The Structure of Ancient Maya Society: Evidence from the Southern Lowlands

Abstract

In the structure of old Maya society was severely dichotomized into a village folk and a ceremonial center, or urban, elite, Obviously, there is much to sup-port this view. The great politico-religious centers of the Late Formative (ca. 1000 B.C. to 200 A.D.) and Classic (ca. 200 to 900 A.D.) periods with their impressive temple and palace architecture, elaborate tombs, and the records of calendrical science and hieroglyphic texts carved on stone, stand in dramatic contrast to a jungle village of thatched huts. It is not my purpose to argue here that there was no gulf whatsoever between the Maya farmer of Classic times and his theocratic betters. Such a separation did exist. It is the profundity of the split that I question. There is, it is true, a reasonable continuity and paral-lel between the life and culture of the common Maya villager of the past and his present-day counterpart. On the other side, there is also a partial analogy between the Spanish urban-Catholic church tradition and the prehistoric Mayan theocratic tradition. Both represent centers of authority toward which the village Indian faced or faces; both were nuclei of civilizations and ideologies which penetrated in a less than full manner into the world of the simple farm-ing communities. I think, however, that the qualification partial should be emphasized. An overstress on this analogy has perhaps been responsible for a too ready acceptance of ancient Maya social structure as but an image of his-toric and modern times. Recent archeological data from the Maya lowlands of the Belize Valley, British Honduras,' and the inferences drawn from them, lead me to believe that the relationship between rural village and ceremonial center may have been considerably more tight-knit than the conventional picture would have it. These new data pertain to systematic field work on prehistoric settlements of small dwelling mounds. To date, there has been relatively little investigation into the problem of settlement patterns in the Maya lowlands (Ricketson and Ricketson 1937; Wauchope 1934; Ruppert and Smith 1952). This is partic-ularly true of studies on the remains of what appear to be ordinary domestic buildings, and the distribution and relation of these domestic sites to the ceremonial units. Because of this lack it has been difficult to compare and contrast village community with ceremonial center. To begin with, the very nature of the Belize Valley village sites supports the theory that the majority of the Classic period Maya from this region were at least a semisophisticated peasantry rather than a rustic and primitive folk. The settlements are found as clusters of small house mounds dotted along the alluvial terraces of the river or on nearby hillslopes. These house-mound 777 778 A merirait Anthropologist [58, 1956 clusters run in a more or less continuous distribution from the Guatemalan frontier for a distance of some 30 airline miles to the north and east.* Mound clusters will range from groups of a dozen or so to 300 or more. The mounds themselves are small oval or oblong tumuli of earth and rocks. They are the result of the construction of successive and superimposed house platforms. Iie-fuse of general living is found in and around them, and burials have been made under the floor levels or in the mound slopes. I n most clusters there are usually found one or more mounds of larger size, suggesting a pyramid base for a small temple or a high platform for a palace-like structure. At the hlelhado site (Willey and Bullard 1956) a group of a dozen small house platforms surround a little pyramid mound near the center of the cluster. The site of Nohoch Ek, on a hilltop bordering the river valley, consists of a plaza group of ceremonial buildings and a number of small mounds, presumably house platforms, on the nearby hillside (Coe and Coe 1956). At Barton Ramie (Willey, Bullard, and Glass 1955), where we mapped over 250 mounds within an area of about one square mile, there is a single pyramid, 12 meters high, located near one end of the house-mound distribution. There are also several other Barton Ramie mounds, larger than the small house tumuli, which may have been residential units built around small plazas or may have been platforms for buildings of some public function. This occurrence of what appear to be minor ceremonial mounds in the village house-mound clusters would seem to strengthen the case for a relatively widespread distribution of a ritual and religious life that had some association with temple buildings similar to those of the major centers. We cannot tell, of course, just how much the content of the ceremonial life of the villages had in common with that of the greater centers. Yet the continuous riverine and hillslope settlement of the Belize Valley-with its house mounds clustered around small special buildings, with a t least three ceremonial sites of middling size (Banana Bank, Baking Pot, Cahal Pech; see Ricketson 1929; Satterthwaite 1951), and with its one impressive ceremonial center a t Xunantunich (Benque Viejo; Thompson 1940)-creates the impression of a large but well-integrated network of theocratic stations and substations, all supported by a peasantry indoctrinated with many of the values of urban life. Ceramic and other remains from the Belize Valley small house-mound set-tlements also imply a relative " worldliness " for Maya village society and culture of the district. For example, burials found in house refuse and dating from the Early Classic (Tzakol, 200 to 600 A.D.) period are accompanied by basal-flanged polychrome bowls of fine quality and by Teotihuacan-like tripod jars. Such specimens are virtually identical to 'L1uxury " finds from ceremonial centers. Furthermore, the refuse sherds under floors or in debris dumps off the flanks of the mounds include a substantial percentage of Early Classic poly-chrome pieces as well as numerous slab-footed tripod jars. This situation seems to be in marked contrast to one noted recently by S. F. de Borhegyi (1956:348) in the Guatemalan highlands. There, the Teotihuacan-like pieces did not occur outside of the ceremonial precincts, and Borhegyi sees in this an urban, upper-class possession of luxury trade goods, or imitations of such exotics, and their