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title A Forest of Kings
subtitle The untold story of the ancient Maya
author Linda Schele
date 1990
source <[[1][www.archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche]]>
lang en
pubdate 2025-10-25T12:03:08
topics Mayas, history, kings, rulers, half-finished error-correcting, anthropology, ritual, religion,
cover l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-1.jpg
notes Half the images still need cropping and adding, and there are likely some machine errors that still need fixing.

Also by Linda Schele

Maya Glyphs: The Verbs (1982)

The Blood of Kings:

Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986)

with Mary Ellen Miller

Title Page | ~~

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-37.jpg 70f

A

Forest

of

Kings

The Untold Story of

the Ancient Maya

Linda Schele

and

David Freidel

Color photographs

by Justin Kerr

WILLIAM MORROW

AND COMPANY, INC.

New York

Copyright | ~~

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to
Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and
affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to
print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheie. Linda.

A forest of kings : the untold story of the ancient Maya / Linda Scheie and
David Freidel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliograpical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-688-07456-1

1. Mayas—Kings and rulers. 2. Mayas—History. I. Freidel.
David A. II. Title

F1435.3.K55S34 1990 90–5809

972.01—dc20 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

_{BOOK DESIGN BY RICHARD ORIOLO}

Credits for Illustrations

<biblio> FIGS. 5:12, 5:13, 5:14, 5:15, 5:16, 5:17, 5:18 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Volume 2, Part 1, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1675 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 5:8b-e, 5:11 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 2, Part 2, Naranjo, Chunhuitz, Xunantunich. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 4:5 Eric Von Euw and Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 5, Part 2, Xultún, La Honradez, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 7:1, 7:2, 7:9b-c, 7:10, 7:11, 7:12, 7:13 (map only), 7:14, 7:15, 7:16, 7:20 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 1, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 2:14, 7:5b,d,f, 7:6a,c-d. 7:13a-c, 7:15, 7:17, 7:18 Ian Graham. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 2, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 7:4 (Lintel 23 only), 7:7, 7:9a Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 3, Part 3, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 10:5 Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Volume 2, Part 3, Ixkún, Ucanal, Ixtutz, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIG. 10:12a Samuel Lothrop, Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itza, Yucatán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Volume 10, Number 2. Copyright © 1952 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

FIGS. 10:5, 10:6b Ian Graham. Archaeological Explorations in El Petén, Guatemala. Middle American Research Institution, Tulane University, Publication 33

FIG. 5:4 (Caracol Altar 21) Courtesy of Arlen and Diane Chase; and Stephen Houston

FIG. 5:21 Courtesy of Peter Harrison

FIGS. 6:3, 6:5. 6:8, 10:7a Courtesy of Merle Greene Robertson

FIG. 7:6 Courtesy of Carolyn Tate

FIGS. 9:2, 9:3 Courtesy of Justin Kerr

FIG. 10:9 Courtesy of Peter Mathews

FIG. 10:11 Courtesy of Ruth Krochock

All drawings in Chapter 8 are published courtesy of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia </biblio>

This Book is Dedicated to

Floyd Lounsbury

and

Gordon Willey

Acknowledgments

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-38.jpg 70f

We wish to acknowledge the many people who helped us with the ideas presented in A Forest of Kings and contributed to its writing and production. First and foremost is Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor and vice-president of William Morrow and Company. When she called Linda Scheie in the spring of 1986 about writing a book on the Maya for Morrow, she opened a world to us we never imagined we would or could know. She saw potential in our ideas and believed we could learn how to write for a larger audience. Throughout the process of writing, she has always been sensitive to our fears and trepidations, enthusiastic about how the work was going, merciless in breaking through the limits in our imagination, and encouraging in all things. In short, she saw something in us we did not know was there, and without her exuberant encouragement and support, we might not have tried a book of this scope or ambition. We wish to thank her also for finding Joy Parker, the third and unseen hand in this book. Much of its eloquence and readability comes from her subtle touch.

The manuscript was written using Nota Bene by Dragonfly Software as the primary word processor. For those interested in how collaborative writing and research worked between us, it varied from chapter to chapter, but it always required goodwill and respect from all the participants. A few of the chapters, in their first draft versions, were written sitting together in front of the computer; but most of the time, one of us structured the first draft alone and then mailed it on disk to the other, who rewrote, adapted, added, or deleted material at will in a process we called “massaging the text.” The text went back and forth between both authors until each chapter became a true fusion of our different viewpoints and specialities.

Joy Parker, a professional writer who knew nothing about the Maya before she began, was commissioned to help us make the thick academese of the first version readable to a nonacademic audience. To begin her task, she flew to Austin to meet us and to tape three days of questions, answers, and just talking about the Maya world. Using these tapes, she tore into our text, learning Note Bene and how to use a computer as she went. She reworked each chapter in turn, clarifying the prose, cutting redundancy, and to our surprise, often asking for more detail to the text.

The idea of including vignettes in the book was inspired by Gordon Willey. At a School of American Research seminar on Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya civilization held in Santa Fe in 1982, Professor Willey entertained the group with a wonderful fictional account of the last days of the royal court at Seibal. The vignette was taken by Jeremy A. Sabloff and David Freidel and prepared as a little in-house publication for distribution at Professor Willey’s retirement celebration. Neither Professor Willey’s career nor the idea of vignettes stopped there. Jeremy Sabloff has pursued the vignette concept in subsequent publications and so have we. The original draft of A Forest of Kings had one vignette in it—and Joy asked for more ... and more ... and more. To our astonishment, they worked and we became as enthusiastic about them as she.

When she was done with her version of the text, she sent it to Freidel, who answered her questions, made his corrections, and then passed it on to Scheie. Having a nonspecialist as a writing partner is a wonderful barometer of clarity: When the text came back to us scrambled, we knew we hadn’t explained things right in the first place. When necessary, a chapter was passed through the loop several times. Nota Bene’s redlining feature proved an invaluable tool in this process.

A special thanks to Joan Amico for her meticulous and informed copy editing. Were it not for Richard Oriolo’s skill and imagination, we would not have been able to incorporate such complex visual material in the book. Additional thanks to Bruce Hattendorf, Maria’s capable and hardworking assistant, for his intelligent help; to Debbie Weiss for her professional care; to Harvey Hoffman for his patience and expertise; to Tom Nau for his commitment and skill; and to Nick Mazzella for his able guidance.

Many of the ideas in this book come from years of interchange with friends, colleagues, collaborators, and our students. We wish to acknowledge in particular the contributions to this process made by Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, William Fash, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Elizabeth Benson, Robert Rands, David Kelley, Christopher Jones, Juan Pedro LaPorte, Juan Antonio Valdes, Gordon Willey, Evon Vogt, Brian Stross, Barbara MacLeod, and the many participants in the Texas Meetings on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In addition, we have sent chapters to various colleagues who have offered suggestions and criticisms that have been invaluable. These people include Patrick Culbert, Robert Sharer, William and Barbara Fash, Ruth Krochock, Kent Reilly, Marisela Ayala, Anthony Andrews, Peter Harrison, Linea Wren, and E. Wyllys Andrews IV. We particularly wish to thank Peter Harrison, who provided photographs of Tikal we could obtain from no other source, and McDuff Everton, who offered us his extraordinary wraparound photographs of Palenque. Finally, Justin and Barbara Kerr gave us access to their photographic archives, including roll-outs of pottery as well as photographs of the art and architecture of the major Maya sites that they have taken during their long love affair with the Maya. As valuable to us was the haven—complete with bed and breakfast—they provided each time we went to New York.

Research by Linda Scheie, as it is presented in various chapters, was supported over the years by the Research Committee of the University of South Alabama, the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Dumbarton Oaks of Washington, D.C. Linda’s research on the inscriptions of Copán has been conducted under the Copán Mosaics Project, which is under the direction of Dr. William Fash and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Part of this research was completed as a Fullbright Research Scholar in Honduras from June to December 1987. Support for the CMP came from National Science Foundation (1986–1988), the National Geographic Society (1986–1989), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986–1987), the Center for Field Research (EARTHWATCH, 1985–1988), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1987; 1989), the H. J. Heinz Charitable Fund (1986), and Council for International Exchange of Scholars (1987).

Research on Cerros presented in Chapter 3 was carried out under the auspices of the office of the Archaeological Commissioner of Belize. Joseph Palacio, Jaime Awe, Elizabeth Graham Pendergast, and Harriot Topsey served in that office and greatly facilitated our research. The Cerros work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BNS-77-07959; BNS-78-2470; BNS-78-15905; BNS-82-17620) and by private donations by citizens of Dallas to the Cerros Maya Foundation. T. Tim Cullum and Richard Sandow served as officers of this foundation and effectively launched the research despite numerous difficulties. Their friendship, enthusiasm, and patience are greatly appreciated. Stanley Marcus, and through Mr. Marcus many other individuals, supported the work throughout its duration. Mr. Marcus has been a special mentor and friend to David Freidel throughout his career in Dallas. The research at Cerros was originally directed by Dr. Ira Abrams; without his energy and initiative, Chapter 3 would never have been written.

Research at Yaxuná presented in Chapter 10 is being carried out under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. The Directors of the INAH in Merida, Ruben Maldonado and Alfredo Barrera, have greatly facilitated our work at Yaxuná. Dr. Fernando Robles, senior investigator of the INAH, and Dr. Anthony Andrews first took David Freidel to Yaxuna and have strongly encouraged the work at the site. The Yaxuna research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-21699-88), the National Geographic Society, the Provost’s Office of Southern Methodist University, and private benefactors in Dallas through Mr. Stanley Marcus.

Prologue: Personal Notes

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I remember vividly the first time I walked down the gravel path that led into the ruins of Palenque. Surrounded by vine-shrouded bushes filled with the sounds of playing children, barking dogs, and the chest-deep thumps of tom turkeys, I walked down that path past broken buildings shaded under vine-draped trees until I came to the grass-filled plaza in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Inspired by the curiosity of my architect husband, this was the first time I had ever visited México. I had never before seen the rich web of life in a tropical forest nor heard the cicadas sing in twelve-tone harmony. As I walked through the lichen-painted ruins of that magic place, I felt my imagination stirred by the pathos of a lost world. The enchantment of the forest with its emerald green light and towering trees shrouded in a rich world of orchids, bromeliads, and liana vines produced a kind of exotic beauty I had never imagined. The mystery of calcium-heavy water, tumbling down the rocky streams to the plain below Palenque’s escarpment, to encase rock, leaf, branch, and broken temple alike, spoke to my mind in metaphors of creation and destruction.

We were there quite by accident, for we had planned in that December of 1970 to follow the standard tourist pilgrimage to Yucatán to see the famous ruins of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Kabah. Going to Palenque was a last-minute side trip. It looked close to the main highway on the map and the Sanborns Travelguide said it was worth at least a couple of hours of our time. When we left twelve days later, the direction and passion of my life was changed forever.

At the time I was a professional painter teaching art at a small university in Mobile, Alabama. Like most of my contemporaries, I lived in frustration because I knew what I did in my art was irrelevant to the society around me. No matter the rhetoric I threw at the world, I recognized in my deepest heart that the irrelevancy was real and unchangeable. Yet while teaching our “Introduction to Art” course to nonmajors (the token fine-arts class that is supposed to make modern university graduates cultured), I had built an image in my head of what art could be like if it were critical to the society that produced it. When I walked among the tumbled rocks and broken plaster of Palenque’s wonderland, I knew I had found the dream made real. I had to understand how, why, when, and who had made these things.

It took three years to answer the last question: who? and, strangely enough, finding this answer was an accident also. On the last afternoon of the Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque,[1] held in December 1973, Peter Mathews and I pored over the texts in the ruins of Palenque, looking for the names and dates of kings. After three hours’ work, we had managed to identify five rulers, as well as the dates of major events in their lives.[2] That magic of discovery has not diminished during the intervening fifteen years. I have been an enraptured passenger on a wondrous voyage into the past and a participant in the rediscovery of something very special: the history of a people whose story had been lost in the obscurity of the past.

This time of excitement and discovery comes at the end of 150 years of inspired work by hundreds of people who built the foundation that make this time possible. Yet, even acknowledging the debt all of us owe to the scholars who went before us, this is a special time that will never come again. Only once will someone read Pacal’s name for the first time or realize who built the Temple of the Cross at Palenque or Temple 22 at Copan.[3]

And know that this time of discovery is not yet over, for the decipherment of the Maya writing system, the study of their religion and politics, the excavations and analyses of the remains of their lives are not yet finished. In truth, they are barely begun. What we share in this book is but one stage in the journey, and the product of many different people and approaches. No one person is, or ever can be, responsible for the sum of discovery.

The way I have always studied the ancient Maya is to try to understand the patterns intrinsic to their art, writing, architecture, and other cultural remains. The interpretations of events the two of us offer in this book represent the way we understand those patterns now. As more decipherments are made and new data comes out of the ground, as fresh minds bring their insights to bear upon the patterns we have inherited from our predecessors and expanded in our own work, the connections that we see between these patterns will change. Interpretation in our work is an ephemeral thing that continually adapts to the changing nature of these underlying patterns. It is like the reassessment and reinterpretation of history we experience in our own lives, as we look back on events great and small that have shaped the way we see the world. Those of us in our middle years know this kind of reevaluation in how we see and understand the Vietnam War and all that surrounded it. To me, the truly magical thing is that the ancient Maya now have a history that can enter into this process of reevaluation.

<right> —Linda Schele
Austin, Texas
May 1989 </right>

I passed through Palenque for the first time just after Linda, in the summer of 1971 on my way to begin an exploration of Cozumel Island for the Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project.[4] Although I was just starting graduate school, I had been a working “dirt” archaeologist for eight years, gaining experience at projects in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. I looked forward to seeing the ruins on Cozumel, even though they were humble compared to Palenque, because I enjoy the craft of field work; but I dreamed of another kind of study among the Maya.

I wanted to find a way to reveal the nature of Maya shamanism archaeologically. I wanted to know what the relationship was between political power and religious belief among the ancient Maya. My aspirations were fueled by a thorough and intensive training in social anthropology and in Maya ethnography by my mentors in college. I knew that the Maya institutions of power recorded and observed since the coming of the Europeans were imbued with the sacred and enveloped in the cosmic. The challenge was to discover a way to use archaeology to help penetrate the Christian veil and contribute to a discovery of the Precolumbian institutions of central authority.

Because Cozumel island had been a sacred pilgrimage center just before the Conquest, I did get to investigate Maya politics and religion within the context of ruins and artifacts. I found I could bridge across from the relatively rich eyewitness descriptions of Maya buildings and their functions left by the sixteenth-century explorers to the archaeological remains without great problem. Still, even though I had passed through the veil, the penetration was only beyond the historical era of Spanish chronicles. The great span of the Precolumbian past remained beyond my focus.

My next project, at Cerros in Belize, took me from the demise of Maya civilization to its Preclassic beginnings, deep into the archaeological record and far from the historical observations of the Europeans. When I first laid eyes on the great Sun mask of Structure 5C in the summer of 1977,1 knew that I was going to have to train myself in Maya iconography and attempt to interpret this building in terms of its political and religious functions. I had basic training in symbolic analysis from college, but I was pretty ignorant of Maya art and knew virtually nothing of text translation. Linda was among the several specialists in Maya art who kindly responded to my request for feedback on my first substantive article on the Cerros materials. She called me up from Austin and said, “David, you’re right for all the wrong reasons. We have to talk.”

That was in the fall of 1979; we have been talking ever since. Collaboration comes easily to us. The nature of archaeological research requires teamwork; general interpretation is always the product of many people pooling their insight. It is the nature of epigraphic and iconographic research among the Maya as well. Linda and I have different perceptions of the ancient Maya that draw upon different experience and training. We think together in ways that we find occasionally opaque, regularly surprising, usually stimulating, and always worthwhile. I am now an iconographer with a rudimentary command of epigraphy. She is now an advocate of structural analysis and an evolutionist. Most important, we are both something we could not have been in 1971: we are historians of the ancient Maya.

This book is a unique product of our collaboration. It draws heavily upon our personal scholarly experience with the Maya field. Of the six regions and communities anchoring our histories, we have extensively worked at, and published technical studies on, four of them (Cerros, Palenque, Copan, Yaxuna). We wrote the manuscript on personal computers, rewriting over each other’s prose several times so that the initial expertise of each one of us was repeatedly leavened by the ongoing dialogue between us. Ultimately, our partner in this writing effort, Joy Parker, joined in the process. Joy’s clear prose, fresh perspective, and respect for our subject smoothed the flow of our narrative and enhanced the accessibility of our often intricate concepts.

I am changed by this book. I cannot look at a Maya ruin now and think of the people who built it and lived with it as abstractions, an aggregate social force shaping the material world and coping with the process of living. Now I see Maya faces, recall Maya names, look for clues to their intentional acts, their decisions, and the events of their daily existence. History has its many limitations to be sure. Ancient Maya history was the privilege of the elite and powerful; at best it gives an accurate reflection of their views on what happened. It is mute about the lives of the ordinary people. We must look to the archaeological record for knowledge of the humble and numerous commoners whose experiences also shaped the Maya destiny. But I now feel better prepared to continue the collaborative enterprise conjoining the insight of the “dirt” archaeological record with the story left by the kings and their nobles. It will yield, I hope, something of the dialogue between the populace, the source of power, and the elite who wielded that power. The long-term history and evolution of this kind of dialogue is, for me, an important source of insight into the current human condition.

<right> —David Freidel
Dallas, Texas
May 1989 </right>

Foreword

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Early in this century the word pharaoh burst upon the imagination of the West and transported the modern mind into the ancient and alien world of Egypt’s living gods. Today, in the tropical lowlands of Central America, another anthropological revolution is uncovering a new intellectual and spiritual legacy for the civilized world: an ancient American civilization ruled by living gods who called themselves ahau.[5]

Flourishing for over a thousand years (200 B.C. to A.D. 900), the Classic Maya world was organized at its apogee into fifty or more independent states encompassing more than 100,000 square miles of forest and plain. The divine ahauob ruled millions of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, warriors, and nobility and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples, palaces, and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations numbering in the tens of thousands. Outside of their realm, the Maya engaged in war, trade, and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains of Central México. Theirs was a civilized world: a world of big government, big business, big problems, and big decisions by the people in power. The problems they faced sound familiar to us today: war, drought, famine, trade, food production, the legitimate transition of political power. It was a world which mirrors our own as we wrestle with the present in search of a future.

Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, hieroglyphic texts and scenes carved on buildings, stone monuments, jade, bone, and other materials impervious to decay in the tropics remain as records of their innovative political solutions to the social crises that dominated life in ancient America. These political chronicles speak in the language of a great philosophical, scientific, and religious vision—a charter for power as eternal and as flexible as the American Constitution.

The Maya conception of time, however, was very different from our own. Our old adage “He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it” might have been expressed by the Maya as “He who does not know history cannot predict his own destiny.” The Maya believed in a past which always returned, in historical symmetries—endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space. By understanding and manipulating this eternal, cyclic framework of possibility, divine rulers hoped to create a favorable destiny for their people. But while the Maya ahauob could know only the immediate results of the events they put into motion, we are gradually reclaiming the full scope of their historical accomplishments from the obscurity of the past.

Our challenge then is to interpret this history, recorded in their words, images, and ruins, in a manner comprehensible to the modern mind yet true to the Maya’s perceptions of themselves. What we can offer here is not quite biography, for the Maya ahauob did not intend their history to be a record of personal glory so much as a cosmic affirmation of their actions. Nor can we offer a comprehensive social history, for the vagaries of time have left us with only the story of the great and victorious. Nevertheless, we can offer a history unique in the Precolumbian Americas, populated with real people, replete with the drama of battle, palace intrigue, heroic tragedy, and magnificent personal artistic and intellectual expression. History unlocks the humanity of the Maya in a way not possible by any other means, for it reveals not only what they did, but how they thought and felt about the nature of reality.

It is important that we acknowledge this history, because only then will a true picture of the Americas emerge. The American chronicle does not begin with the landing of Columbus or the arrival of the Pilgrims, but with the lives of Maya kings in the second century B.C. We who live in this part of the world inherit a written history two millennia old and as important to us as the history of the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese, a history equal in longevity to that of Europe or Asia.

Understanding the complexity of the ancient American civilizations does not come easily to us. From childhood on we have been taught in our schools that the Mediterranean is the only “cradle of civilization”; but, in fact, human beings developed the civilized state also in Northern India, China, Middle America, and Peru. The Maya are one of those societies that transformed themselves from villagers and agriculturists into a great civilization. To accomplish this transformation, they developed a high religion and extraordinary statecraft that produced a stable society for over a thousand years. More than a collection of quaint mythology and exotic rituals, their religion was an effective definition of the nature of the world, answering questions about the origin of humanity, the purpose of human life on earth, and the relationship of the individual to his family, his society, and his gods. It is a religion which speaks to central and enduring problems of the civilized human condition: power, justice, equality, individual purpose, and social destiny.

The world of that vision was informed by the power of the supernatural. Our concepts of animate and inanimate matter would not have made sense to the Maya, for to them everything was alive. The Maya cosmos was peopled with exotic creatures of all sorts and the objects and places in their physical world acquired dangerous power as they interacted with the supernatural Otherworld. Order in the cosmos was not accidental or distant from human affairs. Like the great metaphor of Maya life—the life cycle of maize—the continued well-being of the universe required the active participation of the human community through ritual. As maize cannot seed itself without the intervention of human beings, so the cosmos required sacrificial blood to maintain life. Maya life was filled with endless rituals which seem to us bizarre and shocking, but which to them embodied the highest concepts of their spiritual devotion.

With the decipherment of their writing system, the Maya joined the world’s great pristine civilizations—Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China—on the stage of world history. A picture has emerged, not only of a civilization, but of a world view and the individuals who cherished that view. All of the great events in the lives of rulers—their births, accessions, marriages, conquests and defeats, their deaths, and the births of their children—were recorded on public monuments. Not only kings, but their wives and courtiers, sought a place in history through commissioning monuments of their own. Kings and their nobles marked objects of all types with their names, and artists and sculptors signed their works so that future generations could honor them. The architecture and stone monuments, the pottery, jewelry, and ritual implements found buried in the earth, speak to us of the personal histories of the people who made them. This new American history resounds with the names of heroes, kings, princes, warriors, queens, priests, artists, and scribes and the deeds and accomplishments of their lives. Ancient America created its own vision of the world, its own form of civilization, its own high religion: But it also had its Alexanders, its Myrons, its Sargons, its Ramseses.

The story we construct here is one of drama, pathos, humor, and heroics. We approach this story not as if we were examining a long-dead religion and a history of little contemporary relevance but as scholars unearthing the dynamic actions of real people. If human beings find immortality after death by the memories they leave the generations who follow them, then the Maya have been reborn through our growing awareness of the history they memorialized throughout their cities.

Come, then, and join us on a journey into the American past and meet some of the great and victorious people of Maya history.

How to Pronounce Mayan Words

Many of the words in this book will look strange to English-speaking readers because of the way Mayan words are written. Soon after the conquest, the Spanish began to convert Mayan languages from their own written forms into the Roman alphabet. To do so, they used the spelling conventions of the sixteenth century. Since the characters of the alphabet are pronounced differently in Spanish from the way they are in English, and since the Spanish system of pronunciation itself has changed over the intervening centuries, the conventions used for Maya place names and their hieroglyphic writing should be explained. The alphabet we use here, with a few moderations, is identical to that of the colonial Yucatec sources.

Mayan languages use five vowels, or, as in the case of modern Choi, six. Using the Spanish convention, these vowels are pronounced as follows:

<verse> a is like the a in “far” or “father.” e is like the e in “obey” or “prey.” i is like the double e in “see” or “bee.” o is like the o in “hello” or “open.” u is like the double o in “zoo” or “boo.” a is like the final e in “title” or “handle.” </verse>

The letter u becomes a special case when it falls at the end of a word or is combined with another vowel. Then it functions like the consonant w. The word ahau is pronounced “a-haw” and Uolantun is “wo-lan-toon.” Normally, each individual vowel in a word is pronounced separately as an independent syllable, so that the place name El Baul is pronounced “el ba-ool. ”

Since the Mayan languages have several consonants not found in Spanish, the friars who first tried to write the languages had to improvise. They used x to record the consonant that sounds like the English sh. The color term yax is pronounced “yash,, and the place name Uaxactun is pronounced “wa-shak-tun. ” When the x is at the front of a word, it is still sh, even when it precedes other consonants, as in Xphuhil (“sh-poo-hil”) and Xcalumkin (“sh-kal-loom-kin”). In Mayan words, c is always pronounced like k, regardless of what vowel it precedes. The month Ceh is — “keh” and the day Cimi is “kee-mee.”

In Mayan languages, there is also a contrast between the glottalized and nonglottahzed forms of many consonants. Since this contrast is not used in European languages, English speakers find it hard to pronounce or even to hear the difference. Glottalized consonants are pronounced like the regular consonant, but with the glottis or “voice box” closed. You can hear the unvoiced glottal stop in the way New Yorkers and Englishmen pronounce words with a double t, such as “bottle.” Glottalized consonants sound like very hard and explosive forms of the regular consonants. In this book, the unglottalized k sound is written with c while the glottalized k is represented by the letter k. For example, the word for “earth” is written cab, while the word for “hand” is kab. While these words would be pronounced the same way in English, they sound as different to the Maya as volt and bolt sound to us.

There are other pairs of glottalized and plain consonants also, but in all these cases, the glottalized member of the pair is written with an apostrophe after the regular letter, as in b’, ch’, p’, and t’. A glottal stop is written with a simple apostophe, as in ca’an.

Mayan languages do not have some of the consonants that are native to English, such as the d sound. Conversely, Mayan has a pair of consonants unknown in English. Written as tz in its plain form and tz’ in its glottalized form, the consonant is pronounced somewhat like the English z, but with the blade of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth and with a sharp expulsion of breath.

The Spanish letter j also causes problems for English-speaking people. In Spanish, j is pronounced like the hard h in English, while their letter h is essentially silent. Since the Mayan consonant is more like the English h than the silent Spanish h, the letter j is frequently used to represent it. English speakers often make the mistake of pronouncing it like the English j in “jet.” Our consonant j does not exist in the Mayan languages and thus the English pronunciation is never used. The place name Abaj Takalik is “a-bah tak-a-leek” and Kaminaljuyu is “ka-mee-nal-hoo-yoo. ”

In Mayan words, the accent usually falls on the last syllable, as in the following names used in this book.

In this book we will use the word Mayan to refer only to the languages spoken. The name of the people, used either as a noun or an adjective, will be Maya. We will pluralize Mayan words such as ahau with the pluralizing suffix -ob taken from the Yucatec and Choi. More than one ahau, therefore, is ahauob, which is pronounced a-ha-wob.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-41.jpg 70f][Map 1: the Southern Lowlands Contour intervals at 1000 feet]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-42.jpg 70f][Map of the Western Region of the Southern Lowlands
Contour intervals at 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 feet
drawings of these three maps by Karim Sadr]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-43.jpg 70f][Map of the Eastern Region of the Maya Region
Contour intervals 2,000, 5,000, 7,000]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-44.jpg 70f][The Yucatán Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands
_{Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet}]]

| 1100 B.C. | First settlers in the Copan Valley | | 1000 B.c. | Florescence of Gulf Coast Olmec; early villagers and beginnings of hierarchical social organization in the Pacific zone; the Copan Valley has permanent settlements |

MIDDLE PRECLASSIC

| 900 B.C. | Rich tombs in the Copan Valley | | 600 B.C. | Tikal settled by early villagers | | 500 B.C. | Large towns and long-distance trading |

LATE PRECLASSIC

| 300 B.C. | Late Preclassic period begins | | 200 B.C. | Early Izapa monuments with Popol Vuh mythology in the south; activity in the Copan Valley diminishes | | 100 B.C. | Sculpted temples begin to appear throughout the northern lowlands; carved and dated monuments and large towns in the southern zone; appearance of writing in the Maya zone; formulation of the institution of kingship | | 50 B.C. | Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros; North Acropolis and stelae at Tikal; Group H at Uaxactun; El Mirador the dominant lowland center; green obsidian from Teotihuacan region at Nohmul | | 50 A.D. | El Mirador, Cerros, and other centers abandoned |

EARLY CLASSIC

| 120 | 8.4.0.0.0 | First object with deciphered date (DO celt) | | 150 | 8.6.0.0.0 | The kingdom of Copan established | | 199 | 8.8.0.4.0 | First dated stela (Hauberg) | | 219 | 8.9.0.0.0 | Reign of Yax-Moch-Xoc and founding of the Tikal dynasty | | 292 | 8.12.14.8.15 | Stela 29, earliest monument at Tikal | | 320 | 8.14.2.17.6 | Yat-Balam of Yaxchilan accedes and founds the lineage | | 328 | 8.14.10.13.15 | Stela 9, earliest monument at Uaxactun | | 376 | 8.17.0.0.0 | Great-Jaguar-Paw ends the katun at Tikal | | 378 | 8.17.1.4.12 | Tikal conquers Uaxactun; first appearance of Tlaloc-war complex in Maya imagery | | 379 | 8.17.2.16.17 | Curl-Snout accedes at Tikal under Smoking-Frog | | 396 | 8.18.0.0.0 | Smoking-Frog ends katun at Uaxactun; Curl-Snout ends it at Tikal | | 411 | 8.18.15.11.0 | Astronomically timed “accession” event at Tikal | | 426 | 8.19.10.0.0 | Probable accession of Stormy-Sky of Tikal | | 426 | 8.19.10.11.17 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ of Copan enacts a God K-scepter rite and establishes the dynasty | | 431 | 8.19.15.3.4 | Bahlum-Kuk accedes and founds the dynasty of Palenque | | 439 | 9.0.3.9.18 | Last event on Stela 31 at Tikal: Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting | | 445 | 9.0.10.0.0 | Tikal Stela 31 dedicated | | 475 | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar rules at Tikal | | 488 | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw Skull, the 14^th king, rules at Tikal | | 504 | 9.3.16.18.4 | New ruler (name unknown) accedes at Tikal | | 514 | 9.4.0.0.0 | Summit of North Acropolis reworked at Tikal | | 527 | 9.4.13.0.0 | The 19^th king of Tikal rules | | 537 | 9.5.3.19.15 | Double-Bird, the 21^st king, accedes(?) | | 553 | 9.5.19.1.2 | Lord Water of Caracol accedes | | 556 | 9.6.2.1.11 | Caracol conducts “ax-war” action against Tikal | | 557 | 9.6.3.9.15 | Last date at Tikal before the conquest | | 562 | 9.6.8.4.2 | Caracol conducts “star war” against Tikal |

LATE CLASSIC

| 599 | 9.8.5.16.12 | Oldest son of Lord Water becomes the king of Caracol | | 603 | 9.8.9.13.0 | Pacal the Great is born at Palenque during the reign of Ac-Kan | | 612 | 9.8.19.7.18 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, accedes at Palenque | | 693 | 9.13.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo, grandson of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, accedes at age five | | 695 | 9.13.2.16.0 | Naranjo’s second attack on Ucanal | | 615 | 9.9.2.4.8 | Pacal of Palenque accedes | | 618 | 9.9.4.16.2 | Lord Kan II, younger son of Lord Water, becomes the king of Caracol | | 619 | 9.9.5.13.8 | Lord Kan II of Caracol interacts with Calakmul’s king (Site Q?) | | 626 | 9.9.13.4.4 | Caracol’s first attack against Naranjo | | 627 | 9.9.14.3.5 | Caracol’s second attack against Naranjo | | 628 | 9.9.14.17.5 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan accedes | | 630 | 9.9.17.11.14 | A lord of Naranjo dies | | 631 | 9.9.18.16.3 | Star war against Naranjo by Caracol | | 635 | 9.10.2.6.6 | Chan-Bahlum, son of Pacal of Palenque, is born | | 636 | 9.10.3.2.12 | Second star war against Naranjo by Caracol | | 640 | 9.10.7.13.5 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, dies at Palenque | | 641 | 9.10.8.9.3 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque is designated heir to the throne | | 642 | 9.10.10.0.0 | Caracol victory stair dedicated at Naranjo | | 643 | 9.10.10.1.6 | Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, Pacal’s father, dies at Palenque | | 644 | 9.10.11.17.0 | Kan-Xul, brother of Chan-Bahlum, is born at Palenque | | 645 | 9.10.12.11.2 | Flint-Sky-God K accedes at Dos Pilas | | 647 | 9.10.14.5 10 | Pacal dedicates his first temple at Palenque | | 647 | 9.10.15.0.0 | Shield-Jaguar, son of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 649 | 9.10.16.16.19 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) born | | 652 | 9.11.0.0.0 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan celebrates the period ending with a monument at Quirigua and with the pattern of outlying stelae in the Copan Valley; Pacal celebrates the period ending at Palenque. | | 664 | 9.11.11.9.17 | Flint-Sky-God K captures Tah-Mo’ during his long military campaign in the Petexbatun | | 675 | 9.12.3.6.6 | Pacal begins construction of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque | | 681 | 9.12.9.8.1 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes | | 682 | 9.12.9.17.16 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal accedes as king | | 682 | 9.12.10.5.12 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, daughter of the Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, arrives at Naranjo and reestablishes its royal house | | 683 | 9.12.11.5.18 | Pacal of Palenque dies | | 684 | 9.12.11.12.10 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque accedes in a ten-day-long ceremony | | 686 | 9.12.13.17.7 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) accedes with Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas witnessing the ritual | | 688 | 9.12.15.13.7 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo born | | 690 | 9.12.18.5.16+ | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dedicates the Group of the Cross in a three-day-long ceremony | | 692 | 9.12.19.14.12 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque activates the pib na in the temples of the Group of the Cross | | 692 | 9.13.0.0.0 | Ah-Cacaw plants the first stela and builds the first twin-pyramid group after the defeat by Caracol | | | 9.13.1.4.19 | Naranjo’s first attack on Ucanal: Kinichil-Cab captured under the authority of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau | | 695 | 9.13.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan accedes | | 695 | 9.13.3.7.18 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) | | 695 | 9.13.3.9.18 | Ah-Cacaw dedicates Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rites 260 tuns (13 katuns) after the last date on Stela 31, the stela celebrating Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun | | 695 | 9.13 3.13.15 | Tikal captures a noble of Calakmul (Site Q) | | 698 | 9.13.6.2.0 | Shield-God K, son of Flint-Sky-God K, becomes king of Dos Pilas | | 698 | 9.13.6.4.17 | Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal in a sacrificial ritual at Naranjo | | 698 | 9.13.6.10.4 | Sacrificial ritual at Naranjo with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal | | 699 | 9.13.7.3.8 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo stands atop her captive, Kinich-Cab of Ucanal | | 702 | 9.13.10.0.0 | Stela dedication and period-ending rites at Naranjo in which Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal is bled | | 702 | 9.13.10.1.5 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dies | | 702 | 9.13.10.6.8 | Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, accedes to the throne of Palenque | | 709 | 9.13.17.12.10 | Bird-Jaguar, the son of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 709 | 9.13.17.15.12 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar, lets blood from her tongue | | 709 | 9.13.17.15.13 | Lady Eveningstar, mother of Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, does a bundle rite with Shield-Jaguar | | 710 | 9.13.18.4.18 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Yaxha | | 711 | 9.13.19.6.3 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Sacnab | | 711 | 9.14.0.0.0 | Smoking-Squirrel erects stela at Naranjo; Ah-Cacaw erects a stela and his second twin-pyramid group at Tikal | | 712 | 9.14.0.10.0 | Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal undergoes a sacrificial rite at Naranjo | | 713 | 9.14.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo celebrates his first katun as king by erecting Stelae 2 and 3 | | 715 | 9.14.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan dedicates Temple 22 to celebrate his first katun as king | | 723 | 9.14.11.15.1 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, dedicates the sculpture of Temple 23 | | 726 | 9.14.14.8.1 | Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participate in the dedication rites of Temple 23 | | 734 | 9.15.3.6.8 | Ah-Cacaw’s son become the king of Tikal | | 736 | 9.15.4.16.11 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event | | 738 | 9.15.6.14.6 | 18-Rabbit of Copan taken captive and sacrificed by Cauac-Sky of Quirigua | | 738 | 9.15.6.16.5 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan accedes | | 741 | 9.15.9.17.16 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event with his son, Bird-Jaguar | | 741 | 9.15.10.0.1 | Bird-Jaguar (the son of Shield-Jaguar), Lady Eveningstar (the mother of Bird-Jaguar), Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the wife of Bird-Jaguar), and Great-Skull-Zero (her patriarch) let blood | | 742 | 9.15.10.17.14 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan dies | | 744 | 9.15.13.6.9 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participates in a bailgame | | 746 | 9.15.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending in his father’s name | | 747 | 9.15.16.1.6 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts his own flapstaff ritual | | 749 | 9.15.17.12.16 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan dies | | 749 | 9.15.17.12.10 | Smoke-Shell, the son of Smoke-Monkey of Copan, accedes | | 749 | 9.15.17.15.14 | Lady Xoc, the wife of Shield-Jaguar, dies | | 749 | 9.15.18.3.13 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to celebrate the first katun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession | | 750 | 9.15.19.1.1 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan sacrifices captives as Chac-Xib-Chac | | 751 | 9.15.19.15.3 | Lady Eveningstar, the mother of Bird-Jaguar, dies | | 752 | 9.16.0.13.17 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan takes Yax-Cib-Tok captive | | 752 | 9.16.0.14.5 | Chel-Te, the son of Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born | | 752 | 9.16.1.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes in a nine-day-long ritual that ends with the dedication of Temple 22 | | 752 | 9.16.1.2.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts the tree-scepter rite with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau and a God K-scepter rite with his cahal, Kan-Toc | | 752 | 9.16.1.8.6 | Bird-Jaguar enacts a God K-staff event with Kan-Toc and blood-letting rite with Lady Balam-Ix | | 752 | 9.16.1.8.8 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan captures Jeweled-Skull | | 756 | 9.16.5.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his first period ending in three different ceremonies: one with a cahal in attendance; a second with his wife; and a third with her patriarch and his own son, Chel-Te | | 757 | 9.16.6.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his five-year anniversary with his son, Chel-Te | | 757 | 9.16.6.9.16 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to confirm his support of Ruler 4’s heir | | 757 | 9.16.6.11.14 | Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras dies | | 757 | 9.16.6.17.17 | Ruler 5 of Piedras Negras accedes | | 763 | 9.16.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac of Copan, son of the woman of Palenque, accedes | | 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending with his wife, his son, and his cahals, Great-Skull-Zero and Tilot | | 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan sets up Altar G3 in the Great Plaza | | 768 | 9.16.17.6.12 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates a flapstaff event with his brother-in-law Great-Skull-Zero | | 769 | 9.16.18.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan begins remodeling Temple 11 | | 771 | 9.17.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 21a to celebrate the period ending | | 773 | 9.17.2.12.16 | Yax-Pac dedicates the upper temple of Structure 11 | | 775 | 9.17.5.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Altar Q | | 780 | 9.17.9.2.12 | Yax-Pac’s younger brother become “First Servitor” of the kingdom | | 780 | 9.17.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s scattering rite recorded in Group 9M-18 | | 781 | 9.17.10.11.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates the bench in Group 9N-8 | | 783 | 9.17.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his first katun as king by dedicating Temple 22a; by erecting Stela 8 in the area under the modern village; and by erecting Altar T with his younger brother in the same region | | 790 | 9.18.0.0.0 | Last date at Pomona, Tabasco; last date at Aguateca | | 793 | 9.18.2.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his 30-tun anniversary of accession on the same day his younger brother celebrates his 13^th haab as the “First Servitor” | | 793 | 9.18.3.0.0 | Last date at Yaxha | | 795 | 9.18.5.0.0 | Last date at Bonampak; Yax-Pac places an altar in the Temple 22a council house | | 799 | 9.18.9.4.4 | Accession of 6-Cimi-Pacal at Palenque; the last date at Palenque | | 800 | 9.18.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac and his brother erect Altar G1 in the Great Plaza | | 801 | 9.18.10.17.18 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 18 | | 802 | 9.18.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his two-katun anniversary | | 807 | 9.18.17.1.13 | Ballgame event on La Amelia Stela 1; last date associated with the Petexbatun state | | 808 | 9.18.17.13.4 | Last date at Yaxchilan |

TERMINAL CLASSIC

| 810 | 9.19.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac goes to Quiriguá to celebrate the katun ending; last date at Piedras Negras; last monument erected at Chinkultic; last date at Calakmul; last date at Naranjo; last date at Quiriguá | | 820 | 9.19.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s apotheosis as an ancestor is celebrated on Stela 11 at Copán | | 822 | 9.19.11.14.5 | U-Cit-Tok of Copán accedes and within five years the central government collapses | | 830 | 10.0.0.0.0 | The baktun-ending celebrated at Oxpemul and Uaxactún | | 841 | 10.0.10.17.15 | Last date at Machaquilá | | 842 | 10.0.12.8.0 | Capture on a column on the High Priest’s Grave | | 849 | 10.1.0.0.0 | Bol on-Tun, a Putun-type lord, dominates Seibal and builds a katun-ending complex with five stelae; last date at Altar de Sacrificios; last date at Xunantunich; last date at Ucanal | | 859 | 10.1.10.0.0 | Last date at Caracol | | 862 | 10.1.13.0.0 | Dedication date of the Palace at Labná | | 867 | 10.1.17.15.13 | The earliest date at Chichón Itzá (the Watering Trough) | | 879 | 10.2.0.0.0 | The last ruler of Tikal scattered; last date at Tikal | | 869 | 10.2.0.1.9 | Fire ceremony by Yax-Uk-Kauil and another lord of Chichón Itzá; bloodletting by Kakupacal recorded in the Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá | | 870 | 10.2.0.15.3 | Dedication of Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá | | 874 | 10.2.5.0.0 | Monument erected at Comitán | | 879 | 10.2.10.0.0 | Last date at Ixlú; monument erected at Quen Santo | | 881 | 10.2.12.1.8 | Dedication of the Temple of the Four Lintels at Chichón Itzá by Yax-T’ul and other lords | | 889 | 10.3.0.0.0 | Last date at La Muñeca; last date at Xultún; last date at Uaxactún; last date at Jimbal; last date at Seibal | | 898 | 10.3.8.14.4 | Last date recorded at Chichón Itzá | | 901 | 10.3.11.15.14 | Date on the Ballcourt Marker at Uxmal | | 907 | 10.3.17.12.1 | Date on a capstone in the Monjas at Uxmal | | 909 | 10.4.0.0.0 | Late monument with a Long Count date (Tonina) | | 1200 | 10.19.0.0.0 | Chichón Itzá abandoned | | 1250 | 11.1.10.0.0 | Founding of Mayapán |

POSTCLASSIC

| 1451 | 11.11.10.0.0 | Fall of Mayapán | | 1502 | 11.14.2.0.0 | A Maya trading canoe contacted in the bay of Honduras during the fourth voyage of Columbus | | 1511 | 11.14.11.0.0 | Aguilar and Guerrero shipwrecked on the coast of Yucatán | | 1519 | 11.14.18.17.16 | Cortes lands on Cozumel Island and meets Naum-Pat | | 1521 | 11.15.1.8.13 | Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, falls | | 1524 | 11.15.4.8.9 | Alvarado founds Guatemala City | | 1525 | 11.15.5.2.1 | Cortés meets King Can-Ek at the Itzá capital of Tayasal during his trip across Maya country to Honduras | | 1542 | 11.16.2.3.4 | The city of Mérida founded by the Spanish | | 1618 | 11.19.19.9.1 | Fuensalida and Orbita visit King Can-Ek of the Itzá in Katun 3 Ahau | | 1695 | 12.3.17.10 0 | Avendano’s first visit to King Can-Ek of the Itzá | | 1696 | 12.3.18.8.1 | King Can-Ek of the Itzá accepts Avendano’s invitation to become a Christian | | 1697 | 12.3.19.11.14 | The Itzá are conquered by the Spanish and the last independent Maya kingdom falls |

A Forest of Kings

1. Time Travel in the Jungle

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-45.jpg 70f

Once, many years ago, when we were just beginning our adventure with the Maya, a friend observed that to cross the Texas border into Mexico was to enter a different world where time and reality dance to a different rhythm. After twenty years of moving in and out of that world, both of us have confirmed the truth of that observation for ourselves.

While the experiences of our first journey to that “otherworld” were distinctly our own, they have much in common with the thousands of other pilgrims who go to Yucatán out of curiosity and admiration. For Linda Scheie that first journey came in 1970 when she followed the great arching curve of the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, around to the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. With three students and a husband in tow, she followed the narrow, potholed highway south from Matamoros through the vast, cactus-filled deserts of northern México, skirting the majestic Sierra Madre mountains. At the Gulf port of Tampico, she rode a dilapidated ferry across the Río Pánuco and with the gawking wonder of a first-time tourist entered a world that has known civilization for 5,000 years. The Huastecs, long-lost cousins of the Maya,[6] dwell in the mountains and the dry northern edge of this enormous region. Now we call this world Mesoamerica, a term which refers not only to geography, but to a Precolumbian cultural tradition that shared a 260-day calendar, religious beliefs including definitions of gods and bloodletting as the central act of piety, the cultivation of maize, the use of cacao as a drink and as money, a bailgame played with a rubber ball, screen-fold books, pyramids and plazas, and a sense of common cultural identity.[7] The world view that was forged by the ancient peoples of that land is still a living and vibrant heritage for the millions of their descendants.

The first time you cross the boundary into that world, you may not have an intellectual definition for what is happening to you, but you will sense a change. If nothing else, this region is greener than the desert, and evidence of people and their communities thickens around you. As you drive south, the narrow band of land next to the sea gets squeezed against the waters of the Gulf of Mexico by the huge Sierra Madre mountains and you see for the first time the dramatic contrast between the cool, dry highlands towering above and the hot, humid, forest-covered lowlands. This central opposition is the force that molded life in ancient Mesoamerica into a dynamic interaction between the peoples who lived in these two very different environments.

Moving through the green, hilly land of the Totonacs, another great people of this ancient world, you pass around the modern port city of Veracruz where Cortes’s motley band of adventurers first established a foothold during the time of the Conquest. There you enter the flat, swampy homeland of the primordial Olmec, whose dominions lined the southernmost arc of the Gulf of Mexico. Here amid the twisted courses of sluggish, tide-driven rivers (while carefully dodging the speeding juggernauts of modern tanker trucks that frequent this stretch of road), you see where the first civilization in North America was built. The road rises out of the swamp into a small cluster of black and mottled green volcanic mountains, the Tuxtlas, the natural pyramidal heart of this land, and you can see the flat waterworld of levees and bayous stretching to the horizon in all directions. This was the land of the Olmec, who began building cities at places like San Lorenzo and La Venta by 1200 B.C. They were the people who forged the template of world view and governance that the Maya would inherit a thousand years later when they began to build their own cities.

Southern Veracruz and Tabasco finally give way to the land of the Maya as the coast bends eastward to swing north into the Yucatán Peninsula. The narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, which had widened out briefly into the flat expanse of the ancient Olmec kingdoms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, narrows again as you approach the westernmost Maya city, Palenque. It has always seemed to us that this swampy place could not make up its mind whether it wanted to be land or sea. Patches of dry land peek forlornly up through the flowering hyacinths that have replaced waterlilies to form the floating surface of the dark, still waters the Maya saw as the source of creation. Here is the gateway to the lowlands of the Maya, who developed one of the most fascinating civilizations in the annals of the ancient world.

While our first visits to the hauntingly beautiful ruins that dot the landscape of the Yucatán peninsula were different, we both learned that the Maya are not just a people of the past. Today, they live in their millions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, still speaking one of the thirty-five Mayan languages as their native tongue. They continue to cultivate their fields and commune with their living world in spite of the fact that they are encapsulated within a larger modern civilization whose vision of reality is often alien to their own.

Encounters between the modern Maya and those who visit their lands can also be startling. Linda Scheie remembers vividly the first Maya who truly made a lasting impression on her. As an incredibly naive gringa tourist, she was walking through the market in Merida, when she found herself followed around by a Yucatec woman whose aged, wrinkle-creased face barely came to her shoulder. The old woman’s black eyes gazed upon that foreigner—Ix-tz’ul in Yucatec Mayan—with disbelief, and who could blame her? At five feet eleven and dressed in heavy boots and jeans, Linda was truly an apparition from another world. That tall gringa and the tiny Yucatec shared a moment of contact, but they were from different realities indeed.

That old woman, like millions of other modern Maya, is the inheritor of a cultural tradition that began with the hunter-gatherers who settled the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands to the south eleven thousand years ago. The land her ancestors found was vast and environmentally diverse, covering nearly half a million square kilometers and ranging from high volcanic mountain ranges with narrow cool valleys to dense rain forest interspersed with swamps and rivers to the dry forest plains of the north (Fig. 1:1). This diversity meant that when the Maya became farmers around three thousand years ago,[8] they had to devise many different agricultural techniques, including the terracing of slopes, the raising of fields in swamps and rivers, and the slashing and burning of forest cover. This last technique, swidden agriculture—burning and then planting in the fertile ashes left behind—is both the most ancient and the most common farming method used in the region today.

The archaeological record from those ancient villagers, as well as the description of the Maya by their Spanish conquerors, biased though it was, speaks to us of a cultural heritage which still lives on in Maya farming communities today. Granted that much has changed in the intervening centuries, there is still a basic connection between the ancient Maya and their descendants, just as there is between the ancient Saxons and the modern British. By examining modern village life, we can recover at least a partial picture of what life in those ancient villages was like.

Just as they did in ancient times, modern Maya villagers live in household compounds occupied by extended families. Each family is made up of a group of related adults, including one or more mature couples with growing children; several unmarried adolescents; and, more often than not, a senior couple or grandparents. Such extended families provide the large number of people needed in farming, a labor-intensive way of life. Maya farmers and their families work hard. The yearly cycle of preparing the fields, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing the fruits of their labor leaves only intermittent periods of unoccupied time.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-46.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:1 Topographical map of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Maya Region
_{drawing by Karim Sadr}]]

Extended family organization not only provides a means of ensuring that several farmers are available during the peak periods of work, it also ensures that there are extra hands available to carry out the other necessary activities of the household. Such activities include routine tasks, such as the building and refurbishment of houses, kitchens, and storerooms, the collection of firewood, the preparation of food, and the repair and maintenance of tools. They also include more specialized craftwork, such as the weaving and decorating of cloth, the manufacture of clothing, and the making of pottery. These crafts can be either used by their makers or exchanged for other goods and services needed by the household.

Households live in compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings. The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbors. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.

Despite the diversity in the ways that contemporary Maya communities organize their living space, they cling stubbornly and proudly to local traditions. David Freidel remembers visiting the home of a young Tzotzil Maya farmer in Chiapas. He was very pleased to regard himself as a modern man, and to prove the point he showed David a fine pocket watch that he had acquired. His house had been built by the government as part of a project to improve the living conditions of his people. It was a particularly sturdy structure, but it didn’t fit with the ideals of Tzotzil Maya houses, it had windows, which he had boarded up to avoid drafts. It had a fireplace and chimney, which his wife was using as a store cupboard. His fire was directly on the cement floor with the proper three stones and its smoke was properly blackening the rafters above. No longer a house, now it was a home. Such conservatism in daily practice is vital to the bridges we build between the living Maya and the ruined remains left by their ancestors.

There is a clear division of labor in a Maya family: men farm and women prepare the food in the home. Among the people of Yucatan these role definitions are bestowed upon children in infancy, on the day when they are first carried on their mother’s hip rather than bundled in her shawl. In this ceremony children attain both gender identity and personhood: boys are given little toy field tools, while girls are given toy household utensils.

Participation in this ceremony by adults who are not kinsmen of the child is one of many small ritual ways of forging social ties among different families and even with people from outside the Maya world. As an archaeologist working with Maya from the village of Yaxuná in Yucatán, David Freidel was asked to put a little boy on his hip in just such a ceremony. As it happened the child wasn’t wearing any diapers and, much to the amusement of David’s staff and Maya friends, he reciprocated the honor by making water on his sponsor.

The roles bestowed in this ceremony extend throughout the lifetime of the child. In modern Maya communities, men predominate in the public affairs of the village, while women carry substantial authority within the household and make many economic and social decisions concerning the family in conjunction with the senior men. Women are expert in crafts, especially the making of cloth and clothes.

The public authorities in Maya villages derive from three sources: offices surviving from Precolumbian institutions, those introduced by the Spanish, and those needed for working with the modern national governments presiding over Maya country. In the Maya highlands, the primary hierarchy is made up of cargo officials, adult men who take on the cargo, or burden, of responsibility for organizing the festivals of the saints through the cycle of the year. In many highland communities, there are dual cargo hierarchies. One is responsible for public festivals, and the other for civil matters such as arbitrating disputes which cannot be handled by family patriarchs and matriarchs. Such disputes include unpaid loans, damaged property, sexual improprieties, and other infractions which the national authorities consider too minor to bother with. The cargo officials who try these cases possess an admirable philosophy of justice, one aimed at reconciliation rather than a forcibly imposed verdict from the bench. The civil hierarchy presides over these matters at the cabildo, a municipal building usually found on the square facing the church in the center of the community. Cargo positions are sought after years in advance, and men go to the major festivals to have their names inscribed on waiting lists up to fifteen years long.

To hold a cargo in the public lite of a village is very expensive, often requiring most of the disposable income of a family and its relatives for many years. These officials have to pay for the festivals, and for the many ritual meals, flowers, incense, rockets, and other paraphernalia they use during the performance of their office. They must also live in the population center, away from their households and their fields. In this way, the accumulated wealth of families is put at the disposal of the entire community, and the men buy prestige and authority through their devotion.

The way modern Maya think about cargo officials offers us insight into the ancient attitude toward kings and nobility. Robert Laughlin, a friend of ours and a famous expert on the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, commented at a national meeting where we were presenting our views on Maya divine kingship that modern Maya cargo holders may be saints for a year, but they are still men subject to the same pleasures and needs as the rest of the community. David Freidel remembers spending the night in the home of such a cargo official, Saint John, in the ceremonial center of Zinacantan, a Tzotzil Maya community. After a rough night on the dirt floor, covered not only with warm blankets but with an abundance of fleas, David was awakened before dawn by calls from without: “Saint John, are you dead? Wake up!” To which his host replied: “No, I’m not dead, I’m a little bit alive, wait a minute, come in, come in.” While the wife of Saint John busied herself with the fire, Saint Lawrence and Saint Sabastian strolled in, decked out in wide, flat beribboned sombreros and black ponchos, and everyone huddled on little stools around the growing fire. Someone produced a bottle of homemade cane liquor, a spicy and formidable potion accompanying most ritual business in the town, and a single shot glass. Drinks were poured in proper order, each shot downed in a single gulp after polite bowing to all Saints present; each gulp was followed by spitting on the earth in libation to the unseen but ever-present spiritual beings. With David’s second shot, the memories of fleas faded, replaced by the delicious aroma of coffee laced with cinnamon, fresh thick corn tortillas, and meat jerky broiling on the fire. The Saints proceeded to discuss the preparation of flower arrangements in the church for the upcoming festival of Saint Lawrence: business breakfast, Maya style. Divine kings, like their saintly descendants, no doubt wove their sacred work around the daily pleasures of human life. The beautifully painted crockery from their own official meals, buried in tombs and offerings, is tangible testimony to this tradition.

Unlike its uses in our culture, hierarchy for the modern Maya is an institutional means of maintaining an egalitarian way of life in which everyone has similar material means and no one stands out as wealthy. Wealth is something intrinsically to be feared, as seen in the stories about pacts with the spirits in which people trade integrity for money. People who accumulate wealth or display it in private space are likely to be accused of witchcraft and killed or driven from the village. Unlike us, the Maya are uncomfortable with nonconformity, and such behavior only causes tension within the community.

Shamans also fulfill an important role in the public domain. They cure disease and carry out a wide range of rituals in the fields and homes of a village, and they too have their responsibilities in the public festivals. In contrast with the cargo hierarchies and modern officials, shamans are fundamentally self-selecting and egalitarian in organization. Through their prayers to the age-old divinities of their people, the shamans maintain the link with the past and help modern villagers preserve their language and their most cherished understandings of the world in the face of pressing alternatives from the national cultures.

Although in the ancient world the pressures were different, the shamanistic function has always been to conserve tradition within the community. The shamans were and are public explainers, repositories of the stories and morals of thousands of years of village experience. Their power is intimate and personal, and in the ecstasy of prayer their charisma is unquestionable. They are the keepers of a very complicated world view encoded in special poetic language. We call such knowledge oral history, but in fact it is much more than history. It is an ongoing interpretation of daily life. An example of this way of thinking can be seen in the shaman’s attitude toward disease. Instead of seeing illness as an isolated, purely physical phenomenon, the shaman treats it within the context of the tensions and anxieties of interfamilial and social relationships. The curing of an individual is more than a healing of the physical being. It is a healing of the emotional being, the social being, and the social web holding the community together.

The public rituals of the shamans are occasions for the affirmation of the overarching experience of existence, the cycles of life and death and of the agricultural year, and of the community as the true center of everything important. The poetic form of the shaman’s expression allows him not only to learn and remember encyclopedias of communal knowledge but to express himself effectively in ecstatic states, when he is within the true reality which all of his people know exists behind their common, daily understanding of the world.[9]

The moral and emotional burdens of being a shaman are great, but there are rewards as well. The terrible drought of 1989 finally broke in Yaxuná, Yucatán, only a few days after the village shaman, Don Pablo, had conducted a three-day-long ritual called a Cha-Chae ceremony to summon the storm gods who would bring rain to the parched lands. Having participated in the earlier ceremony, an astounded David Friedel stood in his archaeological field camp watching the rains Don Pablo had called sweep in from the northeast over the pyramids of the ancient city next to the village. With his triumph written across his face in a huge grin, Don Pablo came running over the crest of a nearby hill, clutching his hat in the gusting winds as he fled inches ahead of a gray wall of rain. A great rainbow arched over him in the brilliant orange light of the setting sun in a magnificent display that affirmed the success of his performance as shaman.

Although contemporary villages interact through modern national institutions such as the market economy, the land-tenure system, the school system, and the legal authorities, they also participate in networks °f pilgrimage that come from a far older experience. Villagers attend festivals at other villages and brotherhoods of shamans gather periodically to discuss their craft. These festivals reinforce the local culture and provide opportunities for the arrangement of marriages and the choosing of godparents, acts which link families in real or fictive kinship relationships.

The Spanish overlay of Christianity and the adaptation of village life to the growing impact of modern technological life have produced changes in the Maya village. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable continuity to be seen between modern villagers and their predecessors as described by the Spanish chroniclers. Although the Maya festivals are now arranged according to the Christian calendar, the modern Maya have only switched the timing from the regularities of the katun and the Calendar Round, the ancient way of tracking time. Furthermore, household compounds both of the exalted and the humble, from Preclassic times on, have the same basic identity: small houses arranged around a plaza space. Whether the houses were made of stone and decorated with ornate sculpture, or were the simple wood and thatch constructions of the lowly farmer, the spaces inside them were the same. And both the powerful and the humble buried their dead under the stones of their courtyards so that their ancestors could remain with them and hear the sounds of their descendants’ children playing over their heads.

A vivid reminder of just how strong the continuity is between the ancient and modern ways of life made itself forcefully known to us as we were in the final stages of preparing this book. From the first moment we had turned on the computer to start writing, we knew that shamanism was a fundamental part of Maya life, both ancient and modern. Yet we had only been able to deduce its importance to the older Maya civilization by comparing ancient imagery and the archaeological remains of ritual to the practices of modern Maya shamanism. We had no direct written evidence from the ancient Maya themselves. At the 1989 Dumbarton Oaks conference, David Stuart whispered a miracle into David Freidel’s ear. He and Stephen Houston had deciphered a glyph composed of an ahau face half covered with jaguar pelt as way, the word for “to sleep,” “to dream,” “to metamorphize or transform,” “sorcerer,” and “animal (or spirit) companion.” Here in their writing was the glyph for “shaman,” identifying for all who wanted to see Maya shamans engaged in their Otherworld journeys or manifesting as their spirit companions. Perhaps the most startling coincidence of all was that less than two weeks later, we got a letter from Nikolai Grube of Germany. He had independently found the way reading and recognized what it meant.[10]

This continuity and many others tell us that the villagers of today are the inheritors of more than exotic ruins hidden among vine-draped forests. Moreover, their heritage is not just a collection of myths and half-remembered stories, because their ancestors carved words and images on slabs of stone, on temple walls, and on the objects they used in their ritual lives. These silent monuments hold the names and deeds of kings and nobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity and a place in history. That history was obscured until recently, but those ancient kings now speak again through our new understanding of the words they wrote. It is the decipherment of this writing system that has given us a window into the Maya world. This book is about history as they wrote it and the world as they saw it.

How we came to know about this history is one of the great stories of archaeology. The adventure began with an eccentric nineteenth-century naturalist of dubious renown named Constantine Rafinesque. A man who seemed to just miss fame throughout his lifetime (he almost went on the Lewis and Clark expedition), Rafinesque became interested in the strange writing from Mexico that had been published in the reports of Humboldt’s and Antonio del Rio’s[11] journeys through the region now known as Chiapas. After deciding this odd writing was Maya and deducing how to read the numbers, he published the first modern decipherments in the Saturday Evening Post of January 13, 1827, and June 21, 1828. In a wonderful historical irony, Rafinesque sent letters describing his discoveries about Maya writing to Champolion, who was already famous for his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.[12]

Ancient Maya writing became an abiding part of the public imagination with the publication in 1841 of Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. With carefully detailed illustrations of the ruined cities and vine-covered stone monuments accompanying the authors’ lucid and exciting accounts of their adventures, the Travels became a much-reprinted best seller throughout the United States and Europe. Since then, Europeans and Americans have never lost their fascination with this lost American civilization.

During the ensuing century and a half, many inspired scholars and aficionados contributed to the growing body of knowledge about the Maya and their writing system. The great German scholars Eduard Seler and Ernst Förstemann, along with the American J. T. Goodman, worked out the fundamentals of the calendar and basic questions of reading order by the turn of the century. Just as important as their discoveries was the amazing set of drawings and photographs published by the Englishman Alfred Maudslay in Archaeology: Biología Centrali-Americana and by Teobert Maier in the Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University .

We have often marveled at the hardships these two men and other early explorers endured to complete their work in the hot, forest-covered ruins. Their huge, bulky cameras and the glass-plate technology available to them required gargantuan strength, superhuman patience, and obsessive dedication, but these men left us a priceless heritage[13] that has been basic to the decipherment process. Those glass plates they so laboriously exposed and developed still provide the most detailed records of monuments that have either eroded into near illegibility or been destroyed by looters during the intervening century.

As the early efforts at decipherment progressed, a few people played with the idea that the texts recorded history. One of the most famous near misses was m Herbert Spinden’s[14] 1913 description of the Yaxchilân Lintel 12.

<quote> Upon the bodies of these captives are glyphs which may record their names and the dates of their capture. At the upper part of the stone are two bands of glyphs ... which possibly contain the narrative of the victory or other information of historical interest.

(Spinden 1913:23) </quote>

Two years later in his Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Sylvanus Morley also assumed that history was to be found in the inscriptions. He suggested it was recorded in what he called the “textual residue” left when all the calendric information was accounted for. “It is here, if anywhere, that fragments of Maya history will be found recorded, and precisely here is the richest field for future research, since the successful interpretation of the ‘textual residue’ will alone disclose the true meaning of the Maya writings.”[15]

Ironically, these early suggestions were overwhelmed by the proposition that Maya writing concerned only the stately passage of time. J. Eric Thompson, one of the greatest Maya scholars of this century, was the leading proponent of this viewpoint. It was unfortunate for the field that he was so elegant in expressing his ideas, for the few who argued with him never matched the persuasiveness of his rhetoric. This is the way he put it:

<quote> It has been held by some that Maya dates recorded on stelae may refer to historical events or even recount the deeds of individuals; to me such a possibility is well-nigh inconceivable. The dates on stelae surely narrate the stages of the journey of time with a reverence befitting such a solemn theme. I conceive the endless progress of time as the supreme mystery of Maya religion, a subject which pervaded Maya thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind. In such a setting there was no place for personal records, for, in relation to the vastness of time, man and his doings shrink to insignificance. To add details of war or peace, of marriage or giving in marriage, to the solemn roll call of the periods of time is as though a tourist were to carve his initials on Donatello’s David.

(J. Eric Thompson 1950:155) </quote>

To his everlasting credit, Thompson admitted before he died that he had been utterly wrong. We’ll let him speak the retraction in his own words.

<quote> Touching on the inscriptions of the Classic period, the most significant achievement has been the demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff that texts on stone monuments treat of individual rulers with dates which probably mark birth, accession to power, conquests, and so on. Name glyphs of rulers or dynasties are given, and hints at political events such as alliances.

(J. Eric Thompson 1971:v) </quote>

Proskouriakoff’s accomplishment was truly monumental. Her carefully constructed logic convinced the field instantly and irrevocably that the contents of the inscriptions concerned the deeds of rulers and nobles. Retrospectively, we can’t help but wonder why it took so long to recognize something that is so self-evident today. The answer seems to be that in a barrage of papers published between 1960 and 1964, Proskouriakoff, affectionately known as Tania to her friends, changed the filters before our eyes and altered forever the way we think about the Maya and who they were. Before her work the conclusion was not self-evident.

David Freidel’s first encounter with Tania Proskouriakoff reveals a lot about the character of this great scholar. In the fall of 1971, sensing David’s interest in Maya art, his mentor, Gordon Willey, invited him and Tania to lunch at Young Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, just behind the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge. A brash first-year graduate student, and a long-haired hippie to boot, David arrived sporting a flowing Indian-silk headband. His extravagance raised no eyebrows—great teachers speak to the mind and not to outward appearances—and the conversation ranged over everything from shamanism to Darwinian evolution.

David took what he thought would be a reading course from Tania the following spring, but found that what she taught was actually a “looking” course. He sat in her laboratory in the cluttered, dreary basement of the Peabody Museum for hours on end staring at Maier’s exquisite photographs of stelae, while under a small bright lamp set on a nearby desk, Tania worked away on the beautiful jades that had been dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. She decided that he should work on realistic animal figures in the art on the principle that these are easiest to discern. Like all of the great Mayanists, she was a master typologist who believed that useful insight could come only through painstaking and systematic inventory of empirical patterns revealed as categories in data. She hoped David would follow this sensible approach and she shared her voluminous card catalogs with him to show her own inventory of every motif and element to be found on the known carved monuments, each accurately sketched on a separate card. This inventory undergirds her famous chronological seriation of Maya stelae. Having directed David to the proper methodological path, she did not tell him what to look for. She wanted him to come to his own conclusions about what was conveyed in the art. Periodically she and David would sit by her desk and talk, her clear, intelligent eyes, her quiet, concise words, and her warm wit contrasting sharply with her small, frail appearance and nervous chainsmoking.

Despite her patience, David perplexed and frustrated her. He wanted to interpret whole stela scenes as compositional structures and to establish the patterns of substitution that existed in the objects held or worn as helmets, girdles, and other apparel. Most of all, he wanted to go beyond the first obvious set of patterns to generate more inclusive categories that would let him understand the historical development from natural to grotesque forms. At the end of the course, she said, “David, you have some good ideas, but you need to learn discipline before you can usefully pursue them.” She regarded his deductive leaps as incautious and impossible to prove. She told David that it had taken her many years of careful compilation and study before she was prepared to publicly present her “historical hypothesis.” She believed that one should not publish an argument concerning Maya art, even in article form, until it was incontrovertibly proven.

While no single researcher has ever equaled Proskouriakoff’s central and revolutionary contribution, there were other players[16] in the new historical approach she so elegantly propounded. In 1962, David Kelley published the first history of Quirigua’s dynasty and in 1958 and 1959, Heinrich Berlin identified the name glyphs of historical portraits at Palenque as well as glyphs referring to various Maya cities.

Yet knowing that the contents of the inscriptions concerned history did not help the historical epigraphers figure out how the Maya spelled their words. That discovery belongs to a young Russian named Yuri Knorozov, who in 1952 proposed that the Maya system was not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform in that it was a mixed system composed of full word signs combined with signs representing the sounds of syllables. None of the big three, Thompson, Proskouriakoff, or Berlin, was ever able to accept Knorozov’s ideas. Partly it was because the Russian bureaucracy couched his discovery in the political rhetoric of the day, but just as important was the fact that they never saw the promise of “phoneticism” fulfilled. In one of his many damning criticisms of phoneticism, Thompson[17] said it this way: “A point of some importance, I feel, is that with a phonetic system, as with breaking a code, the rate of decipherment accelerates with each newly established reading .... The first flow of alleged decipherments has not swollen to a river; it has long since dried up.”

In retrospect, the reason the river of decipherment dried up was because only a few hearty souls were ready to ride the current of phoneticism. David Kelley, Michael Coe, and Floyd Lounsbury were the only Western scholars to give Knorozov a fair hearing until the dam broke open at the First Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a tiny little conference held in the village near the ruins in December 1973. At that conference, a new generation of epigraphers, including Linda Scheie and Peter Mathews, were initiated into the mysteries of glyphic decipherment. They joined Kelley and Lounsbury in blending Knorozov’s phoneticism with ProskouriakofTs “historical approach.” During the next five years, in a series of mini-conferences sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks,[18] this group of epigraphers developed a highly successful collaborative approach and forged the last key—the axiom that the writing reflected spoken language and thus had word order that could be used to determine the function of glyphs, even when we could not read them. Thus, while we might not know what a particular glyph meant, we could figure out whether it was a verb or noun by where it fell in a sentence. That simple assumption let us begin paraphrasing inscriptions and dealing with them as whole texts. It was a breakthrough as important as phoneticism and the historical hypothesis because it gave us a larger framework in which to test readings and reconstruct history.

The conjunction of these three approaches—phoneticism, the historical approach, and syntactical analysis—began the acceleration that Thompson evoked as proof that the right system had been found. Now each new discovery ripples outward to trigger other discoveries, which in turn trigger still others. The number of glyphs deciphered and the interpretative fallout is growing exponentially. As the results of epigraphic research have been published, more and more archaeologists have realized that the Maya inscriptions and imagery offer a primary source of data about how the Maya thought about themselves. They are merging epigraphic and iconographic studies with archaeological projects designed to find out how this “history” epigraphers recover looks in the ground. This is a time of marvelous adventure and unprecedented discovery. The process is ongoing and unbelievably exhilarating to those of us privileged to participate in it.

The Maya writing system used to record this ancient history was a rich and expressive script, capable of faithfully recording every nuance of sound, meaning, and grammatical structure in the writers’ language. Calligraphically, it has an unsurpassed elegance, deriving its form from the beauty of freely flowing painted line. Maya scribes, whether carving limestone, engraving jade, inscribing shell, or incising bone, never lost the eloquence of their writing’s original painterly grace. And throughout their history the Maya continued to use the original medium in which writing developed—accordion-folded books made from beaten bark paper that was surfaced with a thin layer of plaster. Four of their books[19] survived the ravages of time and Spanish intervention, but they are but a pitiful remnant of the thousands of books that once formed the basis of Maya knowledge. The four we have are calendar almanacs for the timing of ritual, but we may deduce from other Mesoamerican texts we have in our possession[20] that the Maya also recorded all the details of their lives in their books: genealogy, history, learning, prescriptions for ritual, tribute, trade, mythology, views of the world and history, and perhaps poetry and personal thoughts, ambitions, and dreams. Much information has been lost in the dampness of jungle tombs, but we retain a precious and revealing fragment of this heritage in the public and personal texts they wrote on things of stone and clay.

Millions of Maya today speak languages that descend from the two languages we know were written in the ancient texts—Yucatecan, which was spoken by people living in the northern third and on the eastern edge of the peninsula, and Cholan,[21] which was spoken along the base of the southern lowlands from Palenque in the west to Copan in the east (Fig. 1:2).[22] The area between these two regions was probably occupied by both groups, with Yucatecans concentrated toward the east and Cholans to the west. Like the modern Swiss or Belgians, many of these people were and are culturally bilingual.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-47.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:2 Distribution for Yucatecan and Cholan during the Classic period]]

Speaking two languages that were as similar in vocabulary and grammar as Spanish and Italian gave the people occupying the lowlands an enormous advantage in creating a regional civilization. People living in kingdoms at opposite sides of the Maya region—Palenque on the western edge and Copan on the eastern frontier—spoke the same Cholan language, while people at Dzibilchaltun in the north spoke the same Yucatecan language as people living near Nah Tunich, a cave in the central Peten near the Belizean border. This uniformity of language was one of the factors that facilitated trade and cultural exchange between the kingdoms and gave the people of this region a sense of common identity as Maya. Although fiercely competitive, the Maya, like the ancient Greek city-states, presented a unified ethnic identity to outsiders—especially those who spoke other languages.

Even when speakers could not understand one another, the writing system acted as intermediary, much as the Chinese writing system has functioned for millennia. The wordplays that were so important in the Maya writing system and in the symbolism of their imagery usually worked equally in both Yucatecan and Cholan. Language as the source of visual metaphor provided a common base for the innovation of the symbolic expression of the Classic Maya world view and the institution of kingship. For example, in Cholan and Yucatecan, the words for “snake,” “sky,” and the number “four” are all pronounced in a nearly identical fashion (can in Yucatecan and chan in Cholan).[23] It made good sense to Maya artisans reaching for images to convey the sky arching overhead to portray it as a great snake. They also freely exchanged the glyphs for “sky” and “snake” in titles and names. Since both glyphs were read in the same way, it did not matter which form they used. The fact that only two languages were spoken in such a large geographic area, as much as anything, may account for the remarkable coherency of Classic Maya cultural production during the thousand years of its existence.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-48.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3a]]

The writing system itself worked much like the other great hieroglyphic systems in the world, Egyptian and cuneiform—although it came from an entirely indigenous development. Scribes could spell words with signs representing individual sounds as well as signs representing whole words. We call these “word signs” logographs.[24] For example, the word for “jaguar” (balam in Mayan) could be written simply as a picture of the head of the big cat (Fig. 1:3a). Yet in the Maya world there was more than one spotted cat—for example, there were ocelots and margays. Since confusion could arise concerning this pictorial sign, as with many others, the Maya added syllabary signs to either the front or rear of logographs in order to specify how to pronounce the initial or final consonant. For example, they could attach the syllable sign for ba to the front of the jaguar head or ma to its rear, giving the spelling ba-balam or balam-ma. Since no other word for a cat began with ba or ended in ma, readers knew that here they should pronounce balam, instead of any of the other possible words for “cat.” This type of sign is called a phonetic complement, because it helps to specify the phonetic or sound value of the main glyph it accompanies.

Since these phonetic complements represented the sounds of syllables, the Maya could spell the word using only these phonetic signs, thus eliminating the logograph altogether. The system they devised used two syllable signs to spell a word composed of a consonant-vowel-consonant.[25] For example, cab, “earth,” was spelled with the sign for ca combined with ba to form ca-b(a) (Fig. 1:3b). The final vowel in this kind of spelling was not pronounced. In this phonetic system, the word for “jaguar” used three signs, ba, la, and ma to spell balam(a), again without pronouncing the final a.

The scribes also used other types of signs, called semantic determinatives, which specified that a word should be read with a particular meaning. The most widely distributed sign of this sort was the cartouche that was put around the names of the days in the 260-day calendar. Composed of a hollow circle standing on three scrolled feet, the cartouche told the reader he was looking at the name of a day. When that same sign appeared outside the cartouche, its values were entirely different. For example, the sign that recorded the day Imix became ba outside this cartouche and the day sign Muluc became the syllable u in its naked form (Fig. 1:3c).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-50.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3B]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-51.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3C]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-52.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3D]]

To the despair and sometimes the bemusement of the modern epigrapher, glyphs also had many different graphic forms as well as different phonetic and semantic values. For example, the Imix graph has its regular form, a human form, a zoomorphic form, and a full-bodied form (Fig. 1:3d). The scribe chose the form that fit the space or the elaborateness of his text in the best possible way, and artistry was judged on how elegantly these various forms were combined and used, much like the ornate capital letters used in medieval manuscripts.

Syllables or words (such as u, the third person pronoun, “he/his, she/hers, it/its”) that were frequently used soon developed many different forms, almost as if the scribes got bored writing the same word too many times in the same way. Since each of these alternative signs had its own set of plain, head, and full-bodied forms, the end product was an enormously complex system of writing in which the same word could be written in many different ways. An example of this is the word ahau, which could function both as a day sign and as the rank of the king (Fig. 1:4). The more important parts of a text were often rendered in the more elaborate forms and were larger in scale.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-53.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:4]]

The glyphs in all their various forms were combined into phrases, sentences, and finally the larger texts that have survived into modern times. In the Maya inscriptions, the standard sentence normally began with the time of the action, followed by the action itself, the thing acted upon, and finally the actor. These sentences join with other sentences to become texts, relating sequences of times, actions, and actors, and finally to create a literature with its own style and judgments of what was good and bad writing. Today many of these conventions still survive in the oral traditions of living Maya.[26]

We have found that the surviving Maya literature falls into several genres: the ritual almanacs of the codices; texts marking the ownership of objects from earflares to houses; texts recording the formal dedication of objects, their patronage, and their artists and scribes; and finally, narrative texts. This last category has at least two subdivisions: narratives embedded into pictorial scenes which illustrate the action, and narratives which stand on their own without pictorial illustration. By combining the information recorded in these various kinds of texts, we can reconstruct the history, beliefs, and institutions of the ancient Maya.

The hieroglyphic texts are more than just a history. They constitute a literature, the only written one surviving from the Precolumbian world. The art of writing for the ancient Maya was not only the sequence and structure of words, but included making the image of the word itself. Their writing was one of the most elegant scripts of the ancient world, partially because more than any other writing system, it stayed close to its pictorial and artistic origin. Yet the art of the scribe turned not only on the beauty of the calligraphy but also on how creatively and innovatively he exploited the potential of the writing system and the conventions of text presentation themselves. To the Maya, it was not only what the text said that counted, but also how the scribe chose to say it: and not only how it was said, but also where and on what it was said.

The complexity of the system is often bewildering to the modern reader, just as it must have been to the ancient Maya who was not an expert in its use. But we must recognize that the goal of the writing system was not mass communication, in the modern sense. Few of the ancient Maya population were literate and there were no paperbacks and weekly news journals. Writing was a sacred proposition that had the capacity to capture the order of the cosmos, to inform history, to give form to ritual, and to transform the profane material of everyday life into the supernatural.

History is as much a construction of those writing it as the events it proposes to record, and this is as true of the Maya as of any other civilization. Surviving Maya texts give us, almost exclusively, only the side of the winners—those who were victorious in war, who had the power to commission the great public monuments and buildings, those wealthy enough to fill their tombs with inscribed objects, and those who could afford to buy or commission precious objects as offerings to the gods. In the best of worlds, we would also have more examples of the losers’ stories, as well as the daily records of transactions, taxes, and trade, and the personal thoughts of the humans who lived that history. Time almost never gives us such a complete record. What we have lost of the Maya are the things they wrote in their books and on other perishable material. What we have is history as the kings and nobles wanted their constituents to understand it, the things of faith people wanted to take with them into death, and the words of worth they put on offerings and on the objects they used in ritual and daily life.

Given that the public histories the Maya left behind them are not necessarily the truth, we must use archaeology to provide complementary information of all sorts—some confirming the written record, some qualifying it. It is upon the pattern of conjunction and disjunction between these two records that we base our interpretations of history.

Combining the two streams of information also gives the archaeologist the chronological framework into which we put Maya history. That archaeological history begins with evidence of the first people moving into the Yucatán Peninsula about eleven thousand years ago. For thousands of years, these hunter-gatherers lived quiet lives, leaving behind the chipped stone tools they used as knives, scrapers, and projectile points for hunting game as mute witness of their existence, but by 1000 B.c., they had learned agriculture and begun to build villages.[27] This first phase of settled life is called the Preclassic period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 200). By its end, the Maya had developed a civilized way of life: the social and political institutions, centering on the institution of divine kingship, that would guide the Maya for the next thousand years.

The first subdivision of this long period, the Early Preclassic (1500–900 B.C.), was the time when the first great civilization arose in Mesoamerica. Called the Olmec by modern researchers, this remarkable people built the first kingdoms and established the template of world view and political symbolism the Maya would inherit. Occupying the swampy lowlands of southern Veracruz and parts of highland Guerrero, the Olmec were the first people to create an artistic style and symbolic expression that united different ethnic groups throughout Mesoamerica into a single cultural system.

By the Middle Preclassic (900–300 B.C.), Olmec imagery was used from Costa Rica to the Valley of Mexico and different groups throughout the region were building large population centers and buying into the ideas of kingship and hierarchical society. The reaction of the southernmost Maya peoples to the rise of the Olmec can be seen in their rapid adoption of Olmec innovation in symbolic imagery and social institutions. The Maya in the mountain valleys of western Honduras,[28] Guatemala, and El Salvador began, like the Olmec, to organize their society along more hierarchical lines, a fact which can be extrapolated from the contents of graves from several sites. Some members of society were buried humbly in the floors of their houses, while others were sent to the afterlife accompanied by precious objects such as jade. Throughout the Middle Preclassic period the southern Maya also began raising public buildings—mounds with plazas of earth and stone. On the mountain slopes and foothills above the hot and swampy Pacific coast, other groups[29] began carving stone monuments in styles emulating the Olmec and displaying symbols that presaged the royal iconography of the Maya kings who emerged by the time of Christ. Early rulers were carved in stone along with imagery depicting the symbols of gods and the cosmos of the Middle Preclassic vision. These power images would eventually become the stelae of the lowland tradition, showing the lord frozen at the moment of communication with the Otherworld.

Although surrounded to the west and south by peoples who had elected to unite under the authority of high chieftains and kings, most of the Middle Preclassic villagers of the lowlands chose a different path of social development: tribal confederacies that could convene in the thousands to repel an enemy, but whose members recognized no power above their village patriarchs.[30] Segmentary tribal organization of this type could sustain essentially egalitarian societies of very large size, in spite of the proximity of neighboring hierarchical states. From this type of organization came the template of a kingship replicated in numerous small states, an institution that arose with great rapidity throughout the lowland country in the first century B.C. Early kings were exalted patriarchs, heads of lineages who viewed themselves as brothers because they had all descended from the same mythical ancestors.[31] Segmentary tribal organization was gradually amplified into segmentary state organization.[32]

The Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D. 100) witnessed the emergence of the rank called ahau and the rise of kingdoms throughout the Maya country. From this exalted rank of lords came the person who was the high king, the ahau of the ahauob. From the Pacific slopes of the southern highlands[33] to the northern plains of Yucatán,[34] these lords displayed themselves and their royal regalia on monuments carved with narrative pictures recording their ritual actions. For the first time texts accompanied these scenes, describing who acted, where, and when. It was the beginning of history for the Maya. It was also the beginning of the great political strategies utilized by kings in their creation of public art; for, to the Maya, the cornerstone of historical reality was what could be seen on the temples and public buildings of the city. More powerfully than we can imagine, their art created their reality. It is in this period that the lowland Maya first created decorated temples and the highland peoples[35] raised stone stelae inscribed with texts, and the principles of kingship were firmly established for the next thousand years.

Our story begins in this last phase of the Preclassic period and continues into the florescence of Maya civilization during the Classic period, a phase which traditionally begins with the earliest deciphered date on a stela—now A.D. 199.[36] This time of extraordinary accomplishment falls into two subdivisions: the Early Classic (A.D. 200–600) and the Late Classic (A.D. 600–900).[37] The Classic period ended with a general collapse in most of the Maya region, although in some areas, such as northern Belize and Yucatán, the Classic way of life continued unbroken into the final phase of Precolumbian history, the Postclassic. The Postclassic period lasted from A.D. 900 until the conquest of Yucatán by the Spaniards in 1541, although Maya resistance to Spanish domination continued until the Itzá, Maya Indians who lived around Lake Peten Itzá, were overwhelmed in 1697.

The inscriptions and archaeology also give us information on the world that the Maya inhabited during the Classic period, for it was very different from what we find as tourists. At the height of Classic civilization in the eighth century, the Maya landscape in all its variety supported millions of people. Although the inscriptions from that period tell us the largest domain was Tikal, a kingdom of around 500,000 souls,[38] the average dominion was much smaller, holding jurisdiction over only 30,000 to 50,000 subjects. Maya kings had to cope with a political geography of enormous complexity (Fig. 1:5), resembling the bewildering variety of kingdoms, dukedoms, baronies, and other titled lands of the European Middle Ages. A closer parallel might be the city-states of Classical Greece: little countries that were politically autonomous, yet culturally, socially, and economically interdependent.[39]

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-54.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-55.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:5 Distribution of Emblem Glyph Polities in the Classic Period as suggested by Peter Mathews]]

The first clues about the way the Classic Maya organized themselves came with Heinrich Berlin’s discovery of Emblem Glyphs.[40] Today we । know that these glyphs are titles signifying that people who have them in their names are either a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”), ahau (“lord”), or na ahau (“noble lady”) of a particular kingdom. We also know that these kingdoms were hierarchically organized and included people of many different ranks among their populations. Most of them had a main center or capital, but they also included subsidiary sites ranging from sizable towns up to very large palace compounds and eventually down to hamlets and individual farms.[41]

The glyphic inscriptions give us other kinds of information about the governing hierarchies in these kingdoms, although there was apparently some variation in organization from region to region. The main king was often referred to as the ch’ul ahau. He was always of the rank ahau, but there were also lesser ahauob within the same kingdom who had different responsibilities. Ahauob ruled subordinate population centers within the larger polity and they held important offices, such as war chief, within the main center. The subordinate town of Tortuguero, for example, was ruled by a man named Ahpo-Balam, who was a member of the royal family and an ahau of Palenque. At Copan, the half brother of the last great king ruled a portion of that city. An ahau who was also the son of a king of Naranjo achieved fame as a scribe—not a political office, yet a highly valued specialist rank. In brief, the title of ahau indicated nobility of the highest degree. It was the rank to which the king must belong, but there were many more ahauob than there were kings. This is the typical pattern for a rank that is inherited by several offspring at each generation, as ahau certainly was during the Late Classic period. Obviously, it was in the interests of the kings to find useful work in the government of the realm for their siblings and other ahauob.

Within the kingdoms along the Usumacinta and in the forest to the west of that region,[42] secondary centers might be ruled by a cahal. a noble with less prestige than the ahauob, yet still intimately associated with their kings. The rank of cahal carried many of the ritual prerogatives of the ahauob and produced both provincial governors and officials at the capitals.[43] Both cahalob and ahauob were, therefore, part of the courts that administered the polities, and kings could marry women of either rank to secure political alliances.

Nobles of both ranks were sent to other capitals as emissaries of their high kings,[44] and people of both ahau and cahal rank were important witnesses to the designations of heirs and the accessions of high kings. The powerful and dangerous ritual requirements of accession, along with the preference that the king be ideally the eldest male offspring of his royal sire, suggest that kingship was not elective. Nevertheless, the many exceptions to the ideal of inheritance, including descent of the throne from older to younger brothers,[45] also show how critical the support of the nobility was to the succession.

The number of kingdoms ruled by kings grew from perhaps a dozen in the first century B.C. to as many as sixty at the height of the lowland civilization in the eighth century (Fig. 1:5d).[46] Not all polities survived this span of history, even when they were well established. There were many hazards to challenge kings—wars, intrigues, and natural catastrophes. A king was literally at risk all his life; and more than one king ended his rule, not by dying of peaceful old age but by being taken captive in a war he was too old to fight.[47] It was also true that prosperous and probably autonomous towns always existed within the political geography without ever erecting a royal stela or establishing themselves as an Emblem Glyph polity. Polities both with and without an Emblem Glyph appeared, matured, and disappeared throughout Maya history.

Political coherence and integration characterized life within the dominion of a king, but in the borderlands between these kingdoms, the opportunity must have existed for adventuresome people to maintain independent chiefdoms, or even for whole villages of unallied farmers to exist. Many civilizations tolerate such marginal folk because they service the civilized in a variety of ways, not the least of which is as a human buffer against organized enemies. In the Maya world of the forest, these inbetween people likely gathered many wild plant and tree products—from which they made medicines, poisons, dyes, and incense—and trapped and hunted game for meat and hides. They then sold all these valued commodities to their brethren within the kingdoms. Keeping the border towns under control and assessing tribute were the responsibility of court nobles, and disputed jurisdiction over borderlands was likely one of the causes of wars.

The political geography of the Maya consisted of island cities of royal power in a sea of townspeople and village folk. Kings worked hard to establish firm control over the countryside and to expand their authority as far as possible in the direction of other polities. From the beginning of the institution of kingship, military confrontation was not only a fact of life but a necessary and inevitable royal responsibility. With the proliferation of polities, the civilized territories expanded at the expense of the freeholders. By the Late Classic period, kings looked out at a landscape peopled with brother lords, both enemies and allies, and at escalating conditions of war and strife.

There are certain things about the Maya landscape, about life in the tropics, and about the kind of “technology” available to the ancient Maya that help people of the twentieth century to understand a little better what their lives were really like. They were, first of all, a stone age people, without metal of any kind until several centuries before the Conquest. All they accomplished was done by means of stone tools, utilizing human beings as their beasts of burden: No animals large enough to carry cargo lived in Mesoamerica before the coming of the Spanish. Although the Maya built wide roads to link parts of their kingdoms together, they did not build highway systems. Within the jungle and the rugged mountain landscape, where the wheel was not used, highways did not make a lot of sense. The ancient Maya traveled along paths winding through the deep iorests and cultivated areas, but the major arteries of their transportation were the many rivers and swamps that crisscrossed the landscape. Until very recently,[48] the canoe was the most important form of travel into the interior of the Maya region.

Carved as a single piece from a huge hardwood tree, dugout canoes plied the slow-moving lowland rivers. These rivers drained huge swamps ted by rains that could, and still do, average 150 inches a year in the southern lowlands. Some of this water flows north into the mighty Usumacinta River and its tributaries to empty into the Gulf of México. The rest of it flows east down a network of streams and rivers, large and small, emptying eventually into the Caribbean Sea. Spreading like the veins of a forest leaf, these waterways provided the natural avenues of travel and trade from the southern to the northern lowlands. When we think of lords visiting one another or items being traded between areas, we must remember that these people and trade goods were carried on the backs of bearers in litters or in tumplines[49] or in canoes paddled across the network of waterways that was the superhighway system of the ancient Maya.

These rivers were are not always gentle pathways. At the height of the rainy season, especially when the great thunderstorms and the hurricanes of summer and fall sweep in from the Gulf, these slow-moving rivers can turn into raging torrents of destruction. Conversely, in the dry season they can become too shallow to navigate. Although water, overall, is abundant in the tropics, there is usually too little of it during the dry times, and too much during the torrential rains of summer and fall. Because of these conditions, much of Maya social innovation w’as centered around two great problems: how to store excess water for the times it would be needed, and how to free wet, fertile swampland for farming. The building of reservoirs and massive, complicated canal systems took the labor of thousands and helped develop the concepts of community and central authority. For instance, the Maya of Tikal excavated reservoirs as they quarried stone to build the great houses of the central acropolis. In areas now in the state of Campeche, the lack of permanent water sources forced the Maya to build great rainwater cisterns under their buildings, and at Edzna, to dig kilometers of shallow canals to hold water throughout the dry season.

Further to the north, rainwater collects seasonally in low sinks, but most surface water seeps quickly into the soil and runs underground to the sea. The Maya could reach this underground water only through caves which riddled the limestone. When water dissolved the ceilings of these limestone caves, deep natural wells called cenotes were formed. In the northwestern corner of Yucatán, the water in these wells is close to the surface, but in other regions, for example, at Chichen Itzá, the water table is twenty meters below the surface. Such water is accessible only by long and dangerous climbing down wooden ladders or stone steps carved in the wall of the well itself. The cenotes are a major geographic feature of the northern lowlands, and for a people focused on entrances into the “Other-world” beneath the earth, these caves and water holes became centers of social gathering and the enactment of ritual.

The other great fact of Maya life was the magnificent rain forest, full of towering, liana-draped hardwoods, such as the mahogany, chico zapote, and the most sacred tree of all, the great ceiba. The forest supports a rich web of life, but because the soil under it is thin, nutrients that seep below the surface are captured by the subsoil, which locks them away from the roots of plants. The forest has adapted to this by developing a spectacular factory of insects and fungi which live on its dank and shady floor and digest the fall of leaves, limbs, and trees, returning these precious nutrients to the great spreading roots of the trees. This cycle of life is in full view of humanity, a litany of green blossoming out of death and decay.

The rhythms of the tropical world are not the same as those of the temperate zone in which we live. For us, the central metaphor of death and rebirth derives from the change of winter to spring, but in the Maya tropics spring is the time of drought and the burning of the forest to open the fields for planting. There, the heat of the spring is unending and inescapable as the skies darken with the gritty pall of burning trees, filling lungs with soot and dimming the light of the sun.[50] The forest turns completely white as the trees dry out and many of them lose their leaves. The world becomes the color of bone and the forest smells of death.

The dry season was also the time for wars, for the muddy land dried out then and people could move to and from the battlefield with greater ease. Since planting could not be done until the rains came, there was time for war without endangering the work of farmers. Almost all the battles discussed in this book were fought between late January and early May.

When the rains finally come in late May or early June, the world awakens, literally changing overnight. Thirsty leaves and stems swell with the water of life, and the forest is transformed within hours from the colorlessness of death into a vibrant, unbelievably deep green—the color the Maya called jgx These rains do not bring the riotous color of northern spring, but a sudden change that even more surely emphasizes the transformation of death into life.

In the summer, the rains come in torrential tropical thunderstorms that break across the land with awesome power. In good times, they release their heavy loads of life-giving water with predictable regularity in the late afternoon or early evening, but they can inundate the land as surely as they can bring it life. Eventually, the storms of summer give way in late July and August to a short dry season called the canícula, letting the muddy, saturated earth dry out a little before the fall rains come in their gentle, all-day drizzle. The cold winter storms, today called nortes. can go on for days, chilling the normally warm climate to a bone-deep, shivering, wet cold.

There is a rhythm to tropical life that flows through the experience of all beings living there. In the rich abundance of life that thrives in the forest, in the coming of the rains, and in the terrible consequences of drought, there is a contrast of life and death, of abundance and deprivation, that teaches the lessons of life and cyclic time in metaphors of undeniable power and elegance. Their metaphor is not ours—a spring rebirth timed by the equinox. It is instead the coming of the life-giving rains timed by the summer solstice. This metaphor, however, is just as powerful and penetrating as the temperate cycle upon which the great myths of the Western world are built, and just as effective.

The institution of kingship, and the understanding of the world that fueled Maya civilization welled up out of the experience of the ancient villager. The plants and animals of the forest, the alternation of dry season with the time of rains, the rhythms of planting and burning, were the stuff from which the kings molded the symbols of their power. We are just beginning to understand the patterns of the Maya world and how they used them in the material expression of their culture.

The connections the Maya put into their public history between things spiritual and things human, between things ancestral and things current, between things of the king and things of the community, were not a matter of accident or personal taste. The Maya put them in the public forum of life because they were the things they saw as important. The inscriptions and imagery we have are the propaganda the kings thought their people would believe. They represent the strategies everyone thought gave them a chance to live beyond dying.

These texts and images are a map of the ancient Maya mind and history, of the world as they understood it. Through the words and images they inscribed upon the objects of their lives, they live again in our time. We can remember their deeds, contemplate the power and beauty of their world, and recognize that they accomplished things we honor as civilized, and in the context of human events, as great. The writing of the Maya preserves not only the history of their kings but also their sense of power and sacredness. It lets us utter their names once again—and for a moment see the world as they saw it.

2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, And The Maya World

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-56.jpg 70f

As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon “culture,” and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.

The idea that there are as many “realities” as there are societies may be novel to many of us. Yet whether or not we are aware that we see our world through a filter, our own version of reality guides our actions just as surely as other, different versions have guided other societies around the world in both the present and the past. We in the West live as we do in part because our cultural reality constrains our ability to imagine different ways of doing things. In our world, for example, we could not imagine letting blood from our bodies, as the Maya did, in order to communicate with our ancestors. Such violence seems crazy and “uncivilized” to us. On the other hand, the ancient Maya would find our wartime custom of drafting young men to go and fight in the place of the leaders of our nation both barbaric and cowardly. Maya lords fought their own battles and a king often paid tor defeat in the coin of his own capture and sacrifice.

The principal language of our reality here in the West is economics. Important issues in our lives, such as progress and social justice, war and peace, and the hope for prosperity and security, are expressed in material metaphors. Struggles, both moral and military, between the haves and have-nots of our world pervade our public media and our thoughts of the future. The Maya codified their shared model of reality through religion and ritual rather than economics. The language of Maya religion explained the place of human beings in nature, the workings of the sacred world, and the mysteries of life and death, just as our religion still does for us in special circumstances like marriages and funerals. But their religious system also encompassed practical matters of political and economic power, such as how the ordered world of the community worked.

While we live in a model of the world that vests our definitions of physical reality in science and spiritual reality in religious principles, the Maya lived in a world that defined the physical world as the material manifestation of the spiritual and the spiritual as the essence of the material. For them the world of experience manifested itself in two complementary dimensions. One dimension was the world in which they lived out their lives and the other was the abode of the gods, ancestors, and other supernatural beings. This manner of understanding reality is still true for many of the contemporary descendants of the ancient Maya.

These two planes of existence were inextricably locked together. The actions and interactions of Otherworld beings influenced the fate of this world, bringing disease or health, disaster or victory, life or death, prosperity or misfortune into the lives of human beings. But the denizens of the Otherworld were also dependent upon the deeds of the living for their continued well-being. Only the living could provide the nourishment required by both the inhabitants of the Otherworld and the souls who would be reborn there as the ancestors.[51] To the Maya, the idea of dividing the responsibility for human welfare between politicians and priests would have been incomprehensible. The kings were, above all, divine shamans who operated in both dimensions and through the power of their ritual performance kept both in balance, thus bringing prosperity to their domains.

Because the king lived in the same community as the villager, his explanations of political institutions and rituals had to be voiced in the common language of this shared reality, for the villagers were as much his constituents as were the nobles.[52] For us to understand the actions of Maya kings and their people as rational and necessary for their successful functioning in their world, we must understand how the shared reality of the ancient Maya defined the world for them.

The high art that has so fascinated the modern visitor is the public and private expression of that world view through writing and narrative imagery. This narrative representation of the actions of kings and nobles served a twofold purpose. On the most fundamental level it placed them within the framework of history. Most important, however, it underlined the cyclicality of the cosmic time in which that history unfolded. The Maya were preoccupied with demonstrating historical action as the inevitable result of cosmic and ancestral necessities. It was within this great matrix of belief that the Maya enacted the triumphs, defeats, drama, humor, and pathos of their history and strove to create the greatest and most lasting memorials to their lives.

The World They Conceived

The Maya world was made up of three layered domains: the starry arch of heaven, the stony Middleworld of earth made to flower and bear fruit by the blood of kings, and the dark waters of the Underworld below.[53] To say that the Maya considered these to be three distinct regions, however, is to give a false impression, for they believed all dimensions of existence were interrelated. Furthermore, all three domains were thought to be alive and imbued with sacred power, including the sky, which was represented by a great crocodilian monster. This Cosmic Monster made the rains when it shed its blood in supernatural counterpoint to the royal sacrifices on the earth below.

Ihe Underworld was sometimes called Xibalba,[54] but it is perhaps closer to the original Maya understanding to think of Xibalba as the parallel unseen Otherworld into which the Maya kings and other shamans could pass in ecstatic trance. Like the world of human beings, Xibalba[55] had animals, plants, inhabitants of various kinds, and a landscape with both natural and constructed features. At sundown Xibalba rotated above the earth to become the night sky.

The human plane of existence, like the Otherworld, was a sacred place. The Maya conceived of the human world as a region floating in the primordial sea. Sometimes they represented the earth as the back of a caiman and sometimes as the back of a turtle.[56] The four cardinal directions provided the fundamental grid for the Maya community and for the surface of the world. But for the Maya, the principal axis of the Middleworld was the path of the sun as it moved from east to west on its daily journey. Each direction of the compass had a special tree, a bird, a color, gods associated with its domain, and rituals associated with those gods. East was red and the most important direction since it was where the sun was born. North, sometimes called the “side of heaven,” was white and the direction from which the cooling rains of winter came. It was also the direction of the north star around which the sky pivots. West, the leaving or dying place of the sun, was black. South was yellow and was considered to be the right-hand or great side of the sun.[57] In the Maya conception east, not north, should always be at the top of maps.

This model of the world, however, was concentric as well as quadrangular. The four cardinal directions were also seen in relationship to the center, which also had its color (blue-green), its gods, its bird, and its tree (Fig. 2:1). Running through this center, the Maya envisioned an axis vailed Hocoh Chon (“six sky” or “raised up sky”).[58] The tree which symbolized this axis coexisted in all three vertical domains. Its trunk went through the Middleworld; its roots plunged to the nadir in the watery Underworld region of the Otherworld, and its branches soared to the zenith in the highest layer of the heavenly region of the Otherworld.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-57.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:1]]

The geography of the human world included plains, mountains, caves, cenotes, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and the places and buildings made by people—cities and towns with their houses, palaces, temples, and ballcourts (Fig. 2:2). To the Maya, this world was alive and imbued with a sacredness that was especially concentrated at special points, like caves and mountains. The principal pattern of power points had been established by the gods when the cosmos was created. Within this matrix of sacred landscape, human beings built communities that both merged with t the god-generated patterns and created a second human-made matrix of power points. These two systems were perceived to be complementary, not separate.

As we mentioned above, the world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the wacah chan axis which ran through the center of existence. This axis was not located in any one earthly place, but could be materialized though ritual at any point in the natural and human-made landscape. Most important, it was materialized in.the person of the king, who brought it into existence as he stood enthralled in ecstatic visions atop his pyramid-mountain.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-58.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:2]]

There were two great symbolic representations of this center axis: the king himself, who brought it into being, and his natural analog, the World Tree. The act of communication between the human world and the Other-world was represented by the most profound symbols of Maya kingship: the Vision Serpent and the Double-headed Serpent Bar[59] (Fig. 2:3). In the rapture of bloodletting rituals, the king brought the great World Tree into existence through the middle of the temple and opened the awesome doorway into the Otherworld.[60] During both public and private bloodletting rituals, the Vision Serpent, which symbolized the path of communication between the two worlds, was seen rising in the clouds of incense and smoke above the temples housing the sculptured sanctums. The earthly sides of the portals were within these sanctums.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-59.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:3 Vision Serpents]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-60.jpg 70f][Double-headed Serpent]]

Fortunately for us, one of the greatest of Maya painters[61] left us an eloquent representation of the cosmos as his people understood it to exist. This image was painted on a tripod plate which was intended to hold the blood that helped open a portal to the Otherworld (Fig. 2:4). The opened portal itself is depicted as the Maw of the Underworld, a great bearded and skeletal-jawed serpent. Out of the jaws of this serpent come the pure, life-bearing waters of the earth and below them flow the dark, fecund waters of the Underworld. Along the upper edge of the image arches the living sky, the Cosmic Monster, which contains within its body the great ancestral Sun and Venus. The rains, its holy blood, flow in great scrolls from the mouth of its crocodilian head and from the stingray spine on the Quadripartite Monster at the opposite end. The World Tree, Wacah Chan, emerges from the head of the god Chac-Xib-Chac (the Eveningstar) as he rises from the black waters of the portal. The trunk of the World Tree splits to become the Vision Serpent, whose gullet is the path taken by the ancestral dead and the gods of the Otherworld when they commune with the king as the forces of nature and destiny.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-61.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:4 The Maya Cosmos Venus as Eveningstar rising from the Underworld in its first appearance after superior conjunction]]

Once brought into the world of humanity, these Otherworld beings could be materialized in ritual objects, in features of the landscape, or in the actual body of a human performer.[62] Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument of this materialization.[63] The ritual of communication was performed on the pyramids and in the plazas of the Maya cities, which replicated in symbolic form the sacred landscape generated by the gods at creation.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-62.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:5 A forest of tree-stones at Copan]]

The names for various parts of the Maya cityscape reinforced this symbolism. The slab-shaped monuments they carved with the images of kings were called te-tun, “tree-stone.” Plazas filled with these tree-stones I then represented the earth covered by a tropical forest (Fig. 2:5). The Maya word for temple was yotot (“his house”[64]) or ch’ul na, “holy edifice.” The doors of such buildings were formed to represent the mouth of a monster (Fig. 2:6) in echo of the Maya phrase for door—“mouth of the house” (ti yotot).

Pyramids and temples were often decorated with images of Witz Monsters[65] (Fig. 2:7) to define them as sacred mountains (witz[66] is the Mayan word for “mountain” or “hill). In this metaphor, the door of the temple is also the cave leading into the heart of the mountain. Inside the sanctum of the cave sat the portal, depicted as the skeletal Maw of the Otherworld. The royal mountain thus contained the cave that formed part of the path that led to the supernatural world. Within this cave grew the Tree of the World marking the center, the place of the portal,[67] in replication of the great ceiba trees that often grow from the entrances of caves in the natural world. A group of temples set together on a platform represented a mountain range towering over the forest of tree-stones in the plazas below. The architecture of ritual space thus replicated the features of sacred geography—the forest, the mountain, and the cave.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-63.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:6 Doorway Sculpture from Temple 1 at Tabasquena, Campeche]]

These same metaphors were also used by patriarchs and shamans in the humble settings of the village. Today, Yucatecan village shamans make their models of the natural world out of green saplings and corn stalks and set them up in the middle of fields, at the mouths of caves, or at the bases of natural hills.[68] Maya peasants throughout the region similarly decorate their altars and images with flowers, leaves, pine boughs, and other living links to surrounding nature. The remarkable correspondences between modern peasant shamanistic practices and ancient royal practices suggest that the ancestral shamans of the peasants, presumably also villagers, carried out modest versions of the noble ceremonies. Nevertheless, these humble rituals activated the sacred energies just as effectively as their counterparts in the great urban centers.[69]

So powerful were the effects of these rituals that the objects, people, buildings, and places in the landscape in which the supernatural materialized accumulated energy and became more sacred with repeated use.[70] Thus, as kings built and rebuilt temples on the same spot over centuries, the sanctums within them became ever more sacred. The devotion and ecstasy of successive divine ahauob sacrificing within those sanctums rendered the membrane between this world and the Otherworld ever more thin and pliable. The ancestors and the gods passed through such portals into the living monarch with increasing facility. To enhance this effect, generations of kings replicated the iconography and sculptural programs of early buildings through successive temples built over the same nexus.[71]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-64.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:7 Witz Monster Masks on the Southwest Corner of Temple 22 at Copan]]

The result was a layered pattern of power points particular to each Maya royal capital, a dynamic pattern that was both conserved and elaborated upon by successive rulers. On the larger scale, dynastic histories affected the sacred geography that had been created by the gods. As kings and nobles built temples to consolidate their power, and as king and commoner buried their dead in the houses they built, human action both added to and shifted the great magnetic centers of supernatural power that dotted the landscape. Sacred geography was affected as much by the unfolding of human history as by the intrinsic structure of the cosmos. But of course, for the Maya these were connected aspects of the same basic forces of nature.

The strategies of political competition were conceived and executed within this matrix of sacred power. Ritual, war, trade, marriage, accession, and other social activities were more likely to succeed if they were conducted at the proper place and time. Specialists in the complex patterns of time and in the movements of the heavens, like Western astrologers, kept track of the movements of the stars and planets to discover when it was favorable to proceed. As the Maya exploited the patterns of power in time and space, they used ritual to control the dangerous and powerful energies they released. There were also rituals which contained the accumulated power of objects, people, and places when they were no longer in active use.[72] And conversely, when the community became convinced that the power was gone from their city and ruling dynasts, they just walked away.

The Maya described the inhabitants of their world, both human and superhuman, in elaborate and powerful stories. These myths, like those in the Bible, not only described but also explained the nature of those beings and their relationships. Because the Maya wrote primarily upon perishable paper, our understanding of their literature and of the many forms such stories must have taken is severely limited. There is one example, however, of a Maya Bible,[73] a compilation of stories that explains the essence of living experience. It is called the Book of Council or the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya[74] people.

Fragmentary versions of these stories and others were written down by Maya literate both in their own script and that of their new masters, the Spanish. Many of these accounts were requested by the Spanish and incorporated into their official documents, but some made their way into carefully guarded caches of books saved by the Maya from the great burning. Other versions were transferred orally from generation to generation of living Maya, making it possible for modern scholars to record them. In fact, one version or another of the creation stories related in the Popol Vuh are found in all periods of Maya history: on the monuments of Preclassic cities like Izapa and Cerros,[75] on Classic period pottery and public art, in documents from the Colonial period, and in the modern oral tradition. There can be no doubt that the creation mythology of the ancient Maya later inspired the genesis stories of the Popol Vuh and that the Precolumbian versions of these stories described the shared world view which linked farmer and king together into a unified society.

The Heroes of Maya myth were twins. In the seventeenth-century Popol Vuh myth, they were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The names most securely associated with them in the Classic period are Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In the version of the myth preserved in the Popol Vuh, these twins were the offspring of an older set of twins who had been called to Xibalba for making too much noise playing the ballgame. Named Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu,[76] these older twins were tricked by the Lords of Death, defeated, and sacrificed. The Lords of Death buried one twin under the ballcourt in Xibalba and hung the skull of the other in a gourd tree as a warning to others so ill advised as to offend the powerful Xibalbans. Found by the daughter of a Lord of Death, the skull impregnated her by spitting in her hand. Frightened by her enraged father, the girl fled Xibalba to the Middleworld, where she wandered until she found the grandmother of the dead twins. The grandmother sheltered her and eventually she gave birth to a new set of twins, named Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

After many adventures, these twins found the ballgame gear their grandmother had hidden after the death of their forebears. The two became great ballplayers and in their turn disturbed the Xibalbans who lived in the Underworld just under the ballcourt. They too were called to Xibalba to account from their unseemly behavior, but unlike the first set of twins, they outwitted the Lords of Death and survived a series of trials designed to defeat them. On the first night they were put in the Dark House and given a torch and two cigars and told to keep them lit all night. They tricked the Lords of Death by putting fireflies at the tips of their cigars and passing a macaw’s tail off as the glow of the torch.

The following day the twins played ball with the lords and allowed themselves to lose. They had till morning to come up with the four bowls of flowers that were bet on the outcome. Thinking to distract Hunahpu and Xbalanque from finding a solution to this problem, the lords had put the twins in Razor House, a place full of stone blades which were constantly looking for something to cut. The twins got the blades to stop moving by promising them the flesh of animals. This accomplished, they sent leaf-cutting ants to the gardens of the Lords of Death to bring back the bowls of flowers. In the morning the lords were enraged to find that they had been paid with their own blossoms.

The twins continued to play ball with the Lords of Death by day and allow themselves to be tested by night. They survived the Cold House, which was full of freezing wind and hail; Jaguar House, a place filled with hungry jaguars; Fire House, a place filled with raging flames; and a house filled with shrieking bats which they escaped by spending the night curled up inside their blowguns.

They did not escape the Bat House completely unscathed, however. As morning approached and the bats grew quiet, Hunahpu peeked out of the muzzle of his blowgun for a look around. Just at that moment a large bat swooped down and knocked off his head, which rolled onto the Xibalban ballcourt. Xbalanque, however, managed to replace the head with a squash, which he carved to resemble his brother’s face.

In the ballgame the next day, the Xibalbans used the brother’s severed head as the ball, but Xbalanque was ready for their tricks. He kicked his brother’s head into the high grass at the side of the court. Out of the grass jumped a rabbit who bounced away like a ball, taking the Xibalbans with him. Xbalanque retrieved his brother’s head, replaced it on his body, and put the squash in its place. He yelled at the Xibalbans that he had found the lost ball and, when play resumed, the squash splattered into bits on the court. The Lords of Death were furious when they realized they had been outsmarted once again.

As a last resort the Lords of Death decided to burn Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Learning of this, the twins instructed two seers, Xulu and Pacam, telling them what they should say when the lords asked for advice in disposing of their remains. The twins cheerfully accepted an invitation to see the great stone fire pit where the Xibalbans were brewing an alcoholic beverage. When challenged to a game of jumping over the pit, they simply jumped in.

Thinking they had won, the lords followed the advice of the two seers and ground the twins’ bones, casting the powder into the river. After five days Hunahpu and Xbalanque were resurrected with the faces of catfish. On the following day they took on human form again, put on the guise of vagabond actors, and began to perform miraculous dances. Hearing of these remarkable new performers, the Lords of Death invited them to demonstrate their skills at court.

The lords were most anxious to see the remarkable dance of sacrifice in which one twin decapitated and dismembered the other. Commanded to perform, Xbalanque dismembered his brother and then brought him back to life. The Lords of Death were overwhelmed and begged to have it done to themselves. The Hero Twins gladly acquiesced, but then they did not bring the lords back to life. Thus was death outwitted and hope brought to humankind. A soul called to Xibalba in death goes with the hope that it too will outwit the Lords of Death, to emerge, like the Hero Twins, in triumph and become venerated as an ancestor.

Xibalba, like the world of humanity, contained many kinds of beings, some of which were found in both worlds and some of which were unique to one or the other.[77] The myth of the Heroes suggests, however, that while people could enter Xibalba, the Lords of Death could not visit the Middleworld except in their nonphysical manifestations—rot, disease, and death. They could not rule as sentient beings here. It was thus the human form of godhood that spanned the worlds, rather than the supernatural form, and that human form was ultimately the king. He was the earthly manifestation of the Hero Twins and he reenacted their triumph over death through ritual.

Maya artists often represented Xibalba as being underground,[78] but they also pictured it underwater with its denizens upside down relative to the human world. In at least one version (Fig. 2:4), Xibalbans lived foot to foot with humans, exactly as if they were mirror people. Xibalba was, furthermore, not always underfoot, for at night it circulated to take its place above in the night sky. The Maya saw stars and constellations, the planets and the moon, as living beings who interacted with the cycles, natural and social, of the Middleworld. To the ancient Maya the world of the stars was as alive as the world of humankind. Astronomical observation was not a matter of simple scientific curiosity, but a source of vital knowledge about Xibalba and its powers. Sky patterns reflected the actions and interactions of those gods, spirits, and ancestors with the living beings of the Middleworld. Both king and commoner adjusted their living to those patterns or suffered the consequences.

From the myth of the Hero Twins came three great axioms that appear repeatedly in the imagery of Classic Maya religion and politics. First, the Hero of the Maya vision did not overpower his enemies: He outwitted them. In the myth, the Twins tricked the Lords of Death into submitting to sacrifice. Secondly, resurrection and rebirth came through sacrifice—especially death by decapitation. The Hero Twins were conceived when the severed head of their father spit into the hand of their mother. They defeated death by submitting to decapitation and sacrifice. Finally, the place of confrontation and communication was the ballcourt. The ballgame, as we shall see in later chapters, was the arena in which life and death, victory and defeat, rebirth and triumph played out their consequences.

The rules and scoring of the bailgame remain elusive to us, but we have images of Classic people in play.[79] The ball was made of solid latex rubber shaped into a sphere slightly larger than a modern basketball. Players wore heavy padding called yokes around their waist to protect them from the bruising hardness of the ball. They also wore heavy padding on one knee and forearm to protect themselves from injury as they hit the ball or threw themselves under the flight of the ball. In bailgame scenes, players are often shown on one knee as they prepare to return the ball, and there are several examples where they have thrown themselves to the ground to prevent it from hitting the floor.

The floor of the ballcourt was usually I-shaped, but the side walls could vary considerably, although the Classic Maya generally preferred slanted walls. Markers of various sorts—stone circles at Chichen Itza, macaw heads at Copan—were mounted high on the side walls, although we do not know if they were used in scoring the play. The center ally of the I-shape usually had three round markers about a meter in diameter distributed down its center line. These markers depict one of three kinds of scenes: bound captives, play between historical people, or play between the Hero Twins and the Lords of Death. While we do not know the rules, the iconography and archaeology associated with ballcourts clearly associate them with captive sacrifice and political pomp and circumstance.

The Shape of Time

As this page is written, our world approaches what we conceive of as two great benchmarks in time—great chronological nodes when we contemplate the symmetries of history and evaluate the progress of our species as a social organism. The year 1992 will mark the five-hundredth year since Columbus “discovered” the Americas and began the process of making us into a global community aware of who and what we are. The second great anniversary will be celebrated in the Christian world, where most of us alive now will see the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, known among non-Christian peoples as the “common era.” The first millennium brought expectations of Christ’s return—the second sees us as a species standing on the edge of what could be a great adventure into the cosmos or the extinction of all people everywhere.

On both of these days, we will pause to consider where we have been, what we have done, and what the future may have in store for us. Yet neither of these days has any intrinsic magic of its own. The millennium, for example, will turn on the first day of the month January, which happens to fall on a Sunday. The moon will be in its last quarter, Venus will be sixty days after its maximum distance from the sun as Morningstar, and we will be eleven days past the winter solstice. It will also be seven days after Christmas and twenty-live days after the 58^th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. That year will see the 224^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

We give meaning to days like this because they are the benchmarks we use to perceive that linear time has passed. By observing them we give form to the flow of time and shape to the conceptions of origins and happenings that we call history.

Time for the Maya was no different. They too devised ways of recording the passage of time. Like us, they named days in many different ways and acknowledged linkages between days and events. In this way they attempted to understand the order underlying human affairs and the cycles of the living cosmos. We count with our fingers and base our numbers on units of ten. The Maya counted with the full person, both fingers and toes, and based their system on units of twenty. The symmetries generated by these two number systems are different, but their purposes are the same. We mark the passage of decades, centuries, and millennia; they marked the passage of 20-year cycles, which they called katuns, and 400-year cycles (20x20 years), called baktuns.

In our reckoning of the solar year, we use fractions, calculating that a full year is 365.25 days. Yet how is it possible to make a quarter day? It can’t be done—so instead we accumulate these quarters until we have a full day and add that day every four years to make a leap year. The Maya did not make life so complicated. Their fundamental unit was the whole day with its two halves—night and day.[80] They never altered the endless replacement of one day by the next and any fractions of years left over were simply ignored.

This endless succession of time was given order by grouping days into ever-repeating cycles ranging from the small to the inconceivably huge. Some of these cycles came from the observation of the natural world, for example, the cyclic movements of the moon, the planets, and the constellations. Others derived from the symmetries intrinsic to the numbers themselves, for example, the practice of counting in twenties. Other numbers and their repetitions were sacred and had magical properties.

This succession of days, like locations in space, were conceived as falling within a structure divided into quadrants, each with its appropriate direction and color. When the Spanish arrived, the Maya used this directional structure in their New Year’s ceremonies. Their ancient forebears used this four-part structure differently: They divided the progression of time into quadrants of 819 days each. In the inscriptions recording this cycle, they said that God K,[81] a small manikin-like god who was called Kawil (see the Glossary of Gods), ruled the appropriate direction during that quadrant of time. There were four such gods, each characterized by a long-nosed face, a mirror in the forehead, a smoking celt piercing the mirror, and often a serpent foot. In this context, each of the four was distinguished by his color: the red Kawil of the east, the white Kawil of the north, the black Kawil of the west, and the yellow Kawil of the south. The exact reason for choosing 819 days as the base of this cycle is not known, but the sum is the result of 7x9X 13, all numbers sacred to the Maya.[82]

These quadrants provided one kind of structure to time—one that directly reflected their directional and color organization of space. Yet each whole day also fell into many other cycles, both smaller and larger. The name and character of a day were derived from the combination of positions it occupied in these many different calendric cycles. The most important of these was the 260-day cycle, called a sacred round or tzolkin by modern scholars (Fig. 2:8). Composed of thirteen numbers consecutively combining with twenty day names, this cycle was shared by all the peoples of Mesoamerica. The tzolkin begins with the number 1 combined with the day name Imix, and proceeds to 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and 4 Kan. After thirteen days the number cycle returns back to one. At this point, because there are more names than numbers, 13 Ben is followed by 1 lx and so on. When we pass the 260^th permutation of number and day name, 13 Ahau, we have once again arrived at the first day, 1 Imix. One easy way to visualize how the tzolkin works is to use letters for the day names so that the first twenty-five days fall in the following pattern: 1 A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6F, 7G, 8H, 91, 10J, UK, 12L, 13M, IN, 20, 3P, 4Q, 5R, 6S, 7T, 8A, 9B, IOC, 1 ID, 12E. It takes 260 days for the combination 1A to recur. The tzolkin continues to repeat throughout eternity—one day following the other just as for us Monday follows Sunday every seven days forever.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-65.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:8]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-66.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:9 The Calendar Round and How It Worked (after National Geographic, December 1975)]]

A second cycle used by the ancient Maya consists of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days, with five days left over at the end of the year. This short five-day month is called Uayeb, “the resting or sleep”[83] of the year (Fig. 2:9). Called both a haab and a vague year by modern scholars, this cycle mimics the solar year, but like the 260-day cycle, it is a count of whole days, one following the other in endless progression without any adjustment to the fractional remainder of the true solar year.

Each of these months had a name as do our own. Any day was named by a combination of its numerical position within the month and the name of the month itself; so, for example, the fifth day of the first month was called 5 Pop. The Maya conceived, however, that the last day of any month could also be thought of as the time that the following month was set in place. They could record this last day as the “end of” the current month, but the ancient Maya preferred to call it the “seating” (chum) of the upcoming month. In this haab cycle, the last day of the year would tall on “the seating of Pop” (0 Pop) and New Year’s would be on 1 Pop. Conventionally, modern scholars transcribe this seating day into Arabic notation as 0, giving the impression to many beginners that the days of a Maya month were numbered 0 to 19. This impression is incorrect: they were numbered 1 to 19 or (during five-day months) 1 to 4, making the final day the seating of the following month.

The famous 52-year cycle of the Mesoamerican calendric system reflects the combination of the name of a day in the 260-day tzolkin with its name in the 365-day haab—for example, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. The combination of these two names recurs every 18,980 (52x365) days. In the Maya system, this 52-year cycle is called a Calendar Round.

In addition to the three cycles discussed above, each day was also ruled by one of the Nine Lords of the Night, who succeeded each other in endless progression like our days of the week. The Maya also kept track of the age of the moon on each particular day and of where each day fell in the cycles of Venus and the other planets. All of these factors provided the detailed combination of cyclic information that gave each day its personality in time.

The Maya also reckoned each day in an era-based calendar that counted whole days accumulated since day zero, which they apparently conceived of as the beginning of the current manifestation of the cosmos, the fourth version of creation to exist.[84] Modern scholars call this era-based calendar the Long Count. Its basic unit was a 360-day year, which the Maya called a tun or “stone” because they marked the end of each of these years by setting a stone in the ground.[85] Each of these tuns consisted of eighteen months of twenty days. The months were called uinic (after the Maya word for “human being,” since humans had twenty fingers and toes)[86] and the days kin. Twenty tuns composed a katun, 400 made a baktun, 8,000 made a pictun, and 160,000 made a calabtun—and so on, in multiples of twenty, toward infinity. Since we have no equivalent cycles in our own calendar, we use the Maya words as the English names for the various periods in this calendar.[87]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-67.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:10 Maya Numbers and How They Work in the Calendar]]

To write the number of years that had accumulated since the base date, the Maya used a place-notation system much like ours. Instead of placing their highest numbers on the left and their lowest numbers on the right, however, they placed their highest numbers at the top of a column and their lowest at the bottom, and read them in that order. While we need ten signs to write our numbers, the Maya needed only three: a dot for one, a bar for five, and one of a number of signs for zero (Fig. 2:10). A single day was written with a dot, four days with four dots, six with a dot and bar, nineteen with three bars and four dots, and so on. To write the number twenty, they put a zero sign in the lowest position and a dot in the next one above it. Since there are only 360 days in this kind of year, there could never be a number larger than seventeen in the month position. Eighteen months was written as one year, no months, no days.

In the Maya conception, the zero day of this era-based calendar fell on 13.0.0.0.0[88] of the Long Count, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku of the Calendar Round, and on a day when the ninth Lord of the Night was ruling (Fig. 2:11). Once these day names had been juxtaposed in this way, the calendar was set for all eternity. All the simultaneous cycles that constituted time would now simply click forward one day at a time. The next day was 13.0.0.0.1 5 Imix 9 Cumku, with the first Lord of the Night ruling; followed by 13.0.0.0.2 6 Ik 10 Cumku, second Lord of the Night; and 13.0.0.0.3 7 Akbal 11 Cumku, third Lord of the Night. In our calendar, their zero day corresponds to August 11, 3114 b.C.[89]

Above we talked of the turning of the millennium as one of our own milestones in time. In the near future Maya time also approaches one of its great benchmarks. December 23, 2012, will be 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, the day when the 13 baktuns will end and the Long Count cycles return to the symmetry of the beginning. The Maya, however, did not conceive this to be the end of this creation, as many have suggested. Pacal, the great king of Palenque, predicted in his inscriptions that the eightieth Calendar Round anniversary of his accession will be celebrated eight days after the first eight-thousand-year cycle in the Maya calendar ends. In our time system, this cycle will end on October 15, 4772.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-68.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:11]]

Just as we can transcribe the great milestones of their time into our system, so can we express the day on which our second millennium falls in their calendar system. January 1, 2000, will fall on 9 Ahau in the 260-day Sacred Round and on the eighth day of Kankin in the 365-day haab. The Calendar Round designation is 9 Ahau 8 Kankin, which will be ruled by the third Lord of the Night. On that day, the moon will be 25 days old. Venus will be 133 days after inferior conjunction; and Jupiter will be 69 days, and Saturn 51 days, after opposition to the sun. It will be 2 years, 50 days after the beginning of the 2,282^nd quadrant of the 819-day count in which the white God K will rule the north sky. And finally, that day will fall on the 1,867,260^th day since the Maya zero date, expressed in the Maya Long Count as 12.19.6.15.0.

Our millennium day, of course, had no particular importance to the ancient Maya: Yet they had many such central and transitional days in their own cycles of time and they celebrated them with no less enthusiasm than we celebrate Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July. For the Maya, however, what happened on such days was not merely a remembrance of days past. It was an actual reiteration of the essential events that had happened, continued to happen, and would always happen on those days. Just as we will contemplate both our past and our hopes for the future on January 1, A.D. 2000, so the Maya regularly contemplated their own history and future potential on the important days of their calendar. For the Maya, history affected the structure of time just as ritual affected the nature of matter.

Political strategies and social events had to be calculated within a complex geography of sacred time, just as they were in sacred space. It was vitally important to know not just the character of a day in the major cycles of the tzolkin and haab, but its position in all of the permutations of cyclical time they measured. Certain days were important because of their relationship to Xibalba and the cosmos. The Maya reckoned this kind of importance with their own form of numerology.[90] The four surviving Maya books[91] describe which gods do what actions on different days in the many permutations of the Maya calendar. These patterns of divine action are far more complex than the relatively simple patterns we ascribe to the planets in Western astrology. For the Maya, on any given day hundreds of gods were acting and the pattern of their actions and interactions affected and were effected by the shape of sacred time and space.[92]

Yet the relationship of the kings to this timescape was not passive. While it was true that some social events, like planting and harvesting, were regular and cyclic, the actions of important humans, their births and deaths, triumphs and defeats, their records as builders and leaders, did leave their individual marks on time. Days in the history of each kingdom took on sacredness derived from the dynasts who ruled. Kings legitimized their current actions by asserting that they reiterated ancestral history. Kingly actions were likened to godly actions and exceptions to the norms of legitimate descent were explained as the reenactment of mythological or legendary history. The Maya linked their actions to gods before, during, and after the present creation and to the history of the legendary first civilization of their world—the Olmec.[93] As history accumulated for each kingdom, particular dates were remembered and celebrated for their local importance, much as different independence days are celebrated by different countries in North America. Thus, the patterns of time, like those of the physical world, had form both on the cosmic and the human scale.

The Community of Human Beings

The Maya community was embedded in the matrix of this sacred space and time. Socially, the Maya people organized themselves into families that reckoned blood membership through males and marriage membership through females. This method of organizing kinship relationships is known as patrilineal descent. The principle of selecting a single inheritor of supreme authority in the family from each successive generation usually focused on the eldest male child. This is called primogeniture[94] and it is a principle underlying hierarchical family organization from ancient China to medieval Europe. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Maya families were large, and included several generations of people under one roof or within one household compound.

The principle of reckoning through the male line made it possible for extended families to combine into larger groups, called lineages, which acknowledged a common ancestor. The Maya further combined lineages sharing an even more distant common ancestor into clans. These clans could function as very big families as circumstances warranted, often crosscutting differences in wealth, prestige, and occupation.[95] Maya families still have such clan structure in some communities today.

Some patrilineal systems regarded families within clans to be equal in status, but the structure also lent itself to hierarchical organization. One particular family could successfully claim a higher status if it could prove that it was on the direct line of descent from the founding ancestor. This was done by demonstrating that direct descent had passed through only one member of each generation. Once primogeniture designated a single inheritor of the line in each generation, it was possible to claim that there was a single line of males stretching back to the beginning of the clan, and that all other member families were descendants of a second rank. Internal ranking could be quite complicated, depending as it did on the reckoning of relative distance or closeness to the central lines of males. The principle was essentially open-ended in this respect, and the logical extreme was the ranking of each individual in each family in a pyramid of people stretching back to the beginning. While most societies, including the Maya, quit far short of this extreme, our point is that family ties were a flexible and powerful means of establishing social hierarchy.

The Maya institution of kingship was also based on the principle of inheritance of the line by a single male individual within any one generation leading back to a founding ancestor.[96] Furthermore, families and clans were ranked by their distance or nearness to the central descent line manifested in the king. Political power based on family allegiance may appear to be relatively simple compared to our own social-classes system, but it effectively integrated states composed of tens of thousands of people.[97]

Not surprisingly, the Maya applied the principle of primogeniture and the reckoning of the central line to other important social statuses in addition to the kingship. At Copan, for example, a lineage house was excavated whose patriarchs specialized in the arts of writing.[98] Their status as scribes gave the family sufficient prestige to warrant their special acknowledgment by the royal house of Copan. In the west along the Usumacinta river, members of another noble rank, cahalob,[99] provided administrators for the king and shared many of the prerogatives of the ahauob. The cahal rank was also inherited through family lines. Archaeology, text translation, and art historical interpretation give us glimmerings of many other types of kinship-based statuses. This principle of inherited status permeated the entire society and affirmed the legitimacy and prerogatives of the most exalted, as well as the most humble, of society’s F members.

Recent archaeology at Copan gives us a good example of the way in which the humble and the well-off maintained their integrity, even when living side by side. The residential compounds of kin groups have been classified by size and complexity into four ranks, ranging from Type 1, the lowest, to Type 4, the highest. Group 9N-8, also known as the Scribe’s Compound, is a Type 4 site—a great sprawling compound with multiple courtyards and many residential buildings. Next to it sits a Type 1, the lowest rank—the residence of a family we would call, in our system, low-middle or upper-lower class. Compared to its high-status neighbor, the Type 1 compound is humble, consisting of only a single, small courtyard, surrounded by two houses and kitchen buildings. The houses have stone walls, but the interior rooms are small, even by comparison to Copan’s tradition of tiny interiors. As humble as the Type 1 site was, excavations show that the lineage living there held its own against the neighboring lineage, even as the higher-ranked group expanded into more and more plaza compounds built as the family grew in size. Throughout its history, the lower-ranked compound remained spatially and, we deduce, socially independent. Within the social system of the Maya, the rights and independence of the lower-ranked lineages were protected as vigorously as those of the exalted.[100]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-69.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 10]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-70.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 11
Fig. 2:12]]

Public monuments erected by the Maya king during the Classic period emphasize not only his role as shaman, but also his role as family patriarch. A large percentage of the texts on stelae focus on his genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. Not only were statements of his parentage regularly included in his name phrase, but pictorial records of all sorts show the parents of the king observing the actions of their offspring, even after these parents had died (Fig. 2:12).

The titles of kings also included their numerical position in a line of succession reckoned from the founders of their lineages. These founders were usually real historical persons, but they could also be supernaturals.[101] In the realm of Copan, however, we see another type of situation. There the small population center of Rid Amarillo was governed by a group of lords belonging to a lineage who claimed descent not from the founding ancestor of the high king but from a local founder.[102] The existence of this state of affairs confirms that many subordinate lineages did not bear a real kinship status to the royal line and hence constituted allied vassals rather than relatives of inferior status. Nevertheless, the overriding metaphor of kingly authority was kinship. Kings at Copan and elsewhere used the regalia and ritual of their office to claim identity with the mythical ancestral gods of the Maya. In this way they asserted ultimate kinship authority over all of their subjects, including such subordinates as the Rio Amarillo lords.

Problems with legitimate descent, such as the lack of a male heir or the death of one in war, were solved in extraordinarily creative ways. Some of the most innovative programs in the sculpture and architecture at Yaxchilan and Palenque were erected to rationalize such divergences from the prescribed pattern of descent, problems that are discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. So critical was the undisputed passage of authority at the death of a king that the designation of the heir became an important public festival cycle, with magical rituals spreading over a period of a year or more. At the royal capital of Bonampak on the great Usumacinta River, exquisite polychrome murals show that these rites included both the public display of the heir and his transformation into a special person through the sacrifice of captives taken for that purpose.[103]

The sculptural record also shows the shamanistic nature of Maya / kingship, central to the Classic conception of the cosmos, by depicting the divine ahau as a conductor of ritual. From the very beginning, royal monuments, such as the miniature Hauberg Stela and the San Diego cliff carving looming high above some forgotten kingdom, have depicted kings as manipulators of the supernatural domain (Fig. 2:13). Both these sculptures show a king with the supernaturals he has materialized by the ritual of shedding his blood. In the case of the Hauberg depiction, we know that this bloodletting preceded the protagonist’s accession to kingly office by fifty-two days.[104] This ritual was most likely a public affirmation of his ability to open a portal to the supernatural realm. Although the verb in both these monuments is “he let blood,” the Maya of these earlier times preferred to depict the materialization of the ancestor or god rather than the actual act of taking blood. There was a logical reason for this preference. By featuring the vision, rather than the sacrifice, the successful performance of the king as shaman could be documented publicly. Throughout the Classic period, Maya public art remained focused on the ritual performances of the king, whether these rituals were part of the regular festivals that punctuated Maya life, such as the calendrically timed ritual of period endings, or special celebrations triggered by dynastic events, such as marriages, births, or deaths.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-71.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:13]]

While the ritual lives of villagers and farmers were not portrayed on the public art of the ancient Maya, high-ranking nobles did have the privilege of erecting monuments. Some of these nobles erected monuments at the subsidiary sites they ruled on behalf of high kings, while others placed monuments within the courts or buildings of their own lineage compounds. These depictions take two forms: the noble acting with his king, and the noble acting alone as the protagonist. In the first type of composition, the noble can be easily distinguished from the king by his smaller size, his characteristic clothing, and his name phrases. In the second type, however, we would never know the actor was a noble, instead of a king, without being able to read the text (Fig. 2:14).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-72.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:14 Yaxchilan Lintel 39]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-73.jpg 70f][Lacanja Lintel 1]]

During the Classic period, the heart of Maya life was the ritual of bloodletting.[105] Giving the gift of blood from the body was an act of piety used in all of their rituals, from the births of children to the burial of the dead. This act could be as simple as an offering of a few drops of one’s blood, or as extreme as the mutilation of the different parts of the body to generate large flows of this precious fluid. Blood could be drawn from any part of the body, but the most sacred sources were the tongue for males and females, and the penis for males. Representations of the act carved on stelae depict participants drawing finger-thick ropes through the wounds to guide the flow of blood down onto paper. Men with perforated genitals would whirl in a kind of dervish dance that drew the blood out onto long paper and cloth streamers tied to their wounded members. The aim of these great cathartic rituals was the vision quest, the opening of a portal into the Otherworld through which gods and the ancestors could be enticed so that the beings of this world could commune with them. The Maya thought of this process as giving “birth” to the god or ancestor, enabling it to take physical form in this plane of existence. The vision quest was the central act of the Maya world.

The practice of personal bloodletting took place not only in the temples of the mighty but at altars in the humble village as well. This fact is witnessed to by the presence of obsidian, one of the main implements of the ritual, at many ancient village sites. Obsidian is volcanic glass spewed forth from the towering fire mountains in highland regions of the Maya country. Skilled craftsmen made long thin, razor-sharp blades of the black glass, and such blades are found in virtually every lowland community context of the Maya—albeit in small quantities outside of great cities or the manufacturing towns near the natural sources of the stone. Obsidian was prized for many reasons—not only for its rarity, but for its unsurpassed ability to make clean, quick wounds. No doubt obsidian blades were used for a wide variety of cutting tasks once their main function as bloodletters was at an end, but for this primary ritual use, obsidian was to Maya propitiation of the divine what wine and wafers are to the Christian communion. What the great kings did with obsidian on behalf of all, the farmer did on behalf of his family. To be sure, the gift of obsidian from a king to his subject in return for labor, tribute, and devotion was a kind of subtle coercion. We can say this in light of the fact that the king held a virtual monopoly over the supply of obsidian and chose who was to receive it and who not. But this gift was also an affirmation of a common covenant with the divine and a common means of sustaining this covenant.[106]

The king upheld his part in this divine covenant through his enactment of many rituals of power performed for his people. Indeed he was power, power made material, its primary instrument. On public monuments, the oldest and most frequent manner in which the king was displayed was in the guise of the World Tree. Its trunk and branches were depicted on the apron covering his loins, and the Doubled-headed Serpent Bar that entwined in its branches was held in his arms. The Principal Bird Deity (see the Glossary of Gods) at its summit was rendered as his headdress (Fig. 2:15). This Tree was the conduit of communication between the supernatural world and the human world: The souls of the dead fell into Xibalba along its path; the daily journeys of the sun, moon, planets, and stars followed its trunk. The Vision Serpent symbolizing communion with the world of the ancestors and the gods emerged into our world along it. The king was this axis and pivot made flesh. He was the Tree of Life.

For the Maya, trees constituted the ambient living environment, the material from which they fashioned homes and tools, the source of many foods, medicines, dyes, and vital commodities such as paper. They provided the fuel for cooking fires and the soil-enriching ash that came from the cutting and burning of the forest. Trees were the source of shade in the courtyards and public places of villages and cities, and the home of the teeming life of the forest. It was natural that the Maya would choose this central metaphor for human power. Like other trees, the king was at once the ambient source of life and the material from which humans constructed it. Together, the kings of the Maya realms comprised a forest of sustaining human World Trees within the natural forested landscape of the Maya world.

The king sustained his people, but he also required much from them in the way of service. The regularities of the Maya calendar and the celebration of local history generated endless rounds of feasts and festivals.[107] The rich ceremonial life of the great public centers, reflected in the smaller towns and villages surrounding them, drew deeply upon the natural and human resources of the Maya. The king and his court commanded the skilled and unskilled labor of many craftsmen and commoners, whose basic needs had to be met by an even larger population of farmers, hunters, and fishermen. It is hard for us to imagine just how much patience, skill, and effort went into the creation of the elaborately decorated objects and buildings used by the king in his performance of ritual. A single small jade F carving must have taken a craftsman months to complete, and we can document the fact[108] that great temples took many years of skilled work by construction specialists, carvers, plasterers, and painters as well as common laborers.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-74.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:15 The Maya King dressed as the World Tree]]

The tribute which the community gave to the royal court to finance such work was no doubt a real burden, but not necessarily a severe hardship. In times of general prosperity, which existed for most of Classical Maya history, the common folk enjoyed ready access to the basic necessities of life, both practical and spiritual. In times of hardship and privation, the commoners and nobles all suffered alike. The ancient Maya view of the world mandated serious and contractual obligations binding the king and his nobility to the common people. Incompetence or exploitation of villagers by the king invited catastrophic shifts in allegiance to neighboring kings, or simple migration into friendlier territory.[109] Such severe exploitation was a ruler’s last desperate resort, not a routine policy. The king and his elite lived well, they enjoyed the most favored loods, the most pleasant home sites, the finer quality of clothing.[110] But the great public displays of the Maya were not designed just to exhibit the personal wealth of the king. They also exhibited the community’s property entrusted to the king, fashioned by the hard work and inspiration of many people, and ignited into luminous power by their most prized possession, the king himself.

The practical arrangements of economic matters were never documented in the public record of ancient Maya communities. However, we can surmise that the major economic institution was the public fair[111] that accompanied every major festival in centers great and small. 1 hese public fairs were, along with daily markets in the major towns and cities, the context in which the Maya carried out their business transactions. Even as late as this century, the yearly festival of the Señor de Escupu/as, Christ in the Sepulcher, turns a sleepy little town near the ancient center of Copán into a teeming bazaar of tens of thousands of Maya from all over that part of their country. In a single week at that festival, British merchants from neighboring Belize carried out the better part of their annual indigo trade with the Maya.

These festivals were a major part of Maya public life throughout their history. They had the practical advantage of being held on days in the calendar cycles known to everyone in the region, and were advertised far and wide by royal invitation. Many of them were occasions for visits by nobles and royalty of one kingdom to the other.[112] In the fairs which accompanied the festivals, and in the market towns in border areas between kingdoms, the Maya merchants and craftsmen transacted business under the watchful eyes of local magistrates and lords who judged contractual disputes and kept the peace of the market.[113] Family patriarchs also kept watch over merchants within their kin group and had to report directly to the king if something was amiss. Merchants calculated exchange contracts in the dirt, using pebbles and sticks to write out their numbers,[114] and honored such agreements verbally—without legal documents.[115]

The ancient Maya used various precious commodities for money— carved and polished greenstone beads, beads of red spiny oyster shell, cacao beans, lengths of cotton cloth, and measures of sea salt.[116] Such currencies were in wide demand throughout the Mesoamerican world.[117] Although currencies were probably fixed in value by the king and court within particular realms, merchants working in the uncontrolled lands between kingdoms could speculate on marginal differences in value and scarcities.[118] Even the Maya had their arbitragers.

Everyone used such money, and everyone participated in the markets and tairs. Farmers had the option of bartering for goods or turning part of their maize crop into currency for important social transactions,[119] such as marriages, christenings, funerals, and house-building parties. All such activities were expensive and required feasts and gifts. Maya men and women wore the hard currencies, jade and shell, as jewelry to display the hard work and enterprise of their families. Farmers might use money to pay tribute to their rulers, but usually they preferred to provide labor on building projects in the urban centers or service on the farms of their kings and lords. These activities enabled them to participate directly in sustaining the lives of those who sustained the prosperity of the community at large. The economy of every kingdom was administered strategically by the king and court, through both the control of the prices of Maya currencies and commodities and the management of contractual disputes and fraud in the fairs and markets.

Merchants operating beyond the borders of the kingdom were thought of euphemistically as state ambassadors bearing “gifts” to royal neighbors who acknowledged these with reciprocal “gifts.”[120] Such royal business was so economically vital that the merchants involved in it were high nobles and even members of the royal household. Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, high merchants traveled to the great festivals of neighbors and distant states that controlled especially strategic goods.

The currencies used by the Maya—jade, obsidian, red spiny oyster shell, cloth, salt, and especially chocolate beans (cacao)—were prized beyond their territories and traded to all of the civilized peoples of the Mesoamerican world. In turn, different peoples produced and controlled different commodities, and traded regularly over long distances to obtain those that were outside their political domains. International relations thus were of central importance to the economic well-being of every state. The Maya king carried the burden of gathering the goods within his realm, exchanging them over long distances, and distributing the cherished goods received in return to his lords and allies. These in turn distributed the goods to their constituents in the form of gifts or exchanges. In this way, a portion of these commodities eventually filtered down into the general everyday transactions of the common folk.

In addition to managing the distribution of goods produced by his people, a Maya king also implemented agricultural work programs in the low-lying swamplands and river margins found in many parts of Maya country. In these regions, the land was not easily worked by individuals and families in a village farming community. Excavating the muck at the I bottom of the swamps to create a system of raised fields and canals took organization of time and labor. The result was worth the effort: Fields were adjacent to steady supplies of water, and the canals became home to teeming schools of fish sustained by waterlilies and other evaporationretarding plants.[121] The bottom mud became loaded with nutrients from fish excretions, thus providing rich fertilizer for the fields. It was a delicate and difficult system to maintain, but one with the prospect of enormous productivity, resulting in two or three crops a year.

So important was such swamp and river-edge agriculture to the Maya state that the kings adopted waterlilies as a primary metaphor of royal power. Nobles were, literally, Ah Nab “Waterlily People.” The heartland of Maya country is swampland, and it is more than likely that the kingdoms of the high forest, as well as the wetlands of the Peten, of the Lacandon Forest, and of northern Belize, were the greatest producers of the strategic agricultural commodities, cacao and cotton, in all of the Mesoamerican world. In these regions, the vast swamps surrounding Maya centers supported large systems of raised fields. Most of these were owned and maintained by patrilineages, but a proportion (perhaps significant in size) were maintained as royal farms through tribute labor. Both these farmers and their communities benefited in turn from the resulting prosperity of the realms. Maya kings were not only central to the economic well-being of their own constituencies. They were essential to the economic well-being of their trade partners in other parts of Mesoamerica, who depended upon them for the reliable supply of their currencies.

The understanding of currency in Mesoamerica did not parallel ours in every sense. Currency had value as a unit of economic exchange, it is true; but it also symbolized other values, far removed from the world of economics. A piece of red spondylus shell could buy something, but the same shell bead worn over the loins of a girl child represented her childhood and, when cut off in her baptism, displayed her newfound social maturity. Whole, the shell carried hematite in a dedication offering that brought the gods and sacred energy to reside in a newly built temple. A jade bead could be exchanged for some other commodity, but when placed in the mouth of a beloved grandparent who had passed on into death, it gave sustenance for the journey to Xibalba. Smeared with blue bitumen and human blood, it was cast by a shaman to divine the patterns of the sacred world and time. Carved with imagery, both the spondylus shell and the jade could be worn by a king to convey his wealth or to focus supernatural power in ritual. For the Maya things did not have an intrinsic meaning in themselves. Rather, meaning was acquired through the context of use and the way people shaped materials to function in their everyday lives and in the public life of the community.

For the Maya all things were alive and had meaning, but not everyone in Maya society was fully literate in all the levels of meaning. The farmer offering a gourd bowl of water and white corn gruel to the spirits of his field was less knowledgeable about the intricacies of royal symbolism and religion than the king who, standing in one of the great plazas of his city, offered his blood in a painted clay plate to the ancestors of all Maya. Yet the farmer knew that what he did was essentially the same. When he attended the great ceremonies in the king’s plaza, the farmer could not have read the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tree stones around him, any more than he could have expounded on the subtleties of meaning in the state religion and mythology. But then, neither can most of us expound on the principles of nuclear physics. The point is that we do not have to in order to live in our world and know it is affected by such knowledge.

The king and the farmer inhabited the same world. Even though they understood the symbology of that world on different levels, their lives in it were dynamically interconnected. The successful performance of the king as the state shaman enriched the farmer’s life in spiritual and ceremonial ways. His performance in economic affairs brought wealth to his kingdom and gave his constituents access to goods from far places. Royal celebrations and rituals generated festivals that touched all parts of the community emotionally and materially. The great public works commissioned by the kings created the spaces in which these festivals and rituals took on meaning. The histories written and pictured by the kings on the tree stones standing before human-made mountains gave form to time and space in both the material and spiritual worlds.

3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-75.jpg 70f

In an age when the word invention has become synonymous with technological progress, it is difficult for us to imagine any other kind of invention. One of the great myths of our culture, the Myth of the Industrial Age, teaches us that the capture of fire and the invention of the wheel led inevitably to the combustion engine, flight, and atomic energy. In this myth of progress, only the energy harnessed by technology drives cultural advancement. In turn, we believe that civilized people have the responsibility to perpetuate technological progress and to invent a viable future through such means. We in the West see ourselves as the inheritors of a great hope—the tradition that technology and scientific discovery will be the salvation of humankind. However, another and more fundamental form of invention exists.

If we judge the Maya only by our own definition of progress, they had few technological wonders.[122] By our standards, they were a Stone Age people lacking even such rudimentary developments as the uses of metal[123] and the domestication of beasts of burden.[124] Yet few people today would deny that they possessed a high civilization and a complex social order. If the Maya did not invent an advanced scientific technology that harnessed natural energy, what then did they invent? The answer to this question is simple: They invented ideas that harnessed social energy. The genius of the Maya was expressed through the creation of new visions of power. They invented political symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized life.

It would be untrue to say that there were no technologies associated with these transformations. The writing and pictorial imagery used to interpret and record these social institutions comprised a particular type of technology—similar in nature to what in our time we call the media. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Maya kingship and Maya writing emerged simultaneously in the century before the Common Era, for the technology of writing served the hierarchical institutions of Maya life.

Our own social institutions seem so basic and intrinsic to daily activity that we do not often realize that, like the technological side of our lives, they too are inventions. The same is true for the Maya. Their hierarchical institutions, which we recognize as the hallmarks of civilization, were invented as problem-solving tools during times of cultural strife.

Many of the great inventions of antiquity were social inventions. Just as the Athenian Greeks, whom we revere as spiritual forebears, invented democracy, so the Maya invented the ideas which cemented their survival as a civilization. The most powerful of these social innovations, and the cultural adaptation which instituted their great Classical florescence, was the invention of the institution of kingship. In the brief space of a century, the Maya translated the politics of village life into the politics of governance by the great ahauob, the high kings.[125]

It would be misleading for us to say that they invented this new institution whole-cloth from their own experience, because kings had been around in Meosamerica for a long time—at least a thousand years. As technological invention in our world is born of old knowledge and known technology, so the Maya transformed ancient ideas into something new and uniquely their own. Our own form of government is no different—we see it as an invention and a great experiment in human experience. Yet it is a transformation of ideas from Greece, Rome, and twenty-five hundred years of social experience inherited from our forebears.

At the time when the institution of kingship was invented, the Maya were faced with cultural tensions so great they threatened to tear their society apart. Outside forces were upsetting the heretofore carefully maintained system of social egalitarianism. Trade, both between Maya communities and between the Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors, such as Mije-speaking peoples of the Pacific Coast, the post-Olmec people of the Gulf Coast, the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Teotihuacanos T of the central Valley of Mexico, was generating a flow of wealth that was unequally distributed among the people. In a culture which regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration, this turn of events created unease and social strife. At the same time, the development of raised-field agriculture and extensive water-management systems created prosperity in regions which had the means to organize the labor pool necessary to maintain these systems. As contacts with trading partners already organized into kingdoms intensified, ideas of rank and privilege further exacerbated the differences in wealth and status that had grown with the success of these commercial and agricultural enterprises. A new leadership appeared within many Maya communities—one that was hierarchical in its nature.

We know that the problem the Maya were trying to resolve was one of social inequality because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the cosmos.[126] The development of a high civilization always creates problems of social inequality, but such differences between people need not be manifested negatively. For the Maya, kingship became the primary symbol of and rationale for the noble class, the ahauob. Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself. The rituals of the ahauob declared that the magical person of the king was the pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, the summit of a ranking of families that extended out to incorporate everyone in the kingdom—from highest to lowest. His person was the conduit of the sacred, the path of communication to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead, and indeed of surviving death itself. He was the clarifier of the mysteries of everyday life, of planting and harvesting, of illness and health. He wielded his knowledge and influence to create advantageous trade agreements for his people. He could read in the heavens the signs which told him when to war and when to maintain the peace. The farmer, the stonemason, and the craftsperson might have to pay tribute to the king, but the king compensated them for their service by giving them a richer, more enjoyable, more cohesive existence. The people reaped the spiritual benefits of the king’s intercession with the supernatural world and shared in the material wealth his successful performance brought to the community.

The Late Preclassic town of Cerros (Fig. 3:1) was one of the Maya communities to experience the advent of kingship during the period of its invention.[127] This village of fisherfolk, farmers, and traders was strategically situated to command the mouth of the New River where it emptied into Chetumal Bay on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The people of Cerros built the early community of clustered households, and the later public center which buried it, directly on the water’s edge. Edges for the Maya, whether between the surface of the earth and the underground as in a cave, between night and day, or between the sea and the shore, were intrinsically powerful and ambiguous. Cerros was at such an edge, not only physically but also culturally, for the people of this village were seafarers[128] and traders familiar with distant peoples.[129]

•

Let us imagine a day in the lives of the Cerros people at the time they had decided to adopt the institution of kingship. It is late afternoon and the heat of the day has begun to yield its brilliance to the shadows cast by the tall thatched roofs of the white one-roomed houses. Each dwelling is grouped around an open paved patio space filled with the cacophony of playing children. Dogs nap in the shadows and villagers busy themselves with a hundred different tasks. The women toil over large red and T brown coarsely made bowls, full of maize soaking in lime, which they will grind into dough on the pink granite stones sitting before them on the plaza floor. Engrossed in quiet conversation, people are working in the shade of the house walls, weaving cotton cloth on backstrap looms, repairing nets for the fishermen, and fashioning tools of hardwood, using chipped-stone adzes made from the honey-brown chert which is abundant a few miles to the south.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-76.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:1]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-77.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:2 Structure 2A-Sub 4-1^st]]

Suddenly, from farther up the coast, comes the sound of the conchshell trumpets and wooden drums of the lookouts announcing the arrival of a trading party. Some of the elder men, who have been expecting this event by their day counts, move with dignity to the white stone and lime plaster docking area. This dock, which fronts the community’s public square, creates a sharp, human-made shore for the mottled green water of the bay. The elders in their painted and dyed cotton cloaks, colorful hip cloths and turbans, jade earrings, and strings of bright orange shell beads, are unspoken testimony to the wealth and power of the community. The dignity they project is dampened somewhat by the noisy gathering of excited villagers and farmers coming in from the fields and orchards and filling the plaza behind them.

