"Maya more warlike than previously thought" Topic

"The Maya of Central America are thought to have been a kinder, gentler civilization, especially compared to the Aztecs of Mexico. At the peak of Mayan culture some 1,500 years ago, warfare seemed ritualistic, designed to extort ransom for captive royalty or to subjugate rival dynasties, with limited impact on the surrounding population.

Only later, archeologists thought, did increasing drought and climate change lead to total warfare — cities and dynasties were wiped off the map in so-called termination events — and the collapse of the lowland Maya civilization around 1,000 A.D. (or C.E., current era).

New evidence unearthed by a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Geological Survey calls all this into question, suggesting that the Maya engaged in scorched-earth military campaigns — a strategy that aims to destroy anything of use, including cropland — even at the height of their civilization, a time of prosperity and artistic sophistication…"
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Amicalement
Armand

My high school history teacher back in the 1970's taught me that the Maya were basically Medieval Hippies. Loving one another, watching the stars, and getting high. Peace.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Nothing new its been known for sometime that they were a warlike people.

Its kind of cute if somebody manages to find out his own prejudices on a specific culture are out of line with historical research and finds the need to let all others in the world know of his former ignorance.

The article, however, contains some pretty interesting comparatively new aspects.

Glup?

Amicalement
Armand

Any society that has people called road weasels gets my vote :-)

More seriously though, any society that can produce a highly stratified society with a monarchy and a priestly class is also going to create a military to protect its achievements. I did an undergraduate paper in 1982 called "Pre-Columbian Civilisations in the New World". Interesting – the lecturer suggested we scour sleazy second hand bookshops for a back issue of Playboy featuring an interview with Erich Von Daniken – people evidently mainly get it for the articles. He didn't describe them as hippies but as less warlike and bloodthirsty than the Aztecs. At their peak, when the Spanish were arriving they set quite a high bar.

The History of Ancient Astronauts: Playboy's Von Däniken's Interview (Pt. 1)

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Thanks for the link. I never did find that issue back in 1982 but we got a copy of the article. Interesting to read the preamble on that website.

This was a holdover from the views of the great Mayan scholar J Eric S Thompson. He was one of the first scholars in this field and was very influential for decades.

Unfortunately, this is one of his ideas that was totally wrong. Not that there was an agenda or political axe to grind, it was simply the evidence. There was plenty of evidence of their astronomy, art, architecture, the writings (albeit much less) and the idea of the Maya being peaceful, artistic, philosopher kings was understandable.

However, newer, more in depth findings showed that the Maya participated in almost continual warfare, in some form or another. Wars also had a spiritual/religious component to them so there was a large ritualistic component to combat.

And when we say, "The Maya did this, ……the Maya did that…..", we are talking about a small group that made up the ruling elite. Battles usually were amongst the elite families that ran the city-states. Your average Mayan was a farmer who just wanted to live in peace and raise his crops. In this way, Mayan society wasn't too different from that of the Europeans.

Also, I'm not sure the "scorched earth " policy was that important to the Maya. Defeated enemies were not usually destroyed. Each city state maintained a small hegemony of subservient client cities. These allegiances shifted all the time and some conflict might be needed to pull the satellite cities back into the fold. This was more important and useful to a Mayan power block that utterly destroying a city, it's farmlands, and killing all its people. But that didn't mean it never happened.

So no, the Maya were not peaceful…….at least not the ones that we read about in history.

Any society that has people called road weasels gets my vote :-)

These troops were the advanced scouts of a Mayan army. Their name was zabin or zabinob for plural. I can't prove this but I'd like to think "road weasel" was a term they gave themselves, like "grunt" or "jarhead".

The Mayan lands were often overgrown and very dense, and armies had to move through the land upon the Sacbes or roadways. Hence, the road weasel. The zabinob would move out to harass the incoming army. They would also build up hastily constructed dense barricades that the Spanish called "barraidas".

Scouts, rangers, pathfinders, forlorn hope………perhaps these describe the jobs of the road weasels.