Abstract
In this chapter, I consider the complex relationship between indigenous ideology and the economy of the northern lowlands Maya of Yucatan, Mexico, during the transition from indigenous rule to full-fledged Spanish colonialism. In this analysis, I employ multiple sources of information including late pre-Hispanic iconography, colonial-era Spanish sources, secondary works based on these sources, the native-written Books of Chilam Balam, sacred Christian art still visible in the region’s sixteenth-century Spanish churches, and diachronic archaeological evidence from the territory the Maya of the transitional epoch called Chikinchel, in the northeast corner of Yucatan state. I consider how the links between ideology and commerce changed through time. I propose that indigenous elites used ideological means to maintain the robust Late Postclassic Mesoamerican world system. When the Spaniards tried to usurp the native economy and to kill off native religion with the weapons of Christianity, the Maya reformulated their ideology of commerce to fit the times—and trade itself became a form of resistance to Spanish authority.
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Notes
- 1.
The Mesoamerican Late Postclassic runs roughly from 1200 ad to the Spanish invasion in 1521. The Early Colonial epoch ended in the late seventeenth century, when the native population was at its lowest point and Spain’s Hapsburg rulers were in decline. The Late Colonial period, beginning in the eighteenth century, was marked by stark changes including increased piracy on behalf of other European nations and the advent of Bourbon rule in Spain. Of course, these administrative shifts do not correspond 1:1 with the temporal shifts we observe in the archaeological record. My arguments in this chapter do not rely on the material indicators and chronological details of this disjunction, but I have addressed that issue in other works (Kepecs 1997, 2005, 2013).
- 2.
- 3.
“Venus as the morning star” refers to the planet’s heliacal rising, when the planet can be seen in the morning sky. Venus has a synodic cycle of about 584 days. The planet can be seen in the morning sky for 247 earth days before it cycles behind the sun (the superior conjunction) and later appears in the evening sky until the inferior conjunction from which it emerges again as the morning star.
- 4.
“God M” is the designation for this merchant deity in the Maya codices.
- 5.
The Aztec empire was composed of many city states; these polities, spread across the highlands and parts of the coastal plains of Veracruz and Chiapas (see Berdan et al. 1996), retained considerable political autonomy, but forcibly paid tribute to the rulers of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, in the Basin of Mexico.
- 6.
Ceramics indicate that Otro Sacboh and Emal were in use through the transitional period, though the archaeological and documentary records both indicate that Emal was by far the more important of the two at this time.
- 7.
In 1605, the Emal saltworks produced 50,000 fanegas (ca 5750 metric tons) of salt. I used an account from the mid-nineteenth century (in Ewald 1985), still based on nonmechanized technology, to estimate how much labor a harvest of this size might require. According to this account, five workers could produce 20 fanegas of salt in a 1-day shift. A fanega is roughly a bushel and a half in size, and weighs about 115 kg (Andrews 1983, pp. 137–138). Thus 500 workers divided into 100 groups could collect 2000 fanegas per shift, or 60,000 fanegas in an intensive 30-day dry-season harvest. Even if 500 laborers worked half as hard in pre-Hispanic times, they still could produce 30,000 fanegas (close to 3500 metric tons) in a season. San Fernando alone easily could provide this number of workers in the Late Postclassic, and workers from the five smaller nucleated sites nearby, all with Late Postclassic ceramics, would have contributed significantly to overall population.
- 8.
The texts in the Books of Chilam Balam, written, copied and added to over the course of colonial rule and into the nineteenth century, contain heterogeneous texts; prophesy, astronomy, astrology, medicine—even Christian doctrine, as appropriated by the Maya, are included—but fundamentally the Chilam Balams are historical documents about Maya life in the colonial period (Hanks 2010).
- 9.
Yucatan was divided into two main administrative districts, Merida (the provincial capital, in the western portion of the peninsula) and Valladolíd, the secondary administrative center in the east.
- 10.
See de la Garza et al. 1983, I, p. 82, 149, 218 for examples.
- 11.
- 12.
There is no systematic, quantitative study of deities in the surviving codices, but by my count (Kepecs 1999) Ek Chuah is represented a noteworthy 29 times in the Codex Madrid.
- 13.