The vanguard canoes of the visitors round the point of the turbulent outer bay and enter the calmer waters close to shore. These seagoing canoes are over forty feet long, hewn from single trunks of massive trees, and propelled by multiple paddlers who both stand and sit. The paddlers attack the water in unison and with special energy as they come within sight of the community, where bonfires and billowing incense rise in greeting. From the bay, the village is a slash of white against the uniform green of fallow fields within the young forest which stretches indefinitely in both directions. While some of the boats separate from the main group to land next to the homes of trading partners, the principal voyagers disembark directly onto the dock. They are followed by a crew heavily laden with gifts for their partners and friends and for the patriarchs of the village. The leaders of each party greet each other as equals, formally and briefly, saving the speeches and conversations for the evening banquet.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-78.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:3 Reconstructed by Robin Robertson]]

The visiting traders are themselves patriarchs, wise in the ways of the neighboring Maya cities and the foreign peoples beyond. They are knowledgeable in magical power and its instruments, which they have brought to trade or to give as gifts, and they are warriors capable of defending themselves both at home and abroad. Amid loud music, noise, excitement, and confusion, the group moves slowly across the plaza to a low red platform which has been built to look like a stone model of a house (Fig. 3:2).[130] Sloping panels above the platform resemble thatched roofing and lower inset panels resemble the walls of the house. Instead of a doorway leading inside, however, there is a stairway leading up to an unobstructed summit. In solemn dignity, the leaders ascend the platform and spatter strips of paper with blood drawn from their ears and arms. They then burn these papers with pellets of tree-gum incense in open bowls resting upon clay, drum-shaped stands bearing the masks of the Ancestral Twins (Fig. 3:3).[131] This ritual is an act of thanksgiving to the gods and the ancestral dead for a safe and successful trip. Several curers and sorcerers of the village pray over the patriarchs and bless them on behalf of the spirits of this place.

At the moment when the sun plunges into the sea to begin its daily journey through the Underworld, the elders sit down to a lavish feast consisting of red-fleshed deep-water fish, young sea turtle, pit-roasted deer, endless varieties of steamed maize and vegetable dishes, and fresh fruits from nearby orchards.[132] The last toasts of honey mead, quaffed from ritual red-clay cups,[133] won’t be sworn until the sun and his brother Venus, the Morningstar, end their journey through the Underworld and rise from the eastern sea.

Through the night the firelight flickers on the angular, bright-eyed faces of the leaders, who have painted images over their features to encourage the illusion of their resemblance to the gods. The conversation drifts from accounts of past glories in shared battles, to raids against enemies, to gossip on the planned alliances of neighbors. There are practical reports to be made on how the cotton and cacao crops are faring at home and abroad.[134] There is also speculation about the current reliability of the kings of the southern highlands who jealously trade from their sources of the black volcanic glass, obsidian, and the precious greenstones needed in the rituals that materialize the gods and insure that the earth and sea yield up their harvest.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-79.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:4 The Jewels of Kingship Found in an Offering at the Summit of the Second Temple]]

Finally, deep into the night, the gray-haired leader of the visitors broaches the subject everyone has been waiting for. He pulls a small, soft deerskin bundle from within the folds of his cloak and opens it carefully onto his palm, revealing five stones of glowing green jade carved in the images of gods. Four of these stones are sewn onto a band of the finest cotton, ready to be tied around the head of an ahau. The fifth, a larger image that looks like the head of a frowning child, will ride on the king’s chest suspended from a leather band around his neck. The trader has brought the jewels of an ahau to the patriarchs of Cerros (Fig. 3:4).[135]

The dark eyes of the principal patriarch glitter in the light of the fire. He sees before him the tools he needs to sanctify his rank among his own people. These kingly jewels assert the inherent superiority of their wearer within the community of human beings, transforming a person of merely noble rank into a being who can test and control the divine forces of the world. To have ahauob and an ahau of the ahauob will establish the Cerros community as a presence among the kingdoms of the mighty and the wealthy who rule the wetlands of the interior. Now that the people of Cerros have the means to declare themselves a place of kings, they will be able to deal with the new and changing world of kingdoms and divine power.

Slowly and deliberately, the principal patriarch lakes the bundle from the visitor and puts it into a small jar, with four nubbin feet, covered with red wavy scrolls. Placing the jar at his side in the momentary quiet, he stares into the fire as if to seek his destiny. His companions silently raise their right arms across their chests and clasp their left shoulders in a reverent salute. The Cerros patriarch is in his prime. He has already proven himself in battle and he knows the rituals which call forth the gods and the ancestors from Xibalba. His family is ancient and respected in the community, and wealthy in land and water-going vessels. His gesture of acceptance is the culmination of careful discussion among the families of the village; and it carries with it the blessings of the sorcerers and curers who have prayed, sacrificed, and cast their divination stones. Some unhappy rivals and their followers will leave as enemies, but many new families will join the village as the word spreads of the new king. Cerros is too wealthy a prize to exist for long without a king, and too important a link in the trade network to pretend obscurity. The people of the community also need the resolution that kingship will bring to their own ambiguous feelings toward the wealthy and powerful among them.

•

While it is true that we have told a tale, we have tried to be faithful to the thoughts and motivations of the individuals involved. The people of Cerros did decide consciously to embrace kingship as an institution and the consequences of that decision were profound for all. In the space of two generations, this small fishing village transformed itself into a mighty acropolis. Every living soul in Cerros participated in that transformation, from the lowliest fishermen and farmers who provided food for the laborers, to the most gifted stonemasons who carved the building facades, to the shamans who gave the temples their blessing. It is difficult for us to imagine such complete and rapid social metamorphosis, but what happened at Cerros constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift.

We will never know the names of the individuals who participated in the decision to embrace kingship or of those who bore the rank and responsibilities of ahau. Because the kings of Cerros did not write the details of their lives on stone or clay, they must remain forever anonymous, but their deeds and those of their devout followers clearly declare their commitment to the vision of ahau. In the temples and buildings which remain, we have proof of the awesome energy with which they executed that vision.

Around 50 B.C., the community of Cerros began the revolutionary program of “urban renewal” which buried their village completely under broad plastered plazas and massive temples. Families conducted sacrifices over the foundations of their old homes, acknowledging for one last time the ancestors who lay buried below the floors and patios. They then smashed the vessels of their leavetaking feast, broke jade jewelry with great rocks, and scattered the bits and pieces over the homes they would never see again. Finished with one way of life, they walked outward and began building new homes in a halo some 160 acres in breadth around the new center. To confirm their participation and approval of this new way of life, some patriarchs built their front doorways facing the site of the new temple rather than the sun path. Cerros had begun the transformation that would turn it from village to kingdom.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-80.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:5 The Sacred Precinct and the Ballcourt Group]]

These elders also participated in the rituals that prepared the site of the new temple. Various ceremonies, the breaking of dishes from ritual meals and the burying of water lilies and flowers in the white earth of the temple’s foundation, all helped to thin the membrane between the human world and the Otherworld at this spot and establish it as a place of power. This temple, called Structure 5C by archaeologists, was built directly at the water’s edge, the source of the community’s livelihood. Facing south (Fig. 3:5), it constituted the northern apex of an axis that ran southward through the new urban center. This axis would end eventually in a great ballcourt built just within the reservoir canal the inhabitants had dug to define the limits of their royal capital (Fig. 3:5). Thus, while the king mandated the burial of the old village, he planned the new town that would replace it. The first temple was also in the center of the vertical axis that penetrated the earth and pierced the sky, linking the supernatural and natural worlds into a whole. This plan set the temple between the land and the sea on the horizontal axis and between the heavens and the Underworld on the vertical axis. It materialized the paths of power the king traveled through during ecstatic performance.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-81.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:6 The First Temple at Cerros (reconstructed projection)]]

Since this first temple functioned as the instrument that would convey the king as shaman on his sacred journeys, the builders designed it as a public stage. The rituals that enabled the king’s journey into the sacred world would be enacted in public space so that the full community could witness and affirm their successful performance. That first temple at Cerros was a masterly expression of the Maya vision, one whose effectiveness is equally impressive today. It represented not an experimental beginning, but a complete and resolved statement of a new social and cosmic order (Fig. 3:6).

How did a people who had heretofore built only houses and small buildings obtain the know-how to build temples on such a grand and architecturally complex scale? No one can be certain of the answer, but it is likely that this knowledge came from many sources. The Maya were not the first people in Mesoamerica to build pyramids. The Olmec had raised artificial “mountains” a thousand years earlier and passed the architectural form on to their successors. The pyramidal form developed primarily from the way Mesoamericans built tall buildings by piling up dirt and rock to create a mound on which they could construct a summit temple. The resulting shape emulated the shape of a mountain and created a symbolic landscape in which religious activity took place. Like the cathedrals in Europe, the pyramid temples in Maya country emerged from a long cultural tradition shared by all the peoples of the region. The lowland Maya, however, invented a new way of using the pyramid-temple: They made it a carrier of political messages by adding elaborately modeled and painted plaster facades to both the pyramid below and the temple above. These great sculptural programs became a primary expression of the political and religious doctrines underlying their form of kingship.[136]

The people of Cerros very probably also had the help of master builders,[137] stonemasons, and artisans from already established royal capitals to help them in their first building projects. It is also possible that local artists and builders had sojourned in other communities to learn necessary skills. One thing is certain: The people of Cerros did not invent the royal pyramid, but rather were part of a large number of Maya people who developed and refined its construction.

To begin their task, the builders at Cerros laid the foundation of the new temple and its plaza in layer upon layer of white earth, the soft lime marl underlying the hard capstone of this area. It was the common stuff the people used to build the platforms and patios of their houses. Then they and the elders of the community shattered precious pottery vessels, both the local work of their own craftspeople and pots obtained from trade with the south, and mixed the sherds into the white earth. To the earth and pottery, they added the flowers of fruit trees from their orchards which surrounded the new town.[138] From the foundation upward, the people made this building not only for, but with, devout and sacred action.

The ritual of beginning ended, the builders then laid down a pavement of flat hard stones upon the layers of white earth. They raised a broad platform that would hold both the temple and its plaza. Within this platform masons built a lattice of internal walls that would buttress the internal fill to keep it from spreading as the upper structures were built upon it. The spaces between these walls were filled in with vast quantities of coarse, broken limestone which laborers hauled up from nearby pits that had been driven down to excavate the white earth. When they finally finished this platform, the laborers capped the top of it with soft white lime earth into which they mixed more pottery broken in rituals of devotion and dedication. Upon this surface, the master builders then drew the outline of the temple,[139] a great T shape. The stem of this T represented a long stairway beginning at the bottom of the pyramid and extending southward onto the raised plaza, which constituted the arms of the T (Fig. 3:7). Following this outline, the builders would raise the temple and its stairway simultaneously, an effort of master builders, masons, and laborers drawn from the community, coordinated by the ruler and his counselors.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-82.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:7 Cerros: Plan of the First Temple (Structure 5C-2^nd)]]

The temple platform rose in the form of a steep pyramid with smooth outer walls made of small loaf-shaped blocks. The master builders carefully calculated the proportions of the pyramid in advance in order to accommodate the long stairway and the dimensions of the four elaborately decorated panels which would be mounted on the main, southern side of the building, facing the new plaza. While laborers built up the rubble core of the pyramid, masons fashioned four deep well-like holes which were placed symmetrically to the left and the right of the north-south axis (Fig. 3:7). These holes would contain the great trees of the four directions that T would soar above the thatched roof of the temple.[140]

When the front face of the pyramid approached its full height, master masons were called in to cut and lay the special stones that would function as the armatures of the great masks and ear ornaments which would be modeled on the two upper panels (Fig. 3:8). While some masons worked on these upper panels, others supervised the construction of the stairway which linked the temple at the summit to the plaza below. Much more than a simple means of access, this stairway was the central focus of the whole design, the place where the king would perform his public rituals. This stairway had to be much longer than simple practicality required, for it contained two broad landings, one in the middle of the stairway and one at the threshold of the summit temple. During ritual, the king would pause on the middle and the top landings to perform his ecstatic dance and carry out sacrifice in view of his followers gathered on the plaza below (Fig. 3:9). Four stairs led to the first landing, and nine stairs to the summit threshold. These sacred numbers dictated the length of the whole.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-83.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:8]]

At this point in the construction, it was necessary for the master builder to pause and consult with the king, the patriarchs, and the shamans. The king had a particular decorative program in mind for this building and it was important to follow this program in every respect. The tricky part of the design was about to commence: the building of the front walls of the lower terraces. These walls, like the panels already established on the pyramid face above, would carry great masks. The builders had to establish where to construct the retaining walls of the lower terraces so that the king, when standing on the middle landing, would appear to be in the center of these four great masks. Obviously, this presented a knotty problem in optics. To create this visual impression, they had to set the lower terrace far out in front of the pyramid core, an architecturally awkward solution. The builders had no real choice in this matter, for the ritual function of the facade was more important than its architectural perfection.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-84.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:9 Stations designed for the king to perform ritual in his processional ascent and descent of the temple]]

Once they had agreed upon the position of the lower terrace walls, the masons began laying a second set of armatures into the retaining wall to support the lower pair of masks. These masks had to be of the same scale and proportion as the upper ones. The Maya used strings, plumb lines, and water levels to measure the new mask armatures, but in the end the highly skilled masons adjusted the final proportions by sight. While the building designers worked out the details of each panel, masons built a lattice of walls between the outer retaining wall and the inner pyramid core. The spaces within this lattice would later be filled with loose rock and earth, and the entire terrace capped with smooth plaster.

During the construction of the pyramid and its terrace, woodcutters prepared the massive tree trunks that would be set in the four sockets in the floor of the summit temple. These would represent the trees of the four directions. After floating them as close to the construction site as possible, T the people hauled and rolled these gigantic logs up into the temple where they were shaped and dropped into the floor sockets. Once anchored securely, these trees were ready for the woodcarvers and painters who would transform them into the supernatural trees at the four corners of the cosmos. The king presided over the raising of the world trees, a ceremony commemorating events that occurred at the beginning of creation.[141] Once the building was partially sanctified and activated, it had to be completed rapidly, for the raw power within it was potent and needed the containment that only ritual use by the king could provide. Within this sacred space the king, as shaman, could commune with the supernatural forces of the cosmos.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-85.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:10 The Parallelism Between the Path of the Sun and the Path of the King]]

The masons working at the summit of the pyramid constructed the floor of the temple proper in two levels by raising the rear half of the floor a step above the front half. These two halves were separated by a wall. This design followed that of the fancy homes of prominent people within the community, who preferred a “public” space at the front of the house and a raised, more “private” back area. Unlike the homes of patriarchs at Cerros, however, the temple had walls of stone rather than walls of wood and white earth.

It was ritual need more than prosaic convenience that ultimately dictated the plan of the rooms within the pyramid. The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-86.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:11 The Jaguar Sun mask from the east side of Temple 5C-2^nd]]

The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery of the temple (Fig. 3:10). To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled into the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction— thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west.

This little room, then, was the heart of the temple, the place where the king carried out in solitude and darkness the most intimate phases of his personal bloodletting and the most terrifying phases of his communion with the Otherworld.[142] Here he would prepare himself to meet the ancestors and the gods, fasting and practicing other kinds of trance-inducing physical mortifications. It was here also that the ritual perforation of his genitals took place and that he experienced the first shock of blood loss and the first flood of religious ecstasy. From this little room, he would travel like the sun rising from the earth to appear on the stairway before his people (Fig. 3:6). Dressed in bleached white cotton cloth that clearly showed the stains of his bloodletting, the king would speak to the ancestors on behalf of all.

With the completion of the stone construction of the pyramid, the plasterers set to work covering the walls and the stones of the stairway j with the fine creamy white plaster that produced the softly modeled contours of early Maya architecture. While the plaster was still damp, they painted these surfaces bright red to provide a dramatic contrast to the dominant green of the surrounding forest.

The final work on this temple can only be described as a magnificent performance of consummate skill and cooperative effort. The panels of stone on the terraces of the pyramid base stood ready to be adorned with divine images. The artisans who applied the wet plaster and modeled the elaborate details of these four masks and their complex earflare[143] assemblages and sky frames had to work rapidly and surely (Fig. 3:11). These artisans used a few previously prepared appliqué elements that could be stuck on with plaster glue, but for the most part they had to know what the final images would look like even before they started. It was vital to shape the plaster before it cured. Even with retardants added to the plaster, the sculptors had about thirty minutes in which to apply and work the material before it hardened under their hands.

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-87.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-88.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:12]]

The artisans inherited some unexpected challenges from the master builders and masons: For example, the panels on the western side of the pyramid were more narrow than those on the eastern side.[144] The sculptors compensated by compressing the composition to fit the western panels. They accomplished this primarily by reducing the size of the earflares and then directing the painters to put in any details lost in the places where the plaster could not be modeled.

While the plaster was still damp, the painters began their work, adding red, pink, black, and yellow line to highlight the natural cream color of the raw plaster and to render even finer details in the images. As we saw above, the painters often put in necessary design elements that the plaster modelers left out in their haste. To finish their work before the plaster dried, the artists had to work frantically, dripping and throwing paint with the force of their strokes. Yet even these drip patterns were incorporated as part of the imagery.

The mastery of their craft is evident in the sureness of their drawing and the confidence of their swirling lines. The painters and sculptors knew exactly what the finished panels should look like because, just as with the written word, the panels were designed to be read as symbolic statements about the nature of the kingship and its relationship to the cosmos. And if the artisans were literate in the images of this new, revolutionary religion, then how much more so must their patron the king and his principal followers have been.

We know that the images on this temple were designed to be read because we can read them ourselves. As for actual written text, however, there is very little. While the lowland Maya of those times were literate and wrote brief, rudimentary texts on small objects,[145] they did not write full texts on any of the Late Preclassic buildings discovered so far. Instead, they used isolated glyphs as labeling devices, <verbatim>“tagging"</verbatim> objects and images to clarify and amplify their meaning.[146] Our interpretation of the art on the temple at Cerros is enhanced by such strategic glyphic clues.

The huge masks in the center of each of the four panels of the temple at Cerros derive their meaning from both the glyphic tags and the complex imagery that surrounds them. The lower masks are snarling jaguars emerging totem-pole fashion from the heads of long-snouted creatures whose lower faces merge with the pyramid. These jaguars are marked with the four-petaled glyphs denoting the sun, kin, identifying these beings as the Jaguar Sun God (Fig. 3:12).[147]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-89.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:13 Structure 5C-2^nd and the Cosmos]]

Like a puzzle with one key piece, the whole message of the temple comes into focus with these Sun Jaguars. Since this building faces to the south, a person gazing at its colorful facade would see the sun in its jaguar aspect “emerging” from the sea on the eastern side of the building and “setting” into the sea on the western side. Thus, these terrace panels symbolize the sun at the two most spectacular moments of the tropical day: dawn and dusk. Together, these sun masks display both linear time in the duration of time through the day and year and cyclical time in the return of the cycle to its beginning point over and over again; and it is significant that this path encircles the stairway along which the king must travel on his ritual journeys (Fig. 3:10). Indeed, as we shall see in the passage that follows, these masks made a special statement about kingship.

We know that, for the Maya, the Sun Jaguar represented more than a celestial body. In Classical theology, Yax-Balam, the younger of the Ancestral Hero Twins, is symbolized by the sun.[148] The older brother, Hun-Ahau, in turn, was similarly linked to the planet Venus, that bright celestial body that dances with the sun as Morningstar and Eveningstar. The logic of reading the masks that hover above the Sun Jaguars on the temple as Morningstar and Eveningstar is compelling: (1) if the lower masks denote a celestial body, so then should the upper masks in order to complete the pattern; (2) the upper image should then correspond to some celestial phenomenon hovering above the sun at dawn and dusk; (3) in astronomical terms, the heavenly body associated with the sun in exactly this relationship is the Morningstar which rises in the hours before sunrise and the Eveningstar which follows the path of the sun into the earth in the hours after sunset (Fig. 3:13).

There is other evidence to support a reading of the upper masks of the temple as Venus. Both upper masks have the long snouts that became characteristic of the Cosmic Monster, a being that was especially associated with Venus and the sun as they moved through the heavens.[149] The crowns worn by these masks consisted of three jewels mounted on a headband in the same distinctive pattern as that found on the diadems of early Maya kings (Fig. 3:11). The central symbol of the kingly crown during the Classic period was the three-pointed shape in the center of this band. In its personified form, known as the Jester God,[150] it has a long-nosed head below the three-pointed shape and was worn mounted on a cloth headband by both gods and humans (see the Glossary of Gods). Since it occurs in the writing system as a glyph for ahau, “lord” (Fig. 3:14),[151] we can be reasonably sure that it has the same meaning as a I costume element. We believe that the upper masks of this temple wore these Jester God headbands to mark them as ahau, and therefore, symbolic representations of the first king of Cerros. The Ancestral Twins, of course, are the prototypes of kingship; and in Classic imagery the Jester God headband is a diagnostic feature of the elder twin, named, not surprisingly, Hun-Ahau.[152] This headband marks the upper masks as Hun-Ahau, while the kin sign marks the lower as Yax-Balam, his brother.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-90.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:14 The Jester God]]

The temple decoration was, therefore, more than just a model of the sun’s daily path. It was a depiction of the Ancestral Twins, and was designed to be read in that manner by the king’s constituents. When the king stood upon the stairway landing between the four great masks (Fig. 3:6), he represented the cosmic cycle of the day,[153] but he was simultaneously at the center of a four-part pattern,[154] representing the lineage cycle of the Hero Twins as his founding ancestors—the first ahauob (Fig. 3:15). The lowland Maya established kingship by first crowning their gods[155] and then by proclaiming their living counterparts, the kings, as the direct descendants and spiritual manifestations of these gods.[156] The Maya manipulated their reality through art, and they did so on many levels. The images on this temple were meant to be read not only as eternal, transcendent messages, but also as political statements to be affirmed by congregations who saw them and witnessed the human performances within them. The king of Cerros as the primary ahau could exist, ultimately, because the gods of his community were also ahauob.[157]

As mentioned above, not all of the king’s constituents were equally literate in the new imagery. A farmer, a noble, or a shaman reading the temple would all differ in the depth of their understanding. The point we wish to make, however, is that, on some level, the imagery was recognized and understood by everyone in the community and was an intrinsic part of their reality. We have examples in our own culture of symbols that are universally recognized. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who has not heard of Einstein’s famous equation E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc². The levels of understanding of that formula, however, would differ from person to person. One individual might simply recognize it as Einstein’s equation. Others, because they had taken a physics course, might even know what the letters stood for and what, on a rudimentary level, the Theory of Relativity means. The highest level of understanding, corresponding to that of a Maya ahau or shaman, would be that of a practicing physicist. Regardless of how well we can talk about E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc², it affects our reality. In a very real sense we live in Einstein’s universe, just as the Maya of the Classic period lived in a reality defined by the presence of divine kings.

When the Maya of Cerros built their first royal temple, they gathered the strength of the entire community, the simple hard work of fisherfolk and farmers, the food prepared and served by their women, the leadership of their patriarchs, elders, and shamans. These individuals joined forces with the master builders, masons, and artisans (some local, some probably from other realms) to perform as an act of community the building of a sacred mountain, a portal to the Otherworld. This partnership of effort laid down in rock and white earth shows the people of Cerros as a whole acknowledging and accepting the arrival of kingship in their midst. Throughout the history of the Maya, this phenomenal cooperation was evident anytime a community embraced the institution of kingship.

However unsettling the advent of kingship might have been to the rivals of Cerros, or even to some of its inhabitants, a new social paradigm had taken root in the community. This little royal temple was only the beginning of an enormous release of social enthusiasm and energy. Within a few years, a generation at most,[158] a new and very much more ambitious construction effort eclipsed the original temple and greatly amplified the royal focus of the community. This new building, called Structure 6 by TI the archaeologists, can truly be called an acropolis (Fig. 3:16). Measuring sixty meters long by sixty meters wide, its basal dimensions were more than three times those of the first temple. Its raised plaza stood sixteen meters above the level of the surrounding surface and was well out of view of the populace below. The function of this plaza was clearly different from that of the original temple, which was low enough to allow events upon it to be visible to anyone standing at ground level. Here, at the summit of the new acropolis, the king could carry out actions of the most intimate nature on an open surface rather than inside the walls of the temple (Fig. 3:17).

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-91.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:15]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-92.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:16 The Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros]]

It was now possible for the king to enter the Otherworld through bloodletting and sacrifice in full view of those few privileged enough to climb the grand stairway at the front of the pyramid, pass through the doorways of the portal temple, and stand with him on the sacred ground of the upper plaza. This change of architectural strategy was a logical development, for it took the guesswork out of the witnessing and legitimizing roles of the emergent nobility as they played their part in the establishment of royal power. Now they too could see the awesome visions of the supernatural conjured up by the magical performances of their king.[159]

Below this upper plaza was an even larger platform similar in principle to the one underlying the original temple to the north. Not so exclusive as the upper plaza, this space was still not physically or visually accessible to all, for it was partially closed off along its front edge by long buildings. This platform plaza, in turn, gave way by means of a broad grand stairway to a final lower plaza that extended 120 by 125 meters, a huge and fully accessible plaster-covered expanse capable of accommodating festival crowds numbering in the hundreds with room to spare. The new temple precinct thus had a much more complex arrangement of ritual space: three different kinds of space, all interconnected by broad stairways upon which the king could perform. Such complexity of space reflects the growing complexity of ritual activity surrounding the king and the social status attached to participation in such activity. When the king came dancing down the stairs in an ecstatic trance following a bloodletting ritual, supported on either side by his elite nobles, the first people to see him were those standing on the middle platform. These people could then join his procession and follow him down into the immense lower plaza where the general populace awaited.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-93.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:17 Reconstruction of the Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros. Structure 5C-2^nd and Chetumal Bay are in the background drawing by Karim Sadr]]

The very existence of this pyramid with its carefully differentiated viewing spaces indicates the high degree of social stratification that was present at Cerros. For as long as the kingship at Cerros lasted, these social differences worked to the advantage of the government. The organization necessary to coordinate the construction of the new royal precinct required many times the effort put into the first temple. A large labor pool was required, as well as the civil machinery to guide and control it. As mentioned above, however, the coercion of local labor was alien to the Maya. This new project, like the one before it, was done by and for every member of the community, regardless of their social status.

For the people of Cerros. becoming a kingdom created liabilities as well as benefits. The new building program buried much of the original village under its immense plastered plaza. Albeit willingly, the people living in the old village proper were forced to relocate to the lands surrounding the emerging urban center. That land, however, was also being extensively quarried for the thousands of tons of rock and white earth required by the construction workers. In the course of building the temples at Cerros, its inhabitants effectively lowered the surrounding land so significantly it became necessary to build a complicated system of drainage ditches, reservoirs, and canals to keep their homes and patios from becoming flooded during the rainy season (Fig. 3:18).[160]

Another problem people faced, as they moved out from the old village, was the shortage of building materials. The amount of wealth and rank a family possessed suddenly became strikingly apparent in the type of new home they could afford to construct. Some individuals were able to build their new houses on raised platforms of considerable size, while other families lived on small platforms, and still others had homes at ground level. Control of all available construction materials reinforced the power of the king, for he could then dispense them as rewards for loyalty and support.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-94.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:18 Topographic Map and Drainage System at Cerros]]

The political message of the second temple is harder to read than that of the first. The decorations on the uppermost facade, the only one excavated so far,[161] were badly damaged by natural erosion and the fires banked against them in the termination rituals conducted by the Maya when kingship at Cerros failed and the temple was abandoned. Even though only fragments of the imagery survived, we can still tell it was the same as that of the first temple: four great masks, probably of the Ancestral Heroes, flanking a stairway. The fine quality of the modeled stucco elements that were preserved, and their rich, more elaborate painted detail, demonstrate the high level of artistry involved in the decoration of this pyramid. The beauty and complexity of this building is concrete testimony to the charismatic power of the Cerros king, a ruler strong enough to attract and retain the services of skilled artisans literate in the complex theology and imagery of the new religion.

By this time in the history of Cerros, the first king had died and been replaced by a successor. We know this because of a special political message placed in the second temple. Below the summit where the new king stood for public rituals, he buried a set of royal jewels, including the jades of a royal headband and the chest pectoral of a king.[162] Laid carefully face downward in the bottom of a large clay bucket, the four headband jewels were deliberately arranged in the same fourfold pattern we saw in the great masks of the first temple (Fig. 3:19). In the middle of this pattern, the king set the larger greenstone pectoral, face upward. This particular positioning was both deliberate and symbolic. This ahau pectoral rested within a fourfold pattern, just as the first king had stood within the fourfold pattern of the masks on the first temple. These powerful and magical objects were then covered (Fig. 3:20) with layers of mosaic mirrors made of bright blue hematite crystals glued to mother-of-pearl cutouts,[163] and with red-orange spiny oyster shells of the kind worn by later Maya nobles on their robes. A large red pottery plate served as the lid for the bucket, and surrounding it were four of the small pottery cups used for drinking and a jug for pouring beverages.[164]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-95.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:19 The Arrangement of the King’s Jewels in the Offering Bucket of Structure 6B]]

This cache was more than a simple offering of precious materials to the gods. We believe these jewels were valued because they were the very ones owned and used by the first king of Cerros (the kingly jewels of our story). The pattern in which the precious materials were arranged echoed the pattern of power we have already seen in the first temple and established it within the summit of the second one. The second king buried them in his own temple to invoke this power and to link himself with the former king, who was presumably his ancestor. These jewels would aid T him in his communication with the sacred world of the supernatural.

Later Maya kings, like the great Pacal of Palenque, would define their temples as sacred mountains and have themselves buried therein. At the beginnings of the institution of ahau, however, power lay not in the physical remains of the first king, but in the performance and settings of ritual, and in the objects of power themselves. Instead of focusing on the burial of the first king, his successor manipulated the power objects left by him in order to ensure the act of linkage between their reigns. All of those who worked on the new acropolis, thereby affirming the legitimacy of the succession, understood that symbolism. Just as the people of the community gave their most precious possessions in the form of labor to raise the new building, so the new king sacrificed his most precious heirlooms to its construction.[165]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-96.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:20 The Dedicatory Offering from the Summit of Structure 6B]]

Following the triumphant completion of the new royal temple, the community of Cerros began its most ambitious construction project to date: the establishment of an east-west axis to complement the north-south axis laid down by the first king. The rapidity with which the new construction project followed that of the second temple suggests that they were both part of the program of the second king of Cerros. If this is the case, then the ruler of this early kingdom truly enjoyed extraordinary power.

Directly east of the second temple (Fig 3.1), the king erected the largest of the temples at Cerros, an eastward acropolis called Structure 4. We know that the king rebuilt this structure at least once because the foundation of an earlier temple lies almost directly beneath the present structure. This practice of building one structure on top of the razed foundation of another was not uncommon with the Maya, for they believed that a location accumulated power with time. Once the portal to the Otherworld was opened, once the points of power were set in place, the membrane between the worlds was made thinner with subsequent use.

Whereas the old temple had faced the village, the new temple faced the rising sun and towered over a broad plaza of gleaming white plaster. At sixty meters along each side and twenty-two meters high, this was a building of respectable proportions by any Maya standards. This new acropolis, like the earlier two, buried homes and shrines that were the last S vestiges of the old village and the way of life that went with it.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-97.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:21 Construction Pens Inside Structure 4A, the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]

As with the earlier temples at Cerros, the master builders, laborers, and masons raised the new acropolis in a single enormous effort. Because of its huge size, this building required an extensive honeycomb of internal buttressing walls. Once the masons had raised these walls, laborers hurried to fill the spaces between them with alternating layers of loose boulders, gravel, and white earth. The completion of these square “construction pens” (Fig. 3:21)[166] required a good deal of work, contributed by gangs of farmers and fishermen under the watchful supervision of their patriarchs. As was always the case with the Maya, work on the temple was an act of devotion. The laborers threw their maize grinding stones, fishnet weights, and some of their personal household objects into the rubble as offerings to the ancestral gods.

Very little of the sculptural decoration of this building survived, but it was clearly meant to be the tomb of a king. Built with a steep-sided contour, it had a sepulcher at its summit. This mortuary chamber was long and rather wide as Maya tombs go, and at its northern end there was a plastered bench which would have served as the final resting place of the king (Fig. 3:22). The roof of the tomb was spanned with great stone slabs in an early example of corbel-arch construction. Strangely enough, the tomb was never occupied by its patron, a problem to which we will return.

Now that the east-west axis of the community was clearly defined, the current ruler went to work on the remaining axis. Built to the south, a westward-facing temple, Structure 29C (Fig. 3:23), complemented the eastward-facing tomb of the king and completed the north-south axis of Cerros. This last great structure was closely associated with the north and south ballcourts, which formed a triangle arrangement with the new acropolis (Fig. 3:1; 3:24).

The new pyramid was smaller than the eastward-facing acropolis discussed above, but its builders created a distinctive—and for Cerros, atypical—plan for the summit. They erected three separate temple platforms atop this pyramid, the center one facing toward the west (Fig. 3:23). Each of these platforms had a central stairway flanked by a special iconography. On the middle pyramid, the builders mounted carved jaguar heads with great flowing scrolls pouring out of their mouths, and small snarling human heads emerging from the stonework above them (Fig. 3:25). These bloody images were meant to depict the severed head of the Sun Jaguar— the ancestral brother who died in sacrifice and was reborn as the means of defeating the Lords of Xibalba.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-98.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:22 The Unused Tomb in the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]

The image of the severed head is a central symbol of royal power on stelae and panels of the Classic period. Kings during this period sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by decapitating them. The jaguar adorned with waterlily scrolls presided over such warfare and provided it with its central metaphor: battle as the royal hunt. Noble warriors were either prey or predator, depending on their luck; and kings would go into battle with ropes tied around their arms as if daring their adversaries to capture them. This war-sacrifice complex is the central imagery we will see in the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, the monument raised by king Chan-Bahlum to celebrate his designation as heir to the throne. The westward-facing temple of Cerros, adorned with jaguar heads, was the prototype of the later Classic period complex: it was meant as a war monument.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-99.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:24 The playing court from Complex 50 near the westward-facing acropolis]]

The remaining two temple platforms faced inward toward the central temple.[167] The stairways of these flanking platforms sat between longsnouted masks, also surmounted by snarling human faces (Fig. 3:26). The jaguar images on the middle temple correspond to the lower jaguar masks of the first temple built at Cerros; and the long-snouted masks of the flanking temples echo the masks on the first temple’s upper terraces. We can conclude then that the long-snouted characters on the flanking platforms represent Venus, the elder brother of the Ancestral Twins. This elder brother, as we mentioned above, sacrificed his brother, the Jaguar Sun, and then brought him back to life in order to defeat the Lords of Death in Xibalba. In the Classic Period, whenever jaguar imagery appeared, flanked on either side by Venus, the elder brother, it represented the king flanked by his kinsmen. These kinsmen were usually his father, or his mother and father, from whom he received his right to the throne.[168]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-100.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:25 Snarling Jaguars from the Central Platform on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]

The ballcourts nearby were built in relationship to both the northsouth and the east-west axes of the city. Within these ballcourts rituals of war and sacrifice were played out as were rituals legitimizing the descent of the new royal line. The bailgame was played for many purposes. In a more ordinary setting it could be played between friends or professionals for sport or for wager; but it more often took on a ritual or sacred aspect. Highborn captives were frequently forced to play the bailgame as members of the community looked on. As in the Popol Vuh myth, the losers were sacrificed by decapitation. Often these sacrificial victims were bound into a ball-like form and hurled down the stairs of a temple. In its most elevated form the ballgame was played as a reenactment of the Ancestral Twins’ defeat of the Lords of Death in Xibalba, as related in the Popol Vuh.

These games provided the metaphorical setting for the sacrificial events by which a king or heir promoted his legitimate authority.[169] Whether the king was taking the role of supreme athlete, acting out the role of one of the Ancestral Twins, or sacrificing a captive king or noble, the ballgame had deep religious significance.

We do not know if the builder of the ballcourts and the westward-facing temple was the second or third ruler of Cerros, but that knowledge is not critical to our understanding of the development of kingship at Cerros. Expanded building programs indicate expanded ambition, if nothing else. ! he very existence of a war memorial and a ballcourt indicate that Cerros was looking outward, and that its new royalty was taking a growing part in the cosmopolitan and competitive world of lowland Maya kingdoms.

In the long run, however, the pressures from within and without upon this newborn kingdom were evidently more than it could withstand. The king who planned to bury himself in the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis never occupied his sepulcher—it was left open and empty. Why this happened we do not know. One possibility is that this unfortunate king may have died far from home, taken captive in battle. Regardless Sc of what the true story may have been, his successor ultimately failed to fulfill the promise inherent in the Maya vision of kingship.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-101.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:26 Long-snouted Monster from the NOrth and South (Side) Platforms on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]

The failed attempt to bury a king at the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis marked the beginning of the end of the experiment with \ kingship at Cerros. The heir to that ruler did manage to rally the people temporarily and to launch the construction of another temple along the designs of the first and second ones. Situated directly south of the great eastward-facing acropolis, the final temple reiterated the north-south axis of the community. It faced southward like the original two temples. This new acropolis outwardly resembled the other temple complexes, but its construction work was shoddy and no offerings were deposited in the building’s summit.

Shortly after this final effort, the Maya of Cerros gave up their brief embrace of kingship and systematically released the power from the sacred mountains which they had lifted up from their own earth. The kings were gone. The nobility, once attracted by the promise of a great kingdom, abandoned the city and returned to their estates in the surrounding countryside. The remaining people banked great fires against the masks of their ancestors and lords. They sprinkled layers of white marl over the fires and then reset them. They pulled out their jade earflares (the special ear ornaments that were shaped like the end of a trumpet) and smashed them into bits, sprinkling the pieces on the piles of debris accumulating at the TI bases of the decorated panels. They broke the pottery from their final ritual meals as they brought the termination ritual to an end. At the last, they went down to their homes and continued to live around the ruins of their greatness as fisherfolk and farmers once more.

Many years later, after the eastward-facing temple had begun to fall into ruin, devotees returned to the summit to carry out rituals of termination to release the power of the place. Their clay offering vessels stood in solitary stacks until the stone roof of the tomb collapsed and crushed them.

We will never know exactly why the ahauob of Cerros failed, but we can hypothesize. A major difficulty might have been a problem in the transference of power between the generations within the royal line. In a system that depended less on the rules of succession than on the personal charisma and power of a leader, a weak king would not have been tolerated for very long. Another problem the people of Cerros might have experienced was the difficulty of coping with the novelty of a large scale society. While it is true that this community enthusiastically embraced kingship, intention and execution are two different things. At this point in the history of the Maya, the institution of kingship was newly invented and its practitioners were still improvising as they went along. A society based on a great experiment is a potentially unstable society.

There are reasons to suspect that these problems were common to the times in the Maya lowlands, for other early kingdoms also failed precipitously. At Cerros, however, collapse of the institution was not a matter of sudden abandonment of the place by all of its people. Just as they had once opted for kingship, now they opted against it. Maya kingdoms never maintained a standing army or a police force, so there was no one to make the people obey the king. Without the willing cooperation of the people, nobles and commoners alike, the king could do nothing.

The ahauob of Cerros re-created their world, literally transforming the place in which they and their people lived from a village into a place of kings. They could do this because their people wanted to follow their vision and celebrate its power. As mentioned above, the charisma of the king was not absolute in the Maya vision. It was subject to critical testing in performance: the abundance of crops, the prosperity of trade, the health of the people, victory in battle. We will see in later chapters that Maya kings always faced the possibility of a failure of one sort or another that could cripple a dynasty or bring it down decisively. Much of the public art erected by Maya kings was political propaganda, responding to crises resulting from these kinds of failures.

To some, this new form of Maya government might appear as a fragile sort of adaptation, subject as it was to the character and ability of a few central people and their close kin. Yet the vision of the ahau exploded into brilliant colored stucco clarity throughout the lowlands in the first century before the present era. The first Trees of Life propagated a forest of kings from the outset—in good tropical ecological adaptation, a dispersal of the species insuring that some would always survive any localized catastrophe. Individual kingdoms might fail, but the vision of the ahau as ruler endured, the most geographically extensive and long-lasting principle of governance in the history of ancient Mesoamerica.

The ahauob of Cerros—and those of Lamanai, Tikal, El Mirador, and Uaxactun, among the known early kingdoms—were masked, anonymous rulers who left little record of their personal histories among the grand royal statements of their successes and victories. This would soon change, for in the first two centuries of the present era, the written script crystallized and kings began to emerge as the chronicled tigures of royal drama. In spite of their anonymity, the ancestral kings of the Preclassic period did leave a heritage to their successors in the form of their mute complexes of temple, pyramid, plaza, and plaster mask. They promoted the principle of hierarchy, focusing on architectural construction and reconstruction as the means of achieving their political objectives—principally, perpetuation of the dynasty. They created the first centers and, in the act of establishing them, also defined the notion of dominion. Like the trees of the four directions, which raise up the sky over the earth, the king was the central pillar—the Tree of Life who raised the sky that arched over his entire realm.

4. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-102.jpg 70f

During the explosive first flush of civilized life in the Maya world, cities, like Cerros, blossomed in the towering rain forests of the lowlands. El Mirador,[170] located in the swamps and low hills of Peten, the geographic heart of the Yucatan peninsula, was the greatest of these Preclassic cities. Yet even at the height of El Mirador’s glory, when its ahauob were reigning over vast temples, contenders for its greatness were growing to maturity forty miles to the south. These nascent rivals, Uaxactun and Tikal, grew steadily in power, population, and the ability to create magnificent public art throughout the Late Preclassic period, cultivating their ambition until they were ready to step into the political vacuum left by the decline of El Mirador at the outset of the Classic era.[171] Located less than twelve miles apart—not even a day’s walk—Tikal and Uaxactun were perhaps too closely situated for both of them to become kingdoms of the first rank. Their competition, which is the focus of our next story, was resolved violently in A.D. 378 by means of an innovative type of warfare we call Tlaloc-Venus war, or sometimes simply “star wars.”[172] The imagery and method of this new type of conflict was borrowed from the other great Mesoamerican civilization of this time, Teotihuacan, the huge city that had grown to maturity in the Valley of Mexico during the third and fourth centuries. With the advent of this new kind of warfare, a new concept was incorporated into the Maya culture: the idea of empire.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-103.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:1]]

Like other great Maya capitals of the interior lowland, Tikal began as a village of farmers nestled on the high ground between vast swamps. By 600 B.C., the first small groups of people had settled on the hilltop that would become the central area of the city (Fig. 4:1). These people left the debris of their lives under what would, in future years, be the North Acropolis, sanctum of Tikal’s kings (Fig. 4:2), and in a chultun[173] located about a mile to the east of the Acropolis.[174] Even this early in their history, the villagers were using this site as a burial place. Amid the humble remains under the North Acropolis, the interred body of an adult villager was found. Lying nearby was a sacrificial offering in the form of a severed head.[175] This sacrificial practice, begun so humbly, would later be incorporated into the burial ceremonies of Tikal’s kings. The household debris surrounding this burial place contained the shells of freshwater snails, which were part of the diet of these pioneers, and obsidian and quartzite flakes, both imported goods—obsidian from the highlands and quartzite from northern Belize.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-104.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:2 Cross-section of the North Acropolis at Tikal with Preclassic Construction Marked]]

We do not know much about the individual lives of these early inhabitants, but during the next four centuries they continued to multiply and prosper. By the second century B.C. they had already expanded into much of the “downtown” area of Tikal. At that time, they began to define a center for the community by building stone platforms displaying the sloping moldings and inset panels preferred by all the lowland Maya. These platforms were the harbinger of the North Acropolis and no doubt they facilitated the rites of patriarchs and shamans defining their emergent community in relation to their neighbors and the world at large.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-105.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:3 The Painting on the Outer Walls of Structure 5D-Sub-10-1^st at Tikal]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-106.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:4 Tikal Burial 85 and the Pectoral of a King]]

The first century B.C. witnessed expansion and elaboration of this Acropolis, via large public buildings and chambered burial vaults of kings and high-ranking nobles. These public buildings prefigured all the characteristics of later state architecture: large apron moldings, pyramidal platforms, steeply inclined stairs, and most important, terraces surmounted by large painted plaster masks depicting the gods fundamental to the newly emerged institution of kingship.

The North Acropolis tombs from this era reveal a unique glimpse of the newly emergent Maya ruling elite,[176] who had themselves buried in vaulted chambers set under shrinelike buildings. We find, interred in these chambers, not only the physical remains of these people and the objects they considered of value, but even some pictorial representations of them. In one of these tombs, images of Maya nobles were drawn in black line on the red-painted walls. These figures were perhaps the ancestors or kinsmen of the woman[177] buried inside the chamber. The paintings, along with the rich burial goods laid around the woman’s body, mark the tomb as the “earliest interment of someone of patent consequence”[178] at Tikal. It is interesting that the deceased person in this tomb was a woman, for the Maya of Tikal, like other Maya, gave primacy to males in the reckoning of social status through the principle of patrilineal descent. This tomb, however, shows that status had transcended gender and was now ascribed to both the men and women of noble families. The foundations were laid for a hereditary elite, the clans of the ahauob.

l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-108.jpg 70f

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-109.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:5]]

Other burials from the same century also featured vaulted chambers with shrines and rich offerings of pottery, food, stingray spines, and human sacrifices (if the disarticulated skeletons of an adult and an infant can be so identified). Among the buildings constructed during this time was 5D-Sub-10-lst, a small temple blackened inside by the smoke of sacrificial fires. Outside, artists decorated the shrine with elegant polychromatic paintings that were later piously defaced during the termination rituals of this phase of the Acropolis. These paintings are of people or, perhaps, of gods in the guise of people; but because the North Acropolis is the royal sanctum throughout its later history, we think these paintings depict the Tikal ruler and other nobles,[179] suspended in the red-painted blood scrolls of the Vision Rite (Fig. 4:3).

Finally, a very rich tomb, called Burial 85 by the archaeologists (Fig. 4:4), contained a headless, thighless corpse tied up in a cinnabar-impregnated bundle along with a spondylus shell and a stingray spine (both instruments of bloodletting rituals).[180] Sewn to the top of the bundle was a green fuchsite portrait head that once served as the chest pectoral of the ruler buried therein.[181] The human face on this pectoral wears the Jester God headdress that would be the crown of kings for the next thousand years.[182] We do not know why some of the king’s bones were missing. The Maya are known to have retained bones of important relatives for relics, so that the skull and thighbones may have resided in the house of his descendants for many generations. Without further evidence the answer must remain a mystery.

The noble status of the individuals we find in these tombs is demonstrated not only by the wealth they took with them to the Otherworld, but by the physical condition of their bones. They are larger and more robust than the common people of the kingdom who were buried in other parts of the city.[183] They had a better diet than the people they ruled and were generally taller.

This new, ambitious elite commissioned more than just one or two buildings. During the first century B.C., the lords called upon their people to remodel the entire central area of Tikal—no doubt with an eye to the works of their rivals at El Mirador and Uaxactun. This construction proceeded in three stages. The first stage[184] involved both the renovation of the North Acropolis and the initial leveling and paving of both the Great Plaza and the West Plaza. During the second stage, the huge East Plaza was leveled and paved. The North Acropolis in the city’s center was now flanked on the east and the west by two huge paved areas.[185] In the third phase, the same three areas were repaved once again, perhaps under the direction of the ruler found in Burial 85 or perhaps shortly after his interment.[186] These large plazas were the gathering places from which the common people witnessed the ritual performances of the king. The labor costs in quarrying stone, burning limestone to yield plaster, and finally building the structures, must have been enormous. If the elite of Tikal were constantly expanding this public space, we can assume that the prosperity and prestige of this kingdom were attracting a steady influx of new people whose participation in the ritual life of the kingdom had to be accommodated.[187]

During the same six centuries, Uaxactun to the north underwent a florescence as substantial and dramatic as that of its neighbor Tikal. Late Preclassic platforms in Uaxactun underlying Groups A, E, and H (Fig. 4:5) bear some of the most remarkable Late Preclassic sculpture to have survived into modern times. Temple E-VII-Sub, with its elaborately decorated platform and great plaster masks, was the first of the great Late Preclassic temples to be excavated by archaeologists.[188] At that time it was believed that, up until about A.D. 300, the Maya had possessed only the most simplistic type of farming culture. That vision of Maya history could not accommodate such an elaborate building, so for fifty years that temple stood as an oddity in Maya archaeology. Since then, excavations at Tikal, Cerros, Lamanai, El Mirador, and other sites have uncovered similar structures and shown that Temple E-VII-Sub is a typical expression of Late Preclassic kingship.

E-VII-Sub is no longer an oddity even at Uaxactun itself. Deep within and beneath the complex of the South Plaza of Group H[189] (Fig. 4:6) lies a remarkable assemblage of buildings displaying the largest program of Late Preclassic monumental masks yet discovered. This group, composed of six temples mounted on a small acropolis, was superficially buried by an Early Classic acropolis built at a later date. The largest of the masks on this buried complex can be found on the main eastern building (Sub-3) (Fig. 4:7). These massive stucco sculptures decorate the panels of the upper and lower terraces in typical Maya architectural fashion, similar to the decorative programs we have seen at Cerros. Here, however, the visual “stack” of masks does not display the celestial cycle of the sun and Venus, as found on Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros (and also on Structure E-VII-Sub at Uaxactun).[190] Instead the masks featured here are models of the sacred living mountain (Witz) rising through the layers of the cosmos.[191] The lower panel displays a great Witz Monster sitting in fish-laden primordial waters with vegetation growing from the sides of its head. Above, on the upper panel, sits an identical Monster (probably the mountain peak above the waters)[192] with a Vision Serpent penetrating its head from side to side.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-110.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:6 Uaxactun, Group H, the South Plaza after Valdes 1988]]

It is important to realize that the facade of Uaxactun Structure H-Sub-3 is simply another version of the sacred cosmos, parallel in function to the sun/Venus iconography of the kings at Cerros. In this particular representation of the cosmos, we see the sacred mountain rising from the primordial sea to form the land, just as the land of Peten rose above its swamps. As always, the Vision Serpent is the symbol of the path of communication between the sacred world and the human world. Here, the Vision Serpent’s body penetrates the mountain just as the spiritual path the king must take penetrates down through the rock floor of the pyramid and reaches into the heart., of the earth itself. Like his counterparts at Cerros and Tikal, the ahau of Uaxactun materialized that path through the rituals he conducted on the temple stairway, the physical representation of the path to the Otherworld. Behind him stood his living sacred mountains, signaling and amplifying his actions.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-111.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:7 The Cosmos as Rendered on Uaxactun Structure H-X-Sub-3 after Valdes 1988]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-112.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:8 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Sculptures from the Portal Building Leading to the Inner Plaza of the Acropolis pop , “mat,” sign after Valdes 1987]]

The ahau who commissioned this group portrayed himself on a gateway building situated in the center of the acropolis’s western edge.[193] Designed to create a formal processional entrance along the east-west axis of the complex, this small Sub-10 temple has both eastern and western doors. The king and his retainers could enter through this gateway in ceremony, and at certain times of the year the light of the setting sun would shine through it as well. The stairways leading to each of the gateway doors were flanked by stucco jaguar ahau masks[194] surmounted by panels set into the walls of the temple itself. These panels carried modeled-stucco with oven-mat patterns, one of the main symbols of kingship (Fig. 4:8). Stucco portraits of the king (Fig. 4:9) stood in vertical panels between these mats.

We know this is the king for several reasons. First of all, the figure represented here wears the royal costume—an elaborate ahau head and celt assemblage on a belt above a bifurcated loin apron. This apparel would become the most sacred and orthodox costume of the Classic king. This figure also stands atop a throne mat. Most important, he is encircled by the same scroll signs we saw surrounding his contemporary, the ruler of Tikal (Fig. 4:3). Here, and in the comparable shrine 5D-Sub-10-lst at Tikal, we see Late Preclassic kings memorializing themselves for the first time. They do so at the front of their principal temples, on the main axis of their sacred precincts. This practice is a prototype of what is to come, for the kings of the Classic period will also raise their stelae portraits in such a place and in such a manner.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-113.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:9 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Figures of the King Standing amid Blood Scrolls after Valdes 1987]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-114.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]

Throughout the first century A.D., neither Tikal nor Uaxactun managed to outproduce or dominate the other, but both cities continued to support the institution of kingship. We can see this by the elaborate public architecture and other, smaller ritual objects that have come into our knowledge through archaeological excavation. The imagery each city used to define its kings and to demonstrate the sacred foundations of kingly authority partook of the same fundamental understanding of the world and how it worked. Though Uaxactun may perhaps have had a slight edge, the public constructions of the two kingdoms were relatively equal in scale and elaboration.[195] Tikal and Uaxactun moved into the Classic period as full equals, both ready and able to assume the role of El Mirador when that kingdom disintegrated.[196]

Tikal’s inscriptions tell us of a single dynasty which ruled the kingdom from Early Classic times until its demise in the ninth century, a dynasty that could boast of at least thirty-nine successors in its long history. The historical founder of this extraordinary dynasty was a character (Fig. 4:10) known as Yax-Moch-Xoc.[197] We have no monuments from his reign, but we can reconstruct that he ruled sometime between A.D. 219 and A.D. 238[198]—that is, at least a century and a half later than the ahau who commemorated himself on Structure 5D-Sub-10—1 st in the North Acropolis. This founder, then, was not the first ruler of Tikal, but he must have performed in such an outstanding fashion that later descendants acknowledged him as the leader who established their dynasty as a power to be reckoned with. The recognition of Yax-Moch-Xoc as founder by later Tikal kings is important for another reason. It constitutes the earliest example yet recognized in ancient texts of the principle of the anchoring ancestor. From this man would descend the noble families that would comprise the inner community of the court, the royal clan of Tikal.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-115.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]

The earliest historical Tikal king we have in portraiture is the man i depicted on Stela 29, dated at 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Zip (July 8, A.D. 292).[199] This king, Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar[200] (Fig. 4:11), appears surrounded by a complicated system of emblems which designate his rank and power. The twisted rope that hangs in front of his earflare transforms his head into the living embodiment of the glyphic name of the city. He is the kingdom made flesh.[201] Floating above him is an apparition of the dynastic ancestor from whom he received his right to rule.[202] The king’s “divine” right to the throne is manifested in another kind of imagery: In his right arm, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar from which the sun emerges in its human-headed form. This human-headed manifestation of the sun is none other than GUI of the Triad Gods, one of the offspring of the first mother who existed before the present creation. GUI is also the prototype of the second born of the Ancestral Heroes, whose Classic name was Yax-Balam (“First Jaguar”). The Serpent Bar demonstrates the ability of the king to materialize gods and ancestors in the world of his people.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-116.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:11 Stela 29, the Earliest Dated Monument at Tikal and the King Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-117.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:12 The Leiden Plaque and Zero-Moon-Bird]]

Another image of the Yax-Balam head adorns the chest of the king and a third stares out from his uplifted left hand. The imagery of the disembodied head as a symbol of kingship descends directly from Preclassic times in Mesoamerica. The Olmec, for example, were one of the first cultures to use this symbol, portraying their shaman kings in the form of enormous heads the height of a man. The bundle glyph that signified the kingdom of Tikal appears, surmounting the head attached to the king’s belt and the one he materializes in the mouth of the Serpent Bar, while the king’s own name glyph, a miniature jaguar with a scroll-ahau sign, rides upon the head in his left hand. This is the type of complex imagery the Maya used to designate their rulers and the reason their artistic vision was so powerful and potent.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-118.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:13 Pre-conquest Stelae from Uaxactun
drawing by Ian Graham]]

The next Tikal ruler we can identify, Moon-Zero-Bird,[203] is portrayed on a royal belt ornament called the Leiden Plaque (Fig. 4:12). The inscribed text on the reverse side of this ornament records Moon-Zero-Bird’s seating as king on September 17, A.D. 320. Like his predecessor, he stands holding a Serpent Bar. This time, however, we see emerging from the serpent’s mouth not only the sun, but God K, the deity of lineages. This king also wears an elaborate royal belt. Hanging from this, behind his knees, is a chain with a god suspended from it. The ruler wears a massive headdress, combining the imagery of the Jester God and the jaguar, thus declaring his affiliation with both and his rank as ahau. At his feet a noble captive struggles against his impending fate as sacrificial victim.[204]

The presence of this captive documents the crucial role played by war and captive taking in early Maya kingship. The Maya fought not to kill their enemies but to capture them. Kings did not take their captives easily, but in aggressive hand-to-hand combat. A defeated ruler or lord was stripped of his finery, bound, and carried back to the victorious city to be tortured and sacrificed in public rituals. The prestige value a royal captive held for a king was high, and often a king would link the names of his important captives to his own throughout his life. Captives were symbols of the prowess and potency of a ruler and his ability to subjugate his enemies.[205]

Uaxactun, like Tikal, entered the Classic period with a powerful dynasty and, as with Tikal, the first public records of this royal family are fragmentary and incomplete. Uaxactun’s earliest surviving monument, Stela 9, is dated at 8.14.10.13.15 (April 11, A.D. 328). The ruler depicted on it is anonymous because the glyphs containing his name are eroded beyond recall. The ritual event being recorded here is dated thirty-six years later than Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar’s Stela 29 and some eight years after Moon-Zero-Bird’s accession to the throne of Tikal. Although badly eroded, the scene (Fig. 4:13a) depicts essentially the same images as those found on contemporary stelae from Tikal: The elaborately dressed ruler holds a god head in the crook of his arm. We cannot identify the nature of the event taking place because that information did not survive the ravages of time and wear. But we do know, from the date, that this stela commemorated a historical occasion in the king’s life and not an important juncture in the sacred cycles of time, such as a katun ending. As on the Leiden Plaque, a sacrificial victim cowers at the feet of the king,[206] emphasizing war and captive taking as an activity of crucial public interest to the ruler.

Uaxactun boasted the earliest surviving Maya monuments to record the public celebrations at the ending of a katun—Stelae 18 and 19 in Group E.[207] The image carved on Stela 18 has been lost to erosion, but Stela 19 (Fig. 4:13b) repeats the royal figure on Stela 9 and underscores the conventional nature of Uaxactun’s manner of presenting rulers. The king wears the royal belt with its god image suspended on a chain behind his legs, while he holds either a god head or a Serpent Bar in his arms. A captive of noble status kneels before him with bound wrists raised as if in a gesture of supplication. We can assume from the recurrence of this captive imagery that the festivals associated with regularities in the Maya calendar required the king of Uaxactun to undertake the royal hunt for captives, just as he was required to do for accession rituals and other dynastic events. The likely source of his victims: Tikal, his nearby neighbor to the south.

The rivalry between these two cities comes into dramatic focus during the reign of an extraordinary king. Great-Jaguar-Paw, the ninth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, came to the throne sometime between A.D. 320 and 376. This ruler changed the destiny not only of Tikal and Uaxactun, but also the nature of Maya sacred warfare itself. Under his guidance, Tikal not only defeated Uaxactun, but emerged as the Early Classic successor to the glory and power of El Mirador as the dominant kingdom in the Central Peten region.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-119.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:14 Tikal Stela 39 and Great-Jaguar-Paw]]

Despite the fact that he was such an important king, we know relatively little about Great-Jaguar-Paw’s life outside of the spectacular campaign he waged against Uaxactun. His reign must have been long, but the dates we have on him come only from his last three years. On one of these historical dates, October 21, A.D. 376, we see Great-Jaguar-Paw ending the seventeenth katun in a ritual depicted on Stela 39[208] (Fig. 4:14). This fragmentary monument[209] shows him only from the waist down, but he is dressed in the same regalia as his royal ancestors, with the god Chac-Xib-Chae dangling from his belt. His ankle cuffs display the sign of day on one leg and night on the other. Instead of a Serpent Bar, however, he holds an executioner’s ax, its flint blade knapped into the image of a jaguar paw. In this guise of warrior and giver of sacrifices, he stands atop a captive he has taken in battle. The unfortunate victim, a bearded noble still wearing part of the regalia that marks his noble station, struggles under the victor’s feet, his wrists bound together in front of his chest. He will die to sanctify the katun ending at Tikal.[210]

Warfare was not new to the Maya. Raiding for captives from one kingdom to another had been going on for centuries, for allusions to decapitation are present in even the earliest architectural decorations celebrating kingship. The hunt for sacrificial gifts to give to the gods and the testing of personal prowess in battle was part of the accepted social order, and captive sacrifice was something expected of nobles and kings in the performance of their ritual duties. Just as the gods were sustained by the bloodletting ceremonies of kings, so they were nourished as well by the blood of noble captives. Sacrificial victims like these had been buried as offerings in building terminations and dedications from Late Preclassic times on, and possibly even earlier. Furthermore, the portrayal of living captives is prominent not only at Uaxactun and Tikal, but also at Rio Azul, Xultun, and other Early Classic sites.

The war waged by Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal against Uaxactiin, however, was not the traditional hand-to-hand combat of proud nobles striving for personal glory and for captives to give to the gods. This was war on an entirely different scale, played by rules never before heard of and for stakes far higher than the reputations or lives of individuals. In this new warfare of death and conquest, the winner would gain the kingdom of the loser. Tikal won the prize on January 16, A.D. 378.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-120.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:15 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]

The date of the victory, 8.17.1.4.12 11 Eb 15 Mac, is recorded twice at Uaxactun (on Stela 5 and retrospectively on Stela 22) and twice at Tikal (retrospectively on Stela 31 and on a Ballcourt Marker found in Group 6C-XVI). This is one of the few non-period-ending dates ever recorded by the Maya at more than one site. As we shall see, it was a date of legendary importance for both cities. The two primary characters in this historical drama were the high king of Tikal, Great-Jaguar-Paw’, and a character named Smoking-Frog.[211]

The single visual representation of this event occurs at Uaxactun on Stela 5 (Fig. 4:15), which depicts Smoking-Frog as the triumphant leader of the Tikal forces. On the rear of the monument, he proudly names himself as an ahau of Tikal, while on the front he wears the full regalia of a warrior. He grips an obsidian-bladed club, while a bird, perhaps a quetzal, flutters beside his turban. A cluster of long tails arches from the back of his belt and he stands in front of a censer much like the one that appears with Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39 at Tikal (Fig. 4:16).[212]

Aside from the fact that it commemorates the war between Tikal and Uaxactun, this stela is important for another reason. On it we see depicted the first visual representation of the Tlaloc-Venus cpstyme. This costume, with its balloon-shaped headdress and its spearthrower, is profoundly different from that which we have seen adorning Maya ahauob celebrating war and sacrifice at both Tikal and Uaxactun in earlier times. We know that this kind of regalia marks the occasion of a new type of war— conquest war. Smoking-Frog’s celebration of this conquest on Stela 5 may mark the first known display of this complex in the imagery of public monuments, but the costume in several variations (Fig. 4:17) became one of the standard uniforms of the king as conqueror and warrior.[213]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-121.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:16 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]

The Maya borrowed the costume, and probably the rituals that went with it, from the great central Mexican city, Teotihuacan, whose emissaries appeared in the lowlands at about this time. Although initially adopted as a rationale for conquest, the Maya quickly made these symbols and rituals their own. This imagery held firm at the heart of Maya culture for the next thousand years. For the Maya, among many other peoples in Mesoamerica, this particular costume came to have an overwhelming association with war and sacrifice.[214] Soon after they adopted this kind of war, which we shall call Tlaloc-Venus war,[215] the Maya began timing their battles to particular points in the Venus cycle (especially the first appearance of Eveningstar) and to the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn.[216]

We do not know why the Maya saw this association with the planets, especially Venus, as important to their concepts of war. However, the fact that later groups, such as the Aztec and Mixtec, also had such associations, which they may have inherited from either the Teotihuacanos or the Maya or both, suggests they were part of the wider Mesoamerican tradition. The date of the Uaxactun conquest, January 16, A.D. 378, has no astronomical significance that we can detect, but this event is also the earliest known appearance of the international war ritual. The astronomical associations may have come later and then spread to other societies using this type of warfare. Certainly, the association clearly had been made within forty years of the conquest because two related events in the reigns of the next two Tikal kings, Curl-Snout and Stormy-Sky, were timed by astronomical alignments (see Notes 57 and 58–5).

The subjugation of Uaxactun by Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog, which precipitated this new kind of war and its rituals, survives in the inscriptional record almost entirely in the retrospective histories carved by later rulers at Tikal. The fact that these rulers kept commemorating this event shows both its historical importance and its propaganda value for the descendants of these conquerors. Stela 31, the first of these texts, tells us that the conquest took place twelve days, four uinals, and one tun after the end of the seventeenth katun (Fig. 4:18). The passage records two actors: Smoking-Frog, who “demolished and threw down (homy’ the buildings of Uaxactun,[217] and Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal, who let blood from his genitals[218] to sanctify the victory of his warriors.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-122.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:17 Tlaloc War Costume in Late Classic]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-123.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:18 Tikal’s Record of the Conquest of Uaxactun drawing by John Montgomery]]

The Ballcourt Marker, the second of these inscriptions, records the event (Fig. 4:19) using a glyph in the shape of the head of an old god. This god has a trifurcated blade over his eye and a four-petaled flower on the side of his head. This same god appears as a full-figured effigy in Burial 10 at Tikal. There he sits on a stool made of human leg bones and holds a severed human head on a plate. We do not know the precise word value intended by this glyph, but the god is clearly a deity of human sacrifice, probably by decapitation. In this conquest text, the portrait of his head is used to record one of the actions taking place on that particular day, very probably to the unfortunate captives taken at Uaxactun. These captives were very likely sacrificed by decapitation, perhaps in honor of this gruesome deity. For all of the distinctiveness of the international regalia marking this war and its political consequences, the ultimate ritual of decapitation sacrifice was the same as that which had been practiced by ahauob since time began. We shall see, however, how this international symbolism, grafted onto orthodox Maya practices, functioned as part of the propaganda that enabled Smoking-Frog to be installed as usurper king at Uaxactun.

Pictorial representations of the battle for Uaxactun have not survived, but we know enough about the way the Maya conducted warfare to reconstruct what this struggle might have been like.[219] One thing is clear: This battle would have been unlike anything the seasoned warriors on either side had ever experienced. And for the people of Uaxactun, it would be more devastating than their wildest imaginings.

Imagine the growing sense of horror felt by the people of Uaxactun as they watched their vanquished nobility straggle into the central, dazzling white plazas of their city. The clear, hard winter light of the yax-colored sky was the backdrop to a world changing before their frightened eyes. High above them on the bloodred flank of his living mountain, their king struggled to calm himself so that he might enter into the darkness of his portal with a mind clear and purposeful, to challenge his ancestors. Why this violation of all rules of the way men fight? Where was the path to escape this disaster?

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-124.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:19]]

It had begun well enough. He had led his warriors through the days of tasting, the rites of purification and sacrifice. Deep in the night, with his own hands he painted the strong faces of his kinsmen. In the flickering torchlight of the many-chambered men’s hall, he adorned them with the black and red patterns that would terrify any who dared come against them. How proud he had been when their wives handed them the great honey-colored knives of stone and the shields which they rolled up and hung across their backs. Lastly, their wives gave them the great lances hafted with teeth of lightning, the great flint blades flaked to slice smoothly into the flesh of their enemies.

The king’s principal wife, who was pregnant with their next child, had waited until the men of lesser status were prepared before she brought his battle gear.[220] His second wife stood nearby holding their infant child, and his firstborn child by his principal wife watched the proceedings with wide eyes. One day, he, like his father, would lead the men into battle in defense of the portals of the sacred mountains. Dressed in his full regalia, the king smiled at his son and led his family out into the darkness of the predawn morning.

In the still darkness his warriors awaited him, already dressed, their battle jackets tied loosely closed across their muscled chests. When he appeared in the flickering torchlight, a low-throated shout greeted him and his army began their last stages of preparation. They strapped on their helmets emblazoned with the images of their animal protectors. His ahauob donned the fearsome god masks, made in the image of the ax-wielding executioner Chac-Xib-Chac and the other denizens of the Other-world. They draped the wizened, shrunken heads of now-dead captives around their necks to let the enemy know they faced seasoned men of high reputation and proven valor.

Then there had been the rush of fear and the anticipation of glory as the warriors of Uaxactun reached the open savanna south of the city. There the battle would be fought against the age-old rivals who lived among the swamps to the south, at the right-hand side of the sun. The warming light of the rising sun had burned away the ground mist to reveal the warriors arrayed in tension-filled stillness as they waited to join in battle.

It had begun in the old ways of battle, following twenty katuns or more of honorable precedent. Standing in the waist-high grass, the old men sounded the great wooden trumpets whose piercing song cut through the bass thunder of the great war drums, the tunkul, filling the forest with the sound of great deeds in progress. His people stood together like a c writhing vision of multicolored glory against the green of those trees, shouting insults about the ancestry of the Tikal enemy ranked in their hundreds across the sea of grass. One after another, singly or in groups, I his ahauob shouted their challenges toward their counterparts across the savanna. Charging out onto the battle ground, they screamed their insults, then retreated once again to the massed safety of their own side. Their bravado and rage rippled through the ranks, transforming them into a pulsing sea of hysterical faces and trembling bodies.

Suddenly, the tension became unbearable. Ihe warriors’ rage exploded into frenzied release as the two armies charged across the grass, trampling it into a tight mat under their thudding feet. They merged in the middle of the field in a screaming discharge of released energy, lightning blade clashing against woven shield in the glorious and dangerous hunt for captives to give as gifts to the gods.

The lines struck and intermingled in crazed chaos, screams of pain punctuating the cries of challenge. There was a brief flare of victory as Uaxactun’s surging mass of men flowed across the field like a summer flood, sweeping first toward the clump of men who protected Great-Jaguar-Paw, Tikal’s high king, and then back northward toward the Uaxactun lines. The entangled horde of men finally separated, and bloodied, exhausted warriors fell back toward the safety of their own side in the glaring light of midmorning. They needed to wet their dry throats with water and bind up their oozing wounds with strips of paper. Some of the warriors had taken captives who had to be stripped naked and tied down before they escaped in the heat and confusion of the battle. With such great numbers present from each city, the battle would last all day.

It was then that the treacherous enemy lord struck. Smoking-Frog, the war chief of Tikal’s army, flashed an unseen signal and from the forest came hundreds of hidden warriors. In eerie silence, never once issuing challenge, they hurled a cloud of spears into the thick ranks of the Uaxactun warriors. Shocked and horrified, the king realized the enemy was using spearthrowers, the hunter’s weapon, killing his people like food animals gathered for slaughter.[221]

The surprise of the attack was too great and many of his very best warriors fell to the flying lances, unable to get to safety in time. Many died and even more were crippled by a weapon that the king had seen only foreigners use in war, the foreigners who had come into their lands from Teotihuacan, the giant capital to the far west. The hidden hundreds of Tikal’s militia advanced, all carrying bunches of light, obsidian-tipped darts and throwing-sticks. He heard one of his kinsmen scream as a spear drove through his cheek, turning his black-painted face red with blood.

Shouting their hatred for the enemy, the king and his captains leaped toward the Tikal general, Smoking-Frog, where he stood on the far side of the field. Jamming a wedge of bloody spears through the twisting bodies of Tikal’s young men, the warriors’of Uaxactun tore a pathway through enemy ranks for their vengeful king. But it was too late. Above the blare of the long wooden trumpets and the moan of the conch-shell horns, the high chants of Tikal’s triumph sounded in the broken, corpse-strewn meadow. More spears rained down and the king of Uaxactun was forced to pull back to the forest with the shattered remnant of his army. The young men of the royal clan and many valiant men of the great families of Uaxactun lay dead or bound, resigned to suffer the torture that awaited them at the hands of Smoking-Frog and his ahauob.

Now in the darkness of his sanctum, the king of Uaxactun heard again that awful chant of victory. The warriors of Tikal were entering his city and he could feel the ancestral gift of his world slipping from his grasp. An unthinkable disaster had befallen him and his people. He emerged into the blinding daylight; and as his vision cleared, he saw smoke billowing from the fires of destruction, which consumed the spacious homes and public halls of his city’s center. Screaming taunts of desperation, the lords of Uaxactun gathered on the sides of their living mountains, throwing their stabbing spears, rocks, and finally their bodies at the advancing and implacable Tikal forces.

In spite of all their efforts, Smoking-Frog and his company swirled around the base of the king’s pyramid, killing and capturing the valiant warriors of the Uaxactun royal clan. The king and his men fought to the last. At the moment of his capture, the king of Uaxactun reached furiously for Smoking-Frog’s throat. Laughing, the Tikal lord jerked him to his knees by his long bound hair. The defeated king glared up at the arrogant Smoking-Frog, costumed in the regalia of the new, barbarous warfare— the round helmet, the spearthrower, and the obsidian club. He cursed him as his captor’s minions stripped him bare and tied his elbows behind his back with rough sisal rope.

They would all die. There would be no ransom. Under the code of this new, foreign battle strategy, Smoking-Frog would be able to bring his own Tikal ancestors to the portal of Uaxactun. He and his descendants would rule not only the people of the city but their venerated ancestors as well. It was an act of audacity beyond imagination: war to take not only the king but also his portal—and if possible to hold that portal captive. For as long as Smoking-Frog and his kin reigned, the people of Uaxactun would be cut off from the loving guidance of their ancestors, a people stripped of their very gods.

•

In time to come, this kind of war would require a novel alliance with the denizens of the Otherworld—an unleashing of the forces of Xibalba, particularly Venus, to conquer not only the living royal clan but also all of the apotheosized ancestors of that clan. Kings now had a policy and a strategy that would inspire dreams of conquest throughout the Maya world. Venus would prove a powerful, but treacherous ally in the realization of these dreams.

The most tantalizing mystery surrounding the conquest of Uaxactun is the identity of Smoking-Frog. Who was this warrior who appears in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal? We know he was an ahau of Tikal because he consistently included the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Second, we know he was the principal actor in the conquest of Uaxactun, despite the fact that the conquest took place under the authority of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal. All of this leads us to believe that he was most likely the war chief who led Tikal’s army against the rival kingdom, and as a result of his success, was installed as the ruling ahau of Uaxactun by the victorious Tikal king. We know that eighteen years after the conquest, Smoking-Frog was still at Uaxactun. On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396) he conducted a ritual to celebrate the katun ending, an event he depicted on Stela 4 (Fig. 4:20), which he planted next to his portrait as the conqueror (Fig. 4:5). The people of Tikal didn’t forget him on this occasion either. Back at his home city, Smoking-Frog was named on Stela 18 (Fig. 4:20) which recorded the celebration of the same katun ending. He was also prominently named in the retrospective histories recorded on Stela 31 and the Ballcourt Marker.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-125.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:20 Smoking-Frog at Tikal and Uaxactun]]

Yet even considering his prominence in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal, we are reasonably sure that Smoking-Frog never ruled Tikal as its king. Instead, another ahau named Curl-Snout (Fig. 4:20) became high king of Tikal on September 13, 379, less than two years after the conquest. Curl-Snout apparently held his throne, however, under the sufferance of Smoking-Frog, who appears to have ruled the combined kingdom that was forged by the conquest. We would like to put forward the hypothesis that Smoking-Frog was the brother of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal at the time of the battle of Uaxactun, and that Curl-Snout was his nephew.

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-126.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:21 Stela 31: Curl-Snout in the Land of Smoking-Frog drawing by John Montgomery]]

There are several clues leading to this conclusion. One of the ways we can infer the relationship between Curl-Snout and Smoking-Frog is from the inscriptions at Tikal, which always name Curl-Snout either as the yahau “the noble of” (in this case, “the vassal of”) Smoking-Frog (Stela 18) or as acting u cab “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (Stela 31). When Curl-Snout depicted himself acceding to Tikal’s kingship on Stela 4 and ending Katun 18 on Stela 18, he found it advisable to record publicly his relationship to Smoking-Frog. Perhaps the most important reference to their relationship occurs on Stela 31 where an important event in Curl-Snout’s life, possibly his accession, is said to have taken place “in the land of Smoking-Frog” (Fig. 4:21).[222] From these references we surmise that Curl-Snout ruled Tikal, but under the aegis of Smoking-Frog.[223]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-127.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:22 Kinship Relationships of Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal]]

There are additional hints as to the identity of Smoking-Frog and his relationship to Curl-Snout. The text on the Ballcourt Marker names Smoking-Frog as the ihtan,[224] “sibling,” of a person named “Spearthrower-Owl.” It is interesting that Stela 31, erected many years later by Curl-Snout’s son and heir, Stormy-Sky, names Curl-Snout as the “child of” a person named by an almost identical glyph, “Spearthrower-Shield” (Fig. 4:22). We have now realized that these two seemingly different glyphs are merely different ways of writing the same thing—the shield-owl-spear-thrower substitution that would become Pacafs name at Palenque and the name of the third Lord of the Night.[225] If this substitution is correctly identified, then we can assert that Smoking-Frog was the brother and Curl-Snout the son of the same man. Our remaining task is to determine the identity of the person whom these “spearthrower” glyphs name.

The solution to this mystery involves some complicated detective work. The “spearthrower” name also occurs on Stela 31 in another context. It is the title on the headdress Stormy-Sky holds aloft, prior to donning it in the public ritual depicted on the front of the monument (Fig. 4:23). A medallion attached to the front of the headdress depicts an owl with a shield on its wing and a throwing dart piercing its breast. Stormy-Sky is about to become a “spearthrower-owl-shield” person by putting on this headdress.

The last readable clause of the text on this monument tells us that Stormy-Sky performed this ritual on June 11, A.D. 439, when Venus was near its eastern elongation.[226] The glyph that records this ritual action is the same as the one recording the bloodletting event (Fig. 4:23) that Great-Jaguar-Paw performed on the day Uaxactun was conquered. The use of the same verb in both contexts is to declare a “like-in-kindness” between the two actors. If Stormy-Sky became the “spearthrower-owl” person by performing this rite, we may assume that Great-Jaguar-Paw had taken on this identity in the same ritual context. The “spearthrowerowl” named as the brother of Smoking-Frog and the father of Curl-Snout was none other than the first great Tikal king to call himself by that title—Great-Jaguar-Paw, the king who made war with spearthrowers his own. Furthermore, it is this very equation between grandfather and grandson that Stormy-Sky intended to portray in the first place. It is not by accident that he designated himself the “spearthrower-shield” when he reenacted his ancestor’s bloodletting event. By doing so, he intended to remind his people that he was the grandson of this powerful and innovative man.

[[][Fig. 4:23 The Spearthrower Title and Stormy-Sky at Tikal
drawing of text and stela by John Montgomery]]

In the scenario we have reconstructed, forces from Tikal under the military leadership of Smoking-Frog, the brother of the high king, attacked and defeated the forces of their neighboring kingdom, Uaxactiin, on January 16, 378. The victory placed Smoking-Frog on the throne of Uaxactun, where he oversaw the accession of his nephew, Curl-Snout, to Tikal’s throne on September 13, A.D. 379. For the next eighteen years, and perhaps as long as twenty-six years,[227] Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, possibly marrying into its ruling family as well. Even though Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, however, he remained extremely important at Tikal. It’s possible he was the overall ruler of the new combined kingdom that resulted from his victory in battle.

That the conquest of Uaxactun remained a glorious event of historical memory both at Uaxactun and Tikal is clear from the inscriptions at both sites. The descendants of Smoking-Frog continued to erect monuments at Uaxactun on a regular basis. One hundred and twenty-six years after the conquest, on 9.3.10.0.0 (December 9, 504), a Uaxactun ruler celebrated the conquest by erecting Stela 22. The day of the victory, 11 Eb, appears with the same conquest verb (hom, “to knock down or demolish buildings”) describing the action. Even at such a late date, the borrowed glory of the battle of Uaxactun could burnish the deeds of Smoking-Frog’s progeny.

Another example of this “glory by association” can be seen on the above mentioned Stela 31, erected at Tikal. This monument was commissioned by Stormy-Sky, the grandson of the conqueror, and focused on the defeat of Uaxactun.[228] Stormy-Sky’s motivation in featuring this conquest was, of course, to remember the glories of his grandfather and the triumph of his kingdom against an old rival; but he also gained personal prestige by reminding his people of this event. By concentrating on retrospective historical events on this stela, Stormy-Sky was also able to emphasize the extraordinary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus on 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, A.D. 411, see Note 58–5) which occurred during his father’s, Curl-Snout’s, reign. He then used the conquest and the hierophany as a background to emphasize the importance of his own bloodletting on June 10, 439. So effective was this strategy that his own descendant, Ah-Cacaw, remembered and celebrated this same bloodletting event thirteen katuns later (9.13.3.9.18 or September 17, 695).[229]

The most extraordinary record of the conquest was inscribed on the Ballcourt Marker[230] that was recently discovered in a lineage compound south of the Lost World group. The bailgame with its decapitation and sacrificial associations had been a central component of Maya ritual since the Late Preclassic period, but the marker recording the Uaxactun conquest is not typical of the floor-mounted stone disk used in the Maya ballcourts. This Tikal marker, in the shape of a thin cylinder surmounted by a sphere and disk, is nearly identical to ballcourt markers pictured in the murals of the Tlalocan at Teotihuacan itself.[231] It rests on its own Teotihuacan-style platform and a two-paneled inscription wraps around the cylinder base (Fig. 4:19c). Its form emulates the style of Teotihuacan ballcourt markers as a reflection of the importance of the Tlaloc-Venus war in its records.[232]

The inscription is as extraordinary as the object itself. One panel records the conquest of Uaxactun by Smoking-Frog (Fig. 4:19a), while the opposite side records the accession to office of the fourth lord to rule the lineage that occupied this compound.[233] This was presumably the lineage head who went to war under the leadership of Smoking-Frog. The Ballcourt Marker itself was planted in the altar on January 24, 414, some thirty-six years after the conquest of Uaxactun, but it was not commissioned by a king. It was erected by a lord who named himself “the ahau (in the sense of “vassal’) of Smoking-Frog of Tikal” (Fig. 4:19c).

The people who lived and worked in this ritual/residential complex were members of one of the important, nonroyal lineages of the kingdom. They were not themselves kings; but like their king and his descendants, they remembered the conquest of Uaxactun as the most glorious event in living memory. Like Stormy-Sky, they gained prestige by celebrating its memory in texts recording the history of their own lineage. This lineage presumably provided warriors, perhaps even leaders, for Smoking-Frog’s army and forever gained recognition and glory by their participation.

The war and its aftermath affected more than just the two kingdoms and the people directly involved. Tikal’s victory gave the lords who ruled that kingdom the advantage they needed to dominate the central Peten for the next 180 years. However, this great victory also coincided with an intensified interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan, whose influence, as we have seen, appeared in Maya symbolism just about the time this war was fought. What did this interaction mean for the Maya culture and how far did their involvement with the civilization of Teotihuacan go? To answer this question, we must examine a little history.

During the same centuries that saw the development of lowland Maya kingdoms, the new state of Teotihuacan had simultaneously been growing to maturity in the valley of Mexico (Fig. 4:24). We know that the lowland Maya and the Teotihuacanos had been in contact with each other from at least the first century A.D. Offerings of the distinctive green obsidian mined by the Teotihuacanos have been discovered in Late Preclassic Maya sites at Nohmul and at Altun Ha in Belize.[234] Furthermore, the exchange of material goods was not just in one direction. Just as Teotihuacan-style objects occur at Tikal and elsewhere in the lowlands, Maya-style objects also occur at Teotihuacan. Yet even in light of this long-term exchange of exotic goods between the two regions, something very special and different, at least in scale, took place on the occasion of the war against Uaxactun. What was exchanged this time was not just goods, but a whole philosophy. The Maya borrowed the idea and the imagery of conquest war from the Teotihuacanos and made it their own.

On Stela 5 at Uaxactun (Fig. 4:15), the conqueror, Smoking-Frog, chose to depict himself in ritual war regalia of the Teotihuacan style. On Stela 4 at Tikal (Fig. 4:20), Curl-Snout, the son of Great-Jaguar-Paw, ruler of Tikal at the time of the conquest, depicted himself wearing a shell necklace, also in the style of Teotihuacan, when he acceded as king. ^ Curl-Snout appears again on the sides of Stela 31 (Fig. 4:25), but this time in the same war regalia worn by Smoking-Frog at Uaxactun. If we recall that the Maya utilized their public art for purposes of propaganda, we can see the reasoning behind this costume. When Stormy-Sky acceded to the throne, he needed to present his father (the forebear upon whom his right to rule depended) in the most powerful light possible. What could be more prestigious than for Curl-Snout to appear in the costume worn by Smoking-Frog at the moment of his greatest triumph?

[[][Teotihuacan: the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun]]

[[][The Talud-tablero Style of Architecture Characteristic of Teotihuacan
Fig. 4:24]]

To give the impression that we are seeing Curl-Snout standing behind his son, Stormy-Sky represented him twice, on opposite sides of the stela. On one side we see the inside of his shield and the outside of his spearthrower; on the other we see the inside of the spearthrower, and the outside of the shield. Upon his shield we see the image of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed deity that the Maya would come to associate with this particular kind of war and bloodletting ritual.[235]

Burials from this period at Tikal also give evidence of the Maya interaction with Teotihuacan. Two of our protagonists were buried in the North Acropolis at Tikal: Curl-Snout in Burial 10 and Stormy-Sky in Burial 48.[236] Both tombs include significant numbers of pots made in the style of Teotihuacan, emulating imagery particularly associated with that city. Even more to the point, a special cache at Tikal called Problematic Deposit 5O[237] included what may very well be the interred remains of resident Teotihuacanos of high rank. The most interesting object in this deposit is a vase that appears to depict the arrival of a group of Teotihuacanos at a Maya city (Fig. 4:26).

[[][Fig. 4:25 tails Curl-Snout as the Spearthrower Warrior on the Sides of Stela 31]]

On this vase six Teotihuacanos, marked by their clothing, walk away from a place of talud-tablero-style architecture, the ethnic signal of Teotihuacan (Fig. 4:24), to arrive at a place that has both talud-tablero temples and stepped pyramids of Maya design. At the city of departure, they leave a child and a squatting figure, perhaps representing the family members who see them off on their long journey. Four of the <verbatim><</verbatim> Teotihuacano visitors wear the long-tailed costume we have seen at Uaxactun and Tikal. These same persons carry spearthrowers and appear to escort two other characters who carry lidded cylinders, a pottery shape particularly associated with Teotihuacan.[238] At the end of this “journey,” the arriving Teotihuacanos are greeted by a person dressed like a Maya.

We do not know for sure which cities the artist intended to represent on this vessel—although it would seem logical to identify Teotihuacan as the starting point and Tikal as the point of arrival.[239] The four Teotihuacanos carrying weapons constitute a warrior escort for the two vase-carrying individuals behind them. The rear figures are distinguished by tasseled headdresses of the type that also show up prominently at Kaminaljuyu and Monte Alban in contexts where Teotihuacan symbolism have merged with local traditions. The individuals who wear these headdresses are most likely special-status people who traveled as emissaries, or professional merchants representing their great city throughout western Mesoamerica.[240]

[[][Fig. 4:26 A Visit by Teotihuacanos Carved on a Black Cylindrical Vase from Problematic Deposit 50]]

The appearance of this kind of imagery at Tikal has been explained in several ways, ranging from the military conquest of these sites by Teotihuacan to the usurpation of Tikal’s throne by lords from Teotihuacan or Kaminaljuyu.[241] The last alternative seems unlikely. The status of Curl-Snout as Stormy-Sky’s father is certain. If we are accurate in our analysis of the “spearthrower-shield” glyph, Great-Jaguar-Paw was Curl-Snout’s father and Smoking-Frog’s brother. If these relationships are correctly deciphered, then we can verify an unbroken descent in the Tikal royal line during the very time Teotihuacano imagery begins appearing in such prominence.

If we dismiss conquest and usurpation, then what does the presence of this imagery imply? There is little doubt that the Teotihuacanos were physically present at Tikal, at least in small numbers, just as small numbers of lowland Maya were also present at Teotihuacan. The reason for this was not military occupation. Rather, during the fifth and sixth centuries, Teotihuacan had established a network binding the individual societies in Mesoamerica together in a great web of trade and exchange.

When the Teotihuacanos departed their city to travel among the different areas participating in that trade network, they went as tasselheaded ambassador-traders, protected by warriors. Sacred war as they defined and practiced it is registered in the murals of Atetelco and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in their own great city.[242] The symbology in these images is clearly related, if not identical, to the Tlaloc warfare practiced by the Maya. As these Teotihuacanos spread out from their sacred city, which they believed to be the point on earth where the supernatural world was embodied,[243] they took their form of war and sacrificial rituals with them.

The arrival of the Teotihuacan trader-ambassadors in the central Peten may have intensified the rivalry that already existed between Uaxactiin and Tikal. At the very least their presence inflated the stakes at risk—the wealth in material goods and ideas that came with controlling the trade network of the central Peten region. Certainly when Smoking-Frog depicted himself—and later on, his father—in the costume worn by the Teotihuacan warriors, it was because this costume was prestigious and important propaganda to his people. How much more impressive must the Teotihuacan symbolism have been to the people of the whole Peten region when its adoption by Tikal’s rulers coincided with their conquest of Uaxactun?

Both the son and grandson of the triumphant Great-Jaguar-Paw knew the propaganda value of the Tlaloc complex. They enthusiastically adopted the imagery and its associated rituals, and then quite deliberately commemorated their ancestor’s great feat whenever possible on their own public monuments. By the time Stormy-Sky erected Stela 31, this war and sacrifice ritual was firmly associated with Venus or Venus-Jupiter-Saturn hierophanies, most probably a Maya adaptation.

With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, the Maya adopted this ritual and made it their own. It survived the collapse of the Classic period civilization and is prominent at Chichen Itza and other northern sites of the Postclassic period. It may even have traveled back to central Mexico via Cacaxtla and Xochicalco: For it is the Maya version of the Tlaloc complex that appears at those sites at the end of the Classic period.

Why did the Maya take to this new ritual so readily and enthusiastically? Perhaps the best answer is that it helped Tikal win a staggering victory that made her kings the dominant ahauob of the central Peten. Intensified trade and political association with Teotihuacan were other likely results of this victory. As a ruler of empire, Tikal experienced an inflation of prestige perhaps unprecedented in Maya history and rarely replicated again. This conquest was the stuff of legends and the people of Tikal never let the story pass from memory. Thirteen katuns later another descendent memorialized this legendary conquest when he sought to rebuild the glory of Tikal after a disastrous defeat on the battlefield.

But there is more to this scenario than just the adoption of a new art of war. From early in their history, the Maya honored offerings of blood above all others as the most sacred gifts to the gods. Individuals were often sacrificed to sanctify the construction of a new building. Indeed, the people of Cuello killed and dismembered twenty-six individuals to place under the floor of a new platform they built around 400 B.C.[244] Bloodletting regalia and caches are consistently found at Late Preclassic sites. Some early communities were also fortified, suggesting that ritual war for the taking of sacrificial victims was an important part of Maya life from a very early time. The trifurcated scrolls representing blood, which flow from the mouth of the Tlaloc image, are found on the great plaster masks of Late Preclassic Maya architecture. The symbolism and ritual of the Teotihuacanos’ war imagery fell on fertile ground.

The Maya did more than just borrow the imagery and ritual: They adapted it to their needs. To the Maya the Tlaloc complex with its associated jaguar, bird, spearthrower, and mosaic headdress imagery (see Note 45) meant war and sacrifice above all things. The association of this war/sacrifice complex with planetary conjunctions may have been present at Teotihuacan, but we can never test for that since the Teotihuacanos did not record dates in their art. We do not know when their rituals occurred or if the murals at Teotihuacan even represent specific historical acts. For the Maya, however, the Tlaloc complex became associated with war and sacrifice timed by the apparitions of Venus and Jupiter.[245]

The prominence of Teotihuacan-style imagery in the tombs and on &’the stelae of Tikal lasted only through Stormy-Sky’s reign. By A.D. 475, the rulers of Tikal abandoned this way of representing themselves and concentrated on other aspects of kingship. The intensive interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan lasted for only a hundred years, shifting thereafter to the neutral ground at Kaminaljuyu.[246] Contact between the Teotihuacanos and the lowland Maya must have continued at least until the eighth century when Teotihuacan ceased to be a major intercultural power. The first flush of intense contact is what we have observed at Tikal and it brought prestige and wealth to both parties.

From the Teotihuacanos the Maya gained a sacrificial ritual and a new kind of warfare that would remain central to their religion at least until the ninth century. We know less about what Teotihuacan gained from the interchange. The end result, however, was the establishment of an international network of trade along which moved material goods and ideas. This interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica resulted in a florescence of civilized life, a cultural brilliance and intensity that exceeded even the accomplishments of the Olmec, the first great civilization to arise in Mesoamerica.

5. Star Wars in the Seventh Century

The kingdom of Tikal throve after the conquest of Uaxactun, fulfilling the promise of its victory by becoming the largest and most prosperous Early Classic kingdom in the Maya heartland. This prosperity can be seen in the astounding proliferation of temples and public art commissioned by the ahauob of ensuing generations. The descendants of the victorious king, Great-Jaguar-Paw, launched an ambitious building program that changed the face of the city and studded the terrace in front of the North Acropolis with a forest of tree-stones. These stelae tell us something about the changing emphasis of kingship in Tikal, for the kings who reigned after Great-Jaguar-Paw’s grandson, Stormy-Sky, chose a different style of representing themselves, one that emphasized their humanity by simplifying the cluster of symbolism surrounding them.[247] In place of the old-style portraits that depicted them in full royal regalia, these rulers depicted themselves (Fig. 5:1a and b) holding simple decorated staffs in rituals celebrating period endings in the Maya calendar.[248] In this manner they removed the focus of history from the arena of personal and dynastic events, like birth, accession, and conquest, and placed it instead upon the rhythms of time and the great festival cycles by which these rhythms were celebrated.

[[][Fig. 5:1]]

After thirty years of depicting themselves in this style, the rulers of Tikal began experimenting again, encouraging their artisans to expand the frontiers of tradition into fresh and innovative areas. These artists created new styles by an imaginative combination of elements both old and new. Around 9.4.0.0.0 (A.D. 514), for example, the manner of depicting kings on stelae switched to a front view carved in a relief deep enough to model the king’s face three-quarters in the round. Sculptors also experimented with formats that placed the king’s parents on either side of the stela (Fig. 5:1c) in a modern echo of Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece, Stela 31. Old themes, like the bound captive lying at the feet of the king (Fig. 5:Id), returned to stelae compositions. Eventually the styles for representing kings took their inspiration from even earlier times, creating the Maya version of the adage “Everything old is new again.” In 557, the twenty-first successor, Double-Bird, commissioned a monument in a style that was popular during Tikal’s first flush of conquest glory, depicting himself in shallow relief, standing profile to the viewer (Fig. 5:5). Double-Bird’s monument, Stela 17, holds a unique place in the commemorative art of Tikal. It was the last monument erected before a 130-year period of silence fell upon the inscribed history of this great capital. The reason for this long silence was the conquest of the city by a new kingdom that had grown to maturity m the region to the southeast.

Piecing together the true story of Tikal’s two centuries of cultural innovation is a difficult and painstaking task. Many of the existing stelae and art objects were deliberately effaced or smashed by the conquerors in the time following the erection of Stela 17. Even in such a shattered form, however, one can see the extraordinary beauty and power of Tikal’s artistic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the written history that has come to us from this period is as poor and spotty as the visual one. Many of the texts that survived the destructive frenzy of Tikal’s nemesis treat only of the period-ending celebrations that had become the focus of Tikal’s ritual life. Although the records of the actors who entered and left the stage of history during this period are sketchy, they still provide at least a partial account of the kings who held Tikal’s throne.[249] The kings we currently know from this period are as follows:

| Date | Name | # | Monuments | Date | | | Staff Stela | | | | | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar | 12^th | St. 9, 13 | 475 | | | Mah-Kina-Chan | 13^th | Pot, St. 8? | | | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw-Skull | 14^th | St. 7 | 488 | | 9.3.O.O.O | | | St. 3,15,27 | 495 | | 9.4.0.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 6 | 514 | | | Frontal Style | | | | | 9.3.9.13.3 | birth, Lady of Tikal | ??? | St. 23 | 504 | | 9.3.16.18.4 | accession, ?? | .??? | St. 23 | 511 | | 9.4.3.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 25 | 517 | | 9.4.13.0.0 | Curl-Head | 19^th | St. 10, 12 | 527 | | 9.5.O.O.O? | ??? | | St. 14 | 534 | | | Profile Style | | | | | 9.5.3.9.15 | Double-Bird | 21^st | St. 17 | 537 |

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-49.jpg 70f][The Sequence of the History of the Caracol-Tikal-Naranjo Wars]]

| Maya date | A.D. | Tikal | Naranjo | Dos Pilas | Caracol | Calakmul | | 9.5.3.9.15 | 12/31/537 | Double-Bird acts (accedes) | | | 9.5.12.0.4 | 5/7/546 | | Ruler I accedes | | 1Q1 7 | 4/1R/SS1 | | | | Lord Water accedes | | 9.6.2.1.11 | 4/11/556 | | | | ax-war against Tikal | | 9.6.3.9.15 | 9/17/557 | Double-Bird’s last date | | 9.Ó.8.4.2 | 5/1/562 | | | | star-war at Tikal | | 9.9.4.16.2 | 3/9/618 | | | | Lord K3” 11 accedes | | 9.95.13.8 | 1/9/619 | | | | | lord acts at Naranjo | | 9.9.13.4.4 | 5/28/626 | | | | sacrifice of “he of Naranjo” | | 9.9.14.3.5 | 5/4/627 | | | | bailgame and sacrifice | | 9.9.17.11.14 | 10/4/630 | | | | death of Naranjo lord | | 9.9.18.16.3 | 12/27/631 | | | | star war against Naranjo | | 9.10.3.2.12 | 3/4/636 | | | | star war against Naranjo | | 9.10.4.16.2 | 11/24/637 | | | | 1 katun of rule, Lord Kan II | | 9.10.10.0.0 | 12/6/642 | | victory stair dedicated by Caracol | | 9.10.12.11.2 | 7/5/645 | | | Flint-Sky-God K accedes | | 9.10.16.16.19 10/9/649 | | | | | | Jaguar-Paw born | | 9.11.11.9.17 | 3/2/664 | | | capture of Tah-Mo’ | | 9.12.9.17.16 | 5/6/682 | Ah Cacaw accedes | | 9.12.10.5.12 | 8/30/682 | | Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau arrives from Dos Pilas | | 9.12.13.17.7 | 4/6/686 | | | | Jaguar-Paw accedes | | 9.12.15.13.7 | 1/6/688 | | Smoking-Squirrel born | | 9.13.0.0.0 | 3/18/692 | katun ending and Stela 30 twin pyramid complex | | 9.13.1.3.19 | 5/31/693 | | Smoking-Squirrel accedes | | 9.13.1.4.19 | 6/20/693 | | Kinichil-Cab captured | | 9.13.1.9.5 | 9/14/693 | | smoke-shell event | | 9.13.1.13.14 | 12/12/693 | | smoke-shell event | | 9.13.2.16.0 | 2/1/695 | | war against Ucanal | | 9.13.3.7.18 | 8/8/695 | Ah-Cacaw captures Jaguar-Paw of El Perú | | | | Jaguar-Paw captured | | 9.13.3.8.11 | 8/21/695 | sacrifice of captives | | 9.13.3.9.18 | 9/17/695 | dedication of Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rituals | | 9.13.3.13.15 | 12/3/695 | sacrificial (war?) ritual with Ox-Ha-Te of El Peru | | 9.13.6.2.0 | 3/27/698 | | | Shield-God K accedes | | 9.13.6.4.17 | 5/23/698 | | smoke-shell event with Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal | | 9.13.6.10.4 | 9/7/698 | | smoke-shell event with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal | | 9.13.7.3.8 | 4/19/699 | | sacrificial rite with Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau | | 9.13.10.0.0 | 1/26/702 | | Smoking-Squirrel dedicates stela | | | | | and displays Shield-Jaguar in sacrificial rites | | 9.13.18.4.16 | 3/23/710 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Yaxha | | 9.13.18.9.15 | 6/28/710 | | sacrifice of Yaxha captive | | 9.13.19.6.3 | 4/12/711 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Sacnab | | 9.14.0.0.0 | 12/5/711 | | Venus and period-ending ceremonies | | | | Stela 16 twin-pyramid complex | | 9.14.0.10.0 | 6/18/711 | summer solstice and Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal in sacrificial rite |

While we know little of the personal history of these rulers, they did leave their permanent mark upon the city in the form of the magnificent buildings raised under their patronage. Much of this construction took place in the sacred precincts of the North Acropolis. One of the most extraordinary projects commissioned there was the new version of Temple 5D-33—2^nd (Fig. 5:2), a temple that covered the tomb of the great ruler Stormy-Sky.[250] During the ensuing centuries, this magnificent new temple served as the central stage front of the face of the North Acropolis, which looked out onto the Great Plaza to the south. It was an important symbol of kingship during the middle period of Tikal’s history and the backdrop for all dynastic rituals conducted within the Great Plaza.

In contrast to the novelty of the stelae of this era, Temple 5D-33-2^nd was a model of tradition. The great plaster masks that surmounted its pyramid and its temple walls restated the symbolism of the Late Preclassic period. This symbolic message was similar to the one we saw on Group H at Uaxactun, a cosmology based upon the Sacred Mountains rather than the arch of the sun and Venus.[251] The lowest masks on Temple 33–2^nd are Witz-Mountain Monsters, whose mouths have been rendered as caves (Fig. 5:2). The middle masks represent more Witz Monsters. These have small, severed human heads and blood scrolls (or perhaps maize) emerging from their summits. The masks on the very top level of the temple depict dragons in the shape of what is probably Venus, representing the front head of the Cosmic Monster. Vines, representing the forests of the world, sprout from the top of these open-mouthed heads.[252] As the king performed his sacred rituals, this facade, like the great mask assemblages of Preclassic Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun discussed in earlier chapters, enveloped him in the ancient, orthodox, and transcendent cosmology of the Maya people.

Temple 33–2^nd was but one building in a rash of construction (Fig. 5:3) that continued into the sixth century. This renovation took place over a period of seventy years under the direction of ten successive rulers, many of whom sat the throne for only a short time.[253] The reason for the brief length of their reigns is not known, but it is possible that what we see here is the passing of the kingship from sibling to sibling at the death of a brother.

Beginning around 9.4.0.0.0, these rulers reworked the summit of the North Acropolis into a pattern of eight buildings, a unique pattern that all future Tikal kings would honor and maintain. One of the most lasting innovations of this time, however, was the twin-pyramid complex, whose prototype was erected in the center of the East Plaza.[254] This new type of architecture, with its uncarved pillars and lack of focus on personal history, facilitated the celebration of period-ending rites, a practice that had been initiated at Tikal by Curl-Snout on Stela 18. His successors sustained that practice, developing what would henceforth be an architectural hallmark of this city and a principal focus of Tikal’s festival cycle for the rest of its history.[255]

Suddenly, amid the exuberant brilliance of sixth-century life, the fortunes of Tikal’s twenty-first king took a disastrous turn for the worse. He and his kingdom fell victim to a new and dangerous dynasty that had been on the rise throughout the fifth century in the forests to the southeast of Tikal. The bellicose rulers of this new kingdom, called Caracol by archaeologists, would take not only Tikal but the entire Petén region by storm, eventually controlling the politics of the Classic Maya heartland for more than a century.[256]

Caracol Goes on the Rampage

The portion of Caracol’s dynastic history that survives in its inscriptions begins in A.D. 495; but the protagonist of our story, a king named Lord Water, did not accede to the throne until April 18, A.D. 553 (9.5.19.1.2). Lord Water recorded part of his personal history on Stelae 6 and 14; but until archaeologists discovered a new altar in recent excavations at Caracol, we had no idea what a deadly and pivotal role this ruler played in the drama at Tikal.

The impact of Lord W’ater upon the Maya world was of such proportions that even before the discovery and translation of the key texts, archaeologists and epigraphers had detected the presence of a cataclysmic pattern. The modern story of this history began in 1950 when the great Mayanist, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, published her seminal study of “style” in Maya sculpture.[257] Noting an absence of monuments between the years 9.5.0.0.0 (A.D. 534) and 9.8.0.0.0 (A.D. 593), she proposed that there must have been a hiatus[258] in Maya civilization during this time. She also noted that this hiatus corresponded to the change in ceramics styles, from the Early Classic period to the Late Classic. Another great Mayanist and a colleague of Proskouriakoff’s, Gordon Willey,[259] also suggested that the Maya experienced a regional crisis at this time—a crisis so great it foreshadowed in scale and impact the great final collapse that would come in the ninth century.

Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s second great contribution to Maya studies, the “historical hypothesis,”[260] contracted the time span of the hiatus somewhat. Up until the publication of this hypothesis in the 1960s, the prevailing view of the Classical Maya was that they were benign calendar priests, peacefully recording endless cycles of time on stelae whose written texts would never ultimately be translated. Proskouriakoff proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these texts not only could be read but were the history of kings and kingdoms. The retrospective histories made possible by her discovery filled in some of the gaps in time at various sites. Nevertheless, archaeologists working at Tikal still have found no stela to fill the gap between Stela 17 dated at 9.6.3.9.15 (September 17, 557) and Stela 30 dated at 9.13.0.0.0 (March 18, 692). Moreover, as we have pointed out earlier, stelae erected before this Tikal hiatus were deliberately effaced by abrading or shattering the stone.[261] Obviously, someone intentionally removed this history from the record. We suspect now that the culprit was none other than Lord Water, the rapacious king of Caracol, who opened a campaign of military conquest by attacking his huge neighbor Tikal.

The first clue to his role as Tikal’s nemesis came in 1986 when archaeologists working at Caracol excavated a ballcourt.[262] On its central axis, they discovered a round marker (Fig. 5:4) with a long 128-glyph text circling its upper surface. The text on this “altar” begins with the birth of the king who commissioned the monument, Lord Kan II, and tells of the accession of his ancestor, Lord Water, on April 18, A.D. 553. From our point of view, however, the most important information on this marker is the text recording Lord Water’s aggression against Tikal. This text tells us that on April 11, 556 (9.6.2.1.11), following the end of Katun 6, Caracol conducted an “ax-war” action “in the land of” the ahau of Tikal.[263]

We know, however, that this initial “ax war” wasn’t fatal to Tikal. Shortly thereafter, on September 17, 557, the city’s ruler, Double-Bird, raised his Stela 17 to commemorate a one-katun anniversary—perhaps of his own accession (Fig. 5:5). Those rituals, however, were the last recorded in the public history of Tikal for a very long time. As the scribe of Altar 21 at Caracol exults, a “star-at-Tikal” war event, usually lethal to the loser, took place five years later, on May 1, 562 (9.6.8.4.2).[264] The tables had been turned. Caracol had mastered the same Tlaloc-Venus war that had defeated Uaxactun two centuries earlier. The long darkness at Tikal had begun.

The correspondence of Caracol’s claim of victory to the all-out destruction at Tikal shows us this claim was not a fabrication. Lord Water’s war had indeed broken the back of Tikal’s pride, independence, and prosperity. We are not sure, however, to what extent, or for how long, Caracol was able to maintain political dominance over its huge rival.

Present archaeology does offer us certain clues to Caracol’s ubiquitous presence in the lives of Tikal’s citizens. For example, Tikal’s art and funerary practices exhibit influence from the region of Caracol[265] beginning with this period. We can also see, as we mentioned above, that DoubleBird and his dynasty ceased to erect stelae and other monuments, and that the building of temples and pyramids slowed down. We can speculate as to the reasons for this. Double-Bird had no doubt been captured and killed, his dynasty ended, and his remaining ahauob cut off from the vast trade routes that provided their wealth. We can vividly see the effects of this impoverishment in their burial practices. The well-stocked tombs of the Tikal nobility gave way to meager caricatures of their former glory, lacking both the quantity and quality of earlier grave goods. Tikal’s oppressors permitted only one tomb of wealth—Burial 195, the resting place of the twenty-second successor of the Tikal dynasty. Never permitted to erect public monuments, this man was at least allowed the privilege of a rich burial and a dignified exit to the Otherworld, perhaps to offset the humiliation of being denied his place in history.

Lord Water enjoyed an unusually long and prosperous reign—prosperous for Caracol at least. After forty-six years as king, he died and left the throne to the eldest of two brothers, who were presumably his sons.[266] Born in 575, the older brother became king on June 26, 599, and reigned lor nineteen uneventful years. The younger brother, however, was a king in the mold of his father. After acceding on March 9, 618, this young ruler took his father’s name as his own and then set out to prove that the earlier victories of Lord Water had not been historical accidents. He launched a campaign that would eventually result in the defeat of Naranjo, a major kingdom located to the east of Tikal.

Lord Kan II recorded the history of his wars on Stela 3 in his own capital and on the Hieroglyphic Stairs erected in the capital of his defeated enemy, Naranjo. The earliest events of Kan H’s reign still resist decipherment, but we do have allusions to a strategic alliance he formed soon after becoming king. On 9.9.5.13.8 (January 9, 619), we read that Lord Kan II performed an important but unidentified action in “the land of” an ahau of Calakmul (Fig. 5:6a), a huge kingdom lying to the north of Tikal within sight of the abandoned mountain-temples of El Mirador.[267] Whatever this action may have been, its declaration marked the beginning of an bond between Kan II and the kings of Calakmul that would prove fateful for both Tikal and Naranjo in the katuns to come. Through this alliance, and others like it, the king of Caracol would surround his intended victims with a ring of deadly enemies.

Calakmul was not new to the stage of Maya history. The city had monuments dating from the Early Classic period and was still going stiong by the Late Classic. Calakmul was most probably the inheritor of El Mirador s power in the north and was a long term rival of Tikal.

1 he firs, major mention of a Calakmul king in the interkingdom politics of the times appears in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, a city to the west of Tikal. A passage found on Lintel 35 of the Early Classic Structure 12 records that a vassal lord of the king of Calakmul participated in a ritual at Yaxchilan on 9.5.2.10.6 (January 16, 537). The king of Calakmul is named with a Cauac-in-hand-Ix glyph, but we shall refer to him hereafter simply as “Cu-Ix.”[268]

The name Cu-Ix also appears on Stela 25 at Naranjo, accompanied by the date 9.5.12.0.4 (May 7, 546). This was the most important date in the life of Naranjo’s king, Ruler I, for he repeatedly celebrated anniversaries of it throughout his lifetime. We have presumed that the event was his accession, but whatever it was, the text on Stela 25 records that it took place a cab “in the territory” of Cu-Ix, the Ahau of Calakmul. This text suggests that the Calakmul king was important, if not instrumental, in the installation of Ruler I as the king of Naranjo. Certainly, these two references demonstrate the far-flung influence of the Calakmul king. They also suggests an envelopment strategy against Tikal involving Calakmul in the north, Caracol in the south, Naranjo in the east, and, perhaps, Yaxchilan in the west.[269]

If Naranjo ever was allied with Calakmul, however, that alliance did not last long. We do not know what happened between Ruler 1 of Naranjo and his erstwhile ally at Calakmul; but we have evidence that in later years, the kings of Caracol felt free to skirmish with Naranjo without endangering their own alliance with Calakmul. Thus, on May 28, 626, Lord Water’s second son, the rapacious Lord Kan II, launched a full-scale campaign against Naranjo. He began his military aggression by committing what we can only broadly interpret as an aggressive or sacrificial action against a lord designated in the text of Caracol Stela 3 simply as “he of Naranjo” (Fig. 5:6b). On that day, Venus was at its stationary point as Morningstar,[270] a position believed to be favorable for victory in battle.

On May 4, 627, one year after the initial battle, Lord Kan II staged his second confrontation with Naranjo. The result was again a war or sacrificial ritual, but this time events took place in his own city (Fig. 5:6c). This event was also commemorated on the stairway text at Naranjo, but here it was clearly referred to as a ballgame (Fig. 5:6d).[271] Although we do not know exactly what was meant by “ballgame” in this context, we do know that the game was often used as a ritual for the disposition of captives. The person recorded here as the “player” (read “captive”) did not die, however, for another three years. His name can be found next to a glyph recording his death on October 4, 630 (Fig. 5:6e). We can’t be sure, but we think this person was Ruler I, the king who had been installed by the Calakmul king in A.D. 546 (9.5.12.0.4). Since the inscription of Naranjo Stela 27 describes Ruler I as “five-katun-ahau,”[272] we surmise that he was over eighty years old when he died.

Whether Lord Kan II was recording Ruler Ts death or that of some other powerful noble in his account of these events, the end result was the same. The death of this individual created a power imbalance at Naranjo which invited the next stage of Caracol’s war. In the following year, on December 27, 631, when Venus as the Eveningstar first appeared in the skies over Naranjo,[273] Lord Kan II attacked that kingdom and decisively defeated its hapless warriors (Fig. 5:7a-b).

Why did Lord Kan II of Caracol choose Naranjo as his next target after his victory over Tikal? Ironically, Ruler I of Naranjo may himself have been responsible for this state of affairs. After Tikal was defeated and its nobility stripped of their wealth and influence, the resulting power vacuum may have tempted the king of Naranjo to betray his former allies. He apparently reached out to Tikal in friendship and alliance, involving himself somehow in the politics of that kingdom.

Behind all these gestures of friendship, however, might linger something even more intriguing: a love story. Sometime in the early seventh century, nobles of Tikal mourned the death of a woman of high rank and special status. This Tikal noblewoman was buried with extraordinary pomp and honor. The Tikal ahauob cut her resting place into the living rock, down under the central axis of Structure 5G-8 in the suburbs of their benighted city. The masons then vaulted the chamber with stone in the manner of the great ancestors of the North Acropolis, the only other people of Tikal to have been honored with vaulted tombs. Their parting gift to the spirit of this woman was a single beautiful polychrome bowl with painted images of the Celestial Bird (Fig. 5:8). On its rim is a text recording that its original owner was Ruler I of Naranjo. How it came to Tikal we do not know, but its presence in the tomb of this woman suggests she had some special association with Naranjo, either through marriage or through the exchange of gifts. The occasion symbolized by this bowl may have called down the wrath of Caracol on the aged king of Naranjo.

Neither of the accounts of this “star-war” event found at Caracol and Naranjo actually records the name of the king of Naranjo as a captive. This deletion does not prove, however, that the victim was not the king. We know for certain that some Naranjo notable was eventually sacrificed in a rather gruesome victory celebration which took place in the city of Caracol’s ally, Calakmul. The Hieroglyphic Stairs the defeated Naran-janos were forced to build as a subjugation monument record that a nasty follow-up event spelled k’uxah[274] (“to torture” or perhaps “to eat”) was perpetrated upon this individual “in the land of” the king of Calakmul (Fig. 5:7c). For the time being, Calakmul would benefit from its alliance with the top dog, Lord Kan II; but in the end, as we shall see, it would pay dearly for its role in this deadly game of war and sacrifice.

This victory seems to have temporarily sated the ambitions of Lord Kan II, for he neither attacked Naranjo nor took any more of its lords hostage for the next five years. Instead, he was content to watch and wait for Venus to once again reach an optimum battle position. On 9.10.3.2.12 (March 4, 636), such a favorable position occurred. When the Morningstar was fifteen days and .6° past its maximum elongation, he attacked Naranjo yet again. This time when he recorded his participation in the battle, he prominently featured his personal capture of a lord named 18-Rabbit (Fig. 5;7d). Ironically, 18-Rabbit gained his own kind of immortality by being the victim.

A little over a year later, on 9.10.4.16.2 (November 24, 637), Lord Kan II completed the final act in this long drama by celebrating the completion of his first katun of reign (Fig. 5:7e). Adding insult to injury, he recorded these rites not at his home city but at Naranjo on its subjugation monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs. This ceremony must have rubbed a great deal of salt into the wound of Naranjo’s defeat.

Caracol’s rampage through the Peten changed the lives of noble individuals in many proud and ancient cities. Lord Kan II and his allies no doubt claimed many valuable goods from the losers as tribute. Defeated cities were forced to give up precious commodities like obsidian, shell currencies, heirlooms, craftsmen, handwoven cloth, and highly skilled artists. This tribute was the key to the domination Caracol held over this region. Because the Maya had no standing armies, conquering troops could not be garrisoned as watchdogs in a defeated city. But such policing was unnecessary. A city stripped of its wealth and its king could rarely strike back at its enemies. Loss of prestige resulted in far more than humiliation. It meant waning or destroyed political influence and the inability to recruit population and goods from the hinterlands. Without these people and goods, a city could not hope to prosper and grow.

Perhaps one of the most devastating results of defeat, however, was the stripping away of all public art. When Caracol effaced the monuments of its enemies and impoverished them to the point where they could erect no others, it was taking away their most cherished possession—history. Both Tikal and Naranjo suffered terribly in this sense. In the 130 years after the defeat of Tikal, only one king, the twenty-second, left his name in the inscribed history of the kingdom, and this not in a public space. We would not have known of him at all but for the pottery and wood texts deposited in his tomb, Burial 195, perhaps in defiance of Caracol’s rule.

The lords of the allied city of Uaxactun also suffered in the wake of Caracol’s victories, while no doubt appreciating the bitter irony of the situation. 1 ikal had been undone by the very same Tlaloc-Venus war that the brothers Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had waged against Uaxactun 180 years earlier: The victors of that conflict were hoisted by the same petard of warfare they had introduced among the Maya. Yet rather than being able to celebrate the irony of the situation, the Uaxactun nobility, as part of Tikal’s hegemony, found themselves deeply affected by this defeat as well. With the demise of the royal dynasty at Tikal, Uaxactun also lost the kingship, and the public ritual life of that city virtually stopped. Its leaders ceased erecting monuments in 9.6.0.0.0[275] and did not resume the practice for two hundred years.

At Naranjo, the impact of defeat was shorter-lived, but no less dramatic. On December 6, 642 (9.10.10.0.0), the victorious Caracol ruler lorced the defeated people of Naranjo to dedicate the Hieroglyphic Stairs, a monument that glorified his triumph over them. This kind of stairway not only celebrated defeat and victory, but was used to dispose of captives, who were trussed into bundles and rolled down it after sacrifice in the ballgame. In their stairway, the surviving elite of Naranjo had a constant reminder of the hegemony of Caracol. That disgraceful monument was the last written record placed in public space for the next forty years.

As the katuns ground slowly by, new lords bent on revenge and on rebuilding the reputations of their cities lit sacred fires on the altars of the Peten to lighten the pall of disaster over Tikal and Naranjo. Unlike Smoking-Frog of Tikal, whose triumphs at Uaxactun inspired the admiration and imagination of an entire region, Lord Kan II and his Calakmul allies never succeeded in quelling the hatred and consolidating the submission of their enemies. In the short term, their failed experiment in empire building fired the ambitions of new challengers from the Petexbatun region to the south. These new lords from the kingdom of Dos Pilas would eventually pull Naranjo up from the ashes of defeat and jar Tikal into taking back its own. In wreaking vengeance against the former victors, however, the lords of Dos Pilas would seal the Maya doom even as they rejuvenated the dynasts of the defeated kingdoms. In the long run, the Maya struggle to forge a political unity powerful enough to match their shared vision of divine power would break on the pride of kings and their thirst for vengeance.

Dos Pilas Joins the Party

In an era of great kings who strove to stretch their power beyond traditional boundaries, the long and illustrious career of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas stands out as one of most remarkable of his times. His home was a hilltop city located near Lake Petexbatún and the Pasión River in a region that had played a significant role in Maya cultural history since the Middle Preclassic Period. Here, in the middle of the seventh century. Flint-Sky-God K declared a new kingdom, perhaps carrying with it the hopes of the house of Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal. This new kingdom, Dos Pilas, shared its Emblem Glyph with that ancient kingdom; and it is possible that its ruling family was an offshoot of the Tikal royal lineage— highborn individuals who left Tikal sometime after its downfall and found their way to this new region.[276]

Flint-Sky-God K was a master strategist in the game of politics and domination. He declared kingship at Dos Pilas on 9.10.12.11.2 (July 5, 645) and immediately began to consolidate his power with a series of marriage alliances with nearby kingdoms. He married a woman from the kingdom of Itzan, who bore him two sons. One son inherited both the kingship and his father’s military brilliance. The other son is mentioned in the inscriptional record but never acceded to the throne.[277] Flint-Sky-God K also sent women of his own house, perhaps sisters or daughters, to marry rulers from nearby El Chorro and El Pato.[278]

At the same time, Flint-Sky-God K began a dynastic tradition of rule by conquest. He and his nobles terrified their enemies in a campaign spanning twenty years, from A.D. 664 to 684. He began his glorious saga with the capture of a lord named Tah-Mo’ (“Torch-Macaw”) on March 2, 664 (Fig. 5:9a). In a fashion typical of Maya warriors, Flint-Sky-God K recorded the personal names of his captives, but not the names of their kingdoms, so we do not know what city this hapless man was from. Flint-Sky-God K followed up this victory with a whole series of wars, including several of the Tlaloc-Venus variety. His ambition led him ultimately to intervene in the affairs of the central Petén kingdoms under Caracol’s sway, but he did so in a cunning and circuitous way, as we shall later see.

The power he gained through his successful campaigns eventually brought Flint-Sky-God K to the attention of the powerful kingdom of Calakmul, the erstwhile ally of Caracol and the deadly enemy of Tikal and Naranjo. Part of the story of the contemporary Calakmul king, Jaguar-Paw, is told on a series of panels looted from the region of Calakmul, and part in passages from the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas. One of these looted panels lists Jaguar-Paw’s birth date as October 9, 649 (Fig. 5:9c). Another tells us that around 9.11.10.0.0,[279] this young prince participated with Flint-Sky-God K in a ceremonial event at a place called Yaxhá (Fig. 5:9b), which was perhaps the lake region located near Naranjo. On February 25, 683, Jaguar-Paw returned to the Petexbatún region for another ritual’celebration held on Lake Petexbatún near Dos Pilas[280] (Fig. 5;9d). We are not sure of the nature of these ceremonies, because that part of the text is missing, but they imply some kind of significant connection, perhaps an alliance, between Jaguar-Paw and the vigorous Dos Pilas warlord.

Whatever the relationship between the two men, it was an important one that led to the participation of Flint-Sky-God K in Jaguar-Paw’s accession as king of Calakmul on April 6, 686 (Fig. 5:10a and b).[281] Jaguar-Paw’s accession was also recorded at the kingdom of El Perú, to the north of Dos Pilas. We find this passage on a pair of looted stelae, recorded in association with the period-ending rites conducted by the El Perú king Mah-Kina-Balam and his wife. On one of the monuments, the El Perú lord noted that he had displayed the God K scepter in the company of Jaguar-Paw. These texts suggest that the kings of the western kingdoms traveled to Calakmul to participate in the accession ritual of Jaguar-Paw, who in turn made reciprocal visits to their kingdoms.

At Dos Pilas, Flint-Sky-God K commemorated his participation in Jaguar-Paw’s accession on his own Stela 13 (Fig. 5:10b), which he mounted on the platform supporting his great war monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs 2. The juxtaposition of Jaguar-Paw’s coronation text next to Flint-Sky-God K’s war memorial associates the founding of Dos Pilas with the accession at Calakmul. By doing so, Flint-Sky-God K was paying Jaguar-Paw a powerful compliment.

This all-glyphic Stela 13 conveys first that Jaguar-Paw acceded on 9.12.13.17.7 (April 6, 686). Second, it says that this accession ritual “was seen (yilahy[282] by Flint-Sky-God K, captor of Tah-Mo’, at a place called Nab Tunich, the toponym designating a location somewhere within the kingdom of Calakmul.[283] Presumably, Flint-Sky-God K traveled to Nab Tunich to observe and to participate in the accession rites of Jaguar-Paw.

Regardless of the “friendliness” of this association, there is some evidence that Jaguar-Paw—perhaps before he became the king—was in a subservient position to Flint-Sky-God K, at least in some circumstances. In a scene on a looted pot,[284] Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul is painted kneeling in the position of subordination before a Dos Pilas Lord (Fig. 5:10c). We presume this Dos Pilas lord was Flint-Sky-God K or perhaps his heir.[285] The question that arises, however, is: How’ did a lord of Calakmul and ally of the powerful Caracol find himself in this position in the first place? Since the evidence does not exist to accurately answer that question, we can only suggest various scenarios. Perhaps Flint-Sky-God K was playing “godfather” to Jaguar-Paw, cultivating this young prince before he became the king to secure his support for the new Dos Pilas hegemony in the west. Or, in light of Flint-Sky-God K’s military campaign in the Peten at this time, it is just possible that he wished to establish his own alliance with Calakmul—or at least the promise from its king that he would not interfere with the ambitions of Dos Pilas. At any rate, somehow Flint-Sky-God K made the Calakmul lords an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Whatever the scenario might have been, by neutralizing the king of Calakmul, Flint-Sky-God K was able to extend his influence eastward toward the defeated city of Naranjo. It was a strategy that effectively removed Caracol as a major player in the events to come. Flint-Sky-God K’s command of the primary political instruments of his time, war and marriage, forged the foundation of a new pattern of power in the Peten.

Part of Flint-Sky-God K’s genius as a leader in this complex and interconnected arena of power politics was this very ability to implement different policies in different kingdoms as the situation warranted. While he was neutralizing Calakmul to the north, Flint-Sky-God K was also expanding eastward into the power vacuum left by the defeat of Tikal and Naranjo. Curiously enough, he concentrated his efforts on the lesser prize, Naranjo. This time he resorted to marriage, rather than war or political alliance, as his strategy. He sent a daughter[286] named Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau (“Six Celestial Lord”)[287] to Naranjo in order to reestablish a royal house at this ancient community after its destruction at the hands of Caracol. Although we do not know all the particulars, we can visualize s her pilgrimage.

•

The journey to her new home was difficult and dangerous, for the route she had to take crossed the war-torn heart of the Peten region. In spite of the danger, the wedding party traveled in ceremonial splendor, braving the dangers hidden in the arching forest and the hot fields that lined the way to Naranjo. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau sat in her sedan chair of dark polished wood upon royal pillows of stuffed jaguar skin, veiled from the prying eyes of village spies by a canopy of fine cotton gossamer. A company of sturdy bearers surrounded the four sweating men who carried the long poles of the sedan chair on their shoulders, ready to relieve them in the work of relaying their precious burden to its final destination. Behind came more bearers with bundles of cotton and bark cloth laden with gifts of jade, painted pottery, embroidered textiles, perfumed wooden boxes, and carved-shell diadems.

At the head of this party, the bravest and most experienced of the noble warriors of Dos Pilas strode in full battle gear, resplendent and frightening in their helmets of stuffed deer, peccary, and jaguar. The bright plumage of forest birds and the shrunken heads of defeated enemies dangled from their chests and waists. They carried throwing darts and spearthrowers, stabbing spears tipped with long leaf-shaped points of stone, and clubs studded with razor-sharp imported obsidian blades. Takers of captives and sacrificers, these men would not negotiate if confronted on the trail: They would die to the last man before letting their lady fall into the hands of the enemy. Finally, the best woodsmen of the Dos Pilas household were deployed in a wide circle around the route, moving swiftly and cautiously, alert for treachery.

We can imagine the courage and resolution of the Dos Pilas princess, a living declaration of war against the most powerful enemies of her family, as she traveled to her new home. The first sacred rituals she performed after her arrival lasted three days, beginning on August 30, 682 (9.12.10.5.12), in the time of the beneficent rains of late summer. One hundred and sixteen days earlier, Ah-Cacaw had resurrected the kingship at Tikal. Four years would pass before her father’s journey to Calakmul to participate in Jaguar-Paw’s accession rituals. In this time of changing destinies, a young queen stood at the center of the Maya world. High on her pyramid she spilled her blood in rapture, calling forth the ancestors to witness and confirm the new destiny she brought to this place, while the gathered hosts of the city danced and sang in the broad plazas below, jeering the authors of the hated Hieroglyphic Stairs in their midst. The red towering temple mountains of Naranjo reverberated with the pulsing call of the drums and the deep moan of the shell trumpets reaching friend and foe alike across the vast green canopy of the forest: The royal ahauob of Naranjo were back. The lady from Dos Pilas and her new nobility would reckon their history from this joyous celebration for katuns to come; and under the leadership of her son, Smoking-Squirrel, they would bring back enemies to writhe and die before the monuments commemorating that fateful day.

There are four separate texts recording the events surrounding Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival in Naranjo, but only two of them are still legible today. In both of these texts (Fig. 5:1 la-b), the glyph describing her ritual actions resembles the hand (hom) glyph[288] that Stormy-Sky used to record the conquest of Uaxactun on Stela 31 at Tikal. Here, however, conquest in the sense of “the destruction of buildings” couldn’t possibly be the intended meaning. The action recorded on these stelae is one that led to the dedication of a pyramid three days later (Fig. 5:11c) and most likely the reestablishment of the royal house of Naranjo. As we have described in our historical reconstruction above, we believe both these events were direct results of the marriage of the daughter of the king of Dos Pilas to a noble of Naranjo. One meaning of horn is “borders or boundaries” and certainly these are essential qualities of a viable state. When Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau dedicated the pyramid three days after her marriage, she was reopening the portal to the Otherworld, reestablishing the sacred connection to the ancestors, which had been broken by Naranjo’s enemies so many years ago. This interpretation of events is further borne out by the fact that the pyramid used the Naranjo Emblem Glyph as part of its proper name, indicating that it was the Otherworld portal of this new dynasty. Naranjo had again become a place of kings, a power to be reckoned with once more.

Naranjo Strikes Back

Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s efforts to found a new dynasty were not in vain. On January 6, 688, five years after the dedication of the Naranjo royal house, a male heir, named Smoking-Squirrel, was born to the royal family. This youngster was only five years old when, on May 31, 693, he became the king of Naranjo.[289] Never in all the historical texts of Naranjo do the scribes acknowledge the parentage of Smoking-Squirrel, so for many years his origins remained a mystery. It took the insight of the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff to realize that Smoking-Squirrel was most likely 5 the child of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.

There are many clues leading to this assumption. Not only does Wac-Chanil-Ahau live long into Smoking-Squirrel’s reign, but every time he erected a monument to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, he paired it with a monument dedicated to this woman. These monuments always featured the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival at Naranjo and depicted her engaging in the exact same rituals of state as her son (Fig. 5:12).[290] Smoking-Squirrel constantly portrayed himself with his mother in this fashion for one very important reason: She was the source of his legitimacy and his link to the throne.

Smoking-Squirrel did not, however, find it to his advantage to feature his father on any of his monuments. His male parent was probably a local man whose modest achievements and social rank did not lend prestige to his son. Instead, Smoking-Squirrel capitalized on the celebrity that came from his mother’s pedigree as the child of the illustrious Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas (Fig. 5:13), his maternal grandfather. The texts suggest that this pedigree from Dos Pilas was considered more historically important and politically significant than even his own status as son to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.

The revival of the dynasty and the ascendancy of this child to the ancestral throne of his kingdom smashed the fragile peace of the central Peten. The revived Naranjo nobility launched a campaign to reestablish the power of their royal family, challenging their enemies to meet them on the battlefield. There under a relentless tropical sun, fortune delivered many sons of noble families into their hands.

Naranjo’s first victim was not its enemy Caracol, but rather a strategic border community called Ucanal which stood between Naranjo, Tikal, and the city of Lord Kan II. The kingdom of Ucanal had a hilltop capital to the south of Lake Yaxha[291] on the west bank of the Mopan River. Probably an ally of Caracol, since it straddled the shortest route Lord Kan’s marauders could take on their forays into the Peten, Ucanal was targeted perhaps as much to humiliate the kings of Caracol as to gain military victories for Naranjo.

The campaign began on June 20, 693, only twenty days after the five-year-old boy was placed on the throne. It was the day before the summer solstice, and the Eveningstar was gleaming its last before it would disappear into the glare of the sun on its journey to become the Morningstar. The warriors of Naranjo struck, taking captive a lord of Ucanal named Kinichil-Cab (Fig. 5:14). Doubtless the young king, Smoking-Squirrel, was still too tender in age to have led his army personally. Instead, it appears that Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau took credit for the capture of the unfortunate Kinichil-Cab, for on Stela 24, she stands upon his battered body (Fig. 5:15b).

This battle and the capture of a lord of Ucanal were but the opening blows against Caracol’s hold on the Peten. Naranjo continued to chip away at its enemy’s strength, harassing them at every turn. One hundred days after the first attack, on September 14, 693, the warriors of Naranjo engaged Ucanal in yet another battle, this one probably on the order of a skirmish. They attacked again on December 12 of the same year. This military campaign culminated on February 1, 695, when Naranjo once <verbatim></verbatim> again engaged the main forces of Ucanal in bloody combat, this time with a lord of Dos Pilas in attendance to participate in the victory. The major prize taken in this second full-scale battle of the war was the lord Shield-Jaguar, the unfortunate captive who is featured in the grim rites recorded on both Stela 22 (Fig. 5:15a) and Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17).[292]

Now the star of war glinted brightly for Naranjo. Smoking-Squirrel, like his earlier counterpart at Caracol, timed his battles and war-related rituals according to the position of Venus. He declared his kingship as Venus hovered on the stationary point before inferior conjunction. His S first war event occurred at the helical setting of Eveningstar on the eve of the summer solstice. Finally, his second triumphant battle against Ucanal was waged when Venus rose helically as the Morningstar, exactly one cycle later.

As we have mentioned before, prestigious captives taken in battle were often kept alive for years on end. They were displayed in public rituals and often participated in these rituals in gruesome, humiliating, and painful ways. Smoking-Squirrel and Wac-Chanil-Ahau were enthusiastic practitioners of this sacred tradition. Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal survived his capture to reappear four years later, on May 23, 698, in an event that was in all probability a sacrificial ritual of some sort (Fig. 5:14). Later in the same year, on September 23, Shield-Jaguar suffered through the same rite in “the land of Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo.” A year later, on April 19, 699, it was Lady Wac-Chanil’s turn. The hapless Kinichil-Cab appeared again in a public ritual she conducted. On Naranjo Stela 24 (Fig. 5:15b) we see her standing on the bound, nearly naked body of this unfortunate warrior. Finally, on 9.13.10.0.0 (January 26, 702), the day Smoking-Squirrel dedicated both Stela 22 and Stela 24, the young king displayed his famous captive, Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal, in a public blood-letting ritual (Fig. 5:15a). As depicted, the ill-fated captive is nearly naked, stripped of all his marks of rank and prestige, holding his bound wrists up toward the magnificently dressed fourteen-year-old king who sits high above him on a jaguar-pillow.

In spite of his achievements, this energetic young king was still far from the fulfillment of his military ambitions. When Katun 14 was nearing its end, he began yet another series of battles, which he later recorded on Stela 23 (Fig. 5:16). This time his target was a nearer kingdom, Yaxha, located to the south on the shores of a lake bearing the same name. It was perhaps there that his grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul had acted together in a ritual years before. On March 23, 710, just after the spring equinox, Smoking-Squirrel attacked Yaxha, accompanied by an individual who was the sibling of either his mother or his wife.[293] On this day, Venus was making its last appearance as Morningstar and Jupiter and Saturn hung in conjunction at their second stationary points.[294] Ninety-seven days later, on June 8, shortly after the summer solstice, there was an even more spectacular alignment in the heavens, this time among Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury.[295] On this occasion Smoking-Squirrel conducted a ritual with a prisoner from Yaxha. We have not yet deciphered the glyphs describing this ritual, but at least part of it included the scattering of blood. A year after this rite, on April 12, 711, when Venus again appeared as Morningstar, Smoking-Squirrel went to war once more, this time on the shore of a lake adjacent to Yaxha, a place known as Sacnab, or “Clear Lake.”[296]

Stela 23’s history ends with the battle at Sacnab, but we can pick the story up again on Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17). There Smoking-Squirrel begins his account with the celebration of the period ending on 9.14.0.0.0 at the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar. This heavenly event was celebrated not only at Naranjo but at Copan and Tikal as well, showing how widespread these Venus rituals had become in the Maya world.[297] Two hundred days later, on the summer solstice (June 22, 712), Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal reappears in a rite which is enacted on the occasion of the maximum elongation of Eveningstar. Eighteen years of public humiliation had passed since his capture. We suspect this long-suffering prisoner did not survive this ritual, for with this date he disappears from the record.

[[][Fig. 5:18 Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau at Her Son’s First Anniversary of Rule]]

Smoking-Squirrel’s rampage through the central Peten finally ended, to the relief of neighboring kingdoms, on February 16, 713, with the first katun anniversary of his accession. As he had since the beginning of his reign, Smoking-Squirrel paired the stela commemorating this event with a stela depicting his mother, the founder of his line. Stela 2, which is essentially a war monument, stood adjacent (Fig. 5:12) to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 3 (Fig. 5:18), which shows her participating in her s son’s anniversary celebration. In this text, Smoking-Squirrel once again memorialized her arrival. He also created some useful political propaganda by linking the date of the first katun anniversary of his own accession to the same anniversary date of Naranjo’s Ruler I. Ruler I was, of course, the king who had fallen victim to Caracol’s victory eighty-one years earlier. With this pair of inscriptions, Smoking-Squirrel completed the circle of defeat and triumph for Naranjo. The glory of that city had been revived by a new and vital dynasty.

Smoking-Squirrel’s fame as a warrior was no doubt legend in the region of the Fetén. His successful military campaigns upset the destinies of cities as dramatically as the past victories of his hated enemy, Caracol; and his postconquest strategies were cleverly designed to keep his enemies powerless. For example, by keeping his high-ranked captives, Shield-Jaguar and Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal, alive for many years, Smoking-Squirrel most likely disrupted the succession within both their families and their kingdom. This elegant strategy created chaos in a social structure where these individuals could not be replaced until after they were dead. To display these captives in public rituals over many years confirmed the military prowess and the political power of the young king among his own constituency, and sowed fear and respect among Naranjo’s rivals. Smoking-Squirrel also made optimum use of the powerful allies that came to him through his mother’s line. He fought his wars with the support of his formidable and aggressive grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and most probably Shield-God K, his mother’s half brother, who became ruler of Dos Pilas on 9.13.6.2.0 (March 27, 698). These battles secured the region surrounding Lake Yaxhá, making the journey between Naranjo and the Petexbatún stronghold held by his mother’s people both easier and safer.

The campaign of battles waged by Smoking-Squirrel and his people was not totally inspired by a spirit of revenge and conquest, however. This campaign was also imbued with a spiritual content, chartered by the now venerable mandates of Venus-Tlaloc warfare. Smoking-Squirrel planned his military actions according to the movements of Venus, calling upon the power of that god of conquest to sanction his aggression. The costume he wears on Stela 2, in fact (Fig. 5:17), is the Late Classic version of the same war costume we saw Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal wear in their first Venus war victories. Timing his attacks by Venus also gave Smoking-Squirrel the opportunity to re-create the same cosmic setting as that in which his own predecessor, Ruler I, had suffered ignominious defeat. Thus, Smoking-Squirrel’s successes worked to neutralize his ancestor’s defeat, proving that the god once again favored Naranjo and accepted the restoration of the dynasty.

There can be little doubt that Smoking-Squirrel’s ultimate goal had always been to redeem his city from its disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol. He accomplished this by systematically crushing Caracol’s allies, and bringing a resounding finish to Caracol as a force to be reckoned with in the Petén. Once he was certain that he had reestablished the flow of history in Naranjo’s favor, Smoking-Squirrel finally dismantled the hated stairs the victorious Caracol warlords had erected in his capital. Resetting it in illegible order, he created a nonsense chronicle, a fitting end for a monument erected by his enemies to rob his people of their own place in history.

One of his most telling acts of revenge was to have one of the stairs’ glyph blocks transported to Ucanal. There he placed it in the center alley of the ballcourt,[298] probably in conjunction with some very unpleasant sacrificial rituals involving the defeated lords of that kingdom. The fine irony of this ceremony was surely not lost on the king of Caracol, who was forced to sit passively and watch from afar the neutralization of the monument with which his ancestor had humiliated Naranjo. What more elegant revenge could Smoking-Squirrel have conceived of than the transfer of this block to the city of Caracol’s own ally?

The Giant Stirs

Almost simultaneous with Naranjo’s reemergence as a power in the Peten, Tikal began to reach out and regain its position in the Maya world. The strategy used by its new king exactly paralleled Smoking-Squirrel’s: a successful war waged against the alliance that had once defeated his ancestors.

It’s puzzling that the two principal victims of Caracol’s military rampage, Tikal and Naranjo, make little mention of each other’s efforts to throw off the bonds of their mutual enemy. The reason for this rather deliberate silence is not certain. Perhaps the meddling of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas in Naranjo’s affairs sowed distrust between cities that should have been logical allies. In any event, we are not yet certain if the timing of Tikal’s revival was connected in any way to Naranjo’s; nor do we know to what extent these cities’ struggles to recoup themselves might have been mutually reinforcing.

We do know that Tikal’s liberation may have begun somewhat earlier than Naranjo’s. Although no stelae dated between the years A.D. 557 and 692 survived at Tikal, we know that a ruler named Shield-Skull began an ambitious remodeling project in the North Acropolis and East Plaza during the middle of the seventh century.[299] Even as the dynasty of Great-Jaguar-Paw was plotting its revenge, its kings had already begun the healing process by rebuilding the center of their city. By this act they began wiping out the evidence of Lord Water’s depredations and reaffirming their own cosmic greatness. The mere fact that they got away with this new, architectural program is telling evidence of Caracol’s weakening grip on the Peten in the waning decades of the seventh century.

On 9.12.9.17.16 (May 6, 682), just as Flint-Sky-God K was preparing to send his daughter Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau to Naranjo, a new vigorous ruler, named Ah-Cacaw,[300] ascended to the throne of Tikal and began a campaign to restore the honor of its ruling family. A large man for his times, Ah-Cacaw would live into his fourth katun, and be over sixty years old when he died. At 167 cm (5 feet 5 inches), he was a veritable giant,[301] standing ten centimeters above the average height of the men of his s kingdom.

No sooner had he claimed the throne than Ah-Cacaw began a tremendous new building program, rallying the pride and ingenuity of the entire metropolis with his enormous demands for both skilled and unskilled labor. He mobilized clans of masons, architects, painters, and sculptors and put them to work reshaping the most important ritual space in the city: the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza to the south of it. Embodying five hundred years of royal ritual and history, the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza were not merely the heart of the city, they were the enduring expression of the ruling house of Tikal. Significantly, these monuments also bore the marks of the ignominious desecration placed upon them by Tikal’s conquerors. Ah-Cacaw’s visionary plan was not only to reclaim these monuments, but to surround them with the largest buildings ever known in the Maya world, a group of temples that would ring the Great Plaza, the ceremonial center of his revived kingdom.

The first step in Ah-Cacaw’s plan was to deactivate the ritual spaces of the North Acropolis by cutting them off visually and physically from the Great Plaza. He then shifted the focus of dynastic celebration into the Great Plaza itself. To do this, he reworked the south side and ceremonial front of the North Acropolis. When he began this work, the south side of the Acropolis already held some of the finest pyramids ever built in the history of the kingdom. These “sacred mountains” stood in a row behind the tree-stone forest of stelae created by Tikal’s great kings (Fig. 5:19). On the right side of this magnificent temple group stood Temple 32–1 st,[302] the structure built over Burial 195, the tomb of the twenty-second ruler of Tikal. Ruling around A.D. 600, this fellow was the first king to endure the darkness of a reign without history under the heel of Caracol. On the opposite end towered Temple 34–1^st, built over Burial 10, the tomb of Curl-Snout, the son of the conqueror of Uaxactun and the father of Stormy-Sky.

The centerpiece of the North Acropolis’s facade, however, was the magnificent Temple 33–2^nd (Fig. 5:2) built before the disastrous defeat. Raised in the era of the staff kings, its exquisitely modeled and painted stucco masks displayed the original great architectural programs of the Late Preclassic period. This sacred mountain, above all others, had been the orthodox focus of royal ecstasy and the dramatic backdrop against which the stelae commemorating each king’s vision stood for all to witness. Throughout much of the sixth and seventh centuries this temple remained as the indomitable image of Tikal’s kingship. Under its sculptured pyramid lay Burial 48, the tomb of the great Stormy-Sky; and newly set into its base were Burial 24 and Burial 23, which was probably the tomb of Shield-Skull, Ah-Cacaw’s father. It is no wonder then that this s was the location Ah-Cacaw chose to raise his breathtaking Temple 33.

Ah-Cacaw’s first major political act was to honorably bury two of the desecrated stelae that had been left as trash in the Great Plaza by the victorious Caracol ahauob. We can reconstruct some of what happened during these rededication rites from the archaeological record. At least two of the rituals focused upon the shattered remains of the beautiful Stela 26 (Fig. 5:20) and Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece documenting the victory of Tikal over Uaxactun more than three hundred years earlier.

Over a period of several days, Ah-Cacaw buried these stelae with great ceremony within Temples 33 and 34 (Fig. 5:21). He would have regarded this as a time of solemn ceremonial preparation, an initial, pivotal action in his campaign to repair the dishonor done to his ancestral kings by the blasphemous conquerors. In the following passage, we will visualize the events comprising this important historical occasion.

Ah-Cacaw, a full head taller than his silent companions, halted the procession moving across the broad plaza in the slanting orange light of dawn. His long shadow thrust like a finger from a fist toward the forest of tree-stones standing before the looming temple-mountains. The crooked shadows of the stelae, in turn, fell back onto the steps which led up to the lineage houses holding the earthly remains of his holy ancestors. He raised his eyes to the central temple. The huge plaster faces of the gods, mounted upon this sacred mountain, shone as brightly as they had when first made by his ancestors long before the disastrous defeat of the twenty-first successor of his line. It had taken the entire lifetimes of the four kings before him to bring the kingdom back from that defeat. Now the day of rebirth had finally arrived. As the twenty-sixth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, he was determined that his brother kings would learn to respect Tikal once more, as they had when Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had won their victory over Uaxactun.

Two of those four intervening kings were now buried in the great mountain that held the tomb of Stormy-Sky. One of them was Ah-Cacaw’s father, Shield-Skull, who had begun the restoration of the city to its former glory[303] by commissioning monuments in the Central Acropolis and in the large plaza east of the ancestral mountains. Tikal’s twenty-second king lay within the pyramid on the eastern shoulder of Stormy-Sky’s burial temple, placing three of the kings who had suffered through the humiliation of a reign without history in the threshold zone of the ancient acropolis.[304]

The silence of his reverie was broken by the grunts of struggling men. Ah-Cacaw turned to face the stelae platform before the westernmost of the three temples at the front of the range of sacred mountains. With a unified cry of effort, six of the men straightened their backs, lifting the enormous chunk of broken stela. The stone, cradled in a net of thick ropes suspended from the thick pole they carried on their shoulders, tore at their strength as they took trembling steps toward the steep stairs that rose toward the dark inner sanctum of the western temple. Here the revered Curl-Snout, father of Stormy-Sky, lay at rest under tons of quarried stone mortared with the sweat of the laboring hundreds who had shaped his tomb into its mountain form. As the first six lords staggered up the steps, a second team of men worked to fasten ropes around the other large fragment of tree-stone that lay broken on the plaza floor. This sacred monument was Tikal history incarnate. It carried the names of the ninth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Conqueror of Uaxactun; his grandson, Stormy-Sky, the eleventh successor; Kan-Boar, the twelfth successor; and the thirteenth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, who had been named for his illustrious forebear. Hoisting the carrying pole onto their shoulders, the second cluster of young lords staggered forward in the warming light of the rising sun.

It took the young men, all sons of the royal clan and its high-ranking allies, the entire morning to complete their task. Only five or six of them could bring their strength to bear upon the carrying pole at one time. They had to work slowly and in turns, anxious to protect the exquisitely carved text fragments from the further desecration a careless movement might cause. For three hours the king and his closest companions stood upon the steps of the sacred mountain, watching the slow and halting upward progress of the men. A crowd of witnesses gradually formed on the plaza below as patriarchs and their entourages arrived from both the city and the regions beyond. It was a quiet, tense occasion. Finally, Ah-Cacaw’s lords eased the first large fragment of stone into a neat pit they had cut through the floor of the rear chamber. This pit lay just before the blank back wall of the temple, in the rear room that was the inner sanctum and the portal to the Otherworld.[305] Soon thereafter the second fragment of the broken stela was lowered into the pit.

When the young men emerged from the temple, Ah-Cacaw went to the place where the tree-stone had lain and picked up a handful of fragments left in dusty disarray on the hard plaster surface of the plaza. Cradling the broken fragments reverently against his naked chest, he carried them up the stairs and into the cool darkness of the temple. There he laid them gently into the pit with the larger pieces. Kinsmen and men of high rank followed his lead, moving single file up the stairs until all that remained of the great tree-stone lay in the pit. Ah-Cacaw had ordered that one large chunk be kept back. This fragment would be placed in another offering pit along with the altar of Stormy-Sky’s tree-stone, soon to be deposited in the central temple. Burying the tree-stone fragment with the altar would link the two ritual burials so that his ancestral dead would understand his motivation. By this act, Ah-Cacaw hoped to erase the desecration visited upon their memory by the victors from the southeast and to summon their spirits to help him in the coming war.[306]

The king waited in silence until the solemn procession had ended. Then he led the shamans and the principal men of his lineage into the rear chamber where the fragments lay in their grave. In front of the pit that held the pieces of the tree-stone were three deep holes dug into the floor. These holes would hold the offerings that would both amplify the power emanating from the ancient stela and seal it into the threshold of the portal.

The mood of the crowd intensified as sounds of drumming echoed throughout the huge plaza. It seemed as if everyone in the city was present. The piercing cry of flutes and clay whistles rose from the children of Tikal. Rattles shivered on the dancing ankles of farmers, masons, and weavers, counterpointing the deep-throated rhythm of the chest-high drums arrayed along the stairs. The people—ahauob and common folk alike—sang and danced a plaintive dirge to rekindle the spirits of the desecrated tree-stones of the ancient kings.[307] At the culmination of this ritual of remembrance and burial, the gods and ancestors would turn their faces once more toward the great kingdom at the center of the world. The lineage of Tikal’s kings would reign once again with honor restored.

High nobles chosen for their rank and accomplishments moved from the council houses[308] through the swirling crowd. They bore into the sanctum large offering plates called zac lac.[309] The waists of these men were thickly encircled by the wrappings of their hipcloths and skirts, garments made of fine cotton cloth resplendent with painted and woven patterns rendered in the bright hues of forest dyes.[310] The lordly stewards sported turbans of fine fabric, tightly bound around their long black hair with jade-studded leather headbands. Elegant tail feathers arched from the headbands to bob in time with the graceful movements of the procession. Deep-green jade beads and bloodred spondylus shell ornaments gleamed in their earlobes and against their brown chests as they moved with studied dignity, bringing their gifts to the sacred tree-stone.

Ah-Cacaw was pleased with the richness of the offerings they carried in the great plates. There were shells and coral from the distant seas to the south, east, and west,[311] purchased from coastal traders and hoarded for this day. Even more precious were the seaweed, sponges, and other living creatures the young men had conveyed inland in saltwater-filled crocks to keep them from spoiling in the tropical heat. The shamans took each offering from its plate as it was presented to them. Beside each cache pit lay a square of beaten-bark cloth. Others were spread on the floor next to the base of the broken tree. With expert grace, the shamans placed each of the offerings in its turn onto the light-brown cloth, all the while singing the story of the dark seas before the gods made the world. When the fresh sea creatures, the shells, and the coral were carefully arranged, they laid the backbones of fish and the spines of stingrays onto the prepared stacks. The royal merchants had not been able to procure enough of the stingray spines, so effigy spines carved from bone were added to the offerings. Together these tokens established the primordial sea of creation around this tree of Tikal, nourishing its spirit just as the sea had nourished the first tree, the axis of the world, at the beginning of creation.

Next, an old shaman of the royal court brought forward the divination stones—flakes of obsidian carefully incised with the images of eternal power. Eight of the flakes displayed the Jester God, that most ancient symbol of the kingship. The moon marked three others and two bore pictures of the bag of magical instruments carried by kings in rituals of state.

A warrior prince of the blood came forward next, bearing bundles of soft deer hide. The first was opened, revealing seven faceted flints, small in size but chipped by the finest knappers into irregular shapes resembling tiny amoebalike puddles of water. He unpacked other bundles and took out the blades of spears and spearthrower darts. Still more bundles contained the complex abstract shapes that decorated the wands and staves used during ecstatic ritual performance. The flints glittered in the torchlight, Tikal’s famed workmanship brought to honor the tree-stone and to arm the ancestors. Their shapes focused the power of the Otherworld: Flint and obsidian were the fingernails of the Lightning Bolt, the remnants of Chac-Xib-Chac striking the rock of earth.[312]

From his own embroidered bag, the king removed a royal mosaic mirror made of jade and the silver-blue crystalline hematite forged in the southern fire mountains.[313] A precious heirloom of his dynasty, its delicate surface was mounted on a mother-of-pearl backing. He placed the mirror on top of the growing mound of offerings in the principal pit. Small balls of white stone and black obsidian were added to each offering pile. Finally, lineage patriarchs spilled precious red pigment, symbolizing their blood in enduring form, onto the carefully arranged objects. They pulled the jade and greenstone earflares and beads from their ears, smashed and ground them like maize on grinding stones, and sprinkled the fragments across the paint.[314]

The assembled lords and shamans used additional stingray spines to draw blood from their ears and tongues in the ritual that would bring the offerings to life. Then, chanting prayers, they pulled up the corners of the bark wrapping cloths, being careful to preserve the pattern of the offerings within. Folding the cloths carefully, they formed bundles[315] which were decorated with red and blue on their outside surfaces. While one man held each bundle tightly closed, another placed a band of woven fibers around it, drawing these fibers into a tight knot at the top. Cautiously and reverently, they lowered one bundle into each pit. Others were laid against the base of the broken monument.

As the sun plunged westward toward dusk, Ah-Cacaw thrust an obsidian lancet into the loose skin of his penis, drawing his own blood to both nourish and activate the resanctified tree-stone. Singing a chant to call his ancestors’ attention to his offering, the king smeared his blood across the sides of the stela.[316] Satisfied that his dead had realized the honor he did them and their obligation to unleash the demons of conquest upon his enemies, the king rose, making a trail of his royal blood. Thus the divine ahau created a path for the ancestors to follow as they came out of the mountain and back to Tikal.

As the king emerged into the hot glare of late afternoon, ready to dance for his people, master builders hurried into the temple chambers. One of Ah-Cacaw’s chief shamans had stayed behind to guide their work with quiet suggestions. Together, they sealed the pits with plaster so that the floor became even once again. Young men of the minor noble houses vied with one another for the honor of carrying prepared stones from the plaza up to the sanctum. Using these blocks, the master builders began to erect a wall around the broken stela, carefully and reverently placing the stones against it so that it would not be further damaged. They built up the masonry surface with mud and sand mortar until they had made a bench, a throne-altar that filled much of the rear chamber. When they were satisfied with its shape, they coated it with plaster, modeling the bench into a smooth, white surface—forever sealing the ancestral treasure deep inside. Tikal’s history was safe from further depredation and empowered as a living portal awaiting the king’s command. The call to war would soon come.

