Snake's Nest: Untangling the Relationships between Classic Maya States

The political organisation of the Classic Maya world
has generated almost as much conflict and contention
among scholars as it did amongst the ancient Maya
themselves. As Prudence Rice [2004] has amply demonstrated,
prevailing theories have swung from a homogeneous
empire to a fractious patchwork of independent
statelets existing in precarious balance and most conceivable
organisational models between. This article
discusses the the problems in trying to untangle the complex
inter-state relations of the Classic period and the development
of a software tool to support further research
in this area.
The ancient Maya have a complex historiographical
relationship with the modern world. Without wheeled
transport or metal tools they developed an intricate and
sophisticated culture that after its disintegration around
900AD vanished almost completely back into the forests:
until the middle of the nineteenth century hardly anyone
in the western world knew much more than the wild tales
of shining cities buried in the jungle and the search for
El Dorado. The ancient Maya came to popular attention
at the height of the age of reason, as archaeology was
evolving from an aristocratic pastime into a science. In
an age that equated civilisation with literacy, the Classic
Maya were all but mute. Early explorers were sure their
monuments recorded written information but the script
remained largely undeciphered. An understanding of the
calendrical system allowed early historians to develop a
broad chronology but in the absence of any meaningful
testimony from the Maya themselves, imagination was
employed to fill the blanks.
Many of these gaps were filled by forcing the Maya to
conform to the social and political templates provided
by better understood ancient cultures, with limited success.
The emphasis on dates in the epigraphic record fuelled
an optimistically utopian vision of a pacifist people
living in splendid isolation under the rule of benevolent
astronomer priests obsessed with the cycles of time. Its
most famous advocate Eric Thompson [Drew 1999] acknowledged
evidence of conflict but dismissed it as little
more than minor border disputes or contested inheritancevents might have been recorded for rarity value.
Breakthroughs in decipherment made the utopian ideal
increasingly untenable. The emerging epigraphic record
presented a tangled, often bloody history of warrior rulers,
holy lords recording their achievements in birth, alliance,
conquest and death in a medium designed to awe
their subjects and cow their enemies. Recent research
[Martin & Grube 2000] has identified glyphs for hierarchical
relationships amongst rulers suggesting a web
of coalition and patronage, covering vast distances, that
may represent anything from an ephemeral expression
of dominance to a long-term relationship such as that attested
to between Tikal and Palenque.
The richest and most widely reproduced diagrammatic
representation of this political structure comes from
Simon Martin [Martin & Grube 2000, p21]. It demonstrates
that, for much of the Classic period, the rivalry
between the polities of Calakmul and Tikal formed the
nexus around which the wider political system revolved.
Known in Classical times as Kaan – the Snake Kingdom
– Calakmul was a giant by the standards of the ancient
world, boasting an urban population estimated by
population density analysis to be around 90,000 with a
suburban rural population of over 2.5 million under its
immediate authority [Braswell et al in Demarest, Rice &
Rice 2004]. It is the most frequently referenced site on
monuments throughout the region and has been labelled
a ‘super state’ or, rather more emotively, a superpower
[Coe 1967; Martin & Grube 2000 inter alia]. Unlike other
powerful states such as Tikal and Palenque, the quality
of local stone at Calakmul has meant that many inscriptions
are now fragmentary or illegible: the majority of
what is known about Calakmul’s political machinations
comes from other sites. The prevailing impression, coloured
perhaps by Western conceptions of the snake’s
character, is of an acquisitive and aggressive evil empire,
overcome by the dogged resistance of Tikal and her
allies.
There is no doubting this interpretation could be accurate:
epigraphic evidence and the Martin diagram clearly
show Calakmul was politically and militarily active
throughout the Maya world. The Martin diagram may,
however, be contributing to an impression of continuous
interference over the entire span of the Classic period
that cannot be supported by the fluid nature of political
relations in the Maya world demonstrated elsewhere. In
a social system where power and prestige are directly influenced
by the strength and even charisma of the ruling
lord, many inter-state relationships would come and go
in a handful of years.
The strength of the Martin diagram is its ability to summarise
a wealth of detail about the relationships between
the largest Maya polities. In many ways, it resembles the
network map of the London Underground, with the same
advantages and attendant weaknesses. While it distinguishes
types of association, for example conflict from
diplomacy, and gives some indication of the frequency of
those links, it is unable to demonstrate their duration or
the evidence. A conflict link, for example, may represent
a single act of aggression like a religiously sanctioned
Star War or sporadic low-intensity warfare over an extended
period. In cases such as the relationship between
Calakmul and Yaxchilan which shows both conflict and
marriage alliance, it is impossible to distinguish which
came first or indeed whether they were related at all: the
marriage attested to between Bird Jaguar of Yaxchilan
and Lady Evening Star of Calakmul [Drew 1999] could
have been arranged to cement peace or the two events
could be generations apart.
The very short period between 680 and 685 AD provides
a good example of the complexity the Martin diagram
is poorly equipped to show. Those five years saw a dramatic
shift in the fortunes of many of the major powers
across the Maya world: Calakmul, Palenque and Dos Pilas
all lost rulers who had been in power for over forty
years, notably long reigns even by modern standards;
in contrast Tikal and Naranjo were both emerging from
periods of weakness and internal division. Piecing together
the direct effects of these changes on individual
polities has proved difficult enough but recognising the
effects on the wider political landscape is almost impossible
with a diagrammatic model that cannot distinguish
change over time.
The aim of this research is to produce a new interaction
mapping tool capable of overcoming some of these
weaknesses in the Martin diagram. The Dynamite (Dynamic
Maya Information Tool) software is designed to produce a rich, updateable model of political interactions
that can be extended and customised to support the
needs of individual researchers. In its standard format,
it provides an enhanced version of the Martin diagram,
allowing users to filter the data on a range of different
criteria, including regionally and temporally. It can also
support more specialised filtering to show interactions
and source evidence by type: employing the full range of
filters it would be possible to examine nothing but Calakmul’s
military conquests for the period 580 to 620 AD,
derived solely from epigraphic sources.
Dynamite uses a model of loose data connectivity based
on XML structured data to provide maximum flexibility
and extensibility. Beyond compatible data typing, it
makes no assumptions about the relationship between
objects: all existing filters are provided through stored
queries. This allows researchers to be flexible and innovative
in how they use and expand the source data while
the XML format supports the easy sharing of results and
helps Dynamite move towards a structure of plug-andplay
data.
The suite of Dynamite support tools allows researchers
with even minimal computing experience to examine,
update and extend the stored data as well as create new
queries to run against that data. There are also shortcuts
for experienced developers providing more direct access.
It is hoped that the Dynamite software will contribute
positively to the next generation of research tools for
exploring the growing body of archaeological and epigraphic
data on the relationships between Maya polities
of the Classic period.
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