While this carved stonework is undoubtedly colonial, the Ichmul religious complex grew by accretion; without excavation it is impossible to tell to which building phase the sacristy door frame belongs (R. T. Alexander, personal communication, June 3, 2013). The Franciscans erected a solid stone mission here around 1571. A small stone church “with three or four cells” was added in 1588, but it is unclear whether any of that original structure remains. Most of the religious complex still standing at this site dates to the mid-late eighteenth century (Bretos 1992, pp. 142–144).
- 14.
- 15.
A number of terms in the anthropological literature refer to the kind of cultural reformulation this example represents. Earlier in this chapter I have used the term “reformulation,” though anthropologists are searching for a more academic turn of phrase. Older terms like “syncretism”—and even Fernando Ortíz’ “transculturation,” preferred by many Latin American scholars—are problematic, in that, to varying degrees, they imply a unilineal direction of sociocultural change (from the dominant or “conquering” culture to those “conquered”). Today a number researchers (i.e., Zeitlin and Palka 2013), following Watanabe 1990) prefer the concept of “recombinant patterning,” which refers to the process of recombining attributes of multiple symbols according to the active community’s structural principles. In this case, the active community is indigenous.
- 16.
There is one additional image of the lone dove, similar to the one at Maní, painted in the sacristy at San Augustín Tekantó, in north-central Yucatan; the Tekanto dove dates to the nineteenth century, though the monastery that is part of the religious complex there is sixteenth century, and the dove may be painted over earlier examples (Garcés Fierros, personal communication 2004). If the Tekando dove is indeed a copy from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, it, like the other examples cited in this study, fits my hypothesis. Cristobal Sánchez, encomendero of Tekanto in 1579, claimed that the natives engaged in trade, carrying cotton mantas, wax, honey, and salt “a México y Honduras y a otras partes de donde traen cacao y ropas para indios” (de la Garza et al. 1983, I, p. 218).
- 17.
While a certain amount of these southern goods may have been for Spanish tribute, as Jones suggests, copal resins are collected from various kinds of trees, and differs in color and form; in northern Yucatan resins usually are collected from gumbo-limbo trees; in Guatemala, pines—rare in the north—are common. Honey is highly variable from region to region. Thus much of this exchange likely was predicated on procuring goods with distinct properties for native ritual or medicinal purposes.
- 18.
At all of these churches, the dove also appears on the ornate retablos behind the altars, in the context of the Holy Trinity.
- 19.
The sixteenth-century ruler of Chuburna and the seventeenth-century alcalde of the Cehache refuge settlement bore the same name: Antonio Pech.
- 20.
This route would have been less important in late pre-Hispanic times, when canoe transport was common, but it likely was in use in the Late Postclassic and in any event surely pre-dates its appearance on the first modern map of the peninsula, drawn in 1734 (Antochiw 1994, Plate XXIX). Prior to the eighteenth century, this route may have been hidden from the Spaniards; it is not the Spanish route Jones (1998, p. 130, Map 8) calls the southern section of the Camino Real, which runs from Merida to Chetumal Bay and runs west of the Valladolíd/Chetumal road.
- 21.
Katun numbers are preceded by the title “Ahau,” meaning “lord,” much as we traditionally designate years with designation “A.D.”—anno Domini, “in the year of our lord.” According to the Chilam Balam of Tizimín the katun was seated at Emal (Edmonson 1982) in 13 Ahau (1520–1539), 11 Ahau (1539–1559), 5 Ahau (1599–1618), and 1 Ahau (1638–1658).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Pedro Paulo A. Funari and María Ximena Senatore, for their kind invitation to contribute this work. This chapter is a revised and much extended version of a paper presented at the Segundo Congreso Internacional de Cultura Maya in Mérida, Yucatán, in 2005, co-authored with my colleague Sylviane Boucher at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e História, Centro Regional Yucatán, Mérida. Her invaluable contributions to that paper have made their way into this one, as have those of other researchers who kindly shared information for the 2005 endeavor: Master Restorer Fernando Chahuhtemoc Garcés Fierros of INAH-CRY, independent art historian Dr. Kate Howe, and Dr. Rani T. Alexander at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, New Mexico State University. Without all of them, this chapter would not exist. However, the bulk of the research for this chapter is my own, as are all opinions and interpretations contained herein. I take full responsibility for any and all errors of fact or interpretation.
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Kepecs, S. (2015). Ek Chuah Encounters the Holy Ghost in the Colonial Labyrinth: Ideology and Commerce on Both Sides of the Spanish Invasion. In: Funari, P., Senatore, M. (eds) Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08069-7_6
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