Festival swirled and eddied across the plazas like the floodwaters of the great rivers. There were dancing processions, pageants, and feasts of special foods and drinks served in exquisite painted vessels crafted by artists of the city and the regions beyond. Members of the royal family drew blood from their bodies and spun in ecstasy across the terraces enclosing the Great Plaza.[317] The witnessing populace responded with great devotional outpourings of their own, emblazoning the plaza in bright red. Finally, when the last light of the sun was sinking behind the horizon and the plaster on the throne-altar had cured into a hard surface, Ah-Cacaw mounted the stairs and entered the temple once again. His shamans and the principal men of his lineage accompanied him for the solemn ceremony that would end this part of the ritual.

The old shaman handed him a obsidian lancet struck free from the core only minutes earlier. Ah-Cacaw made his blood flow until the moment came when he could call forth the Vision Serpent that carried his ancestors to him. As the king sank deeply into the trance state, the shaman took the bark cloth saturated with the king’s blood and laid it in a shallow pit dug in front of the newly made altar. When the blood-stained paper of Ah-Cacaw’s kinsmen had swelled the pile to a respectable size, the shaman added rubber, copal, and wood to make a hot fire. Then he spun the fire drill with a bow, gradually creating enough heat to ignite the dried grass on top of the pile. The fire was slow to catch, but eventually the flames rose along the side of the altar, blackening its face with the mark of a sacrificial offering. In the smoke that swirled up into the vault high inside the roof comb, Ah-Cacaw saw the faces of his ancestors and understood that they crowned with triumph his efforts to restore their glory.

This ritual of communication with the ancestors reopened the portal that had been destroyed by their enemies in the war six katuns earlier. The burial of the tree-stone brought power back to the sacred mountains of the kingdom. In the coming days, as the celebration continued, Ah-Cacaw would also honor the desecrated tree-stone of Slormy-Sky and set it inside the great central temple-mountain. At the conclusion of these ceremonies, his people would begin work on the new mountain that would encompass and protect the repose of the ancestors. They would have to work fast, for the king intended to dedicate the new mountain on the thirteenth katun recurrence of Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting. It was the kind of symmetry of time and action that the ancestors and the gods would admire.

In a state of ecstasy, Ah-Cacaw emerged from the smoking inner sanctum to the roaring shouts of his people. Pillars of fire and incense rose from lineage houses throughout the darkened city below. They knew their king would lead them back to victory and the wealth they had lost. Victory and sacrifice would keep their enemies far from the borders of the kingdom. They understood that the determination of this vigorous new king and his ambition to restore the honor of his dynasty affected all their fates. The greatness of the royal past, now recaptured, would unfold into all their futures. They prayed for the ancient strength of the great kings, knowing that the demons of war had to be driven forward to the lands of their enemies. Once unleashed, they would devour all in their path.

Shortly after entombing Stela 26, Ah-Cacaw buried Stela 31, utilizing the same sorts of dedication rituals. The most sacred memorial of Tikal’s glorious military history, Stela 31 was the tree-stone upon which Stormy-Sky himself had engraved the history of the Uaxactun conquest.[318] Enemies had violently torn this magnificent stela from its place in front of Temple 33–2^nd, the building next door to the temple in which Ah-Cacaw later interred Stela 26.

Lifting Stela 31 from where it lay in disgrace, the lords of Tikal carried it in honor up the stairs to the old temple. There they replanted it in the shallow pit they had dug into the floor of the rear room of the temple, laid kindling around its base, and lit a fire to disperse the power accumulated in the stone—just as they had done in the rituals described above for Stela 26. This fire also seared away the dishonor that had been done to the stela’s spirit. Members of the court of Tikal, and those nobles from ancient vassal communities courageous enough to declare for the new king against Caracol, brought elaborate pottery censers in which they burned ritual offerings. After the ceremony, these censers were smashed in a termination ritual and the pieces left scattered on the floors of these soon-to-be-buried temple chambers.

Once Stela 31 was cached in its place, work crews filled the chambers of the old temple, then collapsed its vaults and roof comb, sealing in its power forever. They then covered the old building with a flat-topped pyramid twelve meters tall, which would provide the construction base for a new sacred mountain which would reach 18.8 meters in height. The engineers and masons used the technique of rapid building, for no doubt Ah-Cacaw intended to strike quickly at his enemies once he had completed the reopening of his family’s sacred portal to the Otherworld. Each level of the rising pyramid was divided into rectangular stone construction pens, which were then filled with mud, mortar, and rubble. When the completed temple stood atop it, this towering pyramidal base provided an impressive new backdrop for the stela row in front of the North Acropolis (Fig. 5:21). The pyramid’s huge mass unified the many buildings of the North Acropolis into a range of living mountains with a single supernatural doorway on its northern horizon. Through this doorway the ancestors of Tikal would emerge once again to aid the new king as he strove to reestablish the glory they had forged before the disaster.[319]

We do not know exactly when the termination rituals for the old building, Temple 33—2^nd, ended and the work on Temple 33—1^st began. We can assume, however, that this building project was under way at the same time that Ah-Cacaw was raising his Twin Pyramid Complex. This complex would hold the first stela of his reign, Stela 30, and its altar (Fig. 5:22), both erected to celebrate the end of Katun 13. This Twin Pyramid Complex was the first to be built since the original complex, which had been buried under the East Plaza in Tikal’s old glory days. Ah-Cacaw no doubt chose this particular style of architecture because he wanted to confirm his continuity with the earlier traditions of his dynasty. He also revived the period-ending celebrations initiated by his ancestor Stormy-Sky, especially the staff ritual that had been so prominent in the golden years after Stormy-Sky’s reign. These rituals would remain central to Late Classic Tikal until its demise.

In spite of the fact that he was busily eradicating all remnants of the conqueror’s influence from his city, Ah-Cacaw did not completely reject Caracol’s stylistic influences in the art he created.[320] The round stone altar (Fig. 5:22) he set in front of his portrait, in fact, was carved in a style that was popular in the kingdom of Tikal’s conquerors (Fig. 5:4). This style utilized Caracol’s favorite device of putting the name of the katun in the center of the top surface of the altar and surrounding it with text. It is possible that Ah-Cacaw chose this style for the altar to be placed in front of his first monument precisely because he wished to neutralize the shame of Tikal’s ancient defeat. This conjecture finds further support when we examine his portrait: He chose to depict himself here in a style much like that of Stela 17, the last monument of the hapless twenty-first successor, who had fallen to Caracol so many years ago.

If we had only the archaeologically excavated construction record of Temple 33 and the deposition of Stela 31, there would be little more we could say about the events surrounding its dedication. But Ah-Cacaw rightfully regarded the rekindling of the spiritual fires of his dynasty, in Temple 33—1^st and the Great Plaza, to have been the most important events of his life. These were the pivotal scenes he chose to feature when he memorialized his reign on the broad hardwood lintels spanning the doorways of his great funerary house, Temple 1, high atop the huge pyramid that was built over his tomb. On the dark polished surfaces of these lintels we find Temple 33’s history in wonderful detail.

The construction of Temple 33-lst must have been finished shortly after 9.13.3.0.0 (March 3, 695), for Lintel 3 tells us that the dedication events began with this period ending (Fig. 5:23). One hundred and fiftyeight days afterward, Ah-Cacaw went to war and took captive King Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. The battle that won him this famous captive was in the same style as Caracol’s war against Naranjo (Fig. 5:6) sixty-eight years earlier, and Smoking-Squirrel’s recent war against Ucanal (Fig. 5:14).[321] It was Tlaloc-Venus war. There was one significant difference, however. Aside from the fact that Jaguar-Paw fell to Ah-Cacaw on August 8, 695, two days after the zenith passage of the sun, there was none of the usual astronomical significance we have come to expect in Maya warfare. Ah-Cacaw timed this victory not by the strict mandates of the heavens but by the history of his own people, marked by the thirteen katun anniversary of Stormy-Sky’s war event celebrated on Stela 31.

Thirteen days after the battle in which Jaguar-Paw fell, Ah-Cacaw displayed his Calakmul captives in a ritual in which they were humiliated and probably tortured.[322] This dramatic scene, modeled in plaster, can be found on the upper facade of Structure 5D-57, one of the complex of council houses and temples called the Central Acropolis (Fig. 5:24). Here we see one of the captives, seated and with his wrists bound behind his back. He is held by a tether which stretches to the hand of the victorious king. Ah-Cacaw, standing behind the captive, is dressed in the Mosaic Monster garb of the Tlaloc complex associated with Venus war, the same costume worn by his ancestors during Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun. The captive pictured is not Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul himself, but someone named Ah-Bolon-Bakin, who was an ally or vassal of that captured king.

Twenty-seven days later, Ah-Cacaw sacrificed these unfortunate captives in the dedication ritual for Temple 33. He recorded this event in a triplet form, giving different types of information about the event with each repetition. This critical record was carved on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 (Fig. 5:23). First, Ah-Cacaw recorded the ritual as a dedication event in which he himself let blood from his tongue.[323] Aswe shall see in the chapter on Yaxchilan, this ritual involved the piercing of the tongue to create a wound-through which a cord was drawn. The blood loss and pain an individual experienced during this self-wounding process elicited a trance state in which the Vision Serpent could appear. This Vision Serpent was the conduit through which the ancestors came into the world and spoke to their descendants. We suspect that Ah-Cacaw called on Stormy-Sky, bringing him up through the sacred portal in Temple 33 to witness the dynastic renewal accomplished by his descendant.

[[][Fig. 5:23 Texts recording the Dedication Rituals for Temple 33 on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 and Temple 5D-57]]

The second passage in the triplet declares that the dedication ritual[324] took place in a location named with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph. This location was very likely the Great Plaza, the community’s spiritual center. In this passage, Ah-Cacaw asserts his legitimate right to open the portal to the Otherworld by declaring his royal pedigree as the child of Lady Jaguar-Throne and King Shield-Skull. The final description of the dedication of Temple 33 links the event to Ah-Cacaw’s accession.

[[][Fig. 5:24 Structure 5D-57 and the Rituals of Dedication]]

How do we know that the events recorded in Temple 1 refer to the dedication of Temple 33 and the refurbished Great Plaza area? The answer is that we don’t, except by inference, but the evidence supporting our deduction is strong. The date of Ah-Cacaw’s dedication ceremony as recorded in Temple 1 is the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last date preserved on the broken Stela 31. We know that the date on the broken stela marked a bloodletting ceremony enacted by the ancient king Stormy-Sky on the occasion of a maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[325]

The fact that Ah-Cacaw timed his own dedication rites to this thirteenth katun anniversary date was not accidental. Unlike his royal contemporaries who timed their actions in war and peace by the cycles of Venus, Ah-Cacaw chose a cycle that would connect the rebirth of his dynasty to the old Tikal of the glory days. Stormy-Sky was the pivotal hero of the old dynasty from Ah-Cacaw’s point of view. We believe it was no accident that Ah-Cacaw built his magnificent Temple 33 over the tomb of this great king and there buried Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s beautifully carved war memorial, as part of the termination rites. As we have seen, Ah-Cacaw also timed his war against Calakmul by this thirteenth katun anniversary cycle. This 260-year anniversary was one of the most sacred cycles to the ancient Maya. It alone of the ancient cycles would survive the conquest to be preserved by the Maya in the katun wheel famous in the books of Chilam Balam in Yucatan.

More evidence for our claim can be found by comparing the imagery on Stela 31 with the scenes on the lintels of Temple 1. These scenes clearly portray the essential details of the king’s performance in the Great Plaza on the occasion of the dedication of Temple 33. On Lintel 2 (Fig. 5:25b) Ah-Cacaw sits astride a throne covered with a jaguar pelt, his feet resting on a stepped base marked with bands of waterlilies representing the dark and dangerous surface of Xibalba. He wears the balloon headdress of the Tlaloc war complex and a frightful deity mask, the last earthly thing his sacrificial victims were likely to see. In his hands he holds spearthrower darts and a shield. This is the same battle gear worn by his ancestors, Smoking-Frog on Uaxactun Stela 5 and Curl-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. The Mosaic Monster conjured up by the seated Ah-Cacaw looms above him, menacing the foes of Tikal. This monster is the same god of conquest worn by Curl-Snout as a headdress in his portrait on the left side of Stormy-Sky’s Stela 31 (Fig. 5:25a). The imagery of Lintel 2 refers to much more than the individual portraits of the ancestors on Stela 31. The royal house and the city of Tikal had suffered for katuns while the star of war shone for their enemies. Now their luck had changed. Ah-Cacaw once again commanded the monsters of Tlaloc war his forebears had unleashed with the conquest of Uaxactun.[326]

The innermost lintel of Temple 1 depicts Ah-Cacaw in the other costume he wore during rituals of dedication (Fig. 5:26). Again, Stela 31 seems a likely source of inspiration for this lintel. On Stela 31, as you recall, Stormy-Sky stands holding the cruller-eyed GUI, the jaguar-featured member of the Hero Twins, in his arms. From Stormy-Sky’s belt hang two more versions of the Jaguar Sun, an anthropomorphic version in front and a zoomorphic version in back. This jaguar is the great patron deity of Tikal. He is also equated with the jaguar masks modeled on Late Preclassic temples at Cerros, Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Tikal. He is found in the hand of the king in the earliest known royal portrait at Tikal, Stela 29. We suspect “jaguar” may even be one of the names of the kingdom of Tikal itself.[327]

On Lintel 3, we see the Gill-Jaguar God again, this time looming protectively over Ah-Cacaw. In this scene, the king again sits on a seat covered with jaguar pelts atop a stepped platform. In his right hand, he holds a God K scepter and in his left a round shield. He is heavily adorned with jewelry marking both his rank and his ritual role. His feathered headdress is mounted on a Roman-nosed profile of the sun god and a remnant of his huge backrack can be seen behind him. To announce his rank as ahau, a Jester God rides on his chest over a large pectoral composed of jade beads of varying sizes. Ah-Cacaw is seated on a palanquin which he has ridden into a ritual space, perhaps the Great Plaza itself, in order to conduct the public sacrifices that were part of the dedication celebrations.[328]

Out of the ruins of Tikal’s broken history, Ah-Cacaw reshaped a formidable new place of power and sacrifice. Using the deeds of his ancestor Stormy-Sky as a bridge, he healed the breach in Tikal’s history caused by the long years of darkness. One question remains, however: Why did Ah-Cacaw attack Calakmul?

Calakmul’s alliance with Caracol in the war against Naranjo no doubt made its young king, Jaguar-Paw, a target for Tikal’s wrath. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the participation of Calakmul’s earlier kings in a strategy that had encircled Tikal with the enemies and allies of Calakmul. One of those erstwhile allies, the first king of Naranjo, had found himself the target of the same alliance in the waning years of his life. His descendants focused their wrathful vengeance to the south against Caracol’s neighbors, while Ah-Cacaw of Tikal turned north toward Calakmul itself.

What role did Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas play beyond taking advantage of the resulting power vacuum and setting his own descendants on the throne of Naranjo? We are not sure, for in his early years he had courted the young heir to Calakmul’s throne and attended his accession as a powerful friend. Flint-Sky-God K won a great strategic victory at Naranjo in the power politics of the time, but he must have lost prestige when his most prized ally died at the hands of the new I ikal ruler.

Flint-Sky-God K was the founder of a vigorous new dynasty which may have been an offshoot of the Tikal royal family, but considering his alliances, he was very likely the enemy of that kingdom during its recovery.

The tangle of elite obligations and vendettas we have outlined in this chapter rivals any in recorded history. Caracol conquered Tikal and later, in alliance with Calakmul, conquered Naranjo. A branch of the defeated Tikal family may well have moved into the Petexbatun region to establish the new kingdom of Dos Pilas. Flint-Sky-God K, the founder of the Dos Pilas dynasty, then began a campaign of battles that won him the friendship of the powerful heir and soon-to-be king of Calakmul. He also sent a daughter to Naranjo to reestablish the dynasty there, after the defeat of a king who had been installed in the presence of a former ruler of Calakmul. Tikal attacked Calakmul, the ally of Dos Pilas, while Naranjo rampaged southward toward Caracol, conquering Yaxha (which may have been subordinate to Tikal) and Ucanal. As far as we can tell, CaracoFs response was to duck and hide in the deepest cover it could find, and ride out the crisis. Certainly, its fortunes declined with the reemergence of Tikal and Naranjo as major powers.

Some Thoughts and Questions

These are some of the spare facts of the matter, and with any luck more will come to light in the future. Already, however, we can sense a more subtle and treacherous diplomatic landscape behind the facts we know. Did, for example, Flint-Sky-God K deliver Jaguar-Paw into the hands of Ah-Cacaw? One can envision the young monarch of Calakmul, trapped on the battlefield and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Dos Pilas warriors who never appear, raging in frustration as Ah-Cacaw draws steadily nearer with his fierce companions. Certainly the house of Dos Pilas benefited from the outcome of this battle. The alliance of Calakmul and Caracol had spanned the entire central Peten region, holding many great families hostage. With that axis broken, with Tikal in a celebratory mood, and with relatives ruling Naranjo to the east of Tikal, the kings of Dos Pilas could enjoy a free hand in the Petexbatun , spending the next eighty years consolidating a substantial conquest state of their own.

The impact of these maneuvers on Caracol was profound. No inscriptions exist, as far as we know, from the period spanning the end of Lord Kan H’s reign up until the end of Katun 17. That silence lasted for seventy years. At Calakmul, the results were different, perhaps because that kingdom was so huge and so far to the north that it managed to survive the defeat of its king without major effect. By the next period ending following the death of Jaguar-Paw, the people of Calakmul had already begun to erect stelae once more.

Whatever effects Ah-Cacaw’s deeds may have had on the liberation of the Peten, his rituals of dedication and his family’s program of rebuilding seem to have accomplished their primary purpose. Tikal regained its position as one of the largest and wealthiest kingdoms in the central Peten.

In spite of these very substantial gains, however, the king did not rest on his laurels. The architectural remodeling of downtown Tikal and the wars of Ah-Cacaw were far from over. Less than a year after the dedication of Temple 33, Ah-Cacaw attacked Calakmul again, this time taking captive a lord named Ox-Ha-Te Ixil Ahau, who was immortalized in one of the most elegant drawings left to us by the Maya (Fig. 5:27). The artist incised the image of this man on two carved bones deposited in Ah-Cacaw’s tomb. On these bones we see Ox-Ha-Te Ixil standing in public humiliation with his head bowed, stripped to his loincloth, his wrists, upper arms, and knees bound together. The battle in which he fell took place in the land of a person named Split-Earth, who was the king who apparently succeeded Jaguar-Paw at Calakmul.[329] This captive was one of his nobles. Ironically, both these Calakmul stalwarts enjoyed the privilege of history only because they accompanied a great enemy king to his grave.

At the end of the katun, 9.14.0.0.0, just when Smoking-Squirrel was attacking Yaxha, Ah-Cacaw built his second Twin Pyramid Complex and placed Stela 14 and Altar 5 (Fig. 5:28) in the northern enclosure. On this stela, Ah-Cacaw stands front view with the staff favored by the Early Classic Tikal kings balanced on his forearms. The feathers of his backrack fan out in a torso-high circle behind him. In recognition of the first appearance of the Eveningstar, he wears the skeletal image of this celestial being as his headdress.

Ah-Cacaw may have built one more twin pyramid complex, but this one, which celebrated 9.15.0.0.0, never had any carved monuments erected within it, so we are not sure of the identity of its originator. It was not the custom at Tikal in the Late Classic period to erect stelae recording the details of the kings’ lives. Instead, the kings vested public energy and historical memory into their personal twin pyramid complexes and the rites they conducted on period-endings. This new emphasis began after Stormy-Sky’s death in the fifth century and it was a custom that Ah-Cacaw reinforced. For that reason we have little information about the last twenty years of Ah-Cacaw’s life: A few dates with obscure events appear on the incised bones deposited in his tomb. One clear historical footnote recorded on these bones, however, is the death of Shield-God K, the son of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas.[330] Surely if Ah-Cacaw had strained good relations with the Dos Pilas family when he took Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul, he must have repaired the breach by the time of his demise.

Ah-Cacaw’s son, Ruler B, succeeded him on 9.15.3.6.8 (December 12, 734). This son most likely built his famous father’s funerary mountain, Temple 1, because we have evidence that the pyramid was erected after the tomb was sealed. Still, the absence of any editorial comment by this young man in the hieroglyphic texts on the masterful lintels of this temple suggests that they were completed under the watchful eye of an aging Ah-Cacaw. The devout son, no doubt, merely installed them.[331]

We are less sure about the end of Smoking-Squirrel’s life at Naranjo. All we know is that his son Smoking-Batab succeeded him on November 22, 755.[332]

Many parallels can be drawn between the lives of Ah-Cacaw and Smoking-Squirrel. Both kings inherited polities that had suffered humiliating defeats at the hand of the same enemy—the kingdom of Caracol— and both kings spent their lives successfully reestablishing the prestige and central position of their kingdoms in the affairs of the Late Classic Maya world. Their strategies were essentially the same. Ah-Cacaw began his reign with the honorable deposition of desecrated monuments in the older buildings that fronted the North Acropolis, the ritual center of Tikal. Although his father, Shield Skull, had already begun the process of reawakening the state with a preliminary rejuvenation of the North Acropolis, it fell to Ah-Cacaw to complete the program. He erected the huge Temple 33 over the stela recording the history of his kingdom’s greatest conquest—the deeds of his mighty ancestors, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Curl-Snout, and Stormy-Sky. On the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last readable date on the desecrated monument, he went to war and took a captive high enough in rank and prestige to wipe away the dishonor on the spirit and history of his kingdom. With the building of Temple 33, he remade the ceremonial heart of the city into a new configuration on a scale and proportion worthy of the glory he had regained.

Smoking-Squirrel used the same tools of reclamation to reestablish his kingdom’s honor. His success in war demonstrated both Naranjo’s regained prowess as a military power and the renewed favor of the gods. His success as a charismatic ruler can be seen in his ability to gather the tremendous numbers of laborers and skilled craftsmen needed to remake the center of his kingdom on an even greater and more glorious scale. Smoking-Squirrel built Groups A15 and C (Fig. 5:12), both designed to reproduce the triadic arrangements of Late Preclassic buildings we have seen at Cerros and Uaxactun. His appeal was not only to size, but more important, to the ancient orthodoxy of Maya kingship. This was a pattern seized upon by Ah-Cacaw as well, for by sealing the interior courts of the old temple complex away from processional access, he turned the North Acropolis into the northern point of a new triadic group. Temple 1 formed the second point and Temple 2 the third. Thus, both kings reestablished the prestige of their defeated kingdoms by publicly and forcefully demonstrating their prow’ess as architects and warriors.

What we have tried to show in these histories of the Peten kingdoms is how the interrelationships of the many polities that inhabited this landscape together comprised what we call Maya civilization. In alliance, in war, and in marriage, the great families that ruled these kingdoms wove together a fabric of meaningful existence as intricate as any they wore on state occasions. The patterns of destruction and creation were shared. More important, the destiny of any kingdom hinged upon its successful performance not only within its own borders but also before the watchful eyes of its friends and foes. History was a matter of mutual interpretation and the mutual elaboration of innovative new ideas like Venus-Tlaloc s warfare. In later chapters, as we shift our focus to a close-up of the inner workings of specific kingdoms, we need to bear in mind that the Maya ahauob were always performing for the wider audience of their neighboring peers. Their deeds always required the validation of that larger congregation of true and resplendent people. For the nobility, as for all the people of the community, to be Maya was to be part of the patterns of history formed by the actions of kings within the framework of sacred space and time.

Photo Gallery

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-2.jpg 70f][The magic of these waterfalls at Palenque enchanted Linda Scheie on her first visit to the ruins. The ancient Maya who built their city around their lifegiving pools must have seen these streams as meaningful symbols of the processes of destruction and creation, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1972)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-3.png][Tikal Temple 33 (A.D. 400–700), which was dismantled by archaeologists, was the first major building constructed by Ah-Cacaw. He placed Stela 31 inside the old temple before construction on this final version began. The enormous new temple was dedicated on September 17, A.D. 695, exactly 260 years after the last date on that early stela, (photo by Peter Harrison)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-4.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Cerros shows Structure 5C-2^nd (100 B.C.-A.D. 100), the first temple built at that center, to the right peeking out of the forest next to the shore. The eastward-facing Acropolis of a later king sits at the end of the modern dock extending into Chetumal Bay. During the first century B.C., people of Cerros experimented with kingship and then abandoned it a hundred years later to return to their lives as villagers and farmers, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-5.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Tikal shows the North Acropolis at the top, the Great Plaza in the center, and the Central Acropolis to the lower right. Temple 1 is on the right of the Great Plaza and Temple II on the left. Most of the visible architecture in the North Acropolis is Early Classic (A.D. 300–600), while the Great Plaza and most of the Central Acropolis is Late Classic (A.D. 600–800). (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-6.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph features many of 18-Rabbit’s greatest works. The Great Plaza and its forest of tree-stones (at the top) was built during the early eighth century. 18-Rabbit built the Ballcourt (lower right) six months before he was sacrificed by a rival at the nearby site of Quirigua. The stela on the end of the Ballcourt was commissioned by his father, while the tiny altar near it was placed there by the last tragic king of Copan, the Maya kingdom that dominated western Honduras and the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-7.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the greatest work of King Chan-Bahlum—the Group of the Cross (A.D. 692) at Palenque, México. The view is from the door of the Temple of the Foliated Cross and includes the Temple of the Sun on the left, the Palace in the center, and the Temple of the Cross on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-8.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the south end of the Palace at Palenque. House E, the building housing Pacal’s accession panel, is on the left with the Group of the Cross visible above its roof, while the Temple of Inscriptions, where Pacal is buried, nestles against the mountain on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

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[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-11.jpg 70f][This brightly painted clay figurine (A.D. 600–800) depicts a Late Classic Maya ruler wearing the god Chac-Xib-Chac in his befeathered headdress. His ornate costume includes a royal belt around his waist, huge pendants on his chest, a decorated apron, and tasseled sandals. He wears a round shield on his left wrist and probably once had a tiny spear in his right hand. His mouth ornament is like one worn by Pacal into his grave. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-12.jpg 70f][This painted vessel (A.D. 426) was found in Curl-Snout’s tomb (Burial 10) inside Temple 34 of Tikal, Guatemala. The vessel shape is Maya, but the images reflect contact with Teotihuacán, the great city near modern México City, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-13.jpg 70f][Lintel 41 (A.D. 755) was once mounted over a doorway into Structure 16 at the ruins of Yaxchilán in México. The carved scene depicts Bird-Jaguar standing with a wife from Motul de San José as she helps him prepare for battle. He holds a battle spear in his hand and wears a Tlaloc-war headdress. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-14.jpg 70f][Lintel 24 (A.D. 700–725) was mounted over the left door of Structure 23 at Yaxchilán, México. The carved scenes depict a bloodletting rite celebrating the birth of a son to the sixty-two-year-old king, Shield-Jaguar. He holds a torch over Lady Xoc, his principal wife, as she pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue to sanctify the birth of a younger wife’s child. This child, Bird-Jaguar, became king after ten years of competition with rivals who may have been Lady Xoc’s offspring, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-15.jpg 70f][Dedicated in A.D. 715, Temple 22 of Copan, Honduras, was commissioned by 18-Rabbit to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of his accession. This extraordinary sculpted door leads to the inner sanctum where 18-Rabbit and his successors let blood and talked to their ancestors and the gods. The image represents the arch of the sky held away from the skeletal realm of the Underworld by gods called Pauahtun. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-16.jpg 70f][This jade earflare (50 B.C.-A.D. 50) was once mounted on the side flanges of a headdress worn by a Late Preclassic king from Pomona, Belize. The glyphs are arranged to form a quincunx pattern with the central hole. The inscription evokes the Sun God and the Maize God and the rituals that celebrated their power. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-17.jpg 70f][18-Rabbit, one of the greatest kings of Copan, as he was depicted on the east face of Stela C (A.D. 711), the first tree-stone he planted in the Great Plaza. The intense red color is the original paint. (photo by Linda Schele)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-18.jpg 70f][These great masks (50 B.c.) were modeled from plaster on the eastern terraces of Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, Belize. They represent the Sun God (lower mask) and Venus (the upper mask) as they rise from the horizon at dawn. (photo by James F. Garber)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-19.jpg 70f][The tumbled colonnade attached to the Temple of the Warriors (A.D. 850–950) at Chichón Itzá in Yucatán, México. (photo Graph © Barbara Kerr 1975)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-20.jpg 70f][Stela 31 (A.D. 447), the tree-stone of the great king Stormy-Sky, as it was found inside Temple 33 at Tikal. This side represents Stormy-Sky’s father, Curl-Snout, dressed as a Tlaloc warrior, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-21.jpg 70f][These jade jewels (50 B.C.) were deposited in an offering in the summit of Structure 6, the second temple complex built at Cerros. The center head was worn as a pectoral, while the four smaller heads were mounted on a headband that functioned as the crown Of kings. (photo by Linda Schele)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][Yucatec Maya conducting a primicia ritual at Yaxuná, Yucatán, in 1986. The boughs at the four corners of the table represent the trees at the corners of the world, while the food and drink are located on the central axis once symbolized by the Wacah Chan Tree. The symbolism of the altar and the ritual descend directly from Precolumbian belief and practice, (photo by Debra S. Walker)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][The west gallery (dedicated in A.D. 654) of the building the people of ancient Palenque called the Zac Nuc Nah, the “White Big House.” The Oval Palace Tablet seen on the right shows Pacal receiving a headdress from his mother during his accession rites. Most of Pacal’s successors were inaugurated into the office of king while seated on a throne that once sat below this tablet, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-23.jpg 70f][This is a photo rollout of a bowl sent by Ruler 1 of Naranjo to a noble woman of Tikal as a gift. Buried with her in Structure 5G-8, the bowl (A.D. 590–630) was decorated with images of the Celestial Bird carrying snakes in its beak as it flies across the sacred world of the Maya, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-24.jpg 70f][This extraordinary statue of the God of Scribes and Artists (A.D. 725–750) once decorated Structure 9N-82, the house of a noble scribe at Copan, Honduras. The net headdress, paua, combines with the sign on his shoulder, tun, to spell his name, Pauahtun, while his face is that of a howler monkey, who was an artisan in Maya myth. Here, he holds scribal tools—a paintbrush and a shell paintpot—in his hands. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]

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[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-26.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a vase painting (a.D. 600–800) shows warfare as it was practiced in ancient times. Warriors wearing short-sleeved battle jackets, elaborate headdresses, and the shrunken heads of past victims carry stabbing spears, battleaxes, and flexible shields. They seize captives, who are disarmed but still wearing their battle finery, by their hair to bring them under control. One grabs the leg of his captor as he looks back at his companion’s suffering, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-27.jpg 70f][A modern divination ceremony in progress before an ancient sculpture at La Democracia in Guatemala. Copal incense hovers in front of the head, while a shaman’s pouch with its rock crystals and maize seeds rests on the stone altar. Unseen in the photograph is a chocolate bar the shaman had placed in the mouth of the sculpture to bring it alive for the ritual. The same kinds of objects and rituals were used by the Precolumbian shamans two thousand years ago. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]

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[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-30.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a corpulent lord from Motul de San Jose leaning back against his pillow as he admires himself in a mirror held by a dwarf. Lords surround him as another dwarf, a hunchback, and a flower-bearing lord sit on the floor in front of him. The local band of three musicians plays a conch-shell trumpet and two wooden horns just offstage behind the palace wall. Three enema pots sit on the floor outside the room along with a large round pot that apparently holds the liquid sipped by the dwarf, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-31.jpg 70f][This is the northern vista of Palenque as seen from the Temple of the Inscriptions. The Palace, which was the main ceremonial and residential building of the king, sits in the center of the photograph, while the Group of the Cross, the accession group built by King Chan-Bahlum in the late seventh century, is seen on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-32.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a scene taking place inside a palace painted with images of jaguar gods and watery quadrifoils holding the skeletal visage of a death god. A lord from Dos Pilas sits on a bench bearing a pillow for his back and a set of bundles and boxes to his left. Four lords of high rank sit on the floor in front of him, while an attendant holds an object out to him. Two of the lords face him in rapt attention, while the other two lean toward each other as they converse, perhaps about the business at hand, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-33.jpg 70f][This rollout of a vase painting (A.D. 600–800) shows a lord of Dos Pilas sitting on a bench in front of a large pillow. Two nobles bring him bouquets of flowers, perhaps to be used with the round-bottomed enema pot sitting on the floor between them. Other pots of various shapes sit on the bench and the floor around the principal lord. The three-glyph phrase behind his head names the artist of this vase, who may have depicted himself in the center of the scene with his paintbrush thrust into his headdress, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1989)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-34.jpg 70f][This Early Classic vessel (A.D. 200450) depicts the Sun God paddling his canoe across the watery surface of the Otherworld. The nose-down peccary legs support not only the vessel but the waters of the world depicted on its sides and lid. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-35.jpg 70f][A jade head (A.D. 350–500) representing the god of decapitation sacrifice that was used to record the conquest of Uaxactün on the Tikal Ballcourt Marker. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]

[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-36.jpg 70f][This cylindrical vase (A.D. 600–800) was painted with a scene showing a woman from Dos Pilas dressed in a delicate, transparent lace huipil as she kneels before a lord of Motul de San José. While sitting cross-legged on a mat-covered bench inside a curtain-draped palace, he holds a small deity effigy against his chest as he extends a rattle (or perhaps an enema bag) toward her. Behind him rests a large pillow, while two large vessels sit on the floor below him. (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]

6. The Children of the First Mother: Family and Dynasty at Paleonque

Like a white, shimmering jewel, Palenque perches above the misty, deep green of the forest shrouding the waterlogged lands that stretch northward from the base of the Chiapas mountains to the swampy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. To the south of the city, rugged, jungle-covered hills gradually rise to climax in cold, volcanic highlands. Temples, palaces, and noble homes, all built with the distinctive sloped roofs characteristic of Palenque’s architectural style, line the clear streams that bubble up from within the heart of these mountains to tumble down rocky slopes and into the rolling plain below. As if to instruct humanity in the ways of destruction and rebirth, these life-sustaining w’aters rise through the limestone strata to break onto the surface of the earth. Laden with calcium, the running water fashions a fantasy world of crystal lacework by encasing the decaying leaves and branches of the forest in what will become the fossilladen strata of floriforous limestone a million years hence. The pearly deposits shroud temple and tree alike, creating a mirror to the Otherworld, like a cave turned inside out. Even today, you know you stand on sacred ground here at the western gate of the sun’s journey across the world of the ancient Maya.

Palenque’s magic has fascinated the Western mind since the adventurers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first published accounts of their visits. The drawings and commentaries of intrepid travelers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood especially captured the imagination of nineteenth-century readers and created a special vision of Palenque as the lost city of an intelligent and civilized indigenous people.[333]

Yet Palenque has done more than appeal to the romantic side of the Western imagination. This city has played a crucial role in the modern study of ancient Maya history and religion, as well as in the decipherment of their writing system. The kings of Palenque left a substantial record of texts carved on the fine-grained limestone monuments of their city. Many of their most outstanding monuments are preoccupied with one issue: the relationship between the legitimate inheritance of divine status through family descent and the personal charisma of the king. As we have seen in other kingdoms, the Palenque ahauob had practical reasons for their obsession with history.

Two Palenque kings, Pacal, whose name means “shield,” and his oldest son, Chan-Bahlum,[334] “snake-jaguar,” stand out as primary contributors to the history of their city. They are both members of that class of remarkable people who are responsible for creating what we call a civilization’s “golden age.” Not only did they make their kingdom into a power among the many Maya royal houses of the seventh century; they also inspired and nurtured the exceptional beauty of Palenque’s art, the innovative quality of its architecture, and the eloquence of the political and theological visions displayed in its inscriptions and imagery. The royal literature commanded by these men represents the most detailed dynastic history to survive from Classic times. Their vision wove it into the most beautiful and far-reaching expression of the religious and mythological rationale of Maya kingship left to modern contemplation.

Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the essential details of their dynasty on four separate king lists. According to these family accounts, Palenque’s dynastic history began on March 11, A.D. 431, when a thirty-four-year-old ahau named Bahlum-Kuk (“Jaguar-Quetzal”) became the king. The descent of the royal line continued through subsequent generations of divine ahauob—with only a few minor sidesteps—into the glorious reigns of our two protagonists. Finally, the kingship failed in the hands of their progeny sometime after A.D. 799, the last date recorded in the inscriptions of Palenque. These “minor sidesteps” in the succession are the subject of our tale and the reason for the extraordinary detail of the record those ancient kings have left to us.

Pacal began his task of historical interpretation with the construction of his funerary building—the Temple of Inscriptions (Fig. 6:1). In the corridors of this magnificent temple, he mounted the first of his king lists on three huge stone slabs. These slabs comprise the second-longest[335] inscription left to posterity by the ancient Maya (Fig. 6:Id).[336] In his tomb deep under the temple, Pacal recorded the deaths of the same kings he named above. He also pictured them on the side of his coffin, as part of an ancestral orchard growing out of the cracked earth. His son, Chan-Bahlum, extended this ancestral list back to the founder of the dynasty— and beyond to the divinities who established the order of the cosmos at the beginning of this current manifestation of the universe.

Combined, these four great king lists overlap in time and recorded history to constitute the most detailed and complete dynastic history known from the Classic period (Fig. 6:2). When a Palenque ruler was recorded in all four lists, we have his dates of birth, accession, and death, as well as good information on his kinship relationships with other members of the dynasty. For those kings recorded only on Chan-Bahlum’s list, we have their births and accessions, and a reasonable estimate of their ages at death. We can surmise the latter since we know a new king usually acceded shortly after his predecessor’s death. For those kings whose I names occur only on the sarcophagus and panels of the Temple of Inscriptions, we have only their dates of accession and death, and thus w e cannot estimate length of life or their ages at various events. Still, these four lists taken together allow us to reconstruct the history of Palenque’s dynasty for the ten generations culminating with Chan-Bahlum.[337]

[[][Generation 6 Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ LadyZac-Kuk]]

The very existence of these king lists raises questions about their context and the motivations of the men who made them. What so fascinated and troubled these men that they felt compelled to present such a comprehensive treatise on their dynasty on such important monumental spaces? Here, as in any true history, it is not so much a matter of the facts of the history as their interpretation that reveals the intentions of the chronicler. The royal preoccupation with these lists, and the parallel information that comes to us from other sources, hint of troubles in the very dynastic succession the two kings so obsessively recorded.

The essential problem, as we surmise it from their public efforts to explain it away, was to extricate dynastic succession from the same principle of lineage that originally fostered and legitimated it. As we shall sec, Pacal inherited the throne of Palenque from his mother in violation of the normal patrilineal inheritance patterns that governed Maya succession. His most pressing concern, then, was to justify this departure from the normal rules. To prove his point, he and his son, who inherited the problem, made elegant and imaginative use of the Maya mythology that was the basis of social order and kingly rule.

Pacal’s portrait gallery of his direct ancestors, carved on the sides of his sarcophagus, gives us his version of how each of his ancestors appeared (Fig. 6:3). Each rises with a fruit tree from a crack in the earth to create an orchard of the ancestral dead. Chaacal I in the southeast corner begins the progression through time and lineage that culminates with the mother and father of Pacal, who rise on both the north and south ends of the sarcophagus.

Within this ancestral orchard, Pacal depicted two women—his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, and his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal— and each is depicted twice. Why would Pacal have chosen to double the portraits of these women when he could just as easily have doubled a male ancestor or added portraits of even earlier ancestors to the portrait gallery? In the case of his mother, we might infer that he doubled her portrait precisely because she was his mother. After all, he did the same for his father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, in spite of the fact that his father never ruled. This line of reasoning, however, cannot explain why his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal, held an honored place on the sarcophagus. Some other factor must explain her special status.

From our vantage at least, these two women were certainly deserving of special attention. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were very unusual individuals in that they are the only women we can be sure ruled as true kings. They were neither consorts nor, as in the case of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo, regents for young heirs. Yet by their very status as rulers, they created serious dilemmas for the government of their kingdom. When the throne of Palenque descended through Kanal-Ikal to her children, it became the prerogative of a different lineage, for the Maya nobility reckoned family membership through their males. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were legitimate rulers because they were the children of kings and, as such, members of the current royal lineage. The offspring of their marriages, however, belonged to the father’s lineage. Each time these women inherited the kingship and passed it on to their children, the throne automatically descended through another patriline. This kind of jump broke the link between lineage and dynasty in the succession.

Because the line changed twice through these women rulers, Palenque’s dynasts did not belong to one patriline, but rather to three (Fig. 6:4). The first lineage to declare command of the high kingship descended from the founder Bahlum-Kuk through eight successors to Lady Kanal-Ikal. Even though they were of a different lineage, Pacal and his successors to the throne of Palenque claimed that they derived their right to rule from this man. In this respect, while they followed the traditional practice of other Maya dynasties, which also claimed descent from a founding king, they were declaring the dynastic succession to be a force transcending patrilineality.

[[][Fig. 6:4 The Three Descent Lines in Palenque’s Dynasty]]

Lady Kanal-lkal must have been a charismatic and exceptional woman to have successfully ascended to the throne of a high kingship. What history she herself may have created lies deeply buried under later construction—if indeed she was even permitted the royal prerogative of recording personal history. In all likelihood, she would have based her legitimate claim to the kingship on her status as the child of an acknowledged ruler. Her progeny claimed the throne after her, although they belonged to the lineage of her husband—a man never mentioned by name in the Palenque chronicles. Notables in this second lineage included the king Ac-Kan and his brother Pacal, who died before he could become the high king.

Even though he himself was never a king, this first Pacal appears in the royal grove carved on the side of the sarcophagus. There is a good reason for this. In each generation, the royal line could pass through only one sibling. In this case, the first Pacal was probably the father of Lady Zac-Kuk, the next ruler and last scion of this second royal lineage.[338] The presence of the first Pacal on the side of the great sarcophagus confirms that Pacal the Great was trying to make something more than a list of kings here. He was orchestrating a careful political manipulation of an orthodox belief. By placing his direct ancestors, both kings and nonkings, into a frame of reference that both honored the rules of lineage and transcended them, he worked to establish an unshakable claim to the throne.

The third lineage began with Pacal the Great himself. As the son of a ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, he had the same legitimate claim to the throne as Lady Kanal-Ikal’s child, Ac-Kan. Difficulties arose, however, when Pacal’s own children, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul, followed their illustrious father to the throne. These men belonged to the lineage of their father and their paternal grandfather, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’. Hence the problems with their claim to the kingship were different from Pacal’s and analogous to those of the descendant kings of the second lineage, Ac-Kan and Zac-Kuk. They were the offspring of a lineage that had no legitimate claim to produce kings.

We do not know what happened the first time one of these sidesteps in the royal dynasty occurred because we have no contemporary inscriptions from Lady Kanal-Ikal or her children.[339] The second time it happened, however, in the case of her granddaughter Zac-Kuk, the contradictory imperatives of lineage and dynasty precipitated a crisis. Lady Zac-Kuk’s offspring, Pacal, and his son, Chan-Bahlum, responded to the crisis with the two extraordinarily innovative projects under discussion—the Temple of Inscriptions and the Group of the Cross. These remarkable monuments were designed to interpret the dynastic history of Palenque in such a fashion as to make their legitimate rights to the throne undeniable.

In their presentations of the dynastic sequence at Palenque, both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the descent line as if it were historically unbroken. At the same time, they substantiated their claim of legitimacy by using the current mythology, explaining the historical breaks in the descent sequence as if they were preordained by the cosmos.

Their twofold strategy was brilliant. First they declared Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, to be like-in-kind to the first mother of gods and kings at the beginning of the present creation. This goddess was the mother of the three central gods of Maya religion—the deity complex known as the Palenque Triad. Secondly, Pacal and Chan-Bahlum asserted that Pacal was born on a day that exactly replicated the temporal symmetry of that goddess’s birth. In this way they were able to imply that the human king was made of the same divine substance as the goddess. Having thereby demonstrated that the mother and son were the stuff of the gods, they declared that their own inheritance of the throne from Pacal’s mother replicated the actions of the gods at the beginning of creation: the direct transmission of rule through females as well as males. Here was a radical new definition of dynastic succession that denied patrilineality as the sole fount of power. But who could possibly disagree with something that replayed creation?

Pacal’s overall strategy to hold the throne was more subtle than his son’s, perhaps because he acceded at age twelve while his mother was still alive and after she had been ruling for three years. Lady Zac-Kuk may have left no direct history of her reign; but like her grandmother, Kanal-Ikal, she stands out as a masterful politician, able to manipulate the rival interests of her paternal clansmen away from the succession and toward each other or outside enemies. No doubt her husband, the consort of a princess of the blood, figured prominently in her success through appeal to his own influential noble clan and his own deeds of valor. Just getting her young son on the throne was a triumph. Consolidating that victory required an acceptable historical and theological rationale for this audacious move, one that would calm the discontent of all the noble clans of the kingdom whose own high social status hinged upon lineage descent.

Lady Zac-Kuk lived another twenty-five years after Pacal’s accession. While she lived, she and her husband, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, apparently sustained the alliances necessary to support her son’s rule; but she very probably kept the real power in her own hands. Not until after her death in 640 did Pacal commission works that left their mark in the archaeological record of Palenque. It is also likely that during the delicate transitional period, this resplendent lady helped to craft the ingenious political resolution to the succession celebrated by her son in subsequent katuns.

In 647, seven years after his mother’s death and four years after his father’s, Pacal celebrated his newfound independence by dedicating the Temple Olvidado (Fig. 6:5) in the western zone of the city.[340] On the ridge side above a residential zone spanning one of two permanent water sources that coursed through the city, Pacal’s architects built a new kind of temple that held the seeds of a revolution in architectural technology.[341] With its double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls, multiple doors, and trefoil vaults, this building foreshadowed the technology that would soon produce the largest interior volume and best lighting ever known in Maya architecture.

At the successful completion of his first construction project, Pacal began an extensive building campaign which included the Temple of the Count, the subterranean galleries of the Palace, House E, House B, and finally House C in the Palace which was dedicated in 659 when he was fifty-six years old.[342] With each new building, Pacal experimented with the new style and pushed the innovative technology further.

When Pacal reached his early seventies, he must have begun feeling his mortality, for he began the last great project of his lifetime: the construction of the great mortuary Temple of the Inscriptions. This building, which housed his ultimate statement on dynasty, became one of the most famous monuments in the Mesoamerican world. Built in the stylistic tradition he established with the Temple Olvidado,[343] this spectacular pyramid was a labor of imagination and complex engineering. First, the work crews cleared and leveled a section of ground next to the Palace. This site was located at the foot of the sacred natural mountain which loomed over the great central plaza opening on to the northern horizon. Against the mountain face (Fig. 6:1), a pit was dug into which the laborers set a huge block of limestone that would become Pacal’s coffin when finished.

Consulting with the king, Palenque’s greatest artists designed an image (Fig. 6:3) that would represent his fall down the great trunk of the World Tree into the open jaws of the Otherworld. At the same time, they incorporated a sense of resurrection into this death image. As Pacal falls, he is accompanied by the image of a half-skeletal monster head carrying a bowl of sacrifice marked with the glyph of the sun. This particular glyph is a powerful symbol, representing the sun in transition between life and death, poised on the brink of the Otherworld. Like the sun, the king would rise again in the east after his journey through Xibalba. He was, after all, the living manifestation of the Hero Twins who had set the example of how to defeat the Lords of Death.

Around the hollowed coffin in which he would lie, the artists drew the images of his direct ancestors. These images were arranged in ascending generations, moving from south to north and from east to west, culminating with the central pivot—the king himself. When they were done with the drawings and Pacal had approved them, workmen moved in to construct a protective wall around their work. They then filled the chamber with sand and the masons and architects began to raise the pyramid. Into its center they built a vaulted stairway that would let the sculptors get to the coffin when it was no longer in danger from the construction. Down this dark stairway they would bring the body of the king when he died, setting it into the hollow at the center of the sarcophagus before they rolled the lid across the opening and sealed him in forever.

Pacal’s death was still far off, however, as the great mass of rock and earth rose upward in the nine great terraces upon which the six-doored temple would rest. His masons built the foundation platform of the temple first and then raised the central and rear walls that would hold up the roof. While these walls stood unencumbered by the heavy stone vaulting of the roof, sculptors went to the special quarries where the finest sculptural stone was found. There they cut huge, thick slabs to mount within the bearing walls of the temple—two to fit into the front surfaces of the walls separating the front and back rooms, flanking the doorway into the rear sanctum; and a third to fit into the back wall of the temple in a position where the light from the doorways could still shine upon it. Pacal’s scribes then drew a grid to accommodate a total of 640 glyphs which would record Pacal’s katun history and the important events of his own reign. They reserved the last two columns of the text for his death. Then, as with the sarcophagus, they built a protective wall around the inscriptions until the construction of the vaults and the plastering work was completed.

The passages on these temple tablets give us our first glimpse of this family’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. Less than three years before his own accession, Pacal recorded the accession of a woman whom he named in a mysterious and unusual way (Fig. 6:6). This woman took the throne on October 22, 612, 202 days before the end of the ninth katun, when Pacal was nine years old. Her name is recorded with a glyph written in the form of a screaming bird: Its bulging beak lies back against its forehead, and its gaping mouth is filled with feathers. Since this strange bird is a variant of the Palenque Emblem Glyph, we can assume that Pacal meant to connect the woman in question with the sacred name of his kingdom. Even more important, this same glyph was also used to name the First Mother, affectionately dubbed Lady Beastie by scholars, who was born before the present creation. This goddess, as we have mentioned above, was the mother of the gods and the creatrix of Maya myth.

Is Pacal telling us, then, that the person who held the throne before he became the king was the First Mother? In a way that is exactly what he intended to say, for this mysterious woman was indeed a mother, I although a human one. She was his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk,[344] who gave him life and then the crown when he acceded to power (Fig. 6:7). By using the name of the goddess to refer to his mother, Pacal declared her to be analogous to the mother of the gods. By logical extension, Pacal like-in-kind to the lords who were the three gods of the Palenque Triad, the Late Classic version of the gods the Late Preclassic ahauob fashioned on the temples of Cerros.

The great Pacal died in his eightieth year and was buried by his sons in rituals that involved the highest and lowest people in his realm. Opened again in 1952 by the great Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz, his tomb contains a record of his funerary rites frozen forever in time. We can visualize the rituals that, in the final hours, sent him on his lall into the realm of Xibalba to face the Lords of Death.

•

Chan-Bahlum tasted the salty sweat that rolled into the corner of his mouth as he lowered himself to the last of the high, slippery steps that descended down through the rock of his father’s sacred mountain.[345] Nearby was the vaulted tomb where his father awaited the rites that would begin his fall into the Otherworld. Dizzy from three days of fasting, the hard climb up the outer stairs, and the descent down the inner ones, Chan-Bahlum reached out to the white plastered wall to steady himself. At last, he stepped down into the dank cloud of smoke that filled the corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Masking the sweet smell of death, the blessed incense hovered around a sphere of torchlight before vanishing upward, like the Vision Serpent, following the dark path upward to the human world.[346]

His brown chest heaving like a frightened deer, Chan-Bahlum paused once more, this time to catch his breath. Sixty-seven high steps led from the world of light above, down to the gate of Xibalba. As the senior son of the dead king, and the king-elect, it had been Chan-Bahlum’s obligation to descend deep into this most holy mountain to send his father on the journey only the few and the prepared survived: the journey to confront the Lords of Death and to trick them into relinquishing life once again.

The long days of fasting and grief were taking their toll. Chan-Bahlum felt all his forty-eight years weighing on him like stones upon the backs of his father’s masons. Remembering his duty, he threw off his exhaustion and straightened his heavy jade pendant so that it lay squarely on his chest. His dignity restored, he turned to look into the black eyes of his younger brother. The thirty-eight-year-old Kan-Xul, by their father’s decree, would be king after him. The older man looked upon the more delicate features of his brother and saw in them the image of their father as he had been in his prime. Together they continued into the tomb.

Startled from his concentrated effort, a sculptor saw the princes approaching through the swirling smoke and tore himself away from his last-minute work,[347] carving the great king’s death date on the south edge of the massive sarcophagus lid. He quickly gathered his tools and the debris from his work into a net bag and slung them over his naked, sweat-damp shoulder. Pushing past the princes in the narrow confines of the hall, he mumbled apologies and began his climb out of the tomb. Kan-Xul smiled briefly to reassure his nervous brother. Even with the final rush to transform the imagery of the dead and reborn kings on the sarcophagus from painted line to carved relief, the burial rites would go without mishap. Chan-Bahlum knew it fell to him, as patriarch of Pacal’s lineage, to bury his father properly and heal the wound his death had caused in the fabric of the kingdom. He was determined the ritual would go well and dispel the danger of this time.

Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to his brother and turned back toward the heavy stone door and the three steps that led up to the inner chamber. Xoc,[348] his father’s adviser and a respected member of the lineage, awaited them at the door. He, along with a cadre of shamans, would assist the brothers as they sent their father into the terrifying fall to the Otherworld. First, however, they would equip the dead king with the power to rise like the dawning sun. Chan-Bahlum stepped through the triangular opening in the upper part of the tomb vault and entered the stifling hot chamber filled with the shamans who would sing the king’s spirit on its way. They would contain the dangerous energies that would be left by the king’s departure.

Standing on the threshold above the five stairs that led down into the tomb chamber, Chan-Bahlum paused to gaze at his father’s body. Nestled in an arm-deep cavity cut into the huge limestone block that served as the sarcophagus, Pacal lay on his back with his hands at his sides. His legs were extended and his feet relaxed to the sides as if he were sleeping. The dry, wrinkled skin of the eighty-year-old man seemed transparent in the flickering light of the torches held by the shamans. The jade collar that covered his chest and the cuffs on his wrists gleamed against the red walls of the coffin. The green headband with its Jester God lay on his forehead where it would tell the Lords of Xibalba that a great king had come among them.

Chan-Bahlum and his brother advanced down the steps with slow dignity, passing between the plaster portraits of their father modeled on either side of the entrance. Their horny feet rasped on the cold limestone of the steps as they moved to the platform that had been built so that they could stand level with the body, above the floor of the chamber. Together they stepped from the platform and onto the sarcophagus itself. Chan-Bahlum walked to the right side of the hollow that held his father’s body, while his brother went to the left side. Simultaneously they dropped to their knees and gazed for the last time upon their father’s face. Kan-Xul reached down into the coffin to straighten the ornament in Pacal’s left ear and to align the mica rectangle piece that enframed his mouth.

The two brothers locked eyes as Chan-Bahlum instructed the shamans to join them on the narrow surfaces surrounding the coffin depression and begin the final rites. Xoc stepped to his side and handed him a delicate mosaic mask of jade, shell, and obsidian formed into a likeness of his father’s face. Carefully balancing his weight, Chan-Bahlum leaned forward, reaching down into the coffin to lay the mask across his father’s features. The obsidian eyes of the dead Pacal stared heavenward from under the shining green brow. The visage of this great king would not be lost as his flesh decayed and left only bone.

Satisfied with the positioning of the mask, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul slowly moved until they were kneeling by the dead man’s waist. A shaman gave Chan-Bahlum a cube of jade which he laid reverently in the open palm of the right hand, already adorned with five rings of deep green jade. Another shaman gave Kan-Xul a sphere of jade to be set in the ring-laden left hand to balance the cube in the right. Leaning forward again, Chan-Bahlum set a small jade statue on the rich embroidered cloth that covered his father’s genitals from whence had come the seed and the blood of the greatest of all beings in the kingdom.

Together, the brothers moved to their father’s feet, each of them laying a sphere next to the sole of the foot closest to him. Lastly, Chan-Bahlum took a large hunk of jade that had been reverently and skillfully carved into the image of the patron god of the month Pax. It was an image that read te, the word for the tree down which the dead king was falling in the image on his sarcophagus lid and which he had embodied in his person while alive. The high-pitched, droning voices of the shamans echoed off the walls of the vaulted chamber, as they sent prayers to accompany the falling soul of the king. Satisfied that the body was prepared in the honorable manner appropriate to a high king, Chan-Bahlum and his brother stood up and stepped off the sarcophagus and back onto the platform at its south end.

Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to Xoc who disappeared through the door and called up the stairs. The sounds of the shamans’ prayers counterpointed the shuffling sounds of footsteps descending the high steps from the temple above. Finally, the frightened face of a young boy appeared in the doorway. It was Chac-Zutz’, scion of an important and honored cahal lineage which had served the high king for many generations. Chac-Zutz’ tugged gently on the arm of the four-year-old Chaacal who lagged behind him. The youngest male issue of Pacal’s line, this child might one day be the king if neither Chan-Bahlum nor his brother could produce an heir who lived long enough to inherit the throne.[349]

Chan-Bahlum stared at the two boys with dark-eyed intensity and spoke in a commanding voice, instructing them to look upon the great king who had transformed the face of the kingdom and made them all great. Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul stood in patient dignity while all the important men of the clan filed in behind the boys and then quickly ascended after taking this last opportunity to gaze upon the great Pacal before he was sealed forever into the Otherworld of the ancestors.

When it was done, the king-to-be gestured to the men of the royal lineage who had been chosen to help seal the coffin. After hushed consultation, two of them jumped down to the chamber floor. They handed the heavy stone lid, cut to fit inside the hollow holding the body, up to the four men standing on top of the sarcophagus. These men threaded ropes through holes drilled into each corner of the lid and then lowered it carefully onto the inset ledge around the coffin hollow. Once there, it formed a smooth stone surface across the top of the monolith. With the body now sealed in, they withdrew the ropes and dropped a stone plug into each of the drilled holes. The plug in the southwest corner had a notch cut in it so that the spirit tube, built into the stairway, could connect the chamber where the dead king lay to the world of his descendants above.

The time had finally come to pull the enormous carved lid over the top of the sarcophagus. This action would finish the sealing process and set the dead king amid the symbols that would insure success in his confrontation with the Lords of Death. Chan-Bahlum and his party stepped outside the tomb chamber to give the workers room to carry out this last difficult task. Strong young men of the ahau and cahal rank had been chosen to execute this dangerous and precise operation under the direction of the head mason who had overseen the construction of the tomb chamber. The prayers of the shamans were soon overwhelmed by the controlled pandemonium. The men whispered hoarsely to each other as they brought the equipment into the tomb. They set log rollers on top of the massive stone box that now held the king’s body and arranged themselves as best they could along the sides of the carved slab. Throaty grunts underscored the straining of their muscles as they heaved at the impossibly heavy lid. From the steps above, Chan-Bahlum watched as the great lid finally began to slide slowly forward onto the rollers. Struggling and sweating, the men worked in the close space of the chamber, urging the great lid into its place. Once this was accomplished, they labored to extricate the rollers and seat the lid with the help of ropes strung from the great stone beams in the upper vaulting of the tomb.

Finally, however, it was done. The young men passed the rollers out of the chamber and up the stairs to the venting tunnels in the side of the sacred mountain. Then, more quickly than Chan-Bahlum had believed possible, they were gone, taking all the equipment and the debris of their effort with them. The urgent pandemonium diminished until suddenly only the steady chants of the shamans reverberated through the tomb. The brothers crossed the threshold and stepped down to the platform to gaze at the image of their father carved upon the lid. There they saw him poised in the first moment of his descent down the World Tree into the jaws of Xibalba—his forehead pierced by the smoking ax that marked him as the incarnation of the last born of the First Mother’s sons.

Without speaking, the younger brother lowered himself onto the floor of the tomb chamber to stand at the southwest corner of the great sarcophagus. His eyes were level with the portraits of the ancestors carved on its sides. Chan-Bahlum, who had jumped to the floor at the southeast corner, reached back up to take a plaster head from Xoc, who stood on the platform above. He waited until Xoc had given another head to Kan-Xul, and then the two of them knelt down. As older brother, it was Chan-Bahlum’s perogative to act first. Lying down on his belly, he crawled forward between the stone piers that supported the platform at the south end of his father’s sarcophagus. It was a tight fit but he managed to wriggle between the obstacles until he could reach far under the massive stone sarcophagus, which stood on six low stone blocks.[350] With a silent call to the ancestors of his line, he stretched his arm as far inward as he could reach and gently deposited a life-sized head made of plaster. Torn from another building as an offering to help Pacal’s soul in its journey, it represented his father as he had looked in his prime. Kan-Xul, in his turn, wriggled under the huge sarcophagus and placed his sculpture next to the first. The second sculpture depicted Pacal as he had looked at the age of twelve when he became king.[351]

Sweating in the heat, the two of them extricated themselves and stood to take the ritual cup and plate Xoc handed down to them. The brothers then knelt in unison, carefully balancing the containers which were filled to the brim with food and drink to succor the dead king’s soul on his journey. They placed the offerings on the floor under the south side of the platform while the shamans chanted prayers asking that Pacal’s journey be swift and his defeat of the Lords of Death sure. Finished with the ritual, the two brothers accepted a hand from Xoc, who helped them up onto the platform again.

Chan-Bahlum looked at the red-lidded sarcophagus once more— examining every detail of the preparations. The flickering torchlight played across the relief images of Pacal molded on the plaster walls of the chamber. In front of him, on the north end of the lid, was the carved image of his father. It almost seemed to him as if the dead king were present, sitting cross-legged on the stone platform that had supported the lid before it had been wrestled atop the sarcophagus. Chan-Bahlum stood still, lost in the memory of his father and in the anticipation of his own transformation into the high king. He was a three-katun lord in his forty-eighth year of life. To the people of his world, he was already an old man, and he wondered if the gods would give him time to leave as great a mark on the flow of history as his father had.

At his feet a plasterer worked, laying the spirit tube from the notch in the south end of the lid, across the platform, and up the five stairs to tie into the hollow pipe that ran up the vaulted stairs to the floor of the temple above. The kings of Palenque were practical men as well as people of faith. To help their ancestors ascend into the world of humankind, they created a physical path for the Vision Serpent to follow when a dead king wished to speak to his descendants.

With the spirit tube ready, only one ritual remained. Chan-Bahlum turned to his brother, who handed him the great jade belt his father had worn to mark his status as a divine ahau. The flint pendants dangling under the jade ahau heads clanked together as Chan-Bahlum grasped the leather ties and stretched the heavy belt out between his extended hands. With reverence, he stepped up onto the red surface of the sarcophagus lid and knelt upon the image of his falling father. Leaning forward, he laid the belt down on the lid, stretching it out across the god image that marked the World Tree as a holy thing. The king’s belt rested above the center point of his human body, now hidden under the heavy lid. His soul could at last begin its journey, released from the case of worldly flesh, prepared for the fall to the Otherworld with food, images of his human form, and the belt that would signal his divinity and rank as he met the Lords of Death.

The shamans’ song changed as Chan-Bahlum and his brother voiced their farewell, asking their father to help them when he emerged from Xibalba. Heavy with grief, they climbed the five short stairs leading out of the chamber and prepared themselves for the next stage of the ritual. Stepping down into the outer corridor, they watched as the shamans pushed the huge triangular door closed. Masons rushed down from the venting passages with baskets of wet plaster, which they threw onto the edges of the door with loud slapping noises. Using wooden spatulas and their hands, they smoothed the plaster until all evidence of the door was gone. One of them shouted an order and other men rushed down the long stairs with more plaster and stones. With the same efficient haste, they constructed a stone box at the end of the corridor setting one side of it against the now hidden door. Finishing in a rush, they cleaned up the debris, gathered their tools, and left in a silent hurry for they knew what was coming. A great king had died and it was time to sanctify his journey with a sacrifice so that he could be reborn.

In the sudden silence that fell after the workers had departed, Chan-Bahlum could hear the scuffling descent of more people, this time from the temple above. He turned and saw five captives being dragged down the stairs by the honored kinsmen of the dead king. A woman and four men would go to Xibalba this day to accompany Pacal on his journey. Some of them moaned in terror, but one young man trod forward to meet his fate with insolent pride. He was an ahau taken in battle and chosen to go with Pacal because of his arrogant courage and reckless bravado.

Chan-Bahlum grabbed the young ahau’s hair and wrenched his head up so that he could see the captive’s eyes. He closed his hand on the hilt of the flint knife he had brought with him for this act of sacrifice. In silence he plunged it into the captive’s chest and struck up into the heart. This was the signal. His kinsmen screamed in a cacophony which echoed in the waiting ears above and fell upon the victims, slaughtering them with furious slashes of their bloodstained knives. The limp bodies of the dead were tossed in tangled abandon into the box.

With the sacrifice completed, Chan-Bahlum left the blood-splattered corridor and began to mount the stairs in slow dignity, conserving his strength for the final rite he must perform in the temple above. The muscles in his legs burned with exhaustion as he turned at the midway platform and began the climb up the second flight of stairs. His beblooded kinsmen followed him in a reverent silence broken only by their heavy breathing as they struggled with the hard climb and the residual emotions from the sacrificial ritual.

Chan-Bahlum emerged through the floor of the temple, where the spirit tube from his father’s coffin ended in the head of the Vision Serpent. When he had made his careful way around the ledge beside the stairway entrance, shamans took him by the arms and stripped away his loincloth. One of them handed him a fresh blade of obsidian just struck from a core. He reached down and grasped his penis, holding it tightly as he pierced it three times with the point of the bright black razor. Handing back the blade, he pulled long strands of bark paper through the wounds and watched them turn red with the sacred blood of sacrifice. It was his first sacrificial act as patriarch of the royal clan, an act of symbolic birth in the midst of death.

His brother performed his own act of sacrifice, as did the men who had helped them dispatch the captives. Stained crimson with the flow from his own body and the blood of the captives below, Chan-Bahlum stepped out of the back chamber. He passed through the great katun history his father had commissioned to appear between the central piers of the outer wall. A great roar of grief rose from the gathered multitude in the plaza below as they saw him emerge, the blood on his white loincloth clearly visible in the oblique light of the setting sun. The people of the kingdom in their thousands had come to witness the beginning of the great king’s journey. When Chan-Bahlum’s bloodstained body appeared and cast its shadows on the whitened walls of the temple piers, they knew it was done. Like the setting sun that lit the scene, the great king was falling toward Xibalba. Hundreds began their song of grief and cut their own flesh in pious prayers for the king. Drums beat a mind-numbing rhythm accompanied by the piercing notes of clay whistles blown by people exhausted by days of dancing and fasting in preparation for this moment.

Chan-Bahlum stood above, swaying slightly, looking down on the seething mass of his people. The paper hanging down against his legs was now saturated with his blood, which dripped to stain the white plaster floor below his feet. His younger brother stood off behind his right shoulder, reddened by his own act of sacrifice. The corridor behind them was filled with the most important people of the royal clan. On the terrace just below the temple summit stood ahauob of other lineages and the cahalob who had governed the towns of the kingdoms for the king. They too had drawn blood that now stained the cloth bands tied to their wrists and hanging from their ears and loins.

Shamans stood beside hip-high braziers modeled in the image of the great Ancestral Twins, and watched Chan-Bahlum closely. He began to dance slowly in place, preparing to enter the trance of communication with the dead. When the shamans saw the trance state descend upon him, they threw handfuls of copal resin and rubber (the “blood of trees”) into the fire burning in the conical bowls sitting atop the clay cylinders. Others brought shallow plates filled with blood-saturated paper from the king-to-be and his brother. As great billows of black smoke rose from the braziers, cries of wonder rose with them from the plaza below. The last light of the sinking sun lit the rising columns of smoke to tell the thousands of watchers that the ancestors had arrived. The moaning wail of conch trumpets echoed off the mountain walls and spread over the great plain below. The dead king’s ancestors knew that he was coming to join them. They would go to help him in his conflict with the Lords of Death.

•

The forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum waited 132 days after his father died to conduct his own rituals of accession. The responsibility of finishing his father’s funerary temple fell to him, and this task provided the first step in his own campaign to prove the legitimacy of his ascent to the throne. To do so, he asserted that he had received his power by direct transfer of authority from his dead father in an act replicating events that occurred at the time of creation. In this way, he redefined dynastic succession as a supernatural rite of ecstatic communion between the heir and the dead king, who was in the Otherworld.

The first project of Chan-Bahlum’s reign demonstrates his preoccupation with this new definition of dynasty: the direct ritual transmission of power in place of the traditional system of lineage succession. While finishing his father’s funerary monument, he usurped the outer piers of the temple at the summit. On these he depicted the rituals in which his father chose him as the legitimate heir and transformed him from a human child into a living god[352] (Fig. 6:8). In this scene, modeled in brightly painted stucco, Pacal and three other adults present the six-year-old Chan-Bah-lum from the edge of a pyramid. The height of this structure enabled the audience below, which consisted of the nobility and probably a large number of the commoners as well, to see and acknowledge that this child, of all Pacal’s offspring, was the one who would become the next ruler.[353] Chan-Bahlum, however, mixed the portrayal of the actual ritual with images conveying the supernatural sanction of the new status this ritual bestowed upon him.

The child who is cradled in the arms of his predecessors has both divine and purely human features. His status as a divinity is emphasized by merging other parts of his anatomy with the signs of the god G1I, the third-born child of the First Mother (Fig. 6:8a). One of Chan-Bahlum’s legs, for example, transforms into a open-mouthed serpent in the fashion characteristic of the god. Moreover, penetrating the baby’s forehead is the smoking-ax blade that is so often depicted stuck through the forehead mirror of the god. The identical symbol impales the forehead of Pacal, his father, on the sarcophagus lid in the tomb deep below to bear witness to his divine status as he falls into the Otherworld. Yet to insure that the baby on the Temple of Inscriptions piers was not taken simply to be an image of the god, he was depicted with six toes on each foot (Fig. 6:9a), a physical deformity shown repeatedly in Chan-Bahlum’s adult portraits (Fig. 6:9b-d). The inclusion of this characteristic deformity affirmed the humanity of the baby figure and its personal identity as the six-toed heir Chan-Bahlum. Combining these contrasting features asserted the essential divinity of the human heir.

This ritual display of the child heir, then, constituted the public affirmation of Chan-Bahlum’s new identity as a “divine human.” This new identity was sanctified by the sacrifice of captives taken in battle by Pacal. Another proud father, King Chaan-Muan, depicted exactly this sequence of events explicitly and graphically in the murals of Bonampak, a contemporary Late Classic kingdom on the Usumacinta river.[354] Chan-Bahlum, like the Bonampak king, turned this ephemeral ritual of heir display into a permanent public declaration of his legitimate status by placing it on the facade of a temple which dominated the central public plaza of his city. The fact that the temple housed his father’s grave made the assertion all the more powerful.

During the time when he was finishing his father’s temple, Chan-Bahlum also began work on the Group of the Cross, the buildings that would house his own version of Palenque’s dynastic history—the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Sun. In pictures and texts of unsurpassed eloquence, the new king completed the presentation of his new doctrine of dynasty as an institution transcending lineage. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary for him to reach back to the fundamental and orthodox concepts of royal authority. Chan-Bahlum approached the nebulous and paradoxical nature of political power with the vision of a great theologian and statesman. He divided his pictorial and textual treatise into three temples, thus recalling the triadic arrangement of primordial Late Preclassic royal architecture.[355] In this way, his statement evoked “origins” to the Maya—just as we “borrow” from the architecture of the Parthenon and Pantheon in our own state and religious monuments to declare the Greek and Roman origins of our cultural heritage.

The three temples of the Group of the Cross rise from the summits of pyramidal platforms. The tallest temple is in the north, the middle one in the east, and the lowest in the west (Fig. 6:10). The south side of the group is open, both to preserve the triadic form of the group and to accommodate a large audience for ritual performances. This arrangement was all part of Chan-Bahlum’s plan to assert the ancient and pristine quality of his legitimacy. Although this design violates the landscape of Palenque, which would logically dictate that the principal building face toward the broad plain below, not away from it, it does conform with the primarily southward orientation of the first royal temples built at Cerros and other Late Preclassic kingdoms.

Chan-Bahlum pursued the triadic theme further in the design of the buildings themselves. In each temple, three doors pierce the front wall of an interior which is divided into an antechamber and three rear sanctums (Fig. 6:11). In the central chamber of each temple his masons built the holy portals which opened into the Otherworld. These powerful foci of supernatural energy were set inside miniature houses—called by the Maya pib nau[356] or “underground buildings”—built within the back chamber of each temple. While these little houses were only symbolically underground, they replicated in principle the real underground buildings of Palenque: the tombs of Pacal and other kings in pyramids which dotted the sacred landscape of the city.

Artists decorated the outer facades of the temples with huge plaster reliefs modeled on the roof combs, the entablatures, and on the piers between the doors (Fig. 6:11). Unfortunately, only the sculptures of the Temple of the Cross entablature remain legible. These depicted frontal views of great Witz Monsters gazing out from all four sides of the roof. The Maya thought of this temple as a living mountain. Thus, its inner sanctuary was “underground” because it was in the mountain’s heart.

Into these “underground houses in the hearts of the mountains” the king would tread, alone and stripped of earthly trappings, to meet his father and his ancestors in Xibalba. He would hazard the perils of hell, as the Hero Twins had before him, to bring back life and prosperity for his people. The plaster sculptures that adorned the outer entablatures of the pib na declared their supernatural purpose. Great slabs of stone brought from special quarries bore the words and images that would open these portals to the Otherworld. These stone panels were set into the rear walls of the interior, and into the outer, front walls on either side of the entry doorways. Another set of inscribed doorjamb panels lined the inside of that door (Fig. 6:11).

The images used to represent the visions special to each pib na were all arranged in the same basic pattern. The resonances and contrasts designed into the three compositions provided a means of enriching the information they conveyed and emphasizing the unity of their spiritual source. The pictures in each temple were carved on the central axes of the main tablets set against the back wall of the pib na (Fig. 6:12). Each composition represented one of the three paths to Xibalba, as well as the three forms that supernatural power would take during the king’s ecstatic trances. In each temple, the central image was flanked on the one side by a short figure encased in a heavy cloth costume, and on the other by Chan-Bahlum wearing simple dress. From there the action moved to the two exterior panels, following the path of the king from the Otherworld to the natural one. On the outer panels the king is shown returning in triumph from his transformational journey: He has changed from heir to the reigning monarch of Palenque.

The texts embedded in these narrative scenes tell us exactly which historical events were critical to this transformational process. The text describing the heir-designation of Chan-Bahlum was extremely important. This information appears often, always near the small figure muffled in heavy clothing. This text tells us that the rituals surrounding the presentation of the boy from atop the pyramid took place on June 17, 641, and ended five days later on the summer solstice when he became the living manifestation of the sun.[357] Other significant texts relate that on January 10, 684, the forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum became king 132 days after his father’s death. The glyphs recording this celebration are next to his portrait. They appear on the inner panels of the Temples of the Cross and the Foliated Cross, and over the shield in the center of the Tablet of the Sun.

[[][Fig. 6:12]]

When the scene moves to the outer panels, other important events are emphasized. In the Temple of the Foliated Cross and the Temple of the Sun,[358] we see two different scenes from Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites. In both these temples, the left panel shows him on the first day of these rites, and the right panel shows him at their conclusion, ten days later, when Venus was at its greatest elongation as Eveningstar. In the Temple of the Cross, only the culminating event of the succession rites is shown. In this version, we see Chan-Bahlum facing God L, one of the most important gods of Xibalba, who has evidently guided him out of the Otherworld and back into the light of life. Finally, the text behind Chan-Bahlum on the Tablet of the Cross puts a period to the historical proceedings by recording the three-day-long dedication rites for the completion of this monumental group on July 23, 690.

If we have accurately identified these events—the designation of Chan-Bahlum as heir, his accession as king, and his dedication of the temples—who then is the mysterious personage shown in these final narrative scenes? The answer is simple: The small muffled figure is none other than the dead Pacal, the father of the king-to-be,[359] who stands facing his child in the ritual that will make him king. Chan-Bahlum designed the inner scenes of the temples to represent places in Xibalba where he would meet his father and receive the power of the kingship from him directly. Pacal is shown transferring the kingship to his son through a ritual of transformation paralleling the one he enacted for a frightened six-year-old boy forty-two years earlier. On each of the inner panels, the son is dressed simply in the Maya equivalent of underwear, his long hair wrapped in readiness to don the heavy headdress of kingship. His father stands nearby, his chest muffled in heavy cloth wrapping bands. His neck too is bound in a thick twisted cloth which hangs down his back. This apparel most likely represents the burial clothing he wore in his own final portal deep beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions. At any rate, the costume clearly portrays him in his role as denizen of Xibalba.

On the inner panels, the dead Pacal still holds the insignia of royal power. Transformation and the passing on of authority occurred only during the ten days of the accession rites. At the end of these days and nights of fasting, sacrifice, and communion in the place of death, we finally see Chan-Bahlum coming forth from thepib na wielding those very power objects and wearing the age-old garb of kings. The royal belt, with Chac-Xib-Chac dangling behind his knees, girds his loins. The heavy elaborate feathered headdress adorns his brow with the responsibility of authority. On his back rests the burden of divinity symbolized by the backrack with its image of a god. This was the dress of kings when Tikal conquered Uaxactun. By donning this most ancient and powerful garb, Chan-Bahlum became the ahau of the ahauob—“the lord of lords.”

The central icon at the portal of each of the three temples in the Group of the Cross specifies the nature of the cosmic power and community responsibility that defined kingship for that temple. At the portal of the Temple of the Cross, we see a variant of the World Tree (see the Glossary of Gods). This cross-shaped Tree, with the Serpent Bar of kingship entwined in its branches and the Celestial Bird standing on its crown, was the central axis of the cosmos (Fig. 6:12a).[360] Along this axis rose and descended the souls of the dead and the gods called from the Otherworld by the vision rite to talk to human beings. It was the path the Cosmic Monster took as the sun and Venus moved through its body on their daily journeys.[361] The king himself was the worldly manifestation of this axis, and this emphasized his role as the source of magical power. He was not only the primary practitioner of the rituals that contacted the Otherworld: He was the pathway itself (see Chapter 2, Fig. 2:11). In this portal the dead Pacal gives his son a scepter in the form of the monster that rests at the base of the World Tree—the same sun-marked monster that bore Pacal to Xibalba. Chan-Bahlum wields a disembodied head as an instrument of power, as had the Early Classic kings of Tikal and other kings before him.

The portal of the Temple of the Foliated Cross (Fig. 6:12b) bears a foliated variant of the World Tree formed by a maize plant rising from a band of water and Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, one of the symbols of the watery world of raised fields and swamps (see the Glossary of Gods). In the crown of this foliated tree sits a huge water bird wearing the mask of the Celestial Bird. The branches of the tree are ears of maize manifested as human heads, for, in the Maya vision, the flesh of human beings was made from maize dough. This Foliated Cross represented the cultivated world of the community through the symbol of a maize plant rising from the waters of the earth as the source of life. Maize was not only the substance of human flesh, but it was the major cultigen of the Maya farmer. As the sustainer of life, and as a plant that could not seed itself without the intervention of humans, maize was an ultimate symbol of Maya social existence in communion with nature. In this portal Pacal is shown giving his son the Personified Bloodletter. This was the instrument of the bloodletting rite and the vision quest. It drew the blood of the king and brought on the trance that opened the portal and brought forth the gods from the Otherworld.

Images of war and death sacrifice adorn the panel in the pib na of the Temple of the Sun. A Sun Jaguar shield and crossed spears dominate the central icon (Fig. 6:13). These images are sustained aloft by a throne with bleeding jaguar heads emerging from one axis, and bleeding dragons from the other. As at Cerros, these bleeding heads represent decapitation sacrifice. The throne and its burden of war rest on the shoulders of God L and another aged god from the Otherworld. Both are bent over like captives under the feet of victorious warrior kings.[362] This scene recalls the defeat of the Lords of Death at the beginning of time by the Hero Twins. Captive sacrifice was the source of life through the reenactment of the magical rebirth of these heroic ancestors of the Maya people. God L, who received the greetings of the new king in the Temple of the Cross, now holds up the burden of war and sacrifice. In both cases, ritual performance by the king involved Otherworld denizens in the human community.[363]

Here in the Temple of the Sun, the power object is not actually passed from the inside scene to the outside, as in the other temples; but the intent of the composition is still the same. On the inner panel, Pacal holds a full-bodied eccentric flint and a shield made of a flayed human face: symbols of war among the nobility of Palenque and other Maya kingdoms. If we move to the outer panels, on one we see Chan-Bahlum holding a bleeding jaguar on a small throne as the symbol of sacrificial death. On the opposite panel, he wears cotton battle armor with a rolled flexible shield hanging down his back. The tall staff he wields is probably a battle spear typical of the kind carried by warrior kings at other sites. The parallelism here is nicely rendered. On the one side, he is emerging from the pib na as a warrior prepared to capture the enemies of his kingdom; on the other, he comes forth as the giver of sacrifice, the result of victory.

Once he had memorialized the scenes of his transformation within his living mountains, Chan-Bahlum framed the imagery with the finest examples of royal literature left to the modern world by the ancient Maya. We know that, on the one hand, his actions were politically motivated and designed to gain personal glory. That knowledge, however, cannot obscure our awareness that these texts constitute a magnificent poetic vision of the universe, a remarkable expression of the high level of philosophical and spiritual development within the civilization of the Maya. These texts comprise the only full statement of creation mythology and its relationship to the institution of ahau that we have from the Maya Classic period. They define the sacred origin and charismatic obligations of kingly power.

In these texts, Chan-Bahlum resolved the relationship between lineage and dynasty by evoking the origin myths of the Maya, declaring that his own claim of descent from his grandmother replicated the practices of the gods at the time of the genesis. He pursued and elaborated the same divine symmetries his father had asserted before him, symmetries between the First Mother, First Father, and their children, and the historical realities of Palenque’s dynastic succession. The First Mother was Lady Beastie, who we mentioned above as the mother of the gods and the Creatrix in the Maya vision of the cosmos. As we shall see the Palencanos saw her operate in their lives through her spirit counterpart, the moon. Her husband and the father of her children is called GT (G-one-prime) by modern scholars. He established the order of time and space just after the fourth version of the cosmos was created on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. Both the Creatrix and her husband were born during the previous manifestation of creation, but their children were born 754 years into this one.

The three children are known as the Palenque Triad because Heinrich Berlin[364] first recognized them as a unit of related gods in Paienque’s inscriptions. He dubbed them GI, GII, and GUI for God I, God II, and God III. We now know that the firstborn child, GI, had the same name as his father, GI’, in exactly the same pattern as the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh where Hun-Hunahpu is the father of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. GI is a fish-barbled anthropomorphic god who wears a shell-earflare. He is associated with Venus and with decapitation sacrifice. GII, also known as God K, Bolon Tz’acab, and Kauil, is a serpent-footed god who wears a smoking-ax through his obsidian-mirrored forehead. He is the god of lineages and blood sacrifice. GUI is the cruller-eyed Jaguar God, who is also known as Ahau-Kin, “Lord Sun.” See the Glossary of Gods for full descriptions and pictures.

As the most ancient and sacred of all Maya dieties, these three gods played a crucial role in the earliest symbolism of kingship we saw at Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun. Chan-Bahlum makes them the crucial pivot of his own claim to legitimacy. On the right half of each text, he recounted their actions in the Maya story of the beginning of the current world. On the left he recorded the connections between those sacred events and Paienque’s history. Here is a chronology of the mythological events in the order they are presented. (See Fig. 6:14,15,16 for the full decipherment and drawings of these texts.)

<verse> On December 7, 3121 B.C., when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled, five days after the moon was born and the 2^nd moon had ended, X was the moon’s name and it had 29 days.

It was 20 days after God K had set the south sky place on November 16, 3121 B.C.

that Lady Beastie was born. [Al-Cl]

8. years, 5 months, and no days after he was born and then the past epoch ended. On August 13, 3114 B.C., 13. baktuns were completed.

1 year, 9 months, and 2 days after the new epoch began, GF entered the sky.

On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ dedicated it. “Wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” was its name. It was his house of the north. [DI —C13]

753 years and 12 months after GF had set the wac chan and then the matawil person was born. On October 21, 2360 B.C., the matawil, the blood of Lady Beastie, touched the earth. [D13-F4]

827 years, 11 months, and 2 days after she had been born, and then she crowned herself on August 13, 2305 B.C. [E5-F8]

1,330 years, 12 months, 2 days after August 13^th came to pass and then U-Kix-Chan, the Divine Palenque Lord, was born.

26 years, 7 months, 13 days after U-Kix-Chan had been born ... [E10-F17] </verse>

Alfardas flanking the main stairs

<verse> On October 21,2360 B.C., GI, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,094 years, 11 months, 10 days later On January 10, 692 ... </verse>

The Temple of the Cross

<verse> On December 7, 3121 B.C., Lady Beastie, the First Mother, was born. On June 16, 3122 B.C., GI’, the First Father, was born. On August 13, 3114 B.C., the 13^th baktun ended and the new creation began. On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ entered into the sky and he dedicated the house named ‘wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (the “World Tree house of the north”).[365] </verse>

<verse> ... and then U-Kix-Chan crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. He was a Divine Palenque Lord. [P1-Q3]

On March 31,397 Kuk was born. It was 22 years, 5 months, 14 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself on March 11,431. He was Divine ????? Lord. [P4—Q9] On August 9, 422, “Casper” was born. 13 years, 3 months, 9 days after “Casper” had been born and then it was August 10, 435, 123 days after “Casper” crowned himself and then December 11,435, came to pass, on that day 3,600 years (9 baktuns) ended. <verbatim>|Pl0—S2]</verbatim> 28 years, 1 month, 18 days after “Manik” had been born and then he crowned himself on July 29,487. [R3-S7] 36 years, 7 months, 17 days after he had been born on July 6,465, and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself on June 5, 501. [R8-R13] 39 years, 6 months, 16 days after Kan-Xul had been born and then he crowned himself on February 25, 529. [S13-S18] 42 years, 4 months, 17 days after he had been born and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself on May 4,565. [T1-T6] 1 year, 1 month, 1 day after Chaacal-Ah-Nab had been born on September 5, 523 and then Chan-Bahlum was born. [U6-T11]

48 years, 4 months, 7 days after Chan-Bahlum had been born on September 20, 524 and 18(?) years, 8 months, 2 days. [U11-U18] </verse>

<verse> it was housed the wacah-chan (six-sky) it was the sanctuary of it was the holy thing of Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal and the child of Lady Ahpo-Hel. It happened at the Waterlily Place. </verse>

On October 21, 2360 B.c., GI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.

On August 13, 2305 B.C., at age 815, Lady Beastie became the first being in this creation to be crowned as king.

On March 1 1, 993 B.c., U-Kix-Chan was born.

On March 28, 967 B.C., at age thirty-six, U-Kix-Chan, Divine Lord of Palenque, was crowned king of Palenque.

On November 8, 2360 B.C. when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled, it was ten days after the moon was born, 5 moons had ended, X was its name and it had 30 days.

It was 14 months and 19 days after God K set the west quadrant.{1}

It was the third birth and GII was born. [A1-D2]

34 years, 14 months after GII, the matawil, had been born and then 2 baktuns (800 years) ended on February 16, 2325 B.C.

On that day Lady Beastie, Divine Lord of Matawil, manifested a divinity through bloodletting. [C3-D11]

It had come to pass on Yax -Ha! Witznal in the shell place at the Na-Te-Kan{2} on November 8, 2360 B.C.

2,947 years, 3 months, 16 days later{3} ... [C12-D17]

{1} The scribe made an error here by adding rather than subtracting the Distance Number. The correct station is 1.18.4.7.11 Imix 19 Pax with red and east.

{2} These three locations refer to the Mountain Monster under Chan-Bahlum’s feet, the shell under Pacal’s feet, and the Foliated Cross in the center of the panel (See Figure 6:12).

{3} The Distance Number should be 7.14.13.1.16.

<verse> Alfardas flanking the main stairs On November 8, 2360 B.C.. GII, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,050 years, 63 days later on January 10, 692 ... <verse>

The Temple of the Foliated Cross

<verse> November 8, 2360 B.C., GII was born. Thirty-four years later, on February 17, 2325 B.C., Lady Beastie let her blood when two baktuns ended. ... on July 23, 690, (III and Gill were in conjunction [L1-M4] On the next day, the Mah-Kina-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated in the house of Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord. <verbatim>|L6-L9]</verbatim> On the third day Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord, he let blood with an obsidian blade; he took the bundle after it had come to pass at the Waterlily Place. Wac-Chan-Chac Ox-Waxac-Chac acted there. [L10-L17] 49 years, 6 months, 4 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord on January 10, 692. [M17-P5] 6 years, 11 months, 6 days after he had been seated as ahau and then GI, GII, Gill and their companion gods came into conjunction. Lord Chan-Bahlum enacted a ritual. In 1 year, 12 months, 4 days it will happen, the end of the 13^th katun on March 17, 692. And then it came to pass July 23, 690 and then they were in conjunction the gods, who are the chcrcished-ones of, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord. it was housed, the Na-Te-Kan (Foliated Cross) it was the pib nail of it was the divine-thing of Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal the child of Lady Ahpo-Hcl. It happened at the Waterlily Place. </verse>

<verse> On October 25, 2360 B.C. the third Lord of the Night ruled, it was 26 days after the moon was born, four moons had ended, X was its name and it had 30 days ....

It was 1 year, 46 days after God K set the north quadrant on July 24, 2587 B.C.

On that day he was born, Mah Kina Tah-Waybil-Ahau, Kin-tan “decapitated jaguar.” Ti Nah, Zac-Bac-Na-Chan, Atin Butz’, TITI, Mah Kina Ahau-Kin.. [A1-D6]

765 years, 3 months, 6 days after the wac-chan had been set, and then the matawil, the child of Lady Beastie, Divine Palenquc Lord, was born. [C7—D13]

3,858 years, 5 months, 16 days ... [Cl—D16]

Alfardas flanking the main stairs

On October 25, 2360 B C., GIII, the matawil, touched the earth. [3,894 years, 11 months, 6 days later on January 10, 692 ...] </verse>

The Temple of the Sun

On October 25, 2360 B.c., 754 years after the era began, GUI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.

<verse> ... after the present epoch began on August 13, 3114 B. C., and then July 23,690, came to pass. GUI came into conjunction. 1016–06]

One day later on July 24, 690, the Kinich-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated, in the house of the Bacel-Way Lord Chan-Bahlum. [N7-O12]

Three days later he materialized the divinity through bloodletting. He did it at the Waterlily Place, the Old God of Kuk-Te-Witz.{4} (N13-N16]

146 years, 12 months, 3 days after November 20,496, when Kan-Xul took office as the heir-designate. It had come to pass at the Toc-tan Place. and then June 17, 641, came to pass. He (Lord Chan-Bahlum) became the heir. And on the fifth day after (on June 22,641) Lord Chan-Bahlum became the sun in the company of GI. [O16-Q10]

6 years, 2 months. 17 days after he had been born on May 23, 635, and then he was designated heir. [P11-Q13]

It was 1 year, 167 days until December 6, 642, when 10 years ended (9.10.10.0.0), he warred{5} as heir. [P14-Q16] </verse>

{4} Kuk-te-witz is the ancient name for the mountain behind the Temple of the Foliated Cross, known today as El Mirador.

{5} This is the same war event Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo enacted against Ucanal (Stela 22) and Ah-Cacaw of Tikal enacted against Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul.

<verse> It was an action in the Mah Kina ???? Cab, it was the pib nail of he completed 13 katuns on March 18, 692, Lord [Chan-Bahlum ...] </verse>

This pattern of events reveals Chan-Bahlum’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. In the Temple of the Cross, the first event recorded is the birth of Lady Beastie, the First Mother. In the next passage, we are told that the First Father, GT, was born on an even earlier date.[366] Both these gods were born during the previous creation, indicating that the nature of their power comes from a time before the existence of our world. On 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the cosmos re-formed into the new pattern of creation which manifested the present world. As the text continues, it describes how GT, the First Father, established the order of the new world on 1.9.2, 542 days after the present creation began.

Chan-Bahlum provided a lot of information about these primordial times, beyond their naked existence as dates and events. His real theological and political intentions, however, are revealed by the manner of his presentation. In the text of his accession monument, the Temple of the Cross, he recounted the birth of the First Mother as if it were the first, and not the second, chronological event in the historical sequence. Initially, when recording the birth of the First Father, he didn’t even identify him. The reader had to wait until a subsequent passage to discover that this mysterious person, born eight years before creation—and 540 days earlier than the goddess—was in fact the First Father, GT. Chan-Bahlum manipulated the focus of the text at the expense of the First Father specifically because the First Mother was the pivot of his strategy of legitimization.

In his accession monument, therefore, Chan-Bahlum placed the focus entirely on Lady Beastie and her relationship to the three gods of the Palenque Triad. Pacal had already set the precedent for this association by linking Lady Beastie’s name to that of his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, implying by this reference that his mother was the human analog of the mother goddess of all Maya. Chan-Bahlum went further by contriving to make the birth date of the goddess like-in-kind to the birth date of his own father, Pacal.[367] With a little calendric manipulation, this was easily done. To the Maya, days that fell at the same point in a calender cycle shared the same characteristics in sacred time. Days that fell on the same point in many different cycles were very sacred indeed. By extension, events, such as births, which fell on days that were related cosmically, were also “like-in-kind.” Because of the symmetry of their birth dates, Chan-Bahlum could declare that his father, Pacal, and the mother of the gods, were beings made of the same sacred substance.

The symmetry of sacredness between the First Mother and Pacal was vital for another reason. The mother of the gods was born in the world of the past creation; therefore, she carried into the new world the cumulative power of the previous existence.[368] The date 4 Ahau 8 Cumku represented a membrane, comprised of the horrific chaos of creation, separating the symmetry and order of the former world from that of the present one. The contrived relationship between Pacal’s birth and the goddess’s asserted that his birth held the same sacred destiny as hers and that this symmetry came from the time before the creation.

The parallel Chan-Bahlum wished his people to see is both elegant and effective. He focused their attention on the old and new creation, then demonstrated that Lady Zac-Kuk and her royal clan represented the old ruling lineage at Palenque, while her son Pacal represented the new order of another patrilineal clan—a “new creation,” so to speak. When his mother passed the sacred essence of the kingship on to Pacal, she successfully passed through the chaotic violation of kinship principles of succession to arrive at this new order. Chan-Bahlum’s legitimate claim to the throne rested on this principle: direct transmission of the sacred essence of royal power between kings, irrespective of their gender or family.

Chan-Bahlum extended the similarity between the kings of Palenque and the gods even further by recording the births of the three gods of the Palenque Triad on the left sides of the tablets inside the pib na. There he emphasized their relationship to the First Mother by labeling GI (the namesake of the First Father) and GUI, who were the first and second born of her children, with the glyphic phrase “he is the child of Lady Beastie.” These gods were her children, exactly as Pacal was the child of Lady Zac-Kuk. GII, the god most closely related to Maya kings, was also her child, but Chan-Bahlum chose to relate him to the First Father by setting up contrived numerology between their births, exactly as he contrived to make Pacal’s birth “like-in-kind” to Lady Beastie’s.[369] The equation is, of course, his own claim to legitimacy: As GII was descended from the substance of First Father so was he the descendant of the divine Pacal.

This declaration of parallelism might have been enough, but Chan- Bahlum, intent on proving his right to the throne beyond the shadow of any doubt, was not content to stop there. On the Tablet of the Cross he declared that after she brought the firstborn of the Palenque Triad into the world, Lady Beastie, at age 815, became the first living being to be crowned ruler in the new creation. The crown she wore is called glyph- ically zac uinic (“pure or resplendent person”) and it is visually represented as the Jester God headband we saw first at Cerros. This glyph is the key title taken by all the subsequent kings of Palenque who were recorded on the historical side of this panel. Once again, Chan-Bahlum did not say that the First Father became the king: It was the goddess that he chose to emphasize. The text itself reads: “2 days, 11 uinals, 7 tuns, 1 katuns, and 2 baktuns after she had been born and then she crowned herself the zac uinic, Beastie, on 9 Ik seating of Zac” (Fig. 6:17).

At this point, Chan-Bahlum could certainly have rested from his labors. He had already created a simple and effective equation between the First Mother and the children of the gods on the one hand, and Lady Zac-Kuk and her descendants on the other. But instead he decided to bridge the temporal gap from the accession of the First Mother to the accession of the founder of his dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. He accomplished this by evoking the name of a legendary king, U-Kix-Chan. We know that this man was a figure of legend because Chan-Bahlum tells us he was born on March 11, 993 B.C., and crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. These dates fall during the florescence of the Olmec, the first great Mesoameri- can civilization. The Olmec were remembered by the Classic peoples as the great ancestral civilization in much the same way that the Romans evoked Troy from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as their source of their legitimacy. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec, like the Greeks of the Old XV orld, forged the template of state art and religion for their world by developing many of the symbols, the rituals, and the styles of artistic presentation that would be used by their successors for millennium.

U-Kix-Chan may not have been a real person, but Chan-Bahlum deliberately set his birth date in Olmec times. In this way he could claim that the authority of Palenque’s dynasty had its roots in the beginnings of human civilization as well as in the time of the divine. The passages recording U-Kix-Chan’s name began on the mythological side of the Tablet of the Cross, with his birth, and bridged to the historical side with his accession. He was immediately recognizable as human, no matter how legendary his time, because of the scale of his life. He was twenty-six years old when he became the king of Palenque; the First Mother was 815 when she took the same throne. Since their ages were read with their accessions, their status as divine versus human would have been immediately and emphatically self-evident.

From the legendary “Olmec,” U-Kix-Chan, Chan-Bahlum moved to the birth and accession of the founder of his own dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. The text then proceeded through each succeeding king, finally culminating with Chan-Bahlum I, the ancestor from whom Chanappears as the verb when the Vision Serpen-Bahlum, the author of this text, took his name. The Palenque dynasty envisioned by him descended from the original accession of the mother of the gods.

Lady Beastie was depicted not only as the first ruler of Palenque. Chan-Bahlum also portrayed her as the first to shed her blood for the people of the community in the cathartic act which opened the path to Xibalba and allowed prosperity to flow into the human world. On the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, Chan-Bahlum recorded that thirty-four years after the birth of GH (her third-born child), Lady Beastie celebrated the end of the second baktun with a “fish-in-hand”[370] glyph (Fig. 6:18) that appears as the verb when the Vision Serpent is materialized through bloodletting. Chan-Bahlum’s decision to record this vision-bringing ritual in the Temple of the Foliated Cross was not accidental. If you remember, the Personified Perforator was the instrument that Pacal, on the inner tablet, passed to Chan-Bahlum, on the outer. When Chan-Bahlum spilled his own blood in the rituals that took place within this pib na, he was activating his own portal and generating the energies these images represented: agricultural abundance for the human community. In Chan-Bah- lum’s version of the genesis story, therefore, the First Mother was not only the first being to become a ruler in this creation; she also taught the people how to offer their blood to nourish life, to maintain the social order, and to converse with their ancestors in the Otherworld. The model for human and kingly behavior was again manifested through the actions of the First Mother rather than the First Father.

[[][Fig. 6:18 The First Mother and the First Vision Rite in This Creation]]

Chan-Bahlum did not entirely ignore the father of the gods, however. In the Temple of the Cross, he related the story in which the First Father, GT, as a boy of ten, established cosmic order a year and a half after the creation of the present world. The text calls this action “entering or becoming the sky (och chan).” We can see a beautiful rendering of these actions in a scene from an ornamental pot: GI’ has set up the World Tree which lifted the sky up from the primordial sea of creation. Now he crouches below it, ready to shoot his blowgun at the Celestial Bird sitting atop the Tree, imitating the glory of the sun. It was these actions, separating out the elements of the natural world and assigning them their proper roles, that brought chaotic nature into order[371] (Fig. 6:19).

In the expression of this great cosmic event at Palenque, we learn that this “entering the sky” also resulted in the dedication of a house called “wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (see Note 33). Phis is the name of the structure created by GI’ when he set up the World Tree. It is the dome of heaven and the movement of the constellations as they pivot around the great northern axis of the sky—the pole star. But Wacah-Chan was also the proper name of the pib na in the Temple of the Cross, which, in turn, was named for the central icon on the main tablet—the World free itself. When Chan-Bahlum dedicated his own temples in the Group of the Cross, he replicated the establishment of celestial order brought about by the First Father.

Chan-Bahlum made records of the rituals in which he dedicated the Group of the Cross in all three temples, but he featured them especially in the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun. In both instances he created bridges between the mythological events in the left column of the tablets and the dedication rituals in the right. In this way he declared that the essential causality of these rites derived from the actions of the First Mother and Father (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for the paraphrases and arrangements of these texts).[372]

The rituals themselves fell on three distinct days during a four-day span. On the first day (9.12.18.5.16 2 Cib 14 Mol, July 23, 690), Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the moon appeared in a spectacular conjunction with all four planets less than 5° apart in the constellation of Scorpio.[373] Chan- Bahlum and his people apparently envisioned this conjunction as the First Mother (the moon) rejoined by her three children (manifested as the three planets). Seen this way, this extraordinary alignment in the sky was an omen of enormous portent. On the next day (3 Caban 15 Mol), Chan- Bahlum dedicated his temples with exactly the same ritual that the First Father had enacted to establish the Wacah-Chan at the center of the cosmos. Chan-Bahlum’s own house was named Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Na, “Lord Bahlum-Kuk House” (Fig. 6:20), therefore making it the house of the founder of his dynasty.[374] By proclaiming that his new portals to the Otherworld were also those of his founding ancestor, Chan-Bahlum joined the three patrilineages of Palenque’s kingship into a coherent totality. At their completion, the three temples of the Group of the Cross housed the divine sanction for the dynasty as a whole and gave the rationale for its descent through females’as well as males.

Two days after the house dedication on 5 Cauac 17 Mol,[375] Chan- Bahlum consummated the ritual sequence with a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. The timing of this last bloodletting linked the dedication rites back to Pacal, occurring just three days short of the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of his accession (July 29, 615 to July 26, 690). Chan-Bahlum’s final sacrifice put the finishing touch to the extraordinary document he had created. Having begun these rituals when the First Mother reassembled in the sky with her children, he ended with her action of bloodletting, completing the symmetry he had forged between the creator gods and himself.

The last event Chan-Bahlum recorded in the Group of the Cross was the activation of the pib na themselves on 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab, the eighth tropical year anniversary of his own accession (January 10, 684 to January 10, 692). He recorded this ritual on the jambs around the sanctuary doors, on the outer piers of the temples, and on the balustrade panels mounted on either side of the stairs rising up the pyramidal base of each temple. The most public parts of the dynastic festival were the dedication of the stairway panels and the piers. These events could be easily viewed by an audience standing in the court space in the middle of the temple group.

On each set of balustrades (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for paraphrases), Chan-Bahlum began his text with the birth of the patron god of each temple: GI for the Temple of the Cross, GII for the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and GUI for the Temple of the Sun. On the left side of the stairs, he recorded the time elapsed between the birth of the god and the dedication of the temple. On the right he listed the actors in the dedication rituals and their actions. In this manner, he connected the birth of the god in mythological time to the dedication of the pib na in contemporary time.

Chan-Bahlum also used the four outer piers of each temple to record the dedication ceremonies. Here, once again, he depicted himself engaged in ritual. These more public displays of his political strategy were rendered in plaster relief, like the sculptures he had placed on the piers on the Temple of the Inscriptions. The inscription recording the date of the dedication festival and its events occupied the two outer piers, while the two inner ones illustrated the action. Unfortunately, only the two piers of the Temple of the Sun have survived into the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, given the temple’s focus on warfare, Chan-Bahlum was portrayed in the costume of a warrior. The particular regalia he chose is that which we have already seen at Tikal, Naranjo, and Dos Pilas. The king is shown holding a square, flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it,[376] declaring that he engaged in Tlaloc warfare. No doubt the object of his battles included those captives whose blood would sanctify the pib na as the gods came to reside in them.[377]

Like the balustrades, the doorjambs inside the sanctuaries are all glyphic,[378] but they record no information aside from the pib na dedications. All three sets of inscriptions describe the action in the same manner.

[[][The Mah Kina ???? Cab
_{from the Tablet of the Sun}]]

The verb <verbatim>‘to</verbatim> house” is followed by the proper name of each sanctuary, followed by the glyph u pib nail, “his underground house.” Each pib na was named for the central image on its inner tablet[379] (Fig. 6:21): Wacah Chan for the World Tree on the Tablet of the Cross, Na Te Kan for the maize tree on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, and Mah Kina ????-Cab for the shield stack on the Tablet of the Sun.

Chan-Bahlum’s final message to his people was that the performers of the “house” events were none other the gods of the Palenque Triad themselves. On the doorjambs he referred to these deities as “the cher- ished-ones[380] of Chan-Bahlum,” while on the balustrades he called them the “divinities of Chan-Bahlum.” For this event, Chan-Bahlum depicted himself in the guise of a Tlaloc warrior; but in this instance the costume symbolized more than just warfare. Dressed thus, Chan-Bahlum also became the “nurturer” of the gods[381] through his role as the provider of their sustenance—the blood of sacrifice. He offered them both the blood of captives taken in battle and his own blood.

If he himself was the principal actor, however, why did Chan-Bahlum tell us that the actors were the gods? Perhaps we are meant to understand that they acted in the divine person of the king. Although we do not have the precise phonetic reading of the verb, we suggest that each of the Triad gods came into his pib na on this day and brought the temples of the Group of the Cross alive with the power of the Otherworld. They were witnesses, like the nobility on the plaza below, to the awesome might of the Palenque king.

In his attempt to disengage his dynastic kingship from the prerogatives of the patrilineal clans, Chan-Bahlum brought to bear every major principle in the religion that bound the Maya states into a coherent cultural totality. As the Jaguar Sun and the Tlaloc warrior, he protected the realm from enemies. In war he captured foreign kings and nobles to offer as sacrificial instruments for the glory of Palenque. He recalled the First Father, GT, who raised the sky and established the ancestral home of creation within which his people could dwell at peace on their verdant mountainside. He also recalled the namesake of the First Father, GI, who like his father was an avatar of Venus. Just as the First Mother had shed her blood, causing maize—the raw material of humanity—to sprout from the waters of the Otherworld, so also did Chan-Bahlum shed his blood to nurture and “give birth to” the gods. The metaphor of kingship in both its human and divine dimension stretched from the contemplation of genesis to the mundane lives of farmers who plucked dried ears of maize from the bent stalks of their milpas to grind the kernels into the stuff of life.

The three gods of the Triad were known and exalted by all lowland Maya ahauob, but Chan-Bahlum and Pacal evoked them in very special ways. They gave them birth in temples which celebrated both the creation of the cosmos and the founding of the dynasty by their anchoring ancestor, Bahlum-K.uk. Called forth into this world through the unique courage and charisma of the reigning king, these three gods, like the three historical lineages leading up to Chan-Bahlum, were manifested for all to witness. All the events of the past, both human and mythological, encircled Chan-Bahlum: The dynasty existed in the person of the king.

Even the universe conspired to affirm Chan-Bahlum’s assertions of divine involvement. On the day he began the rites to sanctify the buildings housing his version of history. Lady Beastie and her offspring reassembled as a group in the sky on the open south side of the Group of the Cross.

A year and a half later, on the day he celebrated his eighth solar year in office, the three gods of the Triad housed themselves. By this action they brought the sanctuaries inside the three temples, the pib na, alive with their power. So powerful and eloquent was Chan-Bahlum’s statement of the origins of his dynasty and the preordained nature of its descent pattern, that no subsequent king ever had to restate any proofs. When later kings had problems with descent, they simply evoked Chan-Bahlum’s explanation of the workings of divinity to justify their own right to the throne.[382]

Pacal’s and Chan-Bahlum’s vision of the Maya world has crossed the centuries to speak to us once again in the twentieth century. Their accomplishments were truly extraordinary. Pacal’s tomb with its access stairway and innovative structural engineering is so far a unique achievement in the New World. The imagery of his sarcophagus lid is famous around the globe, and the life-sized plaster portrait of this king found under the sarcophagus has become an emblem of modern Mexico (Fig. 6:22a).

Chan-Bahlum (Fig. 6:22b), in his own way, exceeded even the accomplishment of his father by creating the most detailed exposition of Maya kingship to survive into modern times. His tablets have captured the Western imagination since they were first popularized in 1841 by Stephens and Catherwood in their Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Chan-Bahlum’s masterful performance is the clearest and most eloquent voice to speak to us of both the ancient history of kings and the religion that supported their power.

Both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum had personal agendas as they worked out the political and religious resolution to their problems of dynasty. Their success, however, was meaningful within a larger context than just their personal pride and glory. During the century of their combined lives (A.D. 603 to 702), Palenque became a major power in the west, extending its boundaries as far as Tortuguero in the west and Miraflores in the east. Under their inspired leadership, Palenque took its place in the overall political geography of the Maya world. In the end, however, Palenque’s definition of dynasty as a principle transcending lineage did not provide salvation from the catastrophe of the collapse of Maya civilization. The descendants of Pacal, “he of the pyramid,” followed their brethren into that final chaos when the old institution of kingship failed and the lowland Maya returned to the farming lives of their ancestors.

7. Bird-Jaguar and the Cahalob

In the distant past, a gleaming white city[383] once graced the precipitous hills lining the western shore of a huge horseshoe bend of the great river known today as the Usumacinta (Fig. 7:1). One of the early visitors to the ruins of that once magnificent city, Teobert Maier,[384] named it Yaxchilan. Since Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s pioneering study of its inscriptions, this kingdom has been central to the recovery of historic information about the Maya.[385]

In Yaxchilan’s heyday, visitors arriving by canoe saw buildings clustered along the narrow curving shore which contained and defined the natural riverside entrance into this rich and powerful community. The city ascended in rows of broad, massive terraces built against the face of the forest-shrouded hills that stood as an impassive natural citadel alongside the mighty river. From the temples (Fig. 7:2a) built upon the summits of the tallest bluffs, the lords of Yaxchilan commanded the sweeping panorama of the rich green, low-lying forest which extended, on the far side of the river, all the way to the hazy horizon in the northeast. The light of sunrise on the summer solstice[386] would spill over that horizon to shine through the dark thresholds of the royal sanctuaries whose presence declared the authority of the Yaxchilan ahau over all those who lived below.

Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,”[387] or more delicately put, “Progenitor-Jaguar,” on August 2, A.D. 320, founded the dynasty that ruled this kingdom throughout its recorded history. From that day on, until Yaxchi- lan was abandoned five-hundred years later, the descent of the line was unbroken.[388] Of Yat-Balam’s many descendants, the most famous were Bi Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar, a father and son who collectively ruled the kingdom for over ninety years, from A.D. 681 until around A.D. 771. These two rulers stamped their vision of history upon the city with such power and eloquence that they were the first of the ancient Maya kings to have their names spoken again in our time.[389] Yet in spite of the glory of their reigns and their long-lasting effect upon history, they faced problems of descent from the father to the son. Bird-Jaguar’s claim to the throne was vigorously disputed by powerful noble clans who were allied with other members of the royal family. Even after Bird-Jaguar overcame his adversaries and became king, many of the public buildings he commissioned were erected to retrospectively defend his own actions and prepare a secure ascent to the throne for his heir. In this chapter, we will focus on his problems and the political strategies and alliances that finally enabled him to fulfill his ambition to rule that ancient kingdom.

The history of Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors in the Early Classic period does not survive in great detail. Most of the monuments from those times were either buried or destroyed as each new king shaped the city to his own purposes. However, thanks to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of reusing ancestral texts in his own buildings (Temples 12 and 22), we do have records of the first through the tenth successors of Yaxchilan. One of these venerable texts, a badly eroded hieroglyphic stairway, provides the dates of several early accessions, as well as accounts of the visits of lords from other kingdoms. These brief and sketchy early inscriptions outline the first three hundred years of Yaxchilan’s history. It was a time in which its dynasty prospered and held an important place in the overall political landscape of the Maya.[390]

The foreign visitors mentioned above were ahauob sent by their high kings from as far away as Bonampak, Piedras Negras, and Tikal to participate in Yaxchilan festivals. Reciprocal visits were made as well. Knot-eye-Jaguar, the ninth king of Yaxchilan, paid a state visit to Piedras Negras in the year 519. The relationship between these two kingdoms was apparently a long-lasting one, for another Yaxchilan ahau, presumably Bird- Jaguar, participated in the celebration of the first katun anniversary of the reign of Piedras Negras Ruler 4 in 749, 230 years later. These state visits affirm the ancient and enduring value that the kings of Yaxchilan placed upon the participation of high nobility in the rituals and festivals of their city. Public performances under the aegis of the high king, by both foreign and local lords, affirmed the power of the king and demonstrated public support for his decisions. We shall see shortly how the manipulation of such dramatis personae on monuments was the vital key to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.

Our story opens around the year 647[391] with the birth of a child to the Lady Pacal, favored wife of the king, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar,[392] and scion of a powerful family allied to the king through marriage. The child, whom the proud parents named Shield-Jaguar, was to have a glorious career at Yaxchilan, living for at least ninety-two years and ruling as high king for over six decades. His mark on the city was long-lasting and profound, for later kings left many of his buildings untouched. Among his greatest works were the vast number of tree-stones he set among the plazas and in front of his temples on the summits of his sacred mountains. Shield- Jaguar inherited a city already built by his predecessors, but the accomplishments of his long lifetime exceeded their work by such a factor that, while much of his work is still preserved, most of theirs is forgotten, buried under his own construction and that of his son, Bird-Jaguar.

Most of Shield-Jaguar’s early life is lost to us. What little biographical data we do have tells us that when he was around eleven, one of his siblings participated in a war led by Pacal, the king of Palenque we met in the last chapter.[393] This event must have lent prestige to the royal family of Yaxchilan, but their public monuments say nothing about it. We only know of this event because it was preserved on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C at Palenque. The fact that Pacal described his Yaxchilan cohort as the “sibling” of the eleven-year-old Shield-Jaguar tells us that, even at that early date, Shield-Jaguar had probably been named as heir. Otherwise, Pacal would have chosen to emphasize the captive’s status merely as the son of a male of the royal family.[394]

Later in his life, the demonstration of the young heir’s prowess as a military leader took on a special political importance—enough so that the lords of Yaxchilan required that Shield-Jaguar take a high-ranked captive before he could become king. As prelude to his accession, Shield-Jaguar went into battle and captured Ah-Ahaual, an important noble from a B kingdom whose ruins we have not yet found, but which was highly important in the Maya world of that time.[395] A little over a year later, on October 23, 681, at the approximate age of thirty-four, Shield-Jaguar became high king of Yaxchilan.

Strangely enough, the only picture of Shield-Jaguar’s accession rite to have survived shows not the new king but his principal wife, Lady Xoc, in rapt communion with Yat-Balam, the founding ancestor of the Yaxchi-lan dynasty. Lady Xoc achieved a central place in the drama of Yaxchilan’s history in this and in two other bloodletting rituals she enacted with, or for, her sovereign liege.[396] Her kinship ties with two powerful lineages of the kingdom made her political support so important to Shield-Jaguar that he authorized her to commission and dedicate the magnificent Temple 23. On the lintels of that building were recorded the three rituals that comprised the apical actions of her life.

Thus, with the approval and probably at the instigation of her husband, Lady Xoc was one of the few women in Maya history to wield the prerogatives usually reserved for the high king. Unlike Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque, however, Lady Xoc never ruled the kingdom in her own right. The hidden hand of her husband, Shield-Jaguar, underlies the political intentions of the extraordinary Temple 23. His influence can be seen in both the substance of its narrative scenes and in the texts[397] carved on the lintels that spanned the outer doorways. Constructed in the center of the city’s first great terrace, and in a position to dominate the plazas that extended along the riverfront, this temple is one of the greatest artistic monuments ever created by the Maya.

The carved lintels above the doorways of Temple 23 combine to present a carefully orchestrated political message critical to Shield-Jaguar’s ambition and to the future he hoped to create. Made of wide slabs mounted atop the doorjambs, these lintels displayed two carved surfaces. The first, facing outward toward the public, was composed of pure text. The second was a series of narrative scenes hidden away on the undersides of the lintels, facing downward toward the floor (Fig. 7:2b). A general viewer approaching the building could read only the text above the doorways, which recorded the dedication rituals for various parts of the temple. This text stated that the house sculpture (probably the stucco sculpture on the entablature and roof comb) had been dedicated on August 5, 723, and the temple itself on June 26, 726.[398] The all-important narrative scenes could be seen only by those privileged to stand in the low doorways and look up at the undersides of the lintels.

It is here, on the undersides of the lintels, that we see Lady Xoc enacting the three bloodletting rituals that are today the basis of her fame (Fig. 7:3). The sculptors who created these great lintels combined the sequence of events into a brilliant narrative device. If we look at the lintels from one perspective, we see that each portrays a different linear point in the ritual of bloodletting. Over the left doorway we see Lady Xoc perforating her tongue; over the center portal we see the materialization of the Vision Serpent; over the right we see her dressing her liege lord for battle. If we shift our perspective, however, we see that Shield-Jaguar intended these scenes to be interpreted on many different levels. He used the texts and the detail of the clothing the protagonists wore to tell us that this same bloodletting ritual took place on at least three different occasions:[399] during his accession to the kingship, at the birth of his son when he was sixty-one, and at the dedication of the temple itself.

Over the central door, Lady Xoc is depicted with a Vision Serpent rearing over her head as she calls forth the founder of the lineage, Yat-Balam, to witness the accession of his descendent Shield-Jaguar in 681[400] (Fig. 7:3a). This critical event in the lives of both the principal players was appropriately located on the center lintel, at the heart of the drama. Shield-Jaguar himself is not portrayed here, although his name does appear in the text after the “fish-in-hand” verbal phrase. The sole protagonist is the woman, who by her action as bloodletter materializes the founder of the dynasty to sanction the transformation of his descendant into the king. Since we know of no other pictorial representation of Shield-Jaguar’s accession,[401] we may speculate that he considered his wife’s bloodletting the most important single action in this political transformation.

Over the left door, Lady Xoc kneels before Shield-Jaguar and pulls a thorn-laden rope through her mutilated tongue in the action that will materialize the Vision Serpent. Shield-Jaguar stands before her holding a torch, perhaps because the ritual takes place inside a temple or at night. Although this lintel depicts the first stage in the type of bloodletting ritual shown over the central door, this particular event took place almost twenty-eight years later.[402]

The occasion for this particular act of sacrifice was an alignment between Jupiter and Saturn. On this day those planets were frozen at their stationary points less than 2° apart, very near the constellation of Gemini. This was the same type of planetary alignment we saw celebrated at Palenque when Chan-Bahlum dedicated the Group of the Cross, even though the conjunction at Yaxchilan was perhaps less spectacular, since it involved two planets rather than four. Significantly, this hierophany (“sacred event”) took place only sixty-two days after a son was born to Shield-Jaguar. The birth of this child on August 24, 709, and the bloodletting event that followed it on October 28, were special events in Shield- Jaguar’s reign. This bloodletting would later become the pivot of his son’s claim to Yaxchilan’s throne.

Over the right door (Fig. 7:3b), the sculptors mounted the final scene. Lady Xoc, her mouth seeping blood from the ritual she has just performed, helps her husband dress for battle. He already wears his cotton armor and grasps his flint knife in his right hand, but she still holds his flexible shield and the jaguar helmet he will don. Here Shield-Jaguar is preparing to go after captives to be used in the dedication rites that took place either on February 12, 724, or on June 26, 726.

The depiction of a woman as the principal actor in ritual is unprecedented at Yaxchilan and almost unknown in Maya monumental art[403] at any site. Lady Xoc’s importance is further emphasized by the manner in which Bird-Jaguar centers his own strategy of legitimacy around this building. The three events portrayed—the accession of the king, the bloodletting on the Jupiter-Saturn hierophany, and the dedication of the building itself, were all important events; but the bloodletting on the hierophany was the locus of the political message Shield-Jaguar intended to communicate. Perhaps the planetary conjunction alone would have been enough reason for such a bloodletting to take place. We suspect, however, that more complex motivations were involved. Later, when Bird-Jaguar commissioned monument after monument to explain who he was and, more importantly, who his mother was, he focused on this event as the key to his kingdom.

There are points of interest to make about this bloodletting ritual and the birth that preceded it. Lady Xoc, patroness of this building and the giver of blood, was at least middle-aged at the time of this birth.[404] She had been shown as an adult at Shield-Jaguar’s accession, twenty-eight years earlier, and she may well have been beyond her childbearing years at the time of the later bloodletting. Certainly, other inscriptions make it clear that the child in question was born to Lady Eveningstar, another of Shield-Jaguar’s wives. Why, then, is Lady Xoc celebrating a celestial event E linked to the royal heir born to another woman?

Some startling information about Lady Xoc’s role in Shield-Jaguar’s political machinations is revealed on a lintel mounted over the door in the east end of Structure 23. On its underside, this all-glyphic lintel (Lintel 23) records Shield-Jaguar’s twenty-fifth year anniversary as ruler and also Lady Xoc’s dedication of this extraordinary temple. On the edge of this obscure lintel, facing outward toward the viewer, we find some critical and unexpected information about Lady Xoc. The text tells us that this particular passageway[405] into the temple was dedicated by Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s sister—his aunt, in other words. The title sequence in this aunt’s name is relevatory, for it delineates an up-to-now unknown genealogical relationship between Lady Xoc and the king (Fig. 7:4).[406] We learn here that Lady Xoc was the daughter of Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s father’s sister. In plain English, she was the maternal first cousin of his mother, and his own maternal first cousin once removed.

What this information tells us is that Lady Xoc was distantly related to the patriline of Shield-Jaguar’s mother, but he married her not because of her mother’s relatives but because her father was a member of a powerful noble lineage. How do we know that her father’s line was important, when it is not even mentioned in the inscriptions? We can deduce its importance from the fact that it was worthy to take a wife from the same family that provided the woman who was wife to the king 6-Tun-Bird- Jaguar and mother to the heir, Shield-Jaguar. In other words, anyone powerful enough to marry a woman from the same family that provided the queen-mother to the royal house must also be of extraordinarily high-rank. The importance of the line of Lady Xoc’s father is further confirmed by the fact that it was eligible to provide a wife to the royal house in the next generation. Thus, it was a lineage important enough to take a wife from the highest levels in the kingdom and in its own right to be in a wife-giving alliance with the royal house. In fact, it is precisely this marriage alliance with Lady Xoc’s father that led Shield-Jaguar to take her as his wife in the first place.

What we find amazing here is that Lady Xoc’s patriline is utterly absent from the public record. On Lintel 23, Lady Xoc’s relationship to that patriline is suppressed in favor of her kinship to her mother’s people. As we have shown above, her mother’s clan was already allied to the royal house of Yaxchilan, for Shield-Jaguar’s mother was a member of that patriline. In the best of worlds, Shield-Jaguar could have safely ignored such a well-attested and secure alliance in the public record. What, then, led Shield-Jaguar to commission the extraordinary Temple 23 with its homage to Lady Xoc and her mother’s clan? Why did he deliberately eliminate her father’s clan from public history by redefining her importance in terms of people who were already his allies?

We suspect that the answer to this question lies in a new marriage that Shield-Jaguar contracted late in his life. His new wife, Lady Eveningstar, who bore him a son when he was sixty-one, was apparently a foreigner of high rank. On Stela 10, her son, Bird-Jaguar, recorded her name in his own parentage statement, remarking that she was a “Lady Ahau of Calakmul” (Fig. 7:4).[407] Yet Shield-Jaguar’s treatment of his new wife and the powerful alliance she represented was not what we might expect. Despite the great power and prestige of Calakmul, Shield-Jaguar never once mentioned Lady Eveningstar on his own monuments. Instead, the principal concern of his late monuments was to secure support for Bird- Jaguar, the child she gave him.

To this end, he commissioned Temple 23 when his son was thirteen years old.[408] He honored Lady Xoc, who represented local alliances with two important lineages, as the major actor of the critical events in his reign. And, in the same series of lintels, he emphasized her relationship to her mother’s patriline.[409] But what of her father’s people, not to mention the royal house of Calakmul?

To elect a child of Lady Xoc to succeed him would have brought Shield-Jaguar strategic alliance with her father’s people, a local lineage of extraordinary importance. Alternatively, to designate Lady Eveningstar’s child as the heir would have sealed a blood bond with one of the largest and most aggressive kingdoms of the Peten, but it was also an alliance with a foreign power.[410] The decision for Shield-Jaguar was a difficult one: increased prospects for peace and stability within his kingdom versus an elevated position in the grand configuration of alliance and struggle embracing all of the great kingdoms of the Maya.

Temple 23 was his effort to forge a grand compromise: to honor Lady Xoc and the principle of internal alliance while building support for the child of the foreign alliance. He chose the greatest artists of his kingdom to carve what are even today recognized as great masterpieces of Maya art. In the elegant reliefs he depicted his senior wife carrying out the most sacred and intimate act of lineage fealty, the calling forth of the royal founding ancestor. When she gave her blood for his new heir, she did so in the most horrific ritual of tongue mutilation known from Maya history. No other representation of this ritual shows the use of a thorn-lined rope in the wound. Her act was one of extraordinary piety and prestige—and an act of audacity by the king, for he simultaneously consigned the mother of the heir, scion of Calakmul, to public obscurity. For Shield-Jaguar, this was a masterful three-point balancing act. By honoring Lady Xoc, he was also honoring that patriline. He used texts upon the lintels of the temple to publicly emphasize her relationship to his mother’s family and thus secure that alliance. Lastly, he satisfied his foreign alliance by choosing the child of that marriage as the heir.

This strategy of compromise worked, at least while he was still alive. Perhaps Shield-Jaguar’s extraordinary age was one of the contributing factors in this drama. For him to have lived long enough to marry again and to sire a child in that marriage may have surprised the lineages allied to him by previous marriages. Furthermore, any children born in his youth would have been in their middle years by the time of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. By the time of Shield-Jaguar’s death in his mid-nineties, many of his children may well have been dead or in advanced age themselves. Because of this factor, Bird-Jaguar’s rivals would have had as legitimate a claim on the throne as he; it is likely that he faced the sons and grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar. We cannot, of course, prove that these rivals existed, for they did not secure the privilege of erecting monuments to tel! their own stories. This is one of those situations in which we have only the winner’s version of history. Nevertheless, we know that some set of circumstances kept the throne empty for ten long years, when a legitimate heir of sufficient age and proven competence was available. We surmise that Bird-Jaguar needed those ten years to defeat his would-be rivals. During this long interregnum no other accessions appear in the record. There was no official king, although there may have been a de facto ruler.

There could, of course, be many reasons for such a long delay between reigns. Bird-Jaguar’s own program of sculpture after he became king, however, clearly indicates what he felt were his greatest problems. The first was public recognition of his mother’s status and her equality with Lady Xoc.[411] The second was his need to forge alliances among the noble cahal families of Yaxchilan to support his claim to the throne and force the accession ritual. He built temple after temple with lintel upon lintel both to exalt the status of his mother and to depict his public performance with those powerful cahalob. Like his father, he married a woman in the lineage of his most important allies and traded a piece of history for their loyalty.

The fathering of an heir at the age of sixty-one was not the final accomplishment of Shield-Jaguar’s life. He remained a vigorous leader, both politically and in the realm of war, for many more years. Work on Temple 23 began around 723, when he was seventy-two years old. In his eighties, he still led his warriors into battle and celebrated a series of B victories in Temple 44, high atop one of the mountains of Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:1). Even at eighty-four, Shield-Jaguar went to battle and took a captive, but by then he must have been feeling his mortality. He began a series of rituals soon after his last battle to demonstrate forcefully his support of Bird-Jaguar as his heir-apparent—at least according to the story Bird- Jaguar gives us. In light of the political statement that Shield-Jaguar built into Lady Xoc’s Temple 23 at the height of his power, there is reason to believe that at least the essence of Bird-Jaguar’s account of events leading up to his reign is true.

The series of events preceding Shield-Jaguar’s death and Bird-Jaguar’s ascent to the throne began on June 27, 736. On that day Shield- Jaguar, at the age of eighty-eight, conducted a flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:5a and b), a celebration usually occurring shortly after a summer solstice. We do not know the exact nature of this ritual, but pictures of it show rulers and nobles holding a human-high, wooden staff with a four-to-six-inchwide cloth tied down its length. This narrow cloth was decorated with elaborately woven designs and flapped openings, usually cut in the shape of a T. Shield-Jaguar recorded his first display of this staff on Stela 16, which he erected at the highest point of the city in front of Temple 41. Bird-Jaguar commissioned his own retrospective version of his father’s action on Lintel 50 (Fig. 7:5b).

The next time we see this flapstaff ritual is on Stela 11, a monument erected by Bird-Jaguar soon after his accession. Designed to document events that culminated in his successful ascent to the throne, this stela includes the image of another flapstaff ritual which had occurred on June 26, 741, exactly five years after Shield-Jaguar’s earlier flapstaff ceremony. In this scene (Fig. 7:5c), the shorter Shield-Jaguar,[412] who was then ninety- three years old, faces his son under a double-headed dragon representing the sky, above which sit Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors.[413] Both men now hold the same flapstaff that Shield-Jaguar displayed on Stela 16. Bird-Jaguar took pains to emphasize the importance of this mutual display. He did so by depicting this scene both atop and between texts that recorded his accession to the throne, thus asserting that his father had shared this ritual with him to legitimize his status as heir. Furthermore, Bird-Jaguar set this dual depiction in front of Temple 40 (Fig. 7:5c and e), which was situated on the same hill summit as Temple 41 where Shield-Jaguar had placed his earlier depiction of the flapstaff ritual. This close juxtaposition emphasized the linkage between the two rituals and supported Bird-Jaguar’s political aspirations.

This father-son flapstaff event took place only four days before the end of the tenth tun in the fifteenth katun on 9.15.10.0.0. Five days later, on 9.15.10.0.1 (July 1, 741), another ritual took place that was so important and involved so many critical people that Bird-Jaguar recorded it glyphically and pictorially three times (Fig. 7:6), in three different locations. These locations all pivoted thematically around Temple 23, the building that became the touchstone of his legitimacy.

The most distant of these depictions, Lintel 14 of Temple 20, shows two persons. One is a woman named Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and the other is a man with the same family name, Lord Great-Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:6a). This woman would become the mother of Bird-Jaguar’s son and heir, and the man, who is named as her brother, was most likely the patriarch of her lineage.[414] Great-Skull-Zero belonged to a cahal lineage that was apparently an important source of political support, for Bird- Jaguar continued to depict him on public monuments, even after his own accession. In this earlier ritual, both Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother hold a Vision Serpent the two of them have materialized through bloodletting.[415] She also holds an offering bowl containing an obsidian B blade and bloodstained paper, while he holds the head of the serpent aloft as a female ancestor materializes in its mouth. The name of this ancestor, “Lady Ahau of Yaxchilan, Lady Yaxhal,” appears in the small text above the apparition’s head.

It is possible that this bloodletting rite was part of the rituals of marriage between Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero, but none of the glyphs recorded on this lintel refer to marriage. Whatever the occasion, we can presume that this lady and her kinsmen were vitally important to Bird-Jaguar’s successful campaign to replace his father as high king. Going against precedent, he gives them an unusually prominent place in history, depicting them as participants in this critical bloodletting ritual.

The second time we see this bloodletting is on a retrospective stela (Fig. 7:6b) found next door in Temple 21, a building in which Bird-Jaguar deliberately replayed the iconographic program of Lady Xoc’s temple in celebration of the birth of his own heir.[416] This newly discovered stela[417] shows Bird-Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, engaged in the same bloodletting as his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her brother. This stela emulates the style and iconographic detail of Lintel 25 on Temple 23, which depicts Lady Xoc materializing the founder of the dynasty at Shield-Jaguar’s accession. Bird-Jaguar declares—by means of this not-so- subtle artistic manipulation—that his mother’s actions were every bit as important as those of his father’s principal wife.

On the front of the stela and facing the entry door, Lady Eveningstar is depicted holding a bloodletting plate in one hand and a skull-serpent device in the other, while a huge skeletal Vision Serpent rears behind her. As on Lintel 25, this Vision Serpent is double-headed and emits Tlaloc faces. The text records the date, 4 Imix 4 Mol, and states that a “fish-inhand” vision event took place u cab chan kina “in the land of the sky lords.” A coupleted repetition attests that “Lady Eveningstar let blood.” On the rear, she is shown drawing the rope through her tongue and here the text specifies that she was “the mother of the three-katun lord, Bird- Jaguar, Holy Lord of Yaxchilan, Bacab.” Bird-Jaguar very likely installed this monument to emphasize his mother’s legitimate status, as well as her ritual centrality during his father’s lifetime. At any rate, this stela was part of his program to assert the legitimacy of his own son and heir, whose birth was celebrated on the central lintel of this temple.[418]

Bird-Jaguar set the third depiction (Fig. 7:6c) of this critical bloodletting ritual over the central door of Structure 16, a building located at the eastern edge of the river shelf. Carved on the outer edge of Lintel 39, the scene shows Bird-Jaguar sprawled on the ground as he supports a Serpent Bar, skeletal in detail and emitting GII as the materialized vision. The date is again 4 Imix 4 Mol[419] and the action a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. Now, however, the actor is the future king himself.

Based on these three representations of this critical bloodletting, as well as depictions of similar events at other sites,[420] we can visualize this great ritual in the following vignette.

The starlit darkness broke before the first flush of light as the sun rose from Xibalba over the dark waters of the river. Venus, who had preceded his brother out of the Underworld by almost two hours, now hovered brightly near the seven lights of the Pleiades and the bright star Aldeba- ran.[421] Nine times had the Lords of the Night changed since the sun had taken its longest journey through the sky on the day of the summer solstice. Birds waking in the trees across the river and along the hills above the city raised a crescendo of song, counterpointing the barking of the village dogs and the squawks of brilliant red macaws flying along the edge of the water. Far in the distance, a howler monkey roared his own salutation to the new day. The celestial stage was set for an important festival and the community of people who lived along the river waited anxiously for the rituals that would soon begin.

A crowd of ahauob, cahalob, and people of lesser rank milled restlessly within the cool plaza beside the great river. The iridescent feathers of their headdresses bobbed above their animated conversations like a fantastic flock of birds. The brilliantly embroidered and dyed cloth of their garments swirled in a riot of color against the hard whiteness of the plaster floor and the distant green backdrop of the mist-shrouded forest. As dawn broke through the darkness of night, more people drifted toward the plaza from the distant hillslopes. Still more arrived in canoes, having fought the high floodwaters to cross the river so that they too could witness the great ritual announced by the king.

The king’s family, arrayed in front of the gleaming white walls of the Tz’ikinah-Nal, the house Lady Xoc had dedicated many years ago, and the Chan-Ah-Tz’i,[422] the house of the seventh successor of Yat-Balam, watched the sun rise over the huge stone pier that had been built over the river on its southern side. No one could see the pier now, of course, for the great Xocol Ha[423] was in flood from the thunderstorms of the rainy season. The roar of the tumbling waters played a ground behind the rhythms of drums and whistles echoing through the great open spaces along the canoe-strewn shore. Merchants, visitors, pilgrims, and farmers from near and far had laid their wares along the river for the people of Yaxchilan to peruse. They too joined their voices to the cacophony of sound swelling throughout the gleaming white plazas of the city.

The royal clan stood in two groups, the hard and dangerous tension between them radiating down into the crowd below. The cahalob and ahauob of the court arranged themselves in clusters, clearly indicating their support for one or the other branch of the family. The aging but indomitable Lady Xoc[424] took up position with her kinsmen in front of the Tz’ikinah-Nal. In this, the place of her glory, she contemplated the irony of her fate. Here, in the most magnificent imagery to grace the city, she had commemorated her devotion to Shield-Jaguar. The finest artisans of the realm had carved the lintels in the house behind her, declaring publicly and permanently that she had materialized the founder when her lord acceded as king. And the reward for that sacrifice? She had been forced to deny her own father’s kinsmen and to let her blood to sanctify the final issue of her aged husband’s loins: Bird-Jaguar—son of a foreigner.

Even now the men of her father’s lineage were as reluctant as she to give up their privileges as kinsmen of the king’s principal wife. The gods had favored Shield-Jaguar by giving him a life span beyond that granted to other humankind. He had lived so long that most of the sons of her womb were dead, as were many of their sons.[425] The sharp pain of remembered grief cut through her reverie. The matriarch, soon to enter her fifth katun of life, glanced at her remaining offspring, her thwarted and angry kinsmen, and the powerful cahalob allied to her father’s clan. All stood quietly, grimly, allowing the old woman her moment of bitter reflection.

Most of the witnessing emissaries from towns along the river gathered before the other royal group in anticipation of the celebration to come. Bird-Jaguar, renowned warrior, defender of the realm and future king, quietly conversed with his mother, Lady Eveningstar, and his new wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero. They were framed by the splendor of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. At thirty-one, the heir radiated a physical strength to match his valor and ambition. The bride’s lineage patriarch, Great-Skull- Zero, stood beside her, accompanied by the other cahalob who, by their presence here, declared themselves allies of the king’s son. Chief among them, Kan-Toc proudly and dispassionately surveyed potential friends and foes below, ready to place his prowess as warrior at the disposal of the future king.

The nobles flanking the principal players in this drama stood in small groups on the steps of the temples. Their arms folded across their chests, they spoke of the day’s events, the condition of the new crop, and hundreds of other topics of concern. Some were bare-chested, but the most important lords wore blinding white capes closed at the throat with three huge red spondylus shells. This cotton garb was reserved for those privileged to serve as attendants to the king, or those who held the status of pilgrims to the royal festivals.[426] Farther away, warriors of renown in their finest battle gear stood with other notables who carried the emblazoned staff-fans of Maya war and ceremony. Other nobles sat in informal groups, engaging in lively conversation among the riot of color in the long-shadowed light of the brilliant morning. Excitement and anticipation were becoming a palpable force pulsing through the crowd of people that now included a growing number of farmers and villagers who had come in from the surrounding countryside to share in the festivities.

Shield-Jaguar, the ninety-three-year-old king, sat frail but erect upon the long bench inside the central room of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. The morning light coursing through the door warmed his bony chest, bared above his white hipcloth, as he mused over the many shivering hours he had spent in such rooms in the dark time before dawn. Now with his aged cronies, the last of his most trusted lords, he sat in this venerable house that had been dedicated 286 years earlier by the seventh successor of Yat-Balam.

Shield-Jaguar’s years weighed heavily upon him. This would surely be the final festival of his life—his last opportunity to seal his blessings upon Bird-Jaguar before the gods, the ancestors, and the people of his kingdom. Four days earlier, he had stood before the people with his son and heir and displayed the ceremonial cloth-lined flapstaif. It was important that all his people, noble and common folk alike, witness and accept his gift of power to Bird-Jaguar. The issue of the inheritance still tormented his spirit so powerfully he feared he was not adequately prepared for his trial with the Lords of Death. It was common scandal among all the great houses on the river that the men of Lady Xoc’s lineage continued to press their claims on the king, despite all that he had done for them and for her. The kinsmen of his principal wife had become his most formidable enemies. They would surely maneuver to place one of her own offspring on the throne after his bones lay in the vaulted grave that awaited his fall into Xibalba. Bird-Jaguar would have to be a subtle and powerful leader to take and hold his rightful place as the successor of his father.

A shout from the crowd outside brought Shield-Jaguar back to the present and his immediate duty to the dynasty of Yat-Balam. The Ancestral Sun had climbed above the mouth of the eastern horizon until he hovered free of the earth. Despite the fierce glare the sun brought to the world, Venus retained his strength on this special day so that the brothers could be seen together in the morning sky, momentary companions like the aged king and his energetic son. It was one day after the halfway point of Katun 15. The bloodletting rituals about to begin would consecrate that benchmark in time and demonstrate the king’s support for his youngest son.

The old man’s eyes sparkled as he watched Lady Eveningstar, mother of the heir, move gracefully into the frame of light before his doorway. She would be the first to offer her blood and open the portal to the Other- world.[427] Dressed in a brilliant white gauze huipil, high-backed sandals, and a flower headdress, she stepped forward to stand before her son. Shield-Jaguar was too frail to make the precise ceremonial cut in his wife’s body and that role now fell to Bird-Jaguar. Holding a shallow plate within the circle of her folded arms, Lady Eveningstar knelt before Bird-Jaguar. The bowl was filled with strips of beaten-bark paper, a rope the thickness of her first finger, and a huge stingray spine. Her eyes glazed as she shifted her mind into the deep trance that would prepare her for what was to come. Closing her eyes, she extended her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could. Bird-Jaguar took the stingray spine and, with a practiced twist of the wrist, drove it down through the center of his mother’s tongue. She did not flinch, nor did a sound pass her lips as he took the rope and threaded it through the wound.[428] She stood near the edge of the platform so that all the assembled witnesses could see her pull the rope through her tongue. Her blood saturated the paper in the bowl at her chest and dribbled redly down her chin in brilliant contrast to the deep green jade of her shoulder cape.

Bird-Jaguar removed some of the saturated paper from the plate and dropped it into the knee-high censer that stood on the floor beside his mother’s left leg. After placing fresh paper in her bowl, he removed her head covering and replaced it with the skull-mounted headdress that signaled Venus war and gave honor to the brother of the Sun.[429]

Lady Eveningstar pulled the last of the rope through her tongue, B dropped it into the bowl, and stood swaying as the trance state took possession of her consciousness. In that moment Bird-Jaguar saw what he had been seeking in her eyes—the great Serpent Path to the Otherworld was opening within his mother. He set the ancestral skull into her hand and stood back. That was the signal. The deep moaning voice of a conch trumpet echoed throughout the city, announcing the arrival of the Vision Serpent. Black smoke billowed and roiled upward from the god-faced censer behind Lady Eveningstar and formed a great writhing column in which Bird-Jaguar and his people saw the Double-headed Serpent and the god of Venus war she had materialized with the shedding of her blood. A song of welcome and awe rose from the crowd below as they drew blood from their own bodies and offered it to the god now born into their presence.

The crowd writhed and sway ed as a tide of ecstasy coursed throughout the city. Trumpeters and drummers, caught in the tumult of their music, accelerated their rhythms to a frenzied tempo. Dancing lords whirled across the terrace below the king and his family, their glowing green feathers and hip panels suspended at right angles to their whirling bodies. People throughout the crowd drew their own blood and splattered it onto cloth bands tied to their wrists and arms. The plaza was soon brightly speckled with devotion. Smoke columns rose from censers which stood upright throughout the plaza as the ahauob and the cahalob called their own ancestors forth through the portal opened by the Lady Eveningstar.

Feeling the awesome strength of his mother’s vision, Bird-Jaguar knew he had chosen the penultimate moment to publicly affirm the alliance he had forged by his marriage to Lady Great-Skull-Zero. 1 he numbers of fierce and powerful cahalob who had allied themselves with his cause would give his rivals pause and strengthen his own claim as the rightful successor of the great Shield-Jaguar.

Motioning through the haze of smoke that drifted along the terrace from his mother’s sacrifice, he signaled Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother to bring their own vision through the portal. His wife wore a brilliantly patterned huipil, a heavy jade-colored cape, and a bar pectoral. On her head sat the image of the Sun God at dawn to complement the symbols of Venus worn by his mother. Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of his wife’s lineage, was richly dressed in a skull headdress, a cape, a bar pectoral, knee bands made of jade, a richly bordered hipcloth, a heavy belt, an ornate loincloth, and anklet cuffs. Both were barefoot and grasped the deified lancets of the bloodletting ritual in their hands.

Holding in readiness a shallow plate filled with paper strips, Lady Great-Skull-Zero gestured toward her brother. Like her mother-in-law, she extended her tongue far out of her mouth and permitted Great-Skull- Zero to make the cut of sacrifice. Grasping the obsidian, he pierced her tongue in one deft motion, then handed the bloody blade to Bird-Jaguar. Gazing into the eyes of his new kinsman and future king, Great-Skull- Zero remained motionless while Bird-Jaguar slashed down into his extended tongue. Bleeding heavily and deep in the vision trance, Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Great-Skull-Zero danced together, bringing forth the Serpent known as Chanal-Chac-Bay-Chan.[430] As the great Serpent writhed through their arms, they saw the ancestor Na-Yaxhal materialize between them. A roar rose from the plaza, coming most loudly from the throats of those lords allied with Bird-Jaguar and his wife’s clan.

Finally it was time for the king’s son to sanctify the day with the gift of his own blood. Bird-Jaguar was more simply dressed than Great-Skull-Zero. His hair, worn long to tantalize his enemies in battle, was tied above his head with a panache of feathers which hung down his back. Around his neck he wore a single strand of beads, and a bar pectoral suspended on a leather strap lay against his brown chest. His wrists, ankles, and knees were bejeweled with deep blue-green strands of jade and in the septum of his nose he wore a feather-tipped ornament. His loincloth was simply decorated and brilliantly white so that his people could see the blood of sacrifice he would draw from the most sacred part of his body.

His wife, still weak from her own sacrifice, came to his side to help him with his rite,[431] but his main assistant would be an ahau who was skilled in communication with the gods. The white cape shrouding this ahau’s shoulders contrasted vividly with Bird-Jaguar’s sun-darkened skin. Lady Eveningstar grasped a shallow basket filled with fresh, unmarked paper in one hand, and held the stingray spine her son would use in the other. Still dazed, Great-Skull-Zero stepped in front of Bird-Jaguar, took the basket from his kinswoman’s hand and placed it on the plaza floor between Bird-Jaguar’s feet. Face impassive, Bird-Jaguar squatted on his heels, spreading his muscular thighs above the basket. He pulled his loincloth aside, took the huge stingray spine, and pushed it through the loose skin along the top of his penis. He pierced himself three times before reaching down into the bowl for the thin bark paper strips it contained. Threading a paper strip through each of his wounds, he slowly pulled it through until the three strips hung from his member. His blood gradually soaked into the light tan paper, turning it to deepest red. From the saturated paper, his blood dripped into the bowl between his legs. When he was done, his wife reached down for the bowl and placed the bloodstained paper of his sacrifice in the nearby censer along with offerings of maize kernels, rubber, and the tree resin called pom.

The rising columns of smoke revived the attention of the milling, tired crowd below. Many of the people who had drifted away to the adjacent courts and riverbank to examine the goods brought in by traders and visitors from other cities and kingdoms hurried back to the main plaza. They wanted to witness Bird-Jaguar’s materialization of the god. Times were dangerous along the Xocol Ha, and they hoped for a young, vigorous ruler, skilled in battle and wily in statecraft, to lead the kingdom through the growing peril of the times.

High above the crowd, Bird-Jaguar’s legs gave way beneath him as the trance state overpowered him. Sitting back onto his right hip, he stretched his legs out through the billowing smoke. In his arms, he held the Double-headed Serpent that manifested the path of communication special to kings. God K—the god called Kauil who was the last born of BI the three great gods of the cosmos—emerged from the mouths of the serpents. The great conch-shell trumpets sounded for the third time, warning that a god had been materialized from the Otherworld, this time by the king’s son, Bird-Jaguar.

It was midmorning when the royal family’s bloodletting obligations were fulfilled. Walking with a painfully careful gait, Bird-Jaguar led his mother, his wife, and Great-Skull-Zero to the bench in the Chan-Ah-Tz’i where Shield-Jaguar had been sitting throughout the ritual. The white- caped attendants moved aside as Bird-Jaguar sat down on the right-hand side of his father.[432] His own wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, sat to his right. Lady Eveningstar moved to take the position on Shield-Jaguar’s left, but before she could mount the bench, Lady Xoc entered and usurped that position for herself. In silent menace, the old woman forced the younger woman to take the outside position, jarring everyone present into realizing that neither she nor her kinsmen would ever yield their power without a fight. In a state of uneasy truce, the royal family watched the remainder of the rituals unfold as the ecstasy of the morning’s activities ebbed into the exhaustion of afternoon.

Bird-Jaguar understood all that his father had done for him. First there had been the flapstaff ritual of four days ago and now this great blood ritual so close to the period ending celebration. His father’s public acknowledgment of his favor could not be denied nor would it be forgotten. In the years ahead, this ceremonial recognition would be the most important single component of his claim to the throne. His fight would be a hard one, but now he knew that not only his father but all the ancestors of the royal clan had selected him as the inheritor of the glory of Yaxchilan. After this moment together in eternity, it was simply a matter of time and patience.

Shield-Jaguar was in his mid-nineties and not far from death when this multiple bloodletting took place. We surmise that his advanced age precluded his direct participation in this critically important rite; but, as we have seen, just about everyone else who was important to Bird-Jaguar’s claim participated: his wife and her brother, who was the patriarch of her lineage, Bird-Jaguar himself, and his mother. The four-day-long sequence that began with the flapstaff event and ended in this multiple bloodletting was well-timed. Less than a year later, on June 19, 742, the old man died, and at age thirty-two Bird-Jaguar began his campaign to follow his father into office.

Bird-Jaguar’s first action of public importance after his father’s death was a ballgame (Fig. 7:7) he played on October 21, 744. On the front step of Structure 33, his great accession monument, his artists depicted a captive, bound into a ball, bouncing down hieroglyphic stairs toward a kneeling player.[433] The text carved on this step associated this bailgame with events in the distant mythological past, placing Bird-Jaguar’s actions firmly within the sacred context of the game as it related to the larger cosmos.[434] Bird-Jaguar framed this event with the scenes he felt would most powerfully serve his political ends. Successive panels flank the central scene on the upper step[435] of the stairway leading to the temple platform. To the immediate left of his own bailgame scene, Bird-Jaguar portrayed his own father kneeling to receive a ball bouncing down a hieroglyphic stairway. On his right, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, also kneels to receive a ball. Other panels show important cahalob engaged in the game, as well as Bird-Jaguar’s wives holding Vision Serpents in rites that apparently preceded active play.

Two years later, on June 4, 746 (9.15.15.0.0), Bird-Jaguar celebrated his first big period ending. He recorded this rite in an unusual way, embedding it into the Stela 11 scene depicting him and his father engaged in the flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:8). The text for the period ending tells us that on that day, Shield-Jaguar erected a tree-stone and that he held a staff in his hand.[436] This claim is a bit strange, since Shield-Jaguar had been in his grave for over four years (he died on June 19, 742). In reality, we know that Shield-Jaguar could not have erected a tree-stone, held a staff, nor done anything else on that date. What the reader is meant to understand is that Bird-Jaguar acted in his place.

Even more curious, the final phrase in this text states that these actions took place u cab, “in the land of” Bird-Jaguar. How had the BI kingdom become “the land of” Bird-Jaguar when he hadn’t yet acceded to office and would not qualify for that event for another six years? The embedding of this period-ending notation into the scene of the father-son flapstaff ritual had a special intention. By this juxtaposition Bird-Jaguar implied that he and his father (even after death) acted together on both occasions, and that the kingdom had become Bird-Jaguar’s by this time, if only in de facto status.[437]

The next time we see Bird-Jaguar on a monument, he is once again displaying the flapstaff (Fig. 7:5d). The date is now June 25, 747, eleven years after Shield-Jaguar’s first performance of this ritual, and some six years after the father-son event. By repeating this flapstaff rite yet again, Bird-Jaguar was commemorating his growing command of Yaxchilan’s ritual life.

Two years later on April 3, 749, Lady Xoc, Shield-Jaguar’s principal wife, died and went to join her husband in Xibalba. She had survived him by seven years. A little over a year later—exactly four years after the 9.15.15.0.0 period ending discussed above—Bird-Jaguar conducted a ritual in which he acted as warrior and giver of sacrifices. On June 4, 750, wearing the mask of the god Chac-Xib-Chac, he presented three unnamed victims for sacrifice. He carved this scene on the temple side of Stela 11 (Fig. 7:8), opposite the depiction of the father-son flapstaff event and the unusual period ending text discussed above.[438] These three events—the flapstaff, the period ending, and the GI sacrifice—were of such central importance to his campaign for the throne that Bird-Jaguar surrounded them with texts recording his accession. One text recording that event as hok’ah ti ahauel, “he came out as king,” was carved on the narrow sides of the tree-stone. A second text recording the event as chumwan ti ahauel, “he sat in reign,” was carved under the scene of the flapstaff event. As a finishing touch to the program of Stela 11, Bird-Jaguar placed miniature figures of his dead mother and father in the register above the sacrificial scene. They view his performance with approval from the world of the ancestors.

Bird-Jaguar’s campaign of legitimization was now close to completion, but some barriers still remained. He had yet to prove his prowess as a warrior by taking a captive of sufficient prestige to sacrifice in the accession ceremonies, and to demonstrate his potency by fathering a male child and heir. These last events were never witnessed by his mother, for she died in the following year. On March 13, 751, Lady Eveningstar went to join her rival, Lady Xoc, in the Otherworld.

With the principal female players in this historical drama dead, Bird-Jaguar embarked on the last phase of his crusade. On February 10, 752, 357 days after the end of the sixteenth katun, Bird-Jaguar went to war and took a captive named Yax-Cib-Tok, a cahal of an as-yet-unidentified king.[439] Eight days later, on February 18, Lady Great-Skull-Zero bore him a son, Chel-Te-Chan-Mah-Kina. This son would later take Shield- Jaguar’s name when he himself became the king. With these events Bird- Jaguar’s long struggle for the throne came to an end. Seventy-five days later he was crowned king of Yaxchilan.

Like the multiple bloodlettings that preceded Shield-Jaguar’s death, this capture and the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir loomed large in his program of propaganda. He inscribed the capture on a glyphic step (Fig. 7:9a) located in front of a door leading into Temple 41, the structure built by his father on the highest point of the city. This was the location where Shield-Jaguar himself had erected the depiction of his first flapstaff ritual and the stelae recording the most famous captures of his career. By inscribing the record of his own battle triumph on this building, Bird- Jaguar associated himself with his father’s triumphs as a warrior.

Bird-Jaguar also mounted a pictorial representation of this capture (Lintel 16, Fig. 7:9b) inside Temple 21. Temple 21, if you remember, was BI the structure designed to parallel the glory of Lady Xoc’s magnificent Temple 23. In the scene on this lintel, Bird-Jaguar, dressed in battle armor, stands before his seated captive who bites on his thumb in a gesture of submission or fear.

Bird-Jaguar also depicted the rituals celebrating the birth of his son in two separate locations, maximizing the political implications of the event in the public record. He placed the bloodletting ritual that celebrated the birth over the right-hand doorway of Temple 21, next to the central capture scene described above. If we look at this scene (Fig. 7:9c), we see Bird-Jaguar preparing to draw blood from his own genitals, while one of his wives, Lady Balam, Lady Ahau of lx Witz,[440] pulls a rope through her tongue while holding a plate filled with blood-splattered paper.

