.
K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ used the same “western overlord” title as Sihyaj K’ahk’ and later kings of Tikal, implying ideological ties to Teotihuacan, if implying ideological ties to Teotihuacan, if not necessarily actual vassalage.
For the rest of the Classic period, even after Teotihuacan itself collapsed, the trappings of Teotihuacano authority remained a vital part of Maya political culture. One inscription from Tikal even seems to record that Teotihuacan sent a god effigy—Waxaklajuun U Baah Kan, “Eighteen-Headed Snake” or “Eighteen Snake Images”—to the new ruling house in A.D. 416.
For the next 130 years, until 692, Tikal produced no inscribed monuments, or at least none that have survived.
A Maya rival to Tikal’s authority emerged in the late Early Classic period in the form of the Kan (“Snake”) kingdom. Perhaps originally based at the site of Dzibanche’, in modern Quintana Roo, the Kan kings traced their lineage back to semi-mythical Preclassic “overlords” with no connections to Teotihuacan.In the mid-sixth century A.D., Kan rulers began encroaching on Tikal’s alliances with sites to the southeast, installing a vassal lord at Naranjo in A.D. 546. In 562, they killed the Tikal king Wak Chan K’awiil in a war and obliged his former client king at Caracol to switch allegiance to the Kan dynasty.
For the next 130 years, until 692, Tikal produced no inscribed monuments, or at least none that have survived. This “Tikal Hiatus” roughly corresponds to the boundary between the Early Classic (A.D. 250-600) and Late Classic (600-830) periods. Based on the lack of inscriptions at Tikal, it was once thought that Maya civilization as a whole had suffered a kind of mini-collapse in this period. In fact, as subsequent excavations have shown, it was during the Tikal Hiatus that the Kan dynasty and its allies reached their peak of power and artistic creation.
The site of Calakmul, in southern Campeche, had been ruled by an independent dynasty for centuries, but in the early seventh century the Kan kings made it their new capital. From this base, they set out to reinforce their dominion over the Maya world. They married ladies of the Kan house to rulers all over the Lowlands, personalizing political ties.
After a branch of the Tikal dynasty founded a new capital, Dos Pilas, in the western Petexbatun region of Petén, the Kan ruler Yuknoom Ch’e’n attacked it in 650 and forced its boy-king, Bajlaj Chan K’awiil, to pledge loyalty to him. When Bajlaj Chan K’awiil’s brother Nuun U Jol Chahk, the king of Tikal, attacked Dos Pilas in 672, Yuknoom Ch’e’n came to his vassal’s aid, defeating Tikal five years later. Concerning the massacre of Tikal captives, an inscription at Dos Pilas records that “their heads were piled up into a mountain; their blood was pooled.”
Nuun U Jol Chahk may have survived that battle, but by 681 he had died and been succeeded by his son, Jasaw Chan K’awiil. Yuknoom Ch’e’n of Calakmul died not long afterwards, well into his eighties, and his son Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ took the throne. Inevitably, the new generation of holy lords would have to fight their fathers’ wars over again.
The war came in 695, and this time Tikal came out on top: in a set of two wooden lintels installed in a temple at Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil recorded the “fall” of his enemy’s “flint and shield” and celebrated his capture of one of Calakmul’s gods, a giant jaguar effigy the Kan forces had carried into battle with them. One of the lintels shows Jasaw Chan K’awiil seated on a litter with the captive image.
The other lintel shows him dressed as a Teotihuacano warrior, this time in the company of the victorious war god Waxaklajuun U Baah Kan: an enormous, multi-headed serpent covered in jewels and quetzal feathers, perhaps the very same idol his ancestor Yax Nuun Ahiin had received from his father in Teotihuacan.
Jasaw Chan K’awiil lived until at least A.D. 727. His son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil, took the throne in 734, and continued his father’s program of aggression abroad and monumental construction at home in Tikal.
In the 730s and 740s, he fought a series of successful wars against Calakmul and its allies, capturing more enemy gods and breaking Calakmul’s hegemonic power over the Lowlands. Yet neither king was ever able to restore Tikal’s control over the breakaway kingdom of Dos Pilas, even though the Petexbatun region fragmented into a collection of tiny, warring kingdoms in the late eighth century.
***
Nicholas Carter was born in Houston, Texas. He received his BA in philosophy from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. He the attended the University of Texas in Austin where he earned an MA in Latin American Studies, specializing in the study of the Mayan civilization. There he studied with Dr. David Stuart. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in archaeology at Brown University, where he studies under Dr. Stephen Houston.
***
1. Dunning, Nicholas P., Timothy Beach, and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. 2006. Environmental Variability among Bajos in the Southern Maya Lowlands and Its Implications for Ancient Maya Civilization and Archaeology. In Precolumbian Water Management: Ideology, Ritual, and Power, pp. 81-99. Lucero, Lisa J., and Barbara W. Fash, eds. University of Arizona Pres, Tucson.2. Pearson, Georges, and Joshua Ream. 2005. Clovis on the Caribbean Coast of Venezuela. Current Research in the Pleistocene, vol. 22, pp. 28-31.
3. Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. 1967. The Prehistory of the Tehuacan Valley, Vols. 1-5. Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology and University of Texas Press, Austin.
4. Marcus, Joyce, and Kent V. Flannery. 1996. Zapotec Civilization: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. Thames and Hudson, New York.
5. My discussion of Maya civilization is mainly derived from the following archaeologically rigorous but accessible works:
Houston, Stephen D., and Takeshi Inomata. The Classic Maya. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
McKillop, Heather. The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. W. W. Norton and Co., New York.
Webster, David. The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. Thames and Hudson, New York.
6. Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. Second edition. Thames and Hudson, New York.