This depiction corresponds to Lintel 24 in the program of Temple 23, the bloodletting celebration at the birth of Bird-Jaguar himself. Obviously, Bird-Jaguar wished the audience to draw some parallels. In the earlier bloodletting on Temple 23, Lady Xoc was shown acknowledging the birth of a son to a co-wife, Lady Eveningstar. Here Lady Balam acknowledges the birth of her husband’s heir, also the child of another wife. The only logistical difference is that Lady Great-Skull-Zero is not a foreign wife, as Lady Eveningstar had been, but a woman from a prominent cahal lineage of Yaxchilan. In addition, Temple 21 houses the stela (Fig. 7:6b) that depicts Bird-Jaguar’s mother in the critical 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, which we described in such detail in the vignette. The presence of this stela linked yet another critical bloodletting ritual to the birth of the heir.

In an adjacent temple (Temple 20), Bird-Jaguar mounted another representation of the birth rituals. In this second depiction, Lady Great- Skull-Zero, the mother of the newborn child, holds a Personified Bloodletter in one hand and a bloodletting bowl in the other (Fig. 7:10b). Against her ribs she grasps the tail of a Vision Serpent which winds its way across empty space to rest in the hand of the infant’s father, Bird-Jaguar. The text recording the birth sits immediately in front of the human head emerging from the Vision Serpent’s mouth. This head most likely represents either an ancestor recalled to witness the arrival of the infant heir or the infant himself, Chel-Te-Chan, being metaphorically born through the mouth of the Vision Serpent. This birth scene is mounted in the same building as Lintel 14, which shows Lady Great-Skull-Zero holding the Vision Serpent with Great-Skull-Zero in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting rite (Fig. 7:6a and 7:10c). Thus, in both Temples 20 and 21, Bird-Jaguar connected the birth of his heir and the taking of his captive to the multiple bloodletting event that was so fundamental to his political claim.

With these last two acts—the taking of a captive and the production of an heir, Bird-Jaguar became the king. It is curious that after all his long struggles for the throne, he was never particularly interested in picturing this hard-won accession rite. He did, however, inscribe textual records of this event on Stela 11, the steps of Stela 41, and on the lintels of Structure 10, which he built directly across the plaza from Lady Xoc’s building.

The only actual surviving picture of his accession appears in Temple 33, one of the largest and most important constructions he commissioned during the first half of his reign. Built on a slope above and behind the string of buildings documenting his right of accession (Temples 13, 20, 21, 22, and 23), this building has a lintel over each of its three doors and a wide step portraying the bailgame events discussed earlier (Fig. 7:7) on its basal platform. The accession portrait is over the left door (Lintel 1, Fig. 7:11a). There, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself holding the manifestation of GIF[441] outward toward an audience we cannot see. Behind him stands the mother of his new son, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a bundle to her chest.[442] The verb in the text over her head records that she will soon let blood,[443] just as Lady Xoc did for Shield-Jaguar on the day of his accession (Lintel 25, Fig. 7:3b). Presumably, as the bloodletter for the king, she, like her predecessor Lady Xoc, would be responsible for materializing the founder of the dynasty. Her name is also written in a form that identifies her as the mother of the heir—the child who would become the second Shield-Jaguar.

Bird-Jaguar’s accession rites culminated nine days later with the dedication of a new building, Temple 22, located on the river terrace immediately adjacent to Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s memorial (Fig. 7:12). Into this new building, he reset four very early lintels. These lintels were presumably removed from the important ancestral building now encased within the new construction. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of lintels and inscriptions from the buildings of his ancestors was a very important part of Bird-Jaguar’s political strategy.

On the brand-new lintel he placed over the central doorway of Temple 22, he commemorated the dedication of the earlier temple, which had been named Chan-Ah- Fz’i by King Moon-Skull, the seventh successor in the dynasty. This ancient dedication had taken place on October 16, 454. The inclusion of the earlier texts was meant to link Bird-Jaguar’s dedication of the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i temple to the actions of the ancestral king. The official dedication of Temple 22 took place on May 12, 752, nine days after Bird-Jaguar had become the new king.

Obviously. Bird-Jaguar had to have begun construction of Temple 22 at a much earlier date for its dedication rituals to have played a part in his actual accession rites. This is but one more example of the extent of the power he wielded before he officially wore the crown. His choice of this building as his first construction project, and the one most closely associated with his accession rites, was deliberate. Not only was Temple 22 a new and impressive version of his illustrious ancestor’s Chan-Ah-Tz’i, it stood right next door to Lady Xoc’s pivotal building. Through this construction project, Bird-Jaguar asserted both his mastery of Lady Xoc’s imagery and his connection to a famous and successful ancestor. The purpose of this building (and Temple 12, in which he reset another group of early lintels), was to encase and preserve earlier important monuments and to declare his status as the legitimate descendant of those earlier kings.

This construction project was just the opening shot in a grand strategy that would completely change the face of Yaxchilân over the next ten years (Fig. 7:12). Bird-Jaguar dedicated the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i just nine days after his accession. To the left of the adjacent Temple 23 and attached to it, he built Temple 24 (dedicated on September 2, 755). Its lintels recorded the deaths of his immediate ancestors: his grandmother’s on September 12, 705; Shield-Jaguar’s on June 19, 742; Lady Xoc’s on April 3, 749; and his own mother’s on March 13, 751.

While still working on the huge terrace that supported the group of buildings surrounding Temple 23, Bird-Jaguar began construction on yet another temple, Temple 21. This structure also replicated the magnificent lintels of Lady Xoc’s building. Bird-Jaguar designed the program on this temple around the following scenes: his capture of Yax-Cib-Tok; his own bloodletting in celebration of his son’s birth; and a bloodletting rite that took place on March 28, 755, probably as part of the dedication rites for the temple itself (Fig. 7:9d). The giver of blood in the final event was Lady 6-Tun, a woman from Motul de San José, another of Bird-Jaguar’s wives. These images, of course, deliberately echoed the lintels of Temple 23. Bird-Jaguar intensified the association of this new building with Lady Xoc’s monument by planting inside it the stela recording his mother’s B pivotal bloodletting rite on 9.15.10.0.1. Carved in a style emulating the Lintel 25 masterpiece from Lady Xoc’s temple, this stela depicts Lady Eveningstar (Fig. 7:6b) wearing the same costume as her rival while materializing the same double-Tlaloc-headed Vision Serpent. This, and other imagery, shows us how obsessed Bird-Jaguar was with equating his mother with Lady Xoc.

Next to this building, he constructed Temple 20, which had three lintels showing many of the same events. One depicts his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her patriarch participating in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting. A second shows his wife letting blood along with Bird-Jaguar in celebration of the birth of their son. The third lintel depicts the ritual display of four captives by Bird-Jaguar and an unnamed noble. This lintel has been tentatively dated to November 13, 757.[444]

Across the plaza trom temple 23, Bird-Jaguar constructed three more buildings: Temples 10, 12, and 13. In Temple 12, he reset another series of Early Classic lintels. These recorded the first through the tenth successors of the dynasty, and the accession of the tenth king, Ta-Skull, on February 13, 526. This building, along with Temple 22, honored the members of the long dynasty of Yaxchilan from which Bird-Jaguar descended, and preserved important public records which would have otherwise been lost when he covered over earlier structures during the course of his building program.

To the west of Structure 12, Bird-Jaguar commissioned a great L-shaped platform surmounted by two buildings housing two sets of lintels. The first set, Lintels 29, 30, and 31, are all glyphic and record his birth, accession, and the dedication of the building itself (Temple 10) on March 1, 764. The other building (Structure 13) housed pictorial lintels of extraordinary interest (Fig. 7:13). The first, Lintel 50, shows Shield- Jaguar’s original flapstaff ritual, the event that began Bird-Jaguar’s race for the throne.[445] Balancing Shield-Jaguar’s flapstaff rite is Lintel 33. This lintel, found over the right-hand door of the temple (Fig. 7:13c), shows Bird-Jaguar conducting his own flapstaff event eleven years later on June 25, the summer solstice of the year 747.

Lintel 32 (Fig. 7:13b), found over the middle door, shows Bird- Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, in a bundle rite. According to his inscription, this rite took place the day after his father persuaded Lady Xoc to let her blood in acknowledgment of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. The masterly representation of Lady Xoc’s extraordinarily painful suffering is just across the plaza, so we may assume that Bird-Jaguar used Lintel 32 to show that his own mother was also directly involved in the rituals surrounding his birth. In fact, she holds a bundle that very probably contained the bowl, rope, and lancet used in the bloodletting rite. By this means, he asserted that her role on that occasion was every bit as important as Lady Xoc’s. As a finishing touch, he framed his mother’s participation in the bundle ritual with the flapstaff events he considered to be a key part of his legitimization. The program of this building thus links those crucial events together into a single web of causality. It is retrospective history at its best. Bird-Jaguar masterfully orchestrated events, with their many shades of meaning and connections, to fit the conclusions he wished his people to accept as fact.

With the completion of this last building, Bird-Jaguar had accomplished his campaign of political legitimization. His major problem now was to maintain the loyalty of his nobility and secure their support for his own son. His own problems with the succession appear to have marked B1 him deeply; so much so that the efforts of his remaining years were spent in a concentrated effort to insure that his own heir did not suffer the same fate.

Bird-Jaguar began this new campaign with a set of buildings constructed on the slopes above the river shelf. Pivotal to the program was the huge Temple 33, which he flanked with Temple 1 to the west, and Temple 42 to the east (Fig. 7:14). The ten lintels on these three buildings record a sequence of events beginning with Bird-Jaguar’s accession and culminating with its fifth anniversary. He repeated the same narrative strategy he had used in the building sequence which centered around Temple 23: the repetition of key scenes in more than one location. In this way he was able to feature several different people, thereby allowing many of his nobles and allies the prestige of appearing with the king in the permanent public record of history (Fig. 7:14).

Forty days after his accession, Bird-Jaguar staged the first of these ceremonial events, a bundle ritual, on June 12, 752, ten days before the summer solstice (Fig. 7:15a). One pictorial representation of this event shows us Bird-Jaguar (on Lintel 5 of Temple 1) holding a tree-scepter in each hand, while Lady 6-Sky-Ahau, another foreign wife, this time from Motul de San José,[446] holds a bundle. In the second depiction of this ritual (Lintel 42 of Temple 42), Bird-Jaguar appears not with his wife but with Kan-Toc, one of his most important cahalob.[447] The king holds out a GII Manikin Scepter, an important symbol of the kingship, toward this cahal, who is shown gripping a battle ax and shield.

We do not know the occasion for this ritual event, but Bird-Jaguar found it politically advantageous to represent it on these two lintels—one displaying a foreign wife who probably brought a powerful alliance with her, and the other featuring one of his most important nobles. In the Maya tradition, subordinate nobles were rarely depicted on the same monuments as the high king. Here Bird-Jaguar is obviously flattering his cahal, perhaps cementing his allegiance by publicly acknowledging his importance. The same reasoning would apply to the monument depicting his foreign wife. She must have brought her own set of alliances with her when she came to marry the king of Yaxchilân.

Later in the same year, on October 16, 752, Bird-Jaguar staged another series of rituals, once again depicting each of them in double imagery. During the first ceremony, he displayed a strange-looking staff mounting a basket with a GII miniature sitting atop it (Fig. 7:15b). In one version of this ritual (Lintel 6, Temple 1), Kan-Toc, the same cahal we saw above, stands before the king. He is holding bloodletting paper in one hand and a jaguar-paw club in the other. In the contrasting depiction (Lintel 43 of Temple 42), another wife, Lady Balam of lx Witz, stands with Bird-Jaguar. She holds a bloodletting bowl with a bloodstained rope hanging over one side. She is the same wife we saw letting blood on Lintel 17 to celebrate the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir. Here Bird-Jaguar watches her let blood again in an event occurring either just before or just after his scene with the cahal. Note that the paper held by Kan-Toc in the alternate depiction now rests in Bird-Jaguar’s hand. The fact that the paper is depicted in both scenes lets us know we are seeing different moments in the same ritual.

This particular ritual apparently lasted for several days, for two days later Bird-Jaguar reappears on Lintel 7 (Fig. 7:15c), this time holding the GII Manikin Scepter. Another of his wives appears with him, hugging a large bundle to her chest. While we cannot positively identify the woman depicted here (her name is badly eroded), we are reasonably certain she is another foreign wife, this time a second wife from Motul de San José.[448]

The final episode in this series of lintels records the most famous and important capture of Bird-Jaguar’s lifetime—the taking of Jeweled-Skull (Fig. 7:15d). Once again, he commissioned two versions of the event. As before, one shows him acting with a cahal and the other with a wife. On Lintel 41, Lady 6-Sky-Ahau of Motul de San José stands before the king, who is dressed in full battle regalia including cotton armor and lance. She has been helping him dress for war in the same type of ritual we saw Lady Xoc perform for Shield-Jaguar thirty-one years earlier. In this scene, however, the action is a little farther along than that shown on the earlier Lintel 26 (Fig. 7:3c). Here Bird-Jaguar is already fully dressed in the Tlaloc war costume and ready to enter the battle.

The capture itself appears on Lintel 8 of Temple 1. Bird-Jaguar, dressed in the battle gear his wife had helped him don, holds the unfortunate Jeweled-Skull by the wrist. Kan-Toc, the cahal he had shown twice before, yanks on the bound hair of his own captive. The manner of Bird-Jaguar’s presentation is highly important. Not only does he share his moment of victory with a subordinate, he represents the two captures[449] as equally important.[450] If it were not for the more elaborate detail of Bird- Jaguar’s costume and the larger size of the text describing his actions, a E casual onlooker might be hard-pressed to identify who was the king and who the lord. Both protagonists are about the same size and occupy the same compositional space.

Why would Bird-Jaguar share the stage of history with his wives and cahalob? In the age-old political traditions of the Maya, the high king’s performance of public ritual affirmed the legitimacy of his power and gained public support for his decisions. Few rulers before Bird-Jaguar had felt compelled to document these mutual performances in monumental narrative art. By allowing his subordinates onto the stage of public history, Bird-Jaguar was actually sharing with them some of his prerogatives as king.

Shield-Jaguar had used this same strategy to deal with his wife Lady Xoc and the lineage she represented. Bird-Jaguar was merely extending this strategy further to include the cahal lineages whose alliances he needed to secure his own position and to insure that his son inherited the throne without dispute. Notice, however, that Bird-Jaguar produced his heir with a woman of this internal cahal lineage, opting for a different solution than his father had with his marriage to a foreigner. We suspect he did not want his own son, Chel-Te, to face the opposition from the internal lineages that had very probably kept him off the throne for ten B years.

Setting his son and heir into the midst of this web of alliance became the preoccupation of the second half of Bird-Jaguar’s reign, and the strategy and emphasis of his political art reflect his new goal (Fig. 7:16). The centrally placed Temple 33 was the first sculptural program designed to focus on the problem. In it Bird-Jaguar employed a uniquely Yaxchilan strategy. At Palenque, in the Group of the Cross, and in the murals at Bonampak, other Maya kings recorded specific rituals which were designed to publicly affirm a child’s status as the chosen heir. Bird-Jaguar never recorded a similar heir-designation rite for his own son, Chel-Te. Instead, he repeatedly depicted himself and the most important of his cahalob in public performance with his heir.

This new strategy was begun with the celebration of the five-tun period ending on 9.16.5.0.0 (April 12, 756). Once again, Bird-Jaguar created multiple representations of the event. He mounted the first of these depictions over the right-hand door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11c). In this scene, Bird-Jaguar holds a GII Manikin Scepter out toward the smaller figure of a cahal. This noble, named Ah Mac, is someone we have not seen before. The cahal holds his own Manikin Scepter and wears the same type of clothing as the king, although his headdress is different.

The second depiction of this period-ending rite is located several hundred meters up the river in Temple ST[451] (Fig. 7:16), one of the first of a series of buildings to be erected in that new area of the city. On the central lintel (Fig. 7:17b), Bird-Jaguar is depicted with his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, celebrating the period ending with a bundle rite. The bundle holds the bloodletting instruments he will use to draw his holy blood. The composition of this scene echoes both his accession portrait on Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11a) and the bundle rite celebrated by his own father and mother to commemorate his birth (on Lintel 32, Fig. 7:13b). The replication of these earlier ritual actions was designed to deliberately link all these actions together in one great string of causality. Just as Shield- Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar had performed the bundle ritual before them, so would Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero reenact it for both his accession and this period ending. The parallel Bird-Jaguar wished to draw is obvious: The first pair of actors were his own parents; the second were the parents of his heir, Chel-Te.

The bundle ritual conducted by Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull- Zero is linked to Chel-Te by the events depicted in the lintels over the flanking doorways. Over the right portal, Chel-Te stands before Great- Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:17c), the patriarch of his mother’s lineage. Great-Skull- Zero is depicted here precisely because he is Chel-Te’s mother’s brother. Exactly this relationship (yichan[452] in Mayan) stands between his name and the heir’s below.

Over the left door (Fig. 7:17a), Chel-Te stands before his mother who sits on a bench and gestures to him with her right hand. Since the flanking scenes have no date, we presume that all three lintels depict different actions that took place on the same day. First, Bird-Jaguar and his wife enacted a bundle rite; next, Chel-Te presented himself to his mother; finally, he appeared before his maternal uncle, who was the head of his mother’s clan. The goal of these juxtapositions was not to glorify Bird-Jaguar, but to show his wife’s lineage giving public support to his son as the heir.

One year later, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself and his son over the central door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11b). The date is 9.16.6.0.0 (April 7, 757), and the event, the celebration of his fifth year in office as king. Both father and son display the same bird scepters Bird-Jaguar held out to Lady 6-Sky-Ahau forty days after his accession on June 12, 752 (Lintel 5, Fig. 7:15a). Bird-Jaguar chose this location carefully. Temple 33, if you remember, is the building that housed the only picture of Bird-Jaguar’s accession. It was also prominently located on the slope immediately above the temple program of legitimization. By depicting his son’s participation in this important ritual at this key site, Bird-Jaguar hoped to document in public and permanent form Chel-Te’s status as the heir.

Nine years later, Bird-Jaguar erected another series of lintels for his son, elaborating upon strategies he had used in earlier buildings. Going upriver again, he built a new temple next to the one that showed his son and wife celebrating the five-tun period ending. This time the event he chose to focus on was the fifteen-tun ending date, 9.16.15.0.0 (February 19, 766). Over the center door (Fig. 7:18), he depicted both himself and his son displaying GII Manikin Scepters in these period-ending rites.[453]

Bird-Jaguar took a different strategy, however, in the two flanking lintels. Over the right door, he showed a woman, presumably his wife Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a Vision Serpent in her arms as she materializes a vision. Over the left door (Fig. 7:18c), he repeated for the second time the scene of his mother Lady Eveningstar acting with Shield- Jaguar on the occasion of his own birth during the Jupiter-Saturn hiero- phany. This juxtaposition is critical. The center lintel proves that Bird-Jaguar acted with his son, and the left lintel relegitimizes his own claim to the throne by declaring once again that his mother acted with his father in the same ritual sequence his father memorialized with Lady Xoc. This is but another example of Bird-Jaguar’s oft-repeated declaration that his mother was as good and as exalted as his father’s principal wife. Clearly the man “doth protest too much.”

Any problems Bird-Jaguar encountered, either because of his mother’s status or because of rivals with better claims to the throne, would very likely be inherited by his son. Aware of the difficulties his heir might still face, Bird-Jaguar was not yet willing to rest on his laurels. He apparently used the same period-ending date, 9.16.15.0.0, to seal the allegiance B of yet another cahal for his son. This fellow, Tilot, ruled the territory on the other side of the river from a subordinate town called La Pasadita. Three lintels mounted on a building at that site show Bird-Jaguar acting in public with Tilot. On the center lintel (Fig. 7:19b), Bird-Jaguar scatters blood on the period ending while Tilot stands by as his principal attendant. Flanking this critical scene is a picture of Tilot and Bird-Jaguar standing on either side of an unfortunate captive taken in battle on June 14, 759 (Fig. 7:19a). On the other side (Fig. 7:19c), Tilot stands before Chel-Te, who sits on a bench as either king or heir.

These lintels lent prestige to Tilot by depicting him in public performance with the high king. The third scene, however, was the payoff, for it shows this powerful cahal in public performance with Bird-Jaguar’s son, Chel-Te. The price Bird-Jaguar paid for this allegiance was the personal elevation of Tilot into a co-performer with the king; but by sharing his prerogatives and his place in history, Bird-Jaguar reinforced the submission of this cahal to his own authority and secured Tilot’s loyalty to the heir.

[[][]]

The last monument Bird-Jaguar erected during his life continued his effort to secure the succession. It also brought his story full circle. Set on Lintel 9 (Fig. 7:20), the single lintel within Temple 2, a building situated on a terrace just below Temple I,[454] this scene shows Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of the queen’s lineage, conducting a flapstaff ritual with Bird- Jaguar. As we mentioned above, this was the ritual first enacted by Shield- Jaguar on June 27, 736 (Fig. 7:5a and b). It was also the ritual Bird-Jaguar enacted with his father on June 26, 741, just before Shield-Jaguar died (Fig. 7:5c). It was the ritual depicted on Lintel 33 as well (Fig. 7:5d), on June 26, 747, with Bird-Jaguar as the sole actor. This final ritual took place on June 20, 768, nearly thirty-two years after its first enactment.

The flapstaff rituals had always been critical to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy to prove himself the legitimate heir to Shield-Jaguar. To show himself enacting the same event with his brother-in-law was an extraordinary elevation of that cahal’s prestige. But his reason for allowing such honor to fall to Great-Skull-Zero is also patently clear from the text on Lintel 9. There Great-Skull-Zero is named yichan ahau, “the brother of the mother of the ahau (read ‘heir’).” Bird-Jaguar participated in this double b display to insure that Great-Skull-Zero would support Chel-Te’s assumption of the throne after Bird-Jaguar’s death. The strategy apparently worked, for Chel-Te took the throne successfully and was known thereafter as the namesake of his famous grandfather, Shield-Jaguar.

Ironically, even though Bird-Jaguar had had problems demonstrating his right to the throne on his home ground, his regional prestige had been secure even before he was formally installed as king. The king of Piedras Negras had felt his presence prestigious enough to invite him to participate in the designation of the Piedras Negras heir; and this event took place three years before Bird-Jaguar was even crowned. Bird-Jag- uar’s royal visit is recorded in an extraordinary wall panel (Fig. 7:21) commissioned retrospectively by Ruler 7 of Piedras Negras. The panel depicts a palace scene where a celebration is taking place. The occasion is the heir-designation of Ruler 5, Ruler 7’s predecessor. The events recorded on the wall panel are these: On July 31, 749 (9.15.18.3.13), Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras celebrated the end of his first twenty tuns as king, in a ritual witnessed by Jaguar ofYaxchilan,[455] who had come down the river by canoe to participate in it. The date of this anniversary falls during the period when Yaxchilan was without a king. We cannot identify the Yaxchilan visitor with absolute certainty, but it was most likely Bird-Jaguar, who would have come as the de facto king of Yaxchilan.

When next Bird-Jaguar appears in a Piedras Negras text, his name and actions are clear. The cahalob portrayed in the scene on this particular wall panel are divided into four groups. The king of Piedras Negras sits on a bench and talks to the seven cahalob seated on the step below him. An ornamental pot divides them into two groups—one of three and another of four people. On the king’s immediate right stands an adult and at least three smaller figures, one of which is the heir to the Piedras Negras throne.[456] At the king’s far right stands a group of three lords talking among themselves. The texts around and in front of this latter group identify these people as Yaxchilan lords; and, according to the text next to the Piedras Negras king, one of them is the great Bird-Jaguar himself.

This scene took place on October 20, 757 (9.16.6.9.16), during the fifth year of Bird-Jaguar’s reign. He had come down the river to conduct a bundle rite for the designation of the Piedras Negras heir. This ritual was apparently celebrated just in the nick of time, for forty-one days later, on November 30, Ruler 4 died. Ruler 5, the heir whose inheritance Bird- Jaguar publicly affirmed, took the throne on March 30, 758 (9.16.6.17.17).

Interestingly enough, Bird-Jaguar’s visit to Piedras Negras was never recorded in the public forum at Yaxchilan. It would seem that the Piedras Negras heir and his descendants are the ones who gained prestige from this visit and wished to record it for their posterity. What then did Bird- Jaguar gain? Presumably, if he went to Piedras Negras at the behest of Ruler 4 to give his public support to the Piedras Negras heir, he secured reciprocal support for his own son’s claim.

Bird-Jaguar’s political problems and his use of monumental art to work out solutions were by no means novel either to his reign or to the political experience at Yaxchilan. Other Maya rulers, such as Pacal and Chan-Bahlum of Palenque, had their own problems with succession. Within the history of the Classic Maya, however, Bird-Jaguar’s solution— sharing the public forum with powerful political allies—was new. The fact that this strategy worked so well would gradually lead to its adaptation by other kings, up and down the Usumacinta River, in the years to come.

Before Bird-Jaguar, Maya kings did not depict themselves on public monuments with cahalob, regardless of how noble or powerful these nobles might have been or how important to the king’s political machinations they were. In indoor mural paintings, of course, the practice was different. Even in the very early murals of Uaxactun, the court, not just the king, was represented. On stelae and architectural lintels, however, kings normally depicted only themselves and occasionally family members—especially mothers and fathers from whom they claimed legitimate inheritance. Cahalob could and did commission monuments to celebrate important events in their lives, but they erected them in their own house compounds or in the subordinate communities they ruled for the high kings. Bird-Jaguar was the first to elevate his cahalob to stand beside him in the public eye. He did so to secure their support for his claim to the throne. That alliance must have been a fragile one, however, for he was forced to share the stage of history with them again and again in order to maintain the alliance, both for himself and his son.

Bird-Jaguar was not the first Maya king to find himself in a struggle to command the succession. Primogeniture can go wrong as often as right, especially when ambitious offspring from multiple marriages are competing for the throne. We can be sure that Bird-Jaguar was not the first son of a foreign wife to compete for a Maya throne. Others before him manipulated the system and strove to use the nobility to support their claim. Bird-Jaguar, however, was the first to exalt those cahalob by depicting them standing beside him in the public record, and we know he did not do so out of a sense of largess. Those cahalob he portrayed with him sold their loyalty for a piece of Yaxchilan’s public history. The price they—and B the people of the city—paid was more than sworn fealty to the king. The precedents established by Bird-Jaguar were dangerous and eventually debilitating. A king with Bird-Jaguar’s personal charisma and ferocity in battle could afford to share the power of the high kingship; but the legacy of conciliar power he left to the cahal families he honored was not so well commanded by his descendants.

8. Copán: The Death of First Dawn[457]

The mountain spine of the Americas wends its way through Maya country, creating a cool high region of mists and towering volcanoes. From the base of these mountains, the peninsula of Yucatán stretches far to the north through the territory of the kings. Located on the southeastern margin of the Maya world, the Copan River drains the valley system it has carved from the rugged, forest-shrouded mountains of western Honduras. This waterway eventually joins the mighty Motagua River on its way to the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea. The broadest valley in this system shares its name, Copan, with that river.[458]

This river is responsible for the richness of the land in the Copan Valley. Each year during the rains of summer and fall, floodw’aters deposit the alluvial soils from the mud-laden river waters onto the valley floor. The resulting fertile bottomlands follow the ambling path of the river through low foothills and the higher ridge lands of the rugged mountains (Fig. 8:1). On their upper reaches, these mountains are covered by pine forests, while deeper in the valley, they are covered with tropical growth—including the mighty ceiba, the sacred tree of all Mesoamericans.

From the dawn of time, the Copan Valley was an inviting place to live. Between 1100 B.C. and 900 B.C. the first settlers, who were just learning to rely on agriculture to feed themselves, drifted into the valley from the Guatemalan highlands or perhaps the adjacent mountains of El Salvador. These earliest immigrants lived in temporary camps, enjoying a good life in the tall gallery forest along the water’s edge. They hunted deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary[459] among the trees and ate the maize and beans they harvested from clearings they had cut with stone axes. By 900 B.C., their farmer descendants had built permanent homes and spread out to occupy the entire valley. There, throughout the bottomlands and foothills, they left the debris of their pottery cooking vessels and the bowls, plates, and cups of their daily meals. Eventually these people established at least three villages—one in the Sepulturas Group, another in the area called the Bosque, and the last under the Great Plaza later built by Copan’s kings (Fig. 8:9).

These prosperous pioneering farmers buried their loved ones under their patio floors within earshot of the children and descendants working and playing above them. In proximity to their homes and families, ancestral spirits could dwell happily in the Otherworld. When the family patriarch stood on the patio and conducted a bloodletting, he knew the ancestors were below his feet—close at hand should he want to call them forth. The departed were buried with an array of gifts and personal belongings, including quantities of highly prized jade, as well as incised and painted pottery with sacred images the Maya had borrowed from the I Olmec—the creators of the first great interregional system of thought and art in Mesoamerica.[460]

These rites for the beloved dead show us that the people of the valley had already begun the process that led to the creation of social stratification, for the privileged were more able than others to take rich offerings with them into Xibalba. The differences in social standing among families in the villages, engendered by bountiful harvests or success in varying commercial enterprises, would become both the foundation of kingship and its burden in the centuries to come. During the Middle Preclassic period, however, the people in the Copán Valley were blessed with an unfailing abundance of all the requirements of life. Their prosperity may well have outstripped even their contemporaries in the lowlands of the Petén, for the quantity of jade found in their tombs exceeds all other burials known from that time.[461]

By contrast, we know little of the Copanccs who lived in the valley during the Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D.150). This was the time when their Maya brethren in the lowlands, at places like Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactún, were acknowledging their first kings. In contrast, Copán saw a major reduction of population and building activity during this 450-year span. Archaeologists have found traces of human activity from the first three centuries of this period in only two locations—one south and the other southwest of the Acropolis. And even this weak trace disappears from the record during the last 150 years of this period.

Scholars working on the history of the Copán Valley have no explanation for this curious lapse. This inexplicable disappearance of population from a thriving area becomes even more enigmatic when compared with Maya activities in both the Pacific areas to the south and the lowlands to the north. In all other parts of the Maya world, the Late Preclassic was a time of exuberant innovation and social experimentation. It was a time when the institutions of government achieved their Classic forms with the invention of kingship. To all appearances, however, the valley of Copán was seriously depopulated, and those who lived among the remnants of a more glorious past did not participate in the events sweeping the Maya society of that time. Kingship, for the Copanecs, would come to the valley only in later years when the mythology and symbolism of governance had already been developed.

By A.D. 200, however, the valley of Copán had recovered and her people had joined the mainstream of Classic Maya life. The construction of the first levels of the Acropolis stimulated a series of building projects, including floors and platforms that would serve, in future centuries, as the foundations lor the Great Plaza, the Ballcourt, and the Acropolis of Copán’s cultural apogee (Fig. 8:1). During this early time, farmers and craftspeople settled the rich agricultural bottomlands north of the river, building their homes as close as possible to the valley’s growing center of power.

This pattern of settlement created no difficulties in the beginning when there was plenty of farmland and only a moderate number of people to support. But slowly the surrounding green sea of maize and forest gave way to a city of white and red plazas—with fine structures of stone, wood, and thatch all jostling for position. Soon, social standing and proximity to the dynamic pulse of the city became more important to these exuberant people than their own food production. Meter by meter, over the centuries, they usurped the richest cropland, constructing their lineage compounds on acreage that used to be fields, gradually forcing the farmers up into the margins of the valley.[462] These new urban elite established particularly dense neighborhoods around the Acropolis, in the area now under the modern village of Copan, and on the ridge above it at a spot called El Cerro de las Mesas. Aristocrats and commoners alike vied with each other for the privilege of residing in the reflected brilliance of the Acropolis and the concentration of power it represented.

[[][Fig. 8:2 The Founding of Copan as a Kingdom
_{b-c: drawing by B.W. Fash}]]

The Classic dynastic chronicles of Copan refer to this dawning era of the kingdom in ways that closely match the archaeological evidence. Later Copan kings remembered the date A.D. 160 as the year their kingdom was established as a political entity. At least three kings recorded 8.6.0.0.0 (December 18, A.D. 159) as a critical early date of the city, and Stela 1 (Fig. 8:2) records the date July 13, A.D. 160, in connection with the glyph that signifies Copan both as a physical location and a political entity. Unfortunately, the area of the text that once recorded the precise event is now destroyed, but we believe that later Copanecs honored this date as the founding of their kingdom.[463]

By A.D. 426, Copan’s ruling dynasty was founded and the principle of kingship was accepted by the elites reemcrging in the valley society after the dormancy of the Late Preclassic period. No doubt here as elsewhere in the Maya world, the advent of this institution consolidated the kingdom, creating a politically coherent court in which the ahauob could air their differences and rivalries while at the same time presenting a unified front to their followers.

Yax-Kuk-Mo’ (“Blue-Quetzal-Macaw”), who founded the ruling dynasty, appears in the historical and archaeological record[464] about 260 years after the recovery from the Late Preclassic slump. We know that he founded the dynasty of kings who led the kingdom of Copan throughout the Classic period. All the subsequent kings of Copan counted their numerical position in the succession from him, naming themselves, for example, “the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[465] In all, sixteen descendants followed Yax-Kuk-Mo’ onto Copan’s throne, and these kings ruled the valley for the next four hundred years.

| <verbatim>#</verbatim> | Name | Accession | Death | Other dates | | 1 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ | | | 426–435? | | 2 | unknown | | | | | 3 | unknown | | | | | 4 | Cu-Ix | | | 465 ± 15 yrs | | 5 | unknown | | | | | 6 | unknown | | | | | 7 | Waterlily-Jaguar | | | 504–544 + | | 8 | unknown | | | | | 9 | unknown | | 551, Dec. 30 | ???? | | 10 | Moon-Jaguar | 553, May 26 | 578, Oct. 26 | | | 11 | Butz’-Chan | 578, Nov. 19 | 626, Jan. 23 | | | 12 | Smoke-Imix-God K | 628, Feb. 8 | 695, Jun. 18 | | | 13 | 18-Rabbit-God K | 695, Jul. 9 | 738, May 3 | | | 14 | Smoke-Monkey | 738, Jun. 11 | 749, Feb. 4 | | | 15 | Smoke-Shell | 749, Feb. 18 | ???? | | | 16 | Yax-Pac | 763, Jul. 2 | 820, May 6 -( | mos. | | 17 | U-Cit-Tok | ???? | 822, Feb. 10 | |

In actuality, Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the first king of Copan. It is probable, however, that he earned the designation of founder because he exemplified the charismatic qualities of the divine ahau better than any of his predecessors. It is important to remember that here, as at Palenque and the other kingdoms that acknowledged such great statesmen, the definition of a founding ancestor served a deeper social purpose. Aristocrats who descended from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ constituted a distinct cluster of noble families, the clan of the kings, by birth superior to all the other elite in the valley. In principle, these people owed the reigning monarch a special measure of loyalty and support.

The earliest date associated with Yax-Kuk-Mo’, 8.19.0.0.0, (February 1, 426), appears as retrospective history on Stela 15, a monument of the seventh successor, Waterlily-Jaguar. At the other end of the historical record, Yax-Pac, the sixteenth successor and the last great king of the dynasty, also recorded events in the life of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He did so on his Altar Q (Fig. 8:3), which he called the “Altar of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” Yax-Pac used the sides of the altar to unfold the sixteen successors of his line, beginning with the founder and ending with himself. On the top, he inscribed two important deeds of Yax-Kuk’-Mo’.[466] There we can read that on 8.19.10.10.17 (September 6, 426), Yax-Kuk-Mo’ displayed the God K scepter of royal authority. Three days later on 8.19.10.11.0 (September 9) I Yax-Kuk-Mo’ “came” or “arrived” as the founder of the lineage[467] (Fig. 8:4a and b). Yax-Pac recorded these two events as if they were the fundamental actions that spawned the dynasty and the kingdom. His commemoration of these events was critical to his campaign for political support from the many ahauob who reckoned their aristocratic pedigree from this founder. Later in the chapter we shall see why Yax-Pac was so anxious to associate himself publicly with the charismatic founder of his dynasty.

The thirteenth successor, a particularly powerful man named 18- Rabbit, also evoked these early rituals of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the basis of authority over his own ahauob. On Stela J, 18-Rabbit inscribed his own accession and that of his immediate predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K, in an intricate text rendered in the form of a mat, the symbol of the kingly throne. On the first strand of the mat, he linked 9.13.10.0.0, the day this extraordinary monument was dedicated, to 9.0.0.0.0 (December 11, 435), a day when Yax-Kuk-Mo’ performed another “God K-in-hand” event (Fig. 8:4c).

Recent excavations under the Acropolis have turned up a building erected either during or shortly after the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Discovered under the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (10L-26), this newly excavated temple once held in its back chamber a stela dated at 9.0.0.0.0,[468] Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is recorded as the king in power when the baktun turned, while his son, the second king of the dynasty, was the owner of this tree-stone. Most important for our understanding of Copan’s history, the text associates the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ with the same date that would be evoked by his descendant, 18-Rabbit. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not an invention of later kings who were fabricating a glorified past for political reasons. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ did rule Copan, and in doing so he left a sacred legacy of tree-stones and temples to his descendants that is now coming to light in the excavations of the Acropolis.

This early temple, which is called Papagayo by the archaeologists,[469] was built only a few meters away from the first Ballcourt, which had been built during an earlier predynastic time. These two buildings became two of Copan’s central metaphors of power throughout its recorded history— the temple of kings and the ballcourt portal to the Otherworld. As the centuries progressed, the successors of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ commissioned temple after temple, building layer upon layer until that first temple and its companions grew into a range of sacred mountains overlooking a forest of tree-stones in the Great Plaza below.[470]

Papagayo temple held not only the 9.0.0.0.0 tree-stone, but also a step placed inside it during a remodeling project by the fourth successor, a ruler named Cu-Ix. Its text and accumulating evidence from ongoing excavations show that Papagayo was embedded in predynastic architecture and that it remained a focus of dynastic activity for centuries after the founder died.[471] This marvelous little temple emerged from obscurity when a tunnel was excavated into the southwest corner of the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs.[472] Both the step and the above-mentioned stela are part of the growing body of inscriptions from the Early Classic period that have been emerging in recent excavations. Among the early kings who have been identified from this collection of inscriptions are the first ruler, Yax-Kuk-Mo’; his son, the second ruler; the fourth, Cu-Ix; the seventh, Waterlily-Jaguar, who left us two tree-stones (Stelae 15 and E) in the Great Plaza; the tenth, Moon-Jaguar, who left at least one tree-stone in the area under the modern village; and the eleventh, Butz’-Chan, who erected a tree-stone both in the village area and in the growing Acropolis. (See Fig. 8:3b for a summary of chronology that has been recovered to date.)[473]

Late Classic Copanec kings considered that their authority sprang from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and his charismatic performance as king. From his reign onward, Copan’s dynastic history unfolded steadily until the system itself collapsed four hundred years later when the civilization of the Classic Maya as a whole failed. Many of the works of Copan’s earliest kings still lie buried under the Acropolis and inside other structures, and are just beginning to come to light. Unfortunately, even when we uncover a buried building or find a fragmentary stela, we rarely find names associated with it. The reason for this is clear. Inscriptions are often unreadable, either because they were already old and worn when they were buried or because they were ritually “terminated” when they were placed in their final resting places. Earlier monuments were torn down to make room for the newer ones, and older buildings were either buried or broken up to be recycled as building materials. There is reason to suspect, however, that the destruction and reuse in construction of inscriptional materials was not a casual matter. The Copanecs, like other Maya, probably defused the power of places and objects they wished to cover or dispose of through special termination rituals involving defacement and careful breakage. These rituals are a source of much of the damage to early inscriptions at Copan.

Our access to recorded history really begins in earnest with the twelfth successor, Smoke-Imix-God K. This ruler stands out as a man of extraordinary accomplishment in a world that produced many great kings. One of the longest-lived kings in Copan’s history, he reigned for sixty-seven years, from A.D. 628 to 695. He presided over the Late Classic explosion of Copan into a major power in the Maya world, expanding the dominion of its dynasty to the widest extent it would ever know. The period ending on 9.11.0.0.0 (A.D. 652) represented one of the pinnacles of his reign. On that date, he erected a series of stelae throughout the valley, making it his personal sacred space in the same manner that other kings marked out the more modest spaces of pyramid summits and plazas for their ecstatic communion.[474] At the eastern entrance to the valley, he set Stelae 23, 13, 12, and at the western entrance, Stelae 10 and 19, all pivoting off Stelae 2 and 3 set up in the huge main plaza north of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:5a). Thus Smoke-Imix-God K activated the entire city of Copan and its valley as his Otherworld portal. Even recalcitrant lords of the noble lineages might hesitate to plot intrigue within the supernatural perimeter of a king so favored by the Ancestors.

Smoke-Imix-God K’s conversion of the entire community of the Copan Valley into a magical instrument bent to his will was more than a boastful gesture. Under his aegis, the Copan nobility enjoyed prestige and wealth at the expense of their rivals in neighboring cities. They were the dominant elite of Maya civilization’s southeastern region.[475] On the same 9.11.0.0.0 period ending, Smoke-Imix-God K celebrated his preeminence over his nearest neighbor, Quirigua, by erecting Altar L there[476] (Fig. 8:5b). In years to come this nearby kingdom, which straddled the rich trade routes of the Motagua River, would throw off the yoke of Copan in a spectacular battle. As Smoke-Imix-God K pursued his dream of empire, however, that day was far in the future. While the king grasped lands to the north and west on the Motagua, Maya lords, most likely from his own city, established themselves in the Valley of La Venta on the Chamelecon River between Copan and their non-Maya neighbors to the east.[477] In the hands of the powerful and ambitious Smoke-Imix-God K, Copan may have been one of the largest Maya royal territories of its time.

In A.D. 695, 18-Rabbit succeeded Smoke-Imix-God K and began his own transformation of his ancestors’ work. Where his predecessor had defined the boundaries of the sacred valley, 18-Rabbit chose the pivotal center of Copan as the stage for his own contribution to the glorious I history of the dynasty. Exhorting the truly exceptional sculptors, architects, scribes, and artisans of his time to extend their arts well beyond the limits of precedence, 18-Rabbit brought about the creation of many beautiful dramas in stone. In the course of a lifetime, he transformed the center of Copan into a unique and beautiful expression of Maya royal power that has endured to the present, unfailingly touching the most dispassionate of modern visitors.

One of his many projects was the remodeling of the Ballcourt. 18- Rabbit capped the older markers created by his predecessors with new images emphasizing his personal role as the incarnation of the Ancestral Hero Twins in their triumph over the Lords of Death. Next to the Ballcourt and within the adjacent space of the Great Plaza, 18-Rabbit also created a symbolic forest of te-tunob (Fig. 8:6). Within this magnificent grove each tree-stone bore his portrait in the guise of a god he had manifested through ecstatic ritual. All the tree-stones found in the Great Plaza were placed there between 9.14.0.0.0 and 9.15.5.0.0 (a.1). 711 — 736).[478]

One of 18-Rabbit’s final projects focused on the Acropolis directly south of his Ballcourt. There he rebuilt one of the ancient living mountains of his forebears, a monument referred to today as Temple 22.[479] 18-Rabbit commissioned his best artists to decorate this amazing building inside and out with deeply carved stone sculpture. Outside the temple, great Witz Monsters reared at the four corners of the cosmos, while the doorway of the inner sanctum, the king’s portal to the Otherworld, was framed by an arching Celestial Monster—the sky of the apotheosized Ancestors—laced with the blood scrolls of royal sacrifice (Pl. <verbatim>#).</verbatim> This sky of the king was held aloft by Pauahtunob, the age-old burden-bearers who stand at the four points of the compass and lift the heavens above the earth. Here they allowed the king to enter the darkness where only divine ahauob could go and return alive.

The magnificence of 18-Rabbit’s work lay not in the themes, which were traditional for Copan and all Maya ahauob, but rather in their execution. Unlike Pacal and Chan-Bahlum at Palenque, 18-Rabbit revealed no special political agenda in his efforts. Instead he focused solely upon the centrality of the king in the life of the state. From Smoke-Imix- God K he had inherited a court of nobles already accustomed to governing neighboring cities. To control these noble subordinates, 18-Rabbit needed to energetically and eloquently assert the prerogatives of his kingship over them. As we can see from the examples of his monumental art shown above, he accomplished his purpose with theological sophistication and poetic passion. Few kings in Maya history have ever wielded the canon of royal power with results as truly breathtaking as those of 18-Rabbit. But this balance of power was not to hold for long. From the clear vantage afforded us by hindsight, we can understand the root of the disaster that ended his reign. His beautiful expressions of the pivotal role of the divine king were aimed at a noble audience who would become increasingly convinced of their own ability to manage the affairs of the kingdom without the king.

The beginning of the end can be seen in the monumental art created by these very nobles. As the prosperity of the kingdom overflowed from the king to the valley elite, this elite began putting up monuments which, although erected in private and not public space, emulated royal practices. During 18-Rabbit’s reign, for example, a lineage of scribes occupying Compound 9N-8 built an extraordinary family temple (Structure 9N-82- Sub; Pl. <verbatim>#)</verbatim> dedicated to God N, the patron god of writing, and hence, of history itself. The texts of the temple mention the high king and probably also his predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K.[480] Not only were the nobility of 18-Rabbit’s reign privileged to commission such elaborately decorated buildings, they were able to take full advantage of the extraordinary artistic talent flourishing in the community of this time. In the case of Structure 9N-82, the <verbatim>scribes</verbatim> lineage was able to hire one of the finest masters in the valley to execute their sculpture.

During 18-Rabbit’s forty-two-year reign, Copan not only flourished as an artistic center of the first rank, but also became an multi-ethnic society, drawing in non-Maya people from the central region of Honduras around Lake Yojoa and Comayagua.[481] The recruitment of these people into the city created a truly cosmopolitan state, but one in which a slight mythological adjustment had to be made. Traditionally, the high king had always been the living manifestation of the special covenant which existed between the Maya people and their supernatural ancestors. By bringing in people from a non-Maya ethnic group, however, 18-Rabbit had to expand upon this tradition. There is not the slightest hint of unorthodox ritual in his monuments. Still, his lavish amplification of the cult of the king as god and supernatural hero may register his public appeal to barbarians less knowledgeable in Maya theology, and more impressed by pageantry, than local aristocrats. He may have persuaded such new converts to Maya culture that he was indeed their advocate to the Other- world, just as he was the advocate for his own people. Whether or not he enacted such a strategy, he did succeed in enhancing the power base of his kingdom and increasing the population of the valley.[482]

As had happened in other ambitious Late Classic kingdoms, the path of war and expansion taken by Copan finally turned back upon itself. The unfortunate 18-Rabbit reaped the whirlwind caused by his predecessor’s actions. In mid-career and at the height of his glory, he had installed a new ruler named Cauac-Sky (Fig. 8:7) at Quirigua, the kingdom brought under the hegemony of Copan by his father, Smoke- Imix-God K. The installation ritual, a “God K-in-hand” event, had taken place on January 2, A.D. 725, in “the land of (u cab}” 18-Rabbit of Copan.[483] Thirteen years after this accession, Cauac-Sky turned on his liege lord and attacked, taking 18-Rabbit captive in battle and sacrificing him at Quirigua on May 3, 738.[484]

The subsequent fate of Copan was profoundly different from that of Tikal or Naranjo after their defeat by Caracol. In their excavations, archaeologists have found no evidence that Quirigua dominated Copan at all. The population of Copan continued to burgeon, its lords pursued their architectural plans, and its merchants plied their trade with the rest of Honduras. In other words, everything was business as usual. A person looking at the record of the city’s economic and social life would never l> guess that anything had changed.[485]

Although it is possible that Cauac-Sky just wasn’t able to dominate so vast a neighbor from his more modest city, a more convincing explanation to this puzzle emerges. The absence of effect in the archaeological record may register a fundamental reaction of the Copan people themselves. The death of the king precipitated no faltering in the orderly world of the nobility and common tolk, perhaps because they were coming to believe that they could get along without a king. Apparently, the ruling dynasty was in no position to challenge that belief for quite some time. According to the inscriptional record, it took the dynasty almost twenty years to recover the prestige it lost when 18-Rabbit succumbed to his rival. Ultimately, this failure fooled the patriarchs of the subordinate lineages into believing that their civilized world could survive quite well without a king at the center.

There was still a king at Copan, however, even if he was an unremarkable one. Thirty-nine days after the defeat of 18-Rabbit, on a day close to the maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar,[486] a new king named Smoke-Monkey acceded to the throne. We have not been able to associate this king with any stelae or structures at Copan. In fact, the only historical episode of his reign that we know of was recorded by one of his descendants. This event, a first appearance of Eveningstar, was recorded in Temple 11 by the sixteenth successor of the dynasty, Yax-Pac.[487] After ruling for ten silent years, Smoke-Monkey died, and Smoke-Shell, his son,[488] became the king on February 18, 749.

Although Smoke-Shell reigned only fourteen years, he succeeded in reestablishing the tradition of glorious public performance, if not the glory, of his dynasty. In contrast to the long decades of humiliation that were the price of defeat paid by the ahauob of Tikal and Naranjo, Smoke- Shell brought his kingdom back from the ignominy of defeat within a katun. The strategy he used featured two main components: an ambitious building program and a judicious political marriage.

Shortly after taking the throne, Smoke-Shell began reconstruction work[489] on one of the oldest and most sacred points in the city center—the locus that had grown over that very early temple that contained the 9.0.0.0.0 temple and its adjacent Ballcourt. The magnificent result of his effort, the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (Structure 10L-26), is one of the premier monuments of the New World and a unique expression of the supernatural path of kings.[490] Inscribed upon this stairway of carved risers is the longest Precolumbian text known in the New World, comprising over twenty-two hundred glyphs.[491] This elegant text records the accessions and deaths of each of the high kings of the Yax-Kuk-Mo’ dynasty. This record of Copan’s divine history rises out of the mouth of an inverted Vision Serpent, pouring like a prophetic revelation of the cosmos, compelling the ancestors of Smoke-Shell to return through the sacred portal he 1 had activated for them. Flowing upward in the midst of this chronicle sit the last five successors of the dynasty, Smoke-Monkey, 18-Rabbit, Smoke- F Imix-God K, Butz’-Chan, and Moon-Jaguar, carved in life-sized portraits <verbatim><</verbatim> (Fig. 8:8). These ancestors are girded in the battle gear of Tlaloc-Venus 1 conquest war we have seen in full bloom at Tikal, Caracol, and Dos Pilas. In his version of history, Smoke-Shell proclaimed the prowess of his predecessors as warlords despite the personal defeat of 18-Rabbit by a vassal ahau.

As the building on his portal progressed, Smoke-Shell sent to a faraway, exotic place to bring a new wife to Copan. From the opposite side of the Maya world, a royal woman from the famous kingdom of Palenque crossed the dangerous lands to marry her new husband and bear him a son who would become the next king.[492] His strategy echoes the marriage alliance between Naranjo and Dos Pilas that revived the Naranjo dynasty after its defeat by Lord Kan of Caracol. This marriage likely occurred late in Smoke-Shell’s life, for his heir came to the throne when he was less than twenty years old.

Smoke-Shell’s efforts to revive the dynasty and to persuade his nobility to follow him apparently succeeded only in the short term. He bequeathed his child, Yax-Pac, a variety of problems touching every stratum of society, from the highest to the most humble. In every long-lived dynasty, the pyramid of royal descendants increases every generation until an enormous body of people exists, all sharing the prerogatives of royal kinship. Not only are these people a drain on the society that must support them, but they create political problems by intriguing against one another. The general nobility was also growing in wealth and power at this time. Needless to say, Yax-Pac would have to be a very strong king to control and satisfy all these political factions. In addition to this, the valley of Copan was plagued by a variety of economic and ecological problems. The rulers of Copan, by and large, had done their job too well. The valley resources had been overdeveloped and strained to their very limits. Now it seemed that the trend toward progress was reversing itself.

Overpopulation was one of the primary problems Yax-Pac would have to deal with during his reign. The kingdom had continued to grow at a steady rate during the two reigns following 18-Rabbit’s capture. Throughout the eighth century, more and more residential complexes[493] sprang up on the rich bottomlands around the Acropolis (Fig. 8:9). The region within a one-kilometer radius of the Ballcourt contained over fifteen hundred structures, with an estimated density of three thousand people per square kilometer. At least twenty thousand people were trying to eke out a living from the badly strained resources. This population simply could not be supported by local agriculture alone, especially since T the best land was buried under the expanding residential complexes around the Acropolis.[494]

When Yax-Pac came to the throne, he inherited a disaster in the C making. Over the generations, expanding residential zones had covered J the best agricultural lands, forcing farmers into the foothills and then onto the mountain slopes. There they were forced to clear more and more forest to produce maize fields. Clearing, in turn, caused erosion. Shorter fallow periods were depleting the usable soils at an even faster rate, just when the kingdom was required to feed the largest population in its history.[495]

Deforestation caused other problems as well. People needed wood for their cooking fires, for the making of lime in the construction of temples,[496] for building houses, and for dozens of other domestic and ritual uses. As more and more people settled in the valley, the forest gradually retreated, exposing more and more of the poor soils on the mountain slopes and causing more erosion. The cutting down of the forest also affected climate and rainfall, making it yet more difficult for people to sustain themselves. With an insufficient food supply came malnutrition and its resultant chronic diseases, rampant conditions that affected the nobility as well as the common people.[497] The quality of life, which was never very good in the preindustrial cities of the ancient world, fast deteriorated toward the unbearable in Copan under the pained gaze of its last great king.

As his father had before him, Yax-Pac continued to place the focus of his royal performance upon dynastic history, holding up the values of his predecessors as the canon by which he would guide Copan through the dangers and crises of the present. After becoming king on July 2, 763, Yax-Pac’s first action on Copan’s beautiful stage[498] was the setting of a small carved altar representing the Vision Serpent into the Great Plaza amid the tree-stones of his rehabilitated predecessor, 18-Rabbit (Fig. 8:20). This small altar celebrated 9.16.15.0.0, the first important period ending after his accession.

Shortly thereafter, the young ahau turned his attention to an ancient temple standing on the northern edge of the Acropolis, overlooking the forest of tree-stones. This old temple had been built by the seventh successor of the dynasty and named on its dedication step “Holy Copan Temple, the House of Mah Kina Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[499] At the base of the temple stairs, Yax-Pac’s father, Smoke-Shell, had erected Stela N, his final contribution to Copan’s public history. Yax-Pac chose the locale of that old temple as the site of his greatest work. There he planned to raise Temple 11, one of the most ambitious structures ever built in the history of the city. In the tradition of his forebears, he encased the old temple in the new, shaping the imagery of the new temple into a unique and spectacular expression both of cosmic order and of the sanctions that bound the fate of the community to that of the king. Through this building and the Otherworld portal it housed at the junction of its dark corridors, Yax-Pac began his lifelong effort to ward off the impending disaster that hung over the valley.

We are not sure of the exact starting date for the construction of this temple, but work on it must have begun in the first few years of Yax-Pac’s reign. Six years later, on March 27, 769, following the celebration of the equinox, Yax-Pac dedicated the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the temple. This Reviewing Stand faced the inner court and temples of his forebears which studded the West Court of the Acropolis. Built against the first terrace of the pyramid that would eventually support Temple 11, the Reviewing Stand was a metaphorical Xibalban Ballcourt, complete with three rectangular markers set into the plaza floor below in the pattern of a playing alley (Fig. 8:10). Jutting outward into the West Court, this stairway was a place of sacrifice where victims were rolled down the stairs as if they were the ball.[500] The stair itself carried an inscribed history of its dedication rituals, naming the structure as a ballcourt. Huge stone conch shells marked the terrace as the surface of the Xibalban waters through which the ax-wielding executioner god Chac-Xib-Chac (an aspect of Venus, the firstborn of the Twins) rose when he was brought forth by the king’s ecstasy.

Yax-Pac further indicated that the entire West Court was under the murky waters of the Underworld by placing two floating caimans[501] atop the platform opposite the Reviewing Stand. The southern side of this pyramid was thus a representation of Xibalba. It was the “place of fright,” the Otherworld where sacrificial victims were sent into the land of the Lords of Death to play ball and to deliver messages from the divine ahau.[502] With the construction of such an elaborate, theatrical ballcourt, Yax-Pac was making an important statement about his strategies for the kingship: He would require himself to excel in battle against noble enemies and bring these enemies here to die.

As the king set about preparing his new temple and the supernatural landscape surrounding it, he reached back to 18-Rabbit, the source of both his dynasty’s success and its profoundest failure. In August of the same year in which he dedicated the Reviewing Stand, Yax-Pac built within the Acropolis what would be the first of many bridges to his paradoxical ancestor. The king set Altar Z on the platform between Temple 22—the magnificent temple created by 18-Rabbit on his first katun anniversary— and Temple 11, the structure that would become his own cosmic building (Fig. 8:11). Yax-Pac may also have set another important precedent with this small monument, for we think it makes mention of a younger brother of the king.[503] This inscription is significant because it indicates the beginning of a trend in Yax-Pac’s strategies in regard to the public record. In the course of his lifetime, Yax-Pac peopled Copan’s stage of history with an ever-increasing troupe of ahauob. This is a strategy we have seen before at Yaxchilan—sharing power is always better than losing it.

[[][Fig. 8:12 Temple 11: Architectural Detail]]

The first katun ending of Yax-Pac’s life was a significant one. Not only was it the first major festival of his young career, but by coincidence it tell on the day of a partial eclipse, followed sixteen days later by the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar.[504] To celebrate the katun ending,[505] Yax-Pac sandwiched a tiny building, Temple 21a, between 18-Rabbit’s great cosmic building, Temple 22, and the now-destroyed Temple 21.[506] The small scale of Temple 21a and its position between the two huge buildings suggests Yax-Pac had assigned most of the available labor to the ongoing construction of Temple 11. Yet regardless of the scale, Yax-Pac was clearly intent upon associating himself with the earlier king. Perhaps Smoke-Shell had successfully restored 18-Rabbit’s reputation and he was, by that time, remembered more for the accomplishments of his reign than the ignominy of his death. Nevertheless, the repeated efforts by Yax-Pac to embrace the memory of this ancestor suggest that there was a pressing need to continue the process of rehabilitation not only of 18-Rabbit but also of his dynasty in the face of a disenchanted nobility.

On 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773), two years after the katun ending, Yax-Pac dedicated Temple 11. The magnificent cosmic statement he made in this monument would become the basis of his fame. Before the passage of time had sullied its original splendor, this building was truly one of the most unusual and intriguing temples ever built in the F Precolumbian Maya world. Facing the northern horizon, this two-story-high temple with wide interior vaults towered over the Ballcourt and 1 Great Plaza. Its principal north door opened through the mouth of a huge Witz Monster,[507] which glared down at the gathered populace below. At each of the two northern corners of this microcosmic world stood a giant Pauahtun (Fig. 8:12a), its huge hands holding up images of the Cosmic Monster, arching across the roof entablatures in symbolic replication of remnant of the full-figured inscription that was over the door the arch of heaven and the planetary beings who moved through that path on their supernatural journeys.[508] It was as if he took the magnificent sculpture at the heart of Temple 22, 18-Rabbit’s greatest building, and turned it inside out so that it became the outer facade rather than an arch over the door to the inner sanctum. Today, fragments of the scaled body of this Cosmic Monster litter the ground around the fallen temple.

Yax-Pac designed the ground floor of this temple with a wide eastwest gallery crossed by a smaller north-south corridor. In this way he engineered an entrance to the building from each of the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west. Just inside each of these four doors, panels facing one another record historical events important to Yax-Pac’s political strategy and the dedication of the temple itself.[509] What is curious about each pair of texts is that one is in normal reading order, while the other facing text reads in reverse order as if you are seeing a mirror image. It is as if you were standing between the glass entry doors of a bank—the writing on the door in front of you would read normally while the writing behind you would be reversed. If you were standing outside, however, the texts on both door would read in the proper order. In Temple 11, of course, the walls are not transparent, but this made no difference, since the audience addressed by these texts consisted of the ancestors and the gods. Apparently, they could read through solid walls. Furthermore, each pair of texts is designed to be read from a different direction starting with the north door: To read them in proper order (that is, “outside the bank doors”) the reader would have to circulate through all four of the directions. This attention to the “point of view” of the gods is not unusual in Maya art.

Just to the south of the place where the two corridors cross, Yax-Pac built a small raised platform set within the skeletal, gaping jaws of the Maw of the Otherworld. The carved image of this great Maw was set at both the southern (Fig. 8:12b) and northern (Fig. 8:13) entries onto the platform. He made the northern side special by replacing the lower jaw of the Maw with a bench depicting twenty ancestral figures, ten each on either side of an inscription recording his accession as king (Fig. 8:14). These were the dynasts who had preceded him onto the throne of Copan.[510] Yax-Pac had brought them forth from the land of the ancestors to participate in his accession rite. Their sanction of this rite was forever frozen in this stone depiction, serving as a testament to those privileged elite who would enter the temple to see and affirm.

Temple 11 was the greatest work of Yax-Pac’s life. To be sure, he built other buildings during his reign, but none so grand in size, ambition, and conception as this one.[511] Temple 11 was an umbilicus linking the kingdom of Yax-Pac to the nurturing, demanding cosmos: the final great expression at Copan of the Maya vision. Its lower level, especially to the south, manifested the underwater world of Xibalba.[512] The great rising Acropolis that supported it was the sacred mountain which housed other portals into the Otherworld. The temple roof was the sky held away from the mountain by the Pauahtunob at the corners of the world. The front door was the huge mouth of the mountain, the cave through which the king entered sacred space. At the heart of the temple was the raised platform defined as the portal to the Otherworld. This building sealed the covenant between Yax-Pac, his people, and their collective destiny. Its enormous size and grand scope were designed to proclaim the power of the king to rally his people in the face of their difficulties. It may not have been the finest Maya temple ever built—the sculptures weren’t anywhere near the artistry of 18-Rabbit’s. Nor was it the most architecturally sound—the vaults were so wide they had to be reinforced because the walls started to fall down as soon as the builders began to raise the second story. Nevertheless, this temple was the statement of authority the young king hoped would help keep disaster at bay.

[[][Fig. 8:14 Temple 11 bench]]

Yax-Pac continued to refine his fundamental statement of charismatic power during the next three years in construction projects that altered the west side of the Acropolis. At the five-year point of Katun 17, three years after he had dedicated Temple 11, he set Altar Q (Fig. 8:3) in front of the newly completed Temple 16, a massive pyramid he built at the heart of the Acropolis. Replete with images of Tlaloc warfare and the skulls of slain victims, Temple 16 replicated the imagery of his father’s great project—Temple 26—as Temple 11 had reproduced Temple 22 of 18-Rabbit’s reign.[513]

Altar Q, a low, flat-sided monument, was more suited to the functions of a throne than those of an altar. It depicted each of the sixteen ancestors seated upon his own name glyph. The whole dynasty unfolded in a clockwise direction, starting with Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and culminating with Yax-Pax himself. His ancestors sit in front of a monument celebrating war while they ride just below the surface of the symbolic sea he created in the West Court. The program of imagery is an elegant and powerful statement of power. Ironically, the charisma of the divine lord as exemplified in battle and conquest belied the reality of Yax-Pac’s circumstances, for this was to be the last great exhortation of kingship to be built in the valley of Copan.

For all of its elegance and centrality, the West Court and Altar Q mark a change in strategy for Yax-Pac. Up to this time, kings had acknowledged the passage of sacred time with buildings, sculptures, and inscriptions erected only in the ceremonial heart of the community. Now, however, Yax-Pac also began to write his history outside the Acropolis by traveling to the residential compounds of his lords to conduct royal rituals within their lineage houses. This was clearly a comedown for an “ahau of the ahauob,” made necessary by the need to hold the allegiance of his lords in the face of civil disaster.[514]

The next important period-ending date that Yax-Pac celebrated, 9.17.10.0.0, was commemorated not only in the royal precinct of the Acropolis, but also in the household of a noble family of the city. The date and description of the scattering rite that Yax-Pax enacted is inscribed on a bench in the main building of Group 9M-18[515] (Fig. 8:9), a large noble household to the east of the Acropolis. Yax-Pac’s action is recorded as an event still to come in the future at the time the patriarch dedicated his house, the place where he held court over the affairs of his family and followers (Fig. 8:15). Strangely the name of the patriarch was not included on the bench. Instead it records a dedicatory offering given in the name of Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s father.[516] Perhaps the lineage patriarch felt he should not place his name so close to that of his liege lord, so he remained anonymous. Nevertheless, he brought prestige to his own house and weight to the decisions he made astride this bench by focusing on the high kings as the main actors in his family drama.

Shortly after the period ending, another lineage benefited from Yax- Pac’s ritual attention, and bragged about it inside the new house of their leader. The scribal lineage living in Group 9N-8 (Fig. 8:9) dismantled the magnificent structure an earlier patriarch had commissioned during the reign of 18-Rabbit and put a new, larger building in its place. The elegance of this building was unmistakable. Its upper zone was sculpted with mosaic images of the lineage’s own patriarch; and on either side of the door that led into the large, central chamber of the building, a Pauahtun, one of the patron gods of their craft, rose dramatically from the Maw of Xibalba.

Almost all of the floor space of this chamber was occupied by a bench[517] on which the patriarch sat to conduct the business of the lineage. This bench (Fig. 8:16) records that on 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Ch’en (July 10, 781),[518] this patriarch dedicated his new house while the king participated in those rites with him. As Yax-Pac had done for the lineage head of Compound 9M-18, he honored this patriarch by participating in rituals on his home ground. The king was breaking precedent, going to his subordinate rather than the other way around. At Yaxchilan, Bird-Jaguar had also gone to his subordinate across the river at La Pasadita, but in that instance he had functioned as the principal actor while the cahal was clearly in a position of subservience. In the scribes’ building, Yax-Pac’s name closes the text, but the noble is given equal billing. Furthermore, this text doubles as the body of a Cosmic Monster, imagery directly associated with the royal house of Copan. Four Pauahtunob hold up the bench in the same way that they hold up the sky in Temples 22, 26, and 11. The head of this scribes’ lineage utilized the same symbolic imagery as his king, and he did so apparently with Yax-Pac’s approval.

Yax-Pac thus gave away some of the hard-earned royal charisma of his ancestors to honor the head of this lineage. Was this the act of a desperate man? In all likelihood the king was fully aware of the potential danger in his capitulation to the nobility, but regarded it as a necessary step in his efforts to save the kingdom from impending economic disaster. He was clearly seeking solutions to immediate political problems threatening the peace and stability of the domain destiny had placed in his hands. Like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan in the west, Yax-Pac tried to secure the continuing loyalty of the patriarchs of his kingdom by sharing his prerogatives with them, particularly the privilege of history.

Once Yax-Pac had embarked on this policy, he pursued it systematically and creatively during the second half of Katun 17. He raised monuments in the community at large and in the main ceremonial center and “lent” his historical actions to the monuments of significant others in the political arena of Copan. In the region now under the modern village of Copan (Fig. 8:5), the king erected two monuments to celebrate the first katun anniversary of his accession. Here, in the village area, he planted Stela 8 (Fig. 8:17), on which he recorded this anniversary and a related bloodletting which took place five days later. As we have seen so often before, the anniversary date fell on an important station of Venus: the maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[519] Yax-Pac also chose to record his parentage on this stela, reminding his people that he was the child of the woman from Palenque. This is the only monument ever to mention Yax-Pac’s relationship to his mother, and it is possible that he did so here in order to lend prestige to his half brother by the same woman.

The second monument celebrating Yax-Pac’s first katun anniversary, Altar T, also graced the central plaza of the town. Here, for the first time, we are formally introduced to Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, the king’s half brother by the woman Smoke-Shell had brought from Palenque to rejuvenate the lineage.[520] As we shall see shortly, this sibling would become an important protagonist in the saga of Copan during the twilight of its dynasty.

Altar T was decorated on three sides with twelve figures, some human and some animalistic. All of these figures faced toward a central inscription referring to the half brother (Fig. 8:18). The figures on Altar T emulate the style of Altar Q, Yax-Pac’s great dynastic monument of twenty years earlier.[521] This design was chosen quite intentionally to honor the king’s half brother. The top surface has a rendering of the image of ‘ a great crocodile sprawling in the waters of the earth. Waterlilies decorate his limbs, and his rear legs and tail drape over the corners and the back of the altar. Like fanciful scales, the king’s name marches down the spine of the crocodile, and the tail of the great beast falls between two humanlike figures personifying the date of Yax-Pac’s accession and its anniversary twenty years later. Sitting among the extended legs of the floating crocodile in the world under its belly are six human figures, presumably ancestors. To be sure, Altar T and its imagery celebrated the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s accession, but the protagonist whose name sits under the nose of the crocodile is the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac himself.

We know Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac was the half brother of the king because his status as child of the king’s mother was prominently inscribed on Altar U, a monument he himself raised (Fig. 8:19) in the town which once existed under the modern village. The “sun-eyed throne stone,”[522] as the Copanecs called it, depicts a sun-eyed monster flanked by two old gods who sit at the open Maw of the Otherworld. The inscriptions on the rear and top surface retrospectively document Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s participation in rituals on 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793) and the seating on January 29, 780, of yet another player on Copan’s historical stage. Named Yax-Kamlay, this man, who may have been a younger full brother of the king, also played a crucial role in the last half of Yax-Pac’s reign. The name Yax K’amlay means “First Steward”[523] so that this full brother may have functioned in a role like “prime minister,” while the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, governed the district of the ancient city under the modern village area for the high king. This type of governance, rule by a council of brothers, ultimately failed in Copán, but it succeeded at Chichón Itzá, as we shall see in the next chapter.

The altar stone was dedicated on June 24, 792, a day near the summer solstice, but the text also records events later than this date. We surmise that the altar was commissioned as an object in anticipation of its function as a historical forum. The anticipated rituals occurred on the day 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793), a day that happily coincided with the thirtieth tun anniversary (30x360) of the king’s accession and the thirteenth haab anniversary (13x365) of Yax-Kamlay’s seating. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, who dedicated the altar, honored both his kingly half brother and the man who was the king’s first minister by celebrating this unusual co-anniversary. It was Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, however, who is clearly the protagonist of the inscription.

Let us stop for a moment and imagine what the king would have seen as he led a procession from the Acropolis to the village on the day these anniversaries were to be celebrated.

•

Yax-Pac paused on the causeway near the ancient tree-stone erected by his ancestor, Smoke-Imix-God K, when the valley had known happier times and lived in hope. He could see the visage of his ancestor etched by the shadows cast in the sharp morning light. The great te-tun displayed two faces—a proud human one facing the rising sun, and another masked with the image of the Sun God watching the ending of the days. Smoke- Imix was forever caught in his act of sacrifice, eternally materializing the sacred world for his people with the shedding of his blood.[524]

For a moment, Yax-Pac wondered what kind of immortality his forebear had won with the great tree-stone he had erected halfway between the Acropolis and the old community now governed by his younger half brother, the son of the royal woman from Palenque. He was grateful that the ancestors had provided him with such a capable sibling. The vigorous, optimistic Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac strove to give him the labor and tribute necessary to keep the kingdom together in these hard times, and now he was overseeing the celebration of the thirtieth tun of reign. By coincidence, Yax-Pac’s anniversary fell on the same day that ended the thirteenth haab of Yax-Kamlay’s administration. They would commemorate the two anniversaries together.

Yax-Pac walked twenty paces ahead and paused again when he saw the smaller tree-stone[525] visible in the small compound to the west of the double portrait of his ancestor. This portrait of Smoke-Imix was less impressive in scale, but equally important, for it preserved the memory of the king as warrior, celebrating the half-period of Katun 12. On that day, Venus had stood still just after he had journeyed across the face of his brother, the Sun, to become Morningstar.[526] 18-Rabbit had made his debut as the heir on the occasion of that period ending. Who among the nobility remembered, or respected, such things nowadays? There was a coughing and shuffling of silent impatience in the halted entourage behind him. He ignored them.

As the low, long-shadowed light of the morning sun rose above the mountains rimming the far side of his lands and broke through the mist, Yax-Pac sighed and turned back to look across the valley. He gazed with pride on the Kan-Te-Na, Pat-Chan-Otot,[527] the house he had dedicated soon after the solar eclipse at the end of Katun 17. Silhouetted against the beams of brilliant yellow light,[528] it towered above the Acropolis, echoing the huge mountains that rose above the valley floor in the distance. The sacred mountains beyond the sacred portals built by the men of his dynasty were bare now, like bones drying in the sun. It was winter and those mountains should be green with growth from the fall rains, but all he saw was bone-white rock and the red slashes of landslides scarring the faces of the witzob. The stands of forest that had once graced the ridgetops were only memories now in the mind’s eye of the very, very old. Even the occasional patches and scraggly survivors he had found in his childhood wanderings were gone—not a single sapling reared its silhouette against the blue sky.

Thirty tuns ago today he had followed his father, Smoke-Shell, onto the throne. Then he had been a young man who had not even seen the end of his first katun. He had harbored great hopes of a glorious and prosperous reign, but the gods and the ancestors seemed to be turning their backs on the people of the sacred Macaw Mountain.

Yax-Pac’s eyes swept across the valley, catching an occasional glimmer of light from the distant waters of the river. Mostly he saw the white houses of his people—hundreds of them—filled with children, many of them sick and hungry. Smoke still rose from the kitchen fires, but Yax-Pac knew the young men had to walk many days now through wider and wider strips of barren land to find firewood. From time without beginning, the earth had yielded up her abundance—wood to cook the bountiful harvests of earlier generations and to make the plaster covering for the buildings and plazas commissioned by the ancestors. What was one to make of a world without trees? The earth itself was dying, and with it all must eventually die.

In the glory days of his grandfathers, his people had believed in the favor of the gods and in the endless cycles of wet and dry that gave rhythm to the passage of days and life to the earth. More and more children had been born, and more and more people had come from distant lands to live in his valley. The more there were, the more they needed fuel and lumber, and the more they cut the forest. The river ran red with the soil of the mountains, naked now, having given up their flesh to the hard storms of summer and the floods of the winter months. Always there was too much rain, or not enough. The hard rains washed away the earth and the rock below could no longer nourish the seeds of the sacred maize. Too much of the good land along the river was under the houses of the noble clans.

The farmers had been driven higher and higher up the stony mountainsides looking for land that could hold their crops. Some of them even had to tie ropes around their waists as they worked the nearly vertical walls of the mountainsides. Anywhere the hard rock cradled a shallow pocket of earth, they planted their seed and hoped the young sprouts of maize would find enough water and nourishment to lift their delicate leaves into the air.

Yax-Pac felt a shiver run up his back in the cold morning air. It was only thirty-five days after the winter solstice, but already it was clear that there had not been enough rain during the fall and winter. His people were facing another bad year, with too many mouths to feed with what little the earth yielded to the hard labor of his farmers. He knew in his heart that they must somehow bring back the forest, for it was the source of life. But what was he to do? His people were sick and dying already. They had to cut and burn the scraggly bush that patched his land like scabs to plant their crops or death would win its final battle with the people of the land of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He saw no way out of this losing battle with the Lords of Death, except more prayer and sacrifices to the gods and the ancestors of the Otherworld. If they would only hear the cry of his people and touch the earth with the gift of gentle rain, perhaps the times of his fathers would return.

Yax-Pac’s eyes traveled up again toward the impassive face of Smoke-Imix and he shivered once more. This was the face of his ancestor which turned toward the west and the death of the sun. Straightening his shoulders, Yax-Pac firmly dismissed all thoughts of doom from his mind and resumed his march toward the house of his brother. Today they would meet to celebrate the years of their reigns: Yax-Pac as the king would be together with his younger brothers and councillors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay. Perhaps, in the quiet moments between their public performances in the rituals, he would have time to talk to the two men who shared the burden of rule with him. They all longed for the old days when there was plenty of everything and no end in sight for the glory of Copan. Maybe together they could get the ancestors to pay attention to the plight of the children of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Pondering the past and his grim vision of the future, Yax-Pac resolved to harness the power and will of his people. While he lived in this world, all of his thoughts, the wisdom of his ancestors, the skill of his scribes and artisans, would be bent to the salvation of his people and his kingdom.

•

This remarkable co-anniversary and the two men who shared it with the king were also celebrated in the Acropolis at almost the same time. On 9.18.5.0.0 when Altar U was about to be completed, Yax-Pac set a small throne stone inside the back chamber of Temple 22a, the council house (Popol Nah) that had been erected next to 18-Rabbit’s Temple 22 by his successor, Smoke-Monkey.[529] On the throne, he celebrated his own katun anniversary (which had been commemorated by Altar T and Stela 8 in the Village area), the co-anniversary he had shared with Yax-Kamlay, and finally the hotun ending. This final date he associated with Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac so that all three of them appear prominently together. In the council house built by his grandfather in the dark years after 18- Rabbit’s defeat, Yax-Pac celebrated his own council of siblings.[530]

[[][Fig. 8:20 Yax-Pac and the Vision Serpent Altars in the Great Plaza]]

The altars of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay signal Yax- Pac’s radical intentions in his efforts to sustain the government, for these brothers must have stood as close to the status of co-regent as the orthodox rules of divine kingship could allow. Furthermore, the two altars Yax-Pac erected in the old village area constituted major historical and theological statements. Not only did the king and his half brother call upon Copan’s best artists and scribes to execute their new vision of authority, but they communicated this vision in a style that was highly innovative, even in the expressive and daring tradition of Copan’s artisans.[531] These large, dramatic, boulderlike altars were the first to combine glyphs and zoomorphic figures, and the first altar monuments to stand on their own without a stela to accompany them.

Yax-Pac shared his royal prerogatives with his brothers in response to the growing stress in the valley as social and economic conditions worsened. He also invited people of lesser status, such as the lords of Compounds 9M-18 and 9N-8 to share royal privilege by erecting monuments memorializing the king’s participation in the dedications of their houses. In this way, he broadened his power base. Perhaps the pressures were different, but Yax-Pac, like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, chose to share his power in order to conserve it. For a while, his strategy worked. In the end, however, the precedents of sharing central power with nonroyal patriarchs destroyed the divinity that had sustained the Copan kingship for more than seven hundred years.

As Copan declined, bits of her history slowly began to slip from the grasp of her people. Neither Yax-Pac nor his lords left any major monuments that celebrated the turning of the katun on 9.18.0.0.0. For reasons yet unknown, the next hotun, 9.18.5.0.0 (September 15, 795), saw a lot of activity. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s Altar U, found in the town beneath the modern village, mentioned that period ending and it was celebrated in Temple 22a as we discussed above. Perhaps more important was Yax- Pac’s return to the forest of tree-stones erected by 18-Rabbit in the Great Plaza. On the eastern side of this plaza, between Stelae F and H, he set I another of the Vision Serpent altars (G2) next to the first monument (Altar G3) he had erected there just after he became the high king (Fig. 8:20).

Five years later on the half-period, 9.18.10.0.0, the third of these Vision Serpent monuments, Altar Gl, was erected. With this monument in place, the triangular portal set in the middle of 18-Rabbit’s tree-stone forest was completed. This altar, right in the ceremonial center of the city, also affirmed the political duality binding Yax-Pac to his half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This superb sculpture, called the “na-chan altar” by the Copanecs, presented a double-headed image of the Cosmic Monster, skeletal at one end and fleshed at the other (Fig. 8:21). Each side of its body displayed a special text. On the north side, the dedication of the altar “in the land of Yax-Pac” was recorded; on the south, Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac’s name. The placement of this altar was highly significant. It was one thing for the half brother to get star billing in the town under the modern village, but entirely another for him to be featured in the sacred precinct in the center of the kingdom. The Acropolis and the Great Plaza had always been the sanctuary of the divine kings.

Yax-Pac’s next project, Temple 18 (Fig. 8:22a), must have been under construction during the time of this same 9.18.10.0.0 period ending. This temple is the last building Yax-Pac ever built on the Acropolis, and its smaller scale is good evidence of the reduced assets available to the king less than twenty-five years after he dedicated his magnificent Otherworld portal in Temple 11. Set on the southeast corner of the Acropolis, directly across trom Temple 22, this final royal sanctuary contained an elaborate vaulted tomb chamber that was looted in ancient times.[532]

Yax-Pac placed this building in one of the most potent points in the city, an area that had been the focus of his attention for thirty years. This temple completed a skewed southward triangle with Temples 21a and 22a, anchored on Temple 22, the sacred building housing the portal of his ancestor 18-R.abbit (Fig. 8:11). The inscription carved into the interior walls of the outer chamber of this temple recorded the date of its dedication as 9.18.10.17.18 4 Etz’nab 1 Zac (August 12, 801), the day of the zenith passage of the sun (Fig. 8:22b). The imagery carved on the jambs of the doors in the outer and the center walls is a radical departure from precedent at Copan and reflects the dark final days of its dynasty. Yax-Pac and a companion (most likely his half brother) wield spears and strut in the regalia of warriors (Fig. 8:23) at the place of the waterlily. They wear cotton armor, shrunken heads, ropes for binding captives, and the bones of past victims. Grasping shields and weapons, they are ready for battle with Copan’s foes.

The symbolism on these two doors reflects a change in strategy in direct correspondence with the violent death throes of Copan. In this last building, Yax-Pac did not reiterate the cosmic sanction of his reign. Instead, he announced his success and prowess as a warrior. Although all Copan’s kings had been warriors and sacrificial executioners, this choice of portraiture is unusual in Copan’s history.

The Hieroglyphic Stairs built by Smoke-Shell emphasized the role of the ancestral kings as warriors, and this same Tlaloc-war iconography was prominently displayed on Temple 16 and Temple 21. Nevertheless, these were merely ancestral portraits or stage backdrops for rituals. Such rituals may have required wars to provide victims to send to the Otherworld in the tradition of Maya political life, but the Copanec tradition since the time of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had been to show the ruler standing in the portal of the Otherworld. It was his role as communicator with the ancestral dead and the materializer of the gods that preoccupied Copan royal portraiture.

In all of the city’s long history, this is the only building on which the king is actually shown in battle, wielding the weapons of war.[533] We can only assume the role of king as active warrior became increasingly important to his public image as the crisis within his kingdom deepened. None of Yax-Pac’s enemies are mentioned by name, but neighboring kingdoms may well have been making forays, or perhaps the non-Maya peoples who had always lived just beyond the borders decided to move against the failing kingdom. Copan may also have been suffering from internal political problems. The nobles who had ruled parts of the kingdom for the high king, especially in its expanded version, may have decided to strike out on their own. War apparently was the only means at Yax-Pac’s disposal to fend off these challenges. Sadly, when authority fails, force is the last arbiter.

In spite of these upheavals, the machinery of the state ground on. Yax-Pac recorded the end of his second katun as king on 9.18.12.5.17 2 Caban 15 Pax (December 4, 802), on a beautifully carved stone incensario. This incensario is the only monument we have identified so far from the second half of that katun.[534] We do have one other record of Yax-Pac’s activities from the end of this katun, albeit an unusual one. Yax-Pac paid a state visit to Copan’s old rival, Quiriguá, in order to perform a scattering rite on 9.19.0.0.0 (June 28, 810) (Fig. 8:24). This visit was unusual on two counts. First of all, kings rarely traveled to neighboring kingdoms; they preferred to send ambassadors.[535] Second, this sort of scattering rite was usually performed at the homesite, not in another king’s city. As far as we know, Yax-Pac did not perform a similar sacrificial ritual at Copán, although we know he was still ruling there, for his death was commemorated there some ten years later.

Yax-Pac died shortly before 9.19.10.0.0 (May 6, 820).[536] Although he had struggled valiantly to retain the loyalty and cooperation of the nobles in his valley, his strategy did not ultimately succeed. After seven hundred years, the central authority in the valley of Copan had less than a decade of life left.

Although we do not know the exact date of Yax-Pac’s death, his survivors chose this half-period date (9.19.10.0.0) to commemorate his entry into the Otherworld. On that day they erected Stela 11 in the southwest corner of the platform supporting Temple 18 (Figs. 8:11 and 8:22), the last building he constructed. The imagery on this stela (Fig. 8:25) depicts Yax-Pac standing in the watery Otherworld holding the bar of office. In this instance, however, the bar is missing the serpent heads that symbolized the path of communication between the supernatural world and the human world.[537] Yax-Pac no longer needed them for he was already among the supernatural beings, a state marked by the smoking torch piercing his forehead. In the Otherworld Yax-Pac was manifested as God K, the deity of kings and their lineages.[538]

The inscription on this strange rounded stela is enigmatic, but we have hints of its meaning. 1 he verb is a phonetic spelling of hom, the verb we have already seen recording ‘I ikal’s war. Ilere, however, the word does not refer to the destruction of war, but rather to the other meaning of the verb, “to terminate” and “to end”—as, for example, “to end a katun.” Following hom is the glyph that stands for “founder” or perhaps “lineage” or “dynasty” in other texts at Copan Putting all this together, we understand this text to mean that the people of Copan believed the dynasty of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had ended with the death of Yax-Pac.[539]

Yax-Pac was not, however, the last king of Copan Although his reign was a difficult one, he was fortunate in one respect. He lived long enough to gain a place in history, but died soon enough to avoid the final tragedy. The king who oversaw those last days of kingship at Copan was named U-Cit-Tok. His is perhaps the saddest story of all the Maya kings we have met, for he inherited a world that had already fallen apart. There were too many people, too much of the forest gone, too many nobles grabbing honor and power for their own benefit, too little faith in the old answers, too little rain, and too much death.

This tragic man became the new king on 9.19.11.14.5 3 Chicchan 3 Ho (February 10, 822),[540] a day that contained some of the old astronomical associations beloved by the Maya, it was the day of disappearance for the Morningstar and a time of conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, which were just visible in the hours before dawn. The accession rituals of that day were commemorated on an altar placed on the mound at the north end of the Ballcourt (Fig. 8:11) near Stela 2, the old monument that commemorated Smokc-Imix-God K and the earlier days of Copan’s glory.

[[][Fig. 8:26 U-Cit-Tok, the Last King of Copan]]

The south side of the altar (Fig. 8:26) depicts the new king seated across from Yax-Pac in direct emulation of Altar Q, and in the tradition pursued by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac on his monument. As on Altar Q, the Calendar Round sits between the two kings, but U-Cit-Tok felt the need to qualify its meaning even further by writing chumwan, “he was seated,” after it.[541] On the left, in the same place occupied by Yax-Kuk-Mo’ on Altar Q, the new ruler sits on his own name glyph, holding out a fanlike object toward his predecessor. On his opposite side, in the same position he occupies on Altar Q, sits Yax-Pac. Perched on his name glyph, Yax- Pac mirrors the position and clothing of his successor, passing on, by analogy, the power and sanction of his divinity. It was not the younger version of the king that U-Cit-Tok wished to evoke, but the divinity of the mature and aged Yax-Pac. The pattern of Yax-Pac’s beard emulates his portrait on Stela 11, the image of his last and irreversible journey into Xibalba.

The final hours of the kings of Copan are frozen in this amazing altar. On the other side is a scene of two figures, seated profile to the viewer while engaged in some sort of ritual (Fig. 8:27). We will never know what the sculptor intended to depict here because the altar was never finished.[542] In the middle of his cutting the imagery into the stone, the central authority of Copan collapsed. The sculptor picked up his tools and went home, never to return to his work on the altar. Copan’s dynastic history ended with the echoing slap of that sculptor’s sandals as he walked away from the king, the Acropolis, and a thousand years of history. The kings were no more, and with them went all that they had won.

The residential compounds beyond the Acropolis continued to function for another century or so. Some of the lineages even profited enough from the disintegration of central power to continue adding to their households. But without the central authority of the king to hold the community together, they lost it all. The lineages would not cooperate with each other without the king to reduce their competition and forge bonds of unity between them. Toward the end, one of the buildings in Compound 9N-8 collapsed onto an occupant, but his relatives never even bothered to dig him out. It was the final straw—the people simply walked away.[543] Within two centuries of the demise of the last king of Copan, 90 percent of the population in the Copan Valley system was gone.[544] They left a land so ravaged that only in this century have people returned to build the population back to the levels it knew in the time of Yax-Pac. Today, history is tragically replaying itself, as the people of Copan destroy their forests once more, revealing yet again the bones of the sacred witzob—but this time we are all threatened by the devastation.

9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichen Itza

Maya kingdoms were dying as the tenth cycle of the baktun neared its end. The epidemic of political chaos spread a thousand miles across the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, from Palenque to Copan; and in the southern lowland country, few dynasties endured into the ninth century. Yet in the northern part of the peninsula, in the dry forest lands of the northeast, in the rugged hill country of the west, on the northwestern plain, and along the coasts, Maya states not only flourished during the Terminal Classic period, but grew in strength and numbers (Fig. 9:1).[545]

The cultures of these northern lowlands were distinctive from those in the south in several respects. The northerners, for example, developed architectural techniques using concrete wall cores surfaced with veneer block masonry.[546] They used this construction technique to render elaborate programs of political and religious imagery (Fig. 9:2) in complex stone mosaic facades and wall carvings. Further, the northern Maya developed a historical tradition of their own, distinct from the south’s, collected in books called the Chilam Balam. In them, each community compiled and kept its own version of history, which, after the Spanish conquest, was transcribed from its original hieroglyphic form into an alphabetic system using Spanish letters to record Mayan words.[547] The histories kept in these many books describe successive incursions of foreigners from outside Yucatán, some from as far away as central Mexico. Because these Classic period societies of the northern lowlands had a significantly greater interaction with outsiders than the Maya in the south, they assimilated a greater amount of foreign culture. This interaction resulted in their developing a more international outlook in politics and trade.

[[][Fig. 9:1 The Yucatan Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet]]

In spite of its international tradition, the northern region merges into the southern lowlands without geographic interruption; and from the time of the earliest kingdoms, the Maya living in both regions were linked, linguistically, culturally, economically, and politically.[548] Although the destinies of southern and northern kings in the Terminal Classic period diverged, they ultimately shared a common root. Since the institution of ahau was at the heart of government in both regions, we must look at the distinctive ways the northerners modified its relationship to central leadership in order to understand how the northerners transcended the limitations that led to failure in the south.

The social catastrophe of the ninth century was the culmination of the gradual faltering of Maya kingship over a thousand years of history and many ingenious attempts to accommodate change. Yet in the end, this chain reaction of collapsing governments became the catalyst that pushed some of the peoples of the north toward a fundamental revision of the basic institution of ahau.

Few of the Maya kingdoms were able to make the crucial transition from one form of government to another. The southern kingdoms of the Terminal Classic period tried, but their leaders failed because they attempted to solve their burgeoning social problems using methods that were fast becoming obsolete: the time-honored politics of the divine dynasties. The aggrandized kingdoms of such men as Great-Jaguar-Paw and Lord Kan II were never able to establish stable empires because they could not transcend the pride and exclusivity of the kingship—pride that compelled conquered dynasties to resist the acknowledgment of permanent subordination; exclusivity that prevented would-be emperors from effectively sharing power. On the other hand, some ahauob in the northern lowlands did succeed in perpetuating central government in this time of turmoil. Like the conqueror kings in the southern lowlands, the Itzá lords sought to break out of the limitations imposed by many small, competing realms. The way they accomplished this was to forge a conquest state and hegemonic empire with its capital, Chichén Itzá, in the center of the north. This city witnessed the birth of a social and political order based upon a new principle of governance, mu! tepal, “joint rule.”

For a few centuries, Chichén Itzá ruled the Maya of the north without rival. The ahauob of Chichén Itzá honored many of the religious and political protocols laid down by generations of kings before them. Yet, at the same time, they were revolutionizing the ancient royal institutions, creating new policies, rituals, and symbols partly inspired by foreign traditions. At the height of their power in the lowlands, they extended the boundaries of their military and economic interests—and their religious and political vision—to the point where all of Mesoamerica knew of Chichén Itzá, as either a valuable ally or a formidable enemy.

Our last royal history will recount the transformation of Chichén Itzá, its rise and triumph through foreign invasion and alliance—through war on an unprecedented scale, diplomacy, and brilliant political innovation. It is also the story of the Itzá’s opponents in this struggle: the orthodox Maya ahauob of Cobá and the innovative and international ahauob of the Puuc hills region. In their conflicts with Chichón Itzá, these powers endured and lost the closest thing to a world war the northern Maya would experience before the coming of the European conquerors.[549]

At the northern apex of the ancient city of the Itzá, the Castillo rises into the clear air above the dry forest that stretches away into the distance across the flat plain (Fig. 9:3) of central Yucatán. This structure is a mute but eloquent testimony to the engineering elegance and revolutionary vision of a city that, in its heyday, stretched for at least twenty-five square kilometers[550] beyond its wide central plazas (Fig. 9:4). Here at the heart of the community, the vision is a silent one. Unlike the kings of the south, the last divine lords of Chichón Itzá chose not to use hieroglyphic texts on their stelae and buildings to proclaim their histories and triumphs. Instead, these rulers pursued a magnificent architectural program of bas- reliefs carved on piers, walls, pillars, and lintels. The decision to tell their story in pictures unencumbered by the written word was a deliberate one, for these cosmopolitan Maya had changed the institution of ahau and the kingship derived from it.

Archaeology and the carved-stone inscriptions found in other parts of the city also give testimony to this transformation. These two sets of E evidence, however, tell two quite different, though ultimately related, versions of Chichén Itzá’s history.[551] During the Late Classic period, while the southern lowland kingdoms flourished, new cities came to prominence in the range of low hills called the Puuc in the northwestern part of the peninsula.[552] While divine ahauob ruled these cities,[553] the culture of their people shows strong ties to the Gulf Coast region and highland Mexico. These ties can be seen in features of architectural decoration and ceramic styles. One group of foreigners, called by archaeologists the “Putun” or “Chontai” Maya,[554] traded with the Puuc communities during the Late Classic period, and heavily influenced their culture. Indeed, the elite of the Puuc region may well have regarded themselves not only as ethnically Putun, but also as the political inheritors of the great traditions of the southern Classic period kingdoms. Described as crude barbarians by the Yucatecan Maya in some of their later books, these Chontai speakers were probably no more barbarian than the Germanic generals who, by diplomacy and force, took over Roman provinces in the waning years of that civilization.

% hile the Puuc hills in the west nurtured a prosperous and cosmopolitan constellation of new cities, the eastern region witnessed the establishment of a huge Late Classic state with its capital at Cobâ. With more than seventy square kilometers of homes, temples, house-lot walls, and stone causeways, Cobâ was undoubtedly the largest city in the northern region of Maya country.[555] Beyond its teeming multitudes and towering pyramids, Cobâ reached out for the agricultural produce and human labor of the surrounding towns. These communities were physically linked to the great city by stone roads that helped to reinforce the alliances and obligations between the noble families of vassals and the ahauob in the center.[556] In contrast to the Maya of the Puuc cities, the people of Cobâ and their kings sustained strong cultural ties to the southern kingdoms. The style of their great pyramids reflected Petén traditions and their divine lords raised tree-stones with extensive, and unfortunately badly eroded, hieroglyphic texts. Like the ahauob of Palenque and Copân, the nobility of Cobâ apparently regarded themselves as frontier stalwarts of a great Maya tradition with its heart in the southern lowlands.

Archaeological research documents that, soon after the consolidation of these distinctive western and eastern kingdoms in the northern lowlands by the end of the eighth century, a series of strategic coastal strongholds was established by canoe seafaring peoples. These people were called the Itzâ by archaeologists, after references to them in Books of Chilam Balam.[557] These coastal Itzâ used pottery styles which would become characteristic of Chichén Itzâ, and they brought with them foreign goods, such as Mexican obsidian, both black and green.[558] Eventually, these merchant warriors founded a permanent port facility on an island off the northern coast, at the mouth of the Rio Lagartos, where they could command a rich trade in the sea salt prized in Mexico and elsewhere. Called Isla Cerritos,[559] this small island was literally transformed by artificial construction into a single round and massive platform with masonry docking along its entire periphery for the large dugout canoes used by these peoples.

At some juncture in their expansion along the coastal areas, the Itzâ moved inland to establish a new state in the north. Although the Chilam Balam books claim the Itzâ incursions came from the direction of Cozumel Island and the east coast of the peninsula, the archaeological evidence suggests they came directly inland from their outposts along the coast. It is hardly accidental that their final major capital at Chichén Itzâ was established in the center of the northern plain, directly south of their port at Isla Cerritos. That central zone, however, was already a frontier between the state of Cobâ to the east and the Puuc cities to the west and south. The Itzâ marched provocatively into a region that was already occupied by formidable kingdoms. It is clear that they intended to stay. The first step in their plan was the conquest of Izamal, a kingdom that boasted one of the largest and most famous pyramids in the north.[560] Once they had overcome Izamal, the Itzâ armies kept right on going. They aimed for a border city between Coba and the Pune, an ancient center known as Yaxuna (or Cetelac, as some call it).

The massive pyramids of Yaxuna had been raised by kings in the Preclassic and Classic periods and were the largest such structures in the central northern lowlands. Following a decline in the Late Classic period, Yaxuna experienced a resurgence of both population and prestige in the Terminal Classic. At the time of the Itza incursions, Yaxuna was probably a sizable town, marking the boundary between Coba’s sphere of influence and the Puuc cities to the west. In this flat land without rivers, there were only two clear geographic markers: the deep natural wells, called cenotes, and the sacred mountains raised by ancestral peoples. Both were used by the northern Maya to stake out political centers and frontiers. Yaxuna had large ancient pyramids and the aura of power and legitimacy such places contain. It also had a great natural well. Both of these landmarks made it the logical choice for a border city.

The Itza could not take Yaxuna immediately because the king of Coba and the rulers of the Puuc cities claimed it as their own. By dint of diplomacy or force of arms, these two kingdoms initially repelled the invaders’ advance, thus forcing the Itza to chose another nearby sacred spot for their new capital. The Itza established their new city at a another cenote that would come to be known as Chichen Jtzd, “the Well of the Itza.” This site was located twenty kilometers to the north of Yaxuna.

This first confrontation was but the opening round in a grim war for control of the northern part of the peninsula. Responding to the new intruders, the king of Coba commissioned the construction of the most ambitious political monument ever raised by the Maya: a stone road one hundred kilometers long, linking the center of Coba to the ancient center of Yaxuna. Townsmen and villagers living along the route of this sacred causeway quarried three quarters of a million cubic meters of rock from the earth for its construction. They filled the masonry walls and packed down tons of white marl on the road’s surface, using huge stone rolling pins. This road declared Coba to be master of a territorial domain covering at least four thousand square kilometers, nearly twice the size of the southern lowland kingdom of Tikal at its height.[561]

At Yaxuna, the arrival of the masonry road triggered a frenzy of building activity on the foundations of the ancient ruins (Fig. 9:5). Early Classic buildings were quarried to provide building blocks for the new temples and palaces that rose at the edges of the broad plaza area where the Coba road ended. Masons removed the rubble and stone from the sides of the Preclassic Acropolis and piled it up again into a pyramid twenty-five ] meters high, facing eastward toward Coba. To this conglomerate of old and new, the Yaxuna people added a ballcourt and its associated temples and platforms. We know that the Puuc cities also had their part in the rebuilding of Yaxuna because the style of the new buildings emulated the Puuc tradition, rather than that of Coba.

Surrounding this new seat of authority, the inhabitants founded a perimeter of smaller communities, one almost exactly midway between Yaxuná and Chichón Itzá (Fig. 9:6). To decorate their small palaces, artisans of these towns carved stone bas-reliefs displaying the warriors of the polity taking captives (Figs. 9:7 and 9:8). They also displayed bas- reliefs of the accession of their lords, including one who acceded to the rank of cah, a variant of the cahal status of nobles in the southern lowland kingdoms (Fig. 9:9).

Ultimately, however, the efforts of the Puuc cities and Coba to remain in power in the center of the northern lowlands failed. After many years of bitter fighting, Chichón Itzá’s armies won the battle on the fields of Yaxuná. The rebuilding of that city ended almost as soon as it had begun. Quarried blocks of stone lay strewn at the base of ancient platforms, abandoned in hasty retreat before the masons could use them. The occupants of the perimeter communities likewise fled, leaving their little decorated palaces unattended and their homes to fall into ruin.

We cannot say how long this war lasted, but its final outcome is certain. The war reliefs of Yaxuná[562] were cast down from their buildings to be rediscovered a millennium later by archaeologists (Fig. 9:10). The inhabitants of Chichón Itzá, by contrast, went on to expand their city, adding many ambitiously conceived buildings dedicated to their triumph and glory. The cities of the Puuc region and the great capital of the northwestern plain, Dzibilchaltún,[563] likewise collapsed as political capitals. As Chichón Itzá prospered, these rival kingdoms were eventually abandoned. The final occupation of Uxmal also shows the presence of the pottery styles of Chichón Itzá.[564] Cobá may not have been abandoned in the wake of this catastrophe, but it experienced a slow, steady decline in public construction.[565]

The archaeology of Chichón Itzá itself yields an enigmatic and controversial picture of these events.[566] Traditionally, archaeologists regarded the city as having had two major occupations: an earlier “Maya” community with Puuc-style temples and palaces, including dedicatory lintels with hieroglyphic texts; and a later “Toltec” or foreign community established by Mexican conquerors and their Maya allies. In reality, Chichen Itza shows evidence of having always been a single city occupied by a remarkable. increasingly cosmopolitan nobility. This nobility manipulated diverse political expressions in their public art—some Maya, some Mexican—but all aimed at reinforcing and consolidating their authority.

This revised vision of Chichen Itza as a single, unified culture is based upon a realization that the pottery style of the “Toltec” city was at least partly contemporary with the pottery style of the Puuc and “Maya” Chichen. It is also based upon recognition that the settlement organization of the city is unitary: A network of stone roads links principal groups into a whole. Finally, although the artistic style of the “Toltec” part of the city is distinctive, this style also utilizes Maya hieroglyphic texts.[567] The royal patrons of this “Toltec” complex in the northern section of Chichen Itza may have favored murals and sculpture over texts, but they were not illiterate foreigners. They were true Maya citizens.

What the archaeology of Chichen Itza does suggest is that several generations of rulers built public architecture and sculpture to commemorate their increasing success in war and trade. As the ahauob of Chichen Itza w’orked to forge a conquest state that incorporated the territories of their enemies, the political statements they commissioned departed more and more from the prototypes they had inherited from the southern kings. These kings abandoned narrative portraits with inscribed texts in favor of assemblies of portraits carved on pillars in the great colonnades or engraved on the interior walls of their temples, throughout this book we have shown how changes in the strategies of public art reflect improvisations in the institution of ahau. In the case of the Itzá, these changes were designed to legitimize not only conquest but also consolidation. We have seen such improvisation before in the case of Early Classic Tikal, but here the strategy is more comprehensive, reaching into the very essence of the institution of ahau itself—namely its focus upon the lineal connection between males of descending generations.

The political organization of Chichón Itzá, as conveyed in its hieroglyphic texts, was revolutionary even before the initiation of the non- glyphic public art programs. This innovativeness is particularly evident in the treatment of family relationships between ahauob,[568] as we shall see shortly. The nobles of this city shared extraordinary privileges with their rulers. The texts of Chichón Itzá are scattered throughout the city in places traditionally reserved for the use of kings: on the stone lintels spanning the doorways of public buildings; on the jambs of these doorways; on freestanding piers in doorways, an architectural fashion of the Terminal Classic period; and on friezes decorating the interiors of these buildings.

The written history of Chichón Itzá covers a remarkably short span for a city of such importance. The dates associated with these texts are all clustered within the second katun of the tenth baktun. The earliest clear date at the site, July 2, A.D. 867, is inscribed on a monument that was found lying on the ground. This monument, know n as the Watering Trough Lintel, has a deep corn-grinding-metate surface cut into it. Recently, the intriguing question has arisen that an inscription on a temple called the High Priest’s Grave,[569] traditionally regarded as the latest date at the site (10.8.10.11.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, or May 13, A.D. 998) might actually have been carved much earlier. We suggest instead that this date fell on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, 842) and is thus the earliest date in the city. This alternative makes better sense in light of the tight clustering of the other inscribed dates found within the city. The date inscribed on the High Priest’s Grave is only one of several texts, including several undeciphered historical ones, on the temple. Hence it clearly falls into the phase of public literacy in the city.

At the same time, the High Priest’s Temple is architecturally a prototype of the four-sided Castillo with the famous serpent sculptures on its stairways.[570] The Castillo is the focal point of the later northern center only a few meters to the north and east of it. The imagery within the High Priest’s Temple, including a bound noble on a column and a serpent- entwined individual over the inner dais, clearly anticipates the iconography of buildings in the great northern center such as the Temple of the Chae Mool and the Temple of the Warriors. This earlier placement of the High Priest’s Grave would tie the “Toltec” northern center to the “Maya” southern center architecturally and spatially. If confirmed, it would also make the original implementations of the “Toltec” iconographic and architectural styles which lack inscriptions completely contemporary with the “’Maya” styles found with the dedicatory monuments throughout the southern districts of the city.

The restricted distribution of dates at Chichón Itza is commensurate with the intent of the texts, for they do not delineate a dynastic history like those we encountered in the southern kingdoms. The inscriptions of the southern cities focused on the commemoration of major events in the lives of kings and their significant others, often tying these events to major conjunctions in the cycles of time. The focus of attention in the Chichén Itzá texts is upon rituals of dedication carried out by groups of lords. The historical information given consists not of personal history but of dates, names, and the relationships among the actors who participated in these rituals.

The Temple of the Four Lintels is one of three Puuc-style buildings containing inscribed monuments in a group that terminates the main north-south sacbe, or roadway, of the city (Fig. 9:11). The assemblage of lintels from this building illustrates the general rhetoric of these inscriptions. The name of the principal protagonist is listed, along with the date of the inscription and the action being commemorated. This information is followed by a statement of his relationship to a second person. This second person may then be qualified as the agent of yet another ritual in the overall process of dedication. Finally, in a couplet structure, there is a reiteration of the dedication by the principal individual, followed by a listing of two more individuals who are said to be related to one another. The date of this particular dedication, July 13, A.D. 881, is thrice recorded on the lintels of this temple.

This focus upon dedicatory rituals and their participants leaves us with only a brief and enigmatic history of the important people of Chichén Itzá. We are not told when these people were born or when they acceded, warred, or died as we were in the southern kingdoms. We do, however, have some glimmering of the kinds of rituals being carried out. In the Four Lintels texts, there are references to the drilling action which creates new fire[571] and several of the individuals named carry a “fire” title. Furthermore, two of these lintels carry images on them which, when found in other scenes at Chichén Itzá, pertain to sacrifice. The most prominent images are the bird which claws open the chests of victims to extract the heart and the serpent which rises above the sacrifice.[572]

The Casa Colorada is a sizable temple south of the main city center and next to the sacbe leading to the southern group containing the Temple of the Four Lintels. Here, a hieroglyphic frieze records a series of events that took place on two different dates, 10.2.0.1.9 6 Muluc 12 Mac (September 15, 8 69),[573] and 10.2.0.15.3 7 Akbal 1 Ch’en (June 16, 8 70). Again, we see the names of several different lords listed along with the ritual actions they performed on these days. We find recorded, among others, a “fish- in-hand” bloodletting ritual and the ceremonial drilling activity associated with the creation of fire (Fig. 9:12). Here, as in the case of the Four Lintels texts, the emphasis is again upon a series of individuals who are named as agents of different actions.

The bridge between the textual programs and the purely artistic programs in the city can be found on the carved doorway column in Structure 6E1[574] (Fig. 9:13). In this one instance, the artist wrote out the names of the individuals glyphically, but rendered their actions in portraits. On the doorway column of this building, we see four striding figures. One of them carries a handful of throwing-stick darts and a severed human head. The others carry axes of the kind used in decapitation sacrifice[575] and knives used in heart-extraction rituals at Chichen Itza.[576] Here then we have a group of titled individuals[577] who are participants in, or witnesses of, a death sacrifice. Another glyphic inscription is found in the nearby Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs (Structure 6E3). This temple is associated with a particular kind of elite residence called a Patio Quad structure,[578] which finds its most spectacular expression in the Mercado, a colonnaded palace in the main northern center. In the past this Patio Quad type of house has been attributed to the “Toltec-Chichen Itza,” illiterate foreigners living within the city. The presence of these traditional Maya-style glyphs on a building which is clearly the household shrine of this group, however, is but one more example that the “Maya” and “Toltec” styles existed simultaneously in time, as part of one unified culture.[579]

Any overview of the monumental art of Chichén Itzá raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Who were these mysterious lords who did not care to celebrate their births, accessions, and triumphs as Maya rulers had done before them? This is a matter which is not easily resolved. First of all, the actual number of historical individuals recorded in the texts is still a point of controversy. Those people we can identify with relative certainty are listed in Figure 9:14. Second, sorting out the kin relationships at Chichén is a perplexing task. The relationships we are sure of are given in Figure 9:15. The connections here are between women of ascending generation and their progeny, as expressed in the glyphic expressions “mother of” and “child of mother.”

At the most, these glyphs tell us that there were two, perhaps three, generations of women who were mother, grandmother, and possibly greatgrandmother to the major group of men named as “siblings” in these texts. The kinship ties among these five men can be determined in the following ways: (1) Two of them, Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi, are the children of the same mother, and (2) four of them are named in the kind of yitah, or “sibling,” relationship we have seen recorded at Caracol and Tikal. Kin- Cimi, Ah-Muluc-Tok, Wacaw, and Double-Jawbone are all named in this “sibling” group. Since Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi share the same mother, Kakupacal can also be added to this group of brothers.

We have seen siblings before in the royal histories of the Maya, but not in sets of five. Moreover, although there are many more discoveries to be made in these texts, as of now there is no clear evidence that any one of these individuals was superior in rank to any of the others. All carry such noble titles as ahau and yahau kak, “lord of fire,” but there is no single individual whom we can identify with certainty as king. This situation is exacerbated by the presence of at least one, and perhaps two, more such sibling sets in these texts, as shown in Figure 9:14. While there may eventually be evidence to suggest generational relationships among the groups, for the present there are no clear father-son relationships in any surviving record from Chichen Itza. The dates of the texts in question cover a span of time which is relatively brief by Maya standards, and the texts imply contemporaneous actions by these people. The native chronicles of the Itza declare that Chichen Itza was ruled by brothers in its heyday[580]—and a brotherhood of princes is exactly what we see emerging from the ancient texts.

There are precedents for the sharing of power between a Maya king and his key relatives. Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal ruled their expanded domain together. Yax-Pac of Copan had co-regents of a sort in his brothers. Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan elevated his cahalob, his noble kin, and his supporters to stand beside him on the royal monuments of the realm. Of course, the king had always been an ahau, like many of the nobles around him. The dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles, however, was still a fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years.

At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya had a word for this kind of government: multepal, joint or confederate government.[581] It was a multepal that ruled Mayapan, the last regional capital of the northern Maya, which was established after the fall of Chichen Itza, during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200–1450) and just before the Spanish conquest.[582] Within the Mayapan government, there was a particularly powerful family, the Cocom, whose patriarch was generally regarded as the “first among equals.” There was also a rival political faction, the Xiu, whose family patriarch was high priest of the cult of Kukulcan and carried the title of Ah Kin Mai, Priest of the Cycle. Neither of these leaders, however, could successfully claim to rule their constituents in the manner that the Classic period southern kings did. We are convinced that the present textual evidence at Chichen Itza points to an earlier and precedent-setting multepal as the institution of government in that city.

The Cocom family of the Conquest period claimed to be the descendants of the ancient rulers of Chichen Itza. According to legend, the Cocom returned to the territory of the city of the sacred well after the fall of Mayapan in A.D. 1450.[583] Chichen Itza texts from the end of the Classic period provide some support for their claim to be the former rulers of that city. In the text of the Casa Colorada frieze discussed above, Yax-Uk-Kauil, Kakupacal, and other notables are associated with Hun-Pik-Tok, who is called “Divine Cocom, the ahau (vassal) of Jawbone-Fan” (Fig. 9:12).[584] The name Hun-Pik-Tok also appears on the lintel from the Akab Tzib, where he is again named the vassal of the “Divine Cocom” overlord, Jawbone-Fan. The ancient pedigree of the Cocoms is thus confirmed by their appearance in the inscriptions of Kakupacal and his siblings in the early history of Chichón Itzá.

Since neither Hun-Pik-Tok nor Jawbone-Fan is tied to any of the sibling sets, we have no way of knowing what kin relationship they may have had with Kakupacal and his siblings. Hun-Pik-Tok, moreover, does not get the amount of historical attention we have seen on the monuments of other Maya kings. Instead, he is, at most, an antecedent presence to the sibling sets, either providing them with some form of legitimacy or acting as their ally. Nevertheless, we can assume from all of this evidence that the multepal form of government probably did not originate at Mayapán, as some have believed, but in Chichón Itzá itself.

We also know that Chichón Itzá, like the more orthodox Maya kingdoms, also used an Emblem Glyph, which can be loosely translated as “divine Chichén Itzá lord.”[585] The main phrase of the Chichén Itzá Emblem Glyph is comprised of male genitalia and a le sign. Male genitalia are one of the most ancient and venerable of titles taken by kings, and probably connote the concept of “progenitor.”

The Emblem Glyph was widely used in the names of Chichén’s leaders: Several members of the sibling sets used the Emblem Glyph as a title. This “male-genitalia” glyph even occurs as part of the name of the oldest female appearing on the monuments. In the name of this woman, the grandmother of the five brothers, the glyph probably simply connoted the simple idea of an ancestress. In the southern kingdoms, contemporaries of the ruler could also refer to themselves with the Emblem Glyph title. In those cases, however, there was never any ambiguity as to which of these lords was the high king and which were in positions of subordination. The ambiguous nature of the hierarchical labels at Chichón is just one more piece of evidence supporting the concept of confederate rule.

The texts we have surveyed so far give us only a glimpse of Chichón Itzá’s rich and complex-history. To examine the culture and political structure further, we must turn to the richer and more extensive political statements found in the imagery on its public art. Here we find a marked thematic contrast to the art of the southern lowland Maya kingdoms, particularly those of the Late Classic period. Chichén Itzá’s many carved panels, pillars, piers, lintels, sculptures, and murals do not celebrate the king, but rather groups of people, particularly in processional arrangements.

One of the most spectacular of these stone assemblies is the gallery of notables carved on the squared columns of the Northwest Colonnade and the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9.16). The Northwest Colonnade is a spacious, beam-and-mortar roofed building found at the base of the raised pyramid crowned by the Temple of the Warriors. The gallery of notables is, literally, a frozen procession representing 221-plus striding men. These stone figures frame the processional route which leads to the temple stairway (Fig. 9:17).[586]

For the most part, the individuals portrayed are warriors, as the name of the building complex implies. The majority are armed with spearthrowers, although some carry bunched spears and others clubs studded with ax blades. There is also a depiction of another defensive weapon, a curved stick evidently used to parry spears hurled by enemies.[587] These weapons are associated with the Tlaloc-warfare complex which we saw operating among southern lowland kingdoms. In the art of Chichen Itza, however, there are abundant and explicit depictions of the actual waging of war with such weapons. Some of the warriors in the procession are clearly veterans, proudly displaying their amputated limbs. Each is an individual portrait, differing in details from the others (Fig. 9:18). In addition to the warriors, there are other important people. Some have been identified as sorcerers or priests by the regalia they wear and the fact that they are not armed (Fig. 9:18d). There is also one intimidating old matriarch striding among all of these men.[588] She is probably either the matriarch of the principal sodality or a representative of the Moon Goddess Ix-Chel, also known as Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. This figure echoes images from elsewhere in the city and we find her as well in the Temple of the Jaguars across the great platform from the Temple of the Warriors.

In the center of the procession, on the columns in front of the stairway leading upward to the sacrificial stone, the Chae Mool, there is an assembly of prisoners. This group of bound captives confirms the essential intent of the overall composition—to celebrate victory in war. Despite the brilliant and innovative architectural framework, the political message here is the same as the one we have seen throughout our earlier histories— capture and sacrifice of rival lords by the powerful. There is one significant difference, however. In the monumental art of the southern kingdoms, we have seen prisoners stripped, humiliated, and often mutilated. Here, the captives are dressed in rich regalia, in most respects the same kind of attire worn by the highest ranking of the victorious warriors surrounding them (Fig. 9:18c). Obviously, the Itzá preferred to absorb their enemies rather than destroy them.

Although the elite of Chichón Itzá clearly had ties to the non-Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the winners celebrating here are as clearly “Maya” in their appearance as their victims. Let us pause now to imagine what a procession like this would have been like in the days when Chichón was entering into the era of its glory.

A bewhiskered, grizzled face swam before the eyes of the adolescent boy as the old steward shook him awake in the cold dampness of the colonnaded hall. It was still dark in the plaza in front of his family compound. Inside, the red-painted walls and heavy wooden rafters glinted in the flickering torchlight, festooned with stone-edged weapons and sparkling gear. Already the boy’s elder kinsmen were dressed in their sleeveless jackets of embroidered cotton armor. Their golden-feathered, greenstone- studded helmets shone in the dim light. As the men engaged in animated conversation, the small blue birds, which hung like diadems from the front of their helmets, bobbed with the movements of their heads. They reminded the boy of the pretty little birds that swooped among the swarms of insects at half-light, devouring them by the thousands, like the Itzá overwhelming their enemies on the field. The men’s green-feathered back- shields were emblazoned with the fearful insignia of their family and their city. Schoolboys from the villages vied with one another to supply the long strips of cotton[589] with which the men strapped each other’s arms and legs for war.

Laughter and casual conversation filled the boy’s ears, and his belly growled as the scent of hot corn gruel laced with chocolate and chili filled his nostrils. He moved quickly to join the others. No battle today. Instead, they would march in victory to the great council hall of the lords.

Accompanied by the ancient shamans, his father emerged from the family shrine which sat on a steep platform across the plaza. The blood of last evening’s sacrifices stained their long robes and matted their flowing hair. The boy’s heart swelled with pride as he remembered the lords the men of his family had taken captive in the campaign of the hill towns. His older brother had told him how the shouts of victory had mingled with the screams of terror as the women of the vanquished had fled their burning homes.

If the sacrifices were finished, the boy knew it was getting late. As he dressed hastily, he could hear the defeated nobles in their finery being assembled by his siblings on the plaza before the great hall. The drums of his clan began sounding the march. Still straightening his helmet, the boy rushed down the stairs to join the procession as it moved off led by his father, their great captain.

Drumsong and the smoke of morning temple fires rose from the arcade of tall shade trees and fruit orchards lining the road. Dawn was just turning the sky pale-blue as the boy’s clan reached the main thoroughfare, joining the other groups of warriors who were pouring in greater and greater numbers from the paths among the trees. Together, they headed northward on the great white limestone road. The jogging rhythm of the warriors surrounding him propelled the boy forward, even as he strained to catch a glimpse of the prisoner-kings of the enemy whom the high lords of the council paraded among them. The company marched the battle dance of the Itza, a frightening, sinuous rush of warriors that carried death to all who opposed it. The massive red walls of the first house of the siblings loomed to the boy’s right as the swelling ranks of the army emerged onto the plaza of the old center. Their arrival was punctuated by a roar of approval from the crowds lining every side.

The great captains danced forward, reenacting the capture of their enemies. Uttering his distinctive hawklike war cry, the boy’s father grabbed a valorous ahau by the hair and pushed him off balance, stabbing his spear into the air. Up ahead, the procession slowed as the vast stream of men expanded out onto the broad avenue, flanked on one side by the Observatory and on the other by the Red House. Elbowing past the intent ranks of his clan and their provincial allies, the young boy maneuvered himself to the edge of the battle group. It was his responsibility, he reminded himself as the older men gave way, to stand at the exposed edge of his family’s ranks, moving them at the signals from his father and his elder siblings.

Moving forward with the impetus of the men-at-arms, the boy passed the old Castillo, its sacred cave now sealed by the graves of seven great lords.[590] It loomed high above the far side of the parade. The new Castillo, still under construction, rose proudly before them, surrounded by a sea of city folk. As the crowd fell back cheering, the army writhed onto the blinding white plaza and danced across to the Great Ballcourt. Also unfinished, this structure was vast beyond all imagining, encompassing an awesome vision of victory and sacrifice at the heart of the mighty city. The sweet stench of death filled the boy’s nostrils as he passed the huge skull rack before the Ballcourt. The hollow-eyed heads of defeated enemies glared back at him, sending a shiver down his spine as he contemplated their earthly remains mounted in row upon row on the tall wooden rack. The older trophies shone in the morning light with the creamy-white brillance of naked bone, while others taken more recently still bore the flesh and hair of their unfortunate owners. All hung as grim reminders of what the wargame would bring for some of the prisoners today.

At full strength now, the army swirled around the Castillo, gyrating to the reverberation of hundreds of great wooden drums and the wail of the conch trumpets. Thousands upon thousands of warriors arranged in long sinuous lines moved with the discipline of years of combat, pushing back the crowds to the edges of the plaza and up onto the flanks of the buildings. The prisoners moved in their midst, each one the ward of a great veteran. The boy’s father signaled his son to shift his battle group into tormation along the eastern side of the great northern plaza, joining the others of his province. In a moment the wargames would begin in earnest.

Vibrating with tension, the men faced a wide sea of their compatriots across the plaza. When the signal whistles and cries rose from their captains, they rushed forward to engage each other as they had engaged the enemy in the battle of the hills. The crowd roared encouragement. More warriors rushed forward in the melee to dampen the danger of accident. Circles opened in the crowd as brave enemies were freed from their bonds and given weapons with which to pantomime deadly combat with the Itzá’s best heroes. Dart duels cut alleyways throughout the ranks as men moved out of the line of fire.[591] The dance of death progressed, parry and thrust, the groans of surprise at a sudden wound. Some Itzá would join their ancestors today if they were not alert.

In the midst of this melee, the boy saw his father squaring off against his highest-ranked prisoner, both armed with stabbing spears. The two men closed vigorously, wrestled, and then closed again. The lord fought well, but the boy’s father was in better condition and soon had his prisoner down on the plaza with a spear under his chin. There was a pause. Suddenly the father raised up his enemy and gave him back his spear. He gazed into his face and then turned his back to him as he would to a sibling and trusted battle companion. The decision he offered his enemy was to die taking his captor with him. Such a death, however, would be a humiliating act of cowardice. Better by far to live as a younger sibling, a prince of the hated Itzá and their city of the new creation. The captive grasped his spear tightly and, for a moment, the boy thought his father’s time had come. But then the captive’s fingers slowly relaxed, his eyes dropped, and he fell into line behind his captor as the group came back together again and moved off toward the council house.[592] The boy felt a flush of pride. Not all of the lords would have taken such a chance, but he knew his father held his position in the high council by means of his courage as well as his wisdom.

The boy’s battle party moved forward to the steps of the Temple of the Warriors, the council house of the Itzá nation. The ambassadors from distant allied cities in the western mountains were arrayed along the front of the halls with their piles of sumptuous gifts. Dressed in long skirts, the dreadful shamans of the city moved among them, waving their crooked staffs and billowing censers and muttering incantations against treachery. The lords of the council gathered on the steps with their highest-born prisoners, announcing the names of those who had joined the nation and those who had chosen to go to the Otherworld today. Those who chose death were honored with ritual celebration before being led through the lower hall and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice. There, as the sun stood high in the sky at midday, one after the other they received the gentle death, so called because no one ever made a sound when his heart was cut out. The great Vision Serpent rose in the clouds of incense surrounding their lifeless bodies.

The sacrifices continued through the afternoon, and the warriors, engaged in their games on the plaza, clustered like angry bees around a hive until the sun sank in bloody splendor. The boy amused himself with the games and wondered if he would ever get to sacrifice in the Great Ballcourt when it was finished by the master builders and masons of the defeated hill cities. Mostly, however, his thoughts were with his father, sitting in the council house plotting the future of the city. Now that there was peace in the land, the Itza could look outward to the world beyond and the challenges it would bring.

•

The eternal stone rendering of this procession in the Temple of the Warriors depicts figures wearing three of the basic motifs of Tlaloc warfare we have seen in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:18a): the Tlaloc mask, the year-sign headdress, and the clawed-bird warrior. In the temple above this procession, a second gathering of portraits was carved on twenty more columns. Here there are no prisoners, but only warriors and dignitaries. These figures, ranged along the back wall of the hall before the throne dais, embody some particularly fine expressions of this particular artistic program. Although these familiar images of warriors and important dignitaries frame the ritual space which the leader occupied, as we have come to expect in the lineage houses of the earliest Maya kingdoms, they are also different. This great procession of VIPs stands in place of the traditional Classic symbol of the domain—the carved portrait of the victorious king. The throne is still upheld by the customary small warrior figures, but at Chichen Itza, the Maya did not attempt to record the personal identity of the man who sat there.

The same principle holds true for the Temple of the Chae Mool, an earlier council house buried beneath the Temple of the Warriors. Above the benches that line the walls of this building’s inner sanctum, brightly painted murals portray seated lords, wearing masks of the gods who ruled their cosmos. Seated upon jaguar-skin pillows, some of these lords extend offerings in flat bowls, while others sport shields and carry ax scepters with the bottom portion carved to represent the body of a snake. These scepters resemble the Manikin Scepters of royal office displayed in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:19, south bench). Still other lords (Fig. 9:19, north bench) carry spearthrowers and throwing spears while they sit on thrones carved to represent full-bodied jaguars. This kind of jaguar throne, even more than the jaguar-skin pillow, was the furniture of rulers among the southern lowland peoples. Yet here we have not a single preeminent personage but whole assemblies of nobles seated upon this type of throne.

The message of this mural is clear. Once again, the throne is empty. What is being depicted with that empty throne is the historical idea of a central public persona in the city’s government, not a real individual. Each of the surrounding figures is depicted in a distinctive manner. They are clearly meant to represent real people. The government of Chichen Itza, in both its earlier manifestation in the Temple of the Chae Mool, and in its later and more splendid expression in the Temple of the Warriors, is pictured as an assembly, a multepal. What are we to make of the historical legends that claim Kukulcan ruled this city, or of the heroic captains such as Kakupacal and Hun-Pik-Tok of the Cocom, who are likewise mentioned? The answer to that question will have to wait on further archaeological evidence, for these figures certainly do not seem to be centrally focused upon in the public art.

The Great Ballcourt, directly across from the Temple of the Warriors complex, expands and complicates the political program. Here, in addition to an assembly of lords, we see other images of central importance. These figures are known as Captain Sun Disk and Captain Serpent (Fig. 9:20).[593] Captain Sun Disk carries a spearthrower and throwing spears and sits inside a nimbus identified by its triangular protrusions as the sun. Captain Serpent also carries the weapons of war, but he sits entwined within the coils of a great feathered snake.

[[][Fig. 9:21 Lower Temple of the Jaguars: The Upper Registers after Maudslay]]

The importance of the individuals bearing these insignia is clear in the assembly compositions, such as the one found in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:21), where Captain Sun Disk looks down upon the upward-gazing Captain Serpent from his place on the central axis of the overall picture. But there are problems in attempting to identify these insignia as the regalia of real people. First of all, in the imagery of the Classic Maya, the nimbus means simply that the individual so portrayed is a revered ancestor.[594] Captain Sun Disk’s position in the compositions of the Great Ballcourt is variable. In two of the main pictures, however— the one found in the North Temple at the apex of the playing court, and the one in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars across from the Temple of the Warriors—Sun Disk is at the top of the overall picture, the favored locality in Classic Maya art for dead predecessors. Second, the Serpent insignia is not confined to one individual, even on the Great Ballcourt scenes. In the Lower Temple of the Jaguars, for example, there are two Serpent Captains, one feathered and the other decorated with cloud scrolls.[595]

Two serpent captains within a composition could be interpreted as indications of the presence of particularly important individuals; but if we go back to the Temple of the Warriors, there are entire processions of serpent captains (Fig. 9:22). Therefore, we can only conclude that the insignia pertains not to an individual but to some important status. Even more significant is the fact that a serpent captain is also found among the prisoners arranged before the stairway of the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9:18). This status then is not even peculiar to Chichen’s own elite.

It is a difficult task to discover individuals who stand out as unequivocal leaders in a program devoted to assembly. The sun-disk status is a real one, and perhaps it pertains to an individual ancestor, but the iconography of this image never shows Captain Sun Disk actively engaged in any of the scenes as a leader. The Serpent insignia is also important, but it too pertains to many people among the nobility at Chichón Itzá.

What can be derived with certainty from these public monuments is that the government of Chichón Itzá carried out successful campaigns of war against its enemies. The murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:23) are explicit illustrations of the kind of warfare actually fought with the spearthrower and throwing spear displayed in Tlaloc warfare throughout the Classic period in the southern lowlands. This battle scene, and others in the Temple, show that these wars were fought within the communities of the vanquished. Women are shown fleeing their homes as the battle rages around them. It was the kind of war that resulted in “the tearing down of vaults and buildings,” or hom as it was written in the texts of Tikal and Caracol.

As always, the penalty of defeat was capture and sacrifice. Victims had their hearts torn out by warriors dressed in the guise of birds, while the great feathered serpent floated above them.[596] Others were shot with arrows or had their heads chopped off. Decapitation sacrifice was particularly associated with the ballgame, as displayed in the reliefs of the Great Ballcourt (Fig. 9:24), but it was also associated with fire ritual, as seen in mural paintings along the basal wall of the Temple of the Warriors. Like their cultural predecessors, however, the people of Chichén Itzá adhered to the ancient Maya notion of the ballgame as a metaphor for battle, and of the ballcourt (or its architectural surrogates in stairways and plazas)[597] E as the primary setting for decapitation sacrifice. Indeed, the Great Ballcourt at Chichén Itzá was evidently constructed as a monument to the successful completion of the Itzá’s wars of conquest.[598]

The volume of sacrifice at Chichén Itzá is grimly commemorated in the skull-rack platform[599] next to the Great Ballcourt. We have reason to suspect, however, that not all of the kings and nobles captured by Chichén Itzá ended up on the skull rack. The well-dressed prisoners paraded in the Northwest Colonnade below the Temple of the Warriors could easily blend in with the victors if freed from their bonds. There are also processing dignitaries in the Lower Temple of the Jaguar that bear a remarkable resemblance to lords of the Yaxuná area (Fig. 9:25). The message here is the clear. In a government organized around the principle of confederation and assembly, the major political consequence of war need not be the defeat and humiliation of a rival dynasty. Instead, this dynasty might be incorporated into the expanding cosmopolitan state. In a city already housing numerous ahauob, there may well have been room for the vanquished.

At its height, Chichón Itzá ruled supreme in the Maya lowlands. We do not know how far its elite extended their claims to dominion, but surely they prevailed over most of the northern lowlands. After the founding of their kingdom, the Puuc cities fell and Coba slowly dwindled to insignificance. There were some hold-out polities in the southern lowlands, but these intrepid survivors of disaster provided no challenge to a city the size of Chichón Itzá and most likely attempted to negotiate an advantageous relationship with its government. How far beyond the lowlands Chichón Itzá’s lords may have extended their domain is still an open question. During this period many fortified capitals of highland México—Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and Tula, to name but a few—show significant connections to the Maya world. We suspect that in future investigations, more of Chichén Itzá’s Maya legacy will be found in the other cultures of Mexico that so astounded the Spaniards.

One idea that the Maya of Chichén Itzá did not pass on to their Mesoamerican neighbors was divine kingship and its concomitant hieroglyphic literature. This docs not, however, imply a paradox in our vision of the last great burst of Maya social innovation. In order to perpetuate the principle of kingship in this period of crisis, to expand it beyond the limitations that caused its demise in the south, the Maya lords of Chichén Itzá terminated the office of king and the principle of dynasty that had generated it. We do not believe, as some have said, that the people of Chichén Itzá were vigorous Mexican foreigners. Their leaders were Maya ahauob as well as participants in the culture of Mesoamerica. Their enemies, at least among the Puuc cities, were similarly cosmopolitan. If earlier Classic iconographic allusions are any guide, the Itzá were certainly not utilizing novel tactics in warfare. They were adhering to the same four-hundred-year-old precepts of Classic Maya Tlaloc-Venus warfare we have already seen in the south.

The key to success for the Chichén Itzá lords lay in their redefinition of the political consequences of defeat in war. They turned away from the dynastic blood feuds of the past and moved toward effective alliance and i consolidation. This consolidation would become the guiding principle of empire among the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Culhua- E Mexica. At the core of this principle of alliance is the notion of itah, “sibling” or “kinsman of the same generation.” Two siblings perpetuated the first Maya conquest state, that of Tikal and Uaxactún. It was this very principle of brotherhood that Bird-Jaguar invoked in his manipulation of his noble supporters. Even as the lords of the Puuc region desperately fought to withstand Chichén Itzá, they began to declare itah relationships among themselves.[600]

[[][Fig. 9:25 Warriors from Chichen Itza and the Yaxuna Region]]

With Chichen Itza, the first and last Mesoamerican capital among the Maya, we come full circle in the history of their kingship. The divine lords who emerged in the Late Preclassic period to dance upon their sculptured pyramids were first and foremost ahauob, members of a category of being that made them all essentially the same substance. They were siblings in a brotherhood that began with the Ancestral Twins and prevailed throughout all subsequent history. The reassertion of the idea of brotherhood marked the dismantling of that first principle undergirding kingship: dynasty. When the Ancestral Heroes, through the magic of sacrifice, killed one another and brought each other back to life in the Place of Bailgame Sacrifice in Xibalba, they became father and son to each other. So divine kings brought life out of death and were brought to life by the sacrifices of their fathers before them. The lords of Chichen Itza did not celebrate dynasty, nor did they contemplate sacrifice as kings. They were brothers and ahauob together, as their ancestors were at the beginning of time.

10. The End of Literate World and its Legacy to the Future

Naum-Pat, Halach Uinic (“true human”), felt the gentle waves of the dark, glittering sea lap against his feet as he watched the strange canoes bob against the stars. They were vast floating palaces really. Lit from within with lamps and torches, their tall masts and rigging graced the cool moonlight of Lady Ix-Chel.

“Mother of all,” he whispered to himself, “where did these foul-smelling barbarians come from?”

He sighed in astonishment and worry. He had been a seaman all his life. Like his people a thousand years before him, he had plied the deep blue waters and treacherous shallows in great canoes, laden with honey, salt, slaves, chocolate—treasure of all kinds. He had fought enemies upon its rolling surface; he had ridden out the great storms that tormented its waters; he knew every port and people that graced its shores. The sea was his, world of his ancestors, great and dangerous and rich in precious, holy things. Now it had vomited up this monstrosity—a canoe that was a house. The light-skinned barbarians wielded great power, no doubt about it. A shiver ran up his spine. They would be worse and more dangerous than the Aztec pochteca—those dangerous merchants from the west who were extending the Mexica empire toward the ancient lands of the true people.

On the temple mountain yesterday, that old fool of a priest had addressed these new strangers as if they were gods. He had blown incense on them only a moment before they had pushed him aside and entered the sanctuary. After defiling and smashing the sacred images of the gods, they had opened the bundles and handled the holy objects of the ancestors, taking those made of sun-excrement—the yellow metal the foreigners coveted. Metal-lovers, these strange creatures wore helmets, armor, and great knives of the bright and hard substance. Wonderful stuff, he thought as he contemplated the price such objects would bring in the Mexica ports. He cursed the hairy strangers, calling upon the powers of the Otherworld to open the sea and consume them ... and soon.

Worse than looting the temple—other pirates had done that—these men had raised up the World Tree in the form of a wooden cross. They had opened a book—small, black, and poorly painted, but still a book— and read from it in their unutterable tongue. The chilan, his city’s prophet and interpreter for the gods, had watched from the crowd at the base of the temple, shaking his head in fear and wonder.

Naum-Pat shuddered with the horror of the memory of what the strangers had done. As he did so, the words of the famous prophecy of the Chilam Balam went through his mind.

“Let us exalt his sign on high, let us exalt it that we may gaze upon it today with the raised standard,” the great prophet had exhorted them so many years ago. “Great is the discord that arises today. The First Tree of the World is restored; it is displayed to the world. This is the sign of Hunab-Ku on high. Worship it, Itza. You shall worship today his sign on high. You shall worship it furthermore with true goodwill, and you shall worship the true god today, lord. You shall be converted to the word of Hunab-Ku, lord; it came from heaven.”

Naum-Pat had watched in stunned disbelief as the strangers threw down the kulche’, the images of the gods, in the Holy House, and put the wooden Tree in its place. A groan had escaped his throat as he saw the prophecy materialize before his eyes. They had put up the Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First Tree of the World. For the people it had been a very powerful sign. The local chilan had been disturbed enough to send word by courier canoe to the chilanob on the mainland.

Like the chilan, Naum-Pat had seen the raising of the Tree as a powerful portent, but somehow the strangers’ black book had frightened him more. In all the world, only real human beings, only Maya, had books. Others, like the Mexica, had pictures of course, but not the written words of ancestors and heroes, not the prophecies of the star companions. Books were records of the past, they were the truth, the guide to the cycles. The strangers’ metal knives were powerful weapons, but many weapons of the Maya could kill just as efficiently. It was the books that Naum-Pat feared, for with books came true knowledge, knowledge that could vanquish his people’s present and capture and transform their future.

Naum-Pat could not imagine the strangers attacking his people on the neutral ground of Cozumel, Lady Ix-Chel’s sacred isle. They had come ashore with smiles and gifts of clear stones that were like strangely-colored obsidian. He had planned a feast for them tomorrow in the council hall and would treat them distantly, yet with dignity. But what of the future? W as this the beginning of the time of discord and change the great chi- lanob had predicted ‘ The fear in his belly whispered that it was so. As Naum-Pat turned his back to the quiet beach and headed home, his thoughts turned to his children.

In the Maya world, its’at, “one who is clever, ingenious, artistic, scientific, and knowledgeable,” was used with the same respect and in the same contexts we use the word “scientist” today. That its’at also meant “artist” and “scribe” was no accident. For the Maya, as for ourselves, the written word held the key to their future survival. Writing was the power of knowledge made material and artifactual. It was the armature of wealth, prosperity, and the organized labor of the state. It was the wellspring from which flowed knowledge and lore, orally repeated and memorized by the common folk in their songs and prayers.[601] The arrival of the Spanish changed all that and subverted Maya literacy to the ambitions of the Europeans.

But the beginning of the end of literacy occurred centuries before the Conquest, with the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms in the ninth century A.D. As much time separates us from Columbus as separated Naum-Pat from the Classic kings. He and his proud people were still Maya, still civilized, and their elite were still able to read and write, but they lived in a dark age of petty lords and small temple mountains.[602] His age, like our own medieval period, was dimly lit by the flickering lamp of literacy and the collective memory of a great past; but his people’s hope for future greatness was snuffed out by the Spanish conquerors. What brought down the awesome power crafted by the kings of our histories and made them, by the time the Spanish appeared, only a dim memory to their descendants?

The end of the Classic period witnessed a major transformation of the Maya world, one that would leave the southern lowlands a backwater for the rest of Mesoamerican history. Sometimes, as at Copán, the public record stopped dramatically, virtually in mid-sentence. Other kingdoms died in one last disastrous defeat as at Dos Pilas. For many, however, the end came when people turned their backs on the kings, as they had done at Cerros eight hundred years earlier, and returned to a less complicated way of living. Regardless of the manner in which the southern kingdoms met their doom, it is the staggering scope and range of their collapse that stymies us. This is the real mystery of the Maya and it is one that has long fascinated Mayanists and the public.[603]

We have no final answer to what happened, but as with all good mysteries, we have plenty of clues. At Copán, the last decades of the central government were those of the densest population. The voiceless remains of the dead, both commoner and noble alike, bear witness to malnutrition, sickness, infection, and a hard life indeed. In the central Petén, where raised fields played an important role in people’s sustenance, the agricultural system was productive only as long as the fields were maintained. Neglect of the fields during conditions of social strife, such as the growing military competition between Late Classic ruling lineages, likely led to their rapid erosion and decay.[604] Rebuilding these complex agricultural systems in the swamps was beyond the capabilities of individual farmers without the coordination provided by central governments, so they moved out as refugees into areas where they could farm—even if that meant jostling the people already there.

The collapse also came from a crisis of faith. The king held his power as the patriarch of the royal lineage and as the avatar of the gods and ancestors. Ecological and political disaster could be placed directly at his feet as proof of his failure to sustain his privileged communication with the gods. Moreover, because of the way the kings defined themselves and their power, the Maya never established enduring empires, an arrangement that would have created new possibilities of economic organization and resolved the strife that grew in ferocity and frequency during the eighth century. Kings could become conquerors, but they could never transcend the status of usurper, for they could never speak persuasively to the ancestors of the kings they had captured and slain. Each king wielded the written word and history to glorify his own ancestors and his own living people.

As time went on, the high kings were driven to unending, devastating wars of conquest and tribute extraction. In part they were urged on by the nobility. During the Early Classic period, this class comprised a relatively small proportion of the population, but even by the time of Burial 167 in the first century B.c. in Tikal, they were growing rapidly in both numbers and privilege. Averaging about ten centimeters taller than the rest of the population, they enjoyed the best food, the greatest portion of the wealth, and the best chance of having children who survived to adulthood. Since everyone born to a noble family could exercise elite prerogatives, it did not take too many centuries of prosperity for there to be an aristocracy of sufficient size to make itself a nuisance to governments and a burden to farmers. Increasing rivalry between nonroyal nobles and the central lords within the kingdoms appears to have contributed to the downfall of both.

The situation forced the gaze of the nobility outward toward neighboring kingdoms and the tribute they could win by military victory. In the short term, the strategy worked, but in the long term that kind of endemic warfare caused more problems than it solved and eventually the rivalry of the nobility helped rupture the central authority of the king.

Foreign relations were also troublesome at the end of the Classic Period. In the wake of the collapse of Teotihuacán in the late seventh century, other regional civilizations like El Tajin, Xochicalco, and Cacaxtla made a bid for power. Barbarians and marginally civilized peoples in the borderlands between the ancient great powers, like the Chontai Maya-speaking people living in the Tabasco coastlands, also asserted control of trade routes and established new states in both the highlands and lowlands. These merchant warriors, called the Putún, meddled in the affairs of Maya kingdoms and eventually established new hybrid dynasties that prospered at the expense of the traditional Maya governments.

[[][Fig. 10:1 The Last Inscriptional Dates Before the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization]]

The failure of the Maya way of life did not descend upon them with the dramatic suddenness of a volcanic explosion, a shattering earthquake, or a sweeping plague. The Maya had time to contemplate their disaster during the century it took for their way of life to disintegrate into a shadow’ of its former self. By A.D. 910, the Maya of the southern lowlands built no more temple-mountains to house their portals into the Otherworld and I they erected no more tree-stones to commemorate the glory of their kings and cahalob. Throughout the lowlands, they abandoned literacy as part of the public performance of their kings (Fig. 10:1) and retreated from the society they had built under their leadership.

We have observed the sad end of the kings of Copan, but U-Cit-Tok was not alone in his suffering, nor was he the first to watch central government fall amid growing crisis. On the other side of the Maya world, at Palenque, the last words written in the historical record occur in a pitiful little inscription carved on a blackware vase. This vase was not even found in a royal context but in a slab-covered tomb under the floor of a modest residential compound below the escarpment where the great ceremonial precinct of the old glory days was located. The man who recorded his accession in the text tried to enhance his renown by calling himself 6-Cimi-Ah-Nab-Pacal[605] after the great king who had brought Palenque to glory one hundred and fifty years earlier. The vase, however, was made in some obscure town on the swampy plain north of Palenque, and was probably a barbarian Putun Maya gift to an otherwise silent king.[606] Within fifty years of this date, Palenque had been abandoned and reoccupied by wandering tribesmen who lived atop the debris in the disintegrating buildings, leaving broken fragments of bailgame yokes and hachas lying forlornly about. As at Copan, one of these wanderers was killed when the north building of the Palace collapsed[607] and no one dug his body out to give it honorable burial.

[[][Fig. 10:2 Piedras Negras Stela 12]]

At Piedras Negras, a venerable and powerful kingdom on the Usuma- cinta River southeast of Palenque, the last king closed the history of his domain on a glorious high note of artistic achievement. Stela 12 (Fig. 10:2) is a masterpiece showing the ritual display of captives taken in a war with the small kingdom of Pomona[608] downriver on the Usumacinta, perhaps in a ploy to stop people from the flourishing Putún homeland farther downriver from coming up into the territory of the ancient kingdoms. If this was the intention of the Piedras Negras lords, it did not work. The victory over those unfortunate Pomona lords apparently did not contribute to the survival of Piedras Negras. Pomona’s last recorded date fell in the year A.D. 790, while the victor lasted only another twenty years. The last inscription at Piedras Negras celebrated the end of the nineteenth katun in A.D. 810.

This same twenty-year period saw the demise of Yaxchilán farther upriver on the Usumacinta. Like Palenque, Yaxchilán went out with a whimper rather than a bang, but as with Piedras Negras, the last inscription speaks of war. Bird-Jaguar’s son Chel-Te had indeed lived to rule, testimony to his father’s political success. Chel-Te, in his turn, sired a son whom he named after an illustrious ancestor—Ta-Skull, the tenth successor, who had made the alliance with Cu-Ix of Calakmul[609] in the sixth century. The last Ta-Skull, however, did not live up to the memory of his ancestor. He commissioned only a single lintel, mounted in a tiny little temple that he built next to the lineage house where Bird-Jaguar, his paternal grandfather, had given the flapstaff to Great-Skull-Zero, his grandmother’s brother (Fig. 7:20). The all-glyphic lintel Ta-Skull set above the solitary door of this new temple celebrated his victory in war, but the victory must have been hollow one. Not only does the paltry scale of the building signal Yaxchilán’s drastic decline, but its inscription was the work of a inept artisan. The glyphs started out large on the left and got smaller and smaller as the scribe ran out of room to the right. Like his liege, the writer had failed to plan ahead. He was not alone, for the kings of Bonampak and other smaller centers in the region fell silent at the same time.

Onward upstream at Dos Pilas in the Petexbatún region, the story was the same. During a final battle at the capital of the famous Flint-Sky- God K and his conqueror progeny, a desperate nobility threw up a huge log stockade[610] around the sacred center of their city, trying to shield themselves against the vengeance wreaked on them by their former victims. The kings who oversaw the last public history of that dying kingdom were forced to erect their tree-stones at other places than their capital. One Dos Pilas king recorded an image of himself in A.D. 790 on a stela at Aguateca at the southern end of his dynasty’s conquered territories. On the northern frontier, the last-known Dos Pilas king struggled to retain I control of the Pasión River. He raised two stelae at the little community of La Amelia, at the northeastern edge of his greater realm, on the Pasión River near its confluence with the Usumacinta. He also raised several tree-stones at the strategic site of Scibal. These last-known (Fig. 10:3a) images of a Dos Pilas king, elegant, dynamic, and confidently carved, show him valiantly playing ball. The recorded date is A.D. 807. Such play usually celebrated victory and sacrifice, in remembrance of what the Heroic Ancestors had won and sacrificed in the beginning. But we know in hindsight that the Lords of Death won this time. This man’s kingdom probably ended in a violent cataclysm soon thereafter. Within a few years of the Dos Pilas ballplayer stelae, barbarian kings, probably from downriver, had taken Seibal, its prize vassal, and had effectively cut its trade routes to the Usumacinta River and the Peten.

[[][Fig. 10:3]]

The end of Katun 19 in A.D. 810 saw the last gasp of many kingdoms throughout the lowlands; 9.19.0.0.0 also marked the end of the royal history declared by two great dynasties in the central Peten heartland, the old rival kingdoms of Naranjo and Calakmul. Calakmul was the strongest of these realms, for its king was able to raise three stelae (15, 16, and 64) on that date. All three present him in front view, standing atop a captive and holding a shield and a God K scepter. Evidently this special show of power exhausted his fund of local support for public historical celebrations, for we don’t hear from him again. For an indefinite time thereafter, kings without history (or at least, without texts discovered by archaeologists) must have ruled at Calakmul, for one holy lord of this capital did evidently witness a katun rite at Seibal thirty-nine years later. Indirectly then, we know that Calakmul still continued to exist, even after the end of its own known texts.

Naranjo’s final historical ruler erected only one monument—Stela 32—but it was an extraordinary one. Unusually large, this tree-stone celebrates both the ruler’s accession and the katun ending. Shown seated on a great cosmic throne, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar drawn in an exaggerated style that seems to turn everything into flying scrolls.

Turning to the far southwest of the Maya world, we find what is perhaps the most interesting of these 9.19 stelae, a tree-stone erected at Chinkultic (Fig. 10:3b) in highland Chiapas. This carving bears stylistic affinities to the emerging art of the Puuc region in the northern lowlands and ultimately to Itza monuments at Chichen Itza.[611] Since dated monuments were not known in this part of Chiapas in earlier times, Chinkultic’s appearance on the stage of history may reflect the beginning of a diaspora, a movement of literate Maya nobility from the lowlands into the highlands.[612] They might have been looking to a new political order as well as to a new land, their eyes turned to the Chontal-speaking Putun and the revolutionary state of Chichen Itza.

Since the greatest part of Maya history took place during the four hundred years of the tenth baktun (9.0.0.0.0–10.0.0.0.0), one would think that the end of the cycle, with its promise of new beginnings, would have been celebrated with hope and enthusiasm by the Maya kings who survived to witness its completion. Ironically, the reverse is true. It was as if they all thought of it as a time of ill omen. Only the king of the resurgent Uaxactun dynasty and the ahau of Oxpemul, a little center north of Calakmul, celebrated the end of this great cycle.

Twelve years into the eleventh baktun, a captive event recorded on the High Priest’s Grave establishes Itza presence at Chichen Itza on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, A.D. 842). The High Priest’s Grave is a massive, four-sided pyramid with Feathered Vision Serpent balustrades. Like the Pyramid of the Sun at the great city of Teotihuacan, it was built over a cave to mark it as a place of “origin.” The raising of the Temple of the High Priest’s Grave with its captive iconography marked (Fig. 10:4a) the triumph of a new social and political order in the northern lowlands and a new era of barbarian, hybrid Maya states throughout the Maya world. Through the sy mbolism of the cave, it also declared the new state to derive frorfFthe same origin as the great states of earlier times.]

Yet not all the new rulers chose revolution. Some attempted to build on the foundation of ancient Maya kingship. The earliest Chichen Itza date is remarkably close to the last date (10.0.10.17.15; A.D. 841) at Machaquila, a kingdom just west of the then-defunct Dos Pilas hegemony. That last Machaquila king, One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint (Fig. 10:4b), depicted himself without the deformed forehead and step-cut hair that had been the T ethnic markers of the Classic Maya elite. Either his people had abandoned the old style by then, or they were intruders who knew how to use Maya l symbolism in the old orthodox ways. In light of contemporary events at neighboring Seibal, we think this lord was a Putun trying vainly to rekindle the ancient royal charisma at an old hearth of power. At Machaquila, 1 the ruler sided with the orthodox Peten ritualists, while at Seibal, as we shall see, the lords worked to create a new vision out of the tattered 1 remains of the old kingship.

With the end of the first katun in the new cycle (10.1.0.0.0) came the last surge of historical kingship in the southern lowlands. On that date a lord raised a monument at Ucanal, the old border town between Naranjo and Caracol, and another lord celebrated at Xunantunich, a hilltop citadel in Belize above the river trail leading eastward to the Caribbean coast. Ueanal’s monument is particularly noteworthy because it is carved in a style that had grown to prominence in the region around Tikal late in Baktun 9. It shows the Ucanal ruler (Fig. 10:5) standing with one of his lords on top of a struggling, belly-down captive, scattering his blood in celebration of the katun ending. Above him, floating in a S-shaped scroll of blood, lies a Tlaloc warrior of the type who haunted Ucanal a hundred and fifty years earlier during the Naranjo wars. Together, the king and his colleague, who ruled other cities on the headwaters of the rivers emptying into the Caribbean, defined a new eastern frontier of the old royal territory. Beyond them to the east, in the rich river valleys of Belize, some communities survived and even flourished, but these Maya eschewed royal history.[613] To the south and west, other Putún, wise in the ways of the literate kings, raised stelae in chorus at Altar de Sacrificios on the Usuma- cinta and at Seibal on the Río Pasión.

[[][Fig. 10:4]]

The simultaneous expression of literate kingship at several surviving capitals reveals the different kinds of strategies their royalty chose in order to cope with changing times. While the Pasión was now the domain of Putún kings trying to forge new and more effective ritual formulae, the territory to the north of this river, the old heartland of Petén, belonged to conservative kings determined to stick to the old ways. These men were caught between the astute merchant warriors working their way along the rivers in the south, the rising Itza hegemony in the north, and other barbarians who carried their commerce along the Caribbean coast and up the rivers of Belize. The world of the holy lords shrank back upon its Petén birthplace, its ancient capitals shattering into petty fiefdoms.

At Seibal, to celebrate the end of the first katun in the new baktun, a new king commissioned one of the greatest displays of creative artistry of the Late Classic period—the extraordinary Temple A3. That Seibal king, like One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint of Machaquilá, appears to have been a foreigner,[614] for he too wore his hair long and had the undeformed forehead of barbarian outsiders. Nevertheless, he knew the Classic Maya way and used it to create one of the most innovative statements of kingship in Maya history.

The new ruler, Ah-Bolon-Tun-Ta-Hun-Kin-Butz’ (Ah-Bolon-Tun, for short), came to Seibal after the disappearance of its last Dos Pilas overlord. He took charge and revitalized Seibal enough to make it a major player in the politics of the time. To celebrate the end of the first katun of the new baktun, Ah-Bolon-Tun commissioned a temple with four stairways, each facing one of the cardinal directions. In this respect, he designed this temple to parallel the High Priest’s Grave at Chichén Itzá.[615]

[[][Fig. 10:5 Ucanal Stela 3 drawing by Ian Graham]]

In contrast to the one at Chichen, however, this building clearly declared the personal power of the king. Ah-Bolon-Tun decorated his temple with an elaborate polychrome and modeled stucco frieze displaying four larger- than-life portraits of himself over the doorways, each holding offerings and standing at his portals to the Otherworld. He also portrayed other people, perhaps the witnesses to his celebration, as well as monkeys, birds, and other animals—all in a great profusion of corn plants. The effect was no doubt quite spectacular, a world-renewal ceremony that all could admire and understand.

[[][Fig. 10:6]]

He placed one tree-stone inside the building and one at the bottom of each stairway to form the quincunx pattern so important to ancient Maya imagery. On the eastern tree-stone, he holds a staff and stretches his right hand out in the scattering gesture. On the northern tree-stone (Fig. 10:6a), he holds the Cosmic Monster as a ceremonial bar and records that three Ch’ul-Ahauob, one from Tikal, one from Calakmul, and one from Motul de San Jose witnessed the period-ending rites at Seibal.[616] This passage affirms that those three ancient capitals, or some local pretenders to their titles, were still active at this time and that the political landscape was stable enough to make royal visits worthwhile. The record of this gathering of holy Maya lords in the southern kingdoms shows that the conservative holdouts in Peten may have attempted to insulate themselves from change, but that they were prepared to deal with and acknowledge the barbarian kings.

The western te-tun shows Ah-Bolon-Tun holding the Vision Serpent, named Hun-Uinic-Na-Chan, as if it were a ceremonial bar. On the south te-tun, the king wears the jaguar-costume of Gill and holds up God K’s head in his right hand. The central tree-stone shows him holding a round shield in his left hand and lifting up the Manikin Scepter in the other. These five images depict Ah-Bolon- Tun in some of the most important costumes of Classic Maya kings, but never had these costumes been assembled into one composition in this way, nor had the Cosmic Monster and Vision Serpent been merged with the ceremonial bar in quite this manner. In addition to his innovative treatment of these themes within the Maya canon, he also introduced new symbols—ones shared by the Itza at Chichen Itza.[617]

Many modern scholars have taken Ah-Bolon-Tun to be a Chontal- speaking intruder from the lower reaches of the Usumacinta.[618] While he may have been from an intruding group, it hardly matters. As we have seen, Ah-Bolon-Tun was a practiced and skillful manipulator of the Classic Maya imagery of kingship and therefore an acceptable Maya ruler. Moreover, his contemporaries in the old dynasties of other kingdoms dealt with him as a legitimate ahau. Unfortunately, whatever synthesis of the ancient kingship with barbarian beliefs he tried to put together soon began to unravel.

His successors gamely attempted to sustain the effort, but evidently lacked his command of the old orthodoxy. They erected tree-stones to celebrate the next two katun endings and by doing so they give us clear and poignant documentation of a people who were losing their roots in this ancient culture. Each image became more confused than the last, diminishing not only in the skill with which the drawings were executed but also in the very syntax of symbols that gave Classic Maya art its meaning (Fig. 10:6b). The last Seibal imagery w’ould have seemed gibberish to the literate Maya of earlier generations.

The central Peten kingdoms managed to stave off most intruders, although some barbarians probably established an outpost on the east end of Lake Peten-Itza at Ixlu. While the newcomers built architecture like their cousins at Seibal,[619] the images their king raised on tree-stones were perfectly standard and deliberately echoed the canon of period-ending presentations particular to Tikal. They were trying to buy into the old orthodoxy. On 10.1.10.0.0 and again on 10.2.0.0.0 (A.D. 879), this king erected tree-stones showing him materializing the Paddler Gods through bloodletting (Fig. 10:7a). The Tlaloc-marked, spearthrower-wielding warrior we saw at Ucanal floats in blood scrolls along with the Paddler Gods. More revealing, however, is a round altar that accompanied Stela 2. In his own name, this Ixlu lord claims status as a Ch’ul-Ahau of Tikal, while his reference to the gods repeats exactly the prose of an earlier stela at Dos Pilas.[620]

[[][Fig. 10:7]]

The kings of Tikal had lost more than the area at the east end of Lake Peten-Itza. The last king of Tikal erected his only tree-stone in the middle of the forest of kings in front of the North Acropolis. The image is fairly well wrought, with the figure presented in front view holding the ribbondecorated staff that had become prominent with the staff-kings four hundred years earlier (see Fig. 5:1a and b). In order to display the detail of the backrack in the manner of the traditional style, the artist wrapped it out to the king’s side in a completely unrealistic pose. A bound captive lies belly down behind the king’s ankles, echoing both the old style of composition and the kingdom’s former glory. As in the case of Ixlú and Ucanal, small figures float above in the blood scrolls of the king’s vision. All in all, the image is conservative and deeply concerned with remaining faithful to the old way of doing things. In contrast to the innovative king of Seibal, this Tikal ahau was a fundamentalist.

[[][Fig. 10:8]]

Perhaps he had reason, for his domain was a shadow of its former self. The final years of Tikal saw the kingdom fragmented into a series of petty, competing domains. All claimed legitimacy as the seat of the Ch’ul- Ahau of Tikal. While the dynasty of its old nemesis, Caracol, erected its last tree-stone in 10.1.10.0.0 (A.D. 859), Tikal’s old subordinate, Uaxac- tún, which had reestablished its independence, erected its own tree-stones until 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). In this final irony, Uaxactún’s monumental art lasted twenty years longer than its former master’s.

Furthermore, on the border halfway between Uaxactún and Tikal, yet another lord had established himself as an independent king at the little site of Jimbal (Fig. 10:8a). This ahau erected a tree-stone on the same date as his Tikal rival—10.2.0.0.0, and like his Ixlú contemporary, he used the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Here again the Paddler Gods float in blood scrolls above the king. This king outlasted the Tikal king by twenty years and erected another all-glyphic tree-stone on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889) on the same date as the lord of Uaxactún.

[[][Fig. 10:9 Toniná Monument 101
drawing by Peter Mathews]]

To the north of Tikal near Calakmul, a king of the site now called La Muñeca erected a tree-stone on the katun-ending in A.D. 889. Xultún, a little-studied kingdom northeast of Uaxactún, had sustained a tradition of stela erection since Cycle 8 times, but it too ended on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). Like Tikal, the last performances of Xultún’s artists (Stelae 3 and 10) evoked the old tradition, but at Xultún, the artistic convention called for the king to be portrayed displaying small effigy gods of the Baby Jaguar and Chae (Fig. 10:8b). We don’t yet know the reason why this date marked the ending of monumental art at so many different sites.

The diaspora up the headwaters of the Usumacinta into the highlands can be seen in two more stelae in Chiapas—one at Comitán dated to A.D. 874 and one at a place called Quen Santo in A.D. 879. The last historical declaration of the Classic Maya kings was raised not too far away, also in the Chiapas highlands, at the unlikely kingdom of Toniná. A bellicose realm during most of its Late Classic existence, Toniná’s most glorious moment came when its king captured Kan-Hok-Xul, the aged second son of Palenque’s most famous king, Pacal. For a brief time, the same Toniná king also had a Bonampak lord as his subordinate.[621] Perhaps the military skill of Toniná’s warriors preserved them longer than other Classic-period kingdoms, or perhaps it was their isolated position at the western edge of Maya territory in a valley off the major trade routes. Whatever it was, Toniná’s people retained their Classic heritage longer than any other Maya kingdom. Their last king erected a tree-stone (Fig. 10:9) to celebrate the ka- tun 10.4.0.0.0, which fell on January 20, A.D. 909. This was the last kingly portrait and inscription ever mounted publicly by the Maya of the southern lowlands, and it conformed exactly to the generations-old artistic tenets of that kingdom.

[[][Fig. 10:10]]

However, the collapse of the southern lowlands was not the end of Maya civilization. In the northern lowlands where rainfall rather than raised-field agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, kingdoms prospered as never before in the ninth and tenth centuries. It is in the north, rather than in the south, that the Maya finally established empires over the dominions of kings. As we have seen, the greatest of these empires had its capital at Chichén Itzá, a city with allies at Tula in highland Mexico but with no equal in Mesoamerica during the eleventh century a.D. First cousins of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s people at Seibal, the Itzá constructed a world without kings—a world that was instead ruled by councils of lords.

The Classic Maya view of a world without kings was of a world beyond the pale, a barbarian place without true order. The Chilam Balam chronicles of the northern lowland Maya suggest that the ahauob of Chichón Itzá were sufficiently barbarian to devise such a state. These confederate lords were also Maya enough to regard their solution as a perpetuation of a time-honored practice. They transformed kingship into an abstraction, vested in objects, images, and places, rather than in the individual identity and written words of a person. Their principal image of kingship was not the living king, but a dead king sitting on his sun disk, an icon that had developed from the Classic period ancestor cartouche. Captain Sun Disk may or may not have been an actual person, but his identity as an individual was not the critical message. The function of this imagery was to symbolize the idea of an ancestral king presiding as a spirit over the realm of Chichón Itzá.

For the Itzá the image of such an ancestral king was an anonymous human sitting inside the sun disk wielding the spearthrower and darts of Tlaloc war (Fig. 10:10a). His image could be replaced by a mirror, another ancient symbol of kingship from the Classic period. These two critical symbols of kingship at Chichón, the mirror and the ancestral king, were found together in a cache inside one of the earliest and most important temples at Chichón Itzá—the Temple of Chae Mool, the structure that was later buried inside the Temple of the Warriors. Under the throne seat inside this earlier temple, the ruling council placed a hollowed-out stone column. Inside was a sun disk (Fig. 10:11) carefully wrapped in a sacred bundle, along with stones of divination, the bodies of a finch, representing the warriors of Chichen, and of a pygmy owl, symbolizing Tlaloc war.[622]

[[][Fig. 10:11 Turquoise Mosaic with a Pyrite Mirror. Offering in the Bench from the Temple of Chac Mool]]

In the center of the disk was a golden mosaic mirror of iron pyrite. Surrounding it was a gleaming turquoise mosaic version of the sun disk divided into eight compartments. A profile serpent with a crest of feathers arcing around its head occupied every other compartment, forming a pattern like the four-serpent design that decorated the Classic period ancestor frame (Fig. 10:10b). These crested serpents are the late versions of the Vision Serpent we saw rising in the scene of Shield-Jaguar’s accession, spitting out the image of the founder dressed in the garb of Tlaloc war.

At Chichen Itza, this mosaic mirror was not passed through the generations from king to king. Instead, it was set into the throne to endow it with power and authority. The person who sat on that throne was rendered the temporary steward of ancestral power, a “two-day occupant of the mat,” as the enemies of the Itza scornfully called them.

Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent—Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans and the Vision Serpent of the southern Maya—became the second great abstract symbol of kingship. While images of serpents—feathered, scroll- covered, and plain—abound in the art of Chichen, nowhere in the existing texts is this being given a person’s name. The role of the Feathered Serpent as it writhed between the victims of sacrifice and the hovering ancestor above was clearly derived from the Vision Serpent of Maya kingship. But for these Itza Maya, the Vision Serpent ceased to be the instrument the king used to communicate with the ancestors and became a symbol of the divinity of the state.[623] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the cult of Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, was still the cult of the Maya nobility in Yucatán.

The revolutionaries at Chichón Itzá and the final orthodox kings of the Peten seem to have converged on a central and shared ritual theme in their pursuit of political survival: the Vision Serpent and the calling forth of the Gods and Ancestors through it. In a set of gold plates called the Battle Disks, dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichón Itzá, acts of war (Fig. 10:12a) and sacrifice are depicted. Above many of these scenes writhe Feathered Serpents, Vision Serpents, and blood scrolls embracing Tlaloc warriors, bird warriors, and even GUI, the ancient Sun deity. The similarities to southern lowland images of the same period are striking and underscored by other correspondences in the iconography and epigraphy of these disks and the Cycle 10 monuments of the south.[624] But while the southerners tried to call forth the ancestors to reinforce the ancient definitions of kingship, the lords of Chichón called them forth to proclaim a new order of power. The economic and military success of Chichón Itzá in this contest was undeniable and may have served to seal the doom of the holdouts in Petén.

However, while the Maya of the northern lowlands did succeed in transforming the structure of their government to establish an empire, Chichón at its height was a capital without a public history, without the written declarations of kings embedded into its stone walls. It was a capital that turned its back on a thousand years of Maya royal practice and relegated literacy to the books of chilanob, men who were sorcerers and prophets, but not kings. Joining the ranks of the nonliterate peoples of Mesoamerica, this kingdom looked to the larger world of the Mexican and the Gulf Coast peoples for its prosperity and future. The result of the success of Chichen lords was the Mayanization of Mesoamerica.[625]

Chichen Itza was a great state indeed, but once literate history had been disengaged from the central authority, Maya lords would never again harness the beliefs and aspirations of their own people as once they had. How long that state endured is still a matter of debate among scholars, but it evidently became the template for a cyclic form of government in which power became centralized at one regional capital, then dissolved to re-form elsewhere. After the fall of Chichen Itza, another regional capital arose in the northern lowlands at Mayapan—founded by Cocom lords who claimed descent from the lords of Chichen Itza.

The lords of Mayapan also erected their own tree-stones, but they had become something very different from those of the Classic lords. Their imagery shows gods (Fig. 10:12b) like those in the Dresden and Madrid codices, books that prescribed the timing and nature of ritual. One badly damaged image appears to show a Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First World Tree, mentioned in the prophecy of Chilam Balam. A bird flutters in the sky above the tree in an image that recalls the World Trees at Palenque. Mayapan flourished for a time and then disintegrated as the factions comprising its government struggled among themselves for power. Although the Spanish cut short the bickering among the several small states ruled by these factions, the pattern of cyclical centralization was a precedent the Maya would have likely continued.

The last king of the Maya to reign independently was a man named Can-Ek, king of the Itza who fled after the kingdom of Mayapan failed to the region that had once been ruled by the Ch’ul-Ahauob of Tikal. The last Can-Ek (a name probably meaning Serpent-Star[626]) was at least the third ruler of that name to appear in Spanish chronicles. The first greeted Cortes and his expedition as they made their way across the Peten to Honduras in 1525.

Another Can-Ek met a second Spanish entrada, or “expedition,” to the Itza made in 1618 by the Padres Fuensalida and Orbita. Their goal was to convert the Itza to Christianity. Can-Ek’s reaction to their message bears witness to the power accorded the written word among the Maya. Can-Ek told the padres that, according to the prophecies of the katuns— which projected history to predict the future—their spiritual message was not correct. The padres described his reaction in these words:

<quote> “The time had not yet arrived in which their ancient priests had prophesied to them they were to relinquish the worship of the Gods; because the period in which they then were was Oxahau, which means Third Period ... and so they asked the padres to make no further attempts in that direction, but to return to the village of Tipu and then, on another occasion, to come again to see them.”[627] </quote>

Finding the Itza unwilling to listen, the priests left, and several other attempts to convert the Itza during the next seventy years were met by the same intransigence and sometimes even with violence. It was not until 1695 that the resistance of the Maya to Christianity eased. At that time another padre, Andres de Avendaño y Layóla, accompanied by two other Franciscans and a group of Maya from the town of Tipú in northern Belize, journeyed to the shores of Lake Petén-Itzá to a town named Chacan.[628] After a long night filled with tear and overactive imaginations fueled by memories of past massacres, the three Franciscans emerged from their hut in the morning to see a wedge of flower-adorned canoes emerging out of the glare of the rising sun. The canoes were filled with resplendent warriors playing drums and flutes. Sitting in the largest of the canoes at the apex of the wedge rode King Can-Ek, whom the Spanish chronicler described as a tall man, handsome of visage and far lighter in complexion than other Maya.[629]

Dressed with all the elegance of his station, King Can-Ek wore a large crown of gold surmounted by a crest of the same metal. His ears were covered with large gold disks decorated with long dangles that fell to his shoulders and shook when he moved his head. Gold rings adorned his fingers and gold bands his arms. His shirt was made of pure white cloth elaborately embroidered with blue designs, and he wore a wide black sash around his waist to mark his status as priest of the Itzá. His sandals were finely wrought of blue tread with golden jingles interwoven. Over everything else, he wore a cape made of blue-flecked white cloth edged with an blue-embroidered border. It bore his name spelled in glyphs.[630]

After Can-Ek stepped ashore onto a mat, his men followed him off the canoes while keeping the music going without a break. Silence fell across the plaza when he raised the feather-mounted stone baton he held in his hand. The black-dressed priests of the Chacans came forward to do the king reverence and argue for the sacrifice of the foreigners who had invaded their lands.

Protecting his guests from the Chacan priests, Can-Ek returned to his canoe, taking the Spanish and their party with him for the two-hour canoe trip to his home island. There he hosted Avendaño and his fellow padres in his own house, where they were fed and tended by two of his unmarried sons and two of his unmarried daughters, all of very attractive appearance, according to the Spanish commentator. With the help of two interpreters, Gerónimo Zinak and Ah-Balan-Chel, Avendaño tried to convince Can-Ek that the time prophesied by the Chilam Balam and the katun histories was soon to come.

Can-Ek listened politely to what Avendaño had to say and told him to return another time. That time came later in the same year when Avendaño, in yet another entrada, journeyed south from Merida through the land of the Cehaches, past the huge ruins of Tikal,[631] and to the shore of Lake Petén-Itzá. Once again Avendaño and his party waited for Can- Ek in Chacan. When the Itzá arrived, “they came in some eighty canoes,” Avendaño wrote, “full of Indians, painted and dressed for war, with very large quivers of arrows, though all were left in the canoes—all the canoes escorting and accompanying the petty King, who with about five hundred Indians came forward to receive us.”

The time Avendano had spent learning to speak Mayan and to know Maya prophecies as thoroughly as the Maya’s own chilanob was about to bear fruit. He was to use Maya memory of history to turn their future to his own ends.

Can-Ek must have known it was a special moment too, for in the trip back to Tayasal he tested the courage of his Spanish guest. While they were in the canoe surrounded by painted and befeathered Maya warriors of fierce demeanor, Can-Ek reached down to place his hand over Avendano’s heart. “Are you frightened?” he asked. Hoping to elicit signs of fear, Can-Ek found instead a man prepared to die for what he believed. Avendano looked up at the fearsome ahau and told him he had come in fulfillment of the very Maya prophecies that earlier Can-Ek had used against Padres Fuensalida and Orbita.

“Why should my heart be disturbed?” he retorted. “Rather it is very contented, seeing that 1 am the fortunate man, who is fulfilling your own prophecies, by which you are to become Christians; and this benefit will come to you by means of some bearded men from the East; who by signs of their prophets, were we ourselves, because we came many leagues from the direction of the east, ploughing the seas, with no other purpose than borne by our love of their souls, to bring them, (at the cost of much work) to bring them to that favor which the true god brings them.”[632]

Avendano had turned the tables on Can-Ek. In an act of bravado and perhaps of remarkable insight, he reached up and mimicked Can-Ek’s challenge by putting his own hand on the king’s chest and asking, “Are you now the one who is disturbed by the words of your own prophets?” Can-Ek replied, “No,” but he was putting a good face on the matter, for his own action would soon show he had accepted that the time foretold by the prophecy had come.

When Avendano landed at Tayasal, the capital of the Itza, he and his men were led, for the second time that year, through the streets to Can- Ek’s palace. In the center of the house sat a round stone pedestal and column which the Itza called Yax-Cheel-Cab, “First Tree of the World.” On the western side of the pedestal base, the ill-made (according to Avendano) mask of a deity called Ah-Cocah-Mut rested. Since mut is the word for both “bird” and “prophecy,” we take the image to be the remnant of the Celestial Bird that stood on the crown of the Wacah Chan Tree in Classic-period imagery. Here was the sad echo of the image on Pacal’s sarcophagus, of the great tree-stones of the Classic period, of the tree carved on the stela of Mayapan, and of the tree Naum-Pat saw the Spaniards raise in the temple on Cozumel.

In a temple behind the Yax-Cheel-Cab, Avendano saw a box holding a large bone. He realized later he had seen the remains of the horse Cortes had left with the first Can-Ek 172 years earlier.

Avendano and his companions spent several days in Tayasal, surrounded wherever they went by curious and suspicious Itza. He complained that neither the admonitions of the king nor the protest of the Spaniards forestalled the curious Maya, who touched them everywhere including “the most hidden parts of a man.”[633] All the time Avendano used the old prophecies to work on Can-Ek’s mind. When he finally convinced the Itza king to be baptized, Can-Ek remained suspicious, demanding to know what the bearded priest intended to do, “since they thought that there was some shedding of blood or circumcision or cutting of some part of their body.” The king, like the suspicious Xibalbans of the Popol Vuh, volunteered a child to try it first. Satisfied that he would sustain no physical injury, he suffered himself to be baptized, and soon thereafter three hundred of his people followed his example.

In the midst of these conversion efforts, “governors, captains, and head men of the four other Petens or islands,”[634] arrived at Tayasal splendid in the riotous color of their full war regalia. Avendano calmed them down by inviting them to share food and drink. In his own words, he “treated them kindly, speaking to them more frequently and pleasantly, discoursing with them in their ancient idiom, as if the time had already come (just as their prophets had foretold) for our eating together from one plate and drinking from one cup, we, the Spaniards, making ourselves one with them.”[635]

To argue with these new lords, who would soon prove to be formidable enemies, Avendano spoke to them in Yucatec, read their own books to them, and used their katun prophecies to convince them it was time to accept conversion. He described these books in detail.

It is all recorded in certain books, made of the bark of trees, folded from one side to the other like screens, each leaf of the thickness of a Mexican Real of eight. These are painted on both sides with a variety of figures and characters (of the same kind as the Mexican Indians also used in their own times), which show not only the count of the said days, months and years, but also the ages and prophecies which their idols and images announced to them, or, to speak more accurately, the devil by means of the worship which they pay to him in the form of some stones. These ages are thirteen in number; each age has its separate idol and its priest, with a separate prophecy of its events.

(Means 1917:141)

The hostile chiefs, especially one named Covoh, did not like his words and soon drove Avendano and his companions out of Tayasal in a dangerous, near-fatal retreat through the forest. But a year later, another expedition came back, this one armed and prepared to take on the stubborn Itza by force, if necessary. After a few hours of token resistance, the Itza gave up and fled their island home, leaving the houses of their gods and the site of their Yax-Cheel-Cab to be ravaged by the Spaniards. After 178 years of resistance, the Itza gave up with barely a whimper on March 13, 1697, the day 12.3.19.11.14 1 lx 17 Kankin in the Maya calendar.[636]

The Long Count position of the fall of Tayasal is not that important because the Maya had long since given up the Long Count as a way of keeping time, but they had retained the count of the katuns. The ends of the katuns were the ages Avendano described. Named for the ahau day on which each twenty-tun cycle ended, the katun cycled through the full thirteen numbers used in the tzolkin count. Because the 7,200 days that make up a katun are divisible by 13 with a remainder of -2, the ahau number of each successive katun drops by two. 13 Ahau is followed by 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, 7 Ahau, 5 Ahau, 3 Ahau, 1 Ahau, 12 Ahau, and so on until the count runs through all the numbers. This unit of thirteen katuns formed the basis of the katun prophecies that Avendano used against Can-Ek; each katun ending within the thirteen had its prophecy. The date of Avendano’s visit fell in the katun that ended on 12.4.0.0.0 10 Ahau 18 Uo (July 27, A.D. 1697).

The Chilam Balam of Chumayel records the following prophecy for Katun 10 Ahau:

<quote> Katun 10 Ahau, the katun is established at Chable. The ladder is set up over the rulers of the land. The hoof shall burn; the sand by the seashore shall burn. The rock shall crack [with the heat]; drought is the change of the katun. It is the word of our Lord God the Father and of the Mistress of Heaven, the portent of the katun. No one shall arrest the word of our Lord God, God the Son, the Lord of Heaven and his power, come to pass all over the world. Holy Christianity shall come bringing with it the time when the stupid ones who speak our language badly shall turn from their evil ways. No one shall prevent it; this then is the drought. Sufficient is the word for the Maya priests, the word of God.

8 Ahau, the katun that followed 10 Ahau, was even more ominous than the prophecy above, for throughout Maya history as it was recorded in the katun prophecies, 8 Ahau was a katun of political strife and religious change. These prophecies were the basis of Avendano’s success and Can-Ek’s resigned acceptance of baptism and eventually his defeat.[637] The fatalism that was at the heart of Can-Ek’s thinking came from the katun prophecies. This fatalism was part of the legacy of the Classic-period attitude toward history and its relationship to cyclic time and supernatural causality. Classic-period scribes emphasized the connectedness among the actions of their living kings, the actions of ancestors in the historical and legendary past, and the actions of gods in the mythological past. We do not think men like Jaguar-Paw, Smoking-Frog, Chan-Bahlum, Bird-Jaguar, and Yax-Pac believed that the past dictated the present, but that these events unfolded within the symmetries of sacred time and space. They looked for symmetries and parallelisms as part of their political strategies, and when they could not find them, they very probably manufactured them. The result of this type of thinking, transformed by the exigencies of the Collapse and then the Conquest, became predictive history and produced the fatalism of Can-Ek.

The Spaniards who met Naum-Pat on the island of Cozumel, and 178 years later convinced Can-Ek that his world had come to an end, brought with them a different vision of history and the importance of human events. In their view, w hich we of the Western world have inherited, the history of the New World began with the arrival of Columbus. The eyewitness accounts of these times registered the cataclysmic clash of worlds and realities that was the Conquest and its aftermath; but, as with the story of Can-Ek, we see these events only through the eyes of the Conquerors, not of the peoples they found and changed forever.

Yet as we have shown, the peoples of Mesoamerica had a long and rich historical tradition preserved in many different forms, including myth, oral literature, ritual performance, the arts, painting, and writing. The Maya had kept their written history pristine and untainted by foreign interests for sixteen hundred years before those first Spaniards stepped ashore and surprised Naum-Pat. The conquerors knew the importance of written history to the identity of the people they subdued and used this knowledge to their own ends. They worked to destroy glyphic literacy among the Maya by burning their books and educating Maya children, when they allowed education at all, in Spanish and Latin only.[638] Their logic was clear and compelling: Native literacy perpetuated resistance to the Conquerors and their religion. Denied public history, the stubborn Maya continued to write their own books in secret, eventually in the Roman alphabet as they learned the ways of the Europeans. There are h-men among the Yucatecs today who still read and keep a book of prophecy in the tradition of the Books of Chilam Balam, and the Maya of highland Guatemala still observe and record the ancient count of days and use it to make sense of their lives.

Driven underground, glyphic literacy and the history that went with it was lost until the process of decipherment began to remove the veil. Because we can once again read their words, the ancient Maya are no longer a mute receptacle of our vision of what they must have been. We of the modern world no longer see the historical Maya as our immediate intellectual forebears envisioned them—as serene astronomer priests telling their charges when to plant the crops. Neither were the ancient Maya the “rational economic” people of some current theoretical schemes of social science, nor mindless automatons “behaving” without will or self- awareness as they lived their lives and left witness of their existence in the archaeological record. They were, as occasion warranted, warlike, politically acute, devout, philosophical, shortsighted, inspired, self-serving human beings. Their rulers were fully engaged in managing governments and ruling large populations through the myths and symbolisms they shared with their people. The language and images they used are ones their distant descendants can still understand today.

Recently, Linda Schele had a unique opportunity to observe firsthand the shift of the ancient Maya into the active voice and the potential this transformation holds for the Maya of the modern world. In 1987 while working on the archaeological project in Copán, Honduras, Linda was the guide to a group of American linguists and Maya Indians from the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, México, who came to visit those ancient ruins. During that afternoon and the following day, she shared what she knew of the ancient kings of the city. Some of the visitors were bored and others distracted or doubtful, but for the most part, the Maya and Americans alike were enchanted with what those working at the site had learned. Most of all, they came to the realization that the ancient inscriptions could actually be read. A few grasped that there was powerful history locked up in those silent stones.

They finished the final tour and ate a late lunch together before piling back into their buses to begin the long trip home. While they ate, the leader of the Maya, a Cakchiquel named Martin Chacach Cutzal.[639] asked Linda if she would come to Antigua, Guatemala, that summer and give a workshop on the ancient writing system to a group of modern Maya. She thought about it (for about five minutes) and realized that a lifetime’s dream was about to come true. The modern Maya had asked to learn about the writing and the history of their forebears. Linda[640] traveled to Antigua and, amid the earthquake-shattered ruins of a Spanish church, went on a marvelous four-day journey of discovery into the ancient past with forty Maya men and women.

During the last day, they all worked on reading the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque, one of the most beautiful inscriptions ever carved by the ancient Maya. Everyone cut up a drawing of the inscription and, following Linda’s lead, taped the disassembled text down onto a large sheet so that they could write a translation below each glyph. The resulting grid displayed the structure of the text, showing how its time statements, verbs, and actors worked.

The final session had to end with the text only half translated so that everyone could prepare for the traditional closing ceremony required for such events. Excited with the results, even though they were only half done, almost everyone came forward to express their feelings about the magic that had happened during those four days. Exuberant that it had worked so well, Linda was nevertheless disappointed and a little hurt when one of the most enthusiastic participants, a Kekchi named Eduardo Pacay, known as Guayo to his friends, disappeared without saying a word.

Two hours later, everyone reassembled for the closing ceremony, which was held at the headquarters of the “Francisco Marroquin” project. A polyglot of conversation in at least ten languages floated over the sounds of a marimba as everyone drank rum and cokes or soft drinks and nibbled on snacks of beef, chicken, beans, and tortillas. Finally done eating, everyone stood or sat around the courtyard of the old house as the formal ceremony began in which gifts were given to the teachers and everyone got a diploma declaring that they had participated. Toward the end, Guayo and the two other Kekchi who had been in his team appeared carrying the meter-high chart they had made during the workshop. They opened the tightly rolled paper, and while two of them held it stretched out, Guayo read their translation—in Kekchi. Before forty awestruck witnesses, a Maya read aloud one of the ancient inscriptions in his own language for the first time in four hundred and fifty years.[641] That day, 12.18.14.3.5 1 Men 3 Xul in the ancient calendar,[642] was 291 years after Can-Ek’s conversion and 1,078 years after the last dated monument of the Classic period.

The magic of that moment was special to Guayo and his friends, but it was equally important to the rest of us. In the “world history” courses that punctuate our childhood education, we learn to place a special value on written history and the civilizations that possess it. In antiquity, history was a very special and rare kind of consciousness and it is a momentous event in our own time when we rediscover a lost reality encapsulated in written words. The Maya inscriptions that have been unlocked by the decipherment offer us the first great history of the Americas.

Maya history as we have presented it is, of course, a construction of our times, sensibilities, and intellectual agendas. The ancient Maya who lived that history would have seen it differently, as will their descendants. Even our own contemporaries who work with different patterns of data and different agendas w ill eventually change some of the details and ways of interpreting this information; but that is only the natural result of time and new discoveries. Yet for all the limitations that lie within the proposition that history cannot be separated from the historian, these very limitations are part of the nature of all history—ours as well as theirs. Each generation of humanity debates history, thus turning it into a dynamic thing that incorporates the present as well as the past. This process has been happening with American history both before and after Columbus; it is happening to the history of the last fifty years even as we watch events unfold with mind-boggling rapidity on the evening news. It will happen to the Maya history we have constructed here. But you see, that is the miracle. There is a now Maya history that can be debated and altered into a dynamic synergy with the present and the future. And with that synergy our perception of the history of humanity is changed.

Epilogue: Back to the Beginning

On a warm night in May of 1986, Linda and I, Mary Miller, and many friends celebrated the opening of the Blood of Kings exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by letting a little blood from our fingers onto paper and copal incense and burning the offering. I carefully wrapped the ashes, along with the obsidian blades we had used, in a paper bundle. The following summer, I buried the bundle in the cement benchmark at the center of Yaxuna, a place where I hope to work for ten more years. So we take our thoughts and our feelings for the ancient Maya from this book and from our distant homes back to the Maya field with us, Linda to Copan, me to Yaxuna. Maybe we are a little superstitious, but I’d rather think we’re empathetic, for the Otherworld still shimmers over the Maya landscape even as we of the West pass through it in oblivious innocence.

Don Emetario, captain of the Maya workmen at Yaxuna, and my friend, took me aside at the end of the summer’s work in 1988 to tell me this story. A few years ago he was walking home to the village from his fields along the modern dirt road that cuts through the ruins of Yaxuna. It was dusk, and in the reddening light he saw a tiny boy standing before him, naked and bald. Thinking it might be his son, Emetario cried out to him, but the child ran off the road and disappeared into a hole in the rocky surface of the ancient community. Emetario ran home for a flashlight and peered down into the hole, but all he could see was something furry like a night animal. Was this the “lord of money (the Earthlord)”? Emetario asked me. 1 replied that there are always strange things to be found in ruins, but that I did not know what it was he saw.

I rather suspect that Emctario’s cousin, Don Pablo, knows more than I do about such things. Don Pablo is a H-men, a “known,” or shaman, of the village, who also works for the Yaxuna project. On the last day of our work in the summer of 1988. Don Pablo was working with our photographer in the southern end of the community, clearing the grass from stone foundations for pictures. In the course of the conversation, tie regarded the principal acropolis of the south, a fine raised platform with three buildings upon it, erected in the Preclassic period, at the dawn of Maya history.

“Here was a great temple,” he said, “but the portal is now closed.”

We cannot open the Maya portals to the Otherworld with excavation alone, no matter how careful and how extensive. For the portals are places in the mind and in the heart. We, as pilgrims from another time and reality, must approach the ruined entrances to the past with humility and attention to what the Maya, ancient and modern, can teach us through their words as well as their deeds. So our book is a beginning for us on that path—I look forward to hearing what Don Pablo has to say about our progress.

<right> David Freidel
Dallas, Texas
September 1988 </right>

Update 1991

Since A Forest of Kings went to press, new information relevant to our stories has been discovered. In the 1990 season, excavators in the Caracol Project under the direction of Arlen and Diane Chase discovered several new stelae. According to project epigrapher Nikolai Grube, one of these records an attack on Tikal during the war in which Lord Kan II conquered Naranjo in A.D. 637. Simultaneously, in the Dos Pilas project under the direction of Arthur Demarest, excavators cleared a hieroglyphic stairway, which Stephen Houston and David Stuart, the project epigraphers, analyzed as recording the capture of Shield-Skull, the father of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal on the date 9.12.6.16.17 11 Caban 10 Zotz’ or May 3, A.D. 679. Because we knew only of Caracol’s conquest of Tikal in A.D. 562 when we wrote our story of this period, we could not explain why it had taken so long for Tikal to recover from this single defeat nor why the broken stelae had been allowed to lie unattended in the Great Plaza for over a hundred years. Now it seems likely that Tikal was defeated and devastated at least two more times after the first Caracol victory and that Flint-Sky-God K and his allies disfigured the monuments in the Great Plaza only three years before Ah-Cacaw’s accession in A.D. 682.

The third great discovery came from Nikolai Grube, who deciphered the glyph for “dance” (ak’ot) in May 1990. This new discovery is particularly important to the Bird-Jaguar story in Chapter 7 because the Flapstaff, Basket-staff, and Bird-staff rituals as well as the display of the God K scepter and the bundle can now be identified as public dances. Dance, it turns out, has been one of the focal acts of Maya ritual and political life even until today.

<right> Linda Schele
Austin, Texas
February 1991 </right>

Glossary of Gods and Icons

The Baby Jaguar appears frequently in paired opposition with Chac-Xib-Chac in scenes of dance and sacrifice. He most often appears with the body of a infantile human, although he may also be represented as an adult, fully zoomorphic jaguar. In both aspects, he wears a scarf and is associated with the sun. His human aspect sometimes wears a cruller, associating him with GUI of the Palenque Triad. The Baby Jaguar is particularly important at Tikal in the early inscriptions where it appears as if it were the name of the kingdom. At minimum, it was considered to be a god particularly associated with Tikal, perhaps as its patron. The Baby Jaguar also appears in early inscriptions at Caracol. See Chac-Xib-Chac.

Bicephalic Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Blood is represented by a bifurcated scroll, sometimes with plain contours and sometimes with beaded outlines representing the blood itself. To mark the scroll as blood rather than smoke or mist, the Maya attached a number of signs representing precious materials: kan, “yellow,” yax, “bluegreen,” chac, “red,” shells, jade jewelry like beads and earfiares, obsidian, mirrors of various materials, “zero” signs, and bone. This imagery merges with that of God C, which imparts the meaning “holy” or “divine.” Blood is the holy substance of human beings. See God C.

The Bloodletting Bowl is a flat, shallow plate with angled sides, called a lac in Mayan. It held offerings of all sorts and was often used in caches in a lip-to-lip configuration in which a second bowl was used as the lid. In bloodletting scenes, the bowl usually holds bloodied paper, lancets of various sorts, and rope to pull through perforations.

Cab or Caban, see Earth.

Cauac Signs consist of a triangular arrangement of disks in groups of three, five, or more, combined with a semicircular line paralleled by a row of dots. These signs derive from the day sign Cauac, but in the iconography they mark both things made of stone and the Witz Mountain Monster. When they appear in zoomorphic form or with a wavy contour, cauac signs mark the Eccentric Flint. Combined with the God C-type head, the cauac signs refer to sacred stones, like altars. When the zoomorphic form has eyelids and a stepped forehead, it is the Witz Monster or Living Mountain. See Witz Monster.

The Celestial Bird, also known as the Serpent Bird and the Principal Bird Deity, has a long tail, personified wings, and the head of a zoomorphic monster. Often it appears with a round object and woven ribbon held in its mouth, with a trefoil pectoral around its neck, and a cut-shell ornament attached to a jade headband. In its most common representation it sits atop the World Tree or astride the body of the Cosmic Monster. In its earliest manifestations, it appeared prominently in the Late Preclassic art of the southern highlands. There it represented the idea of nature out of control but brought into order by the Hero Twins and their avatar on earth, the king.[643] This concept of the king as the guardian of ordered nature first came into the iconography of the lowland Maya with the image of this bird, especially in the context of the World Tree.

The Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster.

The Ceremonial Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Chac-Xib-Chac is frequently paired with the Baby Jaguar in early inscriptions, while in Late Classic pottery painting they occur together in scenes of dance and sacrifice. Chac-Xib-Chac can appear in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form, but he is distinguished by a shell diadem, a fish fin on the face of his human version, a shell earflare, and his frequent wielding of an ax. All but the shell diadem and the ax are features shared by G1 of the Palenque Triad, and in fact the two may be aspects of the same entity. Chac-Xib-Chac was the prototype of the great god Chae of the Maya of Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Kings frequently portray themselves in the guise of Chac-Xib-Chac or wear him behind their legs suspended on a chain. On the Cosmic Plate (Fig. 2:4), he is identified by date and actions as Venus as Eveningstar.[644] See Baby Jaguar.

The Cosmic Monster, also known as the Celestial Monster and the Bice- phalic Monster, is a dragon-type monster with a crocodilian head marked by deer ears. The body has legs, usually terminating in deer hooves with water scrolls at the joints. Its body sometimes resembles a crocodile marked with cauac signs, but it can also appear as a sky band or as the lazy-S scrolls of blood. At Yaxchilán, the Monster appears with two crocodile heads, but usually the rear head is the Quadripartite God, which Y hangs upside down in relation to the front head to mark it as a burden of the Cosmic Monster. The front head is usually marked as Venus while the Quadripartite Monster is the sun. Together they represent the movement of Venus, the sun, and by extension, the planets across the star fields at night and the arc of heaven during the day. The Cosmic Monster marks the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds as it exists on the perimeter of the cosmos. See World Tree and Quadripartite Monster.

The Death God (God A) appears as an animated skeleton, sometimes with the gas-distended belly characteristic of parasitical disease or the decay of a corpse. There appear to have been many versions of this god, differentiated by slight variations in the anatomy, the objects carried, and the actions done in the scene. These variations may represent different aspects of the same god, or just as likely, different Lords of Death named for various diseases or actions.

The Directional Gods, see Four-Part Gods.

The Double-headed Serpent Bar, see Serpent Bar.

Earth is represented by bands marked with cab signs from the glyph meaning “earth.” These bands may be split to represent a cleft from which a tree grows or ancestors emerge. In some representations, earth bands may also represent the concept of territory or domain.

Eccentric Flint and Flayed-Face Shield combine a flint lance blade or an eccentric flint with a shield made from a flayed human face. It is an object transferred from ancestor to king in the accession rites at Palenque. At other sites, like Tortuguero, Yaxchilan, and Tikal, this symbol combination is directly associated with war and capture.

The Foliated Cross is a maize tree, representing the central axis of the world in the symbolism of cultivated nature. At its base is the Kan-cross Waterlily Monster representing the canals and swamps of raised-field agriculture. Its trunk, like that of the Wacah Chan tree, is marked with <verbatim><</verbatim> the God C image meaning “holy” or “sacred.” Its branches are ears of maize with a living human head substituting for the grains of maize as a A reference to the myth of creation in which human flesh was shaped from maize dough. Perched on its summit is the great bird of the center, in this context represented as the Waterbird associated with the canals around raised fields. The Waterbird wears a mask of the Celestial Bird. See World Tree.

The Four-Part Gods: Many gods in the Maya system occur in repetitions of four associated with the directions and colors of the four-part division of the world. In the Dresden Codex, Chae (God B) is the principal god shown in a four-part set, but in the Classic period the Pauahtunob[645] or Bacabob are the most frequent deities shown in four repetitions. In the 819-day count of the Classic inscriptions, GII (God K) appears in fourfold division associated with colors, directions, and the appropriate quadrants of the sky. See Pauahtun, GII, and Chac-Xib-Chac.

GI, GII, GUI, see the Palenque Triad.

God B, see Chac-Xib-Chac.

God C is a monkey-faced image that will often have representations of blood drops and other precious materials attached to it. The phonetic reading of the glyphic version as k’ul, the Maya word for “divinity,” “holy,” or “sacred,” identifies the icon as a marker for the same quality. When the image is associated with the depiction of a living being, such as a king or deity, it marks that being as a “divinity.” When it is merged with the image of a thing, such as a tree, stream of blood, or a house, it marks the image as a “holy” thing. See Blood and World Tree.

God D is the most difficult of the old gods to identify iconographically. He has large square eyes, an overhanging nose, a toothless mouth, and wears a headband embossed with a hanging flower. His glyphic name in the codices and the Classic inscriptions is Itzamna. In glyphic expressions at Naranjo and Caracol, which are structurally similar to those naming the Palenque Triad, he appears paired with Gill or the Baby Jaguar.

God K, see Palenque Triad (GII).

God L is one of the aged gods who appear principally in scenes of Xibalba. He is frail and bent with age, wrinkled in feature, and has a huge nose overlapping a toothless mouth. He is a smoker, preferring huge cigars or smaller cigarettes. His most important costume element is a headdress in the form of the mythological bird named Oxlahun Chan (13 Sky). He has a house in the Otherworld, where he is attended by the beautiful young goddesses who personify the number two. His rule of Xibalba is chronieled by a rabbit scribe.[646] He is also the god who presided over the assemblage of gods when the cosmos was ordered on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.

God N, see Pauahtun.

The Headband Twins, who are characterized by ornate headbands displaying the Jester God of kings, occur most frequently in pottery scenes where they are named as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In their fully human aspect, they are the Classic period prototypes of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hun-Ahau Twin carries large dots on his cheek, arms, and legs and functions in the writing system as the anthropomorphic variant of the glyph for lord, ahau. In the Dresden Codex, this Twin appears as the god Venus in his manifestation as Morningstar. His Twin is marked by patches of jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs, and by a cut shell, read ds yax, attached to his forehead. This god functions also as the personification of the number nine and the glyph yax, meaning “blue-green” or “first.” See Palenque Triad.

The Hero Twins, see Palenque Triad and Headband Twins.

The Jester God began as the personified version of the tri-lobed symbol that marked headband crowns of Late Preclassic kings. By the Classic period, this personified version had become the zoomorphic version of the glyph for ahau. Putting a headband with the Jester God, the ahau sign, or a mirror on any animal or human head glyph converted its meaning to ahau. Named for the resemblance of its pointed head to a medieval jester’s cap, this god can appear in miniature form held by the king; but it is most commonly attached to the headband of the king or worn on his chest as a pectoral. The Jester God will sometimes have fishfins on its face.

The Kan-cross Waterlily Monster is a special version of the waterlily distinguished by the presence of a Kan-cross on its forehead. Often the root formations, blossoms, and pads of the waterlily emerge from its head.

It is especially associated with the water environment of agricultural canals. See Waterlily Monster.

The Maize God was represented by a beautiful young man with maize foliation growing from his head. He is identified with the older set of Twins who were the father and uncle of the Hero Twins[647] and his most common representation is as the Holmul Dancer.

The Maw of Xibalba is depicted as the great gaping head of a skeletal zoomorph. This creature has much in common with the mouth of the Witz Monster, but it is always represented with skeletal features and split-representation of two profiles merged at the lower jaw, whereas the mouth of the Witz Monster is shown either in profile or front view as the natural mouth of a fleshed creature. The Maw symbolizes death or the point of transition between the natural world and the Otherworld of Xibalba. In Temple 11 at Copan, the mouth of the Witz Monster was the outer door of the temple itself, while the central platform inside the building was the Maw to Xibalba. In that context, one reached the Maw by entering the mountain. A possible interpretation of the contrast in these images is that the Maw is the portal on the side of the Xibalbans, while the mouth of the Witz Monster is the portal in the world of humans.

The Mexican Year Sign is a trapezoidal configuration that is associated with the Tlaloc sacrifice complex. Its name comes from the function of a similar sign which marks year dates in the Aztec codices. See Tlaloc.

The Moon Goddess in her Classic period form often sits in a moon sign holding a rabbit. Her head functions both as the numeral “one” and as phonetic na. Since na was also the word for “noble woman,” the head of the Moon Goddess precedes female names, distinguishing them from the names of male nobles. In the codices and the Yucatec Colonial sources, the Moon Goddess was called Ix-Chel and she may appear as an aged woman with a toothless mouth.

The Paddler Gods are named from their appearance on four bones from the burial chamber of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal. In the scenes incised on these offerings, they paddle the canoe of life carrying the king’s soul through the membrane between the worlds and into death. The Paddlers appear with special frequency in references to period-ending rites, where they are born of the king’s blood offering. Both gods have aged features. The Old Stingray God is distinguished by squint-eyes and a stingray spine piercing the septum of his Roman nose. He sometimes wears the helmet of a mythological fish called a xoc. His twin is also aged, but he is distinguished by a jaguar pelt on his chin, a jaguar ear, and sometimes a jaguar helmet. From glyphic substitutions, we know this pair represents the fundamental opposition of day and night. The Old Stingray God is the day and the Old Jaguar God the night.[648]

The Palenque Triad is composed of three gods most fully described in the inscriptions and imagery of Palenque where they are asserted to be the direct ancestors of that kingdom’s dynasty. Sired by the mother and father of the gods who had survived from the previous creation, they were born only eighteen days apart. Although their kinship to human kings is detailed only in the inscriptions of Palenque, we surmise they were considered to be ancestral to all Maya kings and thus central images in Maya iconography.

GI, the first born of the Triad, is human in aspect and distinguished from his brothers by a shell earflare, a square-eye, and a fish fin on his cheek. He is particularly associated with the imagery of the incense burner in the Early Classic period and as a mask worn by kings during rituals. GI often wears the Quadripartite Monster as his headdress and is associated with the Waterbird.

GII, the last born of the Triad, is always zoomorphic in aspect. His most important feature is a smoking object—such as a cigar, torch holder, or ax head—which penetrates a mirror in his forehead. He may appear as a reclining child, as a scepter held by a ruler, or as an independent full-figured being. His face always has the zoomorphic snout traditionally called a long-nose, but his body is often shown as human with a leg transformed into a serpent. He is thus the serpent-footed god. He is also called God K,[649] the Manikin Scepter, and the Flare God and has been identified with the Maya names Tahil, Bolon Tzacab, and Kauil.[650] GII is particularly associated with the ritual of bloodletting, the institution of kingship, and the summoning of the ancestors. He is the god most frequently shown on the Double-headed Serpent Bar.

GUI, the second born, is also human in aspect, but he is marked by a jaguar ear and a twisted line called a cruller underneath his eyes. Gill is also called the Jaguar God of the Underworld and the Jaguar Night Sun. His most frequent appearance is as an isolated head worn on a belt, carried in the arm, or surmounted on shields carried by kings and nobles. Both GI and GUI have Roman-nosed, square-eyed faces, long hair looped over their foreheads, and human bodies. GI and GUI will often appear as twins.

The Pauahtuns (also known as God N) are aged in feature with snaggleteeth, small human eyes, and a wrinkled visage. They often wear net headbands in combination with cauac or ‘‘stone” markings on their bodies as spellings of their name, paua (“net”) plus tun (“stone”). Characteristically, they wear a cut-shell pectoral or their bodies emerge from a conch shell or turtle carapace. The version that wears waterlilies in addition to the net headband might have the body of a young man.

The Classic Maya represented the Pauahtuns as beings who held up the four corners of the world. Sometimes they were the sky and sometimes the earth. The image of the Pauahtuns as world bearers is seen, for example, on Temples 11 and 22 of Copán. Pauahtuns are also depicted with scribes and artisans on painted pottery and on sculpture, as in the case of the Scribe’s Palace at Copán. The number five is personified as Pauahtun.

The Personified Perforator is a blade of flint or obsidian, or sometimes a thorn or a stingray spine attached to the ubiquitous long-nosed head that Y personifies inanimate objects in the Maya symbol system. Its other critical feature is a stack of three knots, a symbol that evokes bloodletting with S the perforator.

[[][Principal Bird Deity, see Celestial Bird.]]

The Quadripartite Monster appears in three major versions: as the rear head of the Cosmic Monster, as an independent image at the base of the World Tree, and as a scepter or headdress. It never has a body and its head is usually fleshed above the muzzle and skeletal beneath it. A flat bloodletting bowl marked with the sign for the sun, kin, forms its forehead and a stingray spine, a shell, and crossbands rest in the bowl. The stingray spine represents the blood of the Middleworld; the shell symbolizes the water of the Underworld; and the crossbands are the path of the sun crossing the Milky Way, a sign of the heavens which can be represented by a bird’s wing in Early Classic examples. GI of the Palenque Triad often wears this image as its headdress. The Quadripartite Monster represents the sun as it travels on its daily journey through the cosmos. See Cosmic Monster, World Tree, and GI.

The Royal Belt consists of a heavy waistband to which jade heads were attached at the front and sides. Typically, these heads, which read ahau, surmount a mat sign (or an equivalent sign of rule) and three celts made of polished jade or flint. A chain hung from the sides of the belt to drape across the back of the wearer’s legs where a god hung from the chain. Many examples of the dangling god are identified iconographically as Chac-Xib-Chac. This dangling version of Chac-Xib-Chac also occurs as the head variant of an important title reading chan yat or in some versions chan ton. The first paraphrases as “celestial is his penis” and the second as “celestial is his genitals.”

The Serpent Bar, also known as the Bicephalic Bar, the Double-headed Serpent Bar, and the Ceremonial Bar, is a scepter carried in the arms of rulers, usually held against their chests. To hold the Bar, Maya rulers put their hands in a formal gesture with their wrists back to back and their thumbs turned outward. Its original function in the Late Preclassic period was to symbolize “sky” based on the homophony in Mayan languages between chan-“sky” and chan-“snake.” In Early Classic times, kings began to hold the double-headed snake as a scepter. Since it had originally marked the environment through which the gods move, its structural position in Maya symbolism overlaps partly with the Vision Serpent. In its fully developed form, it signals both sky and the vision path, as well as the act of birthing the gods through the vision rite.[651] See Vision Serpent.

Serpent Bird, see Celestial Bird.

The Skyband consists of a narrow band divided into segments by vertical bars. Inside each segment is a glyph for a planet, the sun, the moon, or other celestial objects.

The Sun God is related to Gill of the Palenque Triad. This particular version features a Roman-nosed human head with square eyes and squintlike pupils in the corner. The four-petaled flower kin marks the head as the image of the sun.

Tlaloc is a symbol of war and bloodletting consisting of a jawless head with blood scrolls emerging from its mouth and large circles around its eyes. It is associated with spearthrowers, darts used as weapons, and a certain type of flexible, rectangular shield. Warriors dressed in the costume of this complex usually wear a full-body suit made from a jaguar pelt. Often, a horned owl will also occur with this imagery. This symbolic complex and its sacrificial meaning is shared by many contemporary Mesoamerican societies, including Teotihuacan, which may have lent this ritual complex to the Maya during the Early Classic period.

Twins and Oppositions: The principle of twinning and opposition is at the heart of Maya cosmological thought. Paired gods, like the Paddlers who represent day and night, are common in Maya religious imagery. Some twins represent oppositions and others are actual twins, born of the same parents. Any god could, however, if need be, appear alone outside its normal pairing. New oppositions could also be generated by new pairings. The most famous examples of twins are the Ancestral Heroes of the Popol Vuh, who are related mythically and historically to several of the frequently shown twins of the Classic period. Another context in which oppositions appear with regularity is in the glyphs that introduce Distance Numbers. In this context, the oppositions function as metaphors for the concept of change, the replacement of one thing by another. Some of the oppositions expressed in this context are male-female, life-death, windwater, Venus-moon, blood-water. The principle of paired oppositions remains today a fundamental characteristic of Mayan languages and metaphor. See Headband Twins, Paddlers, Palenque Triad, Chac-Xib- Chac, and Baby Jaguar.

The Vision Serpent is usually depicted as a rearing snake, sometimes with feathers lining its body and sometimes with its body partially flayed. Personified (or ‘’Holy”) Blood is usually attached to its tail as a symbol of the substance which materializes it. It symbolizes the path out of Xibalba through which the ancestral dead and the gods enter the world when they are called in a bloodletting rite. Normally, Vision Serpents are depicted with a single head, but two-headed versions are known. The Maya apparently softened the distinctions between Vision Serpents and Double-headed Serpent Bars because they considered them to be related in meaning.[652] See Serpent Bar.

Wacah Chan, see World Tree.

Water is the substance in which the world floats. It is shown welling up out of the portal to the Otherworld. In at least some images, water is the atmosphere of Xibalba and actions which occur there take place as if they were underwater. Water is depicted in two ways: as Water Bands composed of alternating rows of dots, scrolls, and stacks of rectangles representing the surface of water, especially shallow water as in swamps or agricultural canals; and as bands filled with the images of waterlilies. Because nab, the word for “waterlily,” was homophonous with words for “lake,” “swamp,” and “river,” Waterlily Bands represented these bodies of water. Waterlily Bands often merge with the symbolism of Blood Bands. A Water Hole is a glyphic and symbolic version of water contained under the earth, in cenotes, and perhaps in rivers. It is related to the glyphic and iconic version of the Maw of the Underworld.

The Waterbird represents a generic class of bird the Maya associated with water, especially the waters of rivers, swamps, and the canals of raised- field agriculture. This bird usually has a long neck, but as in the case of the Palenque Emblem Glyph bird, it can also have a short neck. The head has the crest of the heron and the upturned, bulging beak of the cormorant. See the Celestial Bird.

The Waterlily Monster is the personification of lakes, swamps, and other bodies of still water. It is characterized by the pads and blossoms of the waterlily and in some cases it will appear with an Imix glyph (distinguished from other imix glyphs by cross-hatching in its center) in its forehead. This particular version is closely associated with the tun and uinal glyphs that are used in Long Count notations. A particularly important title of Classic nobility was based on the uinal substitution as a reference to the nobility as “people of the waterlily” or, perhaps, “people of the swamps and lakes.”

The Witz Monster is the symbol of the living mountain. It is depicted as a four-legged zoomorphic creature marked with the distinctive signs of the Cauac and “stone.” To differentiate the Witz Monster from the zoomorph representing “stone,” the Maya portrayed the mountain with eyelids and a stepped cleft in the center of its forehead. On pottery, the mouth of the Witz Monster is often depicted agape. The Witz Monster was placed on temples to transform them into sacred, living mountains. Its open mouth then became the entry into the mountain, symbolizing both the doorway of the temple and the mouth of a cave. To specify which mountain they were picturing the Maya would attach icons to the Witz or write its name within its eyes. See Cauac Signs.

The World Tree is the central axis of the world. Called the Wacah Chan (“six sky” or “raised up sky”) in the glyphs, it appears in the form of a cross marked with God C to denote it is a divine or holy thing. The bejeweled, squared-snouted serpents which usually terminate its branches represent flows of liquid offering—human blood and its analogs, rubber, copal, and the red sap of the ceiba tree. Draped in the branches of the tree is the Double-headed Serpent Bar of kings and perched on its summit is the Celestial Bird Deity, who is the bird of the center in the directional model of the world. The World Tree often emerges from behind the rear head of the Cosmic Monster. The front head of the same creature can be depicted as its roots. The Tree is the path of communication between the natural and supernatural worlds as it is defined at the center of the cosmos. The Cosmic Monster is the same path of communication configured for the periphery of the cosmos. The king personifies this World Tree in his flesh. See Foliated Cross.

Notes

Prologue

[1] This conference, organized by Merle Greene Robertson at Palenque, was a pivotal meeting, bringing together thirty-five of the most active people in Maya studies. The acceleration of the glyphic decipherment and iconographic studies can be traced to this meeting and the timely publication of its results a year later.

[2] Our work with the dynastic history of Palenque was built on Berlin’s (1968) identification of the rulers we called Pacal, Kan-Xul, Chaacal, and Kuk, and Kubler’s (1969) discussion of persons he called Sun-Shield and Snake-Jaguar. Kelley (1968) demonstrated the phonetic reading of one king’s name as Pacal or “shield.” Our work identified two new kings and an accession phrase that allowed us to fill in the gaps in Berlin’s and Kubler’s earlier work.

[3] David Kelley was the first to read Pacal’s name as it was originally pronounced; George Kubler identified the builder of the Group of the Cross as Snake-Jaguar (a name w’e later translated into Choi as Chan-Bahlum); and David Stuart read the inscription that dated Temple 22 and thus identified its builder as 18-Rabbit.

[4] The Harvard-Arizona Cozumel Project was directed by Jeremy A. Sabloff and William L. Rathje and was principally funded by the National Geographic Society. See Freidel and Sabloff (1984) for a description of the ruins on the island.

Foreword

[5] Ahau is glossed in the Motul dictionary, one of the earliest colonial sources on Yucatec Maya, as “rey o emperador, monarca, principe or gran señor” (“king or emperor, monarch, prince or great noble”). In the inscriptions of the Classic period, the high king was an ahau, but so were many of the high nobles in his court. The inscriptions record that the king took the office of ahau when he became king and that he was a k’ul ahau, “holy (or divine) lord” of his kingdom. We shall use the ahau title to refer to Maya of this highest rank, and following the custom of using pluralizing suffixes from other languages as legitimate forms in English, we will pluralize ahau in the Maya fashion as ahauoh.

1. Time Travel in the Jungle

[6] Huastec is recognized by modern linguists as a Mayan language. Archaeologically and linguistically, the separation between Huastec and other Mayan languages occurred very early—probably by 2,000 B.c.

[7] The term Mesoamerica was invented by Paul Kirchhoff (1943) as both a cultural and geographic term to identify a region limited by aboriginal farming, which did not extend into the deserts of northern Mexico, to an eastward limit defined by Mayan- speakers and their cultural and economical influence.

[8] There is still much controversy over the relationship between the hunter-gatherer populations who have left scattered stone-tool evidence ofcampsites in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and in the lowlands of Belize and the farming populations which emerge in the Middle Preclassic period (1000–400 B.C.) Some scholars believe that substantial new populations of farmers moved into the lowlands at the beginning of this period, bringing with them settled village life, the use of ceramic vessels, and the use of domesticated plants. They suggest that these are the true ancestors of the civilized Maya. However, Fred Valdez (personal communication, 1989), reports the presence of preceramic archaic occupation directly underlying the Middle Preclassic village at the site of Colha in northern Belize. With further research, the relationship between an indigenous hunter-gatherer population and the ensuing village farming populations will become clearer. Migration of peoples between the Maya highlands and the adjacent lowlands certainly did occur in antiquity, as it is continuing to occur today.

[9] To say that the shaman conserves culture is only partly accurate, for his constant improvisation of interpretations must be anchored in the changes his people constantly experience from the world around them. His actions are indeed homeostatic in all senses of that word: They work to heal the contradictions in village priorities which inevitably come with the imposition of change from without. These actions conserve things of value by constantly reshaping the changes the Maya perceive in their world to fit fundamental cherished ideas which can be traced thousands of years into the past.

[10] We called Stephen Houston and David Stuart asking them if they would send a letter to us documenting the new reading so that we could refer to it. Houston’s and Grube’s letters arrived within twenty-four hours of each other. This is typical of the growing dynamism in the field of decipherment. As more and more decipherments are made, they in turn generate new readings, so that when a critical mass is reached, many people at once come to the same conclusions. Houston and Stuart (1989) have since published their evidence for this reading.

[11] Humboldt included five pages from the Dresden Codex in his 1810 narrative of his scientific travels in Mexico with botanist Aimé Bonpland. Del Rio’s travels were published by Henry Berthoud of London in 1822 in a book called Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City, which included seventeen plates depicting stone carving from Palenque.

[12] Our recounting of these interesting events is all based on George Stuart’s (n.d.) detailed study of the history of publication and research in the field.

[13] Ian Graham, director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, follows in their footsteps by publishing fine drawings and photographs of Maya inscriptions. Merle Greene Robertson is another of the great archivists. She has spent the last thirty years making rubbings, photographs, and drawings of Maya inscriptions and carvings.

[14] This description was included in his A Study of Maya Art (1913). Completed originally in 1909 as his doctoral dissertation, Spinden’s work represents the first systematic study of Classic period iconography. Many of its observations and connections still hold good today.

[15] Morley (1915:26) proposed this methodology and actually applied it to become the first to suggest a war event at Quiriguâ. Shortly after this time, however, he began a lifelong campaign to photograph and analyze all the Classic period inscriptions he could lind. 1 he two resulting works, The Inscriptions of Copan and The Inscriptions of the Petén. are still critically important resources, but in both, Morley paid almost exclusive attention to calendric material. He was never again interested in the “textual residue,” which ironically he systematically excluded from his drawings.

[16] The critical papers outlining these discoveries were all published between 1958 and 1964, including Berlin (1958 and 1959), Proskouriakoff (I960, 1961a, 1961b 1963- 1964), and Kelley (1962).

[17] This statement was published in the preface to the 1971 edition to his (Thompson 1971:v) Maya Hieroglyphs: An Introduction, but it was but one of several devastating criticisms he published against phoneticism as proposed not only by Knorozov but also by Whorf (Thompson 1950:311–312). His voice was powerful enough to shut down debate until the mid-seventies. Although there are still holdouts against phoneticism today, many of them strident in their opposition, the accumulated evidence, and especially the productivity of the phonetic approach, has convinced most of the working epigraphers that Knorozov was right. We are still engaged in energetic debate about details and individual readings, but there is wide consensus as to how the system works.

[18] Elizabeth Benson, director of the Pre-Columbian Library and Collections of Dumbarton Oaks until 1979, called a series of mini-conference between 1974 and 1978. The participants, David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, and Linda Scheie, worked out detailed paraphrases of the inscriptions of Palenque. This work resulted not only in many new decipherments but in the important methodology of paraphrasing based on syntactical analysis of the texts.

[19] Three of the four known Maya books are named for the cities where they are now found: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Paris Codex. The fourth, the Grolier Codex, resides now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of México. Made of beaten-bark paper folded in an accordion form, each codex combines pictures and written text drawn in bright colors on plaster sizing. The Maya read their books by folding the leaves from left to right until reaching the end of one side; they then turned the codex over and began reading the other side.

[20] Codices from the Mixtec recorded lineage histories as the land documents of their communities. Aztec sources record tribute lists, histories of various sorts, and calendric almanacs and were used to carry news from one part of the empire to another.

[21] Yucatecan is the ancestor of modern Yucatec, Itzá, and Mopán, while Cholan diversified into Choi, Chontai, Chorti, and the extinct language, Cholti. Most linguists consider that the diversification into these daughter languages occurred after the Classic period ended (A.D. 900).

[22] The descendant languages of these two proto-languages were found in approximately this distribution at the Conquest, but with the now extinct Cholti language spoken in the area between Choi and Chorti. Examples of glyphic spelling specific to one or the other language occur in roughly similar distributions, suggesting that they were in approximately the same distributions during the Classic period. Yucatec and Choi also evidence profound interaction in their vocabularies and grammars beginning during the Late Preclassic period, although they diverged from each other many centuries earlier.

[23] This particular homophony has long been known to epigraphers and iconogra- phers, although Houston (1984) was the first to fully document its use in the writing system.

[24] We use the word logograph rather than pictograph because most word signs were not pictures of the things they represented. All pictographs are logographs, but most logographs are not pictographs.

[25] The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov (1952) first identified the way the phonetic spellings work, but it was many decades before his work became generally accepted by Western scholars.

[26] Kathryn Josserand has explored the discourse structure of hieroglyphic texts and found a fruitful comparison of the ancient patterns to the modern. She has found that many of the features that the ancient Maya repeatedly used, such as couplets (Lounsbury 1980), oppositions, building a text toward a peak event, and disturbance in syntax around the peak, are still used today.

[27] Continuities in their toolmaking techniques suggest these people gradually developed village societies between 1500 and 1000 B.C., at least in the eastern Caribbean coastlands of Belize, where there is a gradual shift toward settled village life along the shores of the rivers. R. S. MacNeish (1982) carried out a survey in Belize and discovered the sites and stone artifacts dating from the archaic, prefarming period.

Up until 1988. radiocarbon samples from the remarkable village site of Cuello in northern Belize dated the earliest Maya farmers at roughly 2000 B.C. This period of occupation fell in the Early Preclassic period of Mesoamerica. The weight of evidence (as announced by Norman Hammond, the excavator of Cuello, at the Austin Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in 1988) now favors redating the Cuello village occupation about a millennium later, in what archaeologists call the Middle Preclassic period.

[28] By 900 B.C., hierarchical society was established in the Copán Valley, resulting in a burial tradition with wide-ranging access to exotic goods, especially jade. These burials, especially Burial XVIII-27, are among the richest so far known from the early period in the Maya region (W. Fash n.d. and Scheie and M. Miller 1986. 75, Pl 17).

[29] 1 he groups in the Pacific lowlands have long been accepted to have been May an- speaking. Linguists, especially Terrence Kaufman, Lyle Campbell, Nicholas Hopkins, Kathryn Josserand, and others, now propose that those peoples were speakers of the Mije-Zoqucan language family with the Zoqueans living in the western region closer to the Isthmus and with Mije groups in the east toward El Salvador (Kaufman, personal communication, 1989). If this distribution is correct, then much of the early symbolism of kingship from that region derives from the Mije-Zoqucan cultural tradition, rather than the Mayan.

[30] This kind of social organization is called segmentary because it consists of politically autonomous groups who, for purposes of trade, ritual communion, marriage, and the management of hostilities, regard themselves as descendants of common ancestors and hence as segments of a large family. The lowland Maya developed other forms of social organization as their society became more complex—patron-client relationships, for example, between noble families and families devoted to crafts and skilled labor. Nevertheless, the segmentary lineage organization remained a fundamental building block of Maya society and politics throughout the span of the civilization. The period of civilization has been called segmentary state organization and this is a reasonable label in light of the enduring role of kinship in the hierarchical structure of royal governments.

The archaeological investigation of the origins of Maya complex society in the lowlands is proceeding at a very rapid pace in the interior of the peninsula. Richard Hansen and Donald Forsyth (personal communication, 1989) have recently discovered that the community of Nakbc near El Mirador contains pyramidal mounds of 18 to 28 meters elevation dating to the Middle Preclassic period, perhaps between 600 and 300 B.c. This discovery indicates that before the advent of the Late Preclassic period, some lowland Maya communities were already experiencing the centralization of ritual activity and the concentration of labor power characteristic of the ensuing era of kings. The people of Copan already enjoyed extensive trade contacts and access to precious materials such as carved greenstone during this Middle Preclassic period. Recently, the elaborately decorated Swazy ceramics of northern Belize were redated from the Early Preclassic period into this Middle Preclassic period. Several sites in northern Belize, including Cuello and Colha, were sizable villages with centralized ceremonial activity and extensive trade contacts during this period. The famous Olmec heartland site of La Venta in the Gulf Coast lowlands flourished during the same era and was clearly importing vast quantities of exotic materials from highland sources. Some of the La Venta sources may well be situated in the Motagua drainage in the southeastern periphery of the Maya lowlands.

Viewing this shifting landscape, we now suspect that during the Middle Preclassic period, a long-distance trade network, a “jade trail,” crossed the interior of the peninsula from the Caribbean coast of Belize, through the vicinity of El Mirador, and thence across to the Gulf Coast lowlands. We suspect a pattern similar to the situation after the collapse of the southern kingdoms in the ninth century. Then, a few complex societies endured in the interior to form a demographic archipelago across the sparsely inhabited forest. These societies facilitated trade in exotic commodities and also provided local products for export. This pattern may also exist at the outset of the demographic buildup leading to the emergence of civilization in Preclassic times. Eventually, further discoveries in the interior may push the origins of the institution of ahau back into the Middle Preclassic period. Even were this to be the case, however, ethnographic analogy with other areas of the tropical world, such as Central Africa, shows that small complex societies can coexist with large tribal societies for centuries without the tribal societies developing into states. The empirical record of the Late Preclassic still suggests that the institution of kingship coalesced and dominated Maya lowland society in a rapid transformation during the last two centuries B.c.

[31] We discuss the structural transformations of kinship ideology which accompanied the invention of Maya kingship in Freidel and Scheie (1988b).

[32] See John Fox’s (1987) study of this kind of organization among the Postclassic Quiche of the Guatemala highlands.

[33] Lee Parsons (personal communication, August 1987) excavated a Late Preclassic offering in a major center of the Pacific slopes area which contained a set of three carved greenstone head pendants suitable for wearing as a crown. One of these head pendants is the Jester God, the diagnostic diadem of ahau kingship status from the Late Preclassic period until the Early Postclassic period (Freidel and Scheie 1988a). On Stela 5 at the site of Izapa, a major center of the Late Preclassic period in the southern highlands, the Jester God diadem is also depicted worn by an individual in authority (Fields n.d.). Under the circumstances, there is reason to believe that the institution of kingship predicated on the status of ahau was present in the southern regions of the Maya world as well as in the lowlands to the north during the Late Preclassic period.

[34] There is a massive four-sided pyramid at the northern lowland site of Acanceh in Yucatán which Joesink-Mandeville and Meluzin (1976) correctly identified as Preclassic on the basis of a partially preserved monumental stucco mask illustrated by Seler (Seler 1911). The iconography of this monumental mask is commensurate with the royal iconography of Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros (Freidel and Scheie 1988b). The famous noi thern-lowland bas-relief in Loltún Cave depicts a Maya king. Although not firmly dated by epigraphy or archaeological context, the style of the royal regalia is Late Preclassic (Freidel and Andrews n.d.).

[35] The city of El Mirador raised stelae in the Late Preclassic period (Matheny 1986), and Richard Hansen (1988) has discovered Late Preclassic-style stone stelae at the site of Nakbe, near that great city. We have yet to find any with hieroglyphic writing.

[36] This early date is recorded on the Hauberg Stela (Scheie 1985c and Scheie and M. Miller 1986:191). The names of the phases of Maya history—Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic—are misleading in that civilized life and with it public works of enormous size began earlier than the Classic period. Although an important temple of the Late Preclassic period was excavated at Uaxactun early on (Ricketson and Ricketson 1937), it was not until the last fifteen years that archaeologists finally began to uncover the truly amazing accomplishments of the lowland Maya during the Late Preclassic period.

[37] The latest dated monument from the Classic period is found at the site of Tonina. It has the date 10.4.0.0.0 or the year 909.

[38] Pat Culbert (1988 and personal communication, 1986) gives an overall population distribution of 200 people per square kilometer for the entire Maya region. He estimates a population of 500.000 at Tikal.

[39] We will describe the Maya state with several words, including kingdom, domain, dominion, and polity—a word that technically connotes territoriality and political dominion without additional qualifications as to the nature of the organization or whether it can be considered a nation or a state.

[40] Berlin (1958) noticed this special type of glyph in the inscriptions of many different sites. He showed that it is composed of two constants—the “water-group” affix, which we now know to read ch’ul (“holy”), and the “ben-ich” affix, which reads ahau—and a variable, which corresponded to the city in which the Emblem Glyph was found. Since he could not decide whether this new type of glyph referred to the city as a place or to its ruling lineage, he decided to call it by a neutral term—Emblem Glyph.

Peter Mathews (1985a, 1985b, 1986) has done the most recent work on Emblem Glyphs. Following Berlin’s and Marcus’s (1973 and 1976) work, he observed that the rulers of some neighboring communities, such as Palenque or Tortuguero, are both named as ahau of Palenque, suggesting that the territorial entity named by the Palenque Emblem Glyph is larger than the capital city. He also noted that in star-shell war events the main signs from Emblem Glyphs appeared as if they were locations. Combining these data, he proposed that Emblem Glyph are titles, naming the person who has it as a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”) of a polity. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have additionally recognized glyphs representing geographical features and separate population centers within an area described by a single Emblem Glyph. Finally, we have evidence from Copán that noble lineages tracing their descent to different founders, and presiding over distinct communities within the realm, nevertheless used the same Emblem Glyph. The Copan Emblem Glyph appears on Altar 1 of Rio Amarillo in the name of a governor who ruled that subordinate site, and at the same time traced his descent from a founder other than the founder of Copán’s royal line (Scheie 1987d). Emblem Glyphs thus denote a kingdom or polity as a territorial and political entity with a hierarchy of social positions and different geographical and urban locations within it.

[41] Joe Ball (1989) reports that in the Buena Vista region of northern Belize the larger palace complexes are distributed at five-kilometer intervals throughout the region he surveyed. In between the larger compounds, residential clusters and single-family holdings are found distributed at regular intervals. He has found pottery at the smaller compounds that was probably made at the large Buena Vista center. More important, in debris at Buena Vista, he also has found very well-made pottery with the name of the king of Naranjo (Smoke-Squirrel, whom we shall meet in one of our histories) painted on the rim. Seiichi Nakamura (1987) and the Japanese team working in the La Venta Valley near Copán in Honduras have found the same pattern. One of the largest sites in their survey area, Los Higos, has a stela in the style of Copán, while at least one second-level site had an ahau important enough to have received an incised alabaster vase as a gift from Yax-Pac, the high king of Copán. This gifting down of elite goods was apparently one of the ways Maya kings retained the loyalty of their subordinate lords.

[42] Research to date by Mathews and Justeson (1984:212–213) and Stuart (1984b and 1986c) has documented the use of this cahal title only in sites of these regions. However, other Maya polities certainly had parallel constructions of political ranking and may also have used this title. Stuart and Houston (personal communication, 1987) have now expressed doubts as to the phonetic value of this title glyph, although they do not question its basic meaning. We will continue to employ it as a useful technical term for this rank that is already known in the literature.

[43] Cahalob appear as attendants to kings at Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but they also ruled sites like Lacanjá and El Cayo under the authority of the high kings of larger cities. At least one, Chac-Zutz’, was formerly identified as a king of Palenque, but it is now clear he was in fact a cahal probably serving as a war captain to the high king (Scheie n.d.b).

[44] The inscriptions from kingdoms up and down the Usumacinta record royal visits by people who are named theyahau, “the ahau of,” the high kings of allied kingdoms (Scheie and Mathews n.d.). These royal visits appear to have been one of the important methods of establishing and maintaining alliances between kingdoms and within them.

[45] Lateral descents of this kind are recorded several times in the inscriptions of Palenque, Tikal, Caracol, and Calakmul, among others (Scheie n.d.e). Enough examples are now documented to presume that brother-brother inheritance was an accepted pattern, which may still survive in the highlands of Guatemala. In many of the Maya groups living there, the youngest son inherits the house of his parents and is responsible for caring for them in their old age. Often the son will become owner of the house and the responsible male of the household while his parents are still alive.

[46] Mathews (1986) generally requires the presence of an Emblem Glyph to define a polity, but since Emblem Glyphs usually do not occur in the northern inscriptions, he used other less certain data to suggest polity boundaries in this northern region. His resulting map of Late Classic polities shows a network of small states covering all of the lowlands, and if anything, his numbers may be overly conservative.

[47] Kan-Xul of Palenque and 18-Rabbit of Copán were both captured late in their lives after long and successful reigns. They were apparently sacrificed by their captors—the rulers of the smaller towns of Toniná and Quiriguá, respectively.

[48] When we went to Palenque the first time in 1970, the Chois and Tzeltals living south of Palenque had to rely on canoes to carry cargo from their homes in the Tulijá Valley to Salto de Agua and Villahermosa. At that time there were many men who knew how to make dugout canoes, but when the new road was built from Palenque to San Cristóbal de las Casas, this region opened up to truck and bus travel. The younger generation uses modern transportation and the art of canoe making is being lost. See Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzman (1985) for a description of canoe making and its role in Choi society.

[49] This carrying system places the cargo in a band passed across the bearer’s forehead and down his back. The weight is thus distributed into the muscles of the neck and onto the back, allowing amazingly heavy loads to be carried substantial distances. This method is still used throughout Central America, where one often sees small children walking down the highway bent under the huge load of firewood they carry back to their houses each day. Their parents will carry 100-pound sacks of grain using the same method.

[50] We have all seen recent photographs of the pall of smoke from the burning forest hanging over the Amazon Basin. In the dry season, this is a fact of life across the Maya landscape as well. We might suppose that it would not have been nearly as bad during the Classic period, but archaeology and settlement-pattern studies suggest that the population of the Classic period at least equaled current levels and may well have exceeded them. At the height of the Classic period, soot from dry-season fires would have hung as oppressively over the landscape as it does today.

2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, AND THE MAYA WORLD

[51] The scene on the Acasaguastlan pot (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:181, 193–194) suggests that in Classic Maya thought these two planes of existence were more than just reciprocally dependent. The scene shows the Sun God in the midst of a vision represented by mirrored Vision Serpents—one manifesting day and the other night. Interspersed among the folds of these Vision Serpents are the beasts of the field and forest, elements representing the human community, the waters of both worlds, and sacrificial ritual which communicates between the two. The “waking dream” of the god is the world in which human beings live. On the other side of the equation, David Stuart (1984a, 1988c) has shown that the Maya believed that this vision rite, when performed by kings and other human beings, “gave birth” to the gods. Through this process, the beings of Xibalba, both supernaturals and ancestors, were materialized in the world of humans. If this reciprocity of the vision rite in both worlds was widely believed (and there is evidence to suggest it was), then the w’orld of human experience came into existence as a vision of the gods, while humanity gave the gods material presence in the Middleworld of people through performance of the same rite. In a very real sense, each plane of existence is materialized through the vision rituals performed by inhabitants of the other.

[52] This is more than mere speculation. One of the results of the revolution in Maya hieroglyphic translation is confirmation of the hypothesis that what Maya villagers think of the world today, what their ancestors thought of it at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and what the Classic Maya kings thought of it are all transformations of one and the same model (Vogt 1964). These connections are possible only if, in fact, the villagers of the Classic period, the direct ancestors of the post-Conquest villagers, also shared this model of reality.

[53] These layers are represented in the three elements surmounting the sun-marked bowl of sacrifice in the forehead of the Quadripartite Monster. This symbol, which rests at the base of the World Tree or rides on the tail of the Celestial Monster, represents the sun as it moves through these domains. In turn, the three domains are symbolized by the signs resting in the sacrificial plate, with the crossed bands representing the heavens, the stingray-spine bloodletter representing the blood of sacrifice composing the Middleworld of earth, and the shell representing the watery world of Xibalba.

[54] Xibalba is the Quiche Maya term used in the Popol Vuh for the Underworld. Recinos notes the following about the derivations of this word: “Chi-Xibalba. In ancient times, says Father Coto, this name Xibalbay meant the devil, or the dead, or visions which appeared to the Indians. It has the same meaning in Yucatán. Xibalba was the devil, and xibil to disappear like a vision or a phantom, according to the Diccionario de Motul. The Maya performed a dance which they called Xibalba ocot, or ‘dance of the demon.’ The Quiche believed that Xibalba was the underground region inhabited by the enemies of man.”

While Xibalba is traditionally regarded as the name of the Underworld, and certainly this is the principal spatial location of Xibalba in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1985), we suggest that the Classic Maya regarded the Otherworld as an invisible, pervasive, ambient presence. Even in the Popol Vuh, there are celestial aspects to Xibalba as interpreted by Dennis Tedlock: “They [the Ancestral Hero Twins] choose the Black Road, which means, at the terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld will take them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that they were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they descended below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the Road to Xibalba.” (Tedlock 1985:38; brackets ours). Tozzer’s (1941:132) annotated discussion of Landa’s understanding of Maya hell and heaven likewise reveals the fact that in Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya supernatural abode of gods and ancestors traversed the Underworld, Middleworld, and heavens.

Our analyses of the texts and images pertaining to the Otherworld of the Classic Maya suggest that this is a parallel world revealed in trance. The ritual public spaces of the kings, where people congregated to witness sacrifice, were explicitly designed to convey the idea that they were in the Otherworld (see the acropolis plazas of king Yax-Pac at Copán in Chapter 8). We believe that in the thrall of great public ceremonies, the combination of exhaustion, bloodletting, intoxication, and expectations of trance yielded communal experiences of the Otherworld denizens conjured forth by royalty. Such experiences confirmed the legitimate power of the kings who bore primary responsibility for the interpretation of the visions.

[55] The Popol Vuh stories give the best and most humorous view of Xibalba. We recommend the translation by Dennis Tedlock (1985). Michael Coe has done more than any other scholar to associate the Popol Vuh vision with imagery from the Classic period. See Michael Coe (1973, 1978, and 1982) and Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more detailed discussion of Xibalba and Maya concepts of the afterlife.

[56] Thompson (1950:10–11) was the primary proponent for the crocodile identification. Puleston’s (1976) work on the iconography associated with raised fields supported Thompson’s ideas. Recently, Taube (1988) has presented convincing evidence that the turtle was also used as a symbol for the land surface of the world.

[57] The expressions for the directions vary greatly from language to language, and depend to some degree on whether the speaker faces east or west when naming them. East has different names in different Mayan languages: In Yucatec, it is lakin or “next sun”; in Cholti, it is tzatzib kin or “strong sun”; in Chorti, it is wa an kin, “risen sun ; and in Choi, it is pasib kin or “arrived sun.” North is xaman (there is no etymology for this word) in Yucatec; in Choi chiik iklel and in 1 zeltal kini ha al refer to the north as the direction of winter rains. In Chorti north is tz’ik, “left (side of the sun),” and in Izotzil it is xokon winahel, the “side of heaven.” West is chikin, “eaten sun,” in A ucatec and yaram kin, “below the sun,” in Lacandon. In Choi bdhlib kin, “set sun,” or mahlib kin, “gone away sun’—as well as male! kakal, “gone away sun ’ in Tzotzil—refer to the west as the leaving or setting position of the sun. South, known as nohol in Yucatec and nool in Cholti, is the great side of the sun, because this direction is on the right-hand side as one faces the rising sun.

[58] The glyph wac ah chan is recorded in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque as the name of the sanctuary inside the Temple and by extension the name must refer to the central image of the interior panel. That central image is the World Tree. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the Temple of the Cross.) Nicholas Hopkins in the 1978 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing was the first person to suggest a decipherment for the glyph naming this axis as “stood-up or raised up sky,” and David Stuart’s (personal communication, 1986–87) work with the proper names of buildings and stelae contributed greatly to the recognition of this wac ah chan as a proper name.

[59] David Stuart (1988c) has made an argument that the Double-headed Serpent Bar is another manifestation of the path of communication between the Otherworld and our world.

[60] As we shall see, other important people in addition to kings could participate in opening the portal to the Otherworld through elicitation of the Vision Serpent. As long as the Maya had kings, they remained the pivotal characters in such royal dramas.

[61] This plate was painted by the same artist who executed the famous Altar de Sacrificios vase. See Schele and M. Miller (1986:304—307, 310–312) for a detailed analysis of this plate.

[62] Symbols representing the power of objects began as a profile polymorphic image directly attached to objects such as earflares and bloodletters during the Late Preclassic period, personifying such objects as alive with power (Schele and M. Miller 1986:43–44 and Freidel and Schele 1988b). Objects and people continued to be decorated with these little power polymorphs in public art throughout the Classic period. The metaphysics of this way of regarding the material world is cogently summarized by the great Mayanist ethnographer E. Z. Vogt speaking of the modern highland Maya of Chiapas: “The phenomenon of the inner soul is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to the Zinacantecos also possesses an inner soul: domesticated plants, such as maize, beans, and squash; salt; houses and the fires at the hearths; the crosses; the saints in the churches; the musical instruments played in ceremonies; and the Ancestral Gods in the mountains, as well as the Earth Lord below the surface of the earth. The ethnographer in Zinacantan soon learns that the most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons, nor between persons and objects, as we think of these relationships, but rather between inner souls inside these persons and material objects, such as crosses.” (Vogt n.d.:10-l 1). Crosses, we should add, are further described by Vogt: “In Chiapas they symbolize ‘doorways’ to the realm of the Ancestral Gods who live inside the hills and mountains and/or represent Ancestors themselves, as the Classic Maya stelae depict rulers or royal ancestors” (Vogt n.d.:25). David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has associated these same concepts with the God C “water group” set of signs. This set reads ch’ul, “holy” or “sacred,” in the writing system.

[63] The Spanish describe the Maya drawing blood from all parts of their bodies as their principal act of piety. In Classic representations and post-Conquest descriptions, the most important rites required blood from the penis or tongue, although it could also be drawn from any part of the body (Joralemon 1974 and Thompson 1961). The ritual served two primary purposes in the understanding of the ancient Maya: as the nourishment and sustenance of the gods and as the way of achieving the visions they interpreted as communication with the other world (Furst 1976). The Maya believed this bloodletting-vision rite gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a, 1988c), and thus materialized them in the human world. Every important dynastic and calendric ritual in Maya life required sanctification through bloodletting (Scheie and M. Miller 1986). It brought the central axis into existence and allowed communication with the ancestral dead and the gods.

[64] Mayan languages have two words for “house”: otot is a “house,” but the word incorporated the idea that someone possesses it (analogous perhaps to “home” in English). Na, on the other hand, is a building that does not include ownership in the concept of the word. The word otot cannot be uttered without implying that the house is owned—it is always someone’s house. Na was used in the proper names of temples, but otot is the glyph used to name the category of object to which “temple” belonged. Temples were sacred houses owned by the gods and the spirits of the ancestral dead who resided in them. Thus we know that the ancient Maya thought of the temple as an inhabited place.

[65] The term “monster” has been in Maya scholarly literature since Spinden’s (1913) first study of Maya iconography, but it is a loaded term to English speakers recalling the Frankensteinian tradition in literature and films. Nevertheless, “monsters” in our own tradition usually exhibit features combining animal and human or distorting the normal features of either to the level of the grotesque. The Maya generated their images of supernatural creatures in the same way, combining animal with human or exaggerating the features of both to produce an image that could never be mistaken for a being from the natural world. It is in this sense that wc use the term “monster,” without intending to associate it with any of the negative connotations that have become attached to the word. We use it in its original sense of “something marvelous, a divine portent or warning, something extraordinary or unnatural” and “an imaginary animal (such as a centaur, sphinx, minotaur, or heraldic griffin, wyvern, etc.) having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animal forms” (OED:1842- 1843).

[66] David Stuart (personal communication 1987) first recognized the glyph for witz in its many permutations at Copan and interpreted it as “mountain.” Most important, he found a passage on the Hieroglyphic Stairs where witz is written with the zoomorphic image formerly identified as the Cauac Monster. Distinguished from the cauac zoomorph meaning “stone” by the presence of eyelids and a stepped indention in the forehead, this “mountain” image is the long-nosed god, so prevalent in Maya art and on buildings, which has in the past been called Chae. Rather than referring to the raingod, however, the image identifies the temple as a “mountain” as well as a sacred house. The doorways of temples at Copan and especially in the northern regions are often built in the form of this monster to identify them as the ti’ otot “mouth of the house.” The mouth of the mountain is, of course, the cave, and Maya mythology identifies the road to Xibalba as going through a cave. The Maya not only used natural caves as the locations of bloodletting and vision ritual (MacLeod and Puleston 1979), but the inside of their temple was understood to be the cave pathway to the Otherworld. The ritual of bloodletting materialized the World Tree as the path to the supernatural world. See “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: 301–316) for a detailed examination of the imagery associated with this pathway.

[67] These are elementary and pervasive metaphors of shamanistic ecstasy (sec Mircea Eliade 1970:Chapter 8). It is our basic working hypothesis that Maya royal charisma was essentially shamanistic as this concept is defined by Eliade (see Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

[68] Ritual activities of the modern Maya generally involve the creation of altars, arbors, and corrals which, in their essential features, realize the structure of the world given in this model: four trees at the corners, or six poles holding up the altar. And the associations given by modern “knowers” of these rituals are the same as those to be found in the ancient royal performances: the fourfold arrangement of the cosmos; the use of sacrifice (now chickens, turkeys, deer, or pigs), and most significant, the principle that the created “place” is a conduit to the supernatural. The fact that the modern village Maya, and their direct village ancestors as described by the conquering Spanish, performed ritual that is resonant with that of Precolumbian Maya, albeit of elite and royal status, clearly implies that the knowledge and the performance were the province of the commoner ancients as well.

[69] The pervasive quality of access to the supernatural in shamanistic cosmology is well articulated by Mircea Eliade: “Although the shamanic experience proper could be evaluated as a mystical experience by virtue of the cosmological concept of the three communicating zones [heaven, earth, underworld], this cosmological concept does not belong exclusively to the ideology of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism, nor, in fact, of any other shamanism. It is a universally disseminated idea connected with the belief in the possibility of direct communication with the sky. On the macrocosmic plane this communication is figured by the Axis (Tree, Mountain, Pillar, etc.); on the microcosmic plane it is signified by the central pillar of the house or the upper opening of the tent— which means that every human habitation is projected to the ‘Center of the World, or that every altar, tent, or house makes possible a break-through in plane and hence ascent to the sky.” (Eliade 1970:264–265; brackets ours, italics original.)

[70] Vogt (n.d.) describes the staffs of high office among the modern peasant Maya of the highland region in terms strictly commensurate with this hypothesized attitude of the ancient Maya toward sacred objects and facilities. For example, he states, “The batons are washed and censed in communities such as Chamula in order not only to rid them of accumulations of sweat and dirt, but also to rid them symbolically of any mistakes made by a predecessor serving in the same position. Note that the first washing in Chamula rids the batons of sweat and dirt, and administrative errors, while the water and liquor used in the second and third cleanings are served to the officials who in drinking these liquids renew the sacred power that has come down to them from the Ancestral Gods via these batons. Note also that the silver-headed batons are believed to be infallible; if administrative errors have been made, they are the mistakes of human officials who hold these batons while serving in high offices” (Vogt n.d.:39^4O). Similar repeated ritual results in accumulative power endowed in the silver coin necklaces of the saints housed in Zinacantan center (Vogt 1976:127–128).

[71] New excavations of Temple 26 at Copan have demonstrated that the iconography of the Ballcourt at Copan remained the same in all of its manifestations from Early Classic through Late Classic times. Other buildings, such as Temple 22, retained the same sculptural program through different construction phases, suggesting that those particular foci were symbolically defined early in the city’s history and remained unchanged through subsequent centuries. When new buildings were to be constructed, the Maya performed elaborate rituals both to terminate the old structure and contain its accumulated energy (Freidel and Scheie n.d. and Scheie 1988b). The new structure was then built atop the old and, when it was ready for use, they conducted elaborate dedication rituals to bring it alive. These dedication and termination rituals permeate the archaeological record and they represent a major component of the history recorded in the inscriptions at many sites.

[72] The containment rituals were elaborate and their effects widespread in the archaeological record. The portrait images of both humans and deities were effaced, often by destroying the left eye and nose. Color was removed or whitewashed and sculpture slashed, broken, burned, or sometimes carefully sealed in. Holes were drilled in pottery vessels and other objects were broken or effaced to contain their power. In an earlier building under the summit of Temple 26 at Copan, a circle of charcoal and broken stingray spines, remaining from a ritual conducted to terminate an earlier version of the temple, was recently discovered (W. Fash 1986). At Cerros, this ritual involved the careful burial of the old facade and rituals in which hundreds of pottery vessels were broken over the building. The huge percussion holes that mar the Olmec colossal heads are also remnants of termination rituals (Grove 198 1), reflecting the long-term presence of this ritual and its underlying definition of sacred energy in Mesoamerican thought.

[73] The Old Testament Bible is a complex compilation of history, law, poetry, and prophecy (Drane 1983:22–23) written down over an extended period of time by several authors (Spuhler 1985:113) during the emergence of the Hebrew nation as a state. Behind the Bible is a long history of literacy and of literature both in Greater Mesopotamia and in Egypt. In these respects, the Quiche Popol Vuh is quite comparable. It too is a complex compilation of law, poetry, and history pertaining to a nation. It is also subsequent to a long history of literacy in bordering territory and related society, namely among the lowland Maya. The parallels between the histories of the Old Testament and earlier sacred literature from Mesopotamia are often striking, particularly with respect to Genesis (Spuhler 1985:114–115). In the same fashion, the parallels between the Creation story in the Popol Vuh and the allusions to Creation in the sacred literature of the Classic lowland Maya are beginning to become clear. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the Popol Vuh does not register direct transmission of the Classic Maya cosmology or theology any more than the Old Testament registers directly the beliefs of Sumerians. In both instances, we are dealing with long and complicated literary and theological traditions. Ultimately, our interpretations of the Classic Maya reality must be anchored in the contemporary Classic period texts, images, and archaeological record.

[74] The surviving version of the Popol Vuh combines stories of the great protagonists of Maya myth, the Hero Twins called Hunahpu and Xbalanquc, with creation stories and the dynastic history of the Quiche. Found in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango by the Spanish priest Ximénez in the seventeenth century, the book records the history of Quiche kings to the year 1550. Ximénez hand-copied the original and transcribed it into Spanish. The original is now lost, but we have the copy made by Ximénez. Of the three English versions by Recinos (1950), Edmonson (1971), and Tedlock (1985), we recommend the Tedlock version as the easiest reading for those interested in knowing these stories. The Popol Vuh is one of the finest examples of Native American literature known to the modern world.

[75] See Freidel and Scheie (1988b) and Cortez (1986).

[76] Karl Taube (1985) associated the older set of twins with the maize god and the image from pottery painting known as the Holmul Dancer.

[77] Many of the underworld creatures pictured on Classic Maya pottery have Emblem Glyphs in their names. Houston and Stuart (1989) have shown these beings are the way or “coessences” of the ahau of those kingdoms.

[78] Sec Michael Coe’s (1973, 1978, 1982) works on Maya pottery painting for a corpus of images showing Xibalba and its denizens.

[79] There are as many modern myths about the Precolumbian ballgame as there are ancient ones. The most persistent is that the winner was sacrificed, because the loser was considered unworthy. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that curious idea and the stories of the Popol Vuh, our most detailed information on the game, clearly demonstrates that the loser not the winner was the victim of sacrifice. The father and uncle of the Hero Twins were decapitated after they lost to the treacherous Lords of Death. The most interesting recent work on the Precolumbian ballgame is Ted Leyenaar’s (1978) documentation of a game still played in the state of Sinaloa. His photographs of the equipment and the play resemble Classic Maya imagery to a remarkable degree.

[80] All Maya calendar counts are in whole days. Since fractions were not available, the Maya used only whole-day adjustments to account for remainders in cycles of fractional lengths. For instance, a lunation is approximately 29.53 days long. To account for the accumulating error in a whole-day count, the Maya alternated a 29-day and 30-day moon to give a 29.5-day average. However, even this approximation soon accumulated discernible error between where the count said the moon should be in its cycle and what one observed in actuality. To adjust for that error, the Maya would place two 30-day months back to back, with different sites using different formulas of 29- and 30-day sequences. None of these approximations produced a particularly satisfactory result. With the true tropical year of 365.2422 days, they did not even try. Instead they kept a simple whole-day count that proceeded day by day without attempting to adjust for the .2422 day that accumulated each year. They were aware of the length of the true solar year and reckoned by it when necessary so that rituals would fall on the same point within it—for example, on a solstice. In their calendar, however, they let the count of days drift, with their New Year’s day, 1 Pop, falling one day later in the solar year every fourth repetition. See Floyd Lounsbury (1978) for a detailed discussion of the Maya calendar and number system.

[81] The use of letters of the alphabet to name these gods comes from Schellhas (1904), the first modern scholar to systematically study their images and glyphic names in the codices. God K, the deity of the 819-day count, appears in four versions which are distinguished by the color glyph and direction of the four quadrants through which the count moves. The first 819-day-count station began 6.15.0 before the creation day and is associated with the birth of the mother of the gods in the text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque (Lounsbury 1976 and 1980; Scheie 1981 and 1984b).

[82] No apparent relationship to astronomical or seasonal periodicities has been discovered, so that we presume the cycle is based on numerology.

[83] Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1987) has proposed that uayeb is an agentive noun derived from the Choi word waye!, “to sleep.” Uayeb (the five-day month at the end of a year) is, thus, the “resting or sleeping” part of the year.

[84] The Maya, like other Mesoamerican people, believed the world had been created more than once and then destroyed. Each creation used one form of matter that was destroyed by its opposite, for example, a world of fire destroyed by water. Aztec myth makes the current creation the fifth to exist. The writers of the Popol Vuh described these successive creations as the attempts of the gods to create sentient beings who would recognize their greatness. The gods tried different solutions; animals, people of mud, and then wood. Finally in the fourth attempt, they succeed in creating humanity of maize dough. If this seventeenth-century version corresponds to the ancient myth, the current existence is the fourth version in the cosmos to have been created.

[85] Justeson and Mathews (1983) have proposed that the name of this 360-day year is Yucatec and derived from the practice of setting stones to mark the end of years in this count.

[86] The ancient Maya called these twenty-day months uinic or “human being” because people have twenty fingers and toes just as a month had twenty days. Modern scholars most often use the term uinal because that is the term found in the Colonial sources from Yucatán. Both terms were apparently extant in the Classic period, for both spellings occur in the inscriptions; however, there is a preference for uinic over uinal. The Maya apparently thought of the month as a “person,” while they thought of the year as a “stone-setting.”

[87] Except for katun, these terms are coined by modern scholars from Yucatec dictionaries of the Colonial period. Each term is a Yucatec number, bak, pic, calab, combined with tun, the word for year or stone.

[88] We transcribe the Maya vertical arrangement into a left to right format using arabic numbers with periods separating the various cycles. The highest cycle, the baktun (“400-stone”), is written 13.0.0.0.0: 13 baktuns, no katuns, no tuns, no uinals, no days.

[89] The thirteenth 400-year period of the Maya Calendar is soon to end. 13.0.0.0.0 will occur again on December 23, 2012, but this date falls on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, rather than on the creation day, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. From the ancient inscriptions, we know that the Maya did not consider it to be the beginning of a new creation as has been suggested. At Coba, the ancient Maya recorded the creation date with twenty units above the katun as in Date 1 below.

| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 0. 0. 0. | 0 | 4 | Ahau |
| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 9.15.13. 6. | 9 | 3 | Muluc |
| 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. | 8 | 5 | Lamat |

These thirteens are the starting points of a huge odometer of time: each unit clicks over from thirteen to one when twenty of the next unit accumulate. The baktun clicked from thirteen to one four hundred years after the creation date. The Olmec lived during the fifth 400-year cycle; the earliest written dates in Mesoamerica fall into the seventh cycle; and Classic history took place in the last quarter of the eighth and all of the ninth 400-year cycle. The latest Long Count date known is 10.4.0.0.0 at Tonina. Since dates rarely required that numbers higher than the baktun be written, the Maya regularly excluded them from their dates.

We have one exception to this practice at Yaxchilan, where a scribe wrote a date on the stairs of Temple 33 with eight of the larger cycles above the baktun recorded (Date 2 above). The Yaxchilan scribe intended to set this important historical date in its larger cosmic scale, and by doing so told us that all of the higher cycles of the calendar were still set at thirteen during Maya history. Another inscription, this one from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, projects into the future to the eightieth Calendar Round of the great king Pacal’s accession. They give us a count of the precise number of days it will take to come to this date which happens to be only eight days after the end of the first 8,000-year cycle in this creation (Date 3 above). The pictun will end on October 15, 4772, in our calendar and the anniversary will occur eight days later on October 23, 4772.

Combining the information from all these dates, we have reconstructed the nature of Maya time in this creation. On the day of creation, all the cycles above the katun were set on 13, although this number should be treated arithmetically in calendric calculations as zero. Each cycle within the calendar is composed of twenty of the next lowest units, moving in the order 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000, 3,200,000, 64,000,000, and so on toward infinity. With this information, we can project how long it will take to convert the highest thirteen in the Coba date to one—41,341,050,000.000,000,000,000,000,000 tropical years.

These huge numbers are meant, of course, to represent the infinite scale of the cosmos, but ihey give us other kinds of information. Although the Long Count appears to record a linear concept of time, it, like the other components of Maya calendrical science, was cyclic. Different eras came and went, and each era was itself composed of ever larger cycles, one within the other and all returning to a starting point. The metaphor used by modern scholars is that of a wheel rolling back on its starting point. It is the huge scale of the higher cycles that allowed the Maya to unite linear and cyclic time. From a human point of view, the larger cycles can be perceived only as a tangent, which has the appearance of a straight line. We use this type of scale in the same way to build a cyclic concept into our essentially linear definition of time—our cosmologists place the “Big Bang” 15,000,000,000 years ago and they contemplate the possibility that it was but one of many “Big Bangs.”

[90] Lounsbury (1976) has discussed “contrived numbers,” as deliberately constructed time distances which link days before the creation date to days in the historical present. The function of these contrived relationships is to demonstrate that some historical date was “like-in-kind” (on the same point in many of the important cycles of Maya time) to the pre-creation date. The worlds that exist on either side of that creation date (13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku) have their special symmetries and patterns of sacredness. To demonstrate that a historical date is “like-in-kind” to a pre-creation date is to say it has the same characteristics and brings with it the symmetry and sacredness of the previous pattern of existence.

[91] These four books, named for the cities in which they are found or for their first publishers, are the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex. Made of beaten-bark paper coated with a fine plaster surface and folded like accordions, the books record in pictures and writing which gods and what acts were associated with days in the calendar. Tables for anticipating the cycle of Venus and eclipses of the sun are also included as books of learning and prognostication for calendric priests specializing in the use of the calendar.

[92] In trying to understand how the ancient Maya thought about time and space, modern people can think of the fabric of time and space as a matrix of energy fields. These fields affect the actions of human beings and gods, just as the actions of these beings affect the patterns within the matrix. For the Maya, it was a relationship of profound and inextricable interaction.

[93] At Palenque, Tikal, and Copan, historical texts recall events that occurred during Olmec history, 1100–600 B.C., or in Late Preclassic times, 200 B.c. to A.D. 200. The texts at Palenque and Tikal imply that each of those dynasties had ruled during those early times, although archaeology has shown that neither kingdom existed during Olmec times. The symbolic relationship they meant to imply was similar in nature to the Aztecs’ proclamation of themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Toltec or our own invocation of Rome or Athens as the source of our political ideology.

[94] When we started writing this book, we presumed that primogeniture was the primary system of inheritance and that the examples of brother-brother successions were historical rarities. Our research, however, has shown that lateral succession was far more frequent than we had believed (Scheie n.d.e.). We still believe that primogeniture was the preferred pattern, but that lateral succession from older brother to younger brother was also acceptable.

[95] William Haviland (1968) provides a lucid and remarkably prescient discussion of Classic Maya kinship organization from the vantage of ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnological information. The epigraphic data generally support the patrician organization he describes.

[96] Although clan structure is a common social institution in the prcindustrial world, in the case at hand there is a specific glyph that designates the founding ancestral king of a royal Maya clan (Scheie 1986b). This characterization of Maya elite organization is documented in Classic Maya history and is not an extrapolation backward from the period of the Spanish Conquest. The function of designating a founding ancestor is to define a group of descendants as relatives and to internally rank these people.

[97] Several reconstructions of the Classic period kinship system have been posited based on evidence from the inscriptions and languages, but we find the evidence for a patrilineal and patrilocal system to be by far the strongest. The major proponents of this system have been Haviland (1977) and Hopkins (n.d.).

[98] This lineage compound was excavated during the second phase of the Proyeto Arqueologia de Copan. Dr. William Fash first proposed the identification of this compound as the residence of a scribal lineage, an interpretation we accept (W. Fash 1986 and 1989).

[99] The glyph for this rank was first identified by Mathews and Justeson (1984) as a title for a subordinate rank. David Stuart (1984b) greatly expanded their discussion by analyzing the distribution and iconographic context for the title. Although the proposed decipherment of the title as cahal is disputed by some epigraphers, we shall use it as a convenient way of identifying this office, accepting that the reading may change in the future.

[100] The type-rank system used in the Copan Valley survey developed during Phase 1 of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan (Willey and Leventhal 1979). Phase 11 of the PAC excavated one example of each of the four types under the direction of Dr. William Sanders. These four excavated examples have been consolidated and are now open to the public. The excavations will be published by the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia in a series of volumes entitled Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán. The information related here comes from personal conversations with Dr. William Fash, who participated in the excavations (see also W. Fash 1983b).

[101] Peter Mathews (1975) first identified the “numbered successor” titles as a way of recording lineage successions, an idea that was elaborated by Berthold Riese (1984). We subsequently found these counts are reckoned from a named ancestor who occurs with the notation “first successor” (Scheie 1986b and Grube 1988). In the Group of the Cross at Palenque and on Altar 1 at Naranjo, a complementary succession is reckoned from mythological ancestors who lived beyond the bounds of human history—that is, before this manifestation of creation materialized on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.

[102] Recorded on Altar 1, the Rio Amarillo ruler names himself as an ahau of the Copán polity, but lists his lineage as descended from its own founder (Scheie 1987d).

[103] Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) began five days before the summer solstice of 641 and ended on December 6 of the following year. Muan-Chan of Bonampak began the rites for his heir on December 14, 790, and ended them on August 6, 792, with a battle in which he took captives for sacrifice. He memorialized this series of rites in the amazing murals of Temple 1 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986b).

[104] See the chapters “Kingship and the Rites of Accession,” “Bloodletting and the Vision Quest,” and “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986) and Stuart (1984a, 1988c) for a full discussion of these rituals and their representations in Maya art.

[105] Peter Furst (1976) first discussed this bloodletting ritual as a quest for a vision which the Maya interpreted as communication with the supernatural world. Furst associates this bloodletting ritual with similar beliefs in many other societies, and he has been a longtime advocate of the role of shamanism in the institution of rulership from Olmec times on. David Stuart (1984a and 1988c) has added rich detail to our understanding of the complex of imagery and texts associated with bloodletting. Bloodletting has been discussed in the context of both rituals and objects manufactured for use in ritual by Scheie and M. Miller (1986).

[106] David Joralemon (1974) provides a clear iconographic discussion of the prismatic- blade bloodletter. Scheie (1984a and n.d.d) describes the epigraphic and iconographic evidence for obsidian as a material from which prismatic-blade bloodletters were made. Freidel (1986a) reviews some of the larger economic implications of the control by governments of obsidian as a prized ritual commodity.

[107] All Maya communities would have celebrated the great regularities of the Maya calendars: the hotun (five-year) endings within a katun, the katun (twenty-year) endings, New Year’s, the 819-day count, the coming of the rains, important points in the solar year, such as solstices and the zenith passages, and stations in the planetary cycles. But each great city also had its own histories that generated a series of local festivals celebrating the founding of the city, the date associated with its special patron gods, the anniversaries of its great kings and their births, triumphs, and deaths. Thus the system of festivals combined those occasions celebrated by all Maya with a complementary series derived from the individual histories of each dynasty. Both kinds of celebrations appear in the glyphic record.

[108] David Stuart has been instrumental in identifying a set of verbs recording rituals of dedication for temples as well as for their plaster and stone sculptures. His date for the dedication of lemple 11 at Copán (September 26, 773) is four years after the dedication of the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the building on March 27, 769. At Palenque, we have about the same time span in the Temple of Inscriptions. The last date in the ongoing history of the interior panels is October 20, 675, some eight years before the death of Pacal on August 31, 683. The 675 date appears to be the last historical date recorded before the tablets were sealed inside a containing wall to protect them during the rest of the construction. Given that the center and back walls must have been standing so the huge panels could be set in them, we deduce that the construction and decoration of the temple took about nine years.

[109] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya rulers in the northern lowlands were explicitly concerned with the well-being of their farming populations precisely because ill treatment encouraged migration, which they could not easily impede (Roys <verbatim>[1962];</verbatim> N. 1 arris <verbatim>[1984]</verbatim> on demographic fluidity). During the Precolumbian era, the periodic abandonment and reoccupation of some centers and the clear evidence of demographic fluctuation at others indicates similar principles in operation. See Freidel (1983).

[110] Analysis of skeletal materials at Tikal by Haviland (1967) suggests that Classic elite populations enjoyed taller stature and generally somewhat greater physical robusticity than the commoners.

[111] The public fair is, and was in antiquity, a temporary marketplace established in town squares near the important civic and religious buildings during religious festivals. Such fairs occurred in cycles and were also no doubt occasioned by great historical events in the lives of rulers. (See Freidel [1981c] for a discussion of this economic institution among the Maya.)

[112] See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of visits between elites.

[113] R. L. Roys (1957) summarized descriptions of marketplaces on the north coast of the peninsula.

[114] Since the place-notation system of the Maya used only three marks—one, five, and zero—addition and subtraction were simple geometric operations that could be conducted with any handy material laid out on a grid drawn in the dust. To add, the two numbers were laid side by side and then collapsed into a sum. The twenties only needed to be carried up to obtain the answer. Subtraction reversed the process and was, thus, a simple geometric operation, which like addition required no memorization of tables. Multiplication was more difficult, but still possible without tables or much training. The system allowed the illiterate to do simple arithmetic needed for trade and exchange without formal education.

[115] Colonial period sources describe verbal contracts, but there is no reason to suppose that contracts, tribute lists, and some form of accounting were not kept in written form, especially since we have just these sorts of documents from the Aztec of Central Mexico. Unfortunately, the writing surface that would have been used for such purposes, bark paper sized with plaster, did not survive in the tropical forest that was home to the Classic Maya.

[116] See Landa’s descriptions of life in Yucatán shortly after the conquest (Tozzer 1941) and Roys’s (1943) discussion of Indian life during the Colonial period of Yucatán.

[117] See Freidel (1986a) for a recent discussion of Mesoamerican currencies.

[118] For a discussion of Maya merchant activities and such speculation see Freidel and Scarborough (1982).

[119] “...they traded in everything which there was in that country. They gave credit, lent and paid courteously and without usury. And the greatest number were cultivators and men who apply themselves to harvesting the maize and other grains, which they keep in fine underground places and granaries so as to be able to sell (their crops) at the proper time.” (Tozzer [1941:96], parens original)

[120] Such visits by high-ranked nobles who represented high kings are documented at Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras (Scheie and Mathews n.d.) and at least one vessel from Burial 116 of Tikal depicts such a visit by lords from the Usumacinta region who display- gifts before Tikal lords (see W. R. Coe [1967:102] for a drawing of this scene). In fact, the offering of gifts, especially cloth and plates full of various substances, is one of the most commonly represented scenes on Maya pottery.

[121] Dennis Puleston (1976 and 1977) accepted the central importance of raised-field agriculture to ancient Maya civilization and proceeded with experimental reclamations of ancient canals to see how the system worked. The experiment not only yielded information on the productivity of the system, but demonstrated how the Maya used the animals and landscape associated with it—water lilies, water birds, fish, and caiman—as important components of their cosmic model and their royal symbolism.

3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings

[122] Some modern visitors are aw ed by the architectural scale and design of Maya ruins. Yet the architectural techniques they used—corbeling and the post-and-lintel system— were primitive even by the standards of the ancient world. The most spectacular exploitations of the corbel systems are found at Palenque and in the use of concrete core construction in some northern lowland kingdoms. The most wonderful technology of the Maya, from our vantage, was their agricultural system. Despite evidence in some instances that the Maya over exploited and allowed the degeneration of their land, generally their success in producing food and commercial crops was nothing short of spectacular, in an age when modern nations are allowing the rapid destruction of the tropical forest belt of the globe, we have much to learn technologically from the Maya who maintained a civilization of millions for over a thousand years in such an environment.

[123] The Maya knew of metals from at least the Early Classic period onward, because their tribal and chiefly neighbors in lower Central America used them. 1 he lowland Maya chose not to use metals, for reasons yet unknown, until very late in their history.

[124] There were no eligible beasts of burden in Mesoamerica at the time of the emergence of farming village life. The largest animals—the tapir, the peccary, the deer, and the large felines—were categorically unsuited either to domestication or service as burden carriers.

[125] The regional timing of the establishment of large-scale public centers in the Maya lowlands is a matter of continuing debate. Matheny (1986) and Hansen (1984) place the initial construction of the Tigre complex at El Mirador in the second century B.C., while W. R. Coe (1965a) identities major public construction at Tikal somewhat later, in the middle of the first century B.c. The Tikal dating is commensurate with the dating at Cerros in Belize (Freidel and Scarborough 1982). Our position is that while the point dates of radiocarbon samples range over roughly a century, 25 B.c. to 125 B.c. for the earliest decorated buildings in the lowlands (perforce the earliest evidence of the kingship they celebrate), the statistical range of possibility for the radiocarbon assay representing an actual absolute date shows an overlap of all the reported contexts. For example, a date from Structure 34 at El Mirador of 125 B.c. + 90 years and a date from Structure 2A-Sub 4 at Cerros of 50 B.c. + 50 years, have a statistically high probability of being contemporary.

[126] We have outlined the technical arguments from iconographic and archaeological evidence for this interpretation of Maya history in a series of papers, principally Freidel and Scheie (1988b).

[127] Cerros (“hills”) is the modern name of this place; its original name was lost long ago.

[128] The evidence for sea travel by the people of Cerros is principally in the form of faunal remains of reef and deep-water fish (Carr 1986b). Dugout canoes made from great tree trunks are traditional to the Maya of Belize and are made even today in some parts of the country.

[129] The evidence for long-distance trade between Cerros and people to the north along the coast of Yucatán, down into the mountainous regions of the southern highlands, and into the interior of the southern lowlands is derived from analyses of exotic materials which do not normally occur in down-the-line trade between neighbors. The Cerros people had available, for example, distinctive marine shells from the northern coast of the Peninsula (Hamilton n.d.) and their craftspeople were familiar with a wide range of foreign styles, which they used freely in the pottery manufactured at the site (R. Robertson n.d). Additionally, there are numerous examples of exotic materials at the site which must have been traded in from other parts of Belize or from the southern highland region (Garber 1986).

[130] A simple public platform of this description is Structure 2A-Sub 4–1^st, which, like the first true royal temple at Cerros (Structure 5C-2^nd) was built as part of the final phase of the nucleated village underlying the later ceremonial center (Cliff 1986). Similar platforms preceded the construction of royal temples in the North Acropolis at Tikal in Guatemala during the same time period (W. Coe 1965a).

[131] Clay drums with cutout and applique faces were found as smashed fragments in the deposits of the nucleated village at Cerros. Elements of the iconography include the “cruller” of GUI (a Sun God and the younger of the Ancestral Heroes Twins) and shark teeth, a signal of GI, who characteristically wears a fish barbel and is associated with Xoc, the shark (see the Glossary of Gods). These drums initiate a long tradition of effigy vessels and vessel supports among the lowland Maya (Freidel, Masucci, Jaeger, and Robertson n.d.).

[132] The reconstruction of vegetal environment and foodstuffs is based on research carried out by Cathy Crane (1986). The fish and game animals have been identified by Carr (1986a and 1986b).

[133] The vessels, affectionately termed “beer mugs” by the Cerros crew, are very effectively designed to hold beverages: graspable, narrow at the straight rim, and weighted on the flat base to discourage tipping. They are identified by Robertson as appropriate for liquids and their context is associated with burials and high ritual (R. Robertson 1983).

[134] Cathy Crane has positively identified cotton at Cerros; the presence of cacao is a more tenuous identification, but there are some macrobotanical remains that look promising.

[135] These are, in fact, the jewels of an ahau that were found deposited in a dedicatory cache at the summit of Structure 6B at Cerros (Freidel 1979; Garber 1983; Freidel and Scheie 1988a). Structure 6 was the second royal temple to be built at Cerros, and it was erected while the first, Structure 5C-2^nd. was still open and in use. The location and design of Structure 6 shows that it was constructed by the successor of the patron of Structure 5C-2^nd. It is hence likely that the jewels found buried in the summit of Structure 6B belonged to the first king of Cerros, patron of Structure 5C-2^nd.

[136] See Freidel (1979; 1983) and Freidel and Scheie (1988b) for technical discussions of the origins and distribution of the lowland Maya sculptured pyramid.

[137] We do not know how the building crafts of the ancient Maya world were divided, but we suspect they did not have architects in the sense of the modern world—that is, specialists who design buildings and are responsible for iconographic programs as well as engineering. More likely, the Maya had specialists, perhaps entire lineages, who were trained in the art of building. Their training, however, would have been less as artists responsible for what the building said, and more as master craftsmen responsible for how the message was executed. We have chosen to use the term “Master Builder” for this specialty, rather than architect, in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, I. M. Pei, or Mies van der Rohe.

[138] These activities have the prosaic title of “termination rituals” in our present scholarly reports (Robertson and Freidel 1986), but the practice clearly encompassed both beginnings and endings of major ritual work such as building temples, rebuilding temples, and finally abandoning them. We believe that the vessels broken on such occasions first held the foods of offering and ritual meals, as found among contemporary Maya. The identification of the fruit-tree flowers is based upon palynological analysis in progress by Cathy Crane. A complete anther of a guava flower is a likely prospect in light of the clustering of four preserved grains of this tree in the deposit.

[139] Although we did not find the outline under this particular building, this is a known Maya practice in the preparation of superstructures (Smith 1950) and a logical deduction in light of the fact that the building and stairway were built in a single construction effort. We know, therefore, that their finished proportions were determined by the initial work.

[140] These sockets for massive posts are more than 3.5 meters deep and 1.2 meters in diameter. If the size of the posts used in modern postholes throughout the Maya area (Wauchope 1938) can be taken as a guide, these temple posts rose 6 to 9 meters above the floor level of the summit temple or superstructure. The walls of the summit temple rose about 2 meters, hence these temple posts rose far above the roof of the temple.

[141] The raising of the great posts constitutes one of the episodes in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985). These posts are called acante, “raised up or stood up tree,” in the rituals of the Yucatec-speaking Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest (Tozzer 1941; Roys 1965). The raising of these posts defined the sacred space within which the shaman communed with the supernatural forces. We have given the technical discussion of this interpretation of Structure 5C-2^nd’s posts in Freidel and Scheie (1988a).

[142] The plan of this temple, while unusual, is not unique. Across the bay from Cerros, there is an Early Classic temple at the community called Santa Rita (D. Chase and A. Chase 1986). The plan of this Early Classic building, constructed a few centuries after Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, is more complex but comparable in principle to the one described here. Maya temples generally featured an inner sanctum where the most intimate features of ritual action took place, as described further in Chapter 7 in the context of Chan-Bahlum’s accession monuments. The distinctive character of the Cerros example is that the path of entry into the inner sanctum corresponds to the path of the sun.

[143] These assemblages consist of a fairly constant set of elements. The center ornament was usually made of jade which had been shaped into a thin-walled cylinder with one end flaring out into a flat surface, often carved to resemble a flower. This part, which is called an earflare because of its shape, was carved by drilling, sawing, and abrasion with reeds, string, sand, and water. During the Early Classic period, this main earflare often had a quincunx design with bosses arranged around the central hole at the four corners. The Maya depicted a curling leaf of maize sitting above the earflare and a large counterweight, often made of shell or pearl, hanging below it. Another popular arrangement had a finger-sized cylinder, which was drilled through its long axis, hanging diagonally from the center of the earflare. To hold it out from the face, a thin string, possibly made from deer or cat gut, was threaded through the center drill-hole, through a bead on the end of the cylinder, back through the drill-hole, and finally through the pierced carlobe to a pearl or shell counterweight.

[144] As described by Schele and M. Miller (1986) for Classic period examples, and by Landa (Tozzer 1941) with respect to the carving of sacred wooden images at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya artists may well have performed major public work of this kind in altered states of consciousness achieved by fasting, bloodletting, and the use of intoxicants. Once executed, the error in the proportions of the building may have been left in the design as a divine expression to be accepted and accommodated rather than corrected.

[145] The earliest archaeologically documented inscribed object in the lowlands is a bone bloodletter found in a Late Preclassic period burial at the site of Kichpanhá, a few miles south of Cerros in northern Belize (Gibson, Shaw, and Tinamore 1986).

[146] On this building there are also special raised and modeled glyph panels attached to earflare assemblages. Such panels are also found on other Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros, Structures 6B and 29B. Similar panels are further reported or illustrated on Structure N9-56 at Lamanai (Pendergast 1981), Structure 34 at El Mirador (Hansen 1984), and on Structure H-Sub 8 at Uaxactún (Valdes 1988). The principle of glyphically “tagging” earflare assemblages, the central power objects of the entities represented as head masks on such panels, is thus a widespread convention in the Late Preclassic period. So far, only the glyphs “tagging” the earflares on Structure 5C-2^nd have been read, as discussed further on in this chapter.

[147] This four-petaled flower regularly appears on the cheek of the Sun God in its young human, old human, and cruller-eyed GUI aspects during the entire Classic period.

[148] In the great creation myth of the highland Quiche Maya, given in their Book of Council, the Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985), the ancestral Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, apotheosize as the sun and the moon rather than the sun and Venus. Actually, the younger twin could be associated in the Classic period with the moon as well as the sun (Schele and M. Miller 1986:308–309), while the elder twin was the Sun in the first opposition and Venus in the second. It is important to grasp that such multiple natures as jaguar/sun/moon or Venus/Celestial Monster/sun are not exclusive and unchanging, but rather inclusive and dynamic. The Waterlily Jaguar, for example, the quintessential predator in royal warfare, can be associated with both the sun as it manifests the Sun God and with Venus in the Venus-timed war rituals discussed in Chapter 4. These “aspects” constitute statements of momentary affinity and resonance. The fact that some of these connections are remarkably enduring and pervasive in Maya thought does not belie the perpetual necessity of reiteration in ritual to re-create and sustain them. Ultimately, the charismatic supernature of the king is dependent upon a logic which mandates his inclusion in such cosmic categories.

[149] One of the creatures especially associated with Venus, as described in the Glossary, is the Celestial Monster. Derived from a crocodilian model, this beastie was long- snouted, like the Cerros creature.

[150] Schele (1974:49–50) dubbed this figure the Jester God because of the resemblance of its tri-pointed head to a medieval court jester.

[151] The Maya writing system uses special signs called semantic determinatives to specify particular meanings when a value could be in doubt. One of these determinatives is the cloth headband worn by kings. In various manifestations, the headband can have the regular ahau glyph attached, as well as a mirror and, most importantly for our purpose, a Jester God. Whenever this ahau-Jester God headband is present, the glyph, whether it is a human head, a vulture, a rodent, or whatever, reads ahau. To wear this headband in the Classic period is to be an ahau.

[152] The Headband Twins are the particular manifestation under discussion. Named glyphically as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam, this set of twins has one member marked by large body spots and the Jester God headband, while the other sports a cut-shell yax sign on his forehead and jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs.

[153] There are additional details in the iconographic program of Structure 5C-2^nd which confirm this interpretation. The glyph panels “tagging” the earflare assemblages on the eastern side of the building contain the word jwc, meaning “green” and “first.” Here they denote that the sun and Venus of the eastern side are “first,” as they should be at dawn. On the western side of the building, the Venus image on the upper panel is being disgorged from the split representation of the framing sky/snake (in Cholan languages, the words for “sky” and “snake” are homophonous [chan/chan]), signaling that the movement is down as it should be in the setting of the sun with the Eveningstar above it.

[154] The Maya shaman establishes a four-part perimeter of sacred space. Inside of this space he can pass over the threshold to the Otherworld. We detail the manner in which Late Preclassic kings harnessed shamanistic ecstasy to their emerging definitions of royal charisma in a recent professional article (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

[155] There are Late Preclassic masks wearing the Jester God headdress in Group H at Uaxactiin, a remarkably preserved and recently excavated temple complex in the interior of the lowlands (Valdes 1988).

[156] There are other potential interpretations of these images which we are exploring, including the prospect that the “first” Venus and sun, on the eastern side, represent the ancestors, while the western Venus and sun represent the human king and his heir (Freidel n.d.).

[157] Reading “between the lines” in this fashion is the key to understanding the people and politics behind the masks and ritual portraits of Maya art. Although such interpretations are subject to dispute and discussion as to their content, there is no doubt that the Maya intended their art and public texts as political propaganda as well as offerings of devotion. The documentation of this strategy is to be found in the texts of royal temples of the Classic period, as described in subsequent chapters.

[158] The earliest public architecture at Cerros, Structure 2A-Sub 4—lst, the small and undecorated pyramid next to the dock, has a radiocarbon date of 58 B.C.+ 50 years from a single large piece of carbonized wood from a sealed plaster floor. The abandonment ritual of the latest public building, Structure 29B, provided us with a piece of burnt wood which registered 25 B.c. + 50 years. What must be understood here is that any radiocarbon date is only the best statistical approximation of the age of an object: the + years give a range into which the date may fall. The wider the + range, the higher the probability that the date falls within that range. The beginning and ending dates of public architecture at Cerros fall within the + range of each other, indicating a range of as little as fifty and as much as one hundred years for all of the public architecture of Cerros to have been built. Other archaeological evidence from the site supports this dating. For example, no change in the style or technology of ceramics occurs between the earliest and the latest building (R. Robertson n.d.). And only eight distinct construction episodes, a very low number for most Maya sites, have been detected in the stratigraphic sequence of architecture (Freidel 1986c). Together, this evidence supports the view that Cerros underwent a veritable explosion of public construction in the first century B.c.

[159] Group H at Uaxactun (see Chapter 4) has this same internal court entered through a portal building atop an acropolis.

[160] Vernon Scarborough has written detailed discussions of the impact of construction activity on the surrounding landscape at Cerros (Scarborough 1983; 1986).

[161] The excavations in temples and pyramids at Cerros were limited in scope compared to those carried out in some Maya centers because the archaeological project had many other research objectives to address as well. Future excavation at the site will no doubt expose more examples of the elaborate stucco work of Late Preclassic royal architecture. Despite the limitations of the record at Cerros, this remains the largest analyzed and reported sample of such decoration from a Maya site. Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Lamanai promise to provide substantive new samples as excavations at those sites are reported and extended.

[162] These are the jewels in our little story of the traders’ landing at Cerros.

[163] The grasping of a mirror is one way of signifying accession to the rulership in the texts of the Classic period (Scheie and J. Miller 1983).

[164] The ancient Maya believed the sacred liquids could be transmuted into other forms, resulting in a group of substances that were transformations of one another. This group included blood, fire, smoke, water (Freidel 1985), but other liquids, gases, and vapors were also related (Scheie and M. Miller 1986).

[165] Offerings of precious and powerful objects are common in the record of Maya royal temples. These are typically called dedicatory offerings with the connotation that the objects were given to the gods by the devout to sanctify buildings and carved stone monuments, like stelae. William Coe’s detailed monograph on the offerings from one Maya center, Piedras Negras (W. Coe 1959), documents the complex symbolism of these objects. The cache from Stela 7 at Copan and newly found caches from Temple 26 incorporate ancestral heirlooms made of jade. Such objects were principally used in shamanistic rituals performed by kings to materialize sacred beings in this world (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).

The burial of such objects in buildings or carved monuments enhanced their power to function as the pathways of this type of communication and as portals to the Otherworld. Just as the caching of whole objects focused sacred power, the reciprocal act was to smash and burn objects to release sacred power prior to scattering or sprinkling. In an earlier phase of Temple 26, for example, large numbers of valuable greenstone jewelry were shattered in pit fires set on the four sides of a temple to be buried by new construction. This last kind of termination ritual (R. Robertson n.d.) was often carried out in the same general cycle as dedicatory rituals (Walker n.d.).

[166] The technique of using internal buttressing of this kind is common in Maya architectural construction. It was especially valuable when large-scale buildings were being raised rapidly. The Maya masons employed loose angular rubble when they could in such projects, and provided vertical stability by capping off the rubble with small rocks, gravel, and dirt which could then support another layer of large loose boulders. The internal walls provided lateral stability.

[167] Although the resulting arrangement resulted in ridiculously narrow alleyways between the flanking stairways and the central platform, the plan was intended to emulate a conventional arrangement now known on the thirty-three-meter-high pyramid at Lama- nai, which also dates to the Late Preclassic (Pendergast 1981). This arrangement can also be seen on a pyramid at El Mirador (Matheny 1987). The three-temple arrangement of small temples or temple-platforms is one of the more important architectural traditions of Late Preclassic architecture.

[168] This pattern is best illustrated in the tri-figure panels of Palenque (Scheie 1979), but it is also found at other sites. The famous Stela 31 at Tikal (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982) depicts king Stormy-Sky flanked by portraits of his father, Curl-Snout.

[169] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:241–264) and M. Miller and Houston (1987) for further discussion of the Classic Maya ballgame.

4. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun

[170] Some of the largest buildings ever constructed in the Precolumbian world were built at El Mirador at least two centuries before the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan. See Ray Matheny’s description of El Mirador and its amazing architecture in the National Geographic Magazine (September 1987).

[171] The political collapse of El Mirador remains one piece in the puzzle of the Protoclassic period as discussed in Chapter 1. The city was not completely abandoned after its heyday, but the modestly prosperous Classic period inhabitants never again laid claim to dominion in a landscape populated by an increasing number of rival kings.

[172] We call this complex Tlaloc-Venus war because of the imagery worn by its practitioners and the regular association of its conduct with important stations of Venus, Jupiter, and conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn (Kelley 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Closs 1979; Lounsbury 1982, Scheie 1984a, n.d.c). The “star-war” nickname comes from the way the Maya recorded the event by using a Venus sign (Kelley argued that it was simply “star”) over the glyph for “earth” or the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom attacked. See Note 45 for further discussion.

[173] A pit with a constricted neck dug into the bedrock by the ancient Maya.

[174] W. R. Coe (1965a and 1965b) has published detailed descriptions of these very early occupations as well as the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods of Tikal.

[175] William Coe (1965b: 1406) himself makes this suggestion.

[176] The empty Late Prcclassic period tomb at the summit of Structure 4 at Cerros also testifies to the practice of burying exalted dead in the early temple complexes, but in actuality the notion of the corpse as a worthy inclusion in the power structure of places does not appear pervasively until the Classic period. Tikal may prove precocious in this ritual activity.

[177] W. R. Coe (1965b:15) identifies the main burial (two skeletons were found in the chamber) as a female.

[178] See W. R. Coe (1965a:15–17 and 1965b: 1410–1412) for full descriptions of this tombs and its contents. Coggins (1976:54–68) discusses the stylistic affinities of the tomb.

[179] The archaeological record is rapidly changing with respect to the early public depictions of Maya kings. Richard Hansen (1989) reports the presence of carved stone stelae at Nakbe, a satellite of El Mirador, which carry the same kind of elaborate scroll work found here. Because these early representations often depict the individual as masked, their identification as historical people is somewhat problematic.

[180] See XV. R. Coe (1965b:21) and Coggins (1976:79–83) for detailed descriptions of this tomb and its contents.

[181] The mask is about the same size relative to a human body as other pectorals known archaeologically (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:81, Pl. 19) and in Maya depictions of rulers. Most telling are the five holes drilled in the lower edge to suspend the cylinder and bead arrays normally depicted with such pectorals.

[182] This three-pointed symbol of ahau, initially a geometric element, was worn as the central diadem of a characteristic headband with three jewels (viewed from the front). The three-jewel crown is seen on the foreheads of the upper masks of Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros with the geometric forms as described in Chapter 3. On the stucco masks of gods in Group H at Uaxactún (Valdes 1987), the three-jewel crown appears with snarling humanoid faces in the personified form that would become the Jester God of Classic period imagery.

[183] William Haviland (1967:322–323) notes that around A.D. 1, a difference in average height could be seen between those people buried in lavish tombs and the rest of the population at Tikal. This difference continued to grow during the Early Classic period marking what Haviland sees as the development of a ruling elite who had consistent access to better nutrition.

[184] Christopher Jones (n.d.) has associated the construction phases detected in the North Acropolis, Great Plaza, and East Plaza with the dynastic history of Tikal as recovered from the inscriptions.

[185] Chris Jones (n.d.) also speculates that the eastern and western causeways were built at this time as “formalizations of the old entrance trails into the site center.”

[186] Chris Jones (n.d.) suggested an association between these massive building projects and the ruler in this burial.

[187] One of the basic historical problems facing Mayanists is the relatively great size of Peten centers and communities of the Late Preclassic period compared to other parts of the lowlands. One explanation would hold that El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún among other centers had early special relationships with those kingdoms of the southern mountains and Pacific slopes regions that show precocious complexity and which supplied the lowlands with strategic commodities (Sharer 1988). We agree that such special relationships are a possibility and that commerce would have attracted more farmers to the region from elsewhere in the lowlands. At the same time, the real potential of the swampy interior for ordinary farmers lies less in its proximity to the highlands than in the development of intensive agriculture based upon effective water management. The great Late Preclassic public works of El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún suggest to us that these governments attracted and commanded labor for many other overtly practical projects, particularly raised-field agricultural plots. Intensive agriculture, of course, would not only guarantee the prosperity of commoners. It would also generate the surplus of commodities necessary to sustain a flourishing trade with the highlands. This “agricultural attraction” hypothesis, however, points to the great antecedent civilization in Mesoamerica’s swampy lowlands: the Olmec of the Gulf Coast. We anticipate the future discovery of more direct relationships between the lowland Olmec of such centers as La Venta and the Middle Preclassic pioneers who first farmed the swamps of Petén.

[188] This famous building was reported by Oliver and Edith Ricketson (1937) as part of their work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

[189] In 1985, Juan Antonio Valdes (1988) began excavations of Group H as part of the Programa de Patrón de Asentamiento. Trenches excavated that year into the platform yielded only Mamón and Chicane! ceramics, dating all interior construction phases to the Preclassic period. In total, he found seven construction phases including the most extraordinary and complete example of Late Preclassic masked architecture now known.

[190] Freidel has discussed the comparative iconography of Structures 5C-2^nd and E-VII-Sub, suggesting that both display the Sun cycle surmounted by Venus (Freidel 1979; 1981a).

[191] The meanings applied to particular buildings were by no means mutually exclusive. Witz is a general term meaning “mountain,” which was applied in glyphic and symbolic form to Maya buildings to define them as the living mountain. In principle, all Maya pyramids were Witz Monsters. On some buildings, such as Structure 5C-2^nd or Structure E-VII-Sub, the animus of the mountain itself is a relatively minor component of the overall decoration, specifically given in the lowermost frontal masks on those buildings from which the larger and more important sun masks emerge. On other buildings, such as the one discussed here, the Witz aspect is central. Still other buildings, as we shall see at Palenque and Copan, emphasize the World Tree which grows from the heart of the mountain. These are not different messages, but aspects of a single unitary vision. The aesthetics of Maya ritual performance encourage such creative and diverse expression of nuance.

[192] Because the specific signal of the Witz monster is his crenelated forehead, as seen on the lower Monster, we have to be cautious in identifying the upper Monster as another Witz, for the top of the mask is destroyed. Nevertheless, the rest of the mask, including the blunt snout surmounted by a human nose, ‘ breath ’ scrolls flanking the gaping mouth, and the eye panels, comprise a virtual replication of the lower, complete mask. When the Late Preclassic architects intend a primary contrast in meaning between masks at different vertical points in a mask stack, as on Structures 5C-2^nd and E-VH-Sub, they usually distinguished them by using different muzzle forms and other features. Hence it is likely that the upper mask here replicates the primary meaning of the lower mask.

[193] All the other buildings in the group have a single room that was entered from a door on the court side of the building. Sub-10 has a door on both the inner and outer sides with flanking plaster masks on both sides of the substructural platform. One entered the group by mounting a stairway rising up the platform from the plaza to the west of Structure H-X, which was a mini-acropolis flanked by a north and south building. Once atop Structure H-X, one could walk to either side of Sub-10, but the main processional entrance was up its short western stair, through the building, and down the east stairs. The use of a building as a gateway into an acropolis is also found on Late Preclassic Structure 6 at Cerros.

[194] The Late Preclassic architectural jaguar mask varies from the strikingly naturalistic animal depictions of Structure 29 at Cerros, to the blunt-snouted snarling zoomorphic image of the sun on Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, to the anthropomorphic version found here in which the fangs are reduced to residual incurving elements within the mouth panel. What began as a broad incisor-tooth bar under the square snout on the sun jaguar of Structure 5C-2^nd is here reduced to the single projecting tooth which will be characteristic of divinity and the Ancestors in the Classic period. This anthropomorphic jaguar, however, still carries the squint eyes and bifurcated eyebrows of the 5C-2^nd version. On Structure 29 at Cerros, the appearance of this humanoid ahau is enhanced by its physical emergence from a naturalistic jaguar head. At Tikal, Early Classic Temple 5D-23-2^nd has a comparable humanoid ahau mask emerging from a jaguar head. In this case, the jaguar carries the mat symbol in its mouth (A. Miller 1986: Fig. 9). The particular ahau masks on Temple H-Sub-10 at Uaxactun are framed below by enormous knots, signaling that they are in fact giant replicas of the girdle heads worn on the belt of the king. Scheie and J. Miller (1983) have discussed these ahau pop and balain pop (“king/mat” and “jaguar/mat”) images of kingship.

[195] The full extent of Late Preclassic construction is not known in either case, and massive constructions at Tikal likely hide very substantial public monuments of this period (Culbert 1977).

[196] Recent excavations at the site of Calakmul in southern Campeche suggest that it was a kingdom with a substantial Late Preclassic and Early Classic occupation. David Stuart (personal conversations, 1989) reminded us that the pyramids of El Mirador are visible from the summits of Calakmul’s largest buildings. That great kingdom was very probably a significant player in the demise of El Mirador, and as we shall see in the next chapter, a vigorous rival of Tikal and Uaxactun for dominance of the central Maya region.

[197] The name glyph in Early Classic texts (Fig. 4:10) consists of yax (“first” or “blue-green”), a bamboo square lashed at the corners with rope, and the head of a fish. Lounsbury and Coe (1968) suggested a reading of moch for the “cage” portion of the glyph, and Thompson (1944) proposed a reading of xoc for the mythological fish head in this name. In some examples, these two signs are preceded by yax, perhaps giving Yax- Moch-Xoc as the full name. It is interesting that this moch-xoc glyph appears in the name of Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39, although that ruler is listed as the ninth successor, rather than the founder.

[198] Peter Mathews (1985a:31) first proposed this calculation, which Jones (n.d.) subsequently supported by showing that the 349 tuns between the accessions of the eleventh and twenty-ninth successors divides into an average reign of 19.3 tuns. The kings who ruled between 375 and 455 were the ninth, tenth, and eleventh successors, with the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, acceding in 426. Giving an average reign of one katun each to the ten rulers who preceded him places the founding date of the lineage somewhere between 8.9.0.0.0 (A.D. 219) and 8.10.0.0.0 (A.D. 238). These calculations fit well with the known archaeological history of likal and with the appearance of historical monuments and portable objects inscribed with historical information dated between A.D. 120 and A.D. 200 (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82–83, 199).

[199] Chris Jones (n.d.) speculates that Stela 36 is even earlier than Stela 29. Found in a plaza at the end of the airfield at Tikal about 3.5 kilometers from the North Acropolis (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:76), this stela may depict one of the unknown rulers between the founder and the ninth successor. The location of this very early monument away from Tikal’s center is curious in any case.

[200] Mathews (1985a:44) associates this scroll-jaguar image with another scroll-ahau- jaguar, a glyph at C5 on Stela 31 that he suggests is the name of a ruler. Unfortunately the date associated with this character fell in the destroyed section of Stela 31, so that we are not able to identify this personage as the same ahau portrayed on Stela 29 or as a different one because royal names could be reused in the Maya culture, as in the kingdoms of Western Europe.

[201] The main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph is a bundle of strands bound together by a horizontal band tied in a knot. The anthropomorphic version of this bundle glyph is a Roman-nosed head with a twisted rope or jaguar tail hanging in front of the ear. The kings on Stela 29 and other later monuments wore headdresses with a twisted rope or jaguar tail in the same position as a way of marking themselves as the living embodiment of the Emblem Glyph and thus of the kingdom. This same head substitutes for an ahau glyph half-covered with a jaguar pelt, which Scheie (1985a) read balan-ahau or “hidden lord” in an earlier study of the substitution patters of these glyphs.

In October, 1989, Stephen Houston and David Stuart informed us they had read the same glyph not as balan-ahau but as way, the word for “sorcerer” and “spirit (or animal) companion.” Nikolai Grube sent a letter to us at almost exactly the same time detailing his own reading of this glyph and its head variant. All three suggested to us that the kings on Stela 29 and 31 are depicted in their their roles as “sorcerers” and one who can transform into their animal companions in the Otherworld. We accept their observations and further suggest that when this way head appears in the position of an Emblem Glyph on the lintels of Temple 4 that it refers to the king as the ch’ul way, “the holy shaman.”

[202] The floating figure on Stela 29 is not named, but we can reconstruct its function from other representations. At Tikal there are two kinds of floating figures: gods materialized through bloodletting, as on Stela 4 and Stela 22, and ancestors recalled by the same rite. This latter type of image is specifically named on Stela 31 as the father of the protagonist Stormy-Sky. Since the floating figure on Stela 29 is patently human, we presume he is the ancestor from whom Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar received the throne.

[203] Scheie and M. Miller (1986:121) called the Leiden Palenque ruler Balam-Ahau- Chaan, while Mathews (1985a:44) called this ruler “Moon-Zero-Bird,” based on the occurrence of his name glyph on Stela 31 at D6-C7 and on the Leiden Plaque at A10. Fahsen (1988b) followed Mathews in the name usage and identified a new occurrence of his name on Altar 13 at Tikal.

[204] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:63–73, 110, 120–121, 319) for detailed discussions of the iconography and inscription on the Leiden Plaque.

[205] David Webster (1977), among other Mayanists, believes that warfare during the early phase of the lowland civilization was instrumental in the establishment of an elite warrior class. These warlords, in his view, launched wars of conquest against less organized neighbors, which yielded them land and booty for their followers. Rising population and a diminishing ratio of arable land to people spurred this kind of warfare and precipitated elitism among the lowland Maya in Webster’s scenario. Webster argues his case from the instance of an impressive early fortification surrounding the center of Becan (Webster 1976). While we find Webster’s work stimulating, we see no clear empirical support for a general condition of conquest warfare during the Late Preclassic period and the first centuries of the Early Classic. Ancient Maya farming settlements, beginning in the Preclassic, were characteristically open and rather dispersed across the landscape until the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 800–1000; see Ashmore 19 81). Although Maya centers certainly contained acropolis constructions suitable for defense as citadels, walled forts of the kind used by populations experiencing direct attack and capable of withstanding siege are not common among these people. Where internecine warfare is aimed at ordinary settled populations in modern and historical preindustrial societies, it often generates a response of nucleated and defended communities. In this regard, a number of Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya are indeed fortified in this fashion (Webster 1979). Our own position is based upon substantive information from texts and images. From the Maya vantage, warfare explicitly served to prove the charisma of kings and high nobility. Ethnohistorical documents (Roys 1962) confirm that such charisma was fundamental to the attraction of population into emergent and flourishing polities (see also Demarest 1986; Chapter 7.) In particular, kingdoms of the Peten, in our view, required and utilized massive organized commoner labor—not only to create and refurbish centers, but also to create and maintain the intensive agricultural systems upon which their economies depended. While the impact of warfare on Maya commoners remains to be elucidated archaeologically, there is positive epigraphic and iconographic evidence to identify the advent of conquest warfare among these people at the close of the fourth century A.D. Preliminary results from research projects aimed at investigating the consequences of conquest warfare (Chase n.d.) indicate that victory indeed economically benefited the winners at the expense of the losers, probably through rigorous tribute extraction (see Roys <verbatim>[1957]</verbatim> for a discussion of predatory tribute at the time of the European Conquest).

[206] The front of the Stela 9 is badly eroded, but the shape, size, and detail of the object in the crook of his right hand correspond to Tikal and Xultún monuments showing rulers holding heads in the guise of deities. The eroded area in front of his legs probably depicted a kneeling captive.

[207] An earlier katun ending, 8.4.0.0.0, is recorded on a broken celt in the collections of Dumbarton Oaks (Schele and M. Miller 1986:84–85). Coggins (1979:44–45) suggested that the emphasis on the celebration of the katun cycles was introduced via Uaxactún from Teotihuacán and that the celebration of repetitive cycles in the Long Count versus the commemoration of one-time historical events was an introduction from Teotihuacán. Since Teotihuacán shows no evidence of using or even being aware of the Long Count calendars and since katun celebrations are dependent on having the Long Count, we find it implausible that something so fundamentally and exclusively Maya would have been introduced from Central Mexico and a cultural area that shows no evidence of having ever used the Long Count or the katun as a basis of calculation or celebration.

[208] Fahsen (1988b) also identifies Stela 28 as Great-Jaguar-Paw based on the appearance of a prominent jaguar head and paw in the lower left corner of the monument. His identification seems to be a good one, but the style of Stela 28 is a bit problematic, since it would have to mark either 8.16.0.0.0 or 8.17.0.0.0.

[209] Stela 39 was found interred in Structure 5D-86-6 in the Lost World Complex (Laporte and Vega de Zea 1988), a building that sits in the center of a group built on the same plan as the contemporary Group E at Uaxactún. The huge four-staired pyramid, with its talud-tablero terraces, faces on the cast a set of three buildings arranged in the same pattern as Group E at Uaxactún. Group E is known to mark the two solstice points at its outer edges and the equinox in its center. The Lost World complex is much larger in scale and has been identified by Laporte as the work of Great-Jaguar-Paw, whom he believes to be buried in the same building as the stela. The rituals ending the seventeenth katun very probably occurred in the Lost World complex, perhaps atop the great pyramid at its center.

[210] The date in the surviving text corresponds to a katun ending which most investigators have interpreted as seventeen, giving a reading of 8.17.0.0.0. The name at the top of the surviving text is Jaguar-Paw, which is exactly the name occurring with this date on Stela 31. However, while looking at a cast of this monument at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Ethnologia of Guatemala, Federico Fahsen (personal communication, 1986) suggested that the number is nineteen rather than seventeen. I resisted his suggestion at first, but it has merit. The Jaguar-Paw name is followed by a “child of mother” expression and the name of a female. Furthermore, the very first glyph could well be the yunen “child of parent” glyph identified by David Stuart (1985b:7) on Tikal Stela 31. Jaguar-Paw’s name may, therefore, occur in a parentage statement for the king who ruled Tikal at 8.19.0.0.0, presumably Curl-Snout.

[211] This date and the events that occurred on it have been the subject of speculation by Proskouriakoff as quoted by Coggins and by Mathews. Clemency Coggins, following suggestions by Proskouriakoff, has offered several variants of the same essential scenario. Coggins proposed that this date marks the arrival of foreigners in the region, which corresponded either to the death of Great-Jaguar-Paw I or to his loss of power to those foreigners. In the first scenario (Coggins 1976:142; 1979b), she proposed that Curl-Snout, the next ruler to accede at Tikal, was a foreigner from Kaminaljuyu. In the second (Coggins 1979a:42), she suggested that Curl-Snout came from El Mirador via Uaxactún bringing Feotihuacanos with him. These Teotihuaeanos then withdrew’ to Kaminaljuyu around A.D. 450. In yet another interpretation, Coggins (n.d.), following new information from Mathews, proposed that Curl-Snout kidnapped Smoking-Frog, whom she identifies as the daughter of Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal, and took her to Uaxactun on the 8.17.1.2.17 date, where he married her. Curl-Snout then took over Tikal after Great-Jaguar-Paw, his new father-in-law, died.

Peter Mathews (1985a:33–46) examined the Tikal-Uaxactun relationship in the larger framework of the Early Classic period. He pointed out that the two sites account for twenty of the thirty-five Cycle 8 monuments and twenty-two of the fifty-two known Cycle 8 dates. The date shared between them is the earliest shared date (not a period ending) now known, and in subsequent history such shared dates “record major battles,” with a few recording important dynastic dates, such as births or accessions. In the records of the shared date at both sites, Mathews identified a person named “Smoking-Frog of Tikal” as the major actor along with Great-Jaguar-Paw, who let blood on this occasion.

Mathews pointed out a pattern of data that is fundamental to interpreting this event. Since Smoking-Frog appears with the Tikal Emblem Glyph at both sites, he was an ahau of Tikal who became the dominant lord at Uaxactun. The conquest of Uaxactun was apparently directed by Smoking-Frog, but Great-Jaguar-Paw, who must have been an old man at the time, also let blood. Smoking-Frog appears as the protagonist of Uaxactun monuments at 8.18.0.0.0. while the ruler Curl-Snout, who succeeded Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal about a year after the conquest, acts at Tikal on the same dates. At Tikal, however, Smoking-Frog’s name appears on all of the Curl-Snout monuments and Curl-Snout acceded “in the land of Smoking-Frog,” suggesting that the new ruler ofTikal held his throne under the authority of Smoking-Frog.

Mathews offered the following explanation for this pattern:

“...if 1 am correct then the nature of the Tikal-Uaxactun ties at this time originates from the placement of Smoking-Frog or of one of his close relatives in power at Uaxactun. This could have been achieved through marriage or by conquest. The nature of the 8.17.1.4.12 event—bloodletting—could be used to support either possibility. Bloodletting was an important feature of both warfare (sacrifice of the captives) and of royal marriages (autosacrifice by the wedding couple). If the event was war, then presumably Tikal imposed a member of its own royal family as ruler of Uaxactun. If the event was marriage, then Tikal apparently married into Uaxactun’s ruling dynasty. Either way, I suspect that Tikal played the dominant role in the relationship between the two sites.”

We accept Mathews’s scenario as the most likely, and we favor his suggestion of conquest as the type of interaction, although a royal marriage may also have resulted from the conquest. The iconography associated with representations of the events are consistently associated with war and bloodletting in Maya history.

[212] This censer is composed of a zoomorphic head with a tri-lobe device over its eye. The same head appears on Stela 39 with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a sky sign on top of it. This combination also occurs at Copan, where the Tikal Emblem Glyph main sign is replaced by the bat of Copan in a context where the tri-lobed head can be identified as the head variant of the sign known as the “impinged bone.” Combined with the sky sign, the “impinged bone” and its tri-lobed head variant identify place names or toponyms (Stuart and Houston n.d.). In these cases, the “sky-impinged bone” identify the main sign of the Emblem Glyphs as a geographic location corresponding to the polity as a place. On Stela 39, the place where the event took place is identified as Tikal. On Stela 5, it is Uaxactun, which used the split-sky sign that also identified Yaxchilan, although there is no reason to suppose that the two kingdoms were related.

[213] The most elaborate example of this complex in its Maya form is on the monument of a Late Classic conqueror. Dos Pilas Stela 2 (Fig. 4:17b), depicts Ruler 3 (Houston and Mathews 1985:17) hulking over his captive, Yich’ak-Balam (Stuart 1987b:27–28), the king of Seibal. Ruler 3 wears the same balloon headdress as Smoking-Frog, but the costume is now in its complete form with a full-bodied jaguar suit, the trapezoidal sign called the Mexican Year Sign, an owl, the goggle-eyed Tlaloc image, and throwing spears and rectangular flexible shields. Piedras Negras Stela 8 (Fig. 4:17a) depicts Ruler 3 of that kingdom in the same costume as he stands on a pyramidal platform with two captives kneeling at this feet.

[214] The date of the Dos Pilas event (which was also recorded on Aguateca Stela 2) and a set of related verbs called “Shell-star” events at other sites were first associated with the periodicities of Venus by David Kelley (1977b). Michael Goss (1979) and Floyd Lounsbury (1982) showed this category of event to be associated with the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar and the two elongation points. Lounsbury went on to add Jupiter and Saturn stationary points to the astronomical phenomenon included in this complex.

Berthold Riese (in Baudez and Mathews 1979:39) first suggested that the star-shell events were war related, a hypothesis that Mary Miller (1986b:48—51, 95–130) has brilliantly supported with her analysis of the inscriptions and imagery in Room 2 of the Bonampak murals. These paintings depict one of the most amazing battle scenes known from the history of art, all under a register that shows stars being thrown into the scene from the heavens. The day is an inferior conjunction of Venus with a heliacal rising of Morningstar probable on the next day (M. Miller 1986b:51). The day of the event, August 2, 792, was also a zenith passage and the constellations that appear in the east just before the dawn of that day, Cancer and Gemini, are also represented on the register.

The Uaxactun costume with its spearthrower, balloon headdress, and bird is regularly associated with these shell-star events. The costume also appears in scenes of self-inflicted bloodletting (Scheie 1984a), such as those shown on Lintels 24 and 25 of Yaxchilan, where a drum-turban decorated with tassels occurs with the complex. Other icons in the complex include the trapezoidal design known as the Mexican Year Sign and the goggle-eyed image known as Tlaloc to the later Aztecs. Along with the balloon headdress, spearthrowers, owls, flexible shield, a jaguarian image made of mosaic pattern, and a full-body jaguar suit, this set of imagery forms a special ritual complex that meant war and sacrifice to the Maya (see Scheie and M. Miller [198 6:17 5–240]).

This complex of imagery also appears at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Kaminaljuyu, Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and numerous other sites throughout Mesoamerica between A.D. 450 and 900. First discovered at Kaminaljuyu (Kidder, Jennings, and Shook 1946), this merging of traditional Maya imagery with Teotihuacân-style imagery has been taken to signal the presence of Teotihuacanos at the Maya sites, especially at Tikal (Coggins 1976, 1979a, 1979b). Teotihuacan certainly had the same complex of iconography and there it was associated with war (Pasztory 1974) and with sacrifice (Oakland 1982 and Parsons 1985). Teotihuacan has been seen by many of these researchers as the innovator of this ritual complex and the donor and dominant partner in all instances where this complex of iconography appears in non-Teotihuacan contexts. We argue that the relationship between the Maya and Teotihuacan during the Classic period is far more complex that these explanations suppose. See René Millon (1988) for his evaluation of the interaction from the viewpoint of Teotihuacan.

[215] The same iconography appears in later inscriptions with an glyph juxtaposing the sign for Venus with “earth” or the main signs of Emblem Glyphs. This type of war we shall call “star-shell” war or simply “star war.”

[216] The coincidence of this iconographie complex with Venus and Jupiter/Saturn stations of importance to the Maya (the heliacal risings of morning and evening stars, the eastern and western elongation points of Venus, and the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn) is overwhelming. This particular kind of war costume and related iconography occurs at the following sites associated with the following astronomical and historical events:

(1) 17.1.4.12—1/16/378: Uaxactun St. 5, conquest by Tikal on a day with no detected astronomical associations

(2) 9.4.3.0.7—10/19/517: Piedras Negras Lintel 12, display of captive with visiting lords 7 days before maximum elongation (-.7) of Morningstar

(3) 9.4.5.6.16—2/5/520: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded event, first appearance of Eveningstar (26 days after superior conjunction)

(4) 9.8.0.0.0—8/24/593: Lacanja St. 1, period ending rite on the first appearance of the Eveningstar (33 days after superior conjunction)

(5) 9.8.13.10.0—1/4/607: Piedras Negras, Lintel 4, unknown event 17 days before maximum elongation (-1.7) of Eveningstar

(6) 9.8.14.17.16—6/3/608 and 9.9.12.0.0—3/10/625: Lamanai St. 9, days of no astronomical associations

(7) 9.9.15.0.0—2/23/628: Piedras Negras St. 26, period-ending rites 5 days after maximum elongation (-.14) of Morningstar

(8) 9.10.6.2.1—2/6/639: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, death of Ruler 1, retrograde before inferior conjunction of Venus

(9) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, a mosaic helmet with Palenque Triad on first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(10) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Piedras Negras St. 34, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(11) 9.11.6.1.8—10/11/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, war event of Ruler 2; Jupiter is 1.44 before its 2^nd stationary point (345.41)

(12) 9.11.6.2.1—10/24/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 2, war event with heir and youths from Bonampak and Yaxchilan; Jupiter is .45 before its 2^nd stationary point (344.46)

(13) 9.11.9.8.6—2/10/662: Piedras Negras St. 35, eroded (6 days before shell-star event); Jupiter is .40 before its 2^nd stationary point (89.68)

(14) 9.11.15.0.0—7/28/667: Chicago Ballcourt Panel, bailgame sacrifice by Zac- Balam: Jupiter is .06 before its 2^nd stationary point

(15) 9.12.0.0.0—7/1/672: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, mosaic helmet verb with Palenque Triad 5 days after maximum elongation (-.73) of Eveningstar

(16) 9.12.7.16.17—4/27/680: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded action of Lady of Site Q, 12 days after maximum elongation (-.776) of Morningstar

(17) 9.12.9.8.1—10/23/681: Yaxchilan Lintel 25, accession of Shield-Jaguar and fish-in-hand bloodletting by Lady Xoc; Jupiter is .17 after 2^nd stationary point (318.27)

(18) 9.12.10.0.0—5/10/682: Copan St. 6, period-ending rites on the retrograde position after inferior conjunction of Venus

(19) 9.12.11.13.0—1/20/684: Palenque, Group of the Cross, end of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rite 11 days before the maximum elongation of Morningstar (-.53)

(20) 9.12.14.10.11—11/16/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, macah of Lady Ahpo-Katun, 4 days before maximum elongation (-.20) of Eveningstar

(21) 9.12.14.10.19—11/19/686: Piedras Negras St. 8 and 7, death of Ruler 2, 1 day before maximum elongation (-.10) of Eveningstar

(22) 9.12.14.10.17—11/22/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, nawah of Lady Ahpo Katun, 2 days after maximum elongation (-.18) of Eveningstar

(23) 9.12.14.11.1—11/26/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, preaccession rite of Ruler 3, 6 days after maximum elongation (-.62) of Eveningstar

(24) 9.12.18.5.16—7/23/690: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication rites for the Group of the Cross, complex conjunction with Jupiter .33 after its 2^nd stationary point (221.43), Saturn at its 2^nd stationary (225.50), Mars at 219.20, and the moon at 232.91

(25) 9.12.19.14.12—1/10/692: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication of the sanctuary buildings, 23 days before maximum elongation (-1.67) of Morningstar and 8^th-tropical year anniversary of Chan-Bahlum’s accession

(26) 9.13.3.8.11—8/21/695: Tikal, Structure 5D-57, nawah by Ruler A; Jupiter is .42 before the 1^st stationary point (45.64); Saturn is at 2^nd station (282.4)

(27) 9.13.3.9.18—9/17/695: Tikal, Temple 1, Lintel 3, bloodletting and 13^th katun anniversary of the last date on Stela 31; Jupiter is .36 after the 1^st stationary point (45.70): Saturn is at its 2^nd station

(28) 9.13.17.15.12—10/28/709; Yaxchilan Lintel 24, bloodletting of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar; Jupiter is .58 after the 1^st stationary point (117.20); Saturn at 2^nd stationary point (114.92)

(29) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Naranjo St. 1, action by Smoking-Squirrel on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(30) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Piedras Negras St. 7, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(31) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Tikal St. 16, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)

(32) 9.14.9.7.2—3/9/721: Piedras Negras St. 7, 17^th tun anniversary of Ruler 3’s accession; Jupiter is .81 after the 2^nd stationary point (81.05); Saturn at 1^st (249.77)

(33) 9.15.0.0.0—8/22/731: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), period-ending 5 days before maximum elongation (-.125) of Eveningstar

(34) 9.15.4.6.9—12/3/735: Aguateca 2 and Dos Pilas 16, star over Seibal war on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)

(35) 9.15.5.3.13—10/7/736: Piedras Negras St. 9, 7^th tun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession, 21 days before maximum elongation (-2.66) of Eveningstar

(36) 9.16.4.1.1—5/9/755. Yaxchilan Lintels 8 and 41, capture of Jeweled-Skull by Bird-Jaguar on a day with no detected astronomical associations

(37) 9.17.0.0.0—1/24/771: Tikal St. 22, scattering rite, visible eclipse 15 days after superior conjunction of Venus

(38) 9.17.5.8.9—6/15/776: Bonampak St. 2, accession of Muan-Chaan 14 days before maximum elongation (-.74) of Eveningstar

(39) 9.17.15.3.13—1/18/786: Bonampak St. 3, capture??? by Muan Chaan 13 days before maximum elongation (-.55) of Eveningstar

(40) 9.18.0.0.0—10/11/790: Cancuen 1, period-ending rites 14 days before maximum. elongation (-.43) of Eveningstar

(41) 9.18.1.15.15—8/16/792): Bonampak Room 2, battle to take captives on the zenith passage of sun and the inferior conjunction of Venus

(42) 10.1.0.0.0—11/30/849: Ixlú St. 2, scattering rite, 16 days after maximum elongation (-.95) of Eveningstar

To test that these astronomical associations are not the product of the natural periodicity of planetary motions and thus coincidental, we calculated the dates and planetary data for every hotun (five-tun period) in Classic history. The pattern holds. The flaloc-war iconography appears when a period-ending date coincided with a important Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn station, and it does not appear on dates without these associations.

If the Tlaloc complex was borrowed from Teotihuacán, an interpretation that seems likely, it may have come with the astronomical associations already in place. However, we will not be able to test that possibility since no Teotihuacán art or architectural objects have dates recorded on them. The Teotihuacanos apparently did not consider the calendar or the days on which the events of myth and history occurred to be important public information. Thus, the astronomical associations with this ritual complex may well have come into being after the Maya borrowed it and made it their own.

[217] We do not understand the full four-glyph phrase yet, but the first glyph is a hand with a jewel suspended from the extended first finger. This same sign is used as the principal verb for the completion of katuns and other period endings, especially when recording the katuns with a reign. Thrice this verb is written with its phonetic spelling appended to it: once on Tortugucro Monument 6, a second time on Naranjo Altar 1, and finally on Copán Stela A (Fig. 4:18). These spellings have a shell marked by three dots superfixed to a sign identified in Landa as ma or surrounded by a dotted circle, generally accepted as the syllable mo. The shell sign is the main glyph in the verb identified in the Dresden and Madrid codices and in the inscriptions of Chichén Itzá as the “fire drill” glyph. For many years, we presumed this glyph to read hax. the back and forth motion of the hands that drives the drill. Recently, however, Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1987) reinterpreted this glyph to read hoch’, also a term for “to drill or perforate” in Yucatec. The shell in his spelling has the value ho, giving the value ho-m(a) and ho-m(o) for the “completion” hand discussed above. In Choi and Yucatec, horn is “to end or finish (acabarse)” (see Aulie and Aulie 1978:66 and Barrera Vasquez 1980:231). Homophones in Yucatec mean “a boundary between property” and most important, “to knock down or demolish buildings or hills (desplomar lo abovedado, derribar edificios, cerros).” The latter meaning especially seems appropriate to the context of conquest.

[[]]

David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) takes the horn discussed above to spell the future suffix on a root ending in -h. Stephen Houston, following Stuart, has suggested lah, a word meaning “to end or finish in Yucatec. This reading is the other possibility, although we find it less likely because in other contexts, such as the west panel of the Temple of Inscriptions, the ma phonetic complement is retained when other tense/aspects are distinguished by different suffixes. However, if this lah suggestion proves to be the correct reading, it still provides an appropriate meaning to the event—that the battle “finished” or “ended” the defeat of Uaxactún.

Regardless of which reading proves to be the correct one in the long run. the association of the “completion” hand with war events seems to be clear. On Lintel 3 of Tikal Temple 4, for example, the same verb appears with an event that took place one day after a “star-war” event against Yaxhá (see glyph C7a on the lintel).

[218] Mathews (1985a:44) observed that the first of the glyphs recording this bloodletting action shows the lower half of a body sitting on its heels in the position assumed by a man when drawing blood from his penis (Joralemon 1974). Mathews suggested the glyph is a direct reference to male bloodletting. Federico Fahsen (1987) has documented other occurrences of the same verb at Tikal with the same meaning. The second verb shows a hand with its thumb extended as it grips a lancet of some sort. The same sign appears in the Early Classic version of the west glyph, which is shown on Yaxchilán Lintel 53 as a monster head biting down on the glyph for the sun. In the two examples of this verb on Stela 31, the hand with lancet has a ba or a bi sign attached to it, producing in the Maya way of spelling a term which should end in -ab or -ib. In Yucatec, the word for west in chikin, “bitten or eaten sun”; the word for “to bite” is chi’; and the word for “bitten” and “to prick or puncture” is chi’bal (Barrera Vasquez 1980:92). The verb is apparently chi’bah, “he was punctured.”

[219] Prescott Follett (1932) compiled a useful summary of the weapons and armor depicted in Maya art as well as Colonial descriptions of warfare. Mary Miller’s (1986b) analysis of the Bonampak murals gives evidence of a battle in progress while Schele (1984a), Dillon (1982), and Taube (1988b) discuss the aftermath of battle.

[220] Marisela Ayala Falcon has called our attention to what is perhaps the most astounding and poignant episode in our entire story. Stela 5, the tree-stone depicting the conqueror Smoking-Frog, was set directly in front of Temple B-VI1I (Fig. 4:5). Excavated by the Carnegie Institution in the thirties, this building was uniquely constructed as a mausoleum. Ledyard Smith (1950:101) describes a tomb built like a chultun directly under the floor of the upper temple and extending down to the bedrock below. He cites the type of loose fill and the construction technique used in the substructure as evidence that the tomb “chamber was constructed at the same time as the substructure” (Smith 1950:52).

Stela 5, the conquest monument, was located in the center of the temple stairs. The stela “lies only a few centimeters from the center of the lowest step of the stairway. The floor was laid at the time of the stairway and turns up to the stela, which was not put through it” (Smith 1950:52). On the other hand, Stela 4, Smoking-Frog’s 8.18.0.0.0 monument, was erected by cutting through this same floor. The stairway and floor then were completed when Stela 5 was set in its place, thus identifying the temple as a victory monument constructed to celebrate the same events as Stela 5.

Of the tomb, Ledyard Smith (1950:52) said this: “It is of interest that it [Temple VIII] was probably built as a burial place; and that the tomb, which contained five skeletons, is one of the few at the site that held more than a single body; and that it is the only example of a group burial found at Uaxactún.” The five people buried in it comprise the most extraordinary detail of all. Smith (1950:101) reported the skeletons included an adult female who was pregnant when she died, a second adult female, a child, and an infant. That the only group grave at Uaxactún should happen to be located in a tomb constructed inside the temple celebrating Tikal’s victory is no accident. The identity of the dead as two women, an unborn child, an infant, and an older child is no coincidence either. These people were surely the wives and children of the defeated king. They were killed and placed inside the victory monument to end forever the line of kings who had ruled Uaxactún.

The defeated king himself was likely taken to Tikal to meet his end. His family stayed at Uaxactún watching the victors construct the new temple at the end of the causeway that connected the huge temple complexes of the city (Group A and B according to archaeological nomenclature). They must have known the tomb was being constructed in the substructure and who would occupy it.

The scene of their deaths can be reconstructed also. A circular shaft dropped to a ledge cut midway down and then fell another couple of meters to the bedrock floor below, dropping five meters in all. The bottom of the shaft widened on its east-west axis to torm the burial chamber. The pregnant woman died and fell on her side with her knees drawn up around her unborn child. Her body lay in the southwest corner. The other woman lay along the north wall with the child lying next to her waist in the center of the tomb. The infant was thrown into the southeast corner. Plates, bowls, and jugs, probably containing food for their journey, were placed around them and then the chamber was sealed with what Smith (1950:101) called an “elaborate stucco adorno painted red. [The] adorno [was] set into the shaft and covered with the floor of the temple.”

[221] Despite the crucial role of weaponry in any interpretation of combat tactics, the investigation of Maya chipped-stone weapon tips remains in the preliminary stages. The hypothesis presented here, that the Teotihuacanos introduced the spearthrower as a weapon in the Maya lowlands, is not original to us. For example, Irvin Rovner (1976:46), from the vantage of Becan, and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (1976:96), from the vantage of Tikal, both note the linkage between the stemmed projectile form and imported Mexican obsidian in the time of the known Early Classic contacts. Gordon Willey (1972:161–177; 1978:102–105) provides some overview discussion of the development of lowland Maya bifacially chipped point-shaped artifacts. The relatively smaller stemmed varieties of point are characteristic of the Late Classic period. Although the function of such points is a matter for empirical investigation through microscopic inspection of edge damage, these points arc in the appropriate range for projectile weapons, such as the spear flung using a throwing-stick. The relatively larger laurel-leaf-shaped points, suitable for the thrusting spears and explicitly depicted by the Classic Maya in their war art, definitely occur by Early Classic times at such sites as Uaxactun and Altar de Sacrificios and persist throughout the Late Classic. During the Late Preclassic period, the smaller stemmed varieties of bifacial point are absent from such communities as Cerros (Mitchum 1986); the characteristic pointed artifact is the large, stemmed, plano-convex macroblade “tanged dagger.” This artifact is suitable for a shock weapon such as the thrusting spear, but not for a projectile weapon; it is broadly distributed in Late Preclassic times throughout the Maya region (Sheets 1976). Nevertheless, there is some preliminary evidence from even earlier contexts tentatively identified as Archaic hunter-gatherer groups in Belize (MacNeish 1981) for the presence of projectile weapons among the original inhabitants of the lowlands. We surmise that while the Maya probably always knew about the throwing-stick and its spear, it did not figure prominently in their politics until it was declared a weapon of war by Great-Jaguar-Paw. In all, the stone-artifact evidence will provide a useful arena for the further exploration of the hypothesized change in battle tactics after A.D. 400.

[222] Mathews (1985a:44—45) proposed much the same interpretation, but there are problems with the calendrics of this passage, which may lead to a different interpretation. The date at the beginning of this passage is clearly 10 Caban 10 Yaxkin with G4 as the Lord of the Night. This particular combination occurred only on 8.6.3.16.17, a date much too early for the chronology of this text and its actors. Christopher Jones, Tatiana Pros- kouriakoff, and others (see C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:70) have pointed out that the accession date on Stela 4 is 5 Caban 10 Yaxkin with the same G4, and thus the date on Stela 31 has been accepted as an error. The problems with this interpretation are twofold:

(1) 8 Men is written just above this Calendar Round on Stela 31 and 8 Men is exactly two days before 10 Caban, reinforcing the likelihood of a 10 Caban reading.

(2) The clause preceding this date records the dedication of a house named Wi-te-na. The reconstruction of the date of this dedication event is problematic because part of the passage was destroyed in the ritual burning that accompanied deposit of Stela 31 in Temple 33. However, if the date recorded immediately before this burned area belongs to the house dedication, it took place 17 tuns, 12 uinals, and 10 kins (or 17.10.12, since the Distance Number could be read either way) after the conquest of Uaxactun. This chronology gives a date of 8.17.18.17.2 11 Ik 15 Zip (June 26, 395) or 8.17.18.15.4 12 Kan 17 Pop (May 19, 395). The relevance of this dedication date is that the 10 (or 5) Caban 10 Yaxkin event, which has been taken to be Curl-Snout’s accession, took place both in “the land of Smoking-Frog” and in the Wi-te-na. Unless the house dedicated seventeen years after the conquest of Uaxactun carried the same name as an earlier house, the Stela 31 event must have taken place after the house was dedicated.

In this second interpretation, the day of the event would be 8.19.7.9.17 10 Caban 10 ‘ axkin (September 2, 423), but the Lord of the Night would be in error, for this day requires G8. Fortunately, the historical argument we propose in this chapter does not depend on the precise date of this event, for the date is not the critical information. Regardless of the timing of the action, the protagonist clearly is Ciirl-Snont, but he acts ‘in the land of Smoking-Frog.” The ahau of higher rank is Smoking-Frog.

[223] The deep interaction of Tikal and Uaxactiin during this period is further supported by the Early Classic murals in Uaxactun Temple XIII. The murals show two high-rank males confronting each other across a three-column-wide text. Next to them sits a palace building with three women sitting inside, and beyond the house, two registers with several scenes of ongoing rituals. The style of dress, the ceramics associated with the building, and the style of the glyphs (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1989) date the mural to approximately the time of Uolantun Stela 1 (8.18.0.0.0) and Tikal Stela 31 (9.0.10.0.0). The main text of the mural has the name of a person called Mah Kina Mo’ (Lord Macaw) and perhaps the name of Stormy-Sky of Tikal. Most interesting, Fahsen (1988a) reports an inscription found on a headless statue in Temple 3D-43, a structure located at the juncture of the Maier and Maudslay causeways. The inscription dates to the time around 8.18.10.8.12 (November 5, 406) and it includes a character named K’u-Mo’. We have no way now of knowing if these two references to someone named Macaw refer to the same person, but the time and place are right.

[224] David Stuart (in a letter dated February 10, 1988) suggested a reading of yilan (or yitah) for the T565 relationship glyph first identified by Kelley (1962) at Quirigua. In Chorti, this term means “the sibling of.” Ihtan is the root, while y is the possessive pronoun used with vowel-initial words. We (Scheie n.d.e) have tested this reading at Tikal, Caracol, Chichen Itza, and other Maya sites and found it to be productive. It is used, for example, to represent the relationship between two kings of Caracol (Rulers IV and V) who were born less than twelve years apart.

[225] At Palenque and Yaxchilan, a horned owl and a shield substitute for each other in the names of the ruler Pacal and G3 of the Lords of the Night. The owl in this context appears with a spearthrowing dart penetrating its body or its head. Exactly this combination occurs in the headdress on Stela 31, which depicts the dart-pierced bird with the shield over its wing. In the title, the spearthrower dart is replaced by the spearthrower itself, so that “spearthrower-owl” and “spearthrower-shield” and combinations of the “spearthrower dart” with the bird and the shield are all variations of the same name.

[[][Spearthrower and owl from the Tikal Ballcourt Marker]]

Virginia Fields (personal communication, 1989) pointed out to me the importance of Stela 32 (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982: Fig. 55a) to the spearthrower-owl identification. This fragment was found in Problematic Deposit 22, a dedication cache intruded into the stair of Structure 5D-26-lst in the North Acropolis. The image depicts a front-view person dressed in regalia identical to the shield carried by C url-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. However, hanging over the chest of the figure is a crested bird very similar if not identical to the bird medallion on Stormy-Sky’s headdress. If Fields’s identification of this bird as the owl in the spearthrower title is correct, then the title is directly associated with the war costume worn by Curl-Snout, just as we propose.

Peter Mathews (personal communication, December 1989) presented us with the final piece of the puzzle by pointing out an entry in the Cordemex dictionary of 1 ucatec (Barrera Vasquez 1980:342) and its relationship to the phonetic value of the cauac sign as cu. The entry has ku (cu in our orthography) as “the omen owl, owl, bird of prophesy in the books of Chilam Balam.” This cu word for “owl” also occurs in Choi and in Tzcltal where it is registered as cuh. Since the objects at the corners of the shield are thought to have the phonetic value hi or he in glyphic contexts, the entire configuration may be the full spelling cu-h(e). Mathews’s observations thus identify the cauac-marked shield as a direct phonetic spelling of the owl and, just as important, with an owl specifically associated with prophecy and fortune-telling. Phis particular association apparently had a very ancient history that derived from the owl’s prominent role in this war iconography.

[226] This final event on Stela 31 took place on June 11, 439, in the Julian calendar when Venus was Morningstar and 44.93+ from the sun. The maximum elongation occurred fifteen days later on June 27 with Venus at 45.62+ from the sun, or .69+ beyond the June 11 position. However, June 11 can be taken as an arrival position for eastern elongation, the point at which Venus is farthest from the ecliptic of the sun as we see them from earth, and on that day Venus was magnitude -4.4, about as bright as it gets. 1 his date then belongs to the same category of astronomical hierophany as the war/Tlaloc events discussed above (See Note 47).

[227] The text on Stela 31 concerning Curl-Snout has proven to be extremely resistant to decipherment. The events and actors as we understand now are as follows:

(1) On 8.17.18.17.2 (June 26, 395) a temple named Wi-te-na was dedicated by Curl-Snout.

(2) On 8.17.2.16.17 (September 13, 379) or 8.19.7.9.17 (September 2, 423), Curl- Snout engaged in a dynastic event that involved displaying a scepter “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (see Note 53 for a discussion of this problematic date).

(3) On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396), Curl-Snout ended Katun 18 in his own land as a one-katun ahau, a title that indicates a person was under twenty years old or else still in his first katun of reign when the event happened. If he was under twenty years old more than seventeen years after his accession, he was indeed young when he acceded, perhaps explaining why Smoking-Frog appears to be the dominant ahau in the kingdom.

(4) On 8.19.5.2.5 (April 13, 421) an unknown event was done by an unknown person.

(5) On 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, 411) another event occurred, but the record of it is lost in the damaged area of the text. We do not know who the actor was, but the event occurs on one of the most extraordinary astronomical hierophanies we have yet discovered in Maya inscriptions. Since July of 411, Jupiter and Saturn had been within four degrees of each other, hovering around an azimuth reading of 72+ as they crisscrossed each other in a triple conjunction that would finally end in March of the following year. This day occurred shortly after the second of these conjunctions just when Venus had swung out 47.22^ to its maximum elongation as Eveningstar.

Federico Fahsen (1988b) has posited that the lost event associated with this date was the accession of Stormy-Sky. We find his suggestion interesting because its fits so well with the chronology of the text on Stela 1 and the date in Burial 48, which is generally accepted as Stormy-Sky’s tomb. Since Stela 1 records the “completion of the second katun” of Stormy-Sky’s reign, he must have reigned at least forty years. Moreover, if 9.1.1.10.10 (March 20, 457), the date painted on the walls of Burial 48, is taken as Stormy-Sky’s death (Coggins 1976:186), then the accession must have been at least two katuns earlier—or 8.19.1.10.10, at the latest. 8.19.10.0.0, the date most of us have taken as his accession date, not only falls after that limit, but its 2-katun anniversary fell on 9.1.10.0.0, nine years after the death date. In contrast, Fahsen’s earlier date has its 2-katun anniversary on 9.0.15.11.0, six years before the tomb date and just after the latest date on Stela 31, 9.0.14.15.15 (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:73). This chronology is much more satisfactory.

We also find support for Fahsen’s suggestion in the fragmentary glyph that follows the 8.18.15.11.0 date on Stela 31. It resembles the T168:518 accession glyph that is used at Naranjo and Palenque. If this date is the accession of Stormy-Sky, then the date under 442 above is likely to correspond to the earlier placement.

(6) On 8.19.10.0.0 (February 1, 426), Stormy-Sky, the son of Curl-Snout, became king or else completed the half-period of the nineteenth katun.

[228] There may have been earlier records of the event, but they have not survived into modern times or archaeologists have not yet found them.

[229] The period of thirteen katuns was very important in Maya thought. The thirteen numbers of the tzolkin (260-day calendar) divided into the 7,200 days of a katun gives a remainder of + 11 or -2. Thus, each time the Long Count advances one katun it reaches the same day name combined with a number two less than the starting point, as in the consecutive katun endings 6 Ahau, 4 Ahau, 2 Ahau, 13 Ahau, 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, and so forth. It takes thirteen katuns to cycle back to the original combination. The 12 Etz’nab 11 Zip (9.0.3.9.18) of the Stela 31 passage cycled back on the katun wheel thirteen katuns later on 9.13.3.9.18 12 Etz’nab 11 Zac. On the occasion of that anniversary, the Late Classic descendant of Stormy-Sky conducted his own bloodletting and war in an episode we will encounter in the next chapter.

[230] This Ballcourt Marker was found inside an altar set inside a court on the north end of Group 6C-XVI-Sub (Fialko 1988 and Laporte 1988). The altar platform was built with a single Teotihuacán-style talud-tablero terrace, a short stairway leading to its summit on which the marker was once mounted in an upright position (Fig. 4:23). We believe that this group was a nonroyal compound, probably for a favored noble lineage subordinate to the high king.

[231] A ballcourt marker with depictions very similar to these murals was found on a ranch in La Ventilla near Teotihuacán in 1963 and is now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico. This Teotihuacan example is made in four pieces joined by tenons and, at 2.13 meters, is twice the size of the meter-high Tikal example (Bernal <verbatim>1969:#8).</verbatim> The Denver Art Museum owns a third example, but we know nothing of its provenience.

[232] This is a unique piece of Mesoamcrican history. First, the lowland Maya of the Preclassic period kingship already celebrated royal events in conjunction with the bailgame played with rubber balls, as we have seen at the center of Cerros where ballcourts are linked to the image of the severed head of the Jaguar Sun. The bailgame is the fundamental metaphor of life out of death: The sacrifice of the Ancestors and their apotheosis occurs in the context of ballgames with the lords of Xibalba. The form of sacrifice associated with the ballgame is specifically decapitation; we have seen that the kings of Tikal and Uaxactún focused upon the severed head resulting from such acts. Further, we know that the severed head of the sun and the bailgame are both central to Maya concepts of warfare.

All well and good: But the lowland Maya did not play the bailgame with markers like the one found at Tikal. Their courts could have carved stones laid into the playing surfaces and sometimes rings or tenoned sculptures mounted in the side walls. The Tikal Ballcourt Marker is a Teotihuacán-style artifact that was used in an entirely different game played with a smaller ball, with sticks, and without courts. Eric Taladoire (1981) has summarized the evidence for this distinctive Early Classic bailgame in his comprehensive review of the Mcsoamerican ballgame. At Teotihuacán, this kind of ballcourt marker and game are depicted in the Mural of Tlalocán, and an actual stone marker was discovered in the La Ventilla Complex at this city. Outside of Teotihuacán, examples of this kind of marker are found in the western region of Mesoamerica; one example is reported from Kaminaljuyu, which clearly had significant ties to Tikal and other lowland Maya capitals during this period (Brown 1977). The Tikal example seems to be of local manufacture, since the long inscription on its shaft is clearly Mayan and refers to local events, but its form deliberately emulates the style of the Teotihuacán game.

[233] The date of this accession is somewhat problematical. The best solution gives 8.16.17.9.0 11 Ahau 3 Uayeb (May 5, 374) for the date of accession, with the alternative being 8.18.5.1.0 11 Ahau 13 Pop (May 10, 411) (Fialko 1988).

[234] Pendergast (1971) found green obsidian in a Late Preclassic cache at Altun Ha, while Hammond reports green obsidian in Late Preclassic contexts at Nohmul (Hammond n.d.). Later materials in Teotihuacan style are known from a cache at Becan (Ball 1974b, 1979, 1983), and Burials 10 and 48 at Tikal (W. R. Coe 1965a). Conversely, Maya-style artifacts have been excavated at Teotihuacan (Linne 1934, 1942 and Ball 1983). The appearance of these objects imported from the opposite region or manufactured in the style of the other culture signals the opening of an extensive interchange network that moved material goods as well as ideas and symbols throughout Mesoamerica.

[235] The Tlaloc complex of imagery is particularly associated with the “star-shell” type of war we have been discussing as battle timed by Venus and Jupiter hierophanies (Scheie 1979, n.d.; Lounsbury 1982; M. Miller 1986b; Closs 1979). Many of the territorial conquests in which rulers of known sites were captured are associated with this complex: Caracol’s defeat of Tikal and Naranjo; Tonina’s defeat of Palenque; Dos Pilas’s defeat of Seibal; Piedras Ncgras’s defeat of Pomona; Tikal’s defeat of Yaxha; and more.

Most captives in Maya art are shown as individuals, some named by glyphs incised on their bodies, most unnamed and anonymous. Their captors stand on captives bodies or display them publicly as offerings whose presentation will gain them merit with the gods. Named prisoners are a minority and those named with their kingdoms identified are rarer still. In most contexts, then, the Maya gleaned prestige from the identities of their captives as individuals as much or more than as representatives of their kingdoms. This remains true of the kingly captives, with the exception that their status as ahauob of their home kingdoms is repeatedly emphasized. If there was war that resulted in territorial conquest as well as political dominance, then these star-shell events are the likely candidates. The first and perhaps the most impressive example of this kind of war was Tikal s conquest of Uaxactun. See Note 47 for a discussion of the astronomical association of this war and sacrifice complex.

[236] Coggins (1976; 1979a:259–268) has presented detailed arguments for these identifications, although the case for identifying Burial 10 as the burial place of Curl-Snout is the weaker of the two cases. We find her evidence well argued and accept her identifications.

[237] Coggins (1976:177–179) remarks that this deposit was found in a dump west of the North Acropolis. She lists seven skeletons, a basalt mano and metate, olivo shells, green obsidian, a mosaic plaque, a couch shell, and thirty-eight vessels, many of them in the style of Teotihuacan. Among these vessels is one depicting the group of Teotihuacanos apparently leaving a Teotihuacan-style pyramid to arrive at a Maya temple, which Coggins speculated was in fact a record of the arrival of Teotihuacanos in the Maya lowlands.

[238] It is just about this time that the cylindrical tripod spread throughout Mesoamerica and became one of the principal pottery forms of the Early Classic period through the entire cultural sphere. The shape, which provides particularly useful surfaces for displaying imagery, was adopted by all of the major cultural traditions of the time. In general the Maya style is taller in the vertical axis than the squatter style of Teotihuacan.

[239] The other possibility is that the cities are Tikal, Kaminaljuyu, and Teotihuacan (Coggins 1979a:263). Kaminaljuyu is a likely candidate for the middle temple depicted on the vase which shares features of both Teotihuacan and Maya architecture. However, if Coggins’s dates of A.D. 386 to 426 for this deposit are correct, the deposit is some seventy-five to a hundred years earlier than the Teotihuacan-style architecture and tombs at Kaminaljuyu. Furthermore, recent excavations in the Lost World group at Tikal by Juan Pedro Laporte (1988) have demonstrated the presence of talud-tablero architecture at Tikal by the third century A.D. A place ruled by Maya which has both styles of architecture is very probably Tikal. The two types of talud-tablero temples represented in the scene are distinguished by their roofcombs and the U-shapes marking the Maya version.

[240] Marcus (1980) has also commented on these tasseled headdresses, also associating them with Teotihuacan emissaries to Monte Alban.

[241] Charles Cheek (1977) proposed a model of conquest to explain the appearance of Teotihuacano architectural and ceramic styles at Kaminaljuyu, placing the time of Teotihuacan conquest in the sixth century. Kenneth Brown (1977 and personal communication, 1986) sees Kaminaljuyu as a port of trade serving as a neutral, secure ground for both lowland Maya and highland Teotihuacanos to trade upon.

At Kaminaljuyu, both lowland Maya and Teotihuacanos seem to have been present during the Middle Classic period (A.D. 400–600). Lowland Maya ceramics and jade artifacts are known at Teotihuacan, especially in the Merchants’ Barrio with its curious arrangement of round buildings (Rattray 1986). Teotihuacanos also seem to have been physically present at Tikal. Moholy-Nagy (personal communication, 1986) believes there were a limited number of people of Teotihuacan ethnic origin at Tikal. This identification is based on a burial pattern consisting of cremation and the use of a pit to deposit the human remains and funerary offerings. Two of these pit burials are known: Problematic Deposit 50 found in a dump west of the North Acropolis and Problematic Deposit 22 found in the center of the North Acropolis in front of Structure 5D-26.

Coggins (1979b:42), following Proskouriakoff, suggested that the appearance of the Teotihuacán imagery at Uaxactún and Tikal signaled the arrival of a foreign people. She has suggested that Curl-Snout was in fact a Kaminaljuyu foreigner who usurped the throne of Tikal on the demise of the old dynasty. Archaeological evidence, however, documents Maya interest in green obsidian for use in cached offerings as early as the Late Preclassic period. New excavations at Tikal place the talud-tablero style of architecture at Tikal earlier than the date of the Uaxactún conquest. The lowland Maya and Teotihuacán had long been known to each other and had long traded for exotic goods originating in each others domains. 1 he appearance of Tikal kings in this Teotihuacán costume represents either an intensification of this contact or the adoption of a Teotihuacán ritual complex by the Maya for their own use. It does not signal the conquest of the central Petén or its dominance by foreigners.

[242] Pasztory (1974) divided Tlaloc imagery into two categories, Tlaloc A, which is associated with water and agricultural fertility, and Tlaloc B, which is associated with war and sacrifice. She pointed out that the goggle-eyed imagery of Stela 31 and the Burial 10 vessels is not a Tlaloc image, but rather humans who wear goggle eyes, which she proceeded to associate with war iconography at Teotihuacán (Pasztory 1974:13–14). This war and sacrifice complex appears as the central theme of the Atetelco murals at Teotihuacán. The iconography of that complex is consistent with Teotihuacán imagery as it appears at foreign sites and may well represent a ritual or religious complex that Teotihuacán traders or political emissaries took with them as they spread outward from Teotihuacán in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Karl Taube (n.d.) has recently identified a war complex he associates with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. The symbolism of this imagery includes the Mosaic Monster headdress, which he identifies as a War Serpent. He cites recent excavations at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Sugiyama 1989; Cabrera, Sugiyama, and Cowgill 1988) in which were found mass burials of warriors who were perhaps sacrificed in dedication rituals sometime during the mid-second century A.D. One of these burials contained eighteen mature males of warrior age. They were buried with obsidian points, mirrors that warriors wore on the back of their belts, war trophies in the form of human maxillas and mandibles, and shell imitations of maxillas and teeth. Other artifacts included 4,358 pieces of worked shell, many of which were drilled at one or both ends. Following suggestions by Berio (1976), Taube suggested these pieced shells were from the Mosaic Monster (his War Serpent) headdress. These recent excavations and work on the war complex of Teotihuacán are enriching our understanding of war in Mesoamerican tradition, especially in the Tlaloc- complex we have seen at Uaxactún and Tikal.

[243] Taube (n.d.) follows Rene Millon in suggesting that all of Mesoamerica saw Teotihuacán as the place where the sun and moon were created. We are not yet convinced that the Maya accepted that view, but the imagery at Teotihuacán, especially in the murals of Tetitla called the Tlalocán (Pasztory 1976), represented the city as the earthly replication of the sacred source of creation and genesis. We contend that the Teotihuacanos thought of themselves as citizens of the central sacred spot in the human plane of existence. The Maya on the other hand understood that all temples performed this function and that all kings were the embodiment of the world axis. We do not see Maya kings, their nobles, or the common folk standing in awe of Teotihuacán, no matter its internal definition of itself.

[244] See the July 1982 issue of the National Geographic Magazine for Hammond’s descriptions of this sacrificial burial.

[245] However, there may be hints that this complex was associated with Venus. Pasztory (1976:245–247) associates the Atetelco warrior iconography with the sun ritual and follows Sejourne in associating the goggle-eyed warriors with half-darkened faces with the later Venus deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. However, the Venus association may also be a Postclassic loan to the people of the Valley of Mexico from the lowland Maya. The sacrificial ritual depicted at Cacaxtla in the eighth century seems to be closer to the Late Classic Maya version of the complex than to Atetelco.

[246] Coggins (1979b:41–42) suggests a variant of exactly this scenario.

Chapter 5: Star Wars in the Seventh Century

[247] The kings changed to a costume consisting of a double-stranded necklace with a pectoral; a thick belt mounting a head-celt assemblage on the tront and a backrack on the rear; a hipcloth overlaid by a pointed loincloth; and elaborate cuffs on the ankles and wrists. The headdresses vary with the particular stela and on Stelae 3 and 9 Kan-Boar wears a cape over his shoulders.

[248] These staff monuments include Stelae 13, 9, 3, 7, 15, 27, 8, and 6.

[249] Coggins (1976:184–208) identified Burial 48 as Stormy-Sky’s grave. Chris Jones (n.d.) dates the construction of 5D-33-2^nd to a time following the sealing of Burial 48. The temporal gap between the sealing of the tomb and the temple construction is unknown, but he assigns the temple construction to the period of the staff portraits. He also dates the spectacular Structure 5D-22—2^nd, the huge temple on the northern edge of the Acropolis, to this same period. Arthur Miller (1986:40–50) describes the imagery of this temple in detail, although he assigns the dates of the tombs and construction phases differently from either Coggins or Jones. Miller points out that once the temple was built, the imagery was unchanged until the seventh century when it was encased by the thirty-meter-high Structure 5D-33-lst. No matter which of these chronologies proves to be correct, it is clear that the iconography depicted on these buildings was commissioned during the period of the staff kings, and that these buildings remained the principal backdrop for royal ritual in the Great Plaza until the seventh century.

[250] The clearest data for ordering the monuments comes from dates and a series of “numbered successor” titles that record the numerical position of a particular king following the founder of his dynasty (Mathews 1975; Riese 1984; Scheie 1986b; Grube 1988). Recorded both on monuments and on a looted pot (Robiscek and Hales 1981:234), these “numbered successor” titles allow’ us to reconstruct the order in which the kings reigned, and to know which kings are still missing from the record. Epigraphers still debate which monuments should be associated with w’hich ruler. The three main theories that describe these events have been put forward by Clemency Coggins (1976), Chris Jones (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982), and Peter Mathews (1985a). None of these reconstructions is likely to be completely accurate: the eroded conditions and incomplete nature of the inscriptional record make study of this period in Tikal’s history difficult. We present our own theory in the main text.

[251] See Chapter 4, Figures 4:6 through 4:9.

[252] A. Miller (1986:43–44) identifies the lower masks as “the sun still in the Underworld.” The center masks he associates with the Old God effigy from Burial 10, which has the same trefoil eyelashes as the Cauac Witz Monster; and the upper masks, he sees as Venus. Although our identifications differ, the interpretative concepts are the same: These masks represent manifestations of the Hero Tw’ins and other cosmic imagery as the sacred definition of the temple in Tikal’s ritual life.

[253] If we calculate the span of time between the death of the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, and the accession of the twenty-first successor, we end up with seventy-two years. Dividing this number by the number of kings who ruled during this period gives us an average reign of about eight years.

[254] C. Jones (n.d.) says that the stairs of the twin pyramids were rebuilt at least once, suggesting that the complex was used for more than one katun celebration. He also notes the existence of two twin-pyramid complexes during this period.

[255] The tw’in-pyramid complexes consist of two pyramids with stairways mounting the four sides of each. These platforms, which never had temples at their summits, sit on the east and west sides of a raised plaza. A row of uncarved stelae paired with plain altars are always erected in front of the west facade of the east pyramid. On the north side of the plaza, a carved stela recording the period-ending rite stands with its altar inside a roofless, walled enclosure entered through a vaulted door. On the south side of each complex is a small building which always has nine doors (see C. Jones <verbatim>[1969]</verbatim> for a detailed description of these complexes at Tikal). Dating the beginning of the twin-pyramid complex to the late fifth or early sixth century is important, for the endings of katuns and their quarter points provide one of the great regular patterns of time on which the Classic Maya system of festival and fair revolved. These complexes are unique to Tikal and they play a role of central importance in the ritual life of Tikal in the second half of the Classic period.

[256] Caracol was first discovered in 1937 by Rosa Mai, a logger. He reported it to A. H. Anderson, the archaeological commissioner of Belize, who visited the site that year. Linton Satterthwaite of the University Museum conducted several field seasons between 1950 and 1958 that resulted in excavations and removal of many of its monuments to safe locations (see A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:3—7 for a history of investigations). Arlen and Diane Chase resumed archaeological investigations in 1985, resulting in the discovery of important new inscriptions and archaeological data of major importance. Chase and Chase confirm earlier reports (Healy et al. 1980) of a very densely packed settlement. The city is situated five hundred meters high on the Vaca Plateau near the Maya Mountains of Southern Belize (A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a: 1–2).

[257] Proskouriakofl ’s work, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, was published in 1950. In this study she carefully compared the manner in which a fixed set of objects were depicted on monuments with inscribed dates in the Maya calendar. By showing how these depictions changed over time, she was able to produce a series of dated examples against which an undated monument could be compared and given a general style date. Her work still stands today as the principal means by which we formally assign stylistic dates to Maya sculptures.

[258] See Proskouriakoff (1950:111–112) for her description of the hiatus.

[259] Willey’s (1974) brief and brilliant discussion of the hiatus as a “rehearsal” for the ninth-century collapse of southern Classic Maya civilization reviews many of the political and economic problems confronting the Maya in the wake of the collapse of extensive trade with Teotihuacan and the proliferation of competing polities in the lowlands (see also Rathje 1971). Although a “pre-historical” view, Willey prophetically pinpointed those very areas of social stress that emerged as significant in our translations of the Maya’s own histories of their times. What the Maya themselves are silent on is the linkage between political and economic power. We are confident that there are more allusions to wealth and prosperity of an economic sort in the texts than we can presently identify, but the essential challenge of extending Maya history into the economic domain rests squarely in the fieldwork of archaeologists. One key will be to pursue the strategic imperishable commodities, such as obsidian, jade, and shell, from their stated functions and values in the texts into the contexts of the actual objects excavated from the earth (Freidel 1986a). Meanwhile, the hiatus remains an issue of regional dimensions in Maya research.

[260] In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff published a study of the distribution of monuments at the site of Piedras Negras and other sites. This study identified for the first time historical events and people in the Classic Maya inscriptions. During the next several years, she published a series of papers that changed the world of Maya studies forever by providing the keys to reconstituting their history through study of the inscriptions. These included identification of women in Maya inscriptions and art (1961b), a description of her discovery of the historical method (1961a), and finally her description of historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan (1963–1964). These articles more than any others are at the heart of the decipherment and the reclamation of Maya history from the darkness of a muted past.

[261] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that almost all pre-9.7.0.0.0 monuments were deliberately effaced, while monuments after that time appear to have been damaged only accidentally. Early monuments were abraded, broken, and moved. Scars from the pecked lines that facilitated their mutilation are still in evidence. Other carvings (the back of Stela 10 and Altar 13) were rubbed smooth. Jones comments, “I would guess that this energetic onslaught was the result of a successful raid on Tikal, probably at the end of the reign of Double-Bird, the man on Stela 17.”

[262] A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:33) report that Altar 21 was found in a central trench dug along the east-west axis of the ballcourt in Group A. The use of the term altar for this monument is something of a misnomer. Beginning in the Late Preclassic Period, Maya placed commemorative stones both in the center and at the ends of the plastered playing surfaces of ballcourts (Scarborough et al. 1982). These markers presumably pertained to the rules of the game and also to the rituals that kings carried out in the ballcourts. Generally, the monuments of ballcourts, including reliefs along the sides of some courts, allude to war and sacrifice. This linkage strongly suggests that the ballgame bore a metaphorical relationship to war (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986; Chapter 6). Located in the center of the playing field, the altar in question is a round monument with 1 Ahau, the day upon which the katun of its dedication ended (9.10.0.0.0), and the events in the lives of the Caracol kings, Lord Water and Lord Kan II (Rulers III and V, in the dynastic list). Stephen Houston (in A. Chase n.d.), the project epigrapher, immediately recognized the implications of that remarkable inscription. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:60–62) proposed that the hiatus at Tikal was the direct result of its conquest by Caracol, an argument that we accept.

[263] We follow the chronological analysis of Altar 21 first presented by Houston (in A. Chase n.d.; A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:99–100). This day, 9.6.2.1.11 6 Chuen 19 Pop, corresponded to an ax event, a type of action that is associated with shell-star war events at Dos Pilas. Most significantly, this same glyph records what happened to 18- Rabbit, a king of Copan captured by Cauac-Sky, his contemporary at Quiriguá. Although the “ax” verb is used in astronomical contexts in the codices, it is clearly associated with war and decapitation ritual in the Classic inscriptions and on pottery (see, for example, the Altar de Sacrificios vase, National Geographic, December 1975, p.774).

[264] Houston (in A. Chase n.d.) noted that the date of this war event, 9.6.8.4.2 7 Ik 0 Zip, corresponds to the stationary point of Venus that forewarns of inferior conjunction. The verb, a star (or Venus) sign, here followed by the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph, occurs throughout the inscriptions of war events timed by Venus apparitions or Jupiter and Saturn stations. The location is indicated by the main signs of the appropriate Emblem Glyph or simply as the “earth.” Here the star war took place at 1 ikal.

[265] Clemency Coggins (1976:258) notes that this period “is characterized by the poverty of its burials.” During this time there is only one burial “rich enough to have had painted ceramics.” Burials in residential areas were equally poor. In an insightful and anticipatory interpretation of stylistic similarities, Coggins (1976:385–386) posited influence from Caracol into the Tikal region exactly during this period and culminating with the first stela known to have been erected after the hiatus, Stela 30 and its altar, depicting the ahau name of its katun in the style of Caracol. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:6O-61) attribute many characteristics, especially in Burials 23 and 24, to Caracol funerary practices.

Chase and Chase (1989) report a 325 percent increase in population at Caracol following the Tikal war. There was a corresponding increase in large, single-phase construction projects both of temples and extensive terracing systems. Tomb space became so sought after that chambers were built into substructures and reused for several people before being finally sealed. Whereas Tikal saw an impoverishment of burial furniture, Caracol experienced a remarkable enrichment. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) have suggested that much of the labor for these construction projects and the wealth of Caracol during this period was transferred from the prostrate kingdom of Tikal.

[266] Houston (in A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:91) suggested that Caracol Rulers IV and V (Lord Kan II) were brothers since they were born only twelve years apart (Ruler IV on 9.7.2.0.3 or November 30, 5 75, and Ruler V on 9.7.14.10.8 or April 20, 5 88). A reading suggested by David Stuart (1987b:27, 1988a, and n.d.) supports Houston’s proposed relationship. On Stela 6, the last clause closes with the information that the halfperiod ending 9.8.10.0.0 was witnessed by Ruler V who was the yitan itz’in, “the sibling younger brother of” Ruler IV. We should also observe that the parentage of Rulers IV and V is not clearly stated in the inscriptions. The most likely reconstruction is that the throne descended from father to firstborn son, but there is some evidence of a break in the descent line with these two brothers.

[267] The Emblem Glyph of this kingdom has a snake head as its main sign. It was identified with Calakmul, a site north of the Guatemala-Mexico border, first by Joyce Marcus (1973 and 1976) and later by Jeffrey Miller (1974). Miller identified looted stelae in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum as coming from the “Snake site,” as Calakmul is sometimes known. Although the Calakmul identification was widely accepted at first, several epigraphers began questioning it because of the unusually wide distribution of this Emblem Glyph and the damaged condition of Calakmul’s monuments. Peter Mathews (1979) assembled all the then-known inscriptions, many of them looted, marked with the Snake site or its dynasty and gave the site the noncommittal designation “Site Q.”

Several years ago, however, Ian Graham discovered the sawed-off remains of the looted monuments currently housed at Cleveland and Fort Worth, in a site called El Perú, located to the west of Tikal in the northwest Petén. Finding the remnants of these shattered stelae at El Perú convinced most epigraphers that the Snake site was finally to be identified as El Perú.

Recently, however, Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have once again questioned the Snake site identification based on the following grounds:

(1) Stelae from El Perú have another Emblem Glyph distinct from the Snake Emblem Glyph. This second Emblem Glyph does not appear paired with the Snake Emblem Glyph in the manner of other double Emblem Glyphs, such as those found at Yaxehilán, Palenque, and Bonampak. This distribution suggests that the Snake Emblem Glyph appearing on El Perú Stela 30 is a reference to a foreign power.

(2) A key Snake site king named Jaguar-Paw appears in the inscriptions of several sites. His birth was recorded on Calakmul Stela 9 and also on Site Q Glyphic Panel 6. His accession was inscribed on El Perú Stela 30 and on Dos Pilas Stela 13. Finally, his capture by Tikal’s Ah-Cacaw was declared in conjunction with a war event in Temple I of that city. The Tikal and Dos Pilas references are clearly to foreigners. The El Perú reference may be taken either as foreign or local, while the Site Q and Calakmul references are more likely to be local.

(3) Finally, Stuart and Houston have identified a place name consisting of a waterlily plant (nab) over a chi hand merged with a tun sign, resulting in the phrase nab tunich. This place name appears with names incorporating the Snake Emblem Glyph at Naranjo, where it is in a foreign context. The Dos Pilas inscriptions say that Jaguar-Paw’s accession occurred at nab tunich, and most important, the ruler on Calakmul Stela 51 has nab tunich in his name. They feel the place is most likely to be some part of Calakmul and prefer the identification of the Snake Emblem Glyph as Calakmul.

We became convinced of the Calakmul identification when Scheie noticed that a fragment in the Tamayo Collection from the side of the Fort Worth stela, recorded a “God K-in-hand” action with two persons named in association. The first of these is the protagonist of that stela, Mah Kina Balam, but his name is followed by ichnal and the name of the current ruler of Site Q. David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has shown that the ichnal glyph means “in the company of.” Given this reading, the fragmentary text records that the El Perú lord enacted the ritual “in the company of” the ruler of Calakmul, giving us strong evidence that Jaguar-Paw of Site Q was a visitor at El Perú for the ritual. Based on this interpretation, we follow Marcus, J. Miller, Stuart, and Houston in accepting Calakmul as the Site Q kingdom. However, we also acknowledge that the evidence is still not indisputable and that Site 2 may be a yet undiscovered city.

[268] This same glyph names the fourth successor of the Copán dynasty who reigned about eighty years earlier (Grube and Scheie 1988).

[269] We have, of course, no direct evidence that Yaxehilán ever participated in the oncoming wars. However, a representative of the Calakmul king attended an important ritual conducted by the tenth king of Yaxehilán. This visit suggests they were at least on friendly terms, if not outright allies. If Cu-ix installed Ruler I on the throne of Naranjo, as Stela 25 implies, then the Naranjo ruler was very likely part of the proposed alliance against Tikal. By the middle of Katun 5, Tikal may have been surrounded by an alliance of hostile states.

[270] This is the stationary point that ends the retrograde movement of Venus as it flashes across the face of the sun at inferior conjunction. The Morningstar would then resume motion in its normal direction, heading toward its maximum distance from the sun.

[271] Captives, especially those of high rank, were sacrificed in a mock ball game played upon hieroglyphic stairs (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:214—263 and M. Miller and Houston 1987).

[272] Mathews (1977) identifies 9.5.12.0.4 as the birth date of Naranjo Ruler I based on an anniversary expression on Stela 3 and a “five-katun-ahau” title included with Ruler I’s name on Stela 27. Based on this last citation, Mathews proposed that Ruler I lived into his fifth katun and ruled until at least 9.10.12.0.4, long after the conquest date. Closs (1985:71), on the other hand, takes the anniversary sequence on Stela 25 as the celebration of the accession of this ruler. Closs’s interpretation has the virtue of placing the birth of this ruler earlier than 9.5.12.0.4 and placing his transition to status as a “five-katun ahau” on a correspondingly earlier date. Since we have neither a clear birth nor accession verb with any of these dates, the final interpretation will have to wait for additional information to appear. The text of Stela 25, however, clearly declares that the event which took place on that date, be it birth or accession, took place “in the land of Cu-Ix of Calakmul.”

[273] Heinrich Berlin (1973), citing a personal communication from Linton Satterth- waite, first commented on this 9.9.18.16.3 7 Akbal 16 Muan date that is shared between Caracol and Naranjo, although he offered no interpretation of its significance. David Kelley (1977b) suggested that it should have corresponded with the heliacal rising of Venus as Morningstar, tempering his suggestion with the caution that his data was too varied to commit to a particular answer. The most important component of his paper was the identification of the “shell-star” complex associated with this particular category of date. Following up on Kelley’s work, Michael Closs (1979) identified the shell-star category as Venus dates and posited that this Caracol-Naranjo date corresponded to the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar, an association confirmed by Floyd Lounsbury and extended to include the Bonampak war scene. See Chapter 4, notes 45 and 47, for a detailed discussion of the war and astronomical associations connected with this set of dates.

[274] David Stuart (1987b:29) first read this collocation as k’u.xa.ah, pointing out that it also occurs on a captive panel at Tonina. He notes that k’ux is “eat/bite/pain in proto-Cholan. Stuart himself suggests that the event may be captive torture, a practice well documented in narrative scenes of the Classic period, but he also notes that Victoria Bricker suggested to him that it might also be cannibalism, a practice documented archaeo- logically in many parts of Mesoamerica, including the Maya lowlands. Freidel participated in the excavation of a deposit of butchered human bones found in a small platform at the Late Postclassic lowland Maya community of San Gervasio on Cozumel Island in 1973. The feet and hands had been sawed away from the meat-bearing limb bones. No matter the action recorded here, it boded no good for the captive.

[275] Mathews (1985a:44) dates Stela 6 at 9.6.0.0.0 and identifies it as the last monument in a 200-year hiatus in monument dedication at Uaxactún.

[276] Berlin (1958) first noted the mutual use of the same Emblem Glyph at both Tikal and the Petexbatún sites, although he posited that the Tikal Emblem Glyph was subtly differentiated from the Petexbatún version. Marcus (1976:63–65) suggested that the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas actually recorded the history of Tikal lords who conquered Dos Pilas and reigned there in the name of the regional capital. Coggins (1976:445^446) sees an offshoot of the Tikal royal family moving to Dos Pilas after the death of Stormy- Sky, and sending one of its sons back to Tikal to reestablish the old family and reign as Ruler A.

Houston and Mathews (1985:9) and Mathews and Willey (n.d.) also think it likely that Dos Pilas was established from Tikal, perhaps by a minor son or a segment of the royal family that moved out of Tikal during the hiatus. With the new information available to us, we know that this hiatus occurred because of Tikal’s defeat by Caracol. They believe the Dos Pilas dynasty intruded itself into the area, using a strategy of intermarriage and war to consolidate its position. They, however, also see the Dos Pilas dynasty as independent of Tikal, a position we accept. We, furthermore, see a tension and competition between Tikal and Dos Pilas that unfolds as Tikal struggled to reestablish the prestige of its rulers.

[277] According to Houston and Mathews (1985:11–12), this second son, named Shield- Jaguar, is recorded on the West Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas.

[278] The El Chorro and El Pato lords name a woman with the Dos Pilas Emblem Glyph as their mother. Mathews and Willey (n.d.) and Houston and Mathews (1985:14) note that the time involved makes their identification as sisters of the king—or at minimum, members of the royal family of Dos Pilas—a likely interpretation.

[279] Unfortunately, since the first half of the stair (Hieroglyphic Stair 2, East 3) is destroyed, we have neither the exact date nor the action recorded in this passage. Since other dates on this stair occur between 9.11.9.15.9 and 9.12.10.12.4, we surmise that this action fell within the same period.

[280] Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified the combination of a waterlily-imix glyph (nab) with a shell-winged dragon as the name of Lake Petexbatún. The action is called a “shell-dragon” ti kan toe, and may have occurred at that lake. The inscription names Jaguar-Paw as ihtah itz’in, the younger brother, of another Calakmul noble, who may also be named at Dos Pilas (HS2, E4).

[281] Jeffrey Miller (1974) first identified the accession date of Jaguar-Paw on a looted monument in the Cleveland Art Museum. He suggested the stela was from Calakmul and was once paired with another looted monument in the Kimbell Art Museum. His pairing of the stelae was correct, but Ian Graham found the remnants of both stelae at the site of El Perú. The Cleveland stela depicts a female who records her celebration of the katun ending 9.13.0.0.0. The accession of Jaguar-Paw is the dynastic event to which this katun celebration is linked.

[282] David Stuart (1987b:25–27) has read this representation of an eye as the verb i/, “to see,” supporting his reading with the phonetic spellings that can accompany or replace it.

[283] Recall that Stuart and Houston (see Note 21) associate this toponym with Calakmul.

[284] Houston and Mathews (1985:14—15) first published this scene and recognized its implications.

[285] The second glyph in the text next to the seated figure is ch’ok, a glyph that Grube, Houston, and Stuart (personal communication, 1988) and Ringle (1988:14) associate with young persons who have not yet taken the throne. Our own study of this title confirms that it appears only in the names of people who are not yet kings, but their ages can range from five to forty-eight years. The title apparently refers to members of a lineage who are not in its highest rank.

[286] Proskouriakoff (1961b:94) first identified this woman in the imagery and texts of Naranjo, pointing out that each of her stelae is paired with another representing a male. She remarked on the presence of the Tikal Emblem Glyph in her name, and observed that the male was born several years after the most important date of the woman. She commented, “She is doubtless older than the man, and one may infer that the relationship could be that of a mother and son.” Berlin (1968:18–20) accepted Proskouriakoff’s analysis, further suggesting that Tikal entered into a dynastic marriage at Naranjo, and that this woman’s male offspring in turn married another woman from Tikal. Molloy and Rathje (1974) and Marcus (1976) both follow the suggestions of their predecessors, but Peter Mathews (1979) noted that the name of the father of this foreign woman in her parentage statement on Naranjo-Stela 24 matches Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas. Houston and Mathews (1985:11) posited two royal marriages for that king—one to a woman of Itzán, which produced the next king of Dos Pilas, and the other to a woman who produced a daughter he sent to Naranjo to marry a noble there. From this marriage came a grandson who was the next king of Naranjo. We accept Mathews’s identification and suggest that the royal woman married a male noble of Naranjo, for the next king, if he was her son, carried the Naranjo Emblem Glyph, rather than that of Dos Pilas.

Berlin (1968:18) observed that the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival also occurs on Cobá Stela 1. On that monument, the date occurs in the last clause on the front in the form of a Long Count, the second notation of this kind in the text. Although the Long Count form of the date suggests that it was especially important in the inscriptional history recorded on this monument, the verb is too eroded to decipher. It appears to have involved a katun, perhaps as an anniversary, but the actor is clearly not any of the principals in the Naranjo-Dos Pilas affair to the south. The scene shows the Coba ruler dressed as the Holmul dancer standing on top of two bound captives who are flanked by two more captives. Although we suspect the Coba inscription records an event important to local history, the fact that the date is shared between Cobá and Naranjo may point to some important connection between the two zones.

[287] Interestingly, a variant of this name occurs in a reference to a foreign wife at Yaxchilán on Lintels 5 and 41 and in a reference to the wife of the ruler Yoc-Zac-Balam of Calakmul. We can come up with a number of explanations as to why the Wac-Chanil- Ahau appellative had this wide distribution: It could have been a special title of royal wives, or perhaps queen mothers; it may have designated foreign women in some way; or it might have been a name popular in the Usumacinta and Petexbatún regions.

[288] In the text at Tikal that records this war event, the extended finger has a bauble dangling from its tip. In this version and a related one on Caracol Stela 3, the jewel does not appear with the hand. However, this hand, both with and without the bauble, occurs in Glyph D of the Lunar Series. We had taken this common occurrence in Glyph D as evidence that both forms are equivalent, but Nikolai Grube and Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1990) have independently shown that the hand without the bauble and its substitutes in Glyph D read hul, “to arrive.” They have convinced us that the two forms of the hand do not substitute for each other in most contexts. Glyph D counts the age of the moon from its hul, “arrival,” a point defined as the first appearance of a visible crescent. In the context of the Naranjo event, they suggest that the verb is simply “she arrived,” an event that was followed three days later by the dedication ritual for a pyramid named with the main sign of the Naranjo Emblem Glyph. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival thus reestablished the house of Naranjo’s rulers.

Archaeologically, there is some evidence supporting the association of termination and dedication rituals with the act of reestablishment or founding. Both kinds of rituals are similar in form and content (Freidel 1986b). Termination rituals involving the smashing of artifacts of pottery, jade, and other materials, and the layering of these materials in white earth, are found not only upon the occasion of the permanent abandonment of buildings, but also at their reconstruction. At Cerros, the first place this ritual activity was identified and documented in the Maya region (Robin Robertson n.d.; Garber 1983), it is clear that the same unbroken ritual offerings which terminate a building can be part of the dedication ceremony of the new building (Walker n.d.). Since the hul event was followed three days later by the dedication of a house, we may very well be dealing with a prime example of a house dedication used to establish a broken dynasty.

Date and universal time: 710 June 28 (Gregorian); 24:22 U 1.

JDN and sidereal time: 1980560.515278; Mean G.S.T.: 18h 49.6m

| Object | G long | G lat | G dist | R.A. | Dec. |
| Sun | 95.45 | 0.00 | 1.017 | 6 23.8 | + 23 30 |
| Moon | 17.46 | 2.58 | 63.016 | 10.3 | + 9 17 |
| Mercury | 117.11 | -2.45 | 0.671 | 7 54.7 | + 18 29 |
| Venus | 116.05 | 1.52 | 1.574 | 7 53.5 | + 22 35 |
| Mars | 115.22 | 1.20 | 2.584 | 7 49.7 | + 22 25 |
| Jupiter | 121.25 | 0.73 | 6.255 | 8 14.7 | + 20 44 |
| Saturn | 115.52 | 0.61 | 10.101 | 7 50.6 | + 21 47 |

As observed from 89.0 degrees west longitude, | 17.0 degrees north latitude:

| Object | Altitude | Azimuth | Mag. | Diam. | Phase(%) |
| Sun | 0.6 | 294.6 | -26.8 | 31 30.9 | |
| Moon | -64.1 | 356.3 | -9.4 | 29 43.8 | 39.6 |
| Mercury | 19.4 | 284.1 | 1.5 | 10.0 | 20.7 |
| Venus | 19.9 | 288.4 | -3.9 | 10.7 | 93.3 |
| Mars | 19.0 | 288.4 | 1.8 | 3.6 | 98.9 |
| Jupiter | 24.4 | 285.5 | -1.8 | 31.5 | |
| Saturn | 19.1 | 287.7 | 0.3 | 16.5 | |

(Outer diameter of Saturn’s rings: 37.2 arc seconds)

[289] Based on the identification of the verb as “accession” at other sites, and on the recurrent anniversary celebrations of this date, Michael Closs (1985) first established that this event was the accession of this child to the throne.

[290] This pairing was first noted by Proskouriakoff (1961b:94). Stela 2, which depicts Smoking-Squirrel on his first katun anniversary, pairs with Stela 3, which represents Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau. The inscription on Stela 3 connects her arrival to his anniversary. Stela 30, depicting Smoking-Squirrel on the same anniversary, couples with Stela 29, which also records her arrival as well as her initial temple dedication. Smoking-Squirrel’s Stela 28 pairs with Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 31. Finally, Stelae 22 and 24 pair together in recording the accession of the young Smoking-Squirrel and its aftermath.

[291] Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2–3:152) notes that Dcanal lies on high ground at the southwestern end of a spur of hills rising above a flat basin on the west bank of the Mopan River. The glyph name for the site is Kan Witz, “Precious Mountain.”

[292] Based on conversations with Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1989), Stephen Houston (1983) first identified this captive and discussed the war between Naranjo and Ucanal. He noted the passages on Stela 2 and 22, and recognized the same name on a pot. He also called attention to this name on Sacul Stela 1, where it appears with the date 9.16.8.16.1 5 Imix 9 Pop (February 12, 760). The text records a scepter ritual enacted by a Sacul lord “in the company of” (yichnal [Stuart, personal communication. 1988]) Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal. Houston pointed out that the time span (sixty-five years) between the Naranjo attack and this event makes it likely that this later Shield-Jaguar was a namesake. He also remarked that Ucanal had reestablished the prestige of its own ruling lineage by that time.

[293] In commenting on this passage, Berlin (1968:20) suggested that it names the wife of the young king as a woman from Tikal. He also posited that the woman named here is not Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, the daughter of Flint-Sky-God K. We agree with his suggestions, but we believe she was also from Dos Pilas. The glyphs that precede her name include “18 ???” and “Lord of the shell-winged-dragon place.” This shell-winged dragon is especially associated with Dos Pilas as the toponym of Lake Petexbatún. The person named thus appears to be a lord of Dos Pilas. His name is followed by yihtah, “the sibling of,” (Stuart 1988a) and a glyph Berlin proposed as “wife.” Lounsbury (1984:178–179) has read it as yatan, “his wife.” The male from Dos Pilas seems to be named as the “sibling of the wife” of the king. The wife was a woman of Dos Pilas. Smoking-Squirrel apparently married a woman in his grandfather’s family to reinforce the alliance with Dos Pilas.

[294] Venus as Morning Star was 6.93+ from the sun, while Jupiter hung at 107.82 and Saturn at 108.09, both frozen at their second stationary points. As we will see in the following chapters, this pairing of Saturn and Jupiter was carefully observed by the Maya and used to time particularly important dynastic events.

[295] The data on the day in question, shown on page 460, was generated with “Planet Positions,” a BASIC program written by Roger W. Sinnott, 1980.

[296] In his map of the Naranjo region, Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 5) used Sacnab as an alternative name for Lake Yaxhá. Sacnab is “clear lake,” while Yaxhá is “blue water.” Maier (1908–1910:70) reported that there are two lakes at the location connected by a natural channel. One of these lakes was called Yaxhá and the other Sacnab. Apparently the names he was given at the end of the nineteenth century come from the Precolumbian names of the lakes.

[297] 9.14.0.0.0 is also recorded on Stela 23, but as a future event, which will follow the current events described in the narrative. The coincidence of the first appearance of Eveningstar on this katun ending was recorded at two other kingdoms. On Stela 16 at Tikal, Ah-Cacaw wears the skeletal god of Eveningstar (Lounsbury, personal communication, 1978) as his headdress, and on Stela C at Copán, 9.14.0.0.0 is connected by a Distance Number to a first appearance of the Eveningstar many years before the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date.

[298] Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 3) reported finding this stone “on the centerline of the ballcourt at the northern extremity of the plaza” in 1972. He posited that it was moved there as the result of Postclassic or even post-Conquest activity, but we believe that the sequence of associated events suggests the placement was deliberate. Caracol conquered Naranjo and erected a stairs there to celebrate its victory. Forty years later, a recovered Naranjo conquered Ucanal and placed a piece of that stairs in the ballcourt of the kingdom they had just defeated. Others (Houston 1983:34 and Sosa and Reents 1980) have also made this connection between defeat, revival, and victory.

Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1976) suggested that triumphal stairs were forceably erected at the site of the loser by the victor. Houston also points out that this type of victory stairs has survived in remarkably good condition at sites like Seibal, Naranjo, and Resbalón, but that they were often reset in illegible order. He suggested that the dismantling and resetting in scrambled order may have been the loser’s way of neutralizing the stair after they had revived their prestige. Apparently one could damage the monuments of a defeated enemy, as Caracol apparently did at Tikal, but the monuments of a victor were not to be defiled in the same way. You reset them out of reading order to neutralize them.

Interestingly, Ucanal’s suffering did not end here. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) report finding a panel at Caracol that depicts two Ucanal captives, bound and seated on legged, stone thrones. Dated at 9.18.10.0.0, the monument documents a Caracol that is once again erecting stelae and returning to its old pattern of aggression. A renewed Caracol apparently struck at the same border community that had felt the earlier wrath of a recovered Naranjo.

[299] Chris Jones (n.d.) dates several important projects to the last part of Tikal’s hiatus: a repaving of the North Acropolis; the completion of its present eight-temple plan; a rebuilding of the edge of the North and Central Acropolis which cut the Central Acropolis off from the East Plaza; and the remodeling of the East Plaza, which included placing a ballcourt in its center over the old Twin Pyramid Complex. Burials 23 and 24 were cut into the pyramidal substructure of Temple 5D-33—2^nd, the huge masked building that fronted the North Acropolis. Jones suggests that Burial 23, the richer of the two, might be the tomb of Shield-Skull, the father of Ruler A, whom he suspects was the patron of much of this construction.

[300] His first name has been read by Chris Jones (1988:107) as Ah-Cacaw, although he also appears in the literature as Double-Comb and Ruler A. Although the reading of one of the glyphs as ca has been questioned, we will use Ah-Cacaw as the name of this ruler.

[301] Chris Jones (1988:107) cited skeletal information from Haviland (1967).

[302] Nomenclature for the phases of these buildings can be a bit confusing for people unused to archaeological conventions. The phases of construction are numbered from the outside to the inside so that Temple 32-lst refers to the last construction phase of Temple 32. Temple 33–2^nd refers to the next phrase inward; 33–3^rd to the next, and so on until the earliest phase of construction is reached.

[303] Both Coggins (1976:380) and Chris Jones (n.d.) speculate that Burial 23, the richer of the two graves dug into Temple 33—2^nd just before the last phase of construction began, contained Shield-Skull. This enigmatic person did not leave any sculpted monuments that survived, but he is recorded on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 as Ah-Cacaw’s father. Jones also describes a significant building program which included Temple 5D-32-lst and the tomb of the twenty-second successor. Other buildings in the East Court and Central Acropolis may have been constructed during the reigns of the four intervening rulers. Unfortunately, since only the twenty-second ruler left us inscribed objects, we cannot know which of those rulers were responsible for the building programs. We interpret the absence of inscribed stelae during the reigns of the twenty-second through the twenty-fifth successors to have been the result of Caracol’s victory; but why the same Tikal rulers left the shattered remains of their ancestors’ stelae lying unattended in front of the North Acropolis, we don’t know.

[304] If our reconstruction of events is correct, the twenty-first ruler was captured by Lord Water of Caracol. The twenty-second ruler is in Burial 195 in Temple 5D-32, located to the immediate east ofTemple 33. The central temple held the older tomb of Stormy-Sky, as well as two others inserted into the substructure shortly before the second phase of construction was buried under the third. If the twenty-fifth ruler was in Burial 23 and if Burial 24 held the twenty-fourth ruler, then three of the four kings who ruled between the defeat and Ah-Cacaw’s accession are buried in the buildings fronting the North Acropolis.

[305] Shook (1958:31) theorized that the stela was originally mounted in the rear chamber of Temple 5D-32. But since all other Tikal stela were erected in plaza space, we surmise that this one had been carried inside the temple from some other location. Chris Jones (n.d.) suggests that Stela 26 had been mounted in front ofTemple 5D-32, while Stela 31 was originally placed in front of 5D-33. The notion that the offering deposit was situated at the physical threshold of the Otherworld portal of these temples is derived from examples of other back-wall locations of altars and symbolic representations of Otherworld beings in the sanctums of Maya temples, as detailed, for example, in Chapter 6.

[306] Chris Jones (n.d.) reports that a fragment of Stela 26 was placed alongside Altar 19 (the altar to Stela 31) in a pit next to the substructure ofTemple 33-lst. Since fragments from both monuments were put in the same cache, he presumes that both stelae were interred in their resting places in a single ceremonial sequence associated with the reestablishment of the Tikal dynastic lineage. Our reconstruction is somewhat different: We do not see any actual sundering in the old line as a result of the defeat by Caracol. There is no epigraphic evidence to suggest the insertion of any usurper Caracol kings; indeed, Caracol evidently did not even raise a victory monument here as they did at Naranjo. The victors apparently contented themselves with the desecration of Tikal royal historical monuments and the imposition of an effective ban on public history in the city. We interpret the ritual deposits of these two stelae—one recording a list of the kings from the lineage during its most aggressive and successful era, and the other recording its most glorious military victory—as a method of compensating for the desecration done to the monuments by the Caracol conquerors and as a means of establishing supernatural support for a new era of military success.

[307] This description is based on images on the lower register of Room 1 at Bonampak. The event associated with that scene is the ‘fire house-dedication ritual now known from many different sites. Although our scenario concerns the honorable deposit of a desecrated stela at Tikal, the fire ritual was very probably of the same type because the material placed in the caches is identical to that placed in dedication caches in other buildings at Tikal (see Note 42 for a discussion of the interrelationship of dedication and termination rituals).

[308] Harrison (1970) has interpreted the presence of family residences as well as administrative and ritual houses in the Central Acropolis. We presume that these buildings functioned both as residences for the royal family and as council houses for the institutions of governance.

[309] The offering plates we describe here are the flat-bottomed plates found in the lip-to-lip caches especially associated with building termination and dedication deposits. One set of this type of cache vessel (Crocker-Delataille 1985:231 <verbatim>[#354])</verbatim> has zac lac incised on the side of the plate. This name associates these lip-to-lip plates with the great stone censers of Copan, which are called zac lac tun (Stuart 1986e). Zac has the meaning of “white,” but also of something “artificial,” in the sense of human-made. Lac is the word tor plate, while tun specifies that the zac lac was made of stone. Both types of vessels were receptacles for offerings [and both have interiors shaped like buckets or deep pans], Shook’s report does not mention either type of zac lac in Temple 34, but his descriptions of the pits dug in the floor closely resemble the bucket shape inside the Copan censers. We suspect that the Maya thought of them as being the same thing; and although no plates were deposited in the Temple 34 cache pits, the material in these caches closely matches dedication offerings from other deposits which have them. Our presumption that a zac lac would have been used to transport the offerings is based on the many depictions of such plates in scenes of ritual activities from painted pottery. The lac plate was one of the principal containers for offerings of all sorts.

[310] These descriptions are based on the wall paintings of Bonampak and Temple XIII from Uaxactun.

[311] Shook (1958:32) reports that some of the marine materials came from the Pacific, while others came from the Atlantic. Presumably, the Tikal lord traded for material both from the Gulf of Mexico and from the Belizean area of the Caribbean coast.

[312] Flint and obsidian are associated with lightning strikes in most Maya languages and in much of their mythology. Most interestingly, the small obsidian blades found throughout the region are called u kach Lac Mam in modern Choi. This phrase translates as “the fingernails of the Lighting Bolt.”

[313] Volcanic hematite is a rare iron mineral. It occurs naturally only in the context of active volcanoes—of which there are several in the southern Maya Mountains. The crystal takes the form of flat flakes with mirror-quality surfaces. Although the crystal is virtually noncorruptible by oxidation, it can be ground into a bright reddish-purple powder that can be used for decorative purposes. This powder contains sparkling fragments of the crystal form. Volcanic hematite was highly prized as a mosaic mirror material—superior even to the iron pyrite which the lowland Maya also imported. Hematite is found in relative abundance in Late Preclassic contexts and in decreasing amounts thereafter, suggesting that the known sources in the highlands were limited and became exhausted during the course of the Classic period. The mother-of-pearl backing on this particular mirror is commensurate with the Late Preclassic volcanic hematite mirrors found in the cache of royal jewels at Cerros as described in Chapter 3.

[314] The practice of deliberately smashing jade artifacts, particularly earflare assemblages, has been identified as an aspect of lowland Maya termination rituals by James Garber (1983). David Grove (1986) has suggested the presence of a similar practice at the Middle Preclassic highland Mexican center of Chalcatzingo and it has been found in relation to one of the earlier phases at Temple 10L-26 at Copan.

[315] This type of bundle has long been known from narrative scenes on pottery, on carved monuments, and in the murals of Bonampak. The Quiche talked about sacred bundles called the Pizom Q’aq’al. which contained relics from their founding ancestors. The Tzotzil today still use bundles in the rituals of office in much the same way they were used in ancient ceremonies. Juan Pedro Laporte found a lip-to-lip cache in the Lost World group. When opened it was found to hold the same array of marine materials, lancets made from the thorns called cuerno de toro in modern Mexico, jade, shell, and so forth. These objects were lying in a black substance which proved on analysis to be amate-fig bark paper, which had been painted blue and red. Around the entire offering, a band of fibrous cloth had been tied. Marisela Ayala (n.d.) was the first to identify this offering bundle with those represented in Maya imagery.

[316] Bruce Love (1987:12) describes the smearing of blood on idols and stelae as these rituals are described in ethnohistorical sources.

[317] In Room 1 at Bonampak, three high-ranked lords are shown being dressed in elaborate costumes. In the dedication scene on the lower register, these same three lords are shown dancing to the music of a band which marches into the picture from their right side. On their left, high-ranked nobles move into the scene in an informal procession. These latter appear to be both witnesses and participants in the ceremonies. I his same kind of dance very likely occurred in all or most dedication rites elsewhere, including 1 ikal.

[318] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that another cache containing fragments of Altar 19, which he associates with Stela 31, and a fragment of Stela 26 were placed in a pit next to Temple 33–1^st. He sees this as evidence that Stela 26 and 31 were deposited at the same time.

[319] W. R. Coe (1967:48) described the construction sequence for Temple 33-lst in detail. Coggins (1976:445–447) and Chris Jones (n.d.) both agree that this construction project was associated with Ah-Cacaw’s reestablishment of the old lineage. Our understanding of this history descends from theirs, although we offer a slightly different interpretation of the data patterns. We see, for example, Temple 33-lst as both a new construction to declare the renewed authority and power of the dynasty, and as a method of ceremonially deactivating the North Acropolis. The Classic period Maya believed that sacred power and energy was accumulated in material objects (1) as they were used to contain the sacred power manifested in ritual and (2) as the actions of kings in the making of history focused the power of the cosmos onto them. To contain the accumulated power of an object which they wished to bury or discard, the Maya used a set of rituals to terminate the object formally. The dispositions of Stela 26 and 31 are examples of exactly these sorts of rituals; but these termination rituals also included drilling holes in pottery, knocking out the eyes of figures, destroying the faces of human imagery, removing color from sculpture, and many others. David Grove (1981) has proposed that this same behavior accounts for the mutilation of Olmec sculpture. Temple 33-lst seems to function like Temple 14 at Pa- lenque. Built by Kan-Xul after his brother Chan-Bahlum’s death, Temple 14 celebrates the dead brother’s emergence from Xibalba. It also contains the power in the Group of the Cross by blocking the main ceremonial access into it (Schele 1988b). Temple 33-lst performs the same function at Tikal by obstructing the formal, processional access into the center of the North Acropolis, deactivating it as the ritual focus of the dynasty.

[320] In an insightful analysis, Coggins (1976:371) noted this stylistic relationship of this altar to the Caracol tradition and, long before the discovery of Altar 21 at Caracol, she suggested there might have been interaction in that direction.

[321] We do not yet have a phonetic reading of this verb, but its association with war and captive taking is widespread. Its other significant occurrence is in the heir-designation ritual of Chan-Bahlum at Palenque. Heir-designation rites as they were portrayed at Bonampak also involved the taking and offering of captives.

[322] This ritual display of captives after a battle is the war event shown most often in narrative scenes in Maya art (Schele 1984a). We can see an excellent example of this in Room 2 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986:112–130). The event in the Tikal scene is spelled nawah. a term meaning “to dress or adorn” (Bricker 1986:158). Here, the action is the dressing of the captive in the garb of sacrifice. This action included stripping him of his regalia, replacing his battle garb with the cut-cloth kilt of sacrifice, replacing his ear ornaments with paper or flowers, and painting him in the color of sacrifice. Landa (Tozzcr 1941:117–119) reported that blue was the color painted on the stripped bodies of sacrificial victims before they were tortured or killed.

Captives most often appear as sacrificial victims, rather than as warriors engaged directly in battle. Capture, and the rank of those captives taken, were central to the prestige of Maya nobles. Sacrificial victims also appear regularly in burials and in dedication rites. Brian Dillon (1982:44) found a deposit of sacrificial victims who were apparently lying in the belly-down position characteristic of captives when they met their fate. Captives, especially high-ranked ones, were often kept alive for years. They appeared repeatedly in all sorts of rituals, and their survival quite possibly created problems of succession in their lineages.

Peter Harrison (1989) has provided us additional information on Structure 5D-57 that enriches this piece of history considerably. At the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, he demonstrated how the builders of the Central Acropolis used the geometry of the triangle in conjunction with older buildings to establish the location of new buildings. Using this technique. Structure 5D-57 was positioned in relationship to what he calls “Great-Jaguar- Paw’s clan house,” known archaeologically as Structure 5D-46, a great two-storied palace built on the west end of the Central Acropolis during the Early Classic period. So important was this palace to subsequent kings that while they added to it, they were careful to retain the original structure as a part of the functioning Acropolis throughout the subsequent history of the city.

The identity of its original patron is established by a eaehe vessel deposited under the west stairs of 5D-46. The inscription on the pot records that it was made for the dedication of the k’ul na (holy structure) of Great-Jaguar-Paw.” Thus, Ah-Cacaw established the location of the building depicting his display of captives at the dedication of Temple 33 in relationship to the residence of the very ancestor whose victory over Uaxactun is celebrated on Stela 31. It was in Temple 33 that he deposited this tree-stone with such reverence. This is a remarkable folding of history back on itself and a wonderful example of the symmetries the Maya found so fascinating and useful in their construction of political history.

[323] The phrase, as written here, includes the “fish-in-hand” verb that records bloodletting and vision rituals at other sites. This verb is followed by a standard phrase including tit and a glyph representing a lancet and an “akbal” compound. In the past, we have presumed this “akbal” glyph referred to a performance of the ritual at night, but Victoria Bricker (1986:73–74) has suggested an alternative explanation that seems to be correct. The glyph consists of the signs ti, ya, the “akbal” sign, and H. If the “akbal” sign reads syllabically as ak\ the combination reads ti yak’il, “in his tongue.”

[324] This verb consists of T79 (value unknown) superfixed to ta (T565) plus the combination -wan, an inflectional suffix for verbs having to do with position in or the shape of space. This same glyph and variants of it occur at Palenque, Copan, and many other sites associated with the dedication rituals for monuments and houses. The “T” in the number above derives from Thompson’s 1962 method of glyph transcription.

[325] For a full discussion of this day and its events, see the later parts of Chapter 4. Proskouriakoff (Coggins 1976:448) first noted that this date is linked to the Temple 1 date.

[326] Even more intriguing is an observation recently made by Karl Taube in his study of Teotihuacan mirrors and war imagery (Taube n.d.). Following earlier work by George Kubler (1976), Taube notes the appearance of a species of cactus found in the highlands of Central Mexico. Both scholars have suggested that the platform under Ah-Cacaw refers directly to Teotihuacan, and Taube suggests it may refer directly to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. We think this may be correct, but we suggest the reference is far more oblique. At the time of the carving of these lintels, Teotihuacan was in severe decline (Millon 1988), but it had been in full florescence at the time of the conquest of Uaxactun when this iconography became so popular. We suggest the reference is to the conquest of Uaxactun and the long-lasting association of that victory with the memory of the Teotihuacanos. See René Millon’s (1988) evaluation of the Maya-Teotihuacan interaction in his discussion of the fall of Teotihuacan.

[327] Scheie (1985a) proposed a reading of bal or balan for the Emblem Glyph ofTikal. New evidence from the Primary Standard Sequence on pottery has lent support to that reading and provided a direct association to this jaguar head. David Stuart (1987b:2–7) has read one of the glyphs in this pottery text as it tz’ibil, “his writing.”

[[]]

In one version of this glyph, the syllable ba is written with a jaguar head, and in another, bal appears as the head of the number 9. This last glyph standardly refers to a human head with the lower jaw covered with a jaguar pelt, and a yax shell sign affixed to its forehead. In many of the toponymic forms of the I ikal Emblem Glyph, the ‘ bundle is prefixed by yax. Since the main sign, as well as the head of the number 9, have phonetic values as bal, the name ofTikal was likely to have been Yax Bal or }ax Balam. The portrait head of the number 9, however, was also used to record the image and the name of the jaguar member of the Headband Twins, who are one of the Classic period manifestations of the Hero Twins. Tikal was apparently named as the special place of this god.

[328] Lintel 3 of Temple 4 depicts the son of Ah-Cacaw seated on a throne, but the point of view is rotated 90+ so that we see a front view of the king. Just as in Temple 1, the throne of the king sits atop a low stepped platform, but here the artist showed clearly the carrying bars of the Maya version of a sedan chair.

[329] Chris Jones (1988:1 10) follows an earlier suggestion by Marcus (1976:90) that the Emblem Glyph of this noble is that of Piedras Negras, based on the identification of the prefix as a leaf. However, the main sign of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph consists of the syllables^, ki, and bi, which can all appear in a variety of substitutions (Stuart 1987b:37). The snake form of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph is formed by simply using the head variant of bi. The Emblem Glyph on this bone has the blood group sign inverted, with the dotted part above the shell sign rather than below it. Therefore, we believe that the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of this captive noble is the snake head associated with Site Q and Calakmul.

[330] Proskouriakoff (in Chris Jones 1988:109) first noted the recurrence of the death date on this bone. The other five events on MT 28 are also deaths, including that of someone named 18-Rabbit-God K on 9.14.15.4.3 and a woman on 9.14.15.6.13. The 18-Rabbit character may be named on Lintel 2 of Temple 1.

[331] Chris Jones (personal communication, 1986) secs little possibility that a passageway could have been left open to give access to the tomb. Ruler B probably oversaw the building of the substructure over the tomb of his father, although Ah-Cacaw is likely to have commissioned the lintels or at least to have overseen the information that would be put on them after his death.

[332] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first recognized that the name phrase on Naranjo Stela 6 is the phonetic version of Smoking-Batab’s name. The day sign in the Calendar Round is eroded, but the three possible readings are:

9.14.18. 4. 8 9 Lamat 11 Muan November 28, 729
9.15.11. 7. 13 9 Ben 11 Muan November 25, 742
9.16.4.10.18 9 Etz’nab 11 Muan November 22, 755

CHAPTER 6: THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MOTHER: Family and Dynasty at Palenque

[333] According to one account by the family of Antonio de Solis of Túmbala in 1746, Palenque came to the attention of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century with its “discovery” by Spaniards. During the next forty years, many visitors, both civilian and government sponsored, went to Palenque and made a series of drawings and maps of the site, which are now in archives in Seville and Madrid and at the British Museum. A set of these early drawing and commentaries by Antonio del Rio and Paul Felix Cabrera appeared in Descriptions of the Ruins of an Ancient City, a two-volume work published by Henry Berthoud in 1822. With this publication, the ruined buildings and sculptures of Palenque came to the attention of the Western world and initiated a fascination with ancient Maya civilization that continues today. The most popular travel accounts were those written by John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in their Incidents of Havel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, published in 1841. These books truly brought the Maya to the attention of the Western world and were immensely popular at the time. For those interested in the history of discovery, see Graham (1971), Berlin (1970), and G. Stuart (n.d.).

[334] This royal name combines the features of a snake and jaguar into one glyph block. At the Primera Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a meeting held at Palenque in December, 1973, at which most of Palenque’s kings were given their modern names, we elected to use the modern Choi spelling of this name combination—chan, “snake,” and bahlum, “jaguar.” Later research into the phonetic complements accompanying this name has shown that it was originally pronounced more like its modern Yucatec version, can-balam, but we have elected to retain the original spelling of this name in order not to add confusion by creating different names for the same person.

[335] The longest inscription was the Hieroglyphic Stair of Temple 26 at Copán. We have deciphered enough of that inscription to know that it recorded a detailed dynastic history of Copán, but unfortunately the stairs were found already badly eroded and out of order for the most part. Time has not been kind to the stairs since they were uncovered in 1898 and much of what was visible then has since been worn away. This inscription is unlikely ever to be deciphered completely, making the panels of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque the longest intact inscription.

[336] Pacal used the nine katuns leading up to and including his own lifetime as the framework for the dyntistic history he inscribed. Beginning with the katun ending on 9.4.0.0.0, he recorded the last royal accession to occur before each successive katun ended. When more than one king ruled within a katun, he linked their accessions to the half-katun or the thirteen-tun point within the katun. He ended the nine katuns with 9.13.0.0.0, the twenty-year period during which he built the temple and commissioned the tablets and their history. By using this device, Pacal locked all the accessions between Chaacal I and himself to specified period endings, thus setting the whole of Palenque’s history into a firm and indisputable chronological framework. This use of katun succession as the framework of history created the prototype of the katun histories that are common in the later books of Chilam Balam in Yucatán. Lounsbury (1974) first offered the chronological decipherment of the sarcophagus edge, while Berlin (1977:136) recognized the nine-katun sequence as the structural framework in which Pacal presented his history on the tablets above. For a detailed decipherment of the tablets from the Temple of Inscriptions, see Schele (1983, 1986c).

[337] Inscriptions document at least three, possibly four, more generations on later tablets, bringing the total number of generations to thirteen or fourteen during the entire history of Palenque.

[338] The inscriptions of Palenque never record the exact kinship relationship between Ac-Kan, Pacal I, and Lady Zac-Kuk, but we can reconstruct it based on the following information. (1) Of the two men, only Ac-Kan became the king of Palenque. The texts of the Temple of Inscriptions are complete in the record of accessions from 9.4.0.0.0 until Pacal II, and Pacal I does not appear in that record. (2) Both men died in 612, but Pacal I died on March 9 while Ac-Kan died six months later on August 11. Most important, the records of their deaths on the edge of the sarcophagus lid are reversed, with the later date recorded first, as if we are to understand these persons in the order Ac-Kan/Pacal, rather than the order of their deaths. (3) Of the two men, only Pacal I is shown as a figure on the sides of the sarcophagus, even though he was never king.

Something about their dynastic roles made it advisable to break the chronological order of the death list to put Ac-Kan before Pacal. At the same time, this something led the Maya to eliminate Ac-Kan from the portrait row and picture Pacal I instead. The most efficient explanation is that they were brothers and that the line passed through Pacal rather than Ac-Kan.

In two other examples on the sarcophagus sides, one of a pair of rulers was eliminated from the portrait gallery, and in those examples we can determine the reason. The first pair, Manik and Chaacal I were born only five and a half years apart, while the other, Chaacal II and Chan-Bahlum I, were born only a year apart. These short periods between births make a father-son relationship between these pairs impossible—they were siblings. Of the first pair of brothers, only Chaacal I appears in portraiture; and of the second pair, only Chan-Bahlum I has a place on the sarcophagus sides. Why? The answer lies in inheritance: The children of only one brother might inherit the throne. The sarcophagus sides depict the direct descent of the line from parent to child. In this interpretation, Pacal I was the sibling of Ac-Kan and he is shown because his child inherited the throne. He won his place in Pacal the Great’s portrait gallery for his role as father of the next ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, and as the grandfather of the child named for him, Pacal, who became one of the greatest American rulers in history.

[339] Such tablets may well be at Palenque in the deep levels of the Palace or in some other building, for deep excavations have rarely been done at Palenque, and then often by accident. The time difference between Lady Kanal-Ikal’s rule and Pacal the Great’s was not long, for she was still alive when her great grandson was born. He was born on March 26, 603 and she died on November 7, 604. Her prominence in Pacal’s records and the twenty-year length of her reign makes likely that Lady Kanal-Ikal commissioned inscriptions and temple constructions during her reign.

[340] He was forty-three years old at the time. He was thirty-seven when his mother died and thirty-nine at his father’s death.

[341] The plan and design of the Temple Olvidado became the hallmarks of Palenque’s architecture: double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls with multiple doors piercing exterior walls, and trefoil vaults arching across the inner galleries. Ihe vault system used in later buildings actually leaned the outer wall against the center wall, above the medial molding. The Palencanos never developed the true arch, but their system gave them the highest ratio of wall thickness to span width ever achieved in Maya architecture. The system also allowed them to pierce the outer walls of their buildings with more doors than any other Maya style, giving Palenque architecture the largest interior volume and best lighting known among the Maya. This innovative sequence began with the lemple Olvidado and culminated with the Group of the Cross and Houses A and D of the Palace.

[342] His construction projects probably also included Houses K and L on the south ends of the eastern and western facades, and perhaps other buildings that were found in excavations of the Palace courtyards.

[343] See Scheie (1986a) for a full discussion of the development of Palenque’s architectural style.

[344] This inference of the identity of the woman named in the Temple of Inscriptions as Pacal’s mother is based on the following pattern of data:

(1) The woman who appears in the equivalent chronological position in the death list on the sarcophagus is his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk.

(2) On the Oval Palace Tablet, the woman named as Pacal’s mother hands him the crown that makes him king, but his father is neither named nor pictured. The parent critical to his legitimate claim to the throne is his mother rather than his father.

(3) His father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, never appears in an accession phrase in any of the inscriptions of Palenque. Furthermore, Pacal depicts Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ only on the sarcophagus where he appears as the king’s father and not as a king in his own right.

(3) The goddess is born on a date deliberately contrived to have the same temporal character (see note 35) as Pacal’s birth.

All of these factors emphasize that Pacal’s right of inheritance descended through his mother rather than his father. Pacal’s strategy for explaining the appropriateness of this pattern of descent was to establish an equation between his mother and the mother of the gods. To have named the woman who acceded shortly before his own accession with the name of the goddess is much in keeping with this strategy.

The name itself consists of the bird from the Palenque Emblem Glyph, which is a heron, with feathers in its mouth. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1977) has suggested that this is a play on the name Zac-Kuk, based on the following word plays. The word for heron in Yucatec and Choi is zac bac, “white bone,” or some expression like “white crest.” The zac bac reading works well as the Palenque Emblem Glyph since the main sign in the Emblem Glyph is a long bone or skull, also bac. Lounsbury suggests that the feathers (kuk) in the mouth changes zac bac to zac kuk, thus making a play on the name of Pacal’s mother which was Zac-Kuk, “White (or Resplendent) Quetzal.” No one has, as yet, suggested a reading for the small sign mounted atop the heron’s head in the name. At the 1989 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Dennis Tedlock offered a different solution by linking the zac bac gloss with the name Xbaquiyalo, the first wife of Hunhunahpu and mother of Hun-Batz’ and Hun-Chuen in the Popol Vuh.

[345] The stairs leading up the front of the Temple of Inscriptions and those leading down to the tomb have risers about 18 inches high. Today, the inner stairs are almost always damp and slippery from condensation in the tunnellike vaults; we assume the same conditions were extant when Pacal was buried.

[346] While we have no way of determining who enacted the rituals described in this scenario, the fact that these particular actions were done is clear from the archaeological record at Palenque and from records of other burial rites, especially those of Ruler 3 at Piedras Negras (Stuart 1985a). The description of the objects deposited inside the coffin and tomb are drawn from Ruz (1973) and from his description of the sacrifice of five victims (1955). The description of the scale and feel of being in the tomb comes from the days Scheie spent locked inside the tomb helping Merle Greene Robertson photograph the stucco sculptures modeled on the walls.

[347] The drawings which survive on the sarcophagus sides are carefully drawn and beautifully designed. However, the carving, especially in the areas at some distance from the image of the falling Pacal, are very sloppily executed. Merle Robertson and Scheie take this contrast to mean that the carving was executed at the last minute and in a rush. See Merle Robertson (1983) for a detailed photographic record of the tomb.

[348] Xoc appears briefly on the Palace Tablet as the man who dedicated the north building of the Palace after Kan-Xul had been taken captive by the king of Tonina. He never became the king, but he apparently was a high-ranked official in the kingdom because he functioned as the surrogate of the captured Kan-Xul until a new king was selected from the royal clan. Given his age of thirty-three at the time of Pacal’s death, we have assumed he served Pacal as well as his descendants.

[349] Chaacal, in fact, did become king after Kan-Xul was taken captive and executed at Tonina. His parentage statements do not name either Chan-Bahlum or Kan-Xul as his father. He was apparently the offspring of one of the women in Pacal’s lineage, perhaps a sister of Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul. Chac-Zutz’ was a cahal, who became an important figure (maybe the war chief of the kingdom) during Chaacal’s reign.

[350] The offerings of the plaster heads, the plates and cups of food, the royal belt, and the slaughtered victims are located in the plans below.

[[][Jester God headband mask]]

[351] The other possibility is that the portraits represent the great king Pacal and his wife Lady Ahpo-Hel.

[352] Merle Robertson (1979) first associated the imagery on these piers with glyphic accounts of Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation. The fact that Chan-Bahlum became a living incarnation of the sun is declared by him in his own textual account of this ceremony in the Temple of the Sun in the Group of the Cross.

[353] The badly damaged condition of these stucco portraits and the texts that once accompanied them preclude identifying them with security, but logically they should be the most important ancestors in Chan-Bahlum’s claim to legitimacy. One possible pattern is that they all represent his father Pacal, but the headdresses, one of which is a jaguar head, suggest that they are meant to represent different individuals. The Maya often represented their names in the imagery of their headdresses. The jaguar headdress, then, may refer to Chan-Bahlum I, his great-great-great-grandfather.

[354] At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan depicted the designation of his heir by showing a high-ranking noble displaying him at the edge of a pyramid. The audience on the mural consists of fourteen high-ranked individuals, but the ritual would have been held publicly, the entire community in attendance (M. Miller 1986b:59–97). At Palenque, Chan-Bahlum did not represent the audience, but we know it included everyone who stood in the plaza under the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions. In the Group of the Cross, he used a pyramid glyph to describe the action of heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) as being “pyramided.” The glyph actually reads le.match’ul na (using the transcription punctuation from Thompson s <verbatim>[1962]</verbatim> A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs) or lem ch’ul na: in Yucatec lem is glossed by Barrera Vasquez as “meter, encajar, introducir. To become the heir was “to introduce the child from the pyramid,” exactly the scenes Chan-Bahlum displayed on the Temple of Inscriptions piers.

[355] Although the first royal temple at Cerros is designed around the quincunx or five-fold principle, the later public buildings there are triadic in concept. The earliest architects created an innovative variety of building designs, but the triadic principle was the most pervasive.

[356] The glyphic phrase for these small inner houses, pib na, consists ofpib, the word for “underground” as in the pits used for cooking, and na, “edifice or building.” Pib na is also the term for a “sweat bath” used by women after childbirth. Many cosmologies of modern Maya in Chiapas refer to a sweat bath in the heart of the mountain. This image may be intended here also.

[357] The text on the Tablet of the Cross writes this second event as yoch-te k’in-k’in, “he became the sun.”

[358] All three panels have the same text on them, but the text is split in different ways in each temple. In the Temple of the Cross, it reads “ten days after he had become the stood-up one (yoch-te acai) and then he spoke of (iwal chi-wa or che-wa) U-Kix-Chan, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, the child of Pacal, Blood Lord of Palenque.” In the Temple of the Foliated Cross, the first event (yoch-te) appears on the left panel and the second (chi-wa) is on the right. In the Temple of the Sun, the glyphs from the left panel survive on Maudslay’s (1889—19O2:P1.86) reproduction of Waldeck’s original drawing, but nevertheless some of them are readable. The first phrase reads chumlah ti ahau le and paraphrases “He was seated as king, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, Blood Lord of Palenque.” The second section of the text is much more difficult, but the best probability is that it begins with a Distance Number that leads to the event ten days after the accession (9.12.11.13.0 5 Ahau 13 Kayab) and then jumps to the right tablet where the event was once written. Today only the long name phrase of the actor, Chan-Bahlum, survives on the right panel.

[359] Mayanists are still debating the identification of this smaller figure. Floyd Louns- bury (in his seminar on Maya hieroglyphic writing, 1975) first proposed that he is Chan- Bahlum at his heir-designation. Since all three of the texts located near his head record this heir-designation and, in’two of the three texts, a war event which took place more than a year later on 9.10.10.0.0, this interpretation has merit. In fact, it has resurfaced recently in a presentation by Basse and it has the support of David Stuart. Another alternative interpretation emerged at the 1987 Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Tom Jones proposed this figure represents the lineage founder, Bahlum-Kuk. Since founders also appear in accession scenes at Yaxchilan (Lintel 25) and Copan (the bench from Temple 11), this interpretation also has merit.

For the present, we still hold to the older interpretation of this shorter figure as Pacal, based on the following arguments:

(1) There is a transfer of a scepterlike object (in the Temple of the Cross a Quadripartite Scepter; in the Temple of the Foliated Cross, a Personified Perforator; and in the Temple of the Sun, a shield and eccentric-shield device). These transferred objects represent the power of the throne, and rulers at Palenque and other Maya sites wield them in scenes of rituals. If the smaller figure is Chan- Bahlum at his own heir-designation, he is already controlling these objects at age six. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1989) has suggested that this is a ritual in which the child was made acquainted with the objects he would one day wield as king. We find this interpretation less satisfying than one in which these objects are transferred from the former king, now deceased, to his son who is becoming the new king.

(2) In the heir-designation presentation on the Temple of Inscriptions piers, the size of the child (104 cm) matches closely the size of six-year-old Choi children in the region today (M. Robertson 1979.132–133). The scale of the child presented in the Bonampak murals conforms to this size in direct proportion to the adult who holds him. The muffled figure in the Group of the Cross may be smaller than the larger figures, but he is still of a size larger than a six-year-old in proportion to the larger figure. The Temple of Inscriptions child when stretched out to full height is only 56 percent of the height of the adults who hold him. while the smaller figure in the Group of the Cross is between 73 percent and 78 percent of the height of the larger figure. According to Robertson’s modern measurements, a 1.04-meter six-year-old from the Palenque region is around 60 percent of the height of a 5’ 6” (1.70m) adult.

(3) If the scene is the documentation of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites, and this interpretation is well supported by the inscriptions, then the composition format of each temple means to present this small figure as the source of power. He holds the objects of power on the inner tablet while the new king holds them on the outer panels. There is a transfer of these objects from the smaller person to the larger one as the scene moves inside to outside. The larger figure also dons the costume of kings in its most ancient and orthodox version during the transition from inside to outside: He wears minimal jewelry and a cotton hipcloth on the inside and the full costume over those minimal clothes on the outside. In addition, the larger figure takes the smaller person’s place when the scene moves from the inside to the outside of the sanctuary, especially in the composition of the Temple of the Cross. The scenes in all three temples emphasize the transformation of the tall figure from heir to king in the movement from inside to outside, and within this program the smaller figure is presented as the source of Chan-Bahlum’s claim to the throne—and that person was either Pacal, his father, or Bahlum-Kuk, the founder of his dynasty.

(4) Finally, in the heir-designation event, the six-year-old child was not the main actor, either at Palenque or at Bonampak. The child was displayed as the heir, but the father, who was the acting king, oversaw that display. At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan went to war, not the child, and at Palenque, Pacal memorialized the thirteenth-haab anniversary of this heir-designation in the Tableritos from the Subterranean building of the Palace without mentioning Chan-Bahlum at all. Chan-Bahlum, the six-year-old child, was the recipient of the action in the heir-designation rites, but the source of those actions was his father, Pacal.

The argument for identifying the smaller figure as Chan-Bahlum at his heir-designation has strengthened with the recognition that the two outer panels of the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun depict Chan-Bahlum at points in his accession rituals separated by at least ten days. The fact that Chan-Bahlum appears on more than one date, involved in more than one action on the outer panels, reinforces the possibility that he is shown at two different ages and in two different actions on the inner panel. Although we believe this latter interpretation to be less probable, it is a viable possibility that must also be kept in mind.

[360] The Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Zinacantan in highland Chiapas still regard the Christian crosses at the base of their sacred mountains as the doorways to the Otherworld which contains their ancestors. The shamans of this community regularly commune with the supernatural at these holy places (Vogt 1976).

[361] See Schele and M. Miller (1986:76–77, 265–315) for a detailed discussion of the World Tree and its appearances in death and bloodletting iconography of the Maya.

[362] The aged god on the right has never been securely identified. Kelley (1965) suggested God M, but demonstration of his identification has not materialized. The only other portrait we have of this god appears on a small incised bone, probably from the Palenque region (see Crocker-Delataille 1985: Pl. 395). The composition of these two old gods bent under the weight of the throne precisely anticipates the display of captives on Late Classic stelae from the site of Coba (Thompson, Pollock, and Chariot 1932).

[363] God L is now recognized as one of the chief gods of the Maya Underworld. Most important, he is the deity shown presiding over the gods on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the day of the current creation (M.D. Coe 1973:107—109). Chan-Bahlum s repeated depiction of this god asserts the ability of the king to control the effects of God L and other Xibalbans in his community, and perhaps his ability as king to gain the willing cooperation of these gods in the affairs of the kingdom.

[364] This set of gods was first noticed by Berlin (1963), who gave it the name Palenque Triad” because it was in the Palenque inscriptions that he first saw them. Building on Berlin’s identification, Kelley (1965) identified their birth dates in the Group of the Cross and suggested associations between these Maya gods and other Mesoamerican supernaturals. Lounsbury (1976, 1980, 1985) sorted out chronological problems concerning their histories and recognized the names of their parents in the I ablet of the Cross. He has also made extensive arguments concerning their identities. In Maya art, these gods appear both singly and as a triad of gods at other Maya sites. Most important, GI and GUI, the first and second-born gods, are the beings most often depicted in the very earliest public images created by the Maya during the Late Preclassic period. They are not just Palenque gods.

[365] The text that records this event falls into a couplet which characterizes the action in two ways. In the first, the god yoch-te ta chan “entered into the sky. In the second, he dedicated a house named “wac-ah-chan xaman waxac na GI or raised up sky north eight house GI.” The first glyph naming the house consists of the number six prefixed to a sky glyph with two ah signs above it. The word for “six is wac. Barrera Vasquez (1980:906) lists a homophone, wac, as “cosa enhiesta” (enhestar means “to erect, to set up, to hoist [up], and to raise [up]“). Wac-ah chan is “raised up sky. i his proper name is followed by the glyph for “north” (xaman) and the portrait head of GI preceded by the number eight (waxac) and phonetic na (“edifice”).

The most likely reference here is to the act of raising the sky from the primordial sea of creation, an act known to be part of many Mesoamerican origin myths. This house is further characterized as yotot xaman, “the house of the north. The same wacah chan phrase names the inner sanctuary of the Temple of the Cross and World T ree on its inner panel. The god’s action was to establish the primary axis of the world by setting the sky in its place and establishing its order. Since this is an action twice associated with the north, we suggest it corresponded in the Maya mind to the set of the polar star and the circular movement of the constellations around that axis. In the tropics, the polar star is much lower than in the temperate zone, and the movement of the constellations through the night is even more noticeable, resembling as much as anything the shifting of patterns around the inside of a barrel. This axial pivot of the sky creates the great pattern through which the sun and the planets move and it was a pattern created by GT 542 days or a year and a half after this era began (Scheie 1987e and n.d.a).

[366] Floyd Lounsbury first deciphered the chronology of this difficult passage. The text begins with a Distance Number of 8.5.0, a birth verb, and then a series of glyphs recording 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the era date. Before Lounsbury proposed this solution, most researchers had assumed that the birth referred to the Initial Series event. In this interpretation, the Distance Number must be in error since the Initial Series date is 6.14.0 before 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, rather than the 8.5.0 written in the text. Lounsbury used known patterns of Mayan grammar to show that there are actually two different births given here, and that the name of the person born 8.5.0 before the era has been deleted from the text. The missing name, however, can be reconstructed—again by using known patterns of Mayan grammar—as the subject of the next event. The name in question is GT, the god who ordered the sky a year and a half after the era began. See Lounsbury (1980 and 1985) for a full discussion of the chronology and grammar of these passages and the identities of the gods of the Palenque Triad.

[367] Lounsbury (1976) called this kind of numerology “contrived numbers.” Such numbers are composed of two dates: The earlier one is usually from a time previous to the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date, and the other is a historical date of significance in the present creation. The Distance Number (amount of time) that separates the two is contrived by using highly factorable numbers, so that both dates fall on the same point in time in several different cycles. The two dates manipulated by Chan-Bahlum, 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahau 18 Zee and 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahau 13 Pop, fall 9.8.16.9.0 or 1,359,540 days apart in the Maya Long Count. This number is 2² x 3² 5 x 7 x 13 x 83 yielding the following relationships:

| 1,359,540 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 5,229 | (26) | gives the same day number |
| | 3,735 | (364) | computing years |
| | 1,734 | (780) | Mars period and three tzolkins (3 x 260) |
| | 1,660 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |

This puts Pacal s birth in relation to Lady Beastie’s on the same day in the tzolkin (8 Ahau), the same point in the Mars cycle, and during the time when the same Lord of the Night reigned. Most important, both persons were born twenty days after time moved into the south-yellow quadrant of the 819-day count. And both quadrants began on 1 Ahau.

[368] In the account of genesis given in the Popol Vuh, First Mother is a daughter of a lord of Xibalba. V hen the skull of First Father impregnates her by spitting in her hand, she is forced to flee to the world of humanity. As in Chan-Bahlum’s story, the First Mother spans the worlds.

[369] The two births are: 12.19.11.13.0 1 Ahau 8 Muan (June 16, 3122 B.c.) for GT and 1.18.5.4.0 1 Ahau 13 Mac (November 8, 2360 B.c.) for GIL The elapsed time between them is 1.18.13.9.0 or 278,460 days. This sum factors out as 2² x 3² x 5 x 7 x 13 x 17 and gives the following patterns of cycles:

| 278,460 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 1,071 | (260) | same day in the tzolkin |
| | 357 | (780) | same day in the Mars cycle and 3 tzolkins |
| | 119 | (2,340) | gives the same Lord of the Night |
| | 765 | (364) | computing year |
| | 153 | (1,820) | seven tzolkin/five haab cycle |
| | 340 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
| | 85 | (3,276) | same quadrant of the four 819-day sequence (east, red, and 1 Imix) |

These cycles make the two births fall on the same day in the 260-day tzolkin, on days ruled by the same Lord of the Night, and on the same day in the same quadrant of the 819-day count. The First Father, GI’, was born in the last creation; his reflection in this creation is his child GII.

[370] The “fish-in-hand” glyph appears on Lintels 13, 14, and 25 of Yaxchilan with scenes of the Vision Serpent, while on Lintels 39, 40, and 41, the scenes depict Bird-Jaguar and two of his w ives holding Double-headed Serpent Bars. The action associated with this verb is the materialization of the Vision Serpent. Since the k’ul “holy” sign follows the “fish-in-hand” when it is inflected as a transitive root, the action is something done to the “holy” liquid of the body—in other words to “blood.” This action results in the appearance of the Vision Serpent. In those examples where it is not followed by the k’ul “holy” sign, God K appears in the object slot, although we do not yet fully understand what meaning is intended. Perhaps this association of God K with “fish-in-hand” reflects the frequent appearance of this god in the mouth of the Double-headed Serpent Bar. It is the vision often brought forth by the ritual. “To manifest a vision (or a divinity)” is an appropriate paraphrase to use for the present, although the final phonetic reading of the “fish-in- hand” glyph may refer to this action metaphorically or through the vision side of the rite.

[371] Constance Cortez (1986) and others have identified this bird with Vucub-Caquix of the Popol Vuh. Cortez suggests that this bird represented the idea of order in nature. When it acted with hubris, imitating the glory of the sun, the natural world was out of order. In the story of the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins opposed Vucub-Caquix, and by defeating him, brought nature back into its proper balance and behavior once again. In this interpretation, the Celestial Bird represents an universe in which order is mediated by the king in his role as the avatar of the Hero Twins.

[372] On the Tablet of the Cross, these events appear immediately behind Chan- Bahlum’s legs, linked to his accession by a Distance Number.

[373] Lounsbury (personal communication, 1978) was the first to recognize that Jupiter and Saturn were frozen at their stationary points less than 5+ apart in the sky. He informed Dieter Diitting of the alignment in 1980 and then Diitting and Aveni (1982) extended the hierophany to include this quadruple conjunction with Mars and the moon also in close proximity on that day (July 20, 690, in the Julian calendar). They located the planets as follows:

| Planet | Longitude | Latitude |
| Mars | 219°.10 | — 2°. 18 |
| Jupiter | 221°.94 | + 0°.83 |
| Saturn | 225°.52 | + 2°.04 |
| Moon | 231°.80 | — 1°.80 |

They describe the phenomena as follows: “... all four planets were close together (a quadruple conjunction) in the same constellation Scorpio, and they must have made quite a spectacle with bright red Antares shining but a few degrees south of the group as they straddled the high ridge that forms the southern horizon of Palenque. The night before 2 Cib 14 Mol the moon would have been just at the western end of the planetary lineup, but the night after it would have been well out of range to the east. The month before and after, Mars would have shifted appreciably away from Jupiter and Saturn. Therefore, the date of the inscription is the best one where the four were closest together.” Aveni continues, “Though conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn with given tolerance in separation are skewed to occur about five times a century, the inclusion of a third planet in the grouping reduces the frequency of occurrence to about once a century.’ Diitting and Aveni speculated that the Palencanos saw this conjunction as a replay of the birth of Triad gods with the moon representing their mother, Lady Beastie. This interpretation seems likely since Chan-Bahium carefully bridged from those births to this 2 Cib 14 Mol event.

Perhaps the most remarkable new piece of information on this date was discovered independently by Stephen Houston and David Stuart (in a letter dated October 19, 1989) and Nikolai Grube (in a independent letter also dated October 19, 1989). The event on this day is written pili u waybil on the Tablet of the Sun and pili u chiltin in the other temples. Houston, Stuart, and Grube all identify way and its past participial waybil as the word meaning “nagual” or “spirit or animal counterpart.” In sixteenth-century Tzotzil (a language very close to the Choi spoken at Palenque), chi’il is “companion, familiar thing, friend” (Laughlin 1988:189).

The verb, which is glyphically spelled pi-lu-yi, seems most closely related to the verb pi’len, which is glossed in Choi (Aulie and Aulie 1978:93) as “acompañar (to accompany)” and “tener relación sexual (to have a sexual relationship).” The second meaning is known to have been used by the Maya as a metaphor for astronomical conjunction, just the event recorded in this phrase. Grube suggested in his letter that the naguals of the Palenque Triad were in conjunction (or had come together) and that the Palencanos regarded the planets as the naguals (or spirit counterparts) of the Triad Gods. Merging his observation with Aveni’s interpretation gives new and important insight into how the Palencanos thought about the events they saw in the sky: The naguals of the three Triad Gods— Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars—were reunited with the nagual of their mother—the moon.

This spectacular hierophany apparently was the trigger event for the house rites that followed over the next three days. However, this day is very near the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of Pacal’s accession, which took place only five days after this hierophany. Considering Chan-Bahlum’s preoccupation with the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, this anniversary must also have played a part in his calculations.

[374] There are several possible houses that may be the Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building. The Temple of the Cross is the most likely candidate because it contains the dynastic list that includes Bahlum-Kuk‘s name as the founder. However, the text behind Chan- Bahlum on the Temple of the Foliated Cross actually has the words pib nah and yotot following Bahlum-Kuk’s name in a passage that may refer to that temple. We suspect, however, that Chan-Bahlum referred to the entire Group of the Cross as the “Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building.” The last and most distant possibility is the Temple of Inscriptions. Mathews (1980) identified an Initial Series date over the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions with the 819-day count appropriate to the 2 Cib 14 Mol series of events. He suggested the date intended here was the hierophany, but it was just as likely to have been 3 Caban 15 Mol, with Chan-Bahlum’s dedication of Ins father’s funerary building as the event taking place. This last solution seems the least satisfactory of the four because of Chan-Bahlum’s deliberate linkage of the 3 Caban 15 Mol dedication event to the mythological dedication of GT. To us, it is more logical to assume he would have reserved such elaborate explanations for his own buildings.

[375] In the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun, a Distance Number of three days stands between 3 Caban 15 Mol and this bloodletting event. However, the 3 Caban 15 Mol event is not recorded at all on the Tablet of the Cross. In that context, the Distance Number must be counted from the date of the astronomical event, 2 Cib 14 Mol. This chronology places the bloodletting on 5 Cauac 17 Mol rather than 6 Ahau 18 Mol.

[376] The only surviving pier reliefs are from the Temple of the Sun. The inscription is fragmentary but the date is indisputably 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab and the verb is the same. The Initial Series date and its supplementary data were on the south pier, while the verb and actor were on the north pier. The figures on both inner piers are badly damaged, but Pier C has a flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it. For the Maya, this Tlaloc iconography signals bloodletting and war, so that we can speculate with some certainty that the 5 Eb 5 Kayab event involved the taking and sacrifice of captives. We have lost the piers on the other two temples, but since the balustrades and sanctuary doorjambs in all three temples repeat the same basic information in the same discourse pattern, it is likely that the piers repeated the same information on all three temples.

[377] Although astronomy plays an important role in the timing of the events of Chan-Bahlum’s history—he ended his accession rites on a maximum elongation of Venus and dedicated the Group of the Cross during a major planetary conjunction—the dedication of the pib na was not timed by astronomy. Like Ah Cacaw of Tikal, he went to Tlaloc war on an important anniversary.

While the association is distant, the 5 Eb 5 Kayab dedication of the inner sanctum may also have been associated with a Venus cycle. The final event of his ten-day-long accession ritual occurred during a maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar. The dedication of the pib na took place almost exactly five rounds of Venus later, but the planet was twenty days from its elongation point on that day. Chan-Bahlum may have been observing Venus as well as the tropical year in timing the dedications of the pib na. although it is clear that Venus was not the primary factor.

[378] Only one jamb panel is preserved from each sanctuary, and of these only the panel from the Temple of the Foliated Cross is complete. Since this panel formed a joint with the outer panel, the border on the outer panel continued onto the edge of the doorjamb. Using this pattern, we can ascertain that the surviving fragments are all from the right sides of the doors. It is possible, therefore, that the left doorjambs recorded the birth of the Triad Gods, but until additional fragments are discovered, we will not know the entire pattern.

[379] The clearest demonstration of the relationship of the central icon with the name of the sanctuary occurs in the Temple of the Foliated Cross. There the icon is a maize tree emerging from a monster with a kan-cross in its forehead while the name of the house is a tree sign over a kan-cross. Since this same relationship must hold for the other two temples, we can identify wacah chan as the name of the tree on the Tablet of the Cross. The Temple of the Sun is more difficult, but the glyph on the balustrade is a variant of the “new-sky-at-horizon” glyph that occurs as a name at Copan. Here it has Mah Kina preceding it, possibly as a reinforcement that the GUI shield in the icon of this temple represents the sun.

[380] The term used here is the T606 glyph which has been taken as “child of mother” (Schele, Mathews, and Lounsbury n.d.). David Stuart (n.d) has recently suggested a reading of u huntan for this glyph, citing glosses from the Motul dictionary of Yucatec for “to take care of a thing” and “to do something with care and diligence.” He suggests that the term refers to the child as the object of the mother’s care and nurturing. It is this sense, as “the objects of caretaking,” that the gods are related to the king—he cares for them like a mother.

[381] In this context, as with the 2 Cib 14 Mol conjunction event, the gods are named as the “cared-ones” of Chan-Bahlum. This same relationship between these gods and Pacal occurs on katun-ending dates in the Temple of Inscriptions. The glyphic terms, Tl.1.606:23, u huntan. identifies the king as the caretaker of the gods in the sense that a mother cares for her child. Since the Maya believed that the act of bloodletting literally gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a), we deduce that the king’s role as caretaker and nourisher took place in the context of bloodletting.

The importance of this role as “nurturer of the gods” is illustrated in the Popol Vuh version of the genesis myth. The following passage describes the gods’ motivation for trying again to create humanity after the first attempt had failed.

“The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth? We have already made our first try at our work and design, but it turned out that they didn’t keep our days, nor did they glorify us.

“So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer.” (Tedlock 1986:79).

The way a community provided sustenance to a king was through tribute, and in Quiche the word tzuqul, “provider,” means “nourish, support, raise, bud, sprout, be born, rear, and support by tribute” (Edmonson 1965:136). The way humanity sustained and nourished ihe gods was through bloodletting. When the king was in this role as “caretaker of the gods,” he became their mother by giving them birth and sustenance. It is this metaphor that Chan-Bahlum used on the doorjambs of the sanctuaries.

[382] Chaacal III evoked the accession of Lady Beastie in his own accession records to relate his own mother to the great founding deity of the Palenque dynasty. Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, was captured late in his reign by a ruler of Tonina. This political disaster apparently threw the succession into confusion. Chaacal III, the next king to come to the throne, chose his accession date so that it would fall into a contrived relationship of numerology with the accession of Lady Beastie (Lounsbury 1976:220–221). Even more interesting is the fact that the date of Lady Beastie’s accession, as written on the Tablet of the Cross, is in error. Two mistakes have been detected:

1. The Distance Number that is written was calculated from the 819-day count date, 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’, rather than the Initial Series date, 8 Ahau 18 Zee.

2. To find the Calendar Round reached by the Distance Number, the scribe used 20 calculating years (1.0.4.0 in the Long Count). Each time one calculating year is added to a Calendar Round, the tzolkin day stays the same, the day of the month stays the same, but the month drops back one as follows:

1.12.19. 0. 2 9 Ik 0 Cumku + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 20. 4. 2 9 Ik 0 Kayab + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 21. 8. 2 9 Ik 0 Pax + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 22. 12. 2 9 Ik 0 Muan + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 23. 16. 2 9 Ik 0 Kankin + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 24. 0. 2. 2 9 Ik 0 Mac + 1.0.4.0 equals
1.1.19. 25. 0. 6. 2 9 Ik 0 Cch + 1.0.4.0 equals
2. 0. 0.10 2 9 Ik 0 Zac + 1.0.4.0 equals
2. 1. 0.14. 2 9 Ik 0 Yax

The Distance Number written in the text falls between 12.19.13.3.0 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’ (the 819-day count) and the ninth interval above. The Calendar Round written in the text is the eighth interval above, 9 Ik 0 Zac. The scribe stopped one interval short of the correct answer.

The Maya knew they had made a mistake because in the very next notation they counted from interval nine, rather than interval eight. They may have left the erroneous Calendar Round in the text because they believed the gods had caused the error. When Chaacal contrived the numerological relationship between his accession and Lady Beastie’s, however, he used the erroneous Calendar Round rather than the correct one. Apparently. history as it was engraved in the stone, erroneous or not, became the gospel according to Chan-Bahlum.

CHAPTER 7: BIRD-JAGUAR AND THE CAHALOB

[383] According to Teobert Maier’s (1901–1903) descriptions, the temples of Yaxchilân were painted white with a red band below the medial molding.

[384] Maudslay named the ruins Menché Tinamit after the Maya people he found living nearby. Maier (1901–1903:104) renamed the city using a combination ofyax, “blue” or “green,” and the word chilan, which he thought meant “that which lies or is scattered around,” referring to the fallen stones of the ruined buildings. Maier criticized Maudslay’s use of what he believed was an ersatz term, and then he proceeded to supply his own. Unfortunately, Maier’s coined name has stuck, although Maudslay’s name was more likely what the Indians living along the river called the old city.

[385] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) published two detailed studies of the life of Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar. These two studies remain today the finest example of historical studies of the Maya inscriptions.

[386] In her study of the history of kingship and the physical orientation of buildings at Yaxchilan, Tate (1986b) identified a group of temples oriented toward the rising sun at summer solstice. Since many of the house dedication dates at Yaxchilan are on or near summer solstices, this orientation is not simply fortuitous.

[387] This king’s name consists of a sign representing male genitals surmounting a jaguar head. The name was probably Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,” but his name was published as “Progenitor-Jaguar” in the National Geographic Magazine (October 1985).

[388] David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first recognized the accession passage of Progenitor-Jaguar on Hieroglyphic Stair 1. This date is best reconstructed as 8.14.2.17.6 7 Cimi 14 Zotz’. The latest date known at Yaxchilan, 9.18.17.13.14 9 lx 2 Zee (April 13, 808), occurs on Lintel 10. a monument of the last king in the dynasty, Mah Kina Ta-Skull. Yaxchilan was certainly abandoned within fifty years of this date.

[389] The great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakofl’ published two seminal papers on her “historical hypothesis” demonstrating her belief that the contents of the Maya inscriptions were primarily historical. The first study (Proskouriakoff 1960) focused on the dynastic sequence of Piedras Negras to prove her thesis, but she did not give personal names to the Maya rulers she identified. However, in a paper published for a more general audience less than a year later, Proskouriakoff (1961a) described her methodology and gave names to these two great kings of Yaxchilan. as well as other personalities of Maya history.

The six years between 1958 and 1964 were an extraordinary lime in Maya studies. Proskouriakoff’s work followed a study by Heinrich Berlin (1959) that had anticipated her results. Berlin had already identified the names of historical people on the sarcophagus in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque. David Kelley (1962) contributed his own study of the history of Quirigua less than a year later. With these seminal studies, we began to speak truly of Maya history as they themselves wrote it and meant it to be understood.

[390] The history we present here is based on several sources, including Proskouriakoff’s (1963–1964) papers, Carolyn Tate’s (1986a) study of Yaxchilan architecture and statecraft. Mathews’s (1975) work on early Yaxchilan history, and long-term conversationsand debate with Peter Mathews, David Stuart, Sandy Bardslay, and many of Scheie’s students, especially Ruth Krochock and Constance Cortes. After this chapter was finished, we received a copy of Peter Mathews’s (1988) dissertation on Yaxchilan and have added information from that source as it is relevant.

[391] Shield-Jaguar’s birth is not recorded on any of the surviving Yaxchilan monuments, but Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) was able to reconstruct it from other glyphic information as having occurred within five years of 9.10.15.0.0.

[392] The third and the eighth successors were also named Bird-Jaguar, which was probably Xtz’unun-Balam in Mayan. The father of Shield-Jaguar was the third Bird- Jaguar, and his grandson, the great Bird-Jaguar, was the fourth. We shall call the grandfather 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar because his name phrase invariably contains a 6-Tun glyph that is not included in his grandson’s name.

[393] Recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C of the Palace at Palenque. the event (an “ax” war and a “capture”) took place on 9.11.1.16.3 6 Akbal 1 Yax (August 28, 654). The Yaxchilan lord who participated in these events was Balam-Te-Chac, who is named ayihtah (“sibling”) of Shield-Jaguar, the ahau of Yaxchilan. This brother does not appear in Yaxchilan’s inscriptions, but at Palenque the context is clearly war and capture. Note that Shield-Jaguar had very likely already been designated heir to Yaxchilan’s throne. Why else would Pacal demonstrate the importance of the Yaxchilan visitor by naming him the sibling of an eleven-year-old who was not yet a king?

[394] The term used for the relationship, ihtan, is “sibling” in modern Chorti, but in the set of kinship terms used by many Maya people, “siblings” include the children of a father’s brothers as well as one’s own brothers and sisters. The Yaxchilan cohort may, therefore, have been the child of one of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar’s brothers, rather than his son.

[395] On Lintel 45, Ah-Ahaual is named “the ahau of (yahau);’ the king of a domain named with a serpent segment with a phonetic ni attached. On Stela 19, this same location is spelled with the phonetic complements ma and na. Since this same serpent-segment glyph appears in the xaman, “north,” glyph with the value ma or man, we suggest the place was known as Man. This Emblem Glyph appears in several other contexts, including the name of Ruler B’s mother at Tikal (see Stela 5). No one has yet associated this Emblem Glyph with a particular archaeological ruin; but in light of Shield-Jaguar’s focus on this capture, the domain was important and prestigious in the Maya world.

[396] This is a unique event in Maya history as we now understand it. Women were recorded in the historical inscriptions because of their roles either as wives or mothers of important Maya lords. Although two women ruled in their own right at Palenque, Temple 23 is the only major Maya monument known to have been dedicated by a woman for the express purposes of celebrating personal history. The rarity of this circumstance points to the extraordinary and pivotal importance of this woman in Yaxchilan’s history.

[397] At Yaxchilan, kings used two forums to display their political messages—the slab-shaped tree-stones erected in front of buildings and the lintel stones that spanned door openings into the interiors of temples. In the local tradition, tree-stones displayed two complementary scenes (Tate 1986a); A period-ending bloodletting rite was depicted on the temple side and a capture on the river side of the monument. The lintels, on the other hand, displayed only one scene; but since a building usually had several sculpted lintels, the various scenes and texts could be orchestrated into larger programs of information. The scribes favored two kinds of compositional strategies in these larger programs. They could place a series of different actions and actors in direct association within a single building or they could divide a ritual or text into parts, which were then distributed across the lintels of a building. By using these multiple scenes in various combinations, the king was able to construct compelling arguments for his political actions. He could interpret history by showing how individual actions were linked into the larger framework of history and cosmic necessity. Retrospectively constructed, these linkages between different rituals and events became the central voice of Yaxchilan’s political rhetoric.

[398] Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) reconstructed this date as 9.14.8.12.5, but Mathews (personal communication, 1979) has noted that this event recurs on Lintel 23 where the date clearly reads 9.14.14.13.17, a placement supported by the presence of G7 as the Lord of the Night on Lintel 26. We accept the later placement as the correct reconstruction.

[399] There are three sequential narrative lines in these lintels: (1) the texts on the outer sides record three separate rituals in the dedication sequence of the temple (the side of Lintel 24 was destroyed when it was lightened for transport to England [Graham 1975- 1986, vol. 3:54]); (2) the texts on the undersides picture the sequence of historical events; (3) they also picture the three stages of the bloodletting rite which took place on each of those historical occasions. Thus, the sculptors let us understand the action sequence of the bloodletting rite and simultaneously that this ritual took place at three different points in time. See Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more complete descriptions of the iconography and rites depicted on these lintels.

[400] A second glyph, which looks like crossed torches, can be seen in the background next to the serpent’s head. This is the glyph that occurs at Copan as a substitute for the lineage founder’s name in “numbered succession” titles. The presence of this glyph in the name phrase referring to the figure emerging from the serpent’s jaw identifies him as the founder Yat-Balam.

[401] There is the possibility, of course, that other depictions once existed and are now destroyed. However, accession was not a favored subject for sculptural representation at Yaxchilan, although it was frequently recorded in glyphic texts. The only other picture of an accession known is Bird-Jaguar’s on Lintel 1.

[402] The bloodletting on Lintel 24 took place exactly twenty-eight years (28 x 365.25) plus four days after Shield-Jaguar’s accession.

[403] Ihe only other women to hold such prominent places are Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque and Lady 6-Sky of Dos Pilas who appears on the stela of Naranjo. The first woman was a ruler in her own right, while the second reestablished the lineage of Naranjo after a disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol.

[404] Mathews (1988:171) suggests that Lady Xoc, whom he calls Lady Fist-Fish, was probably buried in Structure 23 in Tomb 2. He describes nine carved bones found in the tomb and notes that six of them carry her name.

[405] The inscription records the dedication of an object written as pa.si.l(i). In Chorti (Wisdom n.d.), pasi is glossed as “open, open up, break open, make an opening.” The pasil is apparently the east doorway itself, which was perhaps opened up into the building to become the resting place of this lintel.

[406] Toni Jones and Carolyn Jones discovered the important secrets hidden in this Lintel 23 text and presented them at the 1989 Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas.

[407] The main sign of the Calakmul Emblem Glyph (also known as Site Q) is a snake head. On Stela 10. exactly this main sign occurs with the female head and the word ah po. This is the form of the Emblem Glyph title used especially to designate women. The reader should also note that the identification of the snake Emblem Glyph is still questioned by several epigraphers. This particular version is the one Mathews identified with Site Q. It is also the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom allied to Caracol and Dos Pilas in the star wars history detailed in Chapter 5. It is interesting that the “batab” title in Lady Eveningstar’s name uses the directional association “east.” Berlin (1958) first suggested this title should be read “batab,” a documented title in Yucatec sources meaning “ax-wielder.” Although we now know the title refers to the god Chae rather than to the Yucatec title, epigraphers still use “batab” as the nickname of the title. Normal Yaxchilán versions of this title all have the “west” direction connected with their names. The change in directional association may reflect her status as a foreigner from the east.

[408] Bird-Jaguar was thirteen years old when the sculpture was dedicated and about seventeen at the time of the house dedication rituals.

[409] Other dates and events in Temple 23 texts include the dedication of the temple sculptures on August 5, 723; the dedication of Lintel 26 on February 12, 724; the twentyfifth anniversary of Shield-Jaguar’s accession on March 2, 726; and finally, the dedication of the temple itself on June 26, 726. (Note that this last date is very near a summer solstice [Tate: 1986b].) The inscriptions describing these events also specify that they took place next to the river, probably in or very near the location of Temple 23. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified glyphs naming specific topographic features within a polity. These topographic features can include witz, “mountain,” and nab, “water, lake, or river,” and they are often accompanied by a locative glyph called the “impinged bone.” Lady Xoc’s names on Lintels 24 and 25 end with a combination including T606 (perhaps another locative), the glyph for “body of water,” nab, and the main sign of Yaxchilán’s Emblem Glyph, a “split-sky.” These glyphs should refer either to the river itself or just as likely to the flat shelf next to the river on which Temple 23 was built.

[410] This marriage may have simply renewed an old alliance. The Early Classic lintels from Yaxchilán discussed in Chapter 5 record that an ambassador from the Calakmul king visited the tenth successor of Yaxchilán soon after he acceded to the throne. We suspect Yaxchilán was in alliance with Cu-Ix, the Calakmul king who installed the first ruler at Naranjo. He was surely allied to Caracol in the Tikal wars. The alliance of the Calakmul king with the Yaxchilán dynasty may have secured at least their agreement not to interfere, if not their active participation.

[411] Her name consists of a skull with an infixed ik sign that Lounsbury (personal communication, 1980) has identified as Venus in its aspect of Eveningstar. This component of her name precedes a sky glyph and usually a series of titles.

[412] The inverted-L shape, next to the ankles of the shorter figure on the left, faces that figure and most likely identifies it as Shield-Jaguar. The composition presses this figure against the frame, giving it less space as well as a smaller size. The monument was commissioned by Bird-Jaguar, who apparently used the scale difference and compositional device to subordinate his father, even though at the time of the event shown, Shield-Jaguar was the high king.

[413] The figures shown in the ancestral cartouches above the sky register may be the parents of either actor, but the protagonist of Stela 11 is clearly Bird-Jaguar. His parents (Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar) are named glyphically as the ancestral figures on the other side of the monument. We suspect the ancestors on this side represent Bird- Jaguar’s parents as well.

[414] David Stuart (n.d.) has recently identified Great-Skull-Zero as the ichan of Bird-Jaguar’s son. This relationship term stands for mother’s brother in Choi, making him Lady Great-Skull-Zero’s brother and Bird-Jaguar’s brother-in-law. In fact, the relationships of Great-Skull-Zero and Lady Great-Skull-Zero to Bird-Jaguar’s son and future heir (who was not yet born at the time of this bloodletting) are featured in the two actors’ names. Here her name ends with the phrase “mother of the ahau.” Lord Great-Skull- Zero’s ends with yichan ahau, “the mother’s brother of the ahau.” In his name, the chan part of the yichan glyph is written with the head variant of the <verbatim></verbatim> sky glyph.

[415] Since both the woman and man hold Personified Perforators in their hands, they both apparently let blood in this rite.

[416] The scenes on Lintels 15, 16, and 17 deliberately reproduce the same actions shown on Lintels 24, 25, and 26, which are: Lady Xoc materializing the dynasty founder at Shield-Jaguar’s accession; Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar letting blood to celebrate the birth of his heir; and their preparation for a battle on the occasion of the dedication of the building. Bird-Jaguar’s lintels show him and a wife letting blood to celebrate the birth of an heir; his capture of a noble shortly before his accession; and the vision quest of another of his wives, probably as part of the dedication rites of the building. He carefully echoes the compositions of the Structure 23 lintels, but substitutes ritual events important to his own political succession.

[417] A detail of this stela was published in the National Geographic Magazine. October 1985:521.

[418] Bird-Jaguar became a three-katun lord on 9,15.17.12.10, meaning that this stela could not have been carved until after that date. If it was originally erected in the temple where it was found, it had to have been carved after 9.16.3.16.19. It is a retrospective stela depicting this bloodletting event as a part of Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.

[419] The other two lintels in this building date to April 2, 758, and June 29, 763. They depict Lady 6-Tun of Motul de San José and Lady Balam-Ix engaged in the “fish- in-hand” bloodletting rite on those dates. The Bird-Jaguar depiction is then a retrospective one, carved sometime after 763, to link the bloodletting rites of his wives to the earlier 9.15.10.0.1 ritual so important to his demonstration of legitimacy.

[420] Besides the three lintels depicting this ritual at Yaxchilán, similar rituals occur in detailed depictions in the murals of Bonampak and in several pottery scenes.

[421] This day was nine days after the summer solstice so that the sun rose within 1° of the solstice point. Venus was at 71.06° and frozen at the stationary point after its first appearance as Morningstar. The sun rose through Gemini, and Venus was poised near the Pleiades and the bright star we call Aldcbaran. We do not know what the Maya called this star.

[422] Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s house, is named on Lintel 23 with an sun-eyed dog head. On Lintel 21, Temple 22 is named the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. both in its earlier version and in the later rebuilding dedicated by Bird-Jaguar. This ritual could have taken place anywhere in the city, but we are reconstructing it here because all of the representations of the 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting are distributed around Lady Xoc’s building. This spatial point was critical to Bird-Jaguar’s quest for the throne.

[423] Tom Jones (1985) provided convincing evidence that the Usumacinta was called Xocol Ha at the time of the conquest.

[424] Given that Lady Xoc was around twenty years old when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she would have been between forty-five and fifty years old when Bird-Jaguar was born and very likely beyond her childbearing years. Any of her own children who were still alive would very likely have been adults or adolescents at that time.

[425] At the time of this event, Shield-Jaguar was ninety-four years old (+ two years). Lady Xoc’s birth date is not known, but sixty-seven years passed between Shield-Jaguar’s accession (in which she had participated as an adult) and her death date on 9.15.17.15.14. Presuming she was at least eighteen when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she died around age eighty-five. At the time of this 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, she would have been in her late seventies. If she had given birth to Shield-Jaguar’s child around the time of his accession, that child would have been in his late sixties by the time of our event; grandchildren would have been in their forties; great-grandchildren in their twenties; and great-great-grandchildren in their early childhood. Since most Maya did not live beyond their forties (although the elite appear to have had considerably longer lives and better food resources than the common folk), we suspect that the problem in Yaxchilán’s succession may have been that the extremely long-lived Shield-Jaguar had outlived the sons he’d had by his principal wife and perhaps many of his grandsons from that marriage as well. If this was the situation, the rivalry here would have been between grandsons or perhaps great-grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar on one side and the son of Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar on the other. Both claims would be equally legitimate and interpretable as a direct descent from a king, although the claim of a son would have been the stronger, especially if Shield-Jaguar publicly favored that offspring.

[426] The costume was worn by nobles who aided the king in scattering rites at Yaxchilán, by nobles who witnessed an heir-designation at Bonampak, and by emissaries who delivered gifts to kings. This last scene is depicted on a painted pot in the burial of Ruler A at Tikal.

[427] We cannot know the exact sequence of the events which took place during these rites We have arranged the individuals sequentially as a narrative device, but it is also possible that all the principals drew blood at the same time. The other sequences—the dancers, the placement of the high king inside a building, the musicians, and so forth—are based on the lower register of Room 1 and Room 3 at Bonampak, and on Piedras Negras Lintel 3.

[428] Representations of people undergoing bloodletting rarely show pain, and eyewitness accounts of the ritual specifically mention that the participants do not react in pain. (See Tozzer 1941:114, note 552.)

[429] Exactly this sequence of events, including the change of headdresses, is shown on Stela 35.

[430] David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) first identified a set of glyphs on Lintel 14 (E3-D4) and on Stela 10 and 13 at Copan as the name of the Vision Serpent in the manifestation shown on the Yaxchilan lintel.

[431] Stela 2 of Bonampak shows the king’s mother and his wife helping him in a sacrificial rite exactly as we have imagined in the Yaxchilan event.

[432] We have reconstructed this scene from a stucco sculpture which was modeled on the rear of Temple 21 immediately behind Stela 35, which showed Lady Eveningstar in this very bloodletting rite. In the stucco relief, a large male sits in the center with another male and a female on his right and two females on his left. We propose these are the principals of the bloodletting ritual—Shield-Jaguar with Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great- Skull-Zero on his right and with Lady Xoc and Lady Eveningstar on his left.

[433] M. Miller and Houston (1987) first recognized that these scenes occur not in ballcourts, but against hieroglyphic stairs.

[434] On the day of the bailgame, October 21, A.D. 744, Venus was 46.218° from the sun and only five days away from its maximum elongation as Morningstar. As we have seen repeatedly, this kind of Venus date often provided the stimulus for ritual events, especially those involving war and sacrificial rites. See Lounsbury (1982).

[435] A total of thirteen panels make up this sculpted stoop, which is located immediately in front of the three doors of Temple 33. The center panel, depicting Bird-Jaguar at play, is the widest and is designed to be the pivot of the entire program. Steps I, II, and III show three women, one of which is Lady Pacal (Shield-Jaguar’s mother), holding Vision Serpents in their arms in rituals that perhaps began different ballgames. The fact that Bird-Jaguar’s grandmother is depicted suggests that these three women represent different generations, but the inscriptions are too badly effaced to identify the other two.

The remaining ten steps portray males in the midst of the bailgame. The ball is frozen in flight, either to or from the hieroglyphic stairs. Again the badly eroded texts of some panels preclude identification of the actors pictured, but we can identify Shield-Jaguar on Step VI, Bird-Jaguar the Great on Step VII, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar HI, on Step VIII, and the cahal Kan-Toc on Step X. Presumably these steps represent different ballgames, since different generations are shown engaged in play. We may also assume that Bird-Jaguar used this step to bring together all the people, king and cahal, kinsmen and allies, who were important to his status as high king.

[436] The verb is the so-called “scattering” glyph without the drops. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has recently suggested a reading of .ye for this hand. In proto-Cholan (Kaufman and Norman 1984:137),^e’ is given as “take in the hand.” Lomil, the glyph that follows, is the word for lances or other tall staffs. The actions may be another holding of the tall flapstaff. The first glyph of the highly eroded name phrase following the verbal phrases is “5 katun ahau,” a title exclusively used at Yaxchilan in Shield- Jaguar’s name phrase. We surmise, then, that the actor was the then-deceased Shield- Jaguar.

[437] It is possible of course that Bird-Jaguar fabricated this information after the fact and that in reality he had no authority to conduct any ritual at the time of this period ending. This history was, after all, recorded after his accession and is thus a retrospective creation. We suspect, however, that the record is a true one. When he erected this stela sometime after his accession, that particular period ending would still have been fresh in everyone’s mind. If he was required to recruit and retain alliances with cahal lineages in order to hold his throne, documenting a brazen lie would certainly, it seems to us, be a counterproductive strategy.

For this reason we assume that, by that time, he had gained enough support to participate in, if not lead, the ritual. Therefore, in his reconstruction of the story, he could declare that this rite took place in what had become his kingdom on the later date.

[438] Stela 11 was erected in front of Structure 40, a temple built next to an important Shield-Jaguar temple. Before that temple stood five stelae, four recording Shield-Jaguar’s greatest captures (Stelae 15, 18, 19, and 20) and the fifth recording the first flapstaff event. The proximity of the Stela 11 to Shield-Jaguar’s monument, and the prominent place of Bird-Jaguar’s accession in its texts (this information is recorded in the bottom register and on the edges of the stela), identify the flapstaff event and the captive presentations as events critical to Bird-Jaguar’s campaign demonstrating his right to the throne.

[439] On Lintel 16, Bird-Jaguar designates this captive as the cahal of a king who ruled a site named by an unknown Emblem Glyph with a snakelike head as its main sign.

[440] Ix Witz (Jaguar Mountain) is another unknown kingdom. David Stuart (1987b:21) first identified its Emblem Glyph.

[441] GII is also known as the Manikin Scepter or by the name Kauil.

[442] These bundles were critical to the ritual lives of the Maya. In ethnohistorical sources, they hold the sources of the lineage power, and are olten described as having been left by the semi-divine ancestors who founded those lineages. The bundles are recorded as holding idols, jades, eccentric flints, and similar objects. Eccentric flints and eccentric obsidians were worked into irregular, nonutilitarian shapes that often included human or deity profiles. During the Classic Period, it’s fairly certain they were used to store idols such as the Manikin Scepter and the Jester Gods. A bundle has been found archaeologi- cally in the Lost World group at Tikal (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1986 and n.d.). Made of ficus-bark paper tied closed with a woven-fiber band, the bundle was inside a lip-to-lip cache made of an angle-sided plate with an identical plate inverted and set over it as the lid. The bundle inside held the remains of marine creatures and the thorns used in bloodletting. Other similar caches regularly contain bloodletting instruments such as thorns, stingray spines, obsidian, and flint blades. Archaeologists found human blood on one such flint blade discovered in a cache at Colha, Belize (Dan Potter, personal communication, 1987). Merle Robertson (1972) first proposed the association of these bundles with the bloodletting rite, a suggestion that has since been confirmed archaeologi- cally. This lintel at least partially confirms her hypothesis, for the verb written in the text over the woman’s head states that she will soon let blood.

[443] The text records that she will let blood by naming Chanal Hun Winik Chan, the particular Vision Serpent she will manifest.

[444] The text on this lintel is very badly eroded, but based on a detailed examination ofthe original stone, Tate (1986a:336) has proposed readings of 9.16.6.11.0 3 Ahau 3 Muan or 9.17.6.15.0 3 Ahau 3 Kankin. We think this structure was built by Bird-Jaguar. The lintel, therefore, should be dated to the earlier of these two possibilities.

[445] Tate (1986a:3O7) argues that the careless sculptural style and the lack of a date resembles the very late style used by the last documented ruler of Yaxchilân. However, since the building is part of Bird-Jaguar’s program to legitimize himself, we suggest that the scene depicts the first Shield-Jaguar flapstaff event that is also shown on Stela 50.

[446] This woman has the Ik Emblem Glyph in her name, like the woman on Lintels 15 and 39. Here, however, two different people seem to be named: on Lintels 15 and 29 the woman has the title Lady 6-Tun preceding the Emblem Glyph, whereas on Lintels 41 and 5 the woman has Lady 6-Sky-Ahau as her name. If these are separate women, then Bird-Jaguar is associated with four women—Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the mother of his child), Lady Balam of Ix Witz, and these two ladies from Motul de San José.

[447] The Lintel 42 name phrase of this cahal has the “captor of Co-Te-Ahau” title that appears consistently in this fellow’s name phrase.

[448] Tate (1985) has argued this woman is the same Lady Balam of Ix Witz. However, since that lady had already appeared on Lintel 43 two days earlier, we think it more likely that Bird-Jaguar wished to associate yet another of his wives with this bloodletting sequence. We suspect she is the second wife from Motul de San José.

[449] On lintels carved after the date of this capture, both men, whenever they named themselves, included the names of the captives in their titles. They did this regardless of whether or not the narrative action was set before or after the capture itself.

The scene we are discussing here may not be the actual capture, for the captives are already stripped and wearing the cut cloth that signifies sacrifice. This event probably occurred after the capture when the victims are displayed and torture begins. See the fourth wall of Bonampak Room 2 for a graphic description of this phase of the ritual (M. Miller 1986b: 113–130, Pl. 2).

[450] The two protagonists are about the same height, but more important, the two scenes occupy an equal amount of compositional space. Bird-Jaguar is contrasted to Kan-Toe by the more elaborate detail of his costume and by the larger size of the text referring to his actions. Kan-Toe’s inscription is the smaller secondary text between the figures.

[451] Lintel 54 was over the center door, while Lintel 58 was on the left and 57 on the right.

[452] David Stuart (n.d.) first read the glyph for this relationship and recognized that it clarified the role Great-Skull-Zero played in Bird-Jaguar’s history.

[453] Notice that Chel-1 e is represented on both lintels as approximately the same size as his father, in spite of the fact that he was five on 9.16.5.0.0 and fourteen on 9.16.15.0.0. His smaller scale is apparently designed to represent him as simply “child.”

[454] This is the temple housing the western set of duplicating lintels, which include Bird-Jaguar and his cahal Kan-Loe at the capture of Jeweled-Skull; a bird-scepter ritual with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau; a basket-staff event with Kan-Toc; and a bundle/Manikin Scepter event with another wife. Temple 1 exalts the cahal Kan-Toc, very probably to seal his alliance to Bird-Jaguar during his life and to his son after Bird-Jaguar’s death.

[455] The name of this person is a jaguar head holding a cauac sign in a paw raised beside its head. This position is one of the variants of the penis glyph in the founder’s name. This visitor appears to be named Yat-Balam, but obviously he cannot be the founder of Yaxchilán’s dynasty, who was long dead. Either he is a namesake, or the Piedras Negras lord is flattering the Yaxchilán lord by using the founder’s name for him.

[456] Proskouriakoff (1961a) first identified these figures as youths and suggested that this is an heir-designation rite.

CHAPTER 8: C O P Á N : THE DEATH OF FIRST DAWN on Macaw Mountain

[457] The name of the last great king of that community, Yax-Pac, means “First Sun-at- Horizon” or “First Dawn.” Mo’-Witz, or “Macaw Mountain,” was a sacred place in or near the community alluded to by several Late Classic kings there. The death of Yax-Pac was indeed the death of first dawn in the valley, for the contentious rivalry between the kings and their nobility was a key factor in the demise of the kingdom.

[458] Many of the ideas presented in this chapter are the result of collaboration among Dr. William Fash, Barbara Fash, Rudy Larios, David Stuart, Linda Scheie, and many other people who have worked on the Copan Mosaics Project and the Copán Acropolis Project. William Fash (1983a; Fash and Scheie <verbatim>[1986];</verbatim> Fash and Stuart [n.d.]) first suggested that nonroyal lineages competing with the royal house of Copán contributed to the collapse of central power in the valley.

[459] Data on the history of the Copán Valley is drawn from William Fash’s (1983a) study of the process of state formation in the valley. Found in the deepest levels under Group 9N-8 (Fash 1985), the earliest deposit at Copán consisted of ceramics; obsidian; bones of deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary; burned earth; and carbon. Fash interpreted this as a seasonal camp. Viel, the ceramist for the Proyeto Arqueología de Copán, associates this early ceramic phase, Rayo, with the Cuadros phase of the Soconusco Coast and the Tok phase at Chalchuapa (Fash 1983a: 155). The pottery included brushed tecomates and flat- bottomed, flaring-walled bowls decorated with shell stamping, red slip, and hematite paint.

[460] William Fash (1985 and n.d.a) describes this cemetery in detail and associates its ceramics directly with the Middle Preclassic ceramics discovered by Gordon (1898) in the caves of the Scsemil region of the valley, which Fash interprets as part of a very early burial complex. He (1983a: 157–158) cites Middle Preclassic occupations in Group 9N-8, the Bosque, and in the Main Group, while cautioning that the full settlement pattern cannot be reconstructed from the present data. Of the rich burials containing jade, those referred to as Burials VHI-27 and IV-35, he comments that only Burial V at La Venta (Veracruz, México) rivals the Copán tombs in quantity and quality of jade. He takes the jade and the pottery incised with Olmec imagery to “indicate intimate familiarity with heartland Olmec ritual practices.”

[461] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986: 70, 80, 104, 119, Pl. 17, 28–30) for a discussion of some of the jade and ceramics from this early period.

[462] William Fash (1983a: 176) sees this growing density in settlement on the best agricultural lands as the result of social and political motivations which gradually usurped subsistence needs. As the dynasty established itself at the Acropolis, Copanecs found it advantageous to place their residential groups as near the king as possible, and thus gave over their best agricultural lands to the burgeoning population. Fash speculated that events taking place in the city were important enough to lure people into settling areas previously occupied by permanent agricultural settlements, in one of the zones of occupation, El Cerro de las Mesas, people deliberately chose inconvenient locations for settlement, perhaps for purposes of defense or for some as yet undetected religious or political reasons.

[463] The noncalendric text on Stela 17 does not survive, but phrases in the 8.6.0.0.0 texts on Stela I (Smoking-Imix-God K) are repeated in the record of the same event on Stela 4 (18-Rabbit) (Stuart 1986b). The second event on Stela I is unfortunately destroyed, but the last glyph in the text records the main sign of the Copan Emblem Glyph with the “impinged bone” sign that identifies its function here as a location—the kingdom of Copan as a physical entity with a geographical location. This is equivalent to the locational forms of the Tikal Emblem Glyph we encountered on Tikal Stela 39 in Chapter 5. This reference appears to be to the founding of the kingdom itself (Scheie 1987b).

Altar I’ also has an early date (Morley 1920:192) of 7.1.13.15.0 or October 9, 321 B.C., a date remarkably close to the beginning of Copan’s Late Preclassic decline. Unfortunately, the Copanecs did not record the event occurring on that date.

[464] Excavations in the 1988 and 1989 seasons of the Copan Acropolis Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash have uncovered buildings and inscribed monuments contemporary to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s reign.

[465] Sylvanus Morley in his Inscriptions of Copan (1920) worked out much of the chronology of Copan’s inscriptions. Later scholars, including David Kelley (1962; 1976:238–240), Joyce Marcus (1976), Gary Pahl (1976), Berthold Riese (n.d.; 1988; Riese and Baudez 1983), and David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Linda Scheie, and others in the Copan Notes have revised Morley’s chronology and identified a series of Copanec rulers. Peter Mathews (n.d.) first noted “numbered succession” titles at Yaxchilan and Copan, which Riese (1984) subsequently demonstrated had a wide distribution in the Maya inscriptions. The identification of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the founder began when David Stuart managed to identify his dates as belonging to the fifth century. Stuart communicated his finding to William Fash in a letter dated November 1985. Collaborative work between Stuart and Scheie (1986a and Scheie 1986b) led to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s identification as the dynastic founder. Later Copan kings reckoned the establishment of their dynasty from the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and gave themselves titles which reflected their numerical position in the line following him: for example, Smoke-lmix-God K called himself ‘the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” However, we also note that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the true founder of the kingdom, nor its first ruler. Stuart (personal communication, 1985) identified the notation of an even earlier king as a “first successor” on Stela 24.

[466] See Carlson (1977) for a history of the astronomical conference interpretation of Altar Q and an evaluation of the evidence. David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first suggested that the dates on Altar Q are early, rather than contemporary with the altar itself. Joyce Marcus (1976:140–145) first suggested that the Altar Q figures are portraits of rulers, while Riese (n.d.) identified the entire composition as Copan’s sixteen rulers seated in the numerical order of their succession.

[467] The first event is a “God K-in-hand” event. This verb is associated with the display of scepters and is specified by a noun incorporated into the hand holding the scepter or appended to the rear of that hand. The second event is spelled ta.li, a verb which in Choi and Chorti (the language of the Copan region) means “to come” or “to arrive.” In both phrases, the glyph that follows the verb appears in later texts as a replacement for the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ in numbered successor titles. It appears to refer to the idea of “founder,” or perhaps “lineage,” in some way we do not yet understand.

[468] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) has found this monument, broken into three parts and deposited in a building under Temple 10L-26, the building of the famous Hieroglyphic Stairs of Copan. The date on this monument is exactly the same as that on Stela J, 9.O.O.O.O. The front of the te-tun records the date and the king who reigned when this great period ending turned. David Stuart (in Stuart et al. 1989) found the fragmentary remnant of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s name on the last glyph block in this passage, thus confirming that he was reigning. The protagonist and owner of the te-tun, however, was his son, the second ruler in the Altar Q list. We have confirmation, therefore, from a monument carved during or soon after his lifetime that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was indeed a real historical person. Furthermore, this monument was treated with special reverence, carefully cached inside the temple before it was buried in preparation for the next stage of construction. When a later descendant evoked ancestral greatness by constructing the Hieroglyphic Stairs, he chose to put it in this location very probably because he knew a temple of the founder of his line lay deep under Temple 10L-26.

[469] In the interim nomenclature used by the Copán Acropolis Project, buildings are designated by bird names, substructures by colors, and floors by names of archaeologists and other persons. This early temple has been dubbed Papagayo (‘‘Macaw”) until the history and various levels of the main structure, 10L-26, are fully known and numbered.

[470] Stromsvik (1952:198) published a drawing of a mask he found on a terrace under Structure 10L-26 (The Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs). He considered the terrace to be contemporary with the first Ballcourt. Investigations in the Copán Archaeological Project have refined the chronology dating the first phase of the Ballcourt and the earliest floors of 10L-26 to the last half of the Bajic phase (A.D. 300–400) (Cheek 1983:203). During the Copan Mosaics Project (1985-present), Dr. William Fash has continued Strómsvik’s work and found even earlier platforms and structures, some of which are decorated with massive stucco sculptures. They have also found predynastic levels, but the relationship of those levels to Papagayo Temple and other early levels of the Acropolis are still under investigation. Since Stela 63 was set in the floor when Papagayo was constructed, that temple can be dated to between 9.0.0.0.0 and 9.0.5.0.0 (435–440). It was constructed after Ballcourt I was in place, but throughout the subsequent history of the kingdom, the temple in this location (in whatever manifestation) was always associated with one or another of the various stages of the Ballcourt.

[471] In the summer of 1989, Scheie talked with Rudy Larios, Richard Williamson, and William Fash about the architectural history of this early temple. Although analysis of the archaeological data has just begun, all three archaeologists agree that Stela 63 was set in the back chamber of this building when it was built. This dates the construction to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s son, who was presumably the second successor. At a later time, the fourth successor, Cu-Ix, then placed his step in front of the temple to associate himself with the founder. Larios also has clear evidence that the construction of Papagayo is atop another large platform, which may date to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Furthermore, that platform is atop yet another huge platform that must be from predynastic times. The excavations have not yet reached bedrock so that we anticipate finding even earlier structures during the next few field seasons.

[472] Papagayo Temple was uncovered during the 1988 field season of the Copán Mosaics Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash. The step sits in front of Stela 63, which had been erected in the rear chamber by the second ruler when the temple was built. The step has a now-damaged inscription consisting of thirty glyphs on top of the step and a single row on the front edge. The name of the fourth successor occurs on this edge and also on Stela 34, a fragment of which was found lying on the plaza just west of Stela J (Grube and Scheie 1988). The stela fragment had been recut and used (perhaps as a cache) in some as yet unidentified construction. We now know that Papagayo was open at least through the reign of the fourth successor and perhaps later.

[473] The dates and names in this historical reconstruction are drawn from analyses by David Stuart (1984 letter to Fash and 1987) and in the Copón Notes, a series of short research reports produced during the Copán Mosaics Project. Copies are on file in the Archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Tegucigalpa and Copán, Honduras, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Notes of particular interest to the dynastic history are Notes 6, 8, 14–17 from the 1986 season, and Notes 20–22 and 25–26 from the 1987 season, and Notes 59–67 from the 1989 season.

[474] The ritual demarcation of space to facilitate the entry of powerful people into the Otherworld spans Maya history from the Late Preclassic construction of the four-posted temple summits, such as Structure 5C-2^nd at Cerros, to the historical treatise of the early Colonial period called the “ritual of the bacabs” (Freidel and Scheie 1988; Roys 1965). Present-day Maya shamans continue this practice in their construction of “corrals” (Vogt 1976) and altars. The posts of the sacred spaces given in the prayers of the “ritual of the bacabs” are called acantun, “upright or set-up stones”; and acante’, “upright or set-up trees.” Stelae at Copán are specifically called te-tun or “tree-stone.” Smoke-Imix-God K departed from normal practice by using stelae to demarcate the entire core area of his kingdom, while under most circumstances Maya kings used stelae as the permanent markings of the central position held by themselves within the sacred space during their entry into the Otherworld.

[475] William Fash (1983a:217–232) suggested that these outlying stelae were erected to mark the establishment of a state under Smoke-Imix-God K around A.D. 652. Much of the epigraphic evidence he cites in that study has since been replaced or reinterpreted. For example, the Early Classic history of Copan is far more detailed and regular than it appeared to be in 1983. While we now question if Smoke-Imix-God K changed the system at Copán as much as it once appeared that he had, he was still responsible lor placing inscribed monuments throughout the valley. Smoke-1 mix-God K also erected a stela at Santa Rita (Stela 23) and, at about this same time, the lords of Rio Amarillo (Schele 1987d) inscribed altars acknowledging the rule of Copán’s high king. While Smoke-Imix-God K may have inherited a polity that already qualified as a state, he extended its domain farther than it had ever been before.

[476] David Stuart (1987a) first identified the name on Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix- God K. The record of the Copán king occupies the outer rim text, while another date and event are recorded in the interior. The interior date, 9.11.0.11.11, falls 231 days after the period ending. The event phrase includes the glyph ta yuc. I his termine is the Chorti word for “join things, unite, a joining, union” (Wisdom n.d.:771). Smoke-Imix may then have united or joined that polity to his own.

This action explains why the first great ruler of Quiriguá, Cauac-Sky, recorded that he acceded u cab, “in the territory of” 18-Rabbit of Copán. Quiriguá was in the hegemony of Copán after 18-Rabbit’s predecessor “joined” it to the kingdom. Further evidence supporting the conclusion that Smoke-Imix actually brought Quiriguá under his hegemony comes from later rulers’ practice of citing themselves as “Black Copán Ahau and of claiming descent from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as their founder (Schele 1989c).

[477] Etsuo Sato (1987) interprets the appearance of polychrome in the Valley of La Venta as evidence of elites who had access to exotic pottery. He sees these elites as being both heavily influenced by Copanecs and in contact with peoples at Naco and in the Sula Valley.

[478] These monuments include the bifaccd Stela C (9.14.0.0.0), Stela F (9.14.10.0.0), Stela 4 (9.14.15.0.0), Stela H (9.14.19.5.0), Stela A (9.14.19.8.0 or 9.15.0.3.0), Stela B (9.15.0.0.0), and finally, Stela D (9.15.5.0.0). Stela C, the first monument in this set, dates to the same first appearance of Venus celebrated by Ah Cacaw on Stela 16 at Tikal (see Chapter 6). Stela C reflects this association with Venus by linking the period ending to a Venus date occurring before the beginning of this creation. Other analyses have placed Stela C at later dates, but the text specifies that the stela was erected (tz’apah) on 9.14.0.0.0.

[479] In the 1987 excavations, William Fash drove a tunnel into the rear of the platform directly under the temple. Although no cache was found, the excavation uncovered a muzzle stone exactly the same size and shape as the corner Witz Monsters that decorated the 18-Rabbit temple. With present data, we have no way of determining which king commissioned the earlier phase of the building, but clearly that earlier building displayed the same iconography as the later version. See Larios and W. Fash (n.d.) for a preliminary analysis of the final phases of Temples 22 and 26.

[480] Two broken fragments with inscriptions were set in the step of the final phase of this temple. One records the first katun anniversary of 18-Rabbit’s accession (David Stuart personal communication, 1987) and the other is the death date of Smoke-Imix-God K (Schele 1987a). These two dates as well as the style of the God N sculpture found cached in the later building identify the time of the earlier building as the second half of the reign of 18-Rabbit.

[481] William Fash (1983a:236–237) cites Viel’s analysis of the source of Ulua polychrome as the Comayagua Valley, rather than the Sula Valley. Furthermore, caches found within the Early Classic phases of Structure 10L-26 (the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs) include greenstone beads and earflares identical in technical workmanship and design to the greenstone artifacts excavated at the central Honduran site of El Cajón by Kenneth Hirth (1988).

[482] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication) documents evidence for death rates higher than birth rates in the Copán pocket during the Late Classic period. 18-Rabbit had to recruit newcomers from outside the valley to keep the population growing, and his strategy apparently succeeded, for by the end of the eighth century, population exceeded the capacity of the Copán pocket to sustain them.

[483] Kelley (1962:324), following a suggestion by Proskouriakoff, pointed out the u cab expressions at Quiriguá, noting that cab means “town, place, and world.” David Stuart (1987a) first interpreted this passage to indicate that Cauac-Sky’s installation was under 18-Rabbit’s authority and perhaps even took place at Copán. This interpretation is in keeping with his identification of the protagonist of Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix-God K of Copán.

[484] Morley (1915:221) first noted that this 9.15.6.14.6 6 Cimi 4 Zee date was important to Quiriguá’s history, while Kelley (1962:238) suggested that it referred to “a conquest of Quiriguá by Copán, or perhaps to the installation of a Copanec ruler at Quiriguá.” Proskouriakoff(1973:168) took the prominence of the date at Quirigua to indicate that the Quirigua ruler had the upper hand in the encounter. Following her mentor’s suggestions, Marcus (1976:134—140) pointed out that Cauac-Sky, the ruler of Quirigua, was the “captor of” 18-Rabbit, the king of Copan. She correctly identified the event as a battle in which Quirigua achieved independence of Copan.

The verb associated with this date consists of an “ax” followed by the T757 auxiliary verb. This verb records “astronomical” events in the codices, and at Dos Pilas and other sites it appears with “star-shell” war events (see Scheie 1982:351 for a listing). In most of the examples from the Classic inscriptions, the event appears to be “battle,” but on pottery, the “ax” glyph is particularly associated both with scenes of decapitation and with the names of gods shown in the act of self-inflicted decapitation (one example occurs on the famous painted pot from Altar de Sacrificios). This association with sacrifice opens the possibility that the action recorded is execution by decapitation. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1989) and Jorge Orejel (n.d.) have both suggested a reading of ch’ak, “to decapitate,” for the glyph.

[485] The case of Copan is not entirely unique. Palenque suffered a similar disaster when Kan-Xul, the younger brother and successor of Chan-Bahlum, was captured by Tonina and presumably sacrificed. Palenque, like Copan, did not enter into a hiatus, but rather continued under the aegis of its old dynasty. The political reactions at both Copan and Palenque included, however, the emergence of the lesser nobility as players in the game of history. In both kingdoms, the kings struggled in vain to reassert the centrality of the dynasty.

[486] Smoke-Monkey’s accession appears on the base of Stela N and on Steps 40 and 39 of the Hieroglyphic Stairs as 9.15.6.16.5 6 Chicchan 3 Yaxkin (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), a day on which Venus was 45.68° from the sun.

[487] This date is recorded on the north panel of the east door of Temple 11 as 5 Cib 10 Pop or 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (the correct form of the Calendar Round). On this date, the Eveningstar was 7.09° beyond the sun, enough for first visibility after superior conjunction. The action recorded on this date is “it appeared, the Great Star.” Previously, Scheie (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:123) had placed this first appearance forty-six days after the accession of the next king, Smoke-Shell, but the Long Count used for that date was in error. Smoke-Shell acceded on 9.15.17.13.10 11 Oc 13 Pop or February 18, 749, fourteen days after Smoke-Monkey’s death.

[488] On the base of Stela N, the name of Smoke-Shell’s father follows an yune “child of” statement. In that phrase, he is named as a Turtle Shell Ahau (Scheie and Grube 1988). The turtle-shell glyph in this title is a variant of the God N (Pauahtun) glyph that names the lord whose accession is recorded in the north-south text-bands on the base. In that clause, the “Pauahtun Ahau” is clearly named as the former king, Smoke-Monkey. The fifteenth successor, Smoke-Shell, was therefore the child of the fourteenth successor, Smoke-Monkey.

[489] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) holds open the possibility that Smoke-Monkey may have started some of the work on the final stage of Temple 26. Considering that six years passed between Smoke-Shell’s accession and the dedication of the building on 9.16.4.1.0 (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), the project may well have been begun during Smoke-Monkey’s reign.

[490] The date of this dedication event is recorded on the center strips on the eastern incline of the Ballcourt. Although reconstructing the date is problematic, it appears to record the Calendar Round 10 Ben 16 Kayab (or less likely 10 Kan 17 Kayab). The 10 Ben possibility falls on 9.15.6.8.13, a day only 113 days before 18-Rabbit’s death at Quirigua. 18-Rabbit’s accession is recorded in an Initial Series date in the same text, thus confirming that he commissioned the final phase of the Ballcourt (Scheie, Grube, and Stuart 1989). Rudy Larios (personal communication, 1989) has confirmed that Ballcourt III is associated with Structure 10L-26—2^nd, the level under the final phase. This juxtaposition of the dedication date with the capture opens the possibility that 18-Rabbit may have been taken captive in a battle to secure sacrificial victims for his new ballcourt.

The proper name of Ballcourt III is recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs on fragments now mounted in Step 44. These fragments include an unreadable date and the name of the Ballcourt as the Ox Ahal Em Ballcourt (Scheie and Freidel n.d.). The proper name translates as “Thrice-Made Descent” and relates to the mythological events recorded on the Bailgame Panel from Temple 33 at Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:7).

The “thrice-made” event is recorded as a descent in this naming and as a decapitation sacrifice at Yaxchilan, but the references are the same. Both the descents and the sacrifices refer to the Popol Vuh myth. The first descent and sacrifice was of Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu, the first set of Twins. The second descent into Xibalba, which resulted in the second sacrifice, was made by the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They sacrificed each other in order to trick the Lords of Death into defeat. The third descent is that of the king in his guise as the avatar of the Hero Twins. This descent can be accomplished by two means—his own ecstatic journey through bloodletting or by the decapitation of a captive who goes as his messenger. The Ballcourt was then a portal to the Underworld as was the inner sanctum of the temple. The iconography of all three sets of Ballcourt Markers reflects this idea, for each shows the confrontation of the Hero Twins with a Lord of Death (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:251–252, 257) through a quadrifoil shape. This shape symbolized the mouth of the cave and the opening to the Otherworld from Olmec times onward. The playing alley was like a glass-bottomed boat with transparent windows opening on to the Underwater domain of Xibalba. There, the great confrontation of humanity with death played itself out in the myths that became the Popol Vuh. Captives played a losing game and were dispatched in the “thrice-made descent.” Ironically, 18-Rabbit himself may have been dispatched by exactly this means.

[491] It has about twelve hundred glyph blocks, but most of the blocks hold two or more words. There are generally thirty-five glyphs per step and a minimum of sixty-four steps. Some of the steps have figures in the center, which reduces the number of words per step, but recent excavation suggests there were more than the sixty-four reconstructed stairs. 2,200 is about the right count.

[492] Marcus (1976:145) first noted the appearance of the Palenque Emblem Glyph on Copan Stela 8, a monument we now know records that Yax-Pac was the child of this woman. When she traveled to Copan, she apparently brought a royal belt inscribed with the names of family members, which her descendants at Copan inherited and passed down through their family. By an unknown process, this belt traveled to Comayagua, where it was bought from an Indian at the end of the nineteenth century and given to the British Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82, Pl. 21).

[493] William Fash (1983b) identified the household groups in the Copan with sian otot, the Chorti Maya patrilocal residential system documented in detail by Wisdom (1940). He posits that the ancient settlement pattern reflects a system similar to the modern one, thus identifying the numerous residential compounds as patrilineal residences.

[494] William Fash (1983a: 192–195) gives a count of 1,489 structures (not including invisible structures or those washed away by the Rio Copan) within the 2.1 km² entered on the Ballcourt. He allows five people per structure and assumes that 84 percent of the total structures were residential, arriving at a density of 2,977 people per square kilometer. Webster (1985:24) accepts a figure of 15,000 to 20,000 for the Copan pocket and a density of 5,000/km² for the Sepulturas and Bosque zones. The rural zones were less densely settled with an overall density of 100/km². Webster (1985:50) argued for a maximum population of 20,000 for the entire Copan drainage, and he communicates that Sanders believes that the densities near the Acropolis were too high to have been supported by any feasible agricultural methods available to the Copanecs in the eighth century. The hinterlands around Copan supported the dense populations in the pocket.

[495] William Fash (1983a:3O5-3O8) calculates that the pocket’s capacity to support about 10,000 people was exceeded by a significant factor in the eighth century, forcing shorter fallow periods as well as massive deforestation. The loss of topsoil on the intramountain zones, he suggests, led to a depletion of the soils that was so permanent that only pine forest could survive in these highly acidic areas, even today. He further notes that deforestation affected local rainfall and exacerbated the problem further. All of this occurred simultaneously, exactly when the nucleated zone around the Acropolis was occupied by up to 15,000 people, 50 percent more than could have subsisted on the agricultural base within the pocket. It was a prescription for disaster.

[496] In the most recent tunneling under the East Court, Robert Sharer and Alfonso Morales (personal communication, 1989) have found a sharp division between buildings constructed with rough stone covered by thick plaster surfaces and those built with finely finished coursing covered with thin plaster. Sharer (personal communication, 1989) tentatively dates this building to the first half of the seventh century—that is, to the end of Butz’-Chan’s reign or to the first half of Smoke-Imix-God K’s. About this time, the Copanecs apparently switched from plaster to stone as the medium of architectural sculpture, thus suggesting that the wood necessary for making plaster had become a rare commodity. Certainly by 18-Rabbit’s reign, stone was the primary medium for architectural sculpture. Indeed, the building under his version of Temple 22 also used stone as its sculptural medium. If this is the correct interpretation, then the valley environs may have been seriously deforested by the beginning of the Late Classic period.

[497] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication, 1987–1989) has documented severe stress in the Copan Valley populations, especially in the eighth century. This stress was indicated in skeletons found in elite contexts as well as those excavated from the lower strata of Copan society. She notes high death rates for people between five and sixteen, exactly the ages that should have had the lowest rate of death, and she has also found evidence of widespread anemia. In her words, the people who lived in the valley during the eighth century were sick and getting sicker, and this was true for the elite as well as commoners.

[498] This is the earliest monument of Yax-Pac left to posterity. In light of its periodending association, it may well be his first foray into public history.

[499] In 1985, David Stuart made a new drawing of the stair under Temple 11 at the end of a tunnel driven by Strdmsvik. He recognized that the text records the dedication of Structure 11-Sub 12, a temple that originally stood on a platform that was the same height as the floor of the West Court.

[500] Mary Miller (1986:83–84; 1988; M. Miller and Houston [1987:59]) pointed out this association of bailgame scenes, hieroglyphic stairs, and sacrificial scenes, and identified the Reviewing Stands at Copan as the sides of a false ballcourt. She identified the location as underwater and the rising god on the stairway as Chac-Xib-Chac.

[501] Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that Proskouriakoff commented on these crocodiles in the field notes she kept while working on reconstruction drawings for the Carnegie expedition under Strdmsvik.

[502] See Scheie (1987c) for an analysis of the chronology and events recorded in this inscription. The date and event is repeated on the west panel of the north door above in Temple 11, where Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s predecessor, appears as the protagonist. We suggested the event corresponded to his apotheosis and emergence from the Underworld after he had defeated the Lords of Death (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986:265–300).

[503] He dedicated the Reviewing Stand 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769) and Altar Z on 9.16.18.9.19 12 Cauac 2 Zac (August 21, 769). The last glyph in the altar text is ya. tz’itni, spelling the word yatz’in. It occurs in the name of a person (not the king) given in a second clause. Since yitz’in is “younger brother,” and since noyatz’ or yatz’in word with an appropriate meaning occurs in either the Yucatecan or Cholan languages, we suspect this glyph may identify this second person as the “younger brother of the king.”

[504] 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahau 18 Cumku (January 24, 771) has long been known as an eclipse date from its appearance in the eclipse tables of the Dresden Codex. David Kelley (1977: 406) noted that the glyph recording “dark of the moon” for 9.17.0.0.0 on Quirigua Stela E is closely related to the glyph recording the same eclipse station on Dresden, page 51b at BL At Tikal, this solar eclipse darkened 20 percent of the sun beginning at 12:49 P.M. and ending at 3:09 P.M. (Kudlek 1978). It is registered in the inscriptions of Quirigua on Stela E and at Copan on the east panel of the south door of Temple 11. The first appearance of the Eveningstar is also recorded in Temple 11 (south panel, west door) on the day 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771). Venus was separated from the sun by 7.46+ and high enough to be observed above Copan’s mountainous horizon.

[505] On 9.17.0.0.0, Yax-Pac also dedicated Altar 41, recording the dedication rituals on two of the edges of the flat slab, and the Cosmic Monster and a toad on the other two edges. This altar reflects the cosmic nature of this katun ending.

[506] Temple 21 has fallen into the cut made by the Copan River along the eastern edge of the Acropolis. We have no information on its patron, but fragments found on the platform behind it include Tlaloc-war iconography among other motifs.

[507] Although very little evidence survives, William Fash and I have surmised the north door was in fact carved as a monster mouth based on some of the fragments lying on the stairway below the temple. Principal among these fragments are huge stones carved with parallel curving lines that appear to represent the palette of an open mouth.

[508] Both Bill and Barbara Fash argued in their comments on this chapter that we have proof for only two of these Pauahtun figures. One head is located under the huge ceiba tree that stands over the northeast corner of the building, and the other lies among the fragments in the Plaza below the temple. Since no evidence of Pauahtunob has been found on the south side, the design probably had the cosmic arch of heaven only on the northern facade that faced out toward the Great Plaza. Barbara Fash also pointed out to us that Proskouriakoff mentioned in her field notes seeing and recognizing segments of the reptilian body of the Cosmic Monster in the rubble associated with Temple 11.

[509] A summary of the events as we understood them in 1985 appears in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123). In the 1987 field season, David Stuart worked extensively with these texts and supervised the reconstruction of several of the most important panels, particularly the two west panels in the north-south corridor. In November 1987, Scheie reconstructed additional parts of the north panel of the west door. These reconstructions and corrections have allowed a much more accurate understanding of the chronology and events, which are as follows:

a. North door, east panel. The accession of Yax-Pac on 9.16.12.6.16 6 Caban 10 Mol (July 2, 763).

North door, west panel. The dedication of the Reviewing Stand and perhaps the apotheosis of Smoke-Shell on 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769). 9.14.15.0.0 (September 17, 726) continues to the south door, where the actor is recorded.

b. South door, east panel. The finish of the 9.14.15.0.0 event with 18-Rabbit as the actor. The 9.17.0.0.0 period ending and eclipse.

South door, west panel. The 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773) dedication of the Temple. David Stuart recognized the nature of this event in his 1987 work.

c. East door, north panel. The first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar on 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (February 15, 747), an unknown event on 9.17.1.3.5 9 Chicchan 13 Zip (March 24, 772), and a repetition of the 9.17.2.12.16 event, but specified for the xay, “crossing,” of the interior corridors.

East door, south panel. The 819-day count and Long Count for the dedication date, 9.17.2.12.16 (continues to west door).

d. West door, north panel. Continuation of the date from east door and the dedication event. 9.17.5.0.0 period-ending ritual and the latest date in the building.

West door, south panel. The dedication event and the 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771) first appearance of the Eveningstar.

[510] The text and figures on this bench are described and analyzed in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123–125), but some new information of interest has surfaced since that analysis. Each of the twenty personages sits on a glyph, but in 1986 we thought the glyphs did not name any of Copan’s rulers. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has suggested the glyph under Personage 14 refers to the seventh successor, and that the one under Personage 15 is identical to the name of the eleventh successor. However, even with several glyphs associated with the names of particular rulers, the glyphs do not appear to record a series of personal names, but rather a continuous text. Furthermore, I had erroneously taken all ten glyphs on the left side to be in mirror image, signaling that the order of the figures unfolded outward from the central text. This interpretation is wrong. The glyphs under the first four personages on the left (Personages 1—4) read in the correct order. The left text is then broken into at least two clauses. One is written in proper reading order and records the dedication of the bench. The second one we do not yet understand, but we know it is related to the dynastic history of the kingdom. This new analysis does solve one problem in the previous interpretation—there are sixteen successors in the dynasty, including Yax-Pac, but twenty figures on the bench. With the separation of four of these figures and their glyphs into a separate clause, the number of dynasts depicted now becomes the correct one, sixteen.

[511] The ambitious size of the building exceeded the technological capabilities of the Copanecs and caused problems almost immediately. The east-west gallery was simply too wide for the capability of a corbeled vault, especially with the weight of a second story above it. The new walls built by the architects to support the failing vault narrowed the interior corridor to half its former width and severely constricted the readability of the inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions appear to have been covered over, especially those on the west door.

[512] Ricardo Argurcia (personal communication, 1989), co-director of the Copan Acropolis Project, informed us that the building immediately under the final phase of Temple 16 faced east instead of west. He suspects that the entire West Court was not formulated architecturally until Yax-Pac built Temple 11 and 16. If his assessment is correct, then Yax-Pac deliberately created the primordial sea and the Underworld in this West Court as a part of his political strategy.

[513] Williamson, Stone, and Morales (1989) have connected the iconography of Temple 16 to the Tlaloc-war imagery we have discussed throughout this book. Ricardo Ar- gurcia’s (personal communication, 1989) excavations of Temple 16 have proved beyond doubt that the last phase was built during Yax-Pac’s reign. This new dating clearly connects Temples 11 and Temple 16 as part of a unified project, very probably conceived and executed together. The iconography of the West Court with its death and Underwater imagery was intentionally created as a single statement, rather than accumulated through several reigns.

[514] William Fash (1983a:31O-314) first proposed that Yax-Pac used this kind of strategy in dealing with the factionalism evident in the archaeology associated with the latest phrase of Copan life. The epigraphic information upon which he based his ideas has changed drastically since his initial presentation, but our analysis of Yax-Pac’s strategy grows from his initial insights.

The houses we talk about are the principal structures in large, multiple-court residential compounds. These particular structures have benches in them, as do a large number of buildings in the residential compounds, but in general they are large and more elaborately decorated than adjacent buildings. The function of these benches is debated, with some researchers asserting they were simply beds. Clearly, some functioned as sleeping platforms, but the Maya themselves called them chumib, “seat.” From pottery scenes, we deduced that the benches served a number of purposes, including sleeping, working, the conducting of business, audiences with subordinates, and a variety of rituals. The structures with these inscribed “seats” were very probably the rooms from which the lineage heads conducted the business critical to their peoples. They were called otot, “house,” by the Maya, but they are houses in the sense that modern people sometimes have offices in their homes. These structures were more than residential.

[515] For a description of this group under its older designation CV-43, see Leventhal (1983).

[516] This bench text begins with a date corresponding to the dedication of the building in which it is housed. The chronology leads to a future (at the time of the inscribing) enactment of the scattering rite by Yax-Pac on 9.17.10.0.0. The date of the dedication is difficult to decipher but 9.17.3.16.15 is one of the more likely possibilities. The event is the God N dedication event of a house by an offering which had something to do with Smoke-Shell. Since that ruler was long dead at the time of the dedication, we presume this was a offering “to” rather than “from” Smoke-Shell (Schele 1989a). The alternative explanation is that the date of the dedication fell within the reign of Smoke-Shell, but that it was not commemorated by the installation of this bench until shortly before 9.17.10.0.0. In this scenario, both kings would have been active participants.

[517] Altar W’ was set in this same group. Dated at 9.17.5.9.4, the text celebrated the dedication of that altar and names the lineage head as the “third successor” of a person named Skull, who was a ballplayer. Presuming this person was the founder of this particular lineage, he may have been the lord who built the structure with the monkey/God N scribe in the time of 18-Rabbit.

[518] Berthold Riese (in Webster, W. Fash, and Abrams 1986:184) had originally dated this monument to 9.17.16.13.10 11 Oc 3 Yax. Grube and Schele (1987b) proposed a different reading of the day as 11 Ahau and placed the Long Count at 9.19.3.2.0. Stuart, Grube, and Schele (1989) have proposed a new reading of the haab as 3 Ch’en rather than 3 Yax. This new combination gives 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Chen, a placement that is far more in keeping with the style of the carving and with the notation that Yax-Pac was in his first katun of reign when the house dedication occurred.

[519] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first identified the name phrase of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This man’s relationship to the king can be deduced from two monuments (Schele and Grube 1987a). The parentage statements of the king, given on Stela 8, and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s, given on Altar U, name the same woman of Palenque as their mother. Yax-Pac’s father is never given, but we deduce he was Smoke-Shell’s son, based on his position as the sixteenth successor. The younger half brother was, however, not the son of Smoke-Shell. Since Yax-Pac was under twenty at the time of his accession, and since his father reigned for less that fifteen years, we speculate that Smoke-Shell died while his wife was still young. She produced his heir in Yax-Pac, but after his death she remarried and produced another son by a different father, making Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac a half brother. On Altar U (Fig. 8:19), her name includes her status as the mother of the king.

[520] Venus was 46.35° from the sun on the anniversary and 46.21° on the bloodletting five days later.

[521] There are some important differences between the Altar ‘ figures and those on Altar Q, Altar L, and the bench from Temple 11. The latter three monuments depict human figures all wearing a particular kind of breast ornament which appears to be associated with ruling lords at Copán and, interestingly enough, with the noble whose portrait was carved on Stela 1 from Los Higos, one of the largest sites in the La Venta Valley to the north at the edge of Copán’s hegemony. The Altar T figures were a mixture of fully human representations and fantastic beasties on the sides. We do not know whether these figures are to be interpreted as a glyphic text or as beings called from Xibalba, but they are clearly not meant to be understood as ancestors. Furthermore, the four fully human figures on the front surface are not identified by names. We do not know which represents Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, or whether to interpret the four figures as ancestors or contemporary patriarchs. Regardless of our confusion, the imagery on the altar clearly evokes Altar Q and the Temple 11 bench, both of which were in place when Altar T was carved.

[522] Stuart (1986a) first identified the proper name of Altar U. See Schele and Stuart (1986b, 1986c) for analysis of the chronology and inscription on Altar U.

[523] The name is written Yax.k’a:ma:la.ya or Yax K’amlay. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1988) brought to our attention that the root k’atn in Yucatec means “to serve another,” as well as “obligation, offering of the first fruits, and offering.” K’amtesah is “administrator or he who serves” (Barrera Vasquez 1980:371). Chorti (Wisdom n.d.:607) has k’am as “use, service, value” and k’amp’ah as “be of use or value, serve, be occupied with.” If, as Grube suggests, -lay is a derivational suffix, then this man may have been known by the office he fulfilled—“First Steward (or Administrator).”

In earlier analyses, we had taken this Yax-Kamlay glyph to be a title taken by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac upon his seating. However, in the summer of 1989, David Stuart found this same name on Stela 29, on the new altar from Temple 22a, and on a house model located near a residential building just south of the Acropolis. He convinced us that Yax-Kamlay and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac were, in fact, two different individuals. The relationship of Yax-Kamlay to Yax-Pac is less clear than that between the king and Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac. Nikolai Grube and Schele speculate that a glyph in his name on Altar U reading i.tz’Lta is an unpossessed form of “younger brother.” If this reading is correct, then he would have been a younger full brother of the king. At present, however, this reading is only a possibility. Confirmation of the proposed relationship must wait until incontrovertible evidence is found.

[524] On the eastern side of Stela 5, the Serpent Bar holds two tiny ancestral figures in its gaping mouths. On the northern, left side of the king, the ancestor holds a stingray spine, while on the southern, right side, another holds the bowl full of the blood that has brought him forth from the Otherworld.

[525] We refer here to Stela 6, which was mounted in a small, unexcavated compound about a hundred meters west of Stela 5. From a point fifty meters to the south and equidistant from each, both tree-stones can be seen.

[526] Here we have Yax-Pac pausing after he has left the causeway that led west from the Acropolis to a large complex on the slope above and to the east of Stela 5. From his position, he would have seen the cast face of Stela 5, and after walking fifty meters to the west, he would have seen the west face of Stela 5 and the front of its nearby companion, Stela 6. The latter monument celebrated 9.12.10.0.0, a date which corresponded to a stationary point ending the retrograde motion of Venus after its heliacal rising as Morningstar. The same monument has the first historical record of a ritual action by 18-Rabbit, who was to become king after the death of Smoke-Imix.

[527] This was the glyphic name of Temple 11 recorded on the west panel of the south door (Stuart, personal communication, 1988).

[528] We are supposing Yax-Pac was standing on the west causeway due south of Stelae 5 and 6. On that day, January 25, 793, the sun would have risen above the far mountainous rim o’ the valley (about 8 of altitude) at 112° azimuth. From the vantage point we have taken, the sun would appear in a line directly between Temple 16 and Temple 11, but Temple 11 would have dominated the scene.

[529] The identification of Temple 22a is the result of brilliant work by Barbara Fash (1989 and B. Fash et al. n.d.). In working with the sculpture excavated in the fallen debris around Temple 22a, Fash associated the pop, “mat,” signs that were built into the entablatures of all four sides of the building with the ethnohistorical term for “council houses” documented in post-Conquest sources. Known as Popol Nah, these buildings were specifically designed for meetings of community councils. Fash points out that Temple 22a is the only major public building in the Acropolis that has a large front patio attached to the building. Since it provides more floor space than the interior, she suggests that the major lords of the Copán kingdom came here to counsel with the king in meetings that must have resembled the conciliar assemblage of lords that we have seen on Piedras Negras Lintel 3 (see Fig. 7.21).

In the summer of 1989, she found even more remarkable evidence by asking Tom and Carolyn Jones to work with the fragments of huge glyphs that had been found around Temple 22a in recent excavations. They managed to reassemble enough of these glyphs to identify them as a series of locations. Later work by Fash confirmed the likelihood that beautifully carved figures sat in niches above these locations. Given the combination of richly dressed figures with a toponymic, it seems likely that the figures simply read “ahau of that location.” The Popol Nah then may have been graced not only by mat signs marking its function as a council house, but with representations of the ahauob who ruled subdivisions of the kingdoms (or principal locations within it) for the kings. It is not unlike a modern meeting of state governors who come to counsel the president.

The dating of Temple 22a is more complicated. Barbara Fash and David Stuart managed to put together a series of glyphs that also went around the building above the mat signs. They are clearly day signs reading 9 Ahau, which should in this context and without any additional calendric information refer to an important period-ending date. The only 9 Ahau that falls on a hotun (5-tun) ending within the time that is archaeologi- cally and stylistically feasible is 9.15.15.0.0 9 Ahau 18 Xul (June 4, 746). This falls shortly before Smoke-Monkey’s death, so that the Popol Nah may be the only surviving construction from his reign. The sculptural style and the figures deliberately emulate Temple 22, the magnificent temple built by 18-Rabbit, but Smoke-Monkey seems to have elevated conciliar rule to new status at Copan by placing this building in such a prominent place. Perhaps he found such a change in the long-standing practice of governance to be prudent after 18-Rabbit’s ignominious end.

[530] This oddly shaped altar-bench was found in the rear chamber of Temple 22a during the 1988 field season. Four important dates are featured in its chronology. These include 9.18.5.0.0 4 Ahau 13 Ceh (September 15, 795, a day recorded with Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac here and on Altar U); 9.17.9.2.12 3 Eb 0 Pop (January 29, 780, the date Yax- Kamlay was seated); 9.17.10.0.0 (December 2, 789, an important period ending and anchor for the chronology); and 9.17.12.5.17 4 Caban 10 Zip (March 19, 783, the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s own accession). All three major actors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, Yax-Kamlay, and Yax-Pac are mentioned. It is interesting that the undated Stela 29 (Altar O’ under Morley’s designations), which is almost exactly the same size and style as this altar, also mentions Yax-Kamlay and Yax-Pac. It was found in the East Court and may originally have been paired with the Temple 22a stone (Scheie et al. 1989). W. Fash (personal communication, 1989) believes the wear pattern, the position, and the shape of the stone suggest it was part of a seat, perhaps the backrest.

[531] The use of large zoomorphic altars at Copan was initiated by 18-Rabbit, but these altars were usually associated with stelae. Other altars, usually all glyphic, had been known since Smoke-Imix-God K’s reign, but those rarely combined inscriptions and figures. The first experiment utilizing this combined format was Yax-Pac’s Altar Q, but Altars U and T represent innovative experiments in both style and size. Since Quirigua rulers were experimenting with large boulder sculpture during the same period, Copan’s abandonment of the stela format may signify synergy between both the artists and rulers of the two sites.

[532] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that bone, jade, and alabaster fragments were found inside the tomb, so it had definitely been occupied. Who occupied it, we don’t know. The stela commemorating Yax-Pac’s death was set in the corner formed by the west wall of the substructure and the wall that formed an entry gate to the East Court. It was juxtaposed to Temple 18 in a way that would be expected if Yax-Pac was buried there twenty years after the dates inscribed on the building. The tomb was constructed so that it could be entered after the building of the temple was completed. However, without inscriptions to identify the occupant, his identity will remain a matter of speculation.

[533] While it is true that kings are shown holding weapons on the Temple 26 stairs, there they are sitting on thrones in the passive mode. They are not actively going to or returning from battle.

[534] Two other monuments can be dated to the twelve years between the end of Katun 18 and the king’s anniversary. Altar R, which was found on the platform in front of Temple 18, commemorates Yax-Pac’s accession and another event which took place on 9.18.2.8.0 7 Ahau 3 Zip (March 9, 793). The other monument, Altar F’, was found behind Structure 32 (Morley 1920:373) in a residential compound just south of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:11). This square altar has binding ribbons engraved around its perimeter and a text of sixteen glyphic blocks. It is a difficult text, which records the accession of yet another lineage head to an office which we do not yet understand (Scheie 1988a). All we can say about this office is that it was not the office of ahau. The accession took place on 9.17.4.1.11 2 Chuen 4 Pop (775 February 3, 775) and its twenty-fourth tun anniversary on 9.18.8.1.11 10 Chuen 9 Mac (September 30, 798). The text records that the anniversary ritual occurred in the company of Yax-Pac, who was in his second katun of reign.

[535] We have already discussed a royal visit from Bird-Jaguar to Piedras Negras, but in general, the kings preferred to send ahauob as their representatives. See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of these visits and other patterns of interaction between Classic period kingdoms.

[536] See Baudez and Dowd (1983:491–493) for the analysis of the iconography and inscriptions in Temple 18. Just below that building, the latest date associated with Yax-Pac was on Stela 11. Riese argues that the opening date in that text, which is written as 6, 7, or 8 Ahau, must be later than 9.18.0.0.0 based on the “3-katun ahau ’ title in Yax-Pac’s name. Since naked ahau dates are usually associated with period endings, the following Long Count positions are possible:

9.16.15.0.0 7 Ahau 18 Pop
9.17.5.0.0 6 Ahau 13 Kayab
9.19.10.0.0 8 Ahau 8 Xul

Since Yax-Pac’s numbered katun titles refer to katuns of reign, rather than to katuns of life as at most other sites (Scheie 1989b), they cannot be used to estimate his age. However, they do confirm the placement of the Stela 11 date. He was a 1-katun ahau between 9.16.12.5.17 and 9.17.12.5.17; a 2-katun ahau between 9.17.12.5.17 and 9.18.12.5.17; and, a 3-katun ahau between 9.18.12.5.17 and 9.19.12.5.17. Since the first dates fall before his accession, and the second within his second katun of reign, only the third date, 9.19.10.0.0, is a possibility.

[537] Stuart (1984, 1988c) has made a direct connection between the imagery of Vision Serpents and the Double-headed Serpent Bar.

[538] On the sarcophagus of Palenque, the king Pacal falls into Xibalba with the same smoking image in his forehead as a sign of his transformation in death (Scheie 1976.17). Several people have noted the same smoking shapes with the figures on Altar L, but in that scene, the devices penetrate the turban headdresses. On the Palenque sarcophagus and Stela 11, the celts penetrate the flesh of the head itself.

[539] There is also a possibility that the text refers to a branch of the lineage deriving from 18-Rabbit-Scrpent, a name also recorded on Stela 6. The glyph between this 18- Rabbit’s name and Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is u loch, a term for “fork (as of a tree)” in Yucatec and “to fold or bend” in Chorti. We are presuming, for the present, that 18-Rabbit-Serpent is the same person as 18-Rabbit-God K, for this former name appears on Stela 6, dated just eight years before 18-Rabbit-God K’s accession. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has expressed doubts, however, that the two 18-Rabbits are the same person, and that possibility must remain open. In late 1989, another alternative occurred to us—that the I8-Rabbit-Serpcnt name phrase refers to the special Tlaloc-war Vision Serpent on the front of Stela 6 and presumably also on Stela 11. In this interpretation, the “fish-in-hand” verb in the Stela 6 text refers to the appearance of this particular Vision Serpent, while u loch, the phrase on Stela 11, also means “to hold something crosswise in the arms”—exactly the position of the Vision Serpent on both stelae.

[540] Grube and Scheie (1987a) identified this ruler and read his name glyph as U-Cit- Tok’, “the patron of flint.” The Calendar Round of his accession, 3 Chicchan 3 Uo, can fit into the dynastic sequence at Copan only at this Long Count position.

[541] The office into which U-Cit-Tok was seated does not appear in the text, but this may be the result of a historical accident. If we assume that the original intention was to carve all four sides of the monument, as is the case with most other altars at Copan, then the inscription would probably have continued onto one of the other sides. Since the carving was never finished, the text ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence.

[542] Morley (1920:289) first suggested that Altar L is in an unfinished state, a conclusion Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1987) also made when she drew the altar. She was the individual who brought this to our attention.

[543] Both William Fash and Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1986–1987) have described this incident to us.

[544] This estimate comes from Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1987), the physical anthropologist who is investigating the skeletal remains from the burials of Copan.

9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichén Itzá

[545] The Great Collapse of the ninth century is one of the major social disasters of Precolumbian history (see Culbert 1973). E. W. Andrews IV (1965; 1973) underscored the fact that the northern lowland states of the ninth and tenth centuries were enjoying prosperity and expansion in the wake of the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms. Recent discussion and analysis of the relative destinies of northern and southern lowland Maya (Sabloffand E. W. Andrews V 1986) points to a significant overlap in timing between the fall of the southern kingdoms, the rise of the northern kingdoms, and ultimately, the rise of the conquest state of Chichén Itzá.

[546] The most famous architectural style of the northern lowlands is the exquisite Puuc veneer stone masonry (Pollock 1980), regarded by many scholars as the epitome of Maya engineering and masonry skill. This style emerges in the Late Classic and persists through the Early Postclassic period (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986). The north central peninsular region also displays a style called Rio Bec (Potter 1977); and between the central peninsular Rio Bec sites and the concentration of Puuc-style cities in the hills to the north and west, there are communities with architecture of another, related style called Chenes (Pollock 1970). The northern tradition includes the temple-pyramid complex of the southern kingdoms, but there is also an emphasis on constructing many-roomed structures atop large solid pyramids. This change in emphasis may reflect a particular focus upon activities and events involving assemblies of leaders as opposed to the cultic focus upon rulers expressed in temple pyramids (Freidel 1986a) seen in the Late Classic southern lowlands.

[547] The Maya of the time of the Conquest were still literate in their own system of writing. The most famous aboriginal treatises are the Books of Chilam Balam (Edmonson 1982, 1986), which are principally records of the katuns and their prophecies. These books are named after the last great Maya prophet: chilam. “interpreter [of the gods],” and balam. “jaguar,” which was probably his family name. Roys (1967:3 and 182–187) suggested that Chilam Balam lived during the last decades of the fifteen century or perhaps during the first part of the sixteenth century and that his lasting fame came from his foretelling the appearance of strangers from the east who would establish a new religion. Roys (1967:3) says, “The prompt fulfilment of this prediction so enhanced his reputation as a seer that in later times he was considered the authority for many other prophecies which had been uttered long before his time. Inasmuch as prophecies were the most prominent feature of many of the older books of this sort, it was natural to name them after the famous sooth sayer.”

The Books of Chilam Balam were recorded in the Yucatec Maya language, but written in Spanish script. The “prophecies” offered do have components that resemble the Western idea of fortune-telling, but the foretelling is based on detailed accounts of the major historical events and political struggles between competing communities and families from the late Precolumbian through the Colonial periods. Dennis Puleston (1979) argued that the fatalistic beliefs of the Maya and their acceptance of the essential cyclicality of time transformed such records of the past into rigid predictions of the future. We have tried to show in previous chapters that the Maya implementation of history as a guide to the future was subtle and politically imaginative. Bricker (n.d.) provides an elegant proof that some passages in the Books of Chilam Balam are direct transliterations of the glyphic originals. Archaeologists have been wrestling with these fragmentary historical accounts from the vantage of the record from excavation and survey for many years (Tozzer 1957; Pollock, Roys, Proskouriakoff, and Smith 1962; Ball 1974a; Robles and A. Andrews 1986; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).

[548] As noted in Chapter 1, evidence from linguistic reconstructions and particular spellings in the Classic inscriptions indicate that Yucatec was spoken by the peoples occupying the northern and eastern sections of the Yucatán Peninsula. This zone included at least the modern regions of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Belize, and the eastern third of the Petén. Northern and southern lowlands were linked in the Preclassic period by means of shared ceramic styles and by trade materials such as greenstone and chert brought through the southern lowlands or from them. In return, the northern lowland peoples may have traded sea salt (Freidel 1978; E. W. Andrews V 1981) from beds along their northern and western coasts. The northern lowland Maya participated in the early establishment of the institution of kingship, as seen in the famous bas-relief carved into the mouth of the cave of Loltún, which depicts a striding ahau wearing the Jester God diadem and the severed jaguar head with triple plaques on his girdle (Freidel and A. Andrews n.d.). Stylistically, this image dates to the Late Preclassic period.

[549] Our story of Chichón Itzá is based on less secure data than the stories we have offered about the southern kings. The northern Maya cities, with the notable exception of Dzibilchaltún on the northwestern plain, have not enjoyed the extensive and systematic investigations aimed at cultural interpretation that have been carried out at several of the southern cities we have written about. At Dzibilchaltún, E. Wyllys Andrews IV conducted long-term and systematic research (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980). The settlement-pattern work at this site (Kurjack 1974) first alerted Maya scholars to the enormous size of some of these cities, a fact which took a long time to be accepted. Work of this quality and detail is only now in progress at sites like Cobá, Isla Cerritos, Sayil, Ek Balam, and Yaxuná.

Furthermore, in spite of the efforts of many epigraphers over more than sixty years, the hieroglyphic texts of the north are not as well understood as those of the south, partly because they have a higher percentage of phonetic signs and their calligraphy is far more difficult to read. The first date to be deciphered in the Chichen inscriptions was the Initial Series date 10.2.9.1.9 9 Muluc 7 Zac (Morley 1915). During the following two decades, the Carnegie Institution of Washington conducted the excavations that uncovered the remainder of the presently known hieroglyphic monuments of the Chichón Itzá corpus (Martin 1928; Morley 1925, 1926, 1927, 1935; Ricketson 1925; Ruppert 1935). Hermann Beyer’s (1937) structural analysis laid the foundation for later epigraphic research on this body of texts, while Thompson (1937) was the first to explain the tun-ahau system of dating used at Chichón Itzá. Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) raised difficult questions about the presence of Maya inscriptions on “Toltec” architecture at the site.

David Kelley (1968; 1976; 1982) has been working with the texts of Chichón Itzá and Uxmal for many years, and he must be credited with the identification of several key relationship terms in the complex and partially understood network of family ties among nobles of the Chichón community. His structural analyses and interpretations have pushed far beyond the work of previous researchers. He also identified the inscriptional name, Kakupacal (Kelley 1968), an Itzá warrior mentioned in the Books of Chilam Balam, as an ancient ruler of Chichón Itzá. His important work inspired Michel Davoust (1977, 1980), who vigorously pursued the hypothesis that Chichón Itzá was ruled by a dynasty whose names are preserved in the texts.

James Fox (1984a, 1984b, n.d.) has made several major contributions to the unraveling of the Chichón Itzá texts; most notably, he correctly identified the Emblem Glyph of this capital. Jeff Kowalski (1985a, 1985b, 1989; Kowalski and Krochock, n.d.) has made substantial headway in the analysis of texts from Uxmal and other Terminal Classic communities of the north, including Chichón Itzá. Ian Graham, master of the Corpus of Hieroglyphic Writing Project at Harvard University, has generously allowed scholars to work with his drawings of northern lowland texts. David Stuart has contributed fundamentally to the interpretation of the political organization of Chichón Itzá, both in his publications (Stuart 1988a; Grube and Stuart 1987) and in his generous sharing of work in progress through personal communications. Stuart’s decipherment of the sibling relationship at Chichón is the cornerstone of an epigraphic interpretation of conciliar rule there.

Finally, we draw heavily upon the work in progress of Ruth Krochock (1988) whose master’s thesis on the lintels of the Temple of the Four Lintels is a tour de force of method. It is a programmatic breakthrough in the interpretation of the political rhetoric of Chichón Itzá as focused upon the simultaneous participation of contemporary leaders in dedication rituals. Our attempts to push beyond Krochock’s interpretation are based upon intensive consultation with her and with Richard Johnson, Marisela Ayala, and Constance Cortez at the 1988 Advanced Seminar in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Austin and with Ruth, Jeff Kowalski, John Carlson, and others at the 1989 workshop. They are further based upon continued correspondence with Ruth Krochock. We appreciate her helpful advice and words of sensible caution. We also note that Virginia Miller (1989) has independently made many of the same associations between the Tlaloc-warrior of Classic period iconography and the Toltec warriors of Chichón Itzá.

[550] The actual extent of Chichón Itzá has never been documented, since only the central core of the city has been mapped. The description of the city’s limits we use here is an estimate attributed to Peter Schmidt by Fernando Robles and Anthony Andrews (1986). In the Atlas oj ) ucatán, Silvia Garza T. and Edward Kurjack provide an estimate of thirty square kilometers (Garza T. and Kurjack 1980).

The traditional interpretation of the history of Chichen Itzá (Tozzer 1957) holds that the city was occupied several times by different groups of people, generally moving from a Maya “old” Chichen to a Toltec Mexican “new” Chichen represented in the great northern center of the city. We support the view, as recently argued by Charles Lincoln (1986), that Chichón Itzá was a single city continuously occupied through its history. As Lincoln points out, the notion of an early Maya Chichón makes little sense, for it would leave the city without a discernible spatial center. The Maya were quite flexible in their city planning, but no Maya capital lacks an easily identified center.

Viewed as a single city, Chichón Itzá is strikingly diverse and cosmopolitan in its public and elite architecture, registering styles from both Maya country and from México. Traditionally, Chichón Itzá’s Mexican cultural expression has been attributed to a conquest of the northern lowlands by Toltec Mexicans operating out of their capital in Tula Hidalgo, México (see Diehl 1981 on Tula). George Kubler (1975) argued that Tula displays only a fraction of the political program and architectural design found at Chichón Itzá, and it is more likely that Chichón was the dominant community in the acknowledged relationship with Tula. To be sure, Maya groups collaborated with Gulf Coast and Mexican peoples, probably merchant-warrior brotherhoods of a kind that later facilitated the economy of the Aztec Empire; but the Maya civilization was the fundamental source of ideas and imagery in this new government. We believe that Kubler is correct and that Chichón Itzá developed into a truly Mesoamcrican capital, like Teotihuacán before it. This was perhaps the only time in Maya history that their culture stood center stage in the Mesoamerican world. Because we regard the great period of Chichón Itzá to be Mesoamerican and Maya, and not the product of a Toltec invasion, we use the traditional attribution of “Toltec” Chichón Itzá in quotations.

[551] We will generally avoid as much as possible any references to the histories and chronicles, collectively termed the Chilam Balams, passed down to the time of the Europeans. No doubt there is significant historical information in these texts, but despite the brilliant efforts of Joseph Ball (1974a; 1986) and other scholars who worked before the Chichón texts had been even partially deciphered, it will take much future work to coordinate, in any useful way, the evidence of archaeology and epigraphy with that of ethnohistory. These histories are fraught with metaphorical allusions and political manipulations. Some essential assertions of the chronicles are confirmed by archaeology, principally the fact that foreigners entered the northern lowlands and, in alliance with native nobility, established new states such as Chichón Itzá. Some key figures in the historical narratives can also be found in the ancient texts, figures such as Kakupacal of Chichón Itzá (Kelley 1968). Eventually, there will be an historical framework that accounts for all of these forms of evidence.

[552] The timing of the rise of the Puuc cities relative to the southern kingdoms is still a matter of controversy. Most specialists feel comfortable in dating the beginning of the Puuc florescence at about 800 A.D. or a half century earlier (Robles and A. Andrews, 1986:77). This date would establish contemporaneity of at least half a century between the kings of the Puuc and those of the south.

[553] Jeff K. Kowalski (1985a; 1985b; 1987) in his study of Uxmal has carried out the most extensive investigation of the political organization of the Puuc cities as revealed in iconography and epigraphy.

[554] These terms were popularized by J.E.S. Thompson (1970), who proposed that these were barbarian “Mexicanized Maya” who, through energetic trade, warfare, and diplomacy, penetrated the lowlands from their homeland in the swampy river country bordering the Maya domains on the west and established a new hegemony in the period of the Great Collapse. While the details are controversial, most scholars presently adhere to the general notion of a Putún or Chontai movement into the lowlands in Terminal Classic times (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986).

At some point in their peregrinations, the Itzá, often regarded as one group of Putún Maya, established cities along the western coast of the Yucatán peninsula, at Chanpotón— Chan Putún—and elsewhere in Campeche. Edmonson (1986), in his translations of the Chilam Balam books, would place this Itzá settlement prior to their incursions into the center of the peninsula to establish Chichón Itzá. The archaeology of this western coastal region is intriguing, but poorly known. On the one hand, there is the city of Xcalumkin (Pollock 1980) with its veneer mosaic architecture; Late Classic hieroglyphic dates on texts; and use of the ahau-cahal relationship, an innovation which originated in the Western Rivers district of the south at kingdoms such as Yaxchilán. On the other hand, there is Chunchucmil, situated to the north and very close to the rich salt beds of the western coast (Vlchek, Garza, and Kurjack 1978; Kurjack and Garza 1981). This Classic period city covers some six or more square kilometers and has densely packed house lots, temples, and pyramids. Until we have better archaeological control over this region, we will be required to treat the garbled history of its occupation with great caution.

[555] Robles and A. Andrews’s (1986) review of the evidence for the settlement size and organization of Coba. See also Folan, Kintz, and Fletcher (1983) and Folan and Stuart (1977) for discussion of the settlement patterns at Coba.

[556] Stone roads, sacbe, were built by Maya from the Preclassic period onward. Although these roads no doubt could have served prosaic functions, such as commerce and rapid mobilization of troops, all of our descriptions from observers after the Conquest (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) show that such roads functioned principally as pathways for ceremonial processions and pilgrimages among related nobilities. Such rituals were, in all the cases we have come across, political statements of obligation and responsibility. Kurjack and E. W. Andrews V (1976) establish the archaeological case for such an interpretation of settlement hierarchy linked by intersite roads. The roadways of Cobá have been extensively reported on by Antonio Benavides C. (1981).

[557] The original homeland of the Itzá is a matter of continuing dispute. They may have been speakers of a Maya language, probably Chontai, and the best guess places their original communities in the Chontalpa, a stretch of flat, swampy land to the east of the mighty Usumacinta and north of the Peten. The garbled histories of the Chilam Balam books give some reason to suspect that the Itzá established sizable communities along the western coast of the peninsula (perhaps even some of the Puuc-style communities on this coast were Itzá) before making their bid for hegemony in Yucatán by controlling the coastlands. The Maya of the Tabasco-Campeche coastlands were multilingual at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Many of them spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and they were astute, opportunistic merchants and warriors (Thompson 1970). Archaeological survey of the western and northern coasts by Anthony Andrews (1978) confirms the presence of coastal enclaves with pottery diagnostic of the Sotuta Ceramic Sphere associated with Chichén Itzá and the Itzá incursions. Certainly, the people who established Chichón Itzá as a great capital had adopted many ideas of governance from Mexico (Wren n.d.). Hence it is likely that they had Mexican allies in their adventures on the peninsula.

[558] The pottery associated with Chichén Itzá, and its “Itzá” occupation, is called Sotuta Sphere. This survey work along the coast has been carried out primarily by Anthony Andrews (1978). Much of what follows is based upon the syntheses of Andrews and Fernando Robles (A. Andrews and Robles 1985; Robles and A. Andrews 1986). The wide range of Mexican sources of obsidian traded by the Itzá is documented at Isla Cerritos (A. Andrews, Asaro, and Cervera R. n.d.).

[559] This important site is undergoing long-term investigation by Anthony Andrews and Fernando Robles and their colleagues.

[560] Izamal boasts one of the largest pyramids in the northern lowlands. Surface remains of monumental stucco masks which decorated the pyramid, along with the cutstone monolithic-block facading on its terraces, indicate that its major period of construction dates to the Early Classic, long before the Terminal Classic incursions of the Itzá (Lincoln 1980). In the absence of further field investigation, we cannot say how substantial the community may have been at the time of the incursion. Clearly, however, the great pyramid on this otherwise flat plain constituted a famous geographic marker which the Itzá could refurbish as a capital with little additional labor investment.

David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has alerted us to the fact that ethnohis- torical documents (Lizana 1892: Chapter 2) describe Izamal as the capital of a lord named Hun-Pik-Tok, warrior captain of an army of “8.000 flints.” He also identified the same name, Hun-Pik-Tok, in the inscription of the Casa Colorada and on the lintel from Halakal. Hence there is both ethnohistorical and epigraphic evidence to support the hypothesis that Izamal was an established capital of the Itzá at the time of the temple dedications at Chichén Itzá. These dedications occurred during Katun 2 of the tenth baktun, the likely time of Chichén Itzá’s founding as the principal city of the Itzá. Hun-Pik-Tok and Kakupacal, a famous lord of Chichén Itzá mentioned several times in these dedication events throughout that city, are both mentioned on the Casa Colorada, so we can surmise they were contemporaries.

Hun-Pik-Tok reappears on a monument from Halakal, a small satellite community of Chichén Itzá to the east of that city. Most interesting is the fact that Hun-Pik-Tok and another lord named on a lintel from the Akab Tzib from Chichén Itzá are both named as vassal lords of Jawbone-Fan, who was a K’ul Cocom (Grube and Stuart 1987:8–10).

Archaeologically, Lincoln (1986) has noted the presence of Sotuta ceramics at Izamal.

It may well prove significant that both Chichén Itzá and Yaxuná, the frontier community of the Coba state, are both roughly halfway between Izamal and Cobá. This is the zone of struggle between the Itzá and the kings of Cobá. As we have seen in the case of the great wars between Caracol, Tikal, and Naranjo, struggle between hegemonic Maya states could focus on the border communities between them—in their case Yaxha and Ucanal, which sat roughly halfway between Tikal and Caracol.

[561] Calculation of the size of southern lowland kingdoms is still a tricky business (see Chapter 1). Peter Mathews (1985a and 1985b) posits that emblem-bearing polities constituted the principal states which claimed territorial domain over the smaller communities ruled by second-and third-rank nobility. On this basis, and taking into account exceptional conquest events such as Tikal’s incorporation of Uaxactún, the largest southern lowland hegemonies were on the order of 2,500 square kilometers in size. Recently (April 1989), Arthur Demarest and Stephen Houston have suggested in oral reports that the kingdom of Dos Pilas may have encompassed 3,700 square kilometers. This remains to be confirmed though field investigation. Calculation of the size of the Cobá state at the time when the great causeway linking it to Yaxuná was built is based upon Robles and A. Andrews’s map (1986: Fig. 3:4) and the following premises. First, Cobá controlled the coastlands directly fronting the kingdom on the east, some 25 kilometers distant from the capital. This information is based upon study of the distribution of distinctive ceramics of the Cobá Western Cepech Sphere relative to the distribution of Chichén-related Sotuta Sphere ceramics along that coast. Chichén Itzá evidently skirted the coast in front of Cobá when it established communities on the Island of Cozumel (see Freidel and Sabloff 1984; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).

Second, this estimate of kingdom size is calculated by allowing for a corridor of 25 kilometers surrounding the great causeway along its entire route. This figure provides us with a minimal support population for labor, sustenance, and defense during the construction. The timing of the construction of the causeway is equally tricky relative to the war between Chichén Itzá and Cobá. Robles (1980) places its construction at the beginning of the Terminal Classic period, about A.D. 800. We believe that the war between Cobá and Chichén Itzá was under way in earnest by the middle of the ninth century, for the spate of dedications defining Chichén Itzá’s first major temples occurs between A.D. 860 and 880. Present evidence does not allow final resolution of the two possibilities: Either Cobá built the causeway in response to the incursion of the Itzá, as we have postulated in this chapter, or, alternatively, they built the causeway to declare a hegemonic kingdom prior to the Itzá threat. The latter possibility opens the intriguing prospect that the Itzá were posing as “liberators” of the central north, appealing to peoples already subjugated by Cobá. This was a tactic used frequently by conquerors in the ancient world. Sargon of Akkad “liberated” Sumer from rival indigenous hegemonic states in Mesopotamia.

[562] The regalia of some lords of the Yaxuná polity shows a striking resemblance to that of lords in tribute procession at Chichén Itzá.

[563] Research at Dzibilchaltún (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980) documents a dramatic decline and eventual cessation of public construction with the arrival of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the city. E. W. Andrews and E. W. Andrews (1980:274) place that arrival at about A.D. 1000, but since these diagnostic ceramics occur in above-floor deposits of earlier buildings, they warn that the A.D. 1000 date may be too late for the change. Our own scenario would place the collapse of Dzibilchaltún about 100 years earlier.

[564] Recent excavations by the Centro Regional de Yucatán (of the Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México) show the presence of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the main plaza areas of Uxmal (Tomas Gallareta N., personal communication, 1987).

[565] The interpretation of events at Yaxuná and, through the Yaxuná record, of Chichén Itzá’s wars with the Puuc cities and Cobá, is based upon ongoing research by Southern Methodist University, sponsored by the National Endowment lor the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and private donors (Freidel 1987).

[566] The Advanced Seminar on the Maya Postclassic at the School of American Research, Santa Fe (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986), concentrated attention on this problem. See especially the contribution by Charles Lincoln (1986).

[567] Tatiana ProskouriakofF (1970) firmly pointed out the fact that “Toltec” art was found in direct association with Maya hieroglyphic texts and questioned the then popular interpretation that the people who dominated Chichén Itzá at the time of the creation of this art were illiterate foreigners. There is no reason to suppose that any rulers of the Maya before the European Conquest were illiterate, for all of the Maya kings used the calendrics predicated upon literacy as a political tool (Edmonson 1986). Further, the gold disks dredged from the sacred cenote, clearly pertaining to the late or ‘ Toltec” period as identified by the iconography, have glyphic inscriptions (S. K. Lothrop 1952). A goldhandled bone bloodletter from the cenote (Coggins and Shane 1984) also carries a glyphic inscription. The fact that these objects are made from gold (a medium ignored by or unknown to Classic period kings) identifies them as late. Finally, Linca Wren (n.d.) and Ruth Krochock (1988) have reported the discovery of a portable hemispherical sacrificial stone from Chichón Itzá that carries a glyphic inscription. This stone also depicts a duplicate of the decapitation scenes that decorate the playing-wall panels of the Great Ballcourt, a clearly late Chichón building.

But the matter of the literacy of the audience of late Chichón Itzá, the city that built the final temples and courts of the great platform, is far from secure. As Chariot pointed out (Morris, Chariot, and Morris 1931), processional figures in the great assemblies of the northern center often have glyphlike emblems floating above their heads. For the most part, these are not identifiable as Maya glyphs. Some look like Mexican glyphs and others are indecipherable. Were these portrayed peoples truly illiterate, or were they simply complying with the current customs of Mesoamerican elite public display, in which literacy played no part? We can pose the question, but we cannot answer it yet.

[568] Ruth Krochock (n.d.) must be credited with the fundamental identification of the simultaneity of participants in dedication rituals at Chichón, with particular reference to the lintels in the Temple of the Four Lintels. The family relationships posited in the following discussion are predicated principally upon the syllabic identification ofyitah, the “sibling” relationship glyph linking protagonists into single generations (Stuart 1988a: Fig. 54g-i; personal communication, 1988), and upon “child of mother” and “mother of” relationships discussed by Krochock (1988).

[569] The technical name for this building is Structure 3C1 in the nomenclature of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Ruppert 1952:34).

[570] This rather stunning insight was first presented in a graduate seminar on “Caching Rituals and Their Material Remains” held at the University of Texas at Austin, spring semester, 1989. Using the caches of the city as her clues and examining the archaeology of the High Priest’s Grave, Annabeth Headrick proposed that this temple and the seven- lobed cave under it are early in Chichen’s history and functioned as the prototype of later buildings to the north, such as the Castillo and the captive procession in front of the Temple of the Warriors.

The inscription on one of the inner columns (Lincoln 1986:Fig. 5:1) of the temple accompanies the image of a captive rendered in the style of the Temple of the Warriors columns. The Long Count for the 2 Ahau 18 Mol Calendar Round has been interpreted as 10.8.10.11.0 because that date falls within a katun ending on 2 Ahau, the last glyph in the text. However, the 2 Ahau does not occur within the expected formula phrase for Yucatec-style dates. We think it may simply refer to the opening Calendar Round date and not Io the katun within which that date fell. In this alternative interpretation, the date of the column could as easily be 10.0.12.8.0 (July 3, 842) or 10.3.5.3.0 (June 7, 894). Furthermore, the earliest placement, 10.0.12.8.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, has the virtue of making the date of the High Priest’s Grave the earliest known date at Chichón Itzá. Headrick associated the cave under this temple with Chicomoztoc, the origin cave of seven lobes famous from Aztec myth. The presence of this cave points to the High Priest’s Grave as an “origin” building in the cosmic landscape of Chichón Itzá, exactly as the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán marks it as an “origin” temple (Heyden 1981).

[571] This new fire, called suhuy kak, “virgin fire,” was described by Landa in his Relación de Yucatan (Tozzcr 1941:153 155, 158) in association with a number of different ritual occasions, including the New Year ceremonies and the Festival of Kukulcan at Mani.

[572] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes a persuasive case for the association of such sacrifice with the images on the Four Lintels. In the Chilam Balam books (Edmonson 1986), a great serpent deity at Chichón Itzá, named hapay can, “sucking snake,” is said to have demanded many nobles from other communities as sacrificial victims.

[573] James Fox (n.d.) recently identified this date as an important Jupiter date. In fact it is also a Saturn date, for Jupiter (253.81 + ) and Saturn (259.97 + ) had just begun to move after they had hung frozen against the star fields at their second stationary points for about forty days. This is the same hierophany recorded at Palenque on the 2 Cib 14 Mol house dedication and on Lady Xoc’s bloodletting (Lintel 24) at Yaxchilán. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) noticed that the glyph appearing with the 2 Cib 14 Mol event (pil or pul) also recurs in the Casa Colorada text. Unfortunately, there it is recorded with the 7 Akbal event, which has no obvious astronomical associations.

[574] Karl Ruppert (1952) has described the architecture at Chichón Itzá and provides a map showing the survey squares that are the basis for this nomenclature.

[575] The Maya used stone axes in battle, but there are also abundant images documenting that the ax was also specifically a sacrificial instrument (Schele and M. Miller 1986).

[576] These knives are especially evident in the sacrificial scenes of the gold battle disks (S. K. Lothrop 1952).

[577] The final three glyphs in the names of the three persons to the left of the drawing are uinic titles. These titles declare that these men are ulnic, that is to say, “men (in the sense of humans)” of a particular rank or location. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to read that rank.

[578] Patio Quad structures, also called Gallery Patio Structures, have several diagnostic features which can occur in varying combinations: (1) sunken central patios; (2) masonry shrines built against the back wall; (3) colonnaded front rooms; and (4) colonnades bordering the central patio. Generally, the plan of the building is square and the walls are of masonry. Based upon settlement location and associated excavated debris at Chichón Itzá, Freidel (1981b) proposed that these buildings are elite residences. These buildings occur rarely in the Maya area outside of Chichón Itzá. Examples are known at Nohmul in Belize (D. Chase and A. Chase 1982) and on Cozumel Island (Freidel and Sabloff 1984: Fig. 26a), but they also occur in the contemporary highland communities of Mexico (e.g.. in the Coxcatlan area, Sisson 1973).

[579] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) pointed out some time ago that the association of glyphic texts with typical “Toltec” images in the case of this building suggests that the patrons of the latest artistic and architectural programs of the city were not illiterate foreigners.

[580] David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) pointed out to us a reference in Landa to a set of brothers who ruled at Chichón Itzá. They purportedly came from the west and built many beautiful temples in the city (Tozzer 1941:19, 177).

[581] Ralph Roys (in Pollock et al. 1962) extensively discusses the political organization of the Mayapán Confederacy, which was ruled by this principle. Edmonson (1986) translates multepal as “crowd rule.” Barrera Vasquez (1980:539–540, 785) glosses multepal as “united government (or confederation) that was prevalent during the dominion of Mayapán until the middle of the fifteenth century when a great revolution resulted in the destruction of that city.” Mui is listed as “in combination, to do something communally or between many...” and “in a group.” Tepal is “to reign and to govern.”

[582] Mayapán, although a relatively unspectacular ruin by Maya standards (J. Eric Thompson called it “a flash in the Maya pan”), has exceptionally well-preserved remains of buildings made with stone foundations and wooden superstructures. The Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pollock et al. 1962) carried out long-term work at the site, so we have a lot of information on its organization. Essentially, both Chichón Itzá and Mayapán show a central focus upon a four-sided pyramid associated with colonnaded halls. Although the halls at Mayapán are organized in a circle around the pyramid, while the halls at Chichón Itzá are to one side of its great northern central platform, neither of these arrangements is comparable to the vaulted masonry buildings found in Puuc cities and in the southern cities described in previous chapters. Contact-period colonnaded halls (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) functioned as assembly halls for men in public service, as schools for boys being trained in the arts of war and in the essentials of the sacred life, as dormitories for men fasting in preparation for festivals, and as quarters for militia. These halls were not the public residences of important people. Noble residences (Smith in Pollock et al. 1962) were to be found throughout the city of Mayapán. We have seen that the buildings which were equivalent to the colonnaded halls found in southern kingdoms, such as the Palace of Pacal at Palenque, were the public lineage houses of dynasties. Multepal, then, has its material expressions in the organization of the communities in which this form of government prevailed.

[583] Ralph Roys (1962:78) gives the fall of Mayapán as occurring in a Katun 8 Ahau, ca. A.D. 1451.

[584] The cocom reading was first identified in the texts of Chichón Itzá by Grube and Stuart (1987:10).

[585] James Fox (1984b) identified this combination of signs as the Chichen Itza Emblem Glyph.

[586] Our interpretation of the architectural and artistic program of the Temple of the Warriors complex draws heavily upon the skill and brilliance of Jean Chariot, an artist and iconographer. Chariot, along with Ann Axtel Morris and Earl Morris (Morris et al. 1931), published articles on the bold and comprehensive architectural excavations and restorations carried out in these buildings by the Carnegie Institution of Washington earlier in this century. Chariot proposed the hypothesis that the reliefs are attempts at public portraiture. He based this evaluation upon the fact that the artists depicted individualistic detail both in the warriors’ regalia and in their faces, where preserved. Chariot also noted the intriguing presence of glyphlike elements floating above a number of the individuals. These symbols are not recognizable as true Maya glyphs, but they do seem to distinguish these people one from another. It is perplexing that the artisans did not use known glyphs to convey such information, for the elite of Chichón Itzá were certainly aware of glyphic writing throughout the history of the city. Such late and diagnostic media as the gold battle disks and other gold artifacts from the cenote (S. K. Lothrop 1952) carry glyphic inscriptions.

[587] Actual specimens of the throwing spears and the parry sticks were cast into the cenote at Chichón Itzá and were retrieved by modern scholars. They are housed in the museum in Merida.

[588] The Itzá Maya especially favored the goddess Ix-Chel, Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. The island of Cozumel was sacred to Ix-Chel at the time of the Conquest and was also a strategic sanctuary of an oracle of the goddess. Cozumel Island was controlled by the Itzá during the height of their power and the oracle may have originated during that time. The depictions of old women at Chichén include some with skull heads who are dancing with old Pauahtunob. These may well represent the goddess. The woman in this procession, however, is no doubt a real person just like the other portraits. Either she is a representative of the goddess, or possibly she is the matriarch of the principal sodality. Recall that the genealogies of Chichén Itzá describe the descent of the principal group of brothers from their mother and grandmother. In that case, the procession would have occurred in the time of the great captains who dedicated the lintels throughout the city.

[589] Tozzer (1941:121) describes the binding of limbs with cotton-cloth armor in preparation for war.

[590] This is the High Priest’s Grave. The seven-lobed cave was reached by an artificial shaft, sealed by seven graves filled with bones and a wealth of sacred objects, such as rock crystals, jade, shell, clay vessels, and more (see Thompson 1938; Marquina 1964:895–896).

[591] Landa in Tozzer (1941:93–94) describes this form of mock battle in the following way: “One is a game of reeds, and so they call it Colomche, which has that meaning. For playing it, a large circle of dancers is formed with their music, which gives them the rhythm, and two of them leap to the center of the wheel in time to it, one with a bundle of reeds [the shafts of throwing spears and arrows are so termed in this text], and he dances with these perfectly upright; while the other dances crouching down but both keeping within the limits of the circle. And he who has the sticks flings them with all his force at the second, who by the help of a little stick catches them with a great deal of skill.”

[592] This scenario is highly speculative, but it is also commensurate with the fact that the bound prisoners in processions at Chichén Itzá are usually displayed in full regalia and not stripped for sacrifice as in southern Classic depictions. One way to account for this iconography is to propose that there were ritual events that combined mock battle and formal sacrifice. The Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest practiced arrow sacrifice which indeed did combine elements of battle and sacrifice (Tozzer 1941:118), but here the victim was stripped naked in Classic Maya fashion before being tied to a post.

The closest example of what we envision here is found at the Late Classic site of Cacaxtla in highland México (Foncerrada de Molina 1978; Kubler 1980). Here beautifully preserved polychrome-painted murals depict a sacrificial slaughter of battle captives. Some of the victims in this scenes are stripped, but others, including the leader of the losing side, wear full regalia and still carry shields. They are shown with gaping wounds in their flesh from knife and dart wounds and one is depicted dismembered at the waist. There is a sense of a dramatic public slaughter of captives taken in battle.

Although the Cacaxtla murals are a long way from the Maya lowlands, their iconography and style show clear connections to the Maya and they are roughly contemporary to or slightly earlier than Chichen Itzá. Badly ruined murals from the Puuc site of Mulchic (Barrera Rubio 1980:Fig. 3) include not only battle scenes, but also sacrificial scenes in which knife-wielding lords bend over a victim who is wearing an elaborate headdress. The body of the victim is eroded, but this headdress suggests that he was in full regalia at the time of sacrifice. This example is close enough in space and time to the Chichén Itzá context to ofler encouragement that future discoveries of mural scenes in the northern lowlands will either confirm or disconfirm the existence of mock-battle sacrifice in the region. Meanwhile, we hold that the transformation of highborn captives from sacrificial victims to members of the confederacy is the most promising political hypothesis for the success of Chichén Itzá.

[593] Arthur Miller (1977) coined these terms for the two major images in the murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars, one of the three buildings attached to the Great Ballcourt complex containing political imagery.

[594] We are accepting that the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá is equivalent to the “ancestor cartouche“ of Classic period iconography to the south. The conjunction of images that leads us to this conclusion is found especially in the upper registers of stela imagery in the Late Classic period. At Yaxchilán, figures identified glyphically and by image as the mother and father of the protagonist sit in cartouches (Proskouriakoff 1961a:18, 1963- 1964:163; Schele 1979:68; Stuart 1988:218–219) often shown wdth snaggle-toothed dragons in the four corners (see Fig. 10:2). In contrast to the Yaxchilán pattern, Caracol monuments show Vision Serpents emerging from bowls and sky bands in the upper register. Some of the people emerging from the open maw of these serpents are identified glyphically as the parents of the protagonists (Stone, Reents, and Coffman 1985:267–268). In Terminal Classic renditions, the serpent and the cartouche are replaced by dotted scrolls David Stuart (1984) identified as the blood from which the vision materializes. At Jimbal and Ucanal, the characters floating in these blood scrolls are the Paddler Gods and warriors carrying the regalia of Tlaloc war. At Chichén Itzá, the same spearthrower-wielding warriors emerge from Vision Serpents on the gold disks from the Cenote and from sun disks in the upper register of the Temple of the Warriors columns. To us, this consistent association of Vision Serpents, the Ancestor Cartouches, Blood/Vision Scrolls, and Warriors with spearthrower and darts form a cluster of ancestor-vision imagery, which includes Captain Sun Disk of the Chichén Itzá representations.

Several other scholars have also dealt with this imagery, but none have proposed the argument we present here. In a discussion of Yaxchilán Stela 1, David Stuart (1988:181) noted the correspondence between the ancestor cartouches of the Classic period and the Central Mexican sun disk. However, Stuart did not associate those ancestral images with the sun disk and Tlaloc-warrior presentations at Chichén Itzá. Charles Lincoln (n.d.) noted the correspondence between the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá and the cartouches at Yaxchilán, but he argued that the disks at Yaxchilán are specifically dualistic and pertain to the sun and moon. Actually, Spindin (1913:91–92) got closest by associating the sun imagery of the Classic period ancestor cartouches with these sun disk icons from Chichén Itzá and suggested a Maya origin for both.

[595] See Kelley (1982, 1983:205, and 1984) and Lincoln (1986:158) for arguments concerning these characters.

[596] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes the persuasive case that the feathered serpent is, in fact, the Blood Vision Serpent of traditional Maya royal ritual. She suggests that the bird image connected with it might be related to the Principal Bird Deity, who is, in turn, linked with the World Tree. At the same time, there are strong associations between the eagle and heart sacrifice in Mexican religion.

[597] Mary Miller and Stephen Houston (1987) have documented the fact that ballgame sacrifice took place on grand stairways outside of ballcourts.

[598] This link between the bailgame and war was discussed in the context of Preclassic ballcourts at Cerros in Chapter 3. The people of Chichén Itzá and their enemies all used the bailgame as a metaphor for the wars they were fighting. At Chichén Itzá, a small ballcourt directly west of the Mercado Patio Quad hall has a bas-relief procession of warriors pushing captives before them (Ruppert 1952). This composition is nearly identical to a relief procession at the site ofX’telhu, one of the satellites ofYaxuná, which shows the warriors wearing the skin apron and tight leather belt of the ballgame in one of its forms. At Yaxuná, the Ballcourt Complex is the only original construction dating to the Terminal Classic period when the war was waged. The severed head of the victim of sacrifice in the ballcourt or in ballgame ritual was closely associated by all of the contenders with the image of a skull from which waterlilies emerge. This skull with emerging waterlilies was a symbol of fertility and renewal (Freidel 1987). This head is at the center of the baseline in the battle scene illustrated here.

[599] The skull-rack platform at Chichón liza has the standard form of such structures, but its walls are carved with the images of skulls set in rows. 1 ozzer (1957:218–219) associated this gruesome imagery with the practice of taking heads as trophies of war and relics of the dead, both of famous lords who died naturally and captives who died in sacrifice. The trophies from sacrificial rituals and battle were preserved on great wooden racks called tzompantli by the Aztec (Tozzer 1957:130–131) that were contrueted in the most important sacred spaces at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, and at Chichón Itzá, the capital of the Itzá Maya.

[600] These relationships, evidently linking three male individuals, arc found on a monument from Uxmal described by Jeff Kowalski (1985b). He identified the glyph as a relationship, although Stuart’s itah decipherment was not then known.

10. The End of A Literate World and Its Legacy to the Future

[601] Tozzer (1941:28) quotes from Gaspar Antonio Chi, Landa’s Yucatec informant: “They had written records of important things which had occurred in the past ... the prognostications of their prophets and the lives of their lords; and for the common people, of certain songs in meter ... according to the history they contained.

[602] The Maya of the Postclassic period did enjoy commercial prosperity and brisk trade with peoples beyond their borders. Their homes were well built and their technology was generally on a par with that of their ancestors, although, unlike the Classic period peoples, they used metal. The lords of the Late Postclassic Maya, however, simply did not have the command of the social energy of their people that the lords of the Classic period could bring to bear on public works, especially central monumental architecture. It is not that these people were less devout than their ancestors: They built many shrines and temples, but these were as frequently dedicated to gods as to ancestors and as frequently found in homes as in centers. Some Mayanists regard this change not as a dissipation of energy so much as a reorientation to other goals, particularly the material well-being of the rising mercantile cadres, the p’olomob. Be that as it may, the Postclassic Maya who greeted the Spaniards were at best between eras of greatness.

[603] The first systematic study of the collapse was conducted as a School of American Research seminar (Culbert 1973). Several recent books have concentrated on the problem of the collapse from the viewpoint of Teotíhuacán’s collapse in the eighth century (Diehl and Berio 1989); from the viewpoint of Postclassic archaeology in northern Yucatán and the Petón (Sabloff and Andrews V 1986a); and as a worldwide phenomenon (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988).

[604] The only such system to be excavated in the immediate vicinity of a center which rose and then collapsed, Cerros in Belize (Scarborough 1983), shows that the canals silted in beyond use within a century of the political abandonment.

[605] This inscription includes the earliest known usage of a calendric name in a Classic Maya name phrase. This tradition of naming a child for the day in the tzolkin on which he was born was prominent among peoples of western Mesoamerica, such as the Zapotee, the Mixtec, the Cacaxtlanos, the Huastecs of El Tajin, and presumably, the Teotihuacanos, but the Classic Maya used an entirely different system. Since the clay in the pot came from the plain in front of Palenque, we suggest that the man whose accession is recorded in the text or perhaps the person who gave the vase to the Palencano lord in whose grave it was found was one of the Putún Maya.

[606] Robert Rands (personal communication, 1975) discovered that the clay has chemical traces produced by the grasses out on the plain. It was manufactured in the region where the Putún Maya are thought to have lived.

[607] Lauro José Zavala (1949) reported finding this skeleton in the rubble of the west end of south gallery of the House AD in the Palace. He speculated that the man was accidentally caught in the collapse of the vault and never dug out.

[608] The portrayal of the captive lords of Pomoná in their anguish is intensely personal and intimate, among the finest portraits ever achieved by Maya artists. The artists’s concentration on the victims leads Mary Miller to believe that they were vassals from the defeated town who were forced to carve this monument in tribute to their conquerors. If this was the case, then Pomoná at least survived as a place of skilled artisans until the opening of the ninth century A.D.

[609] We met this Calakmul king in Chapter 4. He installed the first ruler of Naranjo on his throne and he apparently sent a visitor to participate in rituals conducted by the contemporary king at Yaxchilán, who may have been an ally.

[610] Demarest, Houston, and Johnson (1989) report that this log palisade was built around the central plaza of Dos Pilas during the last years of its occupation. They also report that Punta de Chamino, a site built on the end of a peninsula jutting into Lake Petexbatún, has massive fortifications across the neck of the peninsula. Warfare was endemic and highly destructive during the last years of the Petexbatun confederacy.

[611] Jeff Kowalski (1989) has traced the Itzá style up the Usumacinta to Seibal and this set of late sites in the highlands of Chiapas.

[612] The Classic diaspora into the adjacent highlands is subject to continued interest and interpretation. See John Fox (1980, 1989) and David Freidel (1985a) for some consideration of the issues.

[613] The notable community here is Lamanai (Pendergast 1986), an ancient center and community which not only survived the collapse but continued to flourish up to the Spanish Conquest. Although clearly participants in the Maya elite world of the Classic period, Lamanai rulers raised few stelae during their history. But there is no certain correlation of historical kingship and the success or failure of government in Belize: Altun Ha, another center of great antiquity and wealth, never raised stelae and yet it succumbed in the time of the collapse. The Belizean situation underscores the fact that historical kingship was a major strategy of Maya governance, but not the only one. Maya centers rose and fell throughout the lowlands without raising stelae or declaring other public inscriptions. Yet at the same time, the correlation between the collapse of lowland society and the failure of historical kingship demonstrates the centrality of this institution, despite the examples of survival beyond the silencing of the historical record. Nevertheless, there are many and complex relationships between historical kings and their nonhistorical counterparts to be worked out in the future (see Freidel 1983).

[614] Sabloff and Willey (1969) first suggested that Seibal’s late florescence resulted from the intrusion and takeover by non-Petén foreigners. Rands (1973) suggested that the ceramics associated with that intruding group are related to the Fine Paste wares from the Palenque-Tabasco region. These foreigners appear to have been Thompson’s Putún Maya (see note 18) who gave rise both to the Itzá of Yucatán and the invaders who took Fine Orange ceramics with them as they went up the Usumacinta River.

[615] The four-sided pyramid is a very old architectural design among the Maya, going back into the Preclassic period at such sites as Tikal and Uaxactún. Although it occurs periodically throughout the Classic period, it seems to have enjoyed resurgence to a position of special prominence in the Terminal Classic period. See Fox (1989) for a discussion of the quadripartite principle in the consolidation of segmentary lineages into new states in the Postclassic period.

[616] David Stuart (1987:25–26) first read the verb in this passage as yilah. “he saw it,” and realized that the Seibal passage record a visit by foreign lords to participate in the period-ending rites conducted by Ah-Bolon-Tun.

[617] See Jeff Kowalski’s (1989) very useful comparison of the Seibal iconography to that of Chichén Itzá. In particular, Kowalski identifies an element called the “knife-wing” in the headdress of one of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s stelae. This element is important in the serpent-bird of prophecy iconography of lintels at Chichén Itzá (Krochock 1988). This complex, in turn, ties into the Vision Serpent-ancestor iconography of Captain Sun Disk, described in this chapter.

[618] Sabloff and Willey (1967) proposed that the southern lowlands might have experienced invasion by barbarians moving up the Western Rivers district at the time of the Collapse. One impressive pattern was the introduction of fine-paste wares from the Tabasco region in conjunction with the barbarian Maya stelae at Seibal. Ihompson (1970:3–47) called these invaders Putún and proposed they were Chontal-speaking Maya who had lived in Tabasco for most of the Classic period. He suggested that they expanded upriver in the chaos at the end of the Classic period. Kowalski (1989) and Ball and Taschek (1989) accept Thompson’s scenario and have added new support to the hypothesis.

[619] Don Rice (1986:332) argued from ceramic, stylistic, and architectural evidence that the late occupants of Ixlú were intruders. Because the shape of the benches built inside the buildings at Ixlú resembles those of late Seibal, he (1986:336) suggested they migrated to Lake Petén-Itzá from Seibal.

[620] Peter Mathews (1976) long ago showed the affinity of this Ixlú altar to a text on Stela 8 at Dos Pilas. This parallelism suggests that the Ixlú lords might have been refugees from the collapse of the Petexbatún state.

[621] A column from Bonampak now in the St. Louis Art Museum names its Bonampak protagonist as the yahau, “subordinate lord,” of the king of Tonina.

[622] Mary Pohl (1983) has reviewed the archaeological evidence for the ceremonial caching of owls, noting that pygmy owls were favored by the Maya. 1 he iconography of owls is not so specific as to require identification of the carved images as pygmy owls, but these are what the Maya deposited. Pygmy owls, according to Pohl, frequent the mouths of caves and hence inspire denotation as messengers from the Otherworld. These pygmy owls may refer to the bird of omen called cu/i in Yucatec, Choi, and Tzeltal and the owl of the spearthrower-shield-owl title we first encountered with Jaguar-Paw, the conqueror of Uaxactun.

[623] The Feathered Serpent could also be represented as a raptorial bird that tore out the hearts of sacrificial victims. The taloned-Kukulcan images that decorated the Temple of the Warriors display an ancestral head peering out from between its open beak, in an analog to Classic-period depictions of ancestors peering out of the mouth of the Vision Serpent.

[624] See the discussions by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Samuel K. Lothrop of these disks and their correspondences to southern lowland imagery and texts (Lothrop 1952).

[625] Scholars have long recognized the significant impact of Maya influence on sites like Xochicalco and Cacaxtla. Now that we have recognized the place of Tlaloc warfare in Classic Maya imagery, we see that Chichcn Itza’s representation of war is clearly not inspired by the Toltec, but by the Maya past. Tlaloc warfare as it is represented at Cacaxtla seems also to be inspired by the Maya model rather than that of Teotihuacan. Furthermore, as George Kubler suggested, Tula, Hidalgo, the capital of the Toltec, may well have emulated the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza rather the reverse. Mary Miller (1985) has shown that the famous Chae Mool figure of Postclassic Mesoamerica derives from Maya imagery of captives and sacrificial victims.

[626] The word can also means “four” and “sky,” so that the name also might have meant “four-star” or “sky-star.” Avendano (Stuart and Jones n.d.) said that the name meant “the star twenty serpent.”

[627] The accounts of the Conquest of the Itza of Lake Peten-Itza were published by Philip A. Means (1917). Dennis Puleston (1979) was the first to connect the prophesies of the Books of the Chilam Balam with Can-Ek’s reaction and the newly recovered histories of the Classic period.

[628] The trip we describe here is a new entrada recorded in a manuscript George Stuart discovered in 1989. He provided us with a copy of the transcription, translations, and the commentary written by Grant Jones (Stuart and Jones n.d.) and has very graciously allowed us to use the events of the entrada and the description of Can-Ek contained in this document.

[629] The size difference between the elite and commoners is one that is documented from Preclassic times onward. Can-Ek’s light complexion may have resulted from a life-style that kept him out of the fierce tropical sun far more than his subordinates.

[630] The cloth of costumes in the Bonampak murals also have glyphs drawn on them, and the ahaus in the first room wear ankle-long white capes amazingly like Avendano’s description.

[631] Avendano (Means 1917:128) says, “We had to observe and wonder on some rocks or buildings on some high places—so high that they were almost lost to sight. And when we caught sight of them clearly, the sun shining on them in full, we took pleasure in seeing them; and we wondered at their height, since without any exaggeration it seemed impossible that work could have been done by hand, unless it was with the aid of the devil, whom they say they adore there in the form of a noted idol.”

[632] This and all other direct quotations come from Avendano’s own description of this entrada as they were translated by Means (1917).

[633] Avendano’s description (Means 1917:137) is full of the irritation the Spanish felt at the uninvited and intimate attention.

[634] This episode (Means 1917:140) recalls the threats presented by the Chacans in Avendano’s first visit.

[635] This episode is recorded in Means (1917:140).

[636] This 12.3.19.11.14 I lx 17 Kankin date is March 13, 1697, in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, this day fell on 12.3.19.11.4 4 Kan 7 Kankin.

[637] Dennis Puleston (1979) first connected this particular prophecy to Can-Ek’s surrender and tried to show that the katun prophecies of the Books of the Chilam Balam were derived at least partially from Classic and Postclassic history. He suggested that Can-Ek’s fatalism was characteristic of Prehispamc Maya historical thought also. The imminent arrival of Katun 8 Ahau was just as likely to have been the stimulus. 8 Ahau is repeatedly associated with the collapse of kingdoms and the change of governments.

[638] See Tozzer (1941, 77–78) for discussion of the suppression of Maya native literature.

[639] Martin was the director of the Proyecto Lingiiistico “Francisco Marroquin,” an organization started in the 1960s to train native speakers in linguistics so that they could record and study their own languages.

[640] Nicholas Hopkins and Kathryn Josserand also helped give the workshop. Nora England of the University of Iowa translated the English version of the workbook into Spanish with the help of Lola Spillari de López. Steve Eliot of CIRMA printed and reproduced the Spanish-version workbook and CIRMA provided support and a room for workshop sessions.

[641] In 1989, Linda Scheie returned to Antigua to give a second workshop. An extra day added to the workshop gave time to finish the full analysis of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs. The final session heard a translation of that inscription read in all the languages of participants—English. Spanish, Classical Maya, Chorti, Pocoman, Cakchiquel, Quiche, Achi, Ixil, Mam, Jalcaltec, and Kanhobal.

[642] The correlation we have used throughout this book set 594,285 days between the zero date in the Maya calendar and the zero date in the Julian calendar, January 1, —4712. Although we believe this is the correct correlation, it is two days out of agreement with the calendars that are still maintained by the Maya of the Guatemala highlands. The correlation that brings the ancient and modern calendars into agreement sets 584,283 days between the two zero dates. In this second correlation, July 23, 1987, falls on 12.18.14.3.17 3 Caban 5 Xul.

Glossary of Gods and Icons

[643] See Cortez (1986) for a full discussion of the Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic contexts.

[644] In this scene, Chac-Xib-Chac rises from the waters of the Underworld in a visual representation of the first appearance of the Eveningstar (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: Pl. 122). GI of the Palenque Triad, who shares many features with Chac-Xib-Chac, is also associated with Venus, principally through his birth date, 9 Ik, a day associated with Venus throughout Mesoamerican mythology. Hun-Ahau of the Headband Twins is yet another aspect of Venus for he shows up in the Dresden Codex as a manifestation of Morningstar. All three of these gods are thus associated with one or another apparition of Venus and may represent different aspects of the same divine being.

[645] Thompson (1934 and 1970b) thoroughly discussed these directional sets of gods and their associations. M.D. Coe (1965) associated this directional organization of gods with the functions and layouts of Yucatecan villages. He (Coe 1973:14–15) also demonstrated that the gods identified by Thompson as bacabs arc the Pauahtuns of the codices and ethnohistorical sources.

[646] This palace scene with the Young Goddesses of Two and the rabbit scribe is painted on a pot now in the Princeton University Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:115a). The creation on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku is depicted on the Pot of the Seven Gods (M.D. Coe 1973:106–109).

[647] See Taube (1985) for a full discussion of the Maize God and his place in Classic Maya iconography.

[648] Examples of the Paddlers in the inscriptions of Copán represent the Old Stingray God with kin signs on his cheeks and the Old Jaguar God with akbal signs (Scheie 1987f).

[649] The alphabetic designations of god images derive from a distributional study of gods and their name glyphs in the Dresden Codex. Not wishing to presume the meaning of the names, Schellhas (1904) used the alphabet as a neutral designation system.

[650] See David Stuart (1987b:15–16).

[651] David Stuart (1988c and 1984) outlined much of the evidence linking the Serpent Bar to the symbolism of the vision rites.

[652] David Stuart (1988c) first outlined how this merging of images and functions is distributed in Maya images.

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1984 An Example of Homophony in Maya Script. American Antiquity 49:790–805.

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1976 Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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1976 The Inscription on the Back of Stela 8, Dos Pilas, Guatemala. A paper prepared for a seminar at Yale University. Copy provided by author.

1977 Naranjo: The Altar of Stela 38. An unpublished manuscript dated August 3, 1977, in the possession of the authors.

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1986 Late Classic Maya Site Interaction. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

1988 The Sculptures of Yaxchilán. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Yale University.

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1988 The Meaning and Function of the Main Acropolis, Copan. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 149–195. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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1982 Teotihuacán: The Blood Complex at Atetelco. A paper prepared for a seminar on the transition from Preclassic to Classic times, held at the University of Texas, 1982. Copy in possession of author.

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n.d. An Analysis of the Inscriptions of the Petex Batun Region. A paper prepared for the graduate seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, University of Texas, 1988.

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1976 Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Copán: A Catalogue and Historical Commentary. Ph.D dissertation, University of California. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

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1985 Three Thematic Complexes in the Art of Teotihuacán. A paper prepared at the University of Texas. Copy in possession of author.

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1976 The Murals of Tepantitla, Teotihuacán. New York: Garland Publishing. Pendergast, David M.

1971 Evidence of Early Teotihuacán-Lowland Maya Contact at Altun Ha. American Antiquity 35:455–460.

1981 Lamanai, Belize: Summary of Excavation Results 1987–1980. Journal of Field Archaeology 8(l):29–53.

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1983 Maya Ritual Faunas: Vertebrate Remains from Burials, Caches, Caves and Cenotes in the Maya Lowlands. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 55–103. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

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1961a Lords of the Maya Realm. Expedition 4(1):14—21.

1961b Portraits of Women in Maya Art. Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, edited by Samuel K. Lothrop and others, 81–99. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1963–1964 Historical Data in the Inscriptions of Yaxchilán, Parts I and II. Estudios de Cultura Maya 3:149–167 and 4:177–201. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1970 On Two Inscriptions at Chichón Itzá. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 67, edited by William R. Ballard, Jr., 459—467. Cambridge.

1973 The Hand-Grasping-Fish and Associated Glyphs on Classic Maya Monuments. In Mesoamerican Writing Systems, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 165–178. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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1976 The People of the Cayman/Crocodile: Riparian Agriculture and the Origins of Aquatic Motifs in Ancient Maya Iconography. \n Aspects of Ancient Maya Civilization, edited by François-Auguste de Montequin, 1–26. Saint Paul: Hamline University.

1977 The Art and Archaeology of Hydraulic Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands. In Social Process in Maya Prehistory: Studies in Honour of Sir Eric Thompson, edited by Norman Hammond, 449–469. London: Academic Press.

1979 An Epistemological Pathology and the Collapse, or Why the Maya Kept the Short Count. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 63–71. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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1971 The Origin and Development of Lowland Classic Maya Civilization. American Antiquity 36(3):275–85.

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1986 A Gulf Coast-Maya Enclave at Teotihuacán. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.

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1950 Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya. Translated by Delia Goetz and S. G. Morley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

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1937 Uaxactún, Guatemala: Group E 1926–1931. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 477. Washington, D.C.

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1984 Hei hieroglyphs. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 263–286. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

1988 Epigraphy of the Southeast Zone in Relation to Other Parts of Mesoamerica. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 67–94. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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1983 Esculturas del las Estructuras 10L-2 y 4. In Introducción a la Arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 143–190. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

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1972 The Ritual Bundles of Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the symposium on “The Art of Latin America,” Tulane University, New Orleans. Copy in possession of author.

1979 An Iconographic Approach to the Identity of the Figures on the Piers of the Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IT edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 129–138. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

1983 The Temple of the Inscriptions. The Sculpture of Palenque, Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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1983 Functional Analysis and Social Process in Ceramics: The Pottery from Cerros, Belize. In Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, 105–142. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

n.d. Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, The Ceramics. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (forthcoming).

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1986 Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I, An Interim Report. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Robiscek, Francis, and Donald Hales

1981 The Maya Book of the Dead. The Ceramic Codex. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Museum. Distributed by the University of Oklahoma Press.

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1980 La secuencia cerámica de la región de Cobá, Quintana Roo. M.A. thesis, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, D.F.

Robles C., Fernando, and Anthony P. Andrews

1986 A Review and Synthesis of Recent Postclassic Archaeology in Northern Yucatán. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 53–98. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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1976 Pre-Columbian Maya Development of Utilitarian Lithic Industries: The Broad Perspective from Yucatán. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 41–53. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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1943 The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatán. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 548. Washington, D.C.

1957 The Political Geography of the Yucatán Maya. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 613. Washington, D.C.

1962 Literary Sources for the History of Mayapán. In Mayapán, Yucatan, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 619. Washington, D.C.

1965 Ritual of the Bacabs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1967 The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

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1935 The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454. Washington, D.C.

1952 Chichén Itzá, Architectural Notes and Plans. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub. 595. Washington, D.C.

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1955 Exploraciones en Palenque 1952. In Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia VT.82–110. México; Secretaria de Pública.

1973 El Templo de las Inscripciones. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Colección Científica, Arqueología 7. México.

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1986 Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Sabloff, Jeremy A., and Gordon R. Willey

1967 The Collapse of Maya Civilization in the Southern Lowlands: A Consideration of History and Process. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 23(4):311–336.

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1977 Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact. The Penn- svlvania State University Press Monograph Series on Kaminaljuyu. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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1983 Obsidian Trade and Teotihuacán Influence in Mesoamerica. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 69–124. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Sato, Etsuo

1987 Resultados preliminares del análisis de la cerámica en el Valle de La Venta, La Entrada. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

Scarborough, Vernon L.

1983 A Late Preclassic Water System. American Antiquity 48:720–744.

1986 Drainage Canal and Raised Field Excavations. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1, An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 75–87. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Scarborough, V. L., B. Mitchum, H. S. Carr, and D. A. Freidel

1982 Two Late Preclassic Ballcourts at the Lowland Maya Center of Cerros, Northern Belize. Journal of Field Archaeology 9:21–34.

Schele, Linda

1976 Accession Iconography of Chan-Bahlum in the Group of the Cross at Palenque. The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part III. Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 9–34. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.

1979 Genealogical Documentation in the Tri-Figure Panels at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol. IV, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 41–70. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.

1981 Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1982 Maya Glyphs: The Verbs. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1983a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by E. P. Benson, 7–48. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1983b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1984a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by Elizabeth Boone, 7–49. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

1984b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1985a Balan-Ahau: A Possible Reading of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a Title at Palenque. Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Tol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 59–65. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1985b Some Suggested Readings of the Event and Office of Heir-Designate at Palenque. Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, 287–307. Albany: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.

1985c The Hauberg Stela: Bloodletting and the Mythos of Classic Maya Rulership. In Fifth Palenque Round Table 1983, Fol. VII. gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 135–151. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1986a Architectural Development and Political History at Palenque. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 110–138. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.

1986b The Founders of Lineages at Copan and Other Maya Sites. Copán Note 8. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies. University of Texas.

1986d Yax-K’uk’-Mo’ at Copán: Lineage Founders and Dynasty at Ancient Maya Cities. Copón Note 8. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987a A Possible Death Date for Smoke-Imix-God K. Copón Note 26. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987b Stela I and the Founding of the City of Copán. Copón Note 30. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987c The Reviewing Stand of Temple 11. Copón Note 32. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987d Notes on the Rio Amarillo Altars. Copón Note 37. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987e Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.

1987f New Data on the Paddlers from Copán Stela 7. Copón Note 29. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988a Altar F’ and the Structure 32. Copón Note 46. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988b The Xibalba Shuffle: A Dance After Death. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 294—317. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1989a A House Dedication on the Harvard Bench at Copán. Copón Note 51. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1989b The Numbered-Katun Titles of Yax-Pac. Copón Note 65. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1989c Some Further Thoughts on the Copán-Quiriguá Connection. Copón Note 67. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

n.d.a House Names and Dedication Rituals at Palenque. In Visions and Revisions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (in press).

n.d.b The Demotion of Chac-Zutz’: Lineage Compounds and Subsidiary Lords at Palenque. In the Sixth Round Table of Palenque, gen. ed., Merle Green Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).

n.d.c The Tlaloc Heresy: Cultural Interaction and Social History. A paper given at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

n.d.d Blood-letting: A Metaphor for “Child” in the Classic Maya Writing System. A manuscript prepared in 1980 for an anthology in honor of Floyd G. Lounsbury.

n.d.e Brotherhood in Ancient Maya Kingship. A paper presented at the SUNY, Albany, conference on “New Interpretation of Maya Writing and Iconography,” held October 21–22, 1989.

Schele, Linda, and David Freidel

n.d. The Courts of Creation: Ballcourts, Ballgames, and Portals to the Maya Other- world. In The Mesoamerican Ballgame, edited by David Wilcox and Vernon Scarborough. Tucson: University of Arizona Press (in press).

Schele, Linda, and Nikolai Grube

1987a The Brother of Yax-Pac. Copan Note 20. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1988 The Father of Smoke-Shell. Copón Note 39. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Schele, Linda, Nikolai Grube, and David Stuart

1989 The Date of Dedication of Ballcourt III at Copán. Copán Note 59. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Schei e, Linda, and Peter Mathews

n.d. Royal Visits Along the Usumacinta. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Schele, Linda, Peter Mathews, and Floyd Lounsbury

n.d. Parentage Expressions from Classic Maya Inscriptions. Manuscript dated 1983.

Schele, Linda, and Jeffrey H. Miller

1983 The Mirror, the Rabbit, and the Bundle: Accession Expressions from the Classic Maya Inscriptions. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller

1986 The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Schele, Linda, and David Stuart

1986a Te-tun as the Glyph for “Stela.” Copón Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986b The Chronology of Altar U. Copón Note 3. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c Paraphrase of the Text of Altar U. Copón Note 5. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

Schele, Linda, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, and Floyd Lounsbury

1989 A New Inscription from Temple 22a at Copán. Copán Note 57. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

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1904 Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 4(1). Cambridge.

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1911 Die Stuckfassade von Acanceh in Yucatán. In Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 47:1011–1025.

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1975 Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

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1988 Early Maya Kingship and Polities. A paper presented a the IV Texas Symposium, “Early Maya Hieroglyphic Writing and Symbols of Rulership: The Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence for Maya Kingship and Polities,” March 10, 1988. Austin: the University of Texas.

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1976 The Terminal Preclassic Lithic Industry of the Southeast Maya Highlands: A Component of the Proto-Classic Site-Unit Intrusions in the Lowlands? In Mava Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 55–69. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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1958 The Temple of the Red Stela. Expedition l(l):26–33.

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1973 First Annual Report of the Coxcatlan Project. Tehuacán Project Report No 3. Andover, Mass.: R. S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Phillips Academy.

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1950 Uaxactún, Guatemala: Excavations of 1931—1937. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 588. Washington, D.C.

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1980 Glyphic Evidence for Classic Maya Militarism. Belizean Studies 8(3):2-ll. Spjnden, Herbert J.

1913 A Study of Maya Art, Its Subject Matter and Historical Development. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, EL Cambridge.

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1985 Anthropology, Evolution, and “Scientific Creationism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 14:103–133.

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1841 Incidents of Travels in Central American, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Harper and Brothers, New York. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Stone, Andrea, Dorie Reents, and Robert Coeiman

1985 Genealogical Documentation of the Middle Classic Dynasty of Caracol, El Cayo, Belize. In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. FI, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 267–276. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Storey, Rebecca

1987 Mortalidad durante el Clásico Tardío en Copán y El Cajón. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureno, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

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1952 The Ball Courts at Copan. Contributions to American Anthropology and History 55:185–222. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Stuart, David

1984a Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. RES 7/8, 6–20.

1984b Epigraphic Evidence of Political Organization in the Usumacinta Drainage. Unpublished manuscript in possession of the authors.

1985a The Inscription on Four Shell Plaques from Piedras Negras, Guatemala. In The Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 175–184. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1985b A New Child-Father Relationship Glyph. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, 1 & 2, 7–8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1986a The Hieroglyphic Name of Altar U. Copan Note 4. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986b The Chronology of Stela 4 at Copán. Copán Note 12. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1986c The Classic Maya Social Structure: Titles, Rank, and Professions as Seen from the Inscriptions. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.

1986d The “Lu-bat” Glyph and its Bearing on the Primary Standard Sequence. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya,” a conference held in Guatemala City in August 1986.

1986e A Glyph for “Stone Incensario.” Copán Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

1987a Nuevas interpretaciones de la historia dinástica de Copán. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureño, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.

1987b Ten Phonetic Syllables. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 14. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

1988a Letter dated February 10, 1988, circulated to epigraphers on the ihtah and itz’in readings.

1988b Letter to author dated March 8, 1988, on the iknal/ichnal reading.

1988c Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 175–221. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

n.d. Kinship Terms in Mayan Inscriptions. A paper prepared for “The Language of Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.

Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, and Linda Schele

1989 A New Alternative for the Date of the Sepulturas Bench. Copan Note 61. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, Linda Schele, and Floyd Lounsbury

1989 Stela 63: A New Monument from Copán. Copán Note 56. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, David, and Stephen Houston

n.d. Classic Maya Place Names. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.

Stuart, David, and Linda Schele

1986a Yax-K’uk’-Mo’, the Founder of the Lineage of Copán. Copán Note 6. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

1986b Interim Report on the Hieroglyphic Stair of Structure 26. Copán Note 17. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Stuart, George

n.d. Search and Research: An Historical and Bibliographic Survey. In Ancient Maya Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press (in preparation).

Stuart, George, and Grant Jones

n.d. Can Ek and the Itzas: New Discovered Documentary Evidence. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in preparation).

Sugiyama, Saburo

1989 Burials Dedicated to the Old Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacán, México. American Antiquity 54(l):85–106.

Taladoire, Eric

1981 Les terrains de jeu de balle (mesoamérique et sud-oest des Etats-Unis). Etudes Mesoaméricaines Série 11:4, Mission Archaeologique et Ethnologique Française au Mexique.

Tambiah, Stanley J.

1977 The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 293:69–97.

Tate, Carolyn

1985 Las mujeres de la nobleza de Yaxchilán. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Internacional de Mayistes,” a conference held in Mexico, D.F.

1986a The Language of Symbols in the Ritual Environment at Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

1986b Summer Solstice Ceremonies Performed by Bird Jaguar III of Yaxchilán, Chiapas, Mexico. Estudios de Cultura Maya XVI:85–112. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

Taube, Karl

1985 The Classic Maya Maize God: A Reappraisal. In Fifth Palenque Round Table, 1983, Vol. VII, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 171–181. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

1988a A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel. Journal of Anthropomorphic Research 44-- 183–203.

1988b A Study of Classic Maya Scaffold Sacrifice. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 331–351. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

n.d. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Cult of Sacred War at Teotihuacán. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.

Tedlock, Dennis

1985 Popo! Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of God and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Thompson, J. Eric S.

1934 Sky Bearers, Colors and Directions in Maya and Mexican religion. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 436, Contribution 10. Washington, D.C.

1937 A New System for Deciphering Yucatecan Dates with Special Reference to Chichón Itzá. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 483, Contribution 22 Washington, D.C.

1938 The High Priest’s Grave. Chicago: Field Museum of Chicago.

1944 The Fish as a Maya Symbol for Counting. Theoretical Approaches to Problems No.2. Cambridge, Mass.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Division of Historical Research.

1950 Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 589. Washington, D.C.

1961 A Blood-Drawing Ceremony Painted on a Maya Vase. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1:13–20. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1962 A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1970a Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1970b The Bacabs: Their Portraits and Glyphs. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61 edited by William R. Bullard, Jr. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

1971 Maya Hieroglyhic Writing: An Introduction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

1977 The Hieroglyphic Texts of Las Monjas and Their Bearing on Building Activities. In Las Monjas by John Bolles. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Thompson, J. E. S., H. E. D. Pollock, and J. Charlot

1932 A Preliminary Study of the Ruins of Coba, Quintana Roo. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 424. Washington, D.C.

Tozzer, Al fred M.

1941 Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. XVIII. Reprinted with permission of the original publishers by Kraus Reprint Corporation. New York, 1966.

1957 Chichón Itzá and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporaneous Maya and Toltec. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, XI and XII. Cambridge.

Turner, B. L., II

1983 Comparison of Agrotechnologies in the Basin of Mexico and Central Maya Lowlands: Formative to the Classic Maya Collapse. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G.Miller, 13–47. Washington, D C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Turner, B. L., II, and Peter D. Harrison

1981 Prehistoric Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Pulltrouser Swamp, Northern Belize. Science 213:399–405.

Valdés, Juan Antonio

1987 Uaxactún: recientes investigaciones. Mexican 8(6):125–128.

1988 Los mascarones Preclássicos de Uaxactún: el caso del Grupo H. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphía Maya, 165–181. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.

Vlchek, David T., Silvia Garza de Gonzál ez, and Edward B. Kurjack

1978 Contemporary Farming and Ancient Maya Settlements: Some Disconcerting Evidence. In Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, edited by Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, 211–223. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Vogt, Evon Z.

1964 The Genetic Model and Maya Cultural Development. In Desarollo Cultural de los Mayas, edited by E. Z. Vogt and A. Ruz, 9–48. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

1976 Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

n.d. Indian Crosses and Scepters: The Results of Circumscribed Spanish-Indian Interactions in Mesoamerica. A paper presented at “Word and Deed: Interethnic Images and Responses in the New World,” a conference held in Trujillo, Spain, December 12–16, 1988.

Walker, Debra S.

n.d. A Context for Maya Ritual at Cerros, Belize. A paper presented at the Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Austin, Texas, March 21, 1986.

Wauchope, Robert

1938 Modern Maya Houses: A Study of Their Significance. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 502. Washington, D.C.

Webster, David

1976 Defensive Earthworks at Becan, Campeche, Mexico: Implications for Maya Warfare. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 41. New Orleans.

1977 Warfare and the Evolution of Maya Civilization. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 335–371. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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1985 Recent Settlement Survey in the Copán Valley, Copán, Honduras. Journal of New World Archaeology V(4):39–63.

Webster, David L., William L. Fash, and Elliot M. Abrams

1986 Excavaciones en el Conjunto 9N8: Patio A (Operación VIII). In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.

Willey, Gordon R.

1972 The Artifacts of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Tol. 64(1). Cambridge.

1974 The Classic Maya Hiatus: A Rehearsal for the Collapse? In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 417—130. London: Duckworth.

1978 Excavations at Scibal, Department of Peten, Guatemala, Number 1, Artifacts. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Vol. 14. Cambridge.

Willey, Gordon, and Richard Leventhal

1979 Prehistoric Settlement at Copán. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 75–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Williamson, Richard, Donna Stone, and Alfonso Morales

1989 Sacrifice and War Iconography in the Main Group, Copán, Honduras. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.

Wisdom, Charles

1940 The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

n.d. Materials on the Chorti Languages. Collection of Manuscripts of the Middle American Cultural Anthropology, Fifth Series, No. 20. Microfilm, University of Chicago.

Wren, Linea

n.d. Elite Interaction During the Terminal Classic Period of the Northern Maya Lowlands: Evidence from the Reliefs of the North Temple of the Great Ballcourt at Chichón Itzá. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, editors

1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Zavala, Lauro José

1951 Informe personal de exploraciones arqueológicas: segunda temporada 1950. An unpublished report provided by Alberto Ruz Lhull. </biblio>

Index

<biblio> agriculture. 39–40, 56, 62, 93–94, 255. 433–434. 439

at Copan, 321–322. 336, 488 raised-field, 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433

swidden, 39

ahau, 17, 20, 21, 45, 53–54, 57, 58,

115. 419, 423, 436 ahauob, see kings; nobility Ah-Bolon-Tun, king of Seibal. 387–389, 393, 505

Ah-Cacaw, king of Tikal. 184,

195–212, 413, 451. 461, 462–466 accession of, 208 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 202 Calakmul vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213 costumes worn by, 209–211 in dedication rituals, 197 203, 205, 206–211. 462–465

height of, 195. 198, 462 name glyph of, 462

ritual performances of, 202–203, 209 son of, 214. 466

stelae of, 204–205, 213, 486 tomb of, 205. 214. 466 war captives of, 205–206, 211, 212, 215, 457

altars, 386, 389, 506

at Caracol, 171, 173, 456, 464 at Copan, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337, 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 491–492, 493–194

Altun Ha, 159, 505

ancestor cartouches, 372, 393, 479, 503 ancestors, 26, 39, 57, 84, 153, 202–203, 207. 275, 307, 394, 395, 506 founding, 85, 87, 116, 140–141, 159–160, 222, 256–257, 271, 310–313, 431, 432, 470 as orchards, 217, 221 relics of, 135, 463 on stelae, 141, 441

Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–76, 101, 114–116, 124, 125. 142. 226, 243, 245, 425, 429, 434, 436, 454, 473

bailgame of, 74–75, 76. 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488

as kingship prototypes, 115–116, 211. 239, 316, 376, 488

symbols of, 114–115, 125, 245

Andrews, Anthony P., 498

Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, 495, 496

Argurcia, Ricardo. 490

armor, cotton, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502

astronomy, 73, 76, 78. 81, 98, 276. 425, 480

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@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-<div style="color:#000000;">{{clear}}
+#title A Forest of Kings
-[[Image:cover.jpg.png|center]]</div>
+#subtitle The untold story of the ancient Maya
+#author Linda Schele
+#date 1990
+#source <[[https://archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche][www.archive.org/details/forestofkingsunt0034sche]]>
+#lang en
+#pubdate 2025-10-25T12:03:08
+#topics Mayas, history, kings, rulers, half-finished error-correcting, anthropology, ritual, religion,
+#cover l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-1.jpg
+#notes Half the images still need cropping and adding, and there are likely some machine errors that still need fixing.
-== Table of Contents ==
+ Also by Linda Schele
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook1|Dedication and Acknowledgments]]</div>
+<center>
+Maya Glyphs: The Verbs (1982)
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook3|Introduction]]</div>
+<br>
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook4|Chapter 1: Defining Anarchism]]</div>
+The Blood of Kings:
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook5|Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework]]</div>
+Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986)
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook6|Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision]]</div>
+with Mary Ellen Miller
+</center>
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook7|Chapter 4: Anarchist Strategy]]</div>
+ Title Page | ~~
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook8|Chapter 5: Anarchism and State Socialism]]</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-37.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook9|Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism]]</div>
+<center>
+A
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook10|Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism]]</div>
+Forest
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook11|Chapter 8: The History of Syndicalist Anarchism]]</div>
+of
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook12|Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism]]</div>
+Kings
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook13|Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism: From Bakunin to the Platform]]</div>
+------
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook14|Chapter 11: Conclusion]]</div>
+The Untold Story of
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook15|Bibliography]]</div>
+the Ancient Maya
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook16|Copyright]]</div><div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|MeansandEndsTheRevolution}} {{anchor|MeansandEndsTheRevolution1}} '''Means and Ends'''</div>
+-------
-<div style="text-align:center;">The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States</div>
+Linda Schele
-<div style="text-align:center;">''by''</div>
+and
-<div style="text-align:center;">ZOE BAKER</div>
+David Freidel
-<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+<br>
-[[Image:AKPressBWLogo_NoCities_half-inch.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook1}} {{anchor|DedicationandAcknowledgments}} Dedication and Acknowledgments ==
+Color photographs
-This book is dedicated to the vast number of anarchist workers whose names do not appear in history books but who nonetheless played a vital role in the struggle for universal human emancipation.
+by Justin Kerr
-This work, which began as a PhD thesis submitted to Loughborough University, greatly benefited from feedback provided by Ian Fraser, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Paul Raekstad, Jesse Cohn, Shawn P. Wilbur, Mark Leier, David Berry, Kenyon Zimmer, Danny Evans, James Yeoman, Ruth Kinna, and Constance Bantman. Thanks to my editor Charles Weigl for making the book much nicer to read. Any errors are my responsibility.
+<br>
-<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.127cm;margin-right:0.127cm;">“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. . . . The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” </div>
+WILLIAM MORROW
-<div style="text-align:center;">''—''karl marx,'' theses on feuerbach ''(1845)</div>
+AND COMPANY, INC.
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook3}} {{anchor|IntroductionThehistoryofc}} Introduction ==
+New York
+</center>
-The history of capitalism and the state is the history of attempts to abolish them and establish a free society without domination and exploitation. Revolutionary workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that another world was possible. It is still possible today. One of the main social movements that attempted to overthrow capitalism and the state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was anarchism. Members of the historical anarchist movement not only attempted to change the world but also produced an elaborate body of ideas that guided their actions. This book is concerned with explaining what their ideas were. Historians sometimes unearth old ideas from the past because they are an interesting way of gaining insight into a different time and place. This is not my principal motivation. I wrote this book because I want to live in a society in which everyone is free. I am convinced that, if we are to achieve this goal, it is important to know the history of previous attempts to do so. My hope is that, through learning about how workers in the past sought to emancipate themselves, workers alive today can learn valuable lessons and develop new ideas that build on the ideas of previous generations.
+ Copyright | ~~
-How to define anarchism is a contentious topic and will be discussed in depth in chapter 1. For the purposes of this book, it will be understood as a form of revolutionary antistate socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the International Workingmen’s Association between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International between 1872 and 1878. During and after its birth as a social movement, it spread rapidly to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who were agnostic about the nature of the future society but advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I do not claim that this is the one true form of anarchism. It is only the kind of anarchism I am focusing on.
+<center>
+Copyright © 1990 by Linda Scheie and David Freidel
-Anarchism so understood is one of the largest movements in the history of socialism. According to the historian Benedict Anderson, “international anarchism . . . was the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism” during the late nineteenth century.[[#1BenedictAndersonTheAgeof|1]] Even the hostile Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is forced to concede that, between 1905 and 1914, “the main body of Marxists” belonged to increasingly reformist social-democratic political parties while “the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism.”[[#2EricHobsbawmRevolutionarie|2]] The vast amount of theory that the anarchist movement produced can be broken down into five main elements:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A theoretical framework for thinking about humans, society, and social change.</div>
+<br>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A set of ethical principles that form the value system of anarchism.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">An analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A vision of alternative social relations and structures that are achievable and would actually promote these ethical principles.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A series of strategies (which are consistent with the ethical principles) for abolishing existing social relations and structures in favor of the proposed alternative social relations and structures.</div>
+All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any<br> form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,<br> recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without<br> permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to<br> Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue<br> of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.
+<br>
-Fully explaining each aspect of anarchist theory, and how these ideas changed over time and varied around the world, goes far beyond the scope of what a single book can hope to achieve. The aim of this book is narrower. I shall rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism within Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1939. It is important to note that this exclusive focus on one part of the world is an artificial construction. The real historical anarchist movement was constituted by transnational networks that operated at a global scale and enabled ideas and people to flow between continents. The movements in different countries were so interconnected that a complete history of anarchism in Europe and the United States necessarily includes the history of anarchism in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania—and vice versa. The true history of anarchism can only be written as a global history. My book is a contribution toward this global history but only covers a small fragment of it.[[#3DavidBerryandConstanceBan|3]]
+It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and<br> affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to<br> print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end.
-In order to rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism, it is necessary to explain the other four main elements of anarchist theory—theoretical framework, value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society—in depth. This is because what anarchists thought about strategy can only be understood within the context of anarchist theory as a whole. Although anarchists developed revolutionary strategies to abolish a variety of different oppressive structures, I shall primarily focus on their strategies to abolish capitalism and the state since this is what most anarchist texts discuss. I shall, when it is relevant, include anarchist views on how to abolish patriarchy, but it should be kept in mind that anarchist men, who were the majority of published anarchist authors, did not give this topic sufficient attention. When explaining anarchist ideas, I will write in the past tense because, for the purposes of this book, I am focused on anarchism during one time period. Many of the ideas I describe are still believed by anarchists today and are not exclusive to the past, such as a commitment to anticapitalism.
+<br>
-I shall throughout this book refer extensively to, and quote from, a number of major anarchist authors who lived in Europe or the United States between 1868 and 1939. This includes, but is not limited to, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), James Guillaume (1844–1916), Carlo Cafiero (1846–1892), Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Émile Pouget (1860–1931), Ricardo Mella (1861–1925), Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), Max Baginski (1864–1943), Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912),[[#4DeCleyrewasinitiallyanin|4]] Emma Goldman (1869–1940), Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), and Charlotte Wilson (1854–1944). I shall supplement the quotations from major anarchist authors with quotations from sources collectively produced by the movement. These will include programs, congress resolutions, and manifestos of formal organizations or affinity groups. In order to maintain a consistent style, all quotes are rendered using American-English spelling.
+Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data<br> Scheie. Linda.
-A key factor determining which authors I have chosen to include within this book is the fact that I can only read English. This is a significant limitation given that the majority of anarchist primary sources within Europe and the United States were originally written in languages other than English—mainly French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish—and have yet to be translated.[[#5FedericoFerrettiAnarchyan|5]] As a result, there are authors who were historically important but whose ideas I cannot examine in any depth due to lacking access to them, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Saul Yanovsky or the Dutch anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis. Even with authors who have been translated into English, such as Reclus, I often only have access to a small amount of their total output. It should therefore be kept in mind that generalizations I make about anarchism are based on the primary sources available in English, and these represent a small fragment of the total texts produced by the historical anarchist movement.
+A forest of kings : the untold story of the ancient Maya / Linda Scheie and<br> David Freidel.
-I shall be quoting anarchist authors at length, rather than only rephrasing their ideas in my own words, because, in order to understand what anarchists thought historically, a modern reader must understand them on their own terms and so through their own language and exact ways of conceptualizing or expressing their ideas. Doing so will not only help ensure that my explanation of anarchist theory corresponds to what anarchists actually thought, but will also bring many obscure and not well-known passages to the reader’s attention. Although I shall sometimes have to, for the sake of clarity and consistent terminology, introduce new language when summarizing anarchist ideas in my own words, this shall only ever represent a change in language and not a change in ideas. I shall, in addition, attempt to use the same language as historical anarchists as much as possible. Throughout this book, I shall not be arguing that anarchist theory was correct or interjecting with my own personal views on which anarchist authors or ideas were best. I will instead only be concerned with establishing and explaining what anarchist authors themselves thought.
+p. cm.
-Through quoting these anarchist authors, I shall be rationally reconstructing the ideas of different thinkers into a coherent system of thought. A rational reconstruction is a reorganization of a set of ideas that highlights the logical relations between its different elements.[[#6MichaelBeaneyAnalyticPhi|6]] A rational reconstruction of a political theory, in other words, not only explains what its exponents claim about various topics, such as how they think about society or the forms of action they advocate to change society. A rational reconstruction also makes the logical connections between the different elements of a political theory explicit, such as how their social theory underpins their choice of tactics. It is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in this manner for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of anarchist texts are short articles, speeches, or pamphlets. Even texts that were published as books are often compilations of previously published articles. Given this, an understanding of what an anarchist author thought can only be reached through assembling the many different ideas they espoused in different places. Bakunin, for example, wrote several sentences and paragraphs about freedom within texts concerned with a more general topic, but did not write an extended essay or book devoted solely to the subject of freedom. In order to establish what Bakunin thought about freedom, one must assemble a collection of short sentences and paragraphs made by him in several different texts. Even when an anarchist author did write about a topic in more detail, it is still necessary to combine different texts together because the positions advocated in one short article can be misunderstood or misrepresented when not connected to the claims made in other short articles. The ideas of the anarchist movement can likewise only be understood by assembling the ideas of a large number of different authors.
+Includes bibliograpical references (p. ).<br> ISBN 0-688-07456-1
-Second, a key reason why anarchist authors wrote political theory was that they aimed to spread revolutionary ideas to workers and inspire them to rise up against their oppressors. This led anarchists to write in a style that was accessible to a wide readership, but could also make their arguments appear simpler than they actually were. For example, on numerous occasions anarchist authors do not explicitly lay out the conceptual connections between their different beliefs. Even when anarchist authors do claim that certain ideas are connected, they do not always explain why this is the case or only explain briefly. Given this, it is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in order to build up the interconnected conceptual system that anarchist authors often left implicit or did not explain in sufficient depth.
+. Mayas—Kings and rulers. 2. Mayas—History. I. Freidel.<br> David A. II. Title
-The technique of rational reconstruction is usually applied to explaining the ideas of a single individual author, such as Marx or Descartes. Such efforts must be sensitive to the fact that an individual author changed their mind or developed their ideas over time. It would therefore be a mistake to unthinkingly place ideas from one period of their life alongside ideas from another period simply because they were written by the same person. This issue becomes greater when rationally reconstructing the ideas of an international social movement over several decades. Assembling together the ideas of a large number of different authors is straightforward when explaining ideas that all anarchists advocated, such as the abolition of capitalism and the state, but is more complicated when examining areas where anarchists disagreed with one another, an idea significantly changed over time, or a whole new idea emerged during a specific historical moment and did not exist prior to this. A rational reconstruction of the ideas of anarchism as a social movement must be sensitive to the fact that anarchist theory was not a single unchanging monolith, but a cluster of different tendencies in dialogue and debate with one another.
+F1435.3.K55S34 1990 90–5809
-While this study will utilize the conceptual rigor of philosophy to summarize the arguments of anarchist authors, it will not examine these ideas in a historically anachronistic manner as if they existed outside of time and space. To truly understand the political theory of historical anarchism it is necessary to understand what these authors intended to mean and communicate to their audiences and how their texts were, independently of these authorial intentions, understood by readers at the time. This requires locating texts within a specific linguistic context—inherited assumptions from previous thinkers, ongoing debates and discussions, how certain words were used at the time, etc.—and the wider social, economic, and political world that these ideas were produced within and in reaction to—the social relations through which the production and consumption of goods were organized, what kinds of domination the ruling classes engaged in, how the oppressed classes resisted and struggled against their rulers, and so on.[[#7QuentinSkinnerMeaningand|7]]
+.01—dc20 CIP
-A comprehensive study of anarchism that fully contextualizes its ideas within their historical moment goes far beyond the scope of this book. I shall, instead, be focusing on a single main context: the history of the anarchist movement itself. This will include not only the theoretical debates within the movement, but also its various actual attempts at overthrowing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. This is because the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was articulated by members of a social movement in order to be put into action. It is furthermore the case that the ideas different anarchist authors proposed were developed in response to the ongoing experiences of class struggle, such as the various actions of different working-class social movements, state repression of anarchist movements, and debates within anarchist organizations about how to act in a specific moment. In order to include this context, I shall combine a detailed textual interpretation of primary sources available in English with the secondary literature on the history of different anarchist movements in Europe and the United States.
+Printed in the United States of America
-There are three limitations to this approach. First, the product of such a rational reconstruction will not correspond precisely to each individual author’s viewpoint and will contain propositions that some of the authors I cite may have objected to, because they disagreed with other anarchists on the topic. To minimize this issue, I shall, when it is relevant, point out when a view was distinct to a specific author and when there are important exceptions to a generalization.
+First Edition
-Second, this rational reconstruction will not exactly correspond to what the workers who composed the bulk of the anarchist movement thought. These workers were, after all, not automatons who blindly repeated word for word the ideas expressed by the major authors of anarchism. They had thoughts of their own about what anarchism was, and about what anarchists should do. They may have, in addition to this, disagreed with my interpretation of the authors I cite, not noticed features of these texts that I have, noticed features that I have failed to, and in general gained different ideas from reading these texts than I have. It is furthermore the case that I will have read texts that individual workers within the movement were unfamiliar with, and they would have read, or if they were illiterate had read to them, texts that I am unfamiliar with.
+5 6 7 8 9 10
-It is difficult to find out what these anarchists thought because the majority of anarchists were not published authors and instead developed ideas through face-to-face conversations with their comrades. German anarchists in New York, to give one example, would discuss politics in a wide variety of locations, ranging from anarchist-run beer halls to singing societies to family picnics in the park.[[#8TomGoyensBeerandRevoluti|8]] The contents of these conversations have unfortunately been largely lost when those who experienced and remembered them died, since only a tiny fraction of them were ever recorded in writing. Given this, it should be kept in mind that it is often unclear whether a major anarchist author is expressing ideas that they themselves came up with or is merely repeating ideas that were developed through countless face-to-face discussions between anarchist workers. Influential anarchist authors themselves routinely pointed out that they were repeating ideas collectively developed within working-class social movements. To give one example, Malatesta wrote in 1899 that “the anarchist socialist program is the fruit of collective development which, even ignoring its forerunners, lasted several decades, and which no one individual could claim to have authored.”[[#9ErricoMalatestaTowardsAna|9]]
+<sub>BOOK DESIGN BY RICHARD ORIOLO</sub>
+</center>
-Third, my reconstruction of anarchist political theory draws upon a small number of women authors. This is because, although large numbers of women played a significant role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anarchist movement, most published anarchist authors appear to have been men.[[#10Fordiscussionsofwomensp|10]] Of those anarchist authors who were women, many of them cannot be included in my rational reconstruction since either they lived outside of Europe and the United States, such as the Chinese anarchist He-Yin Zhen, or they have not been translated into English, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist and doctor Katherina Yevzerov.[[#11LydiaHLiuRebeccaEKar|11]] Nor can my reconstruction, due to its focus on texts, include the perspectives of those women who were active within the anarchist movement but did not (as far as I am aware) have their ideas published by the anarchist press. This includes such individuals as the militant Concha Pérez, who took up arms in the Spanish revolution of 1936 and fought against fascists in Barcelona and on the Aragon Front.[[#12AckelsbergFreeWomen939|12]]
+ Credits for Illustrations
-Despite these shortcomings, a rational reconstruction of the ideas that can be found in the major theorists of anarchism who lived in Europe and the United States will provide a useful synthesis for thinking about the ideas that were prominent within the anarchist movement during the period I am examining. It should be kept in mind throughout that this reconstruction is primarily based on sources written by a small list of people who, despite exerting great influence on the movement, should not be conflated with the movement as a whole. Given this, when I write that “anarchists thought x” or “anarchism holds that y,” I am not committing myself to the strong position that every person within the anarchist movement held these views, since this is not something I could possibly know. I am instead using these phrases as shorthand for the more modest claim that the major anarchist authors, newspapers, and programs of organizations I cite did adhere to these views.
+<biblio>
+FIGS. 5:12, 5:13, 5:14, 5:15, 5:16, 5:17, 5:18 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions.</em> Volume 2, Part 1, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1675 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-The central argument of this book is that the reasons anarchists gave for supporting or opposing particular strategies were grounded in a theoretical framework—the theory of practice—which maintained that, as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves. This theoretical framework was the foundation for the anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries proposed to achieve social change had to be constituted by forms of activity that would develop people into the kinds of individuals who were capable of, and were driven to, (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society.
+FIGS. 5:8b-e, 5:11 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 2, Part 2, Naranjo, Chunhuitz, Xunantunich. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-The structure of this book is as follows. In chapter 1, I define anarchism in depth. In chapter 2, I explain anarchism’s theoretical framework—the theory of practice. With this in place, I rationally reconstruct anarchism’s value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society in chapter 3. The core ideas on strategy that were in general shared by the anarchist movement are described in chapter 4. Chapter 5 reconstructs the anarchist critique of state socialism. Chapters 6 and 7 provide an overview of the two main schools of anarchist strategy: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Chapters 8 and 9 expand the discussion of mass anarchism by explaining the history, theory, and practice of one of its main forms: syndicalist anarchism, which is a kind of revolutionary trade unionism. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of mass anarchism by describing the history and theory of organizational dualism, which was the idea that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and smaller organizations composed exclusively of anarchists. Chapter 11 summarizes the main ideas of anarchist political theory and reaffirms my central argument that the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was grounded in the theory of practice.
+FIG. 4:5 Eric Von Euw and Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 2, Xultún, La Honradez, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-[[#1|1]]. Benedict Anderson, ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination'' (London: Verso 2013), 54.
+FIGS. 4:13, 4:15, 4:20 Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 3, Uaxactun. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#2|2]]. Eric Hobsbawm, ''Revolutionaries ''(London: Phoenix, 1994), 61.</div>
+FIGS. 7:1, 7:2, 7:9b-c, 7:10, 7:11, 7:12, 7:13 (map only), 7:14, 7:15, 7:16, 7:20 Ian Graham and Eric Von Euw. <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 1, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-[[#3|3]]. David Berry and Constance Bantman, eds., ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational'' (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Constance Bantman and Bert Altena, eds., ''Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017); Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
+FIGS. 2:14, 7:5b,d,f, 7:6a,c-d. 7:13a-c, 7:15, 7:17, 7:18 Ian Graham. <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 2, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#4|4]]. De Cleyre was initially an individualist anarchist and mutualist but came to reject this position during the 1890s. Between 1897 and 1900, she came to identify as an anarchist without adjectives who was agnostic about the nature of the future society, while advocating the same strategies as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I shall only be including texts by her from this later period. See “Vision of an Alternative Society” in chapter 3 for a discussion of this view and the supporting references.</div>
+FIGS. 7:4 (Lintel 23 only), 7:7, 7:9a Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 3, Part 3, Yaxchilán. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#5|5]]. Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 61–62; Kenyon Zimmer, “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language,” ''American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism'' 29, no. 1 (2019): 10–11.</div>
+FIG. 10:5 Ian Graham, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 2, Part 3, Ixkún, Ucanal, Ixtutz, Naranjo. Peabody Museum Press. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#6|6]]. Michael Beaney, “Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction,” in ''The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy'', ed. Erich H. Reck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 253.</div>
+FIG. 10:8b Eric Von Euw, <em>Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,</em> Volume 5, Part 1, Xultún. Peabodx Museum Press. Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#7|7]]. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in ''Visions of Politics'','' ''vol. 1,'' Regarding Method ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82–87; Skinner, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” in ''Visions'', 110–14; Skinner, ''The Foundations of Modern Political Thought'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Renaissance'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), x–xiv; Ellen Meiksins Wood, ''Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages'' (London: Verso, 2011), 7–16.</div>
+FIG. 10:12a Samuel Lothrop, Metals from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itza, Yucatán. <em>Memoirs of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.</em> Volume 10, Number 2. Copyright © 1952 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
-[[#8|8]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''34–51, 168–82.
+FIGS. 10:5, 10:6b Ian Graham. Archaeological Explorations in El Petén, Guatemala. <em>Middle American Research Institution, Tulane University,</em> Publication 33
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#9|9]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''65.</div>
+FIG. 5:4 (Caracol Altar 21) Courtesy of Arlen and Diane Chase; and Stephen Houston
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#10|10]]. For discussions of women’s participation in historical anarchist movements see David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''313–17; Jennifer Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City'','' 1880–1945 ''(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 139–75; Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005); Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''155–8; Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 43–47, 66–70; Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'', 91–111.</div>
+FIG. 5:21 Courtesy of Peter Harrison
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#11|11]]. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., ''The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 21, 44.</div>
+FIGS. 6:3, 6:5. 6:8, 10:7a Courtesy of Merle Greene Robertson
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#12|12]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 93–95.</div>
+FIG. 7:6 Courtesy of Carolyn Tate
-== {{anchor|Chapter1DefiningAnarchism}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook4}} {{anchor|Chapter1DefiningAnarchism1}} Chapter 1: Defining Anarchism ==
+FIGS. 9:2, 9:3 Courtesy of Justin Kerr
-Overviews of anarchism often begin by claiming that it is incredibly broad, incoherent, and inherently difficult to define.[[#1ForexamplePeterMarshallD|1]] Being difficult to define is not a unique feature of anarchism. It is a general problem facing the intellectual historian because, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “only something which has no history can be defined.”[[#2FriedrichNietzscheOntheG|2]] That is to say, the reason why one can define hydrogen in terms of essential and unchanging necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is that it lies outside of history and so does not vary within and between human societies. What hydrogen is does not change between tenth-century France and twentieth-century Alaska. This remains true even though how humans have understood or thought about hydrogen has changed over time. But the same is not true of things that are historical in the sense of being inherently connected to and concerned with human activity, such as Christianity or anarchism.
+FIG. 10:9 Courtesy of Peter Mathews
-Such historical entities have a beginning and boundaries that distinguish them from other parts of human existence, but the elements that compose them nonetheless change over time. Christianity, for example, emerged during the first century CE and was characterized by a set of beliefs and practices that made it different from other religions. It was subsequently modified numerous times during its history, such as by the invention of Catholicism and Protestantism. Historical entities are fluid and ever-changing because they are produced by and are about humans who are themselves constantly changing as they engage in activity within constantly evolving social structures. At any given moment in history, people will think and act differently in response to the same wider context. The consequence of this is that, as people articulate distinct perspectives, argue with one another, and act to ensure that their understanding remains dominant or becomes so, they also produce competing and contradictory versions of the same historically produced entity. Over time, this process of contestation causes the widespread version of a historically produced entity to change as some elements arise to prominence or fade into obscurity, whole new elements are added, and other elements are removed. There is no one true version of a historically produced entity. Instead, there is only what elements do or do not compose it according to different individuals or groups of people at the various stages of its development.
+FIG. 10:11 Courtesy of Ruth Krochock
-This should not be mistaken for the claim that there are no characteristics that distinguish one historically produced entity from another. Christianity may be a constellation of disparate elements that changes over time, but it is nonetheless distinct from the religion of the Aztecs. Nor does Nietzsche’s view entail that all definitions of a historical entity are equally good and cannot be better or worse than another definition. A person who defined Christianity as a religion that believes in a single God would be failing to construct a useful definition, because it includes belief systems that should be excluded, such as other monotheistic religions like Islam, and fails to specify the distinct elements that compose Christianity historically and within modern society, such as the belief that Jesus was resurrected.
+All drawings in Chapter 8 are published courtesy of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia
+</biblio>
-Nietzsche’s views on historically produced entities have several consequences for thinking about how to define anarchism. Although anarchism will have an origin and some conceptual boundaries that have historically demarcated it from other ideologies, there will not be a single, unified body of thought called ''anarchism''. At a given historical moment, there will be a series of distinct individuals or groups of people who all happen to call themselves anarchists and are in a process of contestation with one another over what anarchism means or should mean. Since what anarchism means is historically variable, the best we can expect from a definition is that it provides a snapshot of how specific individuals or groups of people understood anarchism at a given moment of its historical development. Such a definition may be rendered incomplete by unexpected developments within anarchism, such as whole new elements arising or previously important elements fading into obscurity. The point is not to establish what anarchism truly means once and for all, but to construct a definition of anarchism that is useful for investigating a particular historical period, topic, or type of anarchism.
+ This Book is Dedicated to
-There are two main views on what anarchism is. Transhistoricists generally define anarchism as referring to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.[[#3MarshallDemandingtheImpos|3]] In response to this way of thinking about anarchism, historicists have argued that anarchism should instead be defined as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and rapidly spread, during and after its birth as a social movement, to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows.[[#4MarieFlemingTheAnarchist|4]]
+<center>
+Floyd Lounsbury
-The disagreement over when to date the birth of anarchism partly stems from the fact that how modern authors think about the history of anarchism has been shaped by the earliest historiographies of anarchism, which were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by members of the anarchist movement. These anarchists, like modern historians of anarchism, disagreed with one another about how anarchism should be defined and when anarchism first emerged. Some authors defined anarchism transhistorically. Peter Kropotkin, for example, remarked in 1913 that “there have always been anarchists and statists” and claimed to have found “anarchist ideas among the philosophers of antiquity, notably in Lao Tzu in China and in some of the earliest Greek philosophers.”[[#5PeterKropotkinModernScien|5]] This view was shared by Rudolf Rocker, who wrote in 1938 that anarchists advocate the abolition of “all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of free humanity” and that, given this, “anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history.”[[#6RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndic|6]]
+<em>and</em>
-Other anarchists adopted a historicist account of anarchism in which it referred exclusively to a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the oppression of capitalism and the state. In 1884, Charlotte Wilson claimed that “Anarchism is a new faith” and “the name assumed by a certain school of socialists” who advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state.[[#7CharlotteWilsonAnarchistE|7]] Decades later, Errico Malatesta wrote in 1925 that there was a distinction between “Anarchy,” which is a cooperative society without oppression and exploitation, and “Anarchism,” which “is the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[[#8ErricoMalatestaTheAnarchi|8]] The latter “was born” when people “sought to overthrow” both “capitalistic property and the State” and therefore did not exist prior to this.[[#9ErricoMalatestaLifeandId|9]]
+Gordon Willey
+</center>
-Importantly, this was not an exclusively European perspective. The Chinese anarchist Li Yaotang, who wrote under the pen name Ba Jin, argued in 1927 that “Anarchism is a product of the mass movement . . . not an idle dream that transcends time. It could not have emerged before the Industrial Revolution, and . . . the French revolution.”[[#10BaJinAnarchismandtheQ|10]] To him, it shared nothing with Daoism and the ideas of Lao Tzu. The Japanese anarchist Kubo Yuzuru likewise wrote in 1928 that “Anarchism originated from the fact of the struggle of the workers. Without that, there would be no anarchism.”[[#11KuboYuzuruOnClassStrug|11]]
+ Acknowledgments
-Given my commitment to Nietzsche’s way of thinking about definitions, I shall be taking a historicist approach and defining anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. It is of course the case that the idea of a free stateless society existed before people in nineteenth-century Europe decided to start calling themselves anarchists. The Chinese Daoist Bao Jingyan argued in the third<sup> </sup>century that the state was created by the strong to oppress the weak, and became the means through which the wealthy reproduced the servitude of the poor. He thought that prior to the rise of states there existed a free, harmonious society with “neither lord nor subject” and claimed that it would be better if the state ceased to exist. Although his one surviving text proposed no strategies to achieve this goal, he did believe that the poor would revolt against the wealthy.[[#12RappDaoismandAnarchism|12]] Even within Europe one can point to earlier authors who advocated the abolition of the state and property in favor of a free society based on communal ownership, such as the radical Christian Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth century.[[#13GerrardWinstanleyTheLaw|13]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-38.jpg 70f]]
-The history of anti-statist thought includes not only a long list of dead authors, but also the large numbers of people who have lived in, or do live in, stateless societies around the world. This is something that historical anarchists were themselves aware of.[[#14EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|14]] The available anthropological evidence indicates that these people do not live in stateless societies by chance. They have, just like people who live under states, developed political philosophies about the kind of society they want to live in, and intentionally implemented these ideas throughout the course of their lives. They are aware that someone could establish themselves as ruler of the group and have, within the limits established by their ecological and social context, consciously and deliberately created social structures to prevent this from happening. This generally goes alongside an awareness of nearby societies with states. A striking illustration of this point is that, on numerous occasions, stateless societies have been created by people who have deliberately fled processes of state formation or expansion, such as stateless societies in the uplands of Southeast Asia.[[#15ChristopherBoehmHierarchy|15]]
+We wish to acknowledge the many people who helped us with the ideas presented in <em>A Forest of Kings</em> and contributed to its writing and production. First and foremost is Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor and vice-president of William Morrow and Company. When she called Linda Scheie in the spring of 1986 about writing a book on the Maya for Morrow, she opened a world to us we never imagined we would or could know. She saw potential in our ideas and believed we could learn how to write for a larger audience. Throughout the process of writing, she has always been sensitive to our fears and trepidations, enthusiastic about how the work was going, merciless in breaking through the limits in our imagination, and encouraging in all things. In short, she saw something in us we did not know was there, and without her exuberant encouragement and support, we might not have tried a book of this scope or ambition. We wish to thank her also for finding Joy Parker, the third and unseen hand in this book. Much of its eloquence and readability comes from her subtle touch.
-Members of stateless societies have developed a variety of complex social relations and arrangements in order to realize their conscious political goals and ethical values. These include: making collective decisions through consensus, between all involved; ensuring that leaders lack the power to impose decisions on others through coercion and must instead persuade people to act in a certain way, through oratory skill alone; and utilizing various forms of social sanction to respond to behavior that threatens the freedom or equality of the group, such as bullying, being greedy, issuing orders, taking on airs of superiority, engaging in acts of physical violence, and so on. These social sanctions include, but are not limited to, criticism, gossiping, public ridicule, ignoring what they say, ostracism, expulsion from the group, and even, in some extreme cases, execution.[[#16BoehmHierarchyintheFore|16]]
+The manuscript was written using <em>Nota Bene</em> by Dragonfly Software as the primary word processor. For those interested in how collaborative writing and research worked between us, it varied from chapter to chapter, but it always required goodwill and respect from all the participants. A few of the chapters, in their first draft versions, were written sitting together in front of the computer; but most of the time, one of us structured the first draft alone and then mailed it on disk to the other, who rewrote, adapted, added, or deleted material at will in a process we called “massaging the text.” The text went back and forth between both authors until each chapter became a true fusion of our different viewpoints and specialities.
-The many different forms of stateless societies that have existed, and continue to exist, around the world should not be romanticized and viewed as utopias. Even societies without a state or a ruling class can contain other kinds of oppressive social relations, such as the oppression of children by adults or women by men. Nor should the stateless societies that anthropologists have studied be viewed as straightforward windows into the past or living fossils of what human life was like prior to the emergence of states. The members of these societies do not live in the paleolithic or the neolithic but the modern world. Their social relations have been shaped by, and are part of, modern history, including the history of colonialism.[[#17RobertLKellyTheLifeway|17]] Matters are only made more complicated by the fact that a significant number of stateless societies move between very different forms of social organization on a seasonal basis.[[#18DavidGraeberandDavidWeng|18]]
+Joy Parker, a professional writer who knew nothing about the Maya before she began, was commissioned to help us make the thick academese of the first version readable to a nonacademic audience. To begin her task, she flew to Austin to meet us and to tape three days of questions, answers, and just talking about the Maya world. Using these tapes, she tore into our text, learning <em>Note Bene</em> and how to use a computer as she went. She reworked each chapter in turn, clarifying the prose, cutting redundancy, and to our surprise, often asking for more detail to the text.
-In claiming that “anarchism” refers to a form of anti-state socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, I am not denying the existence of other political philosophies that have advocated a free, stateless society prior to, in parallel with, or after the emergence of anarchism. Although this book aims to demonstrate the intellectual sophistication of historical anarchist political theory, I also believe that modern anarchism can greatly improve through engaging with these other political traditions and learning valuable insights and lessons from them. My point is only that the term “anarchism” should not be used to refer to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.
+The idea of including vignettes in the book was inspired by Gordon Willey. At a School of American Research seminar on Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya civilization held in Santa Fe in 1982, Professor Willey entertained the group with a wonderful fictional account of the last days of the royal court at Seibal. The vignette was taken by Jeremy A. Sabloff and David Freidel and prepared as a little in-house publication for distribution at Professor Willey’s retirement celebration. Neither Professor Willey’s career nor the idea of vignettes stopped there. Jeremy Sabloff has pursued the vignette concept in subsequent publications and so have we. The original draft of <em>A Forest of Kings</em> had one vignette in it—and Joy asked for more ... and more ... and more. To our astonishment, they worked and we became as enthusiastic about them as she.
-This is motivated by two main reasons. First, throughout the history of socialism, multiple theorists and social movements have advocated the long-term goal of abolishing the state and all systems of class rule in favor of a society of free producers, such as Louis Auguste Blanqui or all of Marxism.[[#19AlanBSpitzerTheRevolut|19]] If a transhistoricist wishes to label such figures as Bao Jingyan an “anarchist” due to their advocacy of a free stateless society without rulers, then they must, in order to be consistent, also refer to Blanqui and all of Marxism as “anarchists.” Doing so would be a mistake given that self-identified anarchists opposed these other forms of socialism on the grounds that they, unlike anarchists, advocated the conquest of state power as a means to achieve human emancipation. This includes not only individuals who anarchists had polemical debates with, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but also leaders of states who were responsible for the imprisonment, deportation, murder, and repression of anarchists, such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. Given this, any definition of anarchism must include strategies to achieve social change within its criteria and cannot define anarchism solely in terms of its goal.
+When she was done with her version of the text, she sent it to Freidel, who answered her questions, made his corrections, and then passed it on to Scheie. Having a nonspecialist as a writing partner is a wonderful barometer of clarity: When the text came back to us scrambled, we knew we hadn’t explained things right in the first place. When necessary, a chapter was passed through the loop several times. <em>Nota Bene’s</em> redlining feature proved an invaluable tool in this process.
-The second reason to reject transhistorical definitions of anarchism is that they are historically anachronistic. The many different people who have advocated the abolition of the state or rulership throughout human history did not refer to themselves as “anarchists” or belong to a social movement that called itself “anarchist.” At no point did they establish a historically contingent configuration of elements that were understood by people at the time to be what “anarchism” is. An author like Winstanley will not tell a historian anything about what “anarchism” as a historically produced entity means. A study of Winstanley’s 1649 ''The True Levellers Standard Advanced'' instead informs a historian about the political ideology that Winstanley understood himself to be an advocate of: the Diggers. To categorize Winstanley as an “anarchist ” is to anachronistically impose a later category onto him rather than understand him on his own terms.[[#20Forasummaryofthelanguag|20]]
+A special thanks to Joan Amico for her meticulous and informed copy editing. Were it not for Richard Oriolo’s skill and imagination, we would not have been able to incorporate such complex visual material in the book. Additional thanks to Bruce Hattendorf, Maria’s capable and hardworking assistant, for his intelligent help; to Debbie Weiss for her professional care; to Harvey Hoffman for his patience and expertise; to Tom Nau for his commitment and skill; and to Nick Mazzella for his able guidance.
-Although adopting a historicist approach significantly limits the scope of who can be considered an anarchist, it is not sufficient to develop a useful definition of anarchism for the purposes of studying it as a coherent political theory. This is because, during its history as a concept, people with fundamentally different commitments have called themselves anarchists and engaged in processes of contestation with one another over what anarchism is or should be. A brief and condensed summary of this history is as follows.
+Many of the ideas in this book come from years of interchange with friends, colleagues, collaborators, and our students. We wish to acknowledge in particular the contributions to this process made by Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, William Fash, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Elizabeth Benson, Robert Rands, David Kelley, Christopher Jones, Juan Pedro LaPorte, Juan Antonio Valdes, Gordon Willey, Evon Vogt, Brian Stross, Barbara MacLeod, and the many participants in the Texas Meetings on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In addition, we have sent chapters to various colleagues who have offered suggestions and criticisms that have been invaluable. These people include Patrick Culbert, Robert Sharer, William and Barbara Fash, Ruth Krochock, Kent Reilly, Marisela Ayala, Anthony Andrews, Peter Harrison, Linea Wren, and E. Wyllys Andrews IV. We particularly wish to thank Peter Harrison, who provided photographs of Tikal we could obtain from no other source, and McDuff Everton, who offered us his extraordinary wraparound photographs of Palenque. Finally, Justin and Barbara Kerr gave us access to their photographic archives, including roll-outs of pottery as well as photographs of the art and architecture of the major Maya sites that they have taken during their long love affair with the Maya. As valuable to us was the haven—complete with bed and breakfast—they provided each time we went to New York.
-'''From Anarchy to Anarchism'''
+Research by Linda Scheie, as it is presented in various chapters, was supported over the years by the Research Committee of the University of South Alabama, the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Dumbarton Oaks of Washington, D.C. Linda’s research on the inscriptions of Copán has been conducted under the Copán Mosaics Project, which is under the direction of Dr. William Fash and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia. Part of this research was completed as a Fullbright Research Scholar in Honduras from June to December 1987. Support for the CMP came from National Science Foundation (1986–1988), the National Geographic Society (1986–1989), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986–1987), the Center for Field Research (EARTHWATCH, 1985–1988), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1987; 1989), the H. J. Heinz Charitable Fund (1986), and Council for International Exchange of Scholars (1987).
-The term “anarchist” was sometimes used as an insult during the English Civil War and the French Revolution.[[#21WoodcockAnarchism1241|21]] It did not refer to a distinct political ideology until it was adopted by antistate socialists in the nineteenth century within the context of industrialization, and the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state (henceforth referred to as the state) as a global economic and political system. The earliest known occurrence of this was in 1840, when the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared himself an “anarchist” in his book ''What is Property?'' He defined “''Anarchy''” as “the absence of a master” and argued that the “highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.”[[#22PierreJosephProudhonWhat|22]] It is important to note that Proudhon was not consistent with his vocabulary and sometimes used the word “anarchy” to signify chaos and disorder.[[#23ProudhonPropertyisTheft|23]] On other occasions, Proudhon labeled himself an advocate of “mutuality,” “mutualism,” and “the mutualist system.”[[#24ProudhonPropertyisTheft|24]] This was a term that Proudhon borrowed from a previously existing social movement among silkworkers in Lyon.[[#25Forthehistoryoftheterm|25]]
+Research on Cerros presented in Chapter 3 was carried out under the auspices of the office of the Archaeological Commissioner of Belize. Joseph Palacio, Jaime Awe, Elizabeth Graham Pendergast, and Harriot Topsey served in that office and greatly facilitated our research. The Cerros work was supported by the National Science Foundation (BNS-77-07959; BNS-78-2470; BNS-78-15905; BNS-82-17620) and by private donations by citizens of Dallas to the Cerros Maya Foundation. T. Tim Cullum and Richard Sandow served as officers of this foundation and effectively launched the research despite numerous difficulties. Their friendship, enthusiasm, and patience are greatly appreciated. Stanley Marcus, and through Mr. Marcus many other individuals, supported the work throughout its duration. Mr. Marcus has been a special mentor and friend to David Freidel throughout his career in Dallas. The research at Cerros was originally directed by Dr. Ira Abrams; without his energy and initiative, Chapter 3 would never have been written.
-During the 1840s, Proudhon advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of a decentralized market socialist society in which the means of production and land were owned in common. In such a society, workers, either as individual producers or voluntary collective associations, would possess, but not own, the means of production and land that they personally used or occupied. To possess a resource was to have the right to control it. As a result, Proudhon envisioned a society where workers self-managed the organization of production and exchanged the products of their labor with one another.[[#26ProudhonWhatisProperty|26]] This was to be achieved through a process of gradual and peaceful social change. From the late 1840s onward, Proudhon advocated the strategy of workers forming cooperatives with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank, at low or no interest. He thought that, over time, these cooperatives could grow in number, trade with one another, and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established.[[#27ProudhonPropertyisTheft|27]]
+Research at Yaxuná presented in Chapter 10 is being carried out under the auspices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. The Directors of the INAH in Merida, Ruben Maldonado and Alfredo Barrera, have greatly facilitated our work at Yaxuná. Dr. Fernando Robles, senior investigator of the INAH, and Dr. Anthony Andrews first took David Freidel to Yaxuna and have strongly encouraged the work at the site. The Yaxuna research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-21699-88), the National Geographic Society, the Provost’s Office of Southern Methodist University, and private benefactors in Dallas through Mr. Stanley Marcus.
-Between the 1840s and 1860s, Proudhon’s version of anti-state market socialism influenced a number of individuals in the United States and Europe who also came to refer to themselves as mutualists.[[#28DavidBerryAHistoryofth|28]] Although these mutualists agreed with Proudhon’s broad vision of socialism and his strategy of forming cooperatives funded by loans from a people’s bank, they also had ideas of their own, were influenced by other authors such as Josiah Warren, and argued with one another about a wide variety of topics.[[#29JosiahWarrenThePractical|29]] Some of those influenced by Proudhon adopted the language of “anarchy” and “anarchist.” For example, in France the journalist Anselme Bellegarrigue wrote and published a short-lived journal called ''Anarchy, A Journal of Order ''in 1850. In the first issue of the journal he wrote, “I am an anarchist,” and insisted that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”[[#30AnselmeBellegarrigueAnar|30]] Around the same time a young Élisée Reclus, who would go onto become an important geographer and member of the anarchist movement, wrote an unpublished essay in order to clarify his thoughts. In it, he advocated the abolition of economic competition and “the tutelage of a government” in favor of socialism and “the absence of government . . . anarchy, the highest expression of order.”[[#31EliseeReclusTheDevelopm|31]]
+ Prologue: Personal Notes
-An especially significant contribution was made by Joseph Déjacque, who was born in France and moved to the United States in the early 1850s. He not only repeated Proudhon’s language of “anarchy” and “anarchist” but was also the earliest known person to self-identify as an advocate of “anarchism.” Déjacque was the first person to use the word “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist” as well. In the August 18, 1859, edition of his paper ''Le Libertaire'', he defined “anarchism” as the abolition of government, property, religion, and the family in favor of liberty, equality, solidarity, and the right to work and love.[[#32MaxNettlauAShortHistory|32]] In contrast to Proudhon and mutualism in general, Déjacque advocated the long-term goals of common ownership of the products of labor, distribution according to need, and the emancipation of women from patriarchy.[[#33JosephDejacqueDownwitht|33]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-39.jpg 70f]]
-In order to achieve these goals, the ruling classes had to be overthrown. Déjacque proposed that this could be achieved via the violent strategy of mass armed insurrections and small secret societies assassinating capitalists and governors.[[#34DejacqueDownwiththeBoss|34]] Although Déjacque advocated the abolition of government, he thought that, given the current ideas and abilities of workers, a revolution would not establish anarchy immediately. There would instead be a period of transition in which decisions were made by workers themselves through universal and “direct legislation” within “the most democratic form of government.”[[#35DejacqueTheRevolutionary|35]] Déjacque’s proposed democratic government was constituted by self-governing communes of 50,000 people in which laws were passed by majority vote and government administrators were elected and recallable. The police were to be randomly selected by lottery and rotated over time such that everyone would engage in policing and there would be “no police outside the people.”[[#36DejacqueTheRevolutionary|36]] Those who broke the law would be subject to trial by jury and an elected magistrate. A person found guilty by an unanimous decision of the jury would not be executed or imprisoned—since the “prison” and the “scaffold” were “government monstrosities”—but would instead only be subject to “moral or material reparation” or “banishment.”[[#37DejacqueTheRevolutionary|37]] Over time, people would develop new and better ways of organizing society until government had been completely abolished and anarchy had been realized.
+I remember vividly the first time I walked down the gravel path that led into the ruins of Palenque. Surrounded by vine-shrouded bushes filled with the sounds of playing children, barking dogs, and the chest-deep thumps of tom turkeys, I walked down that path past broken buildings shaded under vine-draped trees until I came to the grass-filled plaza in front of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Inspired by the curiosity of my architect husband, this was the first time I had ever visited México. I had never before seen the rich web of life in a tropical forest nor heard the cicadas sing in twelve-tone harmony. As I walked through the lichen-painted ruins of that magic place, I felt my imagination stirred by the pathos of a lost world. The enchantment of the forest with its emerald green light and towering trees shrouded in a rich world of orchids, bromeliads, and liana vines produced a kind of exotic beauty I had never imagined. The mystery of calcium-heavy water, tumbling down the rocky streams to the plain below Palenque’s escarpment, to encase rock, leaf, branch, and broken temple alike, spoke to my mind in metaphors of creation and destruction.
-In parallel to these ideological developments, various organizations were formed by the working classes to achieve their emancipation and foster cooperation between workers of different countries.[[#38ArthurLehningFromBuonarr|38]] In September 1864, this culminated in the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (henceforth referred to as the First International) at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London. The International included a wide variety of different kinds of socialists, and this led to a great deal of debate about what aims and strategies the organization should adopt. At the 1869 Basel Congress, the majority of delegates voted in favor of the collective ownership of land as a goal. This was opposed by a minority of mutualists who, while advocating the collective ownership of the means of production, thought that land should be individually owned by those who occupied it. The socialists who advocated the collective ownership of land referred to themselves as collectivists or advocates of collectivism. Some collectivists continued to think of themselves as mutualists.[[#39ArcherFirstInternational|39]]
+We were there quite by accident, for we had planned in that December of 1970 to follow the standard tourist pilgrimage to Yucatán to see the famous ruins of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Kabah. Going to Palenque was a last-minute side trip. It looked close to the main highway on the map and the Sanborns Travelguide said it was worth at least a couple of hours of our time. When we left twelve days later, the direction and passion of my life was changed forever.
-During this period, a tendency emerged within the collectivist wing of the International that rejected participation in parliamentary politics and attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power. They, despite being influenced by Proudhon, dithered from mutualism and advocated revolutionary trade unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[[#40Forageneraloverviewofho|40]] This tendency referred to itself, and was referred to by others, using a variety of labels. This included not only ''collectivist'' but also ''federalist'', ''revolutionary socialist'', and ''anarchist''. Between the mid-1870s and early 1880s, the labels of ''anarchist'' and ''anarchism'' became increasingly prominent until they were the dominant terms for this social movement.[[#41BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|41]] A number of individuals and groups continued to also use alternative language, such as ''autonomist'', ''libertarian'', ''libertarian socialist'', and ''libertarian communist''.[[#42PaulAvrichandKarenAvrich|42]]
+At the time I was a professional painter teaching art at a small university in Mobile, Alabama. Like most of my contemporaries, I lived in frustration because I knew what I did in my art was irrelevant to the society around me. No matter the rhetoric I threw at the world, I recognized in my deepest heart that the irrelevancy was real and unchangeable. Yet while teaching our “Introduction to Art” course to nonmajors (the token fine-arts class that is supposed to make modern university graduates cultured), I had built an image in my head of what art could be like if it were critical to the society that produced it. When I walked among the tumbled rocks and broken plaster of Palenque’s wonderland, I knew I had found the dream made real. I had to understand how, why, when, and who had made these things.
-The anarchist tendency within the First International was primarily located within Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, and the Jura region of Switzerland. It began to form a distinct social movement during a series of congresses held in Spain (Barcelona June 1870, Valencia September 1871), Switzerland (La Chaux-de-Fonds April 1870, Sonvilier November 1871), and Italy (Rimini August 1872). During these congresses, delegates passed resolutions that rejected the strategy of achieving socialism via parliamentarism specifically and the conquest of state power in general. From November 1871 onward, congress resolutions were passed that opposed Marx and Engels’s attempt to convert the General Council of the First International, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections. Marx and Engels thought this was necessary due to their false belief that Bakunin was secretly conspiring to take over the International and impose his anarchist program onto it.[[#43WolfgangEckhardtTheFirst|43]]
+It took three years to answer the last question: who? and, strangely enough, finding this answer was an accident also. On the last afternoon of the <em>Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque,</em>[1] held in December 1973, Peter Mathews and I pored over the texts in the ruins of Palenque, looking for the names and dates of kings. After three hours’ work, we had managed to identify five rulers, as well as the dates of major events in their lives.[2] That magic of discovery has not diminished during the intervening fifteen years. I have been an enraptured passenger on a wondrous voyage into the past and a participant in the rediscovery of something very special: the history of a people whose story had been lost in the obscurity of the past.
-The conflict between the opponents and supporters of the General Council culminated in the International’s September 1872 Hague Congress.[[#44Foracondensedsummaryoft|44]] During this congress, resolutions were passed by majority vote that expelled the anarchists Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International, relocated the General Council from London to New York, and committed the organization to the goal of constituting the working class into a political party aimed at the conquest of political power. Marx and Engels achieved this majority by nefarious means. This included requesting blank mandates from various sections that did not specify who the delegate was or how they should vote. These blank mandates were then sent to supporters of the General Council. In multiple instances, these supporters even had their travel expenses paid for by Marx and Engels in order to ensure that they attended the congress. Several of the groups that issued blank mandates or pro–General Council mandates did not really exist as actual sections of the International, and had been created for the sole purpose of issuing a mandate at Marx and Engels’s request. The resolutions of the Hague Congress were subsequently rejected by the Jura, French, Belgian, Italian, Dutch, English, and Spanish sections of the International on the grounds that they had been passed by a fake majority and violated each section’s autonomy to determine its own strategy and program.[[#45ReneBerthierSocialDemocr|45]]
+This time of excitement and discovery comes at the end of 150 years of inspired work by hundreds of people who built the foundation that make this time possible. Yet, even acknowledging the debt all of us owe to the scholars who went before us, this is a special time that will never come again. Only once will someone read Pacal’s name for the first time or realize who built the Temple of the Cross at Palenque or Temple 22 at Copan.[3]
-Shortly after the end of the Hague Congress, delegates representing the Spanish, French, Italian, Jura, and American sections of the International met at a congress in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. In organizing this congress, which was held on September 15 and 16, 1872, the sections did not think they were forming a new distinct organization that split from the First International. They were rather, from their point of view, merely reorganizing or reconstituting the International on its original federalist basis. In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to this organization as the Saint-Imier International but it should be kept in mind that this is anachronistic.[[#46BerthierSocialDemocracya|46]]
+And know that this time of discovery is not yet over, for the decipherment of the Maya writing system, the study of their religion and politics, the excavations and analyses of the remains of their lives are not yet finished. In truth, they are barely begun. What we share in this book is but one stage in the journey, and the product of many different people and approaches. No one person is, or ever can be, responsible for the sum of discovery.
-During this congress, the delegates voted in favor of four resolutions. The first resolution rejected every resolution of the Hague Congress and the authority of the new General Council in New York. The second resolution declared a pact of mutual defense, solidarity, and friendship between the sections that attended the meeting and any section that subsequently wished to join. This pact consisted of a commitment to be in regular correspondence with one another and to stand in solidarity with any section whose freedom was violated by either government repression or the impositions of an authoritarian General Council. The only distinctly anarchist resolutions were the third and fourth. They advocated a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state simultaneously and established the free federation of free producers. This transformation of society was to be achieved by workers themselves organized within trade unions and autonomous communes. It was proposed that workers in the present should build toward the social revolution by organizing strikes. These forms of class struggle were advocated because they caused workers to develop an awareness of their distinct class interests, taught workers to act for themselves, and increased the power of workers against capitalists. Strikes prepared workers for the social revolution and established, or expanded, the systems of organization through which workers could successfully overthrow the ruling classes and reorganize production and distribution. The resolutions rejected the strategy of attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power, because it would result in workers being dominated and exploited by a new minority of rulers who actually exercised state power, rather than the abolition of all systems of class rule.[[#47ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|47]]
+The way I have always studied the ancient Maya is to try to understand the patterns intrinsic to their art, writing, architecture, and other cultural remains. The interpretations of events the two of us offer in this book represent the way we understand those patterns now. As more decipherments are made and new data comes out of the ground, as fresh minds bring their insights to bear upon the patterns we have inherited from our predecessors and expanded in our own work, the connections that we see between these patterns will change. Interpretation in our work is an ephemeral thing that continually adapts to the changing nature of these underlying patterns. It is like the reassessment and reinterpretation of history we experience in our own lives, as we look back on events great and small that have shaped the way we see the world. Those of us in our middle years know this kind of reevaluation in how we see and understand the Vietnam War and all that surrounded it. To me, the truly magical thing is that the ancient Maya now have a history that can enter into this process of reevaluation.
-For several members of the historical anarchist movement, anarchism did not exist during the 1840s and 50s. Instead anarchism, as they understood it, first emerged within the First International and Saint-Imier International. In 1922, Luigi Fabbri referred to “the whole fifty-year history of anarchism” and so dated the birth of anarchism to 1872.[[#48LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|48]] A similar position was articulated by Malatesta on numerous occasions. In 1899, he wrote that “we, anarchist socialists, have existed as a separate party, with essentially the same program, since 1868, when Bakunin founded the ''Alliance'' . . . and we were the founders and soul of the anti-authoritarian wing of the ‘International Working Men’s Association.’”[[#49ErricoMalatestaTowardsAn|49]] In 1907, Malatesta claimed that “the first anarchists” belonged to “the international.”[[#50MaurizioAntonioliedThe|50]] He later wrote that “Anarchism was born” with the adoption of the resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress in September 1872 and thereby transitioned from the “individual thought of a few isolated men” into “the collective principle of groups distributed all over the world.”[[#51QuotedinDavideTurcatoMa|51]]
+<right>
+—Linda Schele
+<br><em>Austin, Texas</em>
+<br><em>May 1989</em>
+</right>
-It should nonetheless be kept in mind that the Saint-Imier International was not an exclusively anarchist organization. The founding congress was attended by anarchist delegates representing Spain, France, Italy, and the Jura region of Switzerland, but it also included the delegate for America, Gustave Lefrançais, who, despite being a survivor of the Paris Commune, was not strictly speaking an anarchist. The organization soon grew to include a minority of state socialists from England, Germany, and Belgium. This led to a series of heated debates about strategy and the vision of the future society at the 1873, 1874, and 1876 congresses.[[#52BerthierSocialDemocracya|52]]
+I passed through Palenque for the first time just after Linda, in the summer of 1971 on my way to begin an exploration of Cozumel Island for the Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project.[4] Although I was just starting graduate school, I had been a working “dirt” archaeologist for eight years, gaining experience at projects in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. I looked forward to seeing the ruins on Cozumel, even though they were humble compared to Palenque, because I enjoy the craft of field work; but I dreamed of another kind of study among the Maya.
-The pluralist nature of the organization can be seen in the fact that the founding 1872 resolutions declared that each section had the right to decide for itself what form of political struggle they engaged in and that it was “presumptuous,” “reactionary,” and “absurd” to impose “one line of conduct as the single path that might lead to its social emancipation.”[[#53ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|53]] This position was reaffirmed at the 1874 congress, where the delegates voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that each section should decide for itself whether or not to engage in parliamentary struggle. It was not until the final 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, which was attended by delegates representing anarchist groups in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Greece, and Egypt, that the delegates were exclusively anarchist due to state socialists having left the organization. Anarchist-led sections in Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay had affiliated with the Saint-Imier International but did not send delegates to the congress due to the distance.[[#54BerthierSocialDemocracya|54]]
+I wanted to find a way to reveal the nature of Maya shamanism archaeologically. I wanted to know what the relationship was between political power and religious belief among the ancient Maya. My aspirations were fueled by a thorough and intensive training in social anthropology and in Maya ethnography by my mentors in college. I knew that the Maya institutions of power recorded and observed since the coming of the Europeans were imbued with the sacred and enveloped in the cosmic. The challenge was to discover a way to use archaeology to help penetrate the Christian veil and contribute to a discovery of the Precolumbian institutions of central authority.
-During the Verviers Congress, the anarchist delegates passed a series of resolutions that completely separated them from state socialism and thereby established anarchism as a fully distinct social movement, rather than one tendency within a pluralist International.[[#55BerthierSocialDemocracya|55]] The anarchist delegates declared that their goal was the self-abolition of the proletariat through an international social revolution that overthrew capitalism, via the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes. They proposed that the private property of capitalism should be replaced by the collective ownership of land and the means of production by federations of producers themselves, rather than state ownership and control of the economy. To achieve this, they advocated revolutionary trade unionism and rejected forming political parties that engaged in parliamentary politics.[[#56ResolutionsoftheCongress|56]]
+Because Cozumel island had been a sacred pilgrimage center just before the Conquest, I did get to investigate Maya politics and religion within the context of ruins and artifacts. I found I could bridge across from the relatively rich eyewitness descriptions of Maya buildings and their functions left by the sixteenth-century explorers to the archaeological remains without great problem. Still, even though I had passed through the veil, the penetration was only beyond the historical era of Spanish chronicles. The great span of the Precolumbian past remained beyond my focus.
-In many respects, the Verviers resolutions were almost the same as the resolutions adopted five years previously at Saint-Imier. There was one crucial difference. The delegates at Saint-Imier had qualified their critique of achieving socialism via the conquest of state power with a commitment to different views on political struggle coexisting within the same pluralist International. The resolutions of Verviers were, in comparison, actively hostile to state socialism. They declared that society is divided into two main classes with distinct class interests: workers and capitalists. The state exists to defend the interests of capitalists and economic privilege in general. As a result, the state, irrespective of which political party wields its power, cannot be used to abolish class society and will instead reproduce it. The goal of emancipation can only be achieved by workers themselves directly engaging in class struggle.[[#57ResolutionsoftheCongress|57]] Given this: “Congress declares that there is no difference between ''political'' parties, whether they are called socialist or not, all these parties without distinction forming in its eyes one reactionary mass and it sees its duty as fighting all of them. It hopes that workers who still travel in the ranks of these various parties, instructed by lessons from experience and by revolutionary propaganda, will open their eyes and abandon the way of politics to adopt that of revolutionary socialism.”[[#58ResolutionsoftheCongress|58]]
+My next project, at Cerros in Belize, took me from the demise of Maya civilization to its Preclassic beginnings, deep into the archaeological record and far from the historical observations of the Europeans. When I first laid eyes on the great Sun mask of Structure 5C in the summer of 1977,1 knew that I was going to have to train myself in Maya iconography and attempt to interpret this building in terms of its political and religious functions. I had basic training in symbolic analysis from college, but I was pretty ignorant of Maya art and knew virtually nothing of text translation. Linda was among the several specialists in Maya art who kindly responded to my request for feedback on my first substantive article on the Cerros materials. She called me up from Austin and said, “David, you’re right for all the wrong reasons. We have to talk.”
-The theory and practice of the anarchist movement were not invented by a single founding father who developed the ideology in full and then transmitted it to workers. Anarchism was instead cocreated over several years by an international social network that formulated its common program through a process of debate and discussion in newspapers, pamphlets, books, formal congresses, informal meetings, and letters between key militants. This social network was mostly composed of workers, such as Jean-Louis Pindy and Adhémar Schwitzguébel, and a few formally educated individuals from privileged backgrounds, such as Bakunin and Carlo Cafiero.[[#59Accountsoftheanarchistle|59]] This point was understood by later anarchists. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad declared that “anarchism was born, not of the abstract deliberations of some sage or philosopher, but out of the direct struggle waged by the toilers against Capital, out of the toilers’ needs and requirements, their aspirations toward liberty and equality. . . . Anarchism’s leading thinkers: Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it among the masses, they merely helped refine and propagate it through the excellence of their thinking and their learning.”[[#60TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|60]]
+That was in the fall of 1979; we have been talking ever since. Collaboration comes easily to us. The nature of archaeological research requires teamwork; general interpretation is always the product of many people pooling their insight. It is the nature of epigraphic and iconographic research among the Maya as well. Linda and I have different perceptions of the ancient Maya that draw upon different experience and training. We think together in ways that we find occasionally opaque, regularly surprising, usually stimulating, and always worthwhile. I am now an iconographer with a rudimentary command of epigraphy. She is now an advocate of structural analysis and an evolutionist. Most important, we are both something we could not have been in 1971: we are historians of the ancient Maya.
-'''How Collectivists Became Anarchists'''
+This book is a unique product of our collaboration. It draws heavily upon our personal scholarly experience with the Maya field. Of the six regions and communities anchoring our histories, we have extensively worked at, and published technical studies on, four of them (Cerros, Palenque, Copan, Yaxuna). We wrote the manuscript on personal computers, rewriting over each other’s prose several times so that the initial expertise of each one of us was repeatedly leavened by the ongoing dialogue between us. Ultimately, our partner in this writing effort, Joy Parker, joined in the process. Joy’s clear prose, fresh perspective, and respect for our subject smoothed the flow of our narrative and enhanced the accessibility of our often intricate concepts.
-The history of how anarchism as a social movement arose is not only the history of how its program was formulated. It also includes the history of how, and why, a tendency within the First International came to refer to themselves as “anarchists” in the first place. It is necessary to establish in detail how this happened because it clarifies the relationship between the anarchism of Proudhon, who in 1840 was the first person to self-identify as an anarchist, and the anarchism of the social movement that emerged from the late 1860s onward. In 1880, Kropotkin claimed that:
+I am changed by this book. I cannot look at a Maya ruin now and think of the people who built it and lived with it as abstractions, an aggregate social force shaping the material world and coping with the process of living. Now I see Maya faces, recall Maya names, look for clues to their intentional acts, their decisions, and the events of their daily existence. History has its many limitations to be sure. Ancient Maya history was the privilege of the elite and powerful; at best it gives an accurate reflection of their views on what happened. It is mute about the lives of the ordinary people. We must look to the archaeological record for knowledge of the humble and numerous commoners whose experiences also shaped the Maya destiny. But I now feel better prepared to continue the collaborative enterprise conjoining the insight of the “dirt” archaeological record with the story left by the kings and their nobles. It will yield, I hope, something of the dialogue between the populace, the source of power, and the elite who wielded that power. The long-term history and evolution of this kind of dialogue is, for me, an important source of insight into the current human condition.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">When in the heart of the International there rose up a party that fought against authority in all its forms, that party first took on the name of the federalist party, then called itself ''anti-statist ''or ''anti-authoritarian''. At that epoch it even avoided assuming the name of anarchist. The word ''an-archy ''(as it was written then) might have attached the party too closely to the Proudhonians, whose ideas of economic reform the International then combated. But it was precisely to create confusion that the adversaries of the anti-authoritarians took pleasure in using the name.[[#61PeterKropotkinWordsofa|61]]</div>
+<right>
+—David Freidel
+<br><em>Dallas, Texas</em>
+<br><em>May 1989</em>
+</right>
-Nonetheless, as Kropotkin noted, anarchists came to accept the name. As he pointed out in 1910, “the name of ‘anarchists,’ which their adversaries insisted upon applying to them, prevailed, and finally it was revindicated.”[[#62PeterKropotkinDirectStru|62]]
+ Foreword
-One potential problem with Kropotkin’s narrative is that Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in August 1867 in “The Slavic Question,”'' ''which was printed in the Italian paper ''Freedom and Justice''. He wrote in response to Pan-Slavists that “they are unitarians at all costs, always preferring public order to freedom and I am an anarchist and prefer freedom to public order.”[[#63QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|63]] Crucially, this was written before Bakunin had even joined the First International in June or July 1868.[[#64EHCarrMichaelBakunin|64]] A few years later, Bakunin referred to himself as an “anarchist” in private in his 1870 letter to Sergei Nechaev and his unsent October 1872 letter to the editors of ''La Liberté''.[[#65MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|65]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-40.jpg 70f]]
-Bakunin continued to use this language in his published 1873 book ''Statism and Anarchy''. In it, he labeled the opponents of German state communists as “anti-state socialists, or anarchists” and endorsed what he called “the ''anarchist'' social revolution.”[[#66MichaelBakuninStatismand|66]] He wrote that “we revolutionary anarchists are proponents of universal popular education, liberation, and the broad development of social life, and hence are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood. . . . Those are the convictions of social revolutionaries, and for them we are called anarchists. We do not object to this term because we are in fact the enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it.”[[#67BakuninStatismandAnarchy|67]]
+Early in this century the word pharaoh burst upon the imagination of the West and transported the modern mind into the ancient and alien world of Egypt’s living gods. Today, in the tropical lowlands of Central America, another anthropological revolution is uncovering a new intellectual and spiritual legacy for the civilized world: an ancient American civilization ruled by living gods who called themselves <em>ahau</em>.[5]
-It is difficult to determine how much impact Bakunin’s decision in ''Statism and Anarchy'' to refer to himself and the movement he belonged to as “anarchist” had on the language of anti-state socialists within the Saint-Imier International. This is because ''Statism and Anarchy'' was the only major revolutionary socialist text written by Bakunin in Russian, rather than French, and almost all of the 1,200 copies that were printed in Switzerland were smuggled to St. Petersburg and distributed among Russian revolutionary circles.[[#68MarshallShatzIntroductio|68]] In other texts, Bakunin used different language. For example, in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” which was written in 1871 and published posthumously in 1878, he referred to the movement he belonged to as “collectivists” and “revolutionary socialists.”[[#69BakuninSelectedWritings|69]] Even in ''Statism and Anarchy'' he also referred to anarchists as “revolutionary socialists.”[[#70BakuninStatismandAnarchy|70]]
+Flourishing for over a thousand years (200 B.C. to A.D. 900), the Classic Maya world was organized at its apogee into fifty or more independent states encompassing more than 100,000 square miles of forest and plain. The divine ahauob ruled millions of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, warriors, and nobility and presided over capitals studded with pyramids, temples, palaces, and vast open plazas serviced by urban populations numbering in the tens of thousands. Outside of their realm, the Maya engaged in war, trade, and diplomacy with other great states in the mountains of Central México. Theirs was a civilized world: a world of big government, big business, big problems, and big decisions by the people in power. The problems they faced sound familiar to us today: war, drought, famine, trade, food production, the legitimate transition of political power. It was a world which mirrors our own as we wrestle with the present in search of a future.
-It is rare to find other examples of people identifying as “anarchists” between 1867–1871. One notable example is the September 1871 declaration of principles written by the Geneva Section of Socialist Atheists. Its members referred to themselves as “Anarchists” who sought the abolition of the state and “the autonomy of the individual and of the commune,” which were to be achieved without “participation in politics, for to destroy the state, we cannot use the same means as those who support it.”[[#71QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|71]] On other occasions, the term “anarchist” was used to refer to federalist systems of organization, rather than a specific ideology or movement. For example, on December 31, 1871, the Spanish section of the First International reprinted the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular” with their own preface. This preface claimed that the First International had an “anarchist constitution,” despite the fact that the constitution was not committed to what would soon be regarded as core anarchist principles, such as the abolition of the state or abstention from parliamentary politics.[[#72QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|72]]
+Like ourselves, the Maya wrote on paper, keeping thousands of books in which they recorded their history, genealogy, religion, and ritual; but their libraries and archives perished into dust or in the flames of their Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, hieroglyphic texts and scenes carved on buildings, stone monuments, jade, bone, and other materials impervious to decay in the tropics remain as records of their innovative political solutions to the social crises that dominated life in ancient America. These political chronicles speak in the language of a great philosophical, scientific, and religious vision—a charter for power as eternal and as flexible as the American Constitution.
-The fact that people did not widely refer to themselves as “anarchist” during this period is demonstrated by the resolutions of the September 1871 London conference of the First International. The resolutions forbid sections from designating “themselves by sectarian names such as Positivists, Mutualists, Collectivists, Communists, etc.,” but did not include “Anarchists” within the list.[[#73KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|73]] If the label “anarchist” was already being widely used by anti-state socialists in late 1871, Marx and Engels, who wrote the resolutions, would have included the term in their list of forbidden section names, especially since they did include the anti-state socialist label “collectivist.” That the term “anarchist” was not widely used in early 1870s Switzerland is confirmed by Kropotkin’s eyewitness testimony in his autobiography. He recalled that, in early 1872, when he visited the Swiss sections of the First International, “the name ‘anarchist’ was not much in use then.”[[#74PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|74]] In 1899, Malatesta similarly remembered that, around 1868, “Bakunin came onto the scene, bringing with him the ideas that would later be called anarchist.”[[#75MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|75]] Anarchists in Italy initially just referred to themselves as socialists, because they were the first socialist movement in the country.[[#76MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|76]]
+The Maya conception of time, however, was very different from our own. Our old adage “He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it” might have been expressed by the Maya as “He who does not know history cannot predict his own destiny.” The Maya believed in a past which always returned, in historical symmetries—endless cycles repeating patterns already set into the fabric of time and space. By understanding and manipulating this eternal, cyclic framework of possibility, divine rulers hoped to create a favorable destiny for their people. But while the Maya ahauob could know only the immediate results of the events they put into motion, we are gradually reclaiming the full scope of their historical accomplishments from the obscurity of the past.
-The adoption of the term “anarchist” became increasingly common in the build up to and aftermath of the First International’s September 1872 Hague Congress. In Spain, Francisco Tomás wrote, on September 8, 1872, that the First International was divided between two main factions:
+Our challenge then is to interpret this history, recorded in their words, images, and ruins, in a manner comprehensible to the modern mind yet true to the Maya’s perceptions of themselves. What we can offer here is not quite biography, for the Maya ahauob did not intend their history to be a record of personal glory so much as a cosmic affirmation of their actions. Nor can we offer a comprehensive social history, for the vagaries of time have left us with only the story of the great and victorious. Nevertheless, we can offer a history unique in the Precolumbian Americas, populated with real people, replete with the drama of battle, palace intrigue, heroic tragedy, and magnificent personal artistic and intellectual expression. History unlocks the humanity of the Maya in a way not possible by any other means, for it reveals not only what they did, but how they thought and felt about the nature of reality.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">one founded in unitary and centralist principles, and the other in the principles of anti-authoritarianism and federalism. The former has as its aim the organization of the International as a political party and as its purpose the conquest of political power. The latter has as its aim the organization of all workers to demolish all the institutions of this corrupt society and the abolition of political-legal-authoritarian conditions providing a free worldwide federation of free associations of free producers. The Spanish Federation is in the ranks of the latter, that is, anarchist collectivism.[[#77QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|77]]</div>
+It is important that we acknowledge this history, because only then will a true picture of the Americas emerge. The American chronicle does not begin with the landing of Columbus or the arrival of the Pilgrims, but with the lives of Maya kings in the second century B.C. We who live in this part of the world inherit a written history two millennia old and as important to us as the history of the ancient Egyptians or the Chinese, a history equal in longevity to that of Europe or Asia.
-This is not to say that all anti-state socialists adopted the term “anarchist” when the Saint-Imier International was founded in September 1872. There was a great deal of debate and discussion around labels. Reclus, who first publicly called himself an anarchist in March 1876, argued in 1878 that the terms “anarchy” and “anarchist” should be adopted by the movement due to the etymology of the words, and the fact that supporters and opponents were already using the words to refer to them. This is an argument Reclus would not have felt the need to make if there was already a consensus within the movement about the terms.[[#78FlemingAnarchistWay126|78]]
+Understanding the complexity of the ancient American civilizations does not come easily to us. From childhood on we have been taught in our schools that the Mediterranean is the only “cradle of civilization”; but, in fact, human beings developed the civilized state also in Northern India, China, Middle America, and Peru. The Maya are one of those societies that transformed themselves from villagers and agriculturists into a great civilization. To accomplish this transformation, they developed a high religion and extraordinary statecraft that produced a stable society for over a thousand years. More than a collection of quaint mythology and exotic rituals, their religion was an effective definition of the nature of the world, answering questions about the origin of humanity, the purpose of human life on earth, and the relationship of the individual to his family, his society, and his gods. It is a religion which speaks to central and enduring problems of the civilized human condition: power, justice, equality, individual purpose, and social destiny.
-One of the main opponents of the term was Guillaume. Although he had declared his socialism to be “an-archist” in August 1870, he had changed his mind by January 1872. He wrote: “We have been wrong to use, without closely examining it, the terminology of Proudhon, from which we drew those famous words, ''abstention'' and ''an-archy''. . . . As to the word ''anarchy'', I have never liked it, and I have always asked that it be replaced by ''federation of autonomous communes''.”[[#79QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|79]] Guillaume rejected “anarchist” because of its negative connotations and preferred to continue to use the term “collectivists,” which had been used during the First International’s congresses in Brussels (1868) and Basel (1869) to refer to advocates of the collective ownership of land.[[#80Forasummaryofthesecongr|80]] The first usage of the word “collectivism” had itself, according to Guillaume, been in the early September 1869 issue of his paper ''Le Progrès''.[[#81CastletonTheOriginsof|81]] In 1876, Guillaume wrote in the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'':
+The world of that vision was informed by the power of the supernatural. Our concepts of animate and inanimate matter would not have made sense to the Maya, for to them everything was alive. The Maya cosmos was peopled with exotic creatures of all sorts and the objects and places in their physical world acquired dangerous power as they interacted with the supernatural Otherworld. Order in the cosmos was not accidental or distant from human affairs. Like the great metaphor of Maya life—the life cycle of maize—the continued well-being of the universe required the active participation of the human community through ritual. As maize cannot seed itself without the intervention of human beings, so the cosmos required sacrificial blood to maintain life. Maya life was filled with endless rituals which seem to us bizarre and shocking, but which to them embodied the highest concepts of their spiritual devotion.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The words ''anarchy'' and ''anarchists'' are, in our eyes and in those of many of our friends, words we should stop using, because they only express a negative idea without giving any positive theory, and they lend themselves to unfortunate misrepresentations. No “anarchist program” has ever been formulated, as far as we know. . . . But there is a ''collectivist'' theory, articulated in the congresses of the International, and that’s the one we associate with, as do our friends from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Russia.[[#82Ihaveassembledthisquote|82]]</div>
+With the decipherment of their writing system, the Maya joined the world’s great pristine civilizations—Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China—on the stage of world history. A picture has emerged, not only of a civilization, but of a world view and the individuals who cherished that view. All of the great events in the lives of rulers—their births, accessions, marriages, conquests and defeats, their deaths, and the births of their children—were recorded on public monuments. Not only kings, but their wives and courtiers, sought a place in history through commissioning monuments of their own. Kings and their nobles marked objects of all types with their names, and artists and sculptors signed their works so that future generations could honor them. The architecture and stone monuments, the pottery, jewelry, and ritual implements found buried in the earth, speak to us of the personal histories of the people who made them. This new American history resounds with the names of heroes, kings, princes, warriors, queens, priests, artists, and scribes and the deeds and accomplishments of their lives. Ancient America created its own vision of the world, its own form of civilization, its own high religion: But it also had its Alexanders, its Myrons, its Sargons, its Ramseses.
-The label “anarchist” became increasingly common despite Guillaume’s opposition. In December 1876, Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero wrote a letter to the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'' in which they reported that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International was committed to an “anarchist, collectivist, revolutionary program.”[[#83MalatestaTheMethodofFre|83]] In his history of the International, Guillaume revealed that the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'' did not consciously adopt the label “anarchist” until April 1877.[[#84CahmKropotkin38|84]] A few months later, in July, the ''Bulletin'' referred to itself as belonging to “the revolutionary anarchist party.” In August, the French section of the Saint-Imier International held a congress where they adopted what they referred to as a “collectivist and anarchist program.”[[#85QuotedinGrahamWeDoNot|85]]
+The story we construct here is one of drama, pathos, humor, and heroics. We approach this story not as if we were examining a long-dead religion and a history of little contemporary relevance but as scholars unearthing the dynamic actions of real people. If human beings find immortality after death by the memories they leave the generations who follow them, then the Maya have been reborn through our growing awareness of the history they memorialized throughout their cities.
-Even after 1876, the widespread adoption of the terms “anarchist” and “anarchism” did not happen overnight but took several years. As late as 1880, what would become the German-speaking anarchist movement in the United States had yet to adopt the label of anarchism. They instead referred to themselves as social revolutionaries in order to distinguish themselves from parliamentary social democrats. By December 1882, they had altered their language and were now declaring themselves in favor of anarchism.[[#86TomGoyensBeerandRevolut|86]] The widespread decision to adopt this language in the 1880s appears to have occurred independently of Déjacque’s previous usage of the term during the 1850s. The available evidence indicates that Déjacque was not widely known among anarchists until the 1890s. This can be seen in the fact that Max Nettlau’s first article on Déjacque was only published in 1890 in the German anarchist paper ''Freiheit''.[[#87LehningFromBuonarrotito|87]] Jean Grave’s republication of Déjacque’s'' ''book ''L’Humanisphère ''did not occur until 1899.[[#88WoodcockAnarchism233|88]] In 1910, Kropotkin referred to this text as having been only “lately discovered and reprinted.”[[#89KropotkinDirectStruggle|89]]
+Come, then, and join us on a journey into the American past and meet some of the great and victorious people of Maya history.
-The social movement that emerged within the First International came to adopt the labels “anarchist” and “anarchism” through a complex and contingent historical process. This, in turn, raises the question: why did they end up adopting these words? They could, after all, have invented a new term or continued to use other terms, such as federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist. A clue to this puzzle can be found in the September 3, 1876, edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation''.'' ''An article distinguished between “those whose ideal is a popular state” and “the fraction that is called anarchist,” rather than the fraction that calls itself anarchist.[[#90QuotedinBerthierAnarchis|90]] A month later, the editor of the paper, Guillaume, gave a speech at the October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. In it, he claimed that they were usually called “anarchists or Bakuninists” by their political opponents.[[#91JamesGuillaumeOntheAbo|91]]
+ How to Pronounce Mayan Words
-Two of their main political opponents were Marx and Engels. Throughout their correspondence during the 1870s they usually referred to the collectivists as “Bakuninists.”[[#92ForexampleKarlMarxandF|92]] This label was rejected by the collectivists because, as Malatesta explained in 1876, “we do not share all the practical and theoretical ideas of Bakunin” and “follow ideas, not men . . . we reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man.”[[#93QuotedinGeorgesHauptAsp|93]] Bakunin himself agreed. He wrote in his 1873 resignation letter from the Jura Federation that “the ‘Bakuninist label’ . . . was thrown in your face” by “our enemies,” but “you always knew, perfectly well, that your tendencies, opinions and actions arose entirely consciously, in spontaneous independence.”[[#94MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|94]]
+Many of the words in this book will look strange to English-speaking readers because of the way Mayan words are written. Soon after the conquest, the Spanish began to convert Mayan languages from their own written forms into the Roman alphabet. To do so, they used the spelling conventions of the sixteenth century. Since the characters of the alphabet are pronounced differently in Spanish from the way they are in English, and since the Spanish system of pronunciation itself has changed over the intervening centuries, the conventions used for Maya place names and their hieroglyphic writing should be explained. The alphabet we use here, with a few moderations, is identical to that of the colonial Yucatec sources.
-The other term Marx and Engels publicly used during the early 1870s was “anarchists.” To take a few examples: in their May 1872 pamphlet ''Fictitious Split in the International'','' ''they labeled the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular”'' ''as “the anarchist decree”; Engels described the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International as “anarchists” in his July 1873 article, “From the International”; they sarcastically referred to “Saint-Michael Bakunin” as an “anarchist” and his ideas as “the anarchist gospel” in ''The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association'', which was published between August and September 1873.[[#95KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|95]]
+Mayan languages use five vowels, or, as in the case of modern Choi, six. Using the Spanish convention, these vowels are pronounced as follows:
-It is important to note that Marx and Engels referred to the Jura Federation as “anarchists” in May 1872, which was prior to most collectivists referring to themselves with the term. A key reason why Marx and Engels referred to the self-described federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists as “anarchists” was because they wrongly believed their views to be a simple rehashing of Proudhon. In November 1871, Marx wrote a letter to Friedrich Bolte in which he claimed that Bakunin’s views were “scraped together from Proudhon, St. Simon, etc.” and that Bakunin’s “main dogma” was “(Proudhonist) abstention from the political movement.”[[#96KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|96]] In January 1872, Engels described Bakunin’s ideas as “a potpourri of Proudhonism and communism” in a letter to Theodor Cuno.[[#97KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|97]]
+<verse>
+<em>a</em> is like the <em>a</em> in “far” or “father.”
+<em>e</em> is like the <em>e</em> in “obey” or “prey.”
+<em>i</em> is like the double <em>e</em> in “see” or “bee.”
+<em>o</em> is like the <em>o</em> in “hello” or “open.”
+<em>u</em> is like the double <em>o</em> in “zoo” or “boo.”
+<em>a</em> is like the final <em>e</em> in “title” or “handle.”
+</verse>
-The decision by individuals within the movement to adopt the “anarchist” label was not inevitable and occurred to a significant extent by chance. They could have continued to call themselves the federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist movement. Guillaume could have successfully persuaded a large number of people to not refer to themselves as anarchists. They could have called themselves Bakuninists or invented a whole new label. One of the main reasons they adopted the term “anarchist” was that they were borrowing language from Proudhon. But this was not the only reason. Other people within the First International, in particular Marx and Engels, choose to call them “anarchists” due to the belief that they had the same politics as Proudhon. This led to a situation where the federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists had to decide if they were going to adopt the label as their own.
+The letter <em>u</em> becomes a special case when it falls at the end of a word or is combined with another vowel. Then it functions like the consonant <em>w.</em> The word <em>ahau</em> is pronounced <em>“a-haw”</em> and <em>Uolantun</em> is <em>“wo-lan-toon.”</em> Normally, each individual vowel in a word is pronounced separately as an independent syllable, so that the place name El Baul is pronounced <em>“el ba-ool. ”</em>
-It should not be automatically assumed that Proudhon and the collectivists of the First International belonged to the same political tradition because they both called themselves “anarchists.” It cannot be assumed that the collectivists would have ever used the term in such large numbers if it had not been imposed on them by their political opponents, and if there had been no feud with the General Council. If they are to be viewed as belonging to the same political tradition, it must be because of the ideas, rather than just the language that they held in common.
+Since the Mayan languages have several consonants not found in Spanish, the friars who first tried to write the languages had to improvise. They used <em>x</em> to record the consonant that sounds like the English <em>sh.</em> The color term yax is pronounced <em>“yash,,</em> and the place name <em>Uaxactun</em> is pronounced <em>“wa-shak-tun.</em> ” When the <em>x</em> is at the front of a word, it is still <em>sh,</em> even when it precedes other consonants, as in <em>Xphuhil (“sh-poo-hil”)</em> and <em>Xcalumkin (“sh-kal-loom-kin”).</em> In Mayan words, <em>c</em> is always pronounced like <em>k,</em> regardless of what vowel it precedes. The month <em>Ceh</em> is <em>— “keh”</em> and the day <em>Cimi</em> is <em>“kee-mee.”</em>
-It is true that both Proudhon and the collectivists advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of the free federation of free producers.[[#98Thistopicismadeconfusing|98]] Anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin were deeply influenced by Proudhon.[[#99CastletonTheOriginsof|99]] The fact that Proudhon and the collectivists were both anti-state socialists does not, however, entail that they belonged to a single political tradition. Malatesta remarked in 1897 that although “Proudhon . . . first popularized, though amid a thousand contradictions, the idea of abolishing the State and organizing society anarchically,” it was “Bakunin to whom we anarchists of today trace most directly our lineage.”[[#100ErricoMalatestaALongan|100]] Bakunin had himself been careful to describe the politics of First International collectivism as being “the widely developed and pushed to the limit Proudhonism,” rather than a mere repetition.[[#101BakuninSelectedTexts10|101]] He was deeply critical of what he took to be aspects of Proudhon’s thought.[[#102Bakuninwasalsocriticalo|102]] In ''Statism and Anarchy ''he asserted that “there is a good deal of truth in the merciless critique” Marx “directed against Proudhon.”[[#103BakuninStatismandAnarch|103]] He described his own politics as “the anarchic system of Proudhon broadened and developed by us and freed from all its metaphysical, idealist and doctrinaire baggage, accepting matter and social economy as the basis of all development in science and history.”[[#104QuotedinJamesJollTheA|104]]
+In Mayan languages, there is also a contrast between the glottalized and nonglottahzed forms of many consonants. Since this contrast is not used in European languages, English speakers find it hard to pronounce or even to hear the difference. Glottalized consonants are pronounced like the regular consonant, but with the glottis or “voice box” closed. You can hear the unvoiced glottal stop in the way New Yorkers and Englishmen pronounce words with a double <em>t,</em> such as “bottle.” Glottalized consonants sound like very hard and explosive forms of the regular consonants. In this book, the unglottalized <em>k</em> sound is written with <em>c</em> while the glottalized <em>k</em> is represented by the letter <em>k.</em> For example, the word for “earth” is written <em>cab,</em> while the word for “hand” is <em>kab.</em> While these words would be pronounced the same way in English, they sound as different to the Maya as <em>volt</em> and <em>bolt</em> sound to us.
-One of the main topics on which the collectivists differed from Proudhon was strategy. This is extremely important because, as noted above, socialists who called themselves “anarchists” were not distinguished from other kinds of socialism by advocating the abolition of the state. This was a long-term goal of several different kinds of state socialists, including Blanqui, Marx, and Engels. Anarchism must be defined in terms of both its goal and the strategies it proposed to reach this goal.
+There are other pairs of glottalized and plain consonants also, but in all these cases, the glottalized member of the pair is written with an apostrophe after the regular letter, as in <em>b’, ch’, p’,</em> and <em>t’.</em> A glottal stop is written with a simple apostophe, as in <em>ca’an.</em>
-Proudhon, like mutualists in general, rejected the idea of transforming society through violent insurrection while nonetheless viewing himself as a revolutionary. During the late 1840s, as already mentioned, he held that capitalism and the state could be gradually abolished through a process of workers forming cooperatives that would, with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank at low or no interest, grow in number, trade with one another and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established. The collectivists, in contrast, viewed Proudhon’s strategy to achieve fundamental social change as misguided, since cooperatives would be out-competed by larger capitalist businesses (aided by government economic intervention); become like capitalist businesses due to pressure from market forces; or merely improve the living conditions of a small number of workers. If a cooperative movement became so successful that it was a genuine threat to ruling class power, then it would simply be crushed by state violence. According to collectivists, class society could only be abolished through the working classes launching a violent armed insurrection that smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the means of production and land from the ruling classes.[[#105BakuninStatismandAnarch|105]]
+Mayan languages do not have some of the consonants that are native to English, such as the <em>d</em> sound. Conversely, Mayan has a pair of consonants unknown in English. Written as <em>tz</em> in its plain form and <em>tz’</em> in its glottalized form, the consonant is pronounced somewhat like the English <em>z,</em> but with the blade of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth and with a sharp expulsion of breath.
-This key difference on strategy could justify three distinct ways of conceptualizing anarchism: (a) Proudhon and the collectivists represent subdivisions within anarchism as a single political tradition; (b) Proudhon was an anarchist and the collectivists were not anarchists due to diverging from Proudhon; (c) Proudhon was not an anarchist and the term “anarchism” should only be used to refer to the social movement that emerged in the First International. These three potential conceptualizations of Proudhon’s relationship to anarchism rest on the implicit premise that there is one true anarchism that Proudhon is or is not a part of. There is no one true anarchism. There is instead a series of distinct “anarchisms” that arose during the nineteenth century as different people at different historical moments articulated what they thought the words “anarchist” and/or “anarchism” meant or should mean.
+The Spanish letter <em>j</em> also causes problems for English-speaking people. In Spanish, <em>j</em> is pronounced like the hard <em>h</em> in English, while their letter <em>h</em> is essentially silent. Since the Mayan consonant is more like the English <em>h</em> than the silent Spanish <em>h,</em> the letter <em>j</em> is frequently used to represent it. English speakers often make the mistake of pronouncing it like the English <em>j</em> in “jet.” Our consonant <em>j</em> does not exist in the Mayan languages and thus the English pronunciation is never used. The place name <em>Abaj Takalik</em> is <em>“a-bah tak-a-leek” and Kaminaljuyu</em> is <em>“ka-mee-nal-hoo-yoo. ”</em>
-In 1840, the term “anarchist” picked out Proudhon’s political theory for the simple reason that Proudhon decided to call himself an anarchist. The term was subsequently used by a variety of socialists in the 1840s and 1850s to refer to the goal of a society without government or authority. This included Déjacque referring to his ideas as “anarchism” in the late 1850s while advocating what he regarded as a democratic government during the transition to a fully stateless society. Between 1868 and 1880, what the words “anarchist” and “anarchism” were understood to mean changed. This occurred due to an international social network within the First International and Saint-Imier International who were influenced by Proudhon, developing a distinct revolutionary political theory that they called anarchism but could have continued calling federalism, collectivism, autonomism, or revolutionary socialism.
+In Mayan words, the accent usually falls on the last syllable, as in the following names used in this book.
-What matters for the purposes of studying anarchism as a historical concept is that Proudhon’s anarchism and the anarchism of the movement are viewed as distinct entities. Whether one chooses to conceptualize this as: (a) different phases of a single political tradition, or (b) a new political tradition developing out of a previous one does not change the differences between them. These are only alternative ways of viewing the differences. Given my focus on the revolutionary strategy of anarchism, I shall from now on be using the term “anarchism” to refer exclusively to the theory and practice of the anarchist movement, and not its intellectual precursors that can be found during the 1840s and 1850s.
+| Tikal | “tee-kal” |
+| Yaxchilan | “yash-chee-lan” |
+| Pacal | “pa-kal” |
+| Chan-Bahlum | “chan bah-loom” |
+| Yax-Pac | “yash pak” |
+| Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac | “ya-haw chan ah bak” |
+| Uaxactun | “wa-shak-toon” |
+| Kakupacal | “ka-ku-pa-kal” |
-'''The Anarchist Movement'''
+In this book we will use the word <em>Mayan</em> to refer only to the languages spoken. The name of the people, used either as a noun or an adjective, will <em>be Maya.</em> We will pluralize Mayan words such as <em>ahau</em> with the pluralizing suffix <em>-ob</em> taken from the Yucatec and Choi. More than one <em>ahau,</em> therefore, is <em>ahauob,</em> which is pronounced <em>a-ha-wob.</em>
-Who did and did not belong to the anarchist movement is itself a controversial topic. This is because the social movement that emerged within the First International and the Saint-Imier International between 1864 and 1878 was not the only group of people to adopt the term during this period. In parallel to these developments, a small group of mutualists in the United States continued to advocate anti-state market socialism achieved through gradual peaceful means. From the early 1880s onward, they consciously adopted Proudhon’s label of “anarchist” as their own.[[#106BenjaminTuckerInsteadof|106]] Although they were largely an American phenomenon, they did also gain a few adherents in Europe.[[#107Forasummaryofthishisto|107]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-41.jpg 70f][Map 1: the Southern Lowlands Contour intervals at 1000 feet]]
-This led to a situation in which two forms of anti-state socialism, which had both been influenced by Proudhon’s ideas and referred to themselves as “anarchists,” coexisted with one another. On the one side, anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists, and on the other side, individualist anarchists. The fact that they fundamentally disagreed with one another on such topics as their visions of a future society and strategies to achieve social change led to further contestation over what “anarchism” should mean. Both sides sometimes argued that they alone were the true anarchists, and their opponents were fake, pseudo, or inconsistent anarchists. The influential individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, for example, gave a talk at the Boston Anarchist Club in November 1887. He drew a distinction between “real Anarchists like P. J. Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner” and “miscalled Anarchists like Kropotkine,” who had wrongly “usurped the name of Anarchism for its own propaganda.”[[#108BenjaminTuckerInsteadof|108]] The German individualist anarchist John Henry Mackay shared this attitude and argued that anarchism and communism were incompatible with one another.[[#109JohnHenryMackayTheAnar|109]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-42.jpg 70f][Map of the Western Region of the Southern Lowlands<br>Contour intervals at 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 feet<br>drawings of these three maps by Karim Sadr]]
-Similar remarks can be found among anarchist communists. The English paper ''Freedom'' published an editorial in 1892 that argued that “individualists,” such as Tucker, “are not Anarchists” because they advocate market competition and so “lack the fundamental principle of Socialism and Anarchism—solidarity.”[[#110QuotedinRyleyMakingAno|110]] Reclus wrote in an 1895 letter that “the only resemblance between individualist anarchists and us is that of a name.”[[#111QuotedinFlemingAnarchis|111]] In 1914, Kropotkin argued that “an Individualist, if he intends to remain Individualist, cannot be an Anarchist” because “Anarchy necessarily is ''Communist''.”[[#112KropotkinDirectStruggle|112]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-43.jpg 70f][Map of the Eastern Region of the Maya Region<br>Contour intervals 2,000, 5,000, 7,000]]
-On other occasions, there were attempts at tolerance, cooperation, and even combining collectivist/communist anarchism and individualist anarchism together. To give a few examples, Kropotkin and Rocker included individualist anarchists in their summaries of anarchist history.[[#113KropotkinDirectStruggle|113]] The American bookbinder Dyer D. Lum advocated the broad goal of American individualist anarchists—stateless market socialism—achieved via the strategy of anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists—trade unionism and armed insurrection.[[#114DyerDLumOnAnarchy|114]] The anarchist paper ''The Alarm'', which Lum edited, published both individualist anarchist and anarchist-communist authors. In 1889, the anarchist-communist Johann Most reacted to this by verbally attacking Lum for publishing individualist anarchist views and insisted that, as a result of this, German workers should cancel their subscriptions to the paper.[[#115GoyensBeerandRevolution|115]] In response to these kinds of conflicts, Max Nettlau argued in 1914 that anarchist communists and individualist anarchists should cease to be dogmatic and learn to coexist and cooperate with one another, rather than “being divided into little chapels.”[[#116MaxNettlauAnarchismCo|116]] This idea was repeated in the 1920s, when Sébastian Faure and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, who wrote under the pen name Voline, attempted to form anarchist federations that would unite individualist anarchists, anarchist communists, and anarcho-syndicalists into a single organization and develop a new form of anarchism that would be a synthesis of each tendency’s best ideas.[[#117SebastienFaureTheAnarc|117]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-44.jpg 70f][The Yucatán Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands<br><sub>Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet</sub>]]
-This topic is only made more complicated by the fact that what “individualist anarchism” even meant varied between contexts. Within Italian anarchism, a tendency developed during the 1880s and 1890s that referred to itself as “individualist anarchism.” In contrast to other self-described individualist anarchists, it was committed to the goal of anarchist communism, opposed formal organization, and advocated the strategy of individuals engaging in robberies, assassinations, and bombings.[[#118PerniconeItalianAnarchis|118]] This distinction can be seen in Malatesta’s 1897 remark that there are “the individualist anarchists of Tucker’s school” and “the individualist anarchists of the communist school.”[[#119MalatestaPatientWork80|119]]
+| 1100 B.C. | First settlers in the Copan Valley |
+| 1000 B.c. | Florescence of Gulf Coast Olmec; early villagers and beginnings of hierarchical social organization in the Pacific zone; the Copan Valley has permanent settlements |
-The different varieties of individualist anarchism in Europe and the United States also changed over time. For example, during the 1890s, the individualist anarchist writer Mackay popularized the previously obscure German philosopher Max Stirner. These ideas, in turn, influenced wider circles of individualist anarchists when editions of Stirner’s 1844 book ''The Unique and Its Property ''appeared in multiple languages from the early 1900s onward, including English, Italian, French, and Russian.[[#120RockerPioneersofAmerica|120]] Mackay went so far as to rewrite the history of anarchism and claim that Stirner, who never referred to himself as an anarchist, was one of its main founders alongside Proudhon.[[#121MackayTheAnarchistsix|121]]
+<strong>MIDDLE PRECLASSIC</strong>
-The fact that several different and incompatible tendencies adopted the language of “individualist anarchism” is important for understanding Malatesta’s various remarks on the topic. In 1897, he critiqued “those who, in calling themselves individualists, see that as justification for any repugnant action, and who have about as much to do with anarchism as the police do with the public order they boast to protect.”[[#122MalatestaPatientWork77|122]] In response to such self-appointed “individualist anarchists,” Malatesta had argued a year earlier that, since “we cannot stop others adopting whatever title they choose,” our only option is to “differentiate ourselves clearly from those whose notion of anarchy differs from our own.”[[#123MalatestaMethodofFreedo|123]] In 1924, Malatesta continued to claim that some self-appointed “individualist anarchists” were not in fact anarchists, while advocating tolerance toward “individualists” who “are really anarchists.”[[#124MalatestaLifeandIdeas|124]] He even recommended a book by the French individualist anarchist E. Armand and described him as “one of the ablest individualist anarchists.”[[#125MalatestaLifeandIdeas|125]]
+| 900 B.C. | Rich tombs in the Copan Valley |
+| 600 B.C. | Tikal settled by early villagers |
+| 500 B.C. | Large towns and long-distance trading |
-Given this history, there is no neutral and uncontested definition of the anarchist movement. What people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century took anarchism to mean was a product of ongoing debates and discussion between groups who all claimed to be anarchists but had conflicting and incompatible views on both what anarchism meant and who was and was not a genuine anarchist. Although it is impossible to find a neutral and entirely uncontested definition of anarchism, it is possible to pick out contingents that represented one side within the process of contestation over what anarchism meant and to view anarchism from their point of view.
+<strong>LATE PRECLASSIC</strong>
-For the purposes of this book, anarchism will be defined as a form of revolutionary anti-state socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the First International between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International, which included anarchist groups in Europe, South America, and Egypt, between 1872 and 1878. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists.
+| 300 B.C. | Late Preclassic period begins |
+| 200 B.C. | Early Izapa monuments with Popol Vuh mythology in the south; activity in the Copan Valley diminishes |
+| 100 B.C. | Sculpted temples begin to appear throughout the northern lowlands; carved and dated monuments and large towns in the southern zone; appearance of writing in the Maya zone; formulation of the institution of kingship |
+| 50 B.C. | Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros; North Acropolis and stelae at Tikal; Group H at Uaxactun; El Mirador the dominant lowland center; green obsidian from Teotihuacan region at Nohmul |
+| 50 A.D. | El Mirador, Cerros, and other centers abandoned |
-I will not examine the ideas of the intellectual precursors of the anarchist movement who wrote during the 1840s and 50s, such as Proudhon, or the individualist anarchists who operated in parallel with anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists from the 1880s onward. This is motivated by the fact that both Proudhon and individualist anarchists advocated distinct visions of a future society and strategies to achieve the abolition of capitalism and the state. Examining the ideas proposed by every single individual or movement who called themselves anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not possible within the limited space of this book. I am not committing myself to the strong view that Proudhon and the individualist anarchists were not anarchists. My definition of anarchism only specifies the kind of anarchism I will be examining, and does not claim to establish the one true version of anarchism.
+<strong>EARLY CLASSIC</strong>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#11|1]]. For example Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''3; David Miller, ''Anarchism'' (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1984), 2–3; George Woodcock, ''Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements,'' 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 17–18.</div>
+| 120 | 8.4.0.0.0 | First object with deciphered date (DO celt) |
+| 150 | 8.6.0.0.0 | The kingdom of Copan established |
+| 199 | 8.8.0.4.0 | First dated stela (Hauberg) |
+| 219 | 8.9.0.0.0 | Reign of Yax-Moch-Xoc and founding of the Tikal dynasty |
+| 292 | 8.12.14.8.15 | Stela 29, earliest monument at Tikal |
+| 320 | 8.14.2.17.6 | Yat-Balam of Yaxchilan accedes and founds the lineage |
+| 328 | 8.14.10.13.15 | Stela 9, earliest monument at Uaxactun |
+| 376 | 8.17.0.0.0 | Great-Jaguar-Paw ends the katun at Tikal |
+| 378 | 8.17.1.4.12 | Tikal conquers Uaxactun; first appearance of Tlaloc-war complex in Maya imagery |
+| 379 | 8.17.2.16.17 | Curl-Snout accedes at Tikal under Smoking-Frog |
+| 396 | 8.18.0.0.0 | Smoking-Frog ends katun at Uaxactun; Curl-Snout ends it at Tikal |
+| 411 | 8.18.15.11.0 | Astronomically timed “accession” event at Tikal |
+| 426 | 8.19.10.0.0 | Probable accession of Stormy-Sky of Tikal |
+| 426 | 8.19.10.11.17 | Yax-Kuk-Mo’ of Copan enacts a God K-scepter rite and establishes the dynasty |
+| 431 | 8.19.15.3.4 | Bahlum-Kuk accedes and founds the dynasty of Palenque |
+| 439 | 9.0.3.9.18 | Last event on Stela 31 at Tikal: Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting |
+| 445 | 9.0.10.0.0 | Tikal Stela 31 dedicated |
+| 475 | 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar rules at Tikal |
+| 488 | 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw Skull, the 14<sup>th</sup> king, rules at Tikal |
+| 504 | 9.3.16.18.4 | New ruler (name unknown) accedes at Tikal |
+| 514 | 9.4.0.0.0 | Summit of North Acropolis reworked at Tikal |
+| 527 | 9.4.13.0.0 | The 19<sup>th</sup> king of Tikal rules |
+| 537 | 9.5.3.19.15 | Double-Bird, the 21<sup>st</sup> king, accedes(?) |
+| 553 | 9.5.19.1.2 | Lord Water of Caracol accedes |
+| 556 | 9.6.2.1.11 | Caracol conducts “ax-war” action against Tikal |
+| 557 | 9.6.3.9.15 | Last date at Tikal before the conquest |
+| 562 | 9.6.8.4.2 | Caracol conducts “star war” against Tikal |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#21|2]]. Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On the Genealogy of Morality'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53. For discussions of Nietzsche’s views on definitions, see Lawrence J. Hatab, ''Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: An Introduction ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–99; Raymond Geuss, ''History and Illusion in Politics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–8, 69–72; ''Morality'','' Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–14.</div>
+<strong>LATE CLASSIC</strong>
-[[#31|3]]. Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible'', xiii–xiv, 3–5, 96–99; John A. Rapp, ''Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China'' (London: Continuum Books, 2012), 3–5; Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 2–3.
+| 599 | 9.8.5.16.12 | Oldest son of Lord Water becomes the king of Caracol |
+| 603 | 9.8.9.13.0 | Pacal the Great is born at Palenque during the reign of Ac-Kan |
+| 612 | 9.8.19.7.18 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, accedes at Palenque |
+| 693 | 9.13.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo, grandson of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, accedes at age five |
+| 695 | 9.13.2.16.0 | Naranjo’s second attack on Ucanal |
+| 615 | 9.9.2.4.8 | Pacal of Palenque accedes |
+| 618 | 9.9.4.16.2 | Lord Kan II, younger son of Lord Water, becomes the king of Caracol |
+| 619 | 9.9.5.13.8 | Lord Kan II of Caracol interacts with Calakmul’s king (Site Q?) |
+| 626 | 9.9.13.4.4 | Caracol’s first attack against Naranjo |
+| 627 | 9.9.14.3.5 | Caracol’s second attack against Naranjo |
+| 628 | 9.9.14.17.5 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan accedes |
+| 630 | 9.9.17.11.14 | A lord of Naranjo dies |
+| 631 | 9.9.18.16.3 | Star war against Naranjo by Caracol |
+| 635 | 9.10.2.6.6 | Chan-Bahlum, son of Pacal of Palenque, is born |
+| 636 | 9.10.3.2.12 | Second star war against Naranjo by Caracol |
+| 640 | 9.10.7.13.5 | Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, dies at Palenque |
+| 641 | 9.10.8.9.3 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque is designated heir to the throne |
+| 642 | 9.10.10.0.0 | Caracol victory stair dedicated at Naranjo |
+| 643 | 9.10.10.1.6 | Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, Pacal’s father, dies at Palenque |
+| 644 | 9.10.11.17.0 | Kan-Xul, brother of Chan-Bahlum, is born at Palenque |
+| 645 | 9.10.12.11.2 | Flint-Sky-God K accedes at Dos Pilas |
+| 647 | 9.10.14.5 10 | Pacal dedicates his first temple at Palenque |
+| 647 | 9.10.15.0.0 | Shield-Jaguar, son of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 649 | 9.10.16.16.19 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) born |
+| 652 | 9.11.0.0.0 | Smoke-Imix-God K of Copan celebrates the period ending with a monument at Quirigua and with the pattern of outlying stelae in the Copan Valley; Pacal celebrates the period ending at Palenque. |
+| 664 | 9.11.11.9.17 | Flint-Sky-God K captures Tah-Mo’ during his long military campaign in the Petexbatun |
+| 675 | 9.12.3.6.6 | Pacal begins construction of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque |
+| 681 | 9.12.9.8.1 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes |
+| 682 | 9.12.9.17.16 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal accedes as king |
+| 682 | 9.12.10.5.12 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, daughter of the Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas, arrives at Naranjo and reestablishes its royal house |
+| 683 | 9.12.11.5.18 | Pacal of Palenque dies |
+| 684 | 9.12.11.12.10 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque accedes in a ten-day-long ceremony |
+| 686 | 9.12.13.17.7 | Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) accedes with Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas witnessing the ritual |
+| 688 | 9.12.15.13.7 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo born |
+| 690 | 9.12.18.5.16+ | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dedicates the Group of the Cross in a three-day-long ceremony |
+| 692 | 9.12.19.14.12 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque activates the <em>pib na</em> in the temples of the Group of the Cross |
+| 692 | 9.13.0.0.0 | Ah-Cacaw plants the first stela and builds the first twin-pyramid group after the defeat by Caracol |
+| | 9.13.1.4.19 | Naranjo’s first attack on Ucanal: Kinichil-Cab captured under the authority of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan accedes |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.7.18 | Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul (Site Q) |
+| 695 | 9.13.3.9.18 | Ah-Cacaw dedicates Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rites 260 tuns (13 katuns) after the last date on Stela 31, the stela celebrating Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun |
+| 695 | 9.13 3.13.15 | Tikal captures a noble of Calakmul (Site Q) |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.2.0 | Shield-God K, son of Flint-Sky-God K, becomes king of Dos Pilas |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.4.17 | Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal in a sacrificial ritual at Naranjo |
+| 698 | 9.13.6.10.4 | Sacrificial ritual at Naranjo with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal |
+| 699 | 9.13.7.3.8 | Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo stands atop her captive, Kinich-Cab of Ucanal |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.0.0 | Stela dedication and period-ending rites at Naranjo in which Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal is bled |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.1.5 | Chan-Bahlum of Palenque dies |
+| 702 | 9.13.10.6.8 | Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, accedes to the throne of Palenque |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.12.10 | Bird-Jaguar, the son of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.15.12 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar, lets blood from her tongue |
+| 709 | 9.13.17.15.13 | Lady Eveningstar, mother of Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, does a bundle rite with Shield-Jaguar |
+| 710 | 9.13.18.4.18 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Yaxha |
+| 711 | 9.13.19.6.3 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo attacks Sacnab |
+| 711 | 9.14.0.0.0 | Smoking-Squirrel erects stela at Naranjo; Ah-Cacaw erects a stela and his second twin-pyramid group at Tikal |
+| 712 | 9.14.0.10.0 | Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal undergoes a sacrificial rite at Naranjo |
+| 713 | 9.14.1.3.19 | Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo celebrates his first katun as king by erecting Stelae 2 and 3 |
+| 715 | 9.14.3.6.8 | 18-Rabbit of Copan dedicates Temple 22 to celebrate his first katun as king |
+| 723 | 9.14.11.15.1 | Lady Xoc, wife of Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, dedicates the sculpture of Temple 23 |
+| 726 | 9.14.14.8.1 | Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participate in the dedication rites of Temple 23 |
+| 734 | 9.15.3.6.8 | Ah-Cacaw’s son become the king of Tikal |
+| 736 | 9.15.4.16.11 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event |
+| 738 | 9.15.6.14.6 | 18-Rabbit of Copan taken captive and sacrificed by Cauac-Sky of Quirigua |
+| 738 | 9.15.6.16.5 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan accedes |
+| 741 | 9.15.9.17.16 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts a flapstaff event with his son, Bird-Jaguar |
+| 741 | 9.15.10.0.1 | Bird-Jaguar (the son of Shield-Jaguar), Lady Eveningstar (the mother of Bird-Jaguar), Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the wife of Bird-Jaguar), and Great-Skull-Zero (her patriarch) let blood |
+| 742 | 9.15.10.17.14 | Shield-Jaguar of Yaxchilan dies |
+| 744 | 9.15.13.6.9 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan participates in a bailgame |
+| 746 | 9.15.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending in his father’s name |
+| 747 | 9.15.16.1.6 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts his own flapstaff ritual |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.12.16 | Smoke-Monkey of Copan dies |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.12.10 | Smoke-Shell, the son of Smoke-Monkey of Copan, accedes |
+| 749 | 9.15.17.15.14 | Lady Xoc, the wife of Shield-Jaguar, dies |
+| 749 | 9.15.18.3.13 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to celebrate the first katun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession |
+| 750 | 9.15.19.1.1 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan sacrifices captives as Chac-Xib-Chac |
+| 751 | 9.15.19.15.3 | Lady Eveningstar, the mother of Bird-Jaguar, dies |
+| 752 | 9.16.0.13.17 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan takes Yax-Cib-Tok captive |
+| 752 | 9.16.0.14.5 | Chel-Te, the son of Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, is born |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan accedes in a nine-day-long ritual that ends with the dedication of Temple 22 |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.2.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan enacts the tree-scepter rite with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau and a God K-scepter rite with his cahal, Kan-Toc |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.8.6 | Bird-Jaguar enacts a God K-staff event with Kan-Toc and blood-letting rite with Lady Balam-Ix |
+| 752 | 9.16.1.8.8 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan captures Jeweled-Skull |
+| 756 | 9.16.5.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his first period ending in three different ceremonies: one with a cahal in attendance; a second with his wife; and a third with her patriarch and his own son, Chel-Te |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates his five-year anniversary with his son, Chel-Te |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.9.16 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan goes to Piedras Negras to confirm his support of Ruler 4’s heir |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.11.14 | Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras dies |
+| 757 | 9.16.6.17.17 | Ruler 5 of Piedras Negras accedes |
+| 763 | 9.16.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac of Copan, son of the woman of Palenque, accedes |
+| 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates the period ending with his wife, his son, and his cahals, Great-Skull-Zero and Tilot |
+| 766 | 9.16.15.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan sets up Altar G3 in the Great Plaza |
+| 768 | 9.16.17.6.12 | Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan celebrates a flapstaff event with his brother-in-law Great-Skull-Zero |
+| 769 | 9.16.18.0.0 | Yax-Pac of Copan begins remodeling Temple 11 |
+| 771 | 9.17.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 21a to celebrate the period ending |
+| 773 | 9.17.2.12.16 | Yax-Pac dedicates the upper temple of Structure 11 |
+| 775 | 9.17.5.0.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates Altar Q |
+| 780 | 9.17.9.2.12 | Yax-Pac’s younger brother become “First Servitor” of the kingdom |
+| 780 | 9.17.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s scattering rite recorded in Group 9M-18 |
+| 781 | 9.17.10.11.0 | Yax-Pac dedicates the bench in Group 9N-8 |
+| 783 | 9.17.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his first katun as king by dedicating Temple 22a; by erecting Stela 8 in the area under the modern village; and by erecting Altar T with his younger brother in the same region |
+| 790 | 9.18.0.0.0 | Last date at Pomona, Tabasco; last date at Aguateca |
+| 793 | 9.18.2.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his 30-tun anniversary of accession on the same day his younger brother celebrates his 13<sup>th</sup> haab as the “First Servitor” |
+| 793 | 9.18.3.0.0 | Last date at Yaxha |
+| 795 | 9.18.5.0.0 | Last date at Bonampak; Yax-Pac places an altar in the Temple 22a council house |
+| 799 | 9.18.9.4.4 | Accession of 6-Cimi-Pacal at Palenque; the last date at Palenque |
+| 800 | 9.18.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac and his brother erect Altar G1 in the Great Plaza |
+| 801 | 9.18.10.17.18 | Yax-Pac dedicates Temple 18 |
+| 802 | 9.18.12.5.17 | Yax-Pac celebrates his two-katun anniversary |
+| 807 | 9.18.17.1.13 | Ballgame event on La Amelia Stela 1; last date associated with the Petexbatun state |
+| 808 | 9.18.17.13.4 | Last date at Yaxchilan |
-[[#41|4]]. Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism:'' Élisée'' Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''15–23; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010), xxxvi–lv; Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun'' ''(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 510–15.
+<strong>TERMINAL CLASSIC</strong>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#51|5]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''84, 136. On other occasions, Kropotkin appears to adopt a historicist perspective and defines anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism. For an overview of this topic, see Zoe Baker, ''Kropotkin’s Definition of Anarchism ''(forthcoming).</div>
+| 810 | 9.19.0.0.0 | Yax-Pac goes to Quiriguá to celebrate the katun ending; last date at Piedras Negras; last monument erected at Chinkultic; last date at Calakmul; last date at Naranjo; last date at Quiriguá |
+| 820 | 9.19.10.0.0 | Yax-Pac’s apotheosis as an ancestor is celebrated on Stela 11 at Copán |
+| 822 | 9.19.11.14.5 | U-Cit-Tok of Copán accedes and within five years the central government collapses |
+| 830 | 10.0.0.0.0 | The baktun-ending celebrated at Oxpemul and Uaxactún |
+| 841 | 10.0.10.17.15 | Last date at Machaquilá |
+| 842 | 10.0.12.8.0 | Capture on a column on the High Priest’s Grave |
+| 849 | 10.1.0.0.0 | Bol on-Tun, a Putun-type lord, dominates Seibal and builds a katun-ending complex with five stelae; last date at Altar de Sacrificios; last date at Xunantunich; last date at Ucanal |
+| 859 | 10.1.10.0.0 | Last date at Caracol |
+| 862 | 10.1.13.0.0 | Dedication date of the Palace at Labná |
+| 867 | 10.1.17.15.13 | The earliest date at Chichón Itzá (the Watering Trough) |
+| 879 | 10.2.0.0.0 | The last ruler of Tikal scattered; last date at Tikal |
+| 869 | 10.2.0.1.9 | Fire ceremony by Yax-Uk-Kauil and another lord of Chichón Itzá; bloodletting by Kakupacal recorded in the Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá |
+| 870 | 10.2.0.15.3 | Dedication of Casa Colorada at Chichón Itzá |
+| 874 | 10.2.5.0.0 | Monument erected at Comitán |
+| 879 | 10.2.10.0.0 | Last date at Ixlú; monument erected at Quen Santo |
+| 881 | 10.2.12.1.8 | Dedication of the Temple of the Four Lintels at Chichón Itzá by Yax-T’ul and other lords |
+| 889 | 10.3.0.0.0 | Last date at La Muñeca; last date at Xultún; last date at Uaxactún; last date at Jimbal; last date at Seibal |
+| 898 | 10.3.8.14.4 | Last date recorded at Chichón Itzá |
+| 901 | 10.3.11.15.14 | Date on the Ballcourt Marker at Uxmal |
+| 907 | 10.3.17.12.1 | Date on a capstone in the Monjas at Uxmal |
+| 909 | 10.4.0.0.0 | Late monument with a Long Count date (Tonina) |
+| 1200 | 10.19.0.0.0 | Chichón Itzá abandoned |
+| 1250 | 11.1.10.0.0 | Founding of Mayapán |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#61|6]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 9, 3.</div>
+<strong>POSTCLASSIC</strong>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#71|7]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 28, 19. See also, 78.</div>
+| 1451 | 11.11.10.0.0 | Fall of Mayapán |
+| 1502 | 11.14.2.0.0 | A Maya trading canoe contacted in the bay of Honduras during the fourth voyage of Columbus |
+| 1511 | 11.14.11.0.0 | Aguilar and Guerrero shipwrecked on the coast of Yucatán |
+| 1519 | 11.14.18.17.16 | Cortes lands on Cozumel Island and meets Naum-Pat |
+| 1521 | 11.15.1.8.13 | Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, falls |
+| 1524 | 11.15.4.8.9 | Alvarado founds Guatemala City |
+| 1525 | 11.15.5.2.1 | Cortés meets King Can-Ek at the Itzá capital of Tayasal during his trip across Maya country to Honduras |
+| 1542 | 11.16.2.3.4 | The city of Mérida founded by the Spanish |
+| 1618 | 11.19.19.9.1 | Fuensalida and Orbita visit King Can-Ek of the Itzá in Katun 3 Ahau |
+| 1695 | 12.3.17.10 0 | Avendano’s first visit to King Can-Ek of the Itzá |
+| 1696 | 12.3.18.8.1 | King Can-Ek of the Itzá accepts Avendano’s invitation to become a Christian |
+| 1697 | 12.3.19.11.14 | The Itzá are conquered by the Spanish and the last independent Maya kingdom falls |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#81|8]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.</div>
+ A Forest of Kings
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#91|9]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'', ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 13.</div>
+. Time Travel in the Jungle
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#101|10]]. Ba Jin, “Anarchism and the Question of Practice,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 362.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-45.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|11]]. Kubo Yuzuru, “On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle,” in Graham, ed.,'' Anarchism'','' ''vol. 1, 380.</div>
+Once, many years ago, when we were just beginning our adventure with the Maya, a friend observed that to cross the Texas border into Mexico was to enter a different world where time and reality dance to a different rhythm. After twenty years of moving in and out of that world, both of us have confirmed the truth of that observation for ourselves.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#121|12]]. Rapp, ''Daoism and Anarchism'', 37–40, 227–29.</div>
+While the experiences of our first journey to that “otherworld” were distinctly our own, they have much in common with the thousands of other pilgrims who go to Yucatán out of curiosity and admiration. For Linda Scheie that first journey came in 1970 when she followed the great arching curve of the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama, around to the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. With three students and a husband in tow, she followed the narrow, potholed highway south from Matamoros through the vast, cactus-filled deserts of northern México, skirting the majestic Sierra Madre mountains. At the Gulf port of Tampico, she rode a dilapidated ferry across the Río Pánuco and with the gawking wonder of a first-time tourist entered a world that has known civilization for 5,000 years. The Huastecs, long-lost cousins of the Maya,[6] dwell in the mountains and the dry northern edge of this enormous region. Now we call this world Mesoamerica, a term which refers not only to geography, but to a Precolumbian cultural tradition that shared a 260-day calendar, religious beliefs including definitions of gods and bloodletting as the central act of piety, the cultivation of maize, the use of cacao as a drink and as money, a bailgame played with a rubber ball, screen-fold books, pyramids and plazas, and a sense of common cultural identity.[7] The world view that was forged by the ancient peoples of that land is still a living and vibrant heritage for the millions of their descendants.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#13|13]]. Gerrard Winstanley, ''“The Law of Freedom” and other Writings'', ed. Christopher Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77–95.</div>
+The first time you cross the boundary into that world, you may not have an intellectual definition for what is happening to you, but you will sense a change. If nothing else, this region is greener than the desert, and evidence of people and their communities thickens around you. As you drive south, the narrow band of land next to the sea gets squeezed against the waters of the Gulf of Mexico by the huge Sierra Madre mountains and you see for the first time the dramatic contrast between the cool, dry highlands towering above and the hot, humid, forest-covered lowlands. This central opposition is the force that molded life in ancient Mesoamerica into a dynamic interaction between the peoples who lived in these two very different environments.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#14|14]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 120, 127.</div>
+Moving through the green, hilly land of the Totonacs, another great people of this ancient world, you pass around the modern port city of Veracruz where Cortes’s motley band of adventurers first established a foothold during the time of the Conquest. There you enter the flat, swampy homeland of the primordial Olmec, whose dominions lined the southernmost arc of the Gulf of Mexico. Here amid the twisted courses of sluggish, tide-driven rivers (while carefully dodging the speeding juggernauts of modern tanker trucks that frequent this stretch of road), you see where the first civilization in North America was built. The road rises out of the swamp into a small cluster of black and mottled green volcanic mountains, the Tuxtlas, the natural pyramidal heart of this land, and you can see the flat waterworld of levees and bayous stretching to the horizon in all directions. This was the land of the Olmec, who began building cities at places like San Lorenzo and La Venta by 1200 B.C. They were the people who forged the template of world view and governance that the Maya would inherit a thousand years later when they began to build their own cities.
-[[#15|15]]. Christopher Boehm, ''Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10–12; James C. Scott, ''The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
+Southern Veracruz and Tabasco finally give way to the land of the Maya as the coast bends eastward to swing north into the Yucatán Peninsula. The narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, which had widened out briefly into the flat expanse of the ancient Olmec kingdoms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, narrows again as you approach the westernmost Maya city, Palenque. It has always seemed to us that this swampy place could not make up its mind whether it wanted to be land or sea. Patches of dry land peek forlornly up through the flowering hyacinths that have replaced waterlilies to form the floating surface of the dark, still waters the Maya saw as the source of creation. Here is the gateway to the lowlands of the Maya, who developed one of the most fascinating civilizations in the annals of the ancient world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#16|16]]. Boehm, ''Hierarchy in the For''est, 43–88, 101–24. This point was previously made, but with less empirical evidence, by Pierre Clastres, ''Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology ''(New York: Zone Books, 1989), 7–47, 189–218; Clastres, ''Archeology of Violence ''(New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), 87–92.</div>
+While our first visits to the hauntingly beautiful ruins that dot the landscape of the Yucatán peninsula were different, we both learned that the Maya are not just a people of the past. Today, they live in their millions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, still speaking one of the thirty-five Mayan languages as their native tongue. They continue to cultivate their fields and commune with their living world in spite of the fact that they are encapsulated within a larger modern civilization whose vision of reality is often alien to their own.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#17|17]]. Robert L. Kelly, ''The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum'', 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4–7, 15–18, 241–48. There is limited knowledge of what gender relations were like prior to the emergence of writing due to the nature of archaeological evidence. See Marcia-Anne Dobres, “Digging Up Gender in the Earliest Human Societies,” in ''A Companion to Gender History'', ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks'' ''(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 211–26.</div>
+Encounters between the modern Maya and those who visit their lands can also be startling. Linda Scheie remembers vividly the first Maya who truly made a lasting impression on her. As an incredibly naive gringa tourist, she was walking through the market in Merida, when she found herself followed around by a Yucatec woman whose aged, wrinkle-creased face barely came to her shoulder. The old woman’s black eyes gazed upon that foreigner—Ix-tz’ul in Yucatec Mayan—with disbelief, and who could blame her? At five feet eleven and dressed in heavy boots and jeans, Linda was truly an apparition from another world. That tall gringa and the tiny Yucatec shared a moment of contact, but they were from different realities indeed.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#18|18]]. David Graeber and David Wengrow, ''The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ''(London: Allen Lane, 2021), 106–15.</div>
+That old woman, like millions of other modern Maya, is the inheritor of a cultural tradition that began with the hunter-gatherers who settled the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands to the south eleven thousand years ago. The land her ancestors found was vast and environmentally diverse, covering nearly half a million square kilometers and ranging from high volcanic mountain ranges with narrow cool valleys to dense rain forest interspersed with swamps and rivers to the dry forest plains of the north (Fig. 1:1). This diversity meant that when the Maya became farmers around three thousand years ago,[8] they had to devise many different agricultural techniques, including the terracing of slopes, the raising of fields in swamps and rivers, and the slashing and burning of forest cover. This last technique, swidden agriculture—burning and then planting in the fertile ashes left behind—is both the most ancient and the most common farming method used in the region today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#19|19]]. Alan B. Spitzer, ''The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui ''(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 173n37; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, ''Later Political Writings'','' ''ed. Terrell Carver'' ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20; Vladimir Lenin, ''Selected Works ''(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 320, 335; Joseph Stalin, ''Works'','' ''vol. 1,'' 1901–1907'' (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 336–37.</div>
+The archaeological record from those ancient villagers, as well as the description of the Maya by their Spanish conquerors, biased though it was, speaks to us of a cultural heritage which still lives on in Maya farming communities today. Granted that much has changed in the intervening centuries, there is still a basic connection between the ancient Maya and their descendants, just as there is between the ancient Saxons and the modern British. By examining modern village life, we can recover at least a partial picture of what life in those ancient villages was like.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#20|20]]. For a summary of the language Winstanley used to refer to himself and his companions, see John Gurney, ''Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy'' (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 59–64.</div>
+Just as they did in ancient times, modern Maya villagers live in household compounds occupied by extended families. Each family is made up of a group of related adults, including one or more mature couples with growing children; several unmarried adolescents; and, more often than not, a senior couple or grandparents. Such extended families provide the large number of people needed in farming, a labor-intensive way of life. Maya farmers and their families work hard. The yearly cycle of preparing the fields, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing the fruits of their labor leaves only intermittent periods of unoccupied time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#21|21]]. Woodcock, ''Anarchism'', 12, 41. Some historical anarchists were themselves aware of its usage during the French Revolution. See Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 346–47, 350–60.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-46.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:1 Topographical map of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Maya Region<br><sub>drawing by Karim Sadr</sub>]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#22|22]]. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''What is Property?'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205, 209, 216. See also Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 205, 254, 480, 711. For an overview of Proudhon’s life and ideas see Steven K. Vincent, ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); George Woodcock, ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987).</div>
+Extended family organization not only provides a means of ensuring that several farmers are available during the peak periods of work, it also ensures that there are extra hands available to carry out the other necessary activities of the household. Such activities include routine tasks, such as the building and refurbishment of houses, kitchens, and storerooms, the collection of firewood, the preparation of food, and the repair and maintenance of tools. They also include more specialized craftwork, such as the weaving and decorating of cloth, the manufacture of clothing, and the making of pottery. These crafts can be either used by their makers or exchanged for other goods and services needed by the household.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#23|23]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'', 61, 609–10, 742, 766.</div>
+Households live in compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings. The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbors. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#24|24]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''254–55, 291–92, 348, 615–16, 718, 725.</div>
+Despite the diversity in the ways that contemporary Maya communities organize their living space, they cling stubbornly and proudly to local traditions. David Freidel remembers visiting the home of a young Tzotzil Maya farmer in Chiapas. He was very pleased to regard himself as a modern man, and to prove the point he showed David a fine pocket watch that he had acquired. His house had been built by the government as part of a project to improve the living conditions of his people. It was a particularly sturdy structure, but it didn’t fit with the ideals of Tzotzil Maya houses, it had windows, which he had boarded up to avoid drafts. It had a fireplace and chimney, which his wife was using as a store cupboard. His fire was directly on the cement floor with the proper three stones and its smoke was properly blackening the rafters above. No longer a house, now it was a home. Such conservatism in daily practice is vital to the bridges we build between the living Maya and the ruined remains left by their ancestors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#25|25]]. For the history of the term, see Shawn P. Wilbur, “Mutualism,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 213–24; Vincent, ''Proudhon'','' ''162–64.</div>
+There is a clear division of labor in a Maya family: men farm and women prepare the food in the home. Among the people of Yucatan these role definitions are bestowed upon children in infancy, on the day when they are first carried on their mother’s hip rather than bundled in her shawl. In this ceremony children attain both gender identity and personhood: boys are given little toy field tools, while girls are given toy household utensils.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#26|26]]. Proudhon, ''What is Property'', 65–66, 73, 86, 94, 214–16. For a summary of Proudhon’s vision of a postcapitalist society, see Iain McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''28–35.</div>
+Participation in this ceremony by adults who are not kinsmen of the child is one of many small ritual ways of forging social ties among different families and even with people from outside the Maya world. As an archaeologist working with Maya from the village of Yaxuná in Yucatán, David Freidel was asked to put a little boy on his hip in just such a ceremony. As it happened the child wasn’t wearing any diapers and, much to the amusement of David’s staff and Maya friends, he reciprocated the honor by making water on his sponsor.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#27|27]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''164, 281–93''<nowiki>; </nowiki>''McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'', 23–28; Vincent, ''Proudhon'', 142–51, 170–74. For the wider context and how Proudhon’s ideas developed during this period, see Edward Castleton, “The Many Revolutions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,” in ''The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought ''ed. Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 39–69.</div>
+The roles bestowed in this ceremony extend throughout the lifetime of the child. In modern Maya communities, men predominate in the public affairs of the village, while women carry substantial authority within the household and make many economic and social decisions concerning the family in conjunction with the senior men. Women are expert in crafts, especially the making of cloth and clothes.
-[[#28|28]]. ''David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009)'','' ''16–17; Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 41–47, 66–75; James J. Martin, ''Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America'', 1827–1908 (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1970), 103–66; Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 31–52.
+The public authorities in Maya villages derive from three sources: offices surviving from Precolumbian institutions, those introduced by the Spanish, and those needed for working with the modern national governments presiding over Maya country. In the Maya highlands, the primary hierarchy is made up of cargo officials, adult men who take on the cargo, or burden, of responsibility for organizing the festivals of the saints through the cycle of the year. In many highland communities, there are dual cargo hierarchies. One is responsible for public festivals, and the other for civil matters such as arbitrating disputes which cannot be handled by family patriarchs and matriarchs. Such disputes include unpaid loans, damaged property, sexual improprieties, and other infractions which the national authorities consider too minor to bother with. The cargo officials who try these cases possess an admirable philosophy of justice, one aimed at reconciliation rather than a forcibly imposed verdict from the bench. The civil hierarchy presides over these matters at the cabildo, a municipal building usually found on the square facing the church in the center of the community. Cargo positions are sought after years in advance, and men go to the major festivals to have their names inscribed on waiting lists up to fifteen years long.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#29|29]]. Josiah Warren, ''The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren'','' ''ed. Crispin Sartwell'' ''(New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Martin, ''Men Against the State'', 1–102.</div>
+To hold a cargo in the public lite of a village is very expensive, often requiring most of the disposable income of a family and its relatives for many years. These officials have to pay for the festivals, and for the many ritual meals, flowers, incense, rockets, and other paraphernalia they use during the performance of their office. They must also live in the population center, away from their households and their fields. In this way, the accumulated wealth of families is put at the disposal of the entire community, and the men buy prestige and authority through their devotion.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#30|30]]. Anselme Bellegarrigue, “Anarchy, A Journal of Order,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Anarchist Library website, http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anselme-bellegarrigue-the-world-s-first-anarchist-manifesto.</div>
+The way modern Maya think about cargo officials offers us insight into the ancient attitude toward kings and nobility. Robert Laughlin, a friend of ours and a famous expert on the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, commented at a national meeting where we were presenting our views on Maya divine kingship that modern Maya cargo holders may be saints for a year, but they are still men subject to the same pleasures and needs as the rest of the community. David Freidel remembers spending the night in the home of such a cargo official, Saint John, in the ceremonial center of Zinacantan, a Tzotzil Maya community. After a rough night on the dirt floor, covered not only with warm blankets but with an abundance of fleas, David was awakened before dawn by calls from without: “Saint John, are you dead? Wake up!” To which his host replied: “No, I’m not dead, I’m a little bit alive, wait a minute, come in, come in.” While the wife of Saint John busied herself with the fire, Saint Lawrence and Saint Sabastian strolled in, decked out in wide, flat beribboned sombreros and black ponchos, and everyone huddled on little stools around the growing fire. Someone produced a bottle of homemade cane liquor, a spicy and formidable potion accompanying most ritual business in the town, and a single shot glass. Drinks were poured in proper order, each shot downed in a single gulp after polite bowing to all Saints present; each gulp was followed by spitting on the earth in libation to the unseen but ever-present spiritual beings. With David’s second shot, the memories of fleas faded, replaced by the delicious aroma of coffee laced with cinnamon, fresh thick corn tortillas, and meat jerky broiling on the fire. The Saints proceeded to discuss the preparation of flower arrangements in the church for the upcoming festival of Saint Lawrence: business breakfast, Maya style. Divine kings, like their saintly descendants, no doubt wove their sacred work around the daily pleasures of human life. The beautifully painted crockery from their own official meals, buried in tombs and offerings, is tangible testimony to this tradition.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#31|31]]. Élisée Reclus, “The Development of Liberty in the World,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, September 2, 2016, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/elisee-reclus-the-development-of-liberty-in-the-world-c-1850.</div>
+Unlike its uses in our culture, hierarchy for the modern Maya is an institutional means of maintaining an egalitarian way of life in which everyone has similar material means and no one stands out as wealthy. Wealth is something intrinsically to be feared, as seen in the stories about pacts with the spirits in which people trade integrity for money. People who accumulate wealth or display it in private space are likely to be accused of witchcraft and killed or driven from the village. Unlike us, the Maya are uncomfortable with nonconformity, and such behavior only causes tension within the community.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#32|32]]. Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''74–76; Shawn P. Wilbur, “Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of Anarchism,” in ''Contr’un 5: Our Lost Continent ''(2016).</div>
+Shamans also fulfill an important role in the public domain. They cure disease and carry out a wide range of rituals in the fields and homes of a village, and they too have their responsibilities in the public festivals. In contrast with the cargo hierarchies and modern officials, shamans are fundamentally self-selecting and egalitarian in organization. Through their prayers to the age-old divinities of their people, the shamans maintain the link with the past and help modern villagers preserve their language and their most cherished understandings of the world in the face of pressing alternatives from the national cultures.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#33|33]]. Joseph Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861'' (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 11–17, 40–41; Joseph Déjacque, “On the Human Being, Male and Female,” trans. Jonathan Mayo Crane, Libertarian Labyrinth website, April 4, 2011, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/from-the-archives/joseph-dejacque-the-human-being-i.</div>
+Although in the ancient world the pressures were different, the shamanistic function has always been to conserve tradition within the community. The shamans were and are public explainers, repositories of the stories and morals of thousands of years of village experience. Their power is intimate and personal, and in the ecstasy of prayer their charisma is unquestionable. They are the keepers of a very complicated world view encoded in special poetic language. We call such knowledge oral history, but in fact it is much more than history. It is an ongoing interpretation of daily life. An example of this way of thinking can be seen in the shaman’s attitude toward disease. Instead of seeing illness as an isolated, purely physical phenomenon, the shaman treats it within the context of the tensions and anxieties of interfamilial and social relationships. The curing of an individual is more than a healing of the physical being. It is a healing of the emotional being, the social being, and the social web holding the community together.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#34|34]]. Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses'','' ''20–21, 42–44.</div>
+The public rituals of the shamans are occasions for the affirmation of the overarching experience of existence, the cycles of life and death and of the agricultural year, and of the community as the true center of everything important. The poetic form of the shaman’s expression allows him not only to learn and remember encyclopedias of communal knowledge but to express himself effectively in ecstatic states, when he is within the true reality which all of his people know exists behind their common, daily understanding of the world.[9]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#35|35]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, May 13, 2012, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-revolutionary-question.</div>
+The moral and emotional burdens of being a shaman are great, but there are rewards as well. The terrible drought of 1989 finally broke in Yaxuná, Yucatán, only a few days after the village shaman, Don Pablo, had conducted a three-day-long ritual called a Cha-Chae ceremony to summon the storm gods who would bring rain to the parched lands. Having participated in the earlier ceremony, an astounded David Friedel stood in his archaeological field camp watching the rains Don Pablo had called sweep in from the northeast over the pyramids of the ancient city next to the village. With his triumph written across his face in a huge grin, Don Pablo came running over the crest of a nearby hill, clutching his hat in the gusting winds as he fled inches ahead of a gray wall of rain. A great rainbow arched over him in the brilliant orange light of the setting sun in a magnificent display that affirmed the success of his performance as shaman.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#36|36]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”</div>
+Although contemporary villages interact through modern national institutions such as the market economy, the land-tenure system, the school system, and the legal authorities, they also participate in networks °f pilgrimage that come from a far older experience. Villagers attend festivals at other villages and brotherhoods of shamans gather periodically to discuss their craft. These festivals reinforce the local culture and provide opportunities for the arrangement of marriages and the choosing of godparents, acts which link families in real or fictive kinship relationships.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#37|37]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”</div>
+The Spanish overlay of Christianity and the adaptation of village life to the growing impact of modern technological life have produced changes in the Maya village. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable continuity to be seen between modern villagers and their predecessors as described by the Spanish chroniclers. Although the Maya festivals are now arranged according to the Christian calendar, the modern Maya have only switched the timing from the regularities of the katun and the Calendar Round, the ancient way of tracking time. Furthermore, household compounds both of the exalted and the humble, from Preclassic times on, have the same basic identity: small houses arranged around a plaza space. Whether the houses were made of stone and decorated with ornate sculpture, or were the simple wood and thatch constructions of the lowly farmer, the spaces inside them were the same. And both the powerful and the humble buried their dead under the stones of their courtyards so that their ancestors could remain with them and hear the sounds of their descendants’ children playing over their heads.
-[[#38|38]]. Arthur Lehning, ''From Buonarroti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism'' (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 150–210.
+A vivid reminder of just how strong the continuity is between the ancient and modern ways of life made itself forcefully known to us as we were in the final stages of preparing this book. From the first moment we had turned on the computer to start writing, we knew that shamanism was a fundamental part of Maya life, both ancient and modern. Yet we had only been able to deduce its importance to the older Maya civilization by comparing ancient imagery and the archaeological remains of ritual to the practices of modern Maya shamanism. We had no direct written evidence from the ancient Maya themselves. At the 1989 Dumbarton Oaks conference, David Stuart whispered a miracle into David Freidel’s ear. He and Stephen Houston had deciphered a glyph composed of an ahau face half covered with jaguar pelt as way, the word for “to sleep,” “to dream,” “to metamorphize or transform,” “sorcerer,” and “animal (or spirit) companion.” Here in their writing was the glyph for “shaman,” identifying for all who wanted to see Maya shamans engaged in their Otherworld journeys or manifesting as their spirit companions. Perhaps the most startling coincidence of all was that less than two weeks later, we got a letter from Nikolai Grube of Germany. He had independently found the way reading and recognized what it meant.[10]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#39|39]]. Archer, ''First International in France'', 100–101, 126–28, 168–72; Edward Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Contested Legacy and the Debate About Property in the International Workingmen’s Association and the League of Peace and Freedom,” ''Global Intellectual History'' 2, no. 2 (2017): 169–95.</div>
+This continuity and many others tell us that the villagers of today are the inheritors of more than exotic ruins hidden among vine-draped forests. Moreover, their heritage is not just a collection of myths and half-remembered stories, because their ancestors carved words and images on slabs of stone, on temple walls, and on the objects they used in their ritual lives. These silent monuments hold the names and deeds of kings and nobles, and accounts of how they and their people strove for prosperity and a place in history. That history was obscured until recently, but those ancient kings now speak again through our new understanding of the words they wrote. It is the decipherment of this writing system that has given us a window into the Maya world. This book is about history as they wrote it and the world as they saw it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#40|40]]. For a general overview of how this happened, see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy''.'' ''For greater detail, see Archer, ''First International in France''<nowiki>; Moss, </nowiki>''Origins of the French Labor Movement'','' ''52–82.</div>
+How we came to know about this history is one of the great stories of archaeology. The adventure began with an eccentric nineteenth-century naturalist of dubious renown named Constantine Rafinesque. A man who seemed to just miss fame throughout his lifetime (he almost went on the Lewis and Clark expedition), Rafinesque became interested in the strange writing from Mexico that had been published in the reports of Humboldt’s and Antonio del Rio’s[11] journeys through the region now known as Chiapas. After deciding this odd writing was Maya and deducing how to read the numbers, he published the first modern decipherments in the Saturday Evening Post of January 13, 1827, and June 21, 1828. In a wonderful historical irony, Rafinesque sent letters describing his discoveries about Maya writing to Champolion, who was already famous for his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.[12]
-[[#41|41]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''19; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''119, 126; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''225, 262.
+Ancient Maya writing became an abiding part of the public imagination with the publication in 1841 of Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. With carefully detailed illustrations of the ruined cities and vine-covered stone monuments accompanying the authors’ lucid and exciting accounts of their adventures, the Travels became a much-reprinted best seller throughout the United States and Europe. Since then, Europeans and Americans have never lost their fascination with this lost American civilization.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#42|42]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''44–47; Nettlau, ''Short History'','' ''144–45, 161–62, 184–85.</div>
+During the ensuing century and a half, many inspired scholars and aficionados contributed to the growing body of knowledge about the Maya and their writing system. The great German scholars Eduard Seler and Ernst Förstemann, along with the American J. T. Goodman, worked out the fundamentals of the calendar and basic questions of reading order by the turn of the century. Just as important as their discoveries was the amazing set of drawings and photographs published by the Englishman Alfred Maudslay in Archaeology: Biología Centrali-Americana and by Teobert Maier in the Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University .
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#43|43]]. Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''53–55, 104–9, 159–64, 166; Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''57–59; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 176–78.</div>
+We have often marveled at the hardships these two men and other early explorers endured to complete their work in the hot, forest-covered ruins. Their huge, bulky cameras and the glass-plate technology available to them required gargantuan strength, superhuman patience, and obsessive dedication, but these men left us a priceless heritage[13] that has been basic to the decipherment process. Those glass plates they so laboriously exposed and developed still provide the most detailed records of monuments that have either eroded into near illegibility or been destroyed by looters during the intervening century.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#44|44]]. For a condensed summary of the conflict within the International see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 167–92. For a detailed examination, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism''.</div>
+As the early efforts at decipherment progressed, a few people played with the idea that the texts recorded history. One of the most famous near misses was m Herbert Spinden’s[14] 1913 description of the Yaxchilân Lintel 12.
-[[#45|45]]. René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 73–75; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 187–92, 199; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 283–352, 357–68, 383–97.
+<quote>
+Upon the bodies of these captives are glyphs which may record their names and the dates of their capture. At the upper part of the stone are two bands of glyphs ... which possibly contain the narrative of the victory or other information of historical interest.
-[[#46|46]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 77–81; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 354–7.
+(Spinden 1913:23)
+</quote>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#47|47]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September, 1872,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 179–83.</div>
+Two years later in his Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Sylvanus Morley also assumed that history was to be found in the inscriptions. He suggested it was recorded in what he called the “textual residue” left when all the calendric information was accounted for. “It is here, if anywhere, that fragments of Maya history will be found recorded, and precisely here is the richest field for future research, since the successful interpretation of the ‘textual residue’ will alone disclose the true meaning of the Maya writings.”[15]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#48|48]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 18.</div>
+Ironically, these early suggestions were overwhelmed by the proposition that Maya writing concerned only the stately passage of time. J. Eric Thompson, one of the greatest Maya scholars of this century, was the leading proponent of this viewpoint. It was unfortunate for the field that he was so elegant in expressing his ideas, for the few who argued with him never matched the persuasiveness of his rhetoric. This is the way he put it:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#49|49]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 150. In the original, Malatesta gives the incorrect date of 1867 for the founding of the Alliance. I have corrected this in order to avoid confusing the reader. In the nineteenth century, the word ''party'' was often used in a broad sense to refer to a social movement or a group of people who shared the same principles. For Malatesta’s definition, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 65.</div>
+<quote>
+It has been held by some that Maya dates recorded on stelae may refer to historical events or even recount the deeds of individuals; to me such a possibility is well-nigh inconceivable. The dates on stelae surely narrate the stages of the journey of time with a reverence befitting such a solemn theme. I conceive the endless progress of time as the supreme mystery of Maya religion, a subject which pervaded Maya thought to an extent without parallel in the history of mankind. In such a setting there was no place for personal records, for, in relation to the vastness of time, man and his doings shrink to insignificance. To add details of war or peace, of marriage or giving in marriage, to the solemn roll call of the periods of time is as though a tourist were to carve his initials on Donatello’s David.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#50|50]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.</div>
+(J. Eric Thompson 1950:155)
+</quote>
-[[#51|51]]. Quoted in Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18.
+To his everlasting credit, Thompson admitted before he died that he had been utterly wrong. We’ll let him speak the retraction in his own words.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#52|52]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 80–81, 104–129; Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''29–34; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''197–220.</div>
+<quote>
+Touching on the inscriptions of the Classic period, the most significant achievement has been the demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff that texts on stone monuments treat of individual rulers with dates which probably mark birth, accession to power, conquests, and so on. Name glyphs of rulers or dynasties are given, and hints at political events such as alliances.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#53|53]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” 181.</div>
+(J. Eric Thompson 1971:v)
+</quote>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#54|54]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 130–40; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''225–27. For more information about the anarchist sections in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and Egypt see Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 47–50, 115–18, 351–55; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''252–54; Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, ''The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism'','' 1860–1914 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 114–15.</div>
+Proskouriakoff’s accomplishment was truly monumental. Her carefully constructed logic convinced the field instantly and irrevocably that the contents of the inscriptions concerned the deeds of rulers and nobles. Retrospectively, we can’t help but wonder why it took so long to recognize something that is so self-evident today. The answer seems to be that in a barrage of papers published between 1960 and 1964, Proskouriakoff, affectionately known as Tania to her friends, changed the filters before our eyes and altered forever the way we think about the Maya and who they were. Before her work the conclusion was not self-evident.
-[[#55|55]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'','' ''153; Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement'','' ''79; A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 6n*.
+David Freidel’s first encounter with Tania Proskouriakoff reveals a lot about the character of this great scholar. In the fall of 1971, sensing David’s interest in Maya art, his mentor, Gordon Willey, invited him and Tania to lunch at Young Lee’s Chinese Restaurant, just behind the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge. A brash first-year graduate student, and a long-haired hippie to boot, David arrived sporting a flowing Indian-silk headband. His extravagance raised no eyebrows—great teachers speak to the mind and not to outward appearances—and the conversation ranged over everything from shamanism to Darwinian evolution.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#56|56]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 188–91.</div>
+David took what he thought would be a reading course from Tania the following spring, but found that what she taught was actually a “looking” course. He sat in her laboratory in the cluttered, dreary basement of the Peabody Museum for hours on end staring at Maier’s exquisite photographs of stelae, while under a small bright lamp set on a nearby desk, Tania worked away on the beautiful jades that had been dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. She decided that he should work on realistic animal figures in the art on the principle that these are easiest to discern. Like all of the great Mayanists, she was a master typologist who believed that useful insight could come only through painstaking and systematic inventory of empirical patterns revealed as categories in data. She hoped David would follow this sensible approach and she shared her voluminous card catalogs with him to show her own inventory of every motif and element to be found on the known carved monuments, each accurately sketched on a separate card. This inventory undergirds her famous chronological seriation of Maya stelae. Having directed David to the proper methodological path, she did not tell him what to look for. She wanted him to come to his own conclusions about what was conveyed in the art. Periodically she and David would sit by her desk and talk, her clear, intelligent eyes, her quiet, concise words, and her warm wit contrasting sharply with her small, frail appearance and nervous chainsmoking.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#57|57]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.</div>
+Despite her patience, David perplexed and frustrated her. He wanted to interpret whole stela scenes as compositional structures and to establish the patterns of substitution that existed in the objects held or worn as helmets, girdles, and other apparel. Most of all, he wanted to go beyond the first obvious set of patterns to generate more inclusive categories that would let him understand the historical development from natural to grotesque forms. At the end of the course, she said, “David, you have some good ideas, but you need to learn discipline before you can usefully pursue them.” She regarded his deductive leaps as incautious and impossible to prove. She told David that it had taken her many years of careful compilation and study before she was prepared to publicly present her “historical hypothesis.” She believed that one should not publish an argument concerning Maya art, even in article form, until it was incontrovertibly proven.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#58|58]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.</div>
+While no single researcher has ever equaled Proskouriakoff’s central and revolutionary contribution, there were other players[16] in the new historical approach she so elegantly propounded. In 1962, David Kelley published the first history of Quirigua’s dynasty and in 1958 and 1959, Heinrich Berlin identified the name glyphs of historical portraits at Palenque as well as glyphs referring to various Maya cities.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#59|59]]. Accounts of the anarchist-led sections of the International typically refer to named delegates representing various workers’ associations, but do not specify the trade these anonymous workers were involved in. For detailed information on occupations in the Italian and Swiss movements, see Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 76–80; Eckhardt, ''First Socialism Schism'', 13–15.</div>
+Yet knowing that the contents of the inscriptions concerned history did not help the historical epigraphers figure out how the Maya spelled their words. That discovery belongs to a young Russian named Yuri Knorozov, who in 1952 proposed that the Maya system was not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform in that it was a mixed system composed of full word signs combined with signs representing the sounds of syllables. None of the big three, Thompson, Proskouriakoff, or Berlin, was ever able to accept Knorozov’s ideas. Partly it was because the Russian bureaucracy couched his discovery in the political rhetoric of the day, but just as important was the fact that they never saw the promise of “phoneticism” fulfilled. In one of his many damning criticisms of phoneticism, Thompson[17] said it this way: “A point of some importance, I feel, is that with a phonetic system, as with breaking a code, the rate of decipherment accelerates with each newly established reading .... The first flow of alleged decipherments has not swollen to a river; it has long since dried up.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#60|60]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 196.</div>
+In retrospect, the reason the river of decipherment dried up was because only a few hearty souls were ready to ride the current of phoneticism. David Kelley, Michael Coe, and Floyd Lounsbury were the only Western scholars to give Knorozov a fair hearing until the dam broke open at the First Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a tiny little conference held in the village near the ruins in December 1973. At that conference, a new generation of epigraphers, including Linda Scheie and Peter Mathews, were initiated into the mysteries of glyphic decipherment. They joined Kelley and Lounsbury in blending Knorozov’s phoneticism with ProskouriakofTs “historical approach.” During the next five years, in a series of mini-conferences sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks,[18] this group of epigraphers developed a highly successful collaborative approach and forged the last key—the axiom that the writing reflected spoken language and thus had word order that could be used to determine the function of glyphs, even when we could not read them. Thus, while we might not know what a particular glyph meant, we could figure out whether it was a verb or noun by where it fell in a sentence. That simple assumption let us begin paraphrasing inscriptions and dealing with them as whole texts. It was a breakthrough as important as phoneticism and the historical hypothesis because it gave us a larger framework in which to test readings and reconstruct history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#61|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 77. For a summary of the strategies proposed by mutualists in the First International see Archer, ''First International in France'', 44–47, 79–82.</div>
+The conjunction of these three approaches—phoneticism, the historical approach, and syntactical analysis—began the acceleration that Thompson evoked as proof that the right system had been found. Now each new discovery ripples outward to trigger other discoveries, which in turn trigger still others. The number of glyphs deciphered and the interpretative fallout is growing exponentially. As the results of epigraphic research have been published, more and more archaeologists have realized that the Maya inscriptions and imagery offer a primary source of data about how the Maya thought about themselves. They are merging epigraphic and iconographic studies with archaeological projects designed to find out how this “history” epigraphers recover looks in the ground. This is a time of marvelous adventure and unprecedented discovery. The process is ongoing and unbelievably exhilarating to those of us privileged to participate in it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#62|62]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 170.</div>
+The Maya writing system used to record this ancient history was a rich and expressive script, capable of faithfully recording every nuance of sound, meaning, and grammatical structure in the writers’ language. Calligraphically, it has an unsurpassed elegance, deriving its form from the beauty of freely flowing painted line. Maya scribes, whether carving limestone, engraving jade, inscribing shell, or incising bone, never lost the eloquence of their writing’s original painterly grace. And throughout their history the Maya continued to use the original medium in which writing developed—accordion-folded books made from beaten bark paper that was surfaced with a thin layer of plaster. Four of their books[19] survived the ravages of time and Spanish intervention, but they are but a pitiful remnant of the thousands of books that once formed the basis of Maya knowledge. The four we have are calendar almanacs for the timing of ritual, but we may deduce from other Mesoamerican texts we have in our possession[20] that the Maya also recorded all the details of their lives in their books: genealogy, history, learning, prescriptions for ritual, tribute, trade, mythology, views of the world and history, and perhaps poetry and personal thoughts, ambitions, and dreams. Much information has been lost in the dampness of jungle tombs, but we retain a precious and revealing fragment of this heritage in the public and personal texts they wrote on things of stone and clay.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#63|63]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''453n47.</div>
+Millions of Maya today speak languages that descend from the two languages we know were written in the ancient texts—Yucatecan, which was spoken by people living in the northern third and on the eastern edge of the peninsula, and Cholan,[21] which was spoken along the base of the southern lowlands from Palenque in the west to Copan in the east (Fig. 1:2).[22] The area between these two regions was probably occupied by both groups, with Yucatecans concentrated toward the east and Cholans to the west. Like the modern Swiss or Belgians, many of these people were and are culturally bilingual.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#64|64]]. E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 307, 337.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-47.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:2 Distribution for Yucatecan and Cholan during the Classic period]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#65|65]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 191, 238.</div>
+Speaking two languages that were as similar in vocabulary and grammar as Spanish and Italian gave the people occupying the lowlands an enormous advantage in creating a regional civilization. People living in kingdoms at opposite sides of the Maya region—Palenque on the western edge and Copan on the eastern frontier—spoke the same Cholan language, while people at Dzibilchaltun in the north spoke the same Yucatecan language as people living near Nah Tunich, a cave in the central Peten near the Belizean border. This uniformity of language was one of the factors that facilitated trade and cultural exchange between the kingdoms and gave the people of this region a sense of common identity as Maya. Although fiercely competitive, the Maya, like the ancient Greek city-states, presented a unified ethnic identity to outsiders—especially those who spoke other languages.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#66|66]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 179, 133.</div>
+Even when speakers could not understand one another, the writing system acted as intermediary, much as the Chinese writing system has functioned for millennia. The wordplays that were so important in the Maya writing system and in the symbolism of their imagery usually worked equally in both Yucatecan and Cholan. Language as the source of visual metaphor provided a common base for the innovation of the symbolic expression of the Classic Maya world view and the institution of kingship. For example, in Cholan and Yucatecan, the words for “snake,” “sky,” and the number “four” are all pronounced in a nearly identical fashion (can in Yucatecan and chan in Cholan).[23] It made good sense to Maya artisans reaching for images to convey the sky arching overhead to portray it as a great snake. They also freely exchanged the glyphs for “sky” and “snake” in titles and names. Since both glyphs were read in the same way, it did not matter which form they used. The fact that only two languages were spoken in such a large geographic area, as much as anything, may account for the remarkable coherency of Classic Maya cultural production during the thousand years of its existence.
-[[#67|67]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''135–36.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-48.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3a]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#68|68]]. Marshall Shatz, “Introduction” in Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', xxxv.</div>
+The writing system itself worked much like the other great hieroglyphic systems in the world, Egyptian and cuneiform—although it came from an entirely indigenous development. Scribes could spell words with signs representing individual sounds as well as signs representing whole words. We call these “word signs” logographs.[24] For example, the word for “jaguar” (balam in Mayan) could be written simply as a picture of the head of the big cat (Fig. 1:3a). Yet in the Maya world there was more than one spotted cat—for example, there were ocelots and margays. Since confusion could arise concerning this pictorial sign, as with many others, the Maya added syllabary signs to either the front or rear of logographs in order to specify how to pronounce the initial or final consonant. For example, they could attach the syllable sign for ba to the front of the jaguar head or ma to its rear, giving the spelling ba-balam or balam-ma. Since no other word for a cat began with ba or ended in ma, readers knew that here they should pronounce balam, instead of any of the other possible words for “cat.” This type of sign is called a phonetic complement, because it helps to specify the phonetic or sound value of the main glyph it accompanies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#69|69]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 197–98.</div>
+Since these phonetic complements represented the sounds of syllables, the Maya could spell the word using only these phonetic signs, thus eliminating the logograph altogether. The system they devised used two syllable signs to spell a word composed of a consonant-vowel-consonant.[25] For example, cab, “earth,” was spelled with the sign for ca combined with ba to form ca-b(a) (Fig. 1:3b). The final vowel in this kind of spelling was not pronounced. In this phonetic system, the word for “jaguar” used three signs, ba, la, and ma to spell balam(a), again without pronouncing the final a.
-[[#70|70]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 186.
+The scribes also used other types of signs, called semantic determinatives, which specified that a word should be read with a particular meaning. The most widely distributed sign of this sort was the cartouche that was put around the names of the days in the 260-day calendar. Composed of a hollow circle standing on three scrolled feet, the cartouche told the reader he was looking at the name of a day. When that same sign appeared outside the cartouche, its values were entirely different. For example, the sign that recorded the day Imix became ba outside this cartouche and the day sign Muluc became the syllable u in its naked form (Fig. 1:3c).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#71|71]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''375–76.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-50.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3B]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#72|72]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 175. For the 1867 English edition of the rules of the First International, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 20'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 441–46.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-51.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3C]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#73|73]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 22 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 429.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-52.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:3D]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#74|74]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 260.</div>
+To the despair and sometimes the bemusement of the modern epigrapher, glyphs also had many different graphic forms as well as different phonetic and semantic values. For example, the Imix graph has its regular form, a human form, a zoomorphic form, and a full-bodied form (Fig. 1:3d). The scribe chose the form that fit the space or the elaborateness of his text in the best possible way, and artistry was judged on how elegantly these various forms were combined and used, much like the ornate capital letters used in medieval manuscripts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#75|75]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''11.</div>
+Syllables or words (such as u, the third person pronoun, “he/his, she/hers, it/its”) that were frequently used soon developed many different forms, almost as if the scribes got bored writing the same word too many times in the same way. Since each of these alternative signs had its own set of plain, head, and full-bodied forms, the end product was an enormously complex system of writing in which the same word could be written in many different ways. An example of this is the word ahau, which could function both as a day sign and as the rank of the king (Fig. 1:4). The more important parts of a text were often rendered in the more elaborate forms and were larger in scale.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#76|76]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 43n36, 150.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-53.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:4]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#77|77]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''375. For other examples, see 180, 218–19, 252, 272, 278, 290, 334, 357, 362–63, 376–77, 387–88; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''72–73.</div>
+The glyphs in all their various forms were combined into phrases, sentences, and finally the larger texts that have survived into modern times. In the Maya inscriptions, the standard sentence normally began with the time of the action, followed by the action itself, the thing acted upon, and finally the actor. These sentences join with other sentences to become texts, relating sequences of times, actions, and actors, and finally to create a literature with its own style and judgments of what was good and bad writing. Today many of these conventions still survive in the oral traditions of living Maya.[26]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#78|78]]. Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'', 126.</div>
+We have found that the surviving Maya literature falls into several genres: the ritual almanacs of the codices; texts marking the ownership of objects from earflares to houses; texts recording the formal dedication of objects, their patronage, and their artists and scribes; and finally, narrative texts. This last category has at least two subdivisions: narratives embedded into pictorial scenes which illustrate the action, and narratives which stand on their own without pictorial illustration. By combining the information recorded in these various kinds of texts, we can reconstruct the history, beliefs, and institutions of the ancient Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#79|79]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''376.</div>
+The hieroglyphic texts are more than just a history. They constitute a literature, the only written one surviving from the Precolumbian world. The art of writing for the ancient Maya was not only the sequence and structure of words, but included making the image of the word itself. Their writing was one of the most elegant scripts of the ancient world, partially because more than any other writing system, it stayed close to its pictorial and artistic origin. Yet the art of the scribe turned not only on the beauty of the calligraphy but also on how creatively and innovatively he exploited the potential of the writing system and the conventions of text presentation themselves. To the Maya, it was not only what the text said that counted, but also how the scribe chose to say it: and not only how it was said, but also where and on what it was said.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#80|80]]. For a summary of these congresses, see Archer, ''First International in France'','' ''119–29, 166–75.</div>
+The complexity of the system is often bewildering to the modern reader, just as it must have been to the ancient Maya who was not an expert in its use. But we must recognize that the goal of the writing system was not mass communication, in the modern sense. Few of the ancient Maya population were literate and there were no paperbacks and weekly news journals. Writing was a sacred proposition that had the capacity to capture the order of the cosmos, to inform history, to give form to ritual, and to transform the profane material of everyday life into the supernatural.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#81|81]]. Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 169.</div>
+History is as much a construction of those writing it as the events it proposes to record, and this is as true of the Maya as of any other civilization. Surviving Maya texts give us, almost exclusively, only the side of the winners—those who were victorious in war, who had the power to commission the great public monuments and buildings, those wealthy enough to fill their tombs with inscribed objects, and those who could afford to buy or commission precious objects as offerings to the gods. In the best of worlds, we would also have more examples of the losers’ stories, as well as the daily records of transactions, taxes, and trade, and the personal thoughts of the humans who lived that history. Time almost never gives us such a complete record. What we have lost of the Maya are the things they wrote in their books and on other perishable material. What we have is history as the kings and nobles wanted their constituents to understand it, the things of faith people wanted to take with them into death, and the words of worth they put on offerings and on the objects they used in ritual and daily life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#82|82]]. I have assembled this quote from extracts in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''376 and Marianne Enckell, “Bakunin and the Jura Federation,” in ''Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth: The First International in Global Perspective'','' ''ed. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand'' ''(Leiden: Brill, 2018), 363n26.</div>
+Given that the public histories the Maya left behind them are not necessarily the truth, we must use archaeology to provide complementary information of all sorts—some confirming the written record, some qualifying it. It is upon the pattern of conjunction and disjunction between these two records that we base our interpretations of history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#83|83]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''11.</div>
+Combining the two streams of information also gives the archaeologist the chronological framework into which we put Maya history. That archaeological history begins with evidence of the first people moving into the Yucatán Peninsula about eleven thousand years ago. For thousands of years, these hunter-gatherers lived quiet lives, leaving behind the chipped stone tools they used as knives, scrapers, and projectile points for hunting game as mute witness of their existence, but by 1000 B.c., they had learned agriculture and begun to build villages.[27] This first phase of settled life is called the Preclassic period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 200). By its end, the Maya had developed a civilized way of life: the social and political institutions, centering on the institution of divine kingship, that would guide the Maya for the next thousand years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#84|84]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'','' ''38.</div>
+The first subdivision of this long period, the Early Preclassic (1500–900 B.C.), was the time when the first great civilization arose in Mesoamerica. Called the Olmec by modern researchers, this remarkable people built the first kingdoms and established the template of world view and political symbolism the Maya would inherit. Occupying the swampy lowlands of southern Veracruz and parts of highland Guerrero, the Olmec were the first people to create an artistic style and symbolic expression that united different ethnic groups throughout Mesoamerica into a single cultural system.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#85|85]]. Quoted in Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 225.</div>
+By the Middle Preclassic (900–300 B.C.), Olmec imagery was used from Costa Rica to the Valley of Mexico and different groups throughout the region were building large population centers and buying into the ideas of kingship and hierarchical society. The reaction of the southernmost Maya peoples to the rise of the Olmec can be seen in their rapid adoption of Olmec innovation in symbolic imagery and social institutions. The Maya in the mountain valleys of western Honduras,[28] Guatemala, and El Salvador began, like the Olmec, to organize their society along more hierarchical lines, a fact which can be extrapolated from the contents of graves from several sites. Some members of society were buried humbly in the floors of their houses, while others were sent to the afterlife accompanied by precious objects such as jade. Throughout the Middle Preclassic period the southern Maya also began raising public buildings—mounds with plazas of earth and stone. On the mountain slopes and foothills above the hot and swampy Pacific coast, other groups[29] began carving stone monuments in styles emulating the Olmec and displaying symbols that presaged the royal iconography of the Maya kings who emerged by the time of Christ. Early rulers were carved in stone along with imagery depicting the symbols of gods and the cosmos of the Middle Preclassic vision. These power images would eventually become the stelae of the lowland tradition, showing the lord frozen at the moment of communication with the Otherworld.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#86|86]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 11–13, 71–5,'' ''80–83, 96–97.</div>
+Although surrounded to the west and south by peoples who had elected to unite under the authority of high chieftains and kings, most of the Middle Preclassic villagers of the lowlands chose a different path of social development: tribal confederacies that could convene in the thousands to repel an enemy, but whose members recognized no power above their village patriarchs.[30] Segmentary tribal organization of this type could sustain essentially egalitarian societies of very large size, in spite of the proximity of neighboring hierarchical states. From this type of organization came the template of a kingship replicated in numerous small states, an institution that arose with great rapidity throughout the lowland country in the first century B.C. Early kings were exalted patriarchs, heads of lineages who viewed themselves as brothers because they had all descended from the same mythical ancestors.[31] Segmentary tribal organization was gradually amplified into segmentary state organization.[32]
-[[#87|87]]. Lehning, ''From Buonarroti to Bakunin'','' ''16–17.
+The Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D. 100) witnessed the emergence of the rank called ahau and the rise of kingdoms throughout the Maya country. From this exalted rank of lords came the person who was the high king, the ahau of the ahauob. From the Pacific slopes of the southern highlands[33] to the northern plains of Yucatán,[34] these lords displayed themselves and their royal regalia on monuments carved with narrative pictures recording their ritual actions. For the first time texts accompanied these scenes, describing who acted, where, and when. It was the beginning of history for the Maya. It was also the beginning of the great political strategies utilized by kings in their creation of public art; for, to the Maya, the cornerstone of historical reality was what could be seen on the temples and public buildings of the city. More powerfully than we can imagine, their art created their reality. It is in this period that the lowland Maya first created decorated temples and the highland peoples[35] raised stone stelae inscribed with texts, and the principles of kingship were firmly established for the next thousand years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#88|88]]. Woodcock, ''Anarchism'','' ''233.</div>
+Our story begins in this last phase of the Preclassic period and continues into the florescence of Maya civilization during the Classic period, a phase which traditionally begins with the earliest deciphered date on a stela—now A.D. 199.[36] This time of extraordinary accomplishment falls into two subdivisions: the Early Classic (A.D. 200–600) and the Late Classic (A.D. 600–900).[37] The Classic period ended with a general collapse in most of the Maya region, although in some areas, such as northern Belize and Yucatán, the Classic way of life continued unbroken into the final phase of Precolumbian history, the Postclassic. The Postclassic period lasted from A.D. 900 until the conquest of Yucatán by the Spaniards in 1541, although Maya resistance to Spanish domination continued until the Itzá, Maya Indians who lived around Lake Peten Itzá, were overwhelmed in 1697.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#89|89]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 170.</div>
+The inscriptions and archaeology also give us information on the world that the Maya inhabited during the Classic period, for it was very different from what we find as tourists. At the height of Classic civilization in the eighth century, the Maya landscape in all its variety supported millions of people. Although the inscriptions from that period tell us the largest domain was Tikal, a kingdom of around 500,000 souls,[38] the average dominion was much smaller, holding jurisdiction over only 30,000 to 50,000 subjects. Maya kings had to cope with a political geography of enormous complexity (Fig. 1:5), resembling the bewildering variety of kingdoms, dukedoms, baronies, and other titled lands of the European Middle Ages. A closer parallel might be the city-states of Classical Greece: little countries that were politically autonomous, yet culturally, socially, and economically interdependent.[39]
-[[#90|90]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Anarchism and Social Democracy'', 109.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-54.jpg 70f]]
-[[#91|91]]. James Guillaume, “On the Abolition of the State,” in'' Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 192.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-55.jpg 70f][Fig. 1:5 Distribution of Emblem Glyph Polities in the Classic Period as suggested by Peter Mathews]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#92|92]]. For example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 43'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 437, 479–80, 494.</div>
+The first clues about the way the Classic Maya organized themselves came with Heinrich Berlin’s discovery of Emblem Glyphs.[40] Today we । know that these glyphs are titles signifying that people who have them in their names are either a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”), ahau (“lord”), or na ahau (“noble lady”) of a particular kingdom. We also know that these kingdoms were hierarchically organized and included people of many different ranks among their populations. Most of them had a main center or capital, but they also included subsidiary sites ranging from sizable towns up to very large palace compounds and eventually down to hamlets and individual farms.[41]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#93|93]]. Quoted in Georges Haupt, ''Aspects of International Socialism'','' 1871–1914 ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.</div>
+The glyphic inscriptions give us other kinds of information about the governing hierarchies in these kingdoms, although there was apparently some variation in organization from region to region. The main king was often referred to as the ch’ul ahau. He was always of the rank ahau, but there were also lesser ahauob within the same kingdom who had different responsibilities. Ahauob ruled subordinate population centers within the larger polity and they held important offices, such as war chief, within the main center. The subordinate town of Tortuguero, for example, was ruled by a man named Ahpo-Balam, who was a member of the royal family and an ahau of Palenque. At Copan, the half brother of the last great king ruled a portion of that city. An ahau who was also the son of a king of Naranjo achieved fame as a scribe—not a political office, yet a highly valued specialist rank. In brief, the title of ahau indicated nobility of the highest degree. It was the rank to which the king must belong, but there were many more ahauob than there were kings. This is the typical pattern for a rank that is inherited by several offspring at each generation, as ahau certainly was during the Late Classic period. Obviously, it was in the interests of the kings to find useful work in the government of the realm for their siblings and other ahauob.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#94|94]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''247–48.</div>
+Within the kingdoms along the Usumacinta and in the forest to the west of that region,[42] secondary centers might be ruled by a cahal. a noble with less prestige than the ahauob, yet still intimately associated with their kings. The rank of cahal carried many of the ritual prerogatives of the ahauob and produced both provincial governors and officials at the capitals.[43] Both cahalob and ahauob were, therefore, part of the courts that administered the polities, and kings could marry women of either rank to secure political alliances.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#95|95]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 102, 450, 466, 468.</div>
+Nobles of both ranks were sent to other capitals as emissaries of their high kings,[44] and people of both ahau and cahal rank were important witnesses to the designations of heirs and the accessions of high kings. The powerful and dangerous ritual requirements of accession, along with the preference that the king be ideally the eldest male offspring of his royal sire, suggest that kingship was not elective. Nevertheless, the many exceptions to the ideal of inheritance, including descent of the throne from older to younger brothers,[45] also show how critical the support of the nobility was to the succession.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#96|96]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 255.</div>
+The number of kingdoms ruled by kings grew from perhaps a dozen in the first century B.C. to as many as sixty at the height of the lowland civilization in the eighth century (Fig. 1:5d).[46] Not all polities survived this span of history, even when they were well established. There were many hazards to challenge kings—wars, intrigues, and natural catastrophes. A king was literally at risk all his life; and more than one king ended his rule, not by dying of peaceful old age but by being taken captive in a war he was too old to fight.[47] It was also true that prosperous and probably autonomous towns always existed within the political geography without ever erecting a royal stela or establishing themselves as an Emblem Glyph polity. Polities both with and without an Emblem Glyph appeared, matured, and disappeared throughout Maya history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#97|97]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44, 306. In 1886, Engels claimed, in comparison to his previous statement, that what Bakunin labeled anarchism was a blend of Proudhon and Max Stirner. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 382.</div>
+Political coherence and integration characterized life within the dominion of a king, but in the borderlands between these kingdoms, the opportunity must have existed for adventuresome people to maintain independent chiefdoms, or even for whole villages of unallied farmers to exist. Many civilizations tolerate such marginal folk because they service the civilized in a variety of ways, not the least of which is as a human buffer against organized enemies. In the Maya world of the forest, these inbetween people likely gathered many wild plant and tree products—from which they made medicines, poisons, dyes, and incense—and trapped and hunted game for meat and hides. They then sold all these valued commodities to their brethren within the kingdoms. Keeping the border towns under control and assessing tribute were the responsibility of court nobles, and disputed jurisdiction over borderlands was likely one of the causes of wars.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#98|98]]. This topic is made confusing by the fact that, during the 1850s, Proudhon’s ideas and terminology underwent a complicated process of development. By the 1860s, he called for the abolition of government in favor of a federated society while claiming that the state in the sense of the “power of collectivity” would be a part of a free society and lack “authority.” See Shawn P. Wilbur, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” Libertarian Labyrinth website, June 5, 2013, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/contrun/pierre-joseph-proudhon-self-government-and-the-citizen-state-2.</div>
+The political geography of the Maya consisted of island cities of royal power in a sea of townspeople and village folk. Kings worked hard to establish firm control over the countryside and to expand their authority as far as possible in the direction of other polities. From the beginning of the institution of kingship, military confrontation was not only a fact of life but a necessary and inevitable royal responsibility. With the proliferation of polities, the civilized territories expanded at the expense of the freeholders. By the Late Classic period, kings looked out at a landscape peopled with brother lords, both enemies and allies, and at escalating conditions of war and strife.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#99|99]]. Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 184; Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 279n30. For Proudhon and Bakunin’s friendship see Woodcock, ''Proudhon'', 87–89, 266; Carr, ''Bakunin'', 130–31.</div>
+There are certain things about the Maya landscape, about life in the tropics, and about the kind of “technology” available to the ancient Maya that help people of the twentieth century to understand a little better what their lives were really like. They were, first of all, a stone age people, without metal of any kind until several centuries before the Conquest. All they accomplished was done by means of stone tools, utilizing human beings as their beasts of burden: No animals large enough to carry cargo lived in Mesoamerica before the coming of the Spanish. Although the Maya built wide roads to link parts of their kingdoms together, they did not build highway systems. Within the jungle and the rugged mountain landscape, where the wheel was not used, highways did not make a lot of sense. The ancient Maya traveled along paths winding through the deep iorests and cultivated areas, but the major arteries of their transportation were the many rivers and swamps that crisscrossed the landscape. Until very recently,[48] the canoe was the most important form of travel into the interior of the Maya region.
-[[#100|100]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 296.
+Carved as a single piece from a huge hardwood tree, dugout canoes plied the slow-moving lowland rivers. These rivers drained huge swamps ted by rains that could, and still do, average 150 inches a year in the southern lowlands. Some of this water flows north into the mighty Usumacinta River and its tributaries to empty into the Gulf of México. The rest of it flows east down a network of streams and rivers, large and small, emptying eventually into the Caribbean Sea. Spreading like the veins of a forest leaf, these waterways provided the natural avenues of travel and trade from the southern to the northern lowlands. When we think of lords visiting one another or items being traded between areas, we must remember that these people and trade goods were carried on the backs of bearers in litters or in tumplines[49] or in canoes paddled across the network of waterways that was the superhighway system of the ancient Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#101|101]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 105–6.</div>
+These rivers were are not always gentle pathways. At the height of the rainy season, especially when the great thunderstorms and the hurricanes of summer and fall sweep in from the Gulf, these slow-moving rivers can turn into raging torrents of destruction. Conversely, in the dry season they can become too shallow to navigate. Although water, overall, is abundant in the tropics, there is usually too little of it during the dry times, and too much during the torrential rains of summer and fall. Because of these conditions, much of Maya social innovation w’as centered around two great problems: how to store excess water for the times it would be needed, and how to free wet, fertile swampland for farming. The building of reservoirs and massive, complicated canal systems took the labor of thousands and helped develop the concepts of community and central authority. For instance, the Maya of Tikal excavated reservoirs as they quarried stone to build the great houses of the central acropolis. In areas now in the state of Campeche, the lack of permanent water sources forced the Maya to build great rainwater cisterns under their buildings, and at Edzna, to dig kilometers of shallow canals to hold water throughout the dry season.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#102|102]]. Bakunin was also critical of mutualists within the First International who viewed themselves, and not the collectivists, as the true successors of Proudhon. In April 1869, he wrote a letter to Guillaume in which he referred to Tolain and Chemallé, who were leading members of the French section of the First International, as “Proudhon-ians of the second and bad sort” who “want individual property” and to “debate and parade along with the bourgeoisie.” See Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 38.</div>
+Further to the north, rainwater collects seasonally in low sinks, but most surface water seeps quickly into the soil and runs underground to the sea. The Maya could reach this underground water only through caves which riddled the limestone. When water dissolved the ceilings of these limestone caves, deep natural wells called cenotes were formed. In the northwestern corner of Yucatán, the water in these wells is close to the surface, but in other regions, for example, at Chichen Itzá, the water table is twenty meters below the surface. Such water is accessible only by long and dangerous climbing down wooden ladders or stone steps carved in the wall of the well itself. The cenotes are a major geographic feature of the northern lowlands, and for a people focused on entrances into the “Other-world” beneath the earth, these caves and water holes became centers of social gathering and the enactment of ritual.
-[[#103|103]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 142.
+The other great fact of Maya life was the magnificent rain forest, full of towering, liana-draped hardwoods, such as the mahogany, chico zapote, and the most sacred tree of all, the great ceiba. The forest supports a rich web of life, but because the soil under it is thin, nutrients that seep below the surface are captured by the subsoil, which locks them away from the roots of plants. The forest has adapted to this by developing a spectacular factory of insects and fungi which live on its dank and shady floor and digest the fall of leaves, limbs, and trees, returning these precious nutrients to the great spreading roots of the trees. This cycle of life is in full view of humanity, a litany of green blossoming out of death and decay.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#104|104]]. Quoted in James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 108. I have corrected Joll’s translation such that the German word anarchische is translated as anarchic, rather than anarchist.</div>
+The rhythms of the tropical world are not the same as those of the temperate zone in which we live. For us, the central metaphor of death and rebirth derives from the change of winter to spring, but in the Maya tropics spring is the time of drought and the burning of the forest to open the fields for planting. There, the heat of the spring is unending and inescapable as the skies darken with the gritty pall of burning trees, filling lungs with soot and dimming the light of the sun.[50] The forest turns completely white as the trees dry out and many of them lose their leaves. The world becomes the color of bone and the forest smells of death.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#105|105]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''200–202; Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 151–54. This shift in strategy from advocating gradual change via co-ops in the 1840s to violent revolution in the 1870s was part of a wider process of development within French socialism. It included individuals who held similar views to anarchists but did not use the label, such as Eugène Varlin. See Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement'', 4–6, 31–102.</div>
+The dry season was also the time for wars, for the muddy land dried out then and people could move to and from the battlefield with greater ease. Since planting could not be done until the rains came, there was time for war without endangering the work of farmers. Almost all the battles discussed in this book were fought between late January and early May.
-[[#106|106]]. Benjamin Tucker, ''Instead of a Book'','' by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism'', 2nd ed. (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897),'' ''ix, 14.
+When the rains finally come in late May or early June, the world awakens, literally changing overnight. Thirsty leaves and stems swell with the water of life, and the forest is transformed within hours from the colorlessness of death into a vibrant, unbelievably deep green—the color the Maya called jgx These rains do not bring the riotous color of northern spring, but a sudden change that even more surely emphasizes the transformation of death into life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#107|107]]. For a summary of this history, see Nettlau, ''Short History'','' ''30–42; Rudolf Rocker, ''Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1949), 145–54. For individualist anarchism in Britain, see Peter Ryley, ''Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain ''(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 87–111.</div>
+In the summer, the rains come in torrential tropical thunderstorms that break across the land with awesome power. In good times, they release their heavy loads of life-giving water with predictable regularity in the late afternoon or early evening, but they can inundate the land as surely as they can bring it life. Eventually, the storms of summer give way in late July and August to a short dry season called the canícula, letting the muddy, saturated earth dry out a little before the fall rains come in their gentle, all-day drizzle. The cold winter storms, today called nortes. can go on for days, chilling the normally warm climate to a bone-deep, shivering, wet cold.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#108|108]]. Benjamin Tucker, ''Instead of a Book'', 390. See also, 15–16, 111–12, 383–404.</div>
+There is a rhythm to tropical life that flows through the experience of all beings living there. In the rich abundance of life that thrives in the forest, in the coming of the rains, and in the terrible consequences of drought, there is a contrast of life and death, of abundance and deprivation, that teaches the lessons of life and cyclic time in metaphors of undeniable power and elegance. Their metaphor is not ours—a spring rebirth timed by the equinox. It is instead the coming of the life-giving rains timed by the summer solstice. This metaphor, however, is just as powerful and penetrating as the temperate cycle upon which the great myths of the Western world are built, and just as effective.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#109|109]]. John Henry Mackay, ''The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century'' (Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1891), ix. For Mackay’s fictional debate between an individualist anarchist and anarchist communist, see, 116–50.</div>
+The institution of kingship, and the understanding of the world that fueled Maya civilization welled up out of the experience of the ancient villager. The plants and animals of the forest, the alternation of dry season with the time of rains, the rhythms of planting and burning, were the stuff from which the kings molded the symbols of their power. We are just beginning to understand the patterns of the Maya world and how they used them in the material expression of their culture.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#110|110]]. Quoted in Ryley, ''Making Another World'', 108.</div>
+The connections the Maya put into their public history between things spiritual and things human, between things ancestral and things current, between things of the king and things of the community, were not a matter of accident or personal taste. The Maya put them in the public forum of life because they were the things they saw as important. The inscriptions and imagery we have are the propaganda the kings thought their people would believe. They represent the strategies everyone thought gave them a chance to live beyond dying.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|111]]. Quoted in Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''153.</div>
+These texts and images are a map of the ancient Maya mind and history, of the world as they understood it. Through the words and images they inscribed upon the objects of their lives, they live again in our time. We can remember their deeds, contemplate the power and beauty of their world, and recognize that they accomplished things we honor as civilized, and in the context of human events, as great. The writing of the Maya preserves not only the history of their kings but also their sense of power and sacredness. It lets us utter their names once again—and for a moment see the world as they saw it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#112|112]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 203. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''139, 173.</div>
+. Sacred Space, Holy Time, And The Maya World
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#113|113]]. Kropotkin,'' Direct Struggle'', 169,'' ''171–72; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 6, 9.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-56.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#114|114]]. Dyer D. Lum, “On Anarchy,” in ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'', ed. Albert Parsons (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 149–58; Dyer D. Lum, ''Philosophy of Trade Unions'' (New York: American Federation of Labor, 1892); Dyer D. Lum, “Why I Am a Social Revolutionist,” ''Twentieth Century ''5, no. 18 (October 1890). See also, Paul Avrich, ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 56–66.</div>
+As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon “culture,” and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.
-[[#115|115]]. Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''214.
+The idea that there are as many “realities” as there are societies may be novel to many of us. Yet whether or not we are aware that we see our world through a filter, our own version of reality guides our actions just as surely as other, different versions have guided other societies around the world in both the present and the past. We in the West live as we do in part because our cultural reality constrains our ability to imagine different ways of doing things. In our world, for example, we could not imagine letting blood from our bodies, as the Maya did, in order to communicate with our ancestors. Such violence seems crazy and “uncivilized” to us. On the other hand, the ancient Maya would find our wartime custom of drafting young men to go and fight in the place of the leaders of our nation both barbaric and cowardly. Maya lords fought their own battles and a king often paid tor defeat in the coin of his own capture and sacrifice.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#116|116]]. Max Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both,” in ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 79–83.</div>
+The principal language of our reality here in the West is economics. Important issues in our lives, such as progress and social justice, war and peace, and the hope for prosperity and security, are expressed in material metaphors. Struggles, both moral and military, between the haves and have-nots of our world pervade our public media and our thoughts of the future. The Maya codified their shared model of reality through religion and ritual rather than economics. The language of Maya religion explained the place of human beings in nature, the workings of the sacred world, and the mysteries of life and death, just as our religion still does for us in special circumstances like marriages and funerals. But their religious system also encompassed practical matters of political and economic power, such as how the ordered world of the community worked.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#117|117]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828; Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197–205.</div>
+While we live in a model of the world that vests our definitions of physical reality in science and spiritual reality in religious principles, the Maya lived in a world that defined the physical world as the material manifestation of the spiritual and the spiritual as the essence of the material. For them the world of experience manifested itself in two complementary dimensions. One dimension was the world in which they lived out their lives and the other was the abode of the gods, ancestors, and other supernatural beings. This manner of understanding reality is still true for many of the contemporary descendants of the ancient Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#118|118]]. Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'', 239–41, 270–72; Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 63–78; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''357, 415–7. For an overview of different strains of individualist anarchism in Milan, see Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 66–91.</div>
+These two planes of existence were inextricably locked together. The actions and interactions of Otherworld beings influenced the fate of this world, bringing disease or health, disaster or victory, life or death, prosperity or misfortune into the lives of human beings. But the denizens of the Otherworld were also dependent upon the deeds of the living for their continued well-being. Only the living could provide the nourishment required by both the inhabitants of the Otherworld and the souls who would be reborn there as the ancestors.[51] To the Maya, the idea of dividing the responsibility for human welfare between politicians and priests would have been incomprehensible. The kings were, above all, divine shamans who operated in both dimensions and through the power of their ritual performance kept both in balance, thus bringing prosperity to their domains.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#119|119]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 80.</div>
+Because the king lived in the same community as the villager, his explanations of political institutions and rituals had to be voiced in the common language of this shared reality, for the villagers were as much his constituents as were the nobles.[52] For us to understand the actions of Maya kings and their people as rational and necessary for their successful functioning in their world, we must understand how the shared reality of the ancient Maya defined the world for them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#120|120]]. Rocker, ''Pioneers of American Freedom'','' ''152–53; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''169; Laurence S. Stepelevitch, “The Revival of Max Stirner,” ''Journal of the History of Ideas ''35, no. 2 (1974): 324; Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads'','' ''75–6. For a summary of Stirner’s life see David Leopold, “A Solitary Life,” in ''Max Stirner'','' ''ed. Saul Newman'' ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21–41.</div>
+The high art that has so fascinated the modern visitor is the public and private expression of that world view through writing and narrative imagery. This narrative representation of the actions of kings and nobles served a twofold purpose. On the most fundamental level it placed them within the framework of history. Most important, however, it underlined the cyclicality of the cosmic time in which that history unfolded. The Maya were preoccupied with demonstrating historical action as the inevitable result of cosmic and ancestral necessities. It was within this great matrix of belief that the Maya enacted the triumphs, defeats, drama, humor, and pathos of their history and strove to create the greatest and most lasting memorials to their lives.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#121|121]]. Mackay, ''The Anarchists'', ix. Stirner also influenced a few anarchist communists, but the majority rejected his ideas. For a review of Stirner’s book by a syndicalist anarchist, see Max Baginski, “Stirner: ‘The Ego and His Own,’” ''Mother Earth'' 2, no. 3 (1907),'' ''142–51. Bakunin briefly mentions Stirner on at least one occasion but does not claim that he was an anarchist or influenced anarchism. See Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''141–42.</div>
+ The World They Conceived
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#122|122]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 77.</div>
+The Maya world was made up of three layered domains: the starry arch of heaven, the stony Middleworld of earth made to flower and bear fruit by the blood of kings, and the dark waters of the Underworld below.[53] To say that the Maya considered these to be three distinct regions, however, is to give a false impression, for they believed all dimensions of existence were interrelated. Furthermore, all three domains were thought to be alive and imbued with sacred power, including the sky, which was represented by a great crocodilian monster. This Cosmic Monster made the rains when it shed its blood in supernatural counterpoint to the royal sacrifices on the earth below.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#123|123]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 199. See also ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''151.</div>
+Ihe Underworld was sometimes called Xibalba,[54] but it is perhaps closer to the original Maya understanding to think of Xibalba as the parallel unseen Otherworld into which the Maya kings and other shamans could pass in ecstatic trance. Like the world of human beings, Xibalba[55] had animals, plants, inhabitants of various kinds, and a landscape with both natural and constructed features. At sundown Xibalba rotated above the earth to become the night sky.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#124|124]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 23.</div>
+The human plane of existence, like the Otherworld, was a sacred place. The Maya conceived of the human world as a region floating in the primordial sea. Sometimes they represented the earth as the back of a caiman and sometimes as the back of a turtle.[56] The four cardinal directions provided the fundamental grid for the Maya community and for the surface of the world. But for the Maya, the principal axis of the Middleworld was the path of the sun as it moved from east to west on its daily journey. Each direction of the compass had a special tree, a bird, a color, gods associated with its domain, and rituals associated with those gods. East was red and the most important direction since it was where the sun was born. North, sometimes called the “side of heaven,” was white and the direction from which the cooling rains of winter came. It was also the direction of the north star around which the sky pivots. West, the leaving or dying place of the sun, was black. South was yellow and was considered to be the right-hand or great side of the sun.[57] In the Maya conception east, not north, should always be at the top of maps.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#125|125]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 24.Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework</div>
+This model of the world, however, was concentric as well as quadrangular. The four cardinal directions were also seen in relationship to the center, which also had its color (blue-green), its gods, its bird, and its tree (Fig. 2:1). Running through this center, the Maya envisioned an axis vailed Hocoh Chon (“six sky” or “raised up sky”).[58] The tree which symbolized this axis coexisted in all three vertical domains. Its trunk went through the Middleworld; its roots plunged to the nadir in the watery Underworld region of the Otherworld, and its branches soared to the zenith in the highest layer of the heavenly region of the Otherworld.
-== {{anchor|Chapter2TheoreticalFramework1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook5}} {{anchor|Chapter2TheoreticalFramework}} Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework ==
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-57.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:1]]
-To understand anarchist political theory, one must first understand the theoretical framework that anarchists used for thinking about humans, society, and social change. This is the theory of practice.[[#1Forpreviousreconstructions|1]] It is important to note that the theory of practice was often implicit in anarchist texts and not laid out in great detail. The vast majority of anarchist texts were short articles or pamphlets that focused on other topics, such as why capitalism should be abolished or concrete discussions about how to achieve anarchist goals. In addition, anarchist authors did not, in general, feel the need to write an explicit and detailed statement of their social theory’s foundational premises because it was already accepted as the common ground that underpinned their theorizing. A rational reconstruction of the theory of practice has to be made by piecing together different brief statements that anarchist authors made, and then supplementing these brief statements with my own examples in order to clearly illustrate what they thought.
+The geography of the human world included plains, mountains, caves, cenotes, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and the places and buildings made by people—cities and towns with their houses, palaces, temples, and ballcourts (Fig. 2:2). To the Maya, this world was alive and imbued with a sacredness that was especially concentrated at special points, like caves and mountains. The principal pattern of power points had been established by the gods when the cosmos was created. Within this matrix of sacred landscape, human beings built communities that both merged with t the god-generated patterns and created a second human-made matrix of power points. These two systems were perceived to be complementary, not separate.
-'''Materialism and Human Nature'''
+As we mentioned above, the world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the wacah chan axis which ran through the center of existence. This axis was not located in any one earthly place, but could be materialized though ritual at any point in the natural and human-made landscape. Most important, it was materialized in.the person of the king, who brought it into existence as he stood enthralled in ecstatic visions atop his pyramid-mountain.
-Anarchists were, in general, materialists in the broad sense that they viewed matter as the fundamental building block of reality.[[#2MichaelBakuninThePolitica|2]] This materialism went alongside the view that the natural world must be conceptualized as a process that undergoes changes over time, rather than as a static entity. For Bakunin, the universe is the “infinite totality of the ceaseless transformations of all existing things.”[[#3BakuninPoliticalPhilosophy|3]] Cafiero similarly referred to the “continuous processes of transformation” that occur to the “infinity of matter” that constitutes the universe.[[#4CarloCafieroRevolutionEd|4]] The natural world so understood included human society. As Malatesta noted, “the social world” is “nothing but the continuing development of natural forms.”[[#5MalatestaMethodofFreedom|5]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-58.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:2]]
-Anarchists thought that the natural world, which included society, must be conceptualized as a totality or whole. This totality was constituted by interconnected parts that stand in relation to, and mutually shape, one another. Bakunin thought that the universe was a “totality” in which “each point acts upon the Whole” and “the Whole acts upon every point.”[[#6BakuninPoliticalPhilosophy|6]] As a result, he viewed the purpose of science as establishing the “related connections and mutual interaction and causality that really exist among real things and phenomena.”[[#7MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|7]] Reclus wrote that individuals living in society “are part of a whole” and that when “groups of men encounter one another, direct and indirect relations arise.”[[#8EliseeReclusAnarchyGeogr|8]] Kropotkin similarly held that the goal of his history of the French Revolution was “to reveal the intimate connection and interdependence of the various events that combined to produce the climax of the eighteenth century’s epic.”[[#9PeterKropotkinTheGreatFr|9]]
+There were two great symbolic representations of this center axis: the king himself, who brought it into being, and his natural analog, the World Tree. The act of communication between the human world and the Other-world was represented by the most profound symbols of Maya kingship: the Vision Serpent and the Double-headed Serpent Bar[59] (Fig. 2:3). In the rapture of bloodletting rituals, the king brought the great World Tree into existence through the middle of the temple and opened the awesome doorway into the Otherworld.[60] During both public and private bloodletting rituals, the Vision Serpent, which symbolized the path of communication between the two worlds, was seen rising in the clouds of incense and smoke above the temples housing the sculptured sanctums. The earthly sides of the portals were within these sanctums.
-Society, this totality of interconnected and mutually determining parts, changes over time due to the action of humans. According to Bakunin, “history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals. Abstractions advance only when borne forward by real men.”[[#10BakuninSelectedWritings|10]] For Rocker, since “every social process . . . arises from human intentions and human goal-setting and occurs within the limits of our volition” it follows that “history is . . . nothing but the great arena of human aims and ends.”[[#11RudolfRockerNationalisma|11]] Anarchist social theory rested on a particular understanding of what humans are, what human activity is, and how human activity both shapes and is shaped by society.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-59.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:3 Vision Serpents]]
-Anarchists viewed humans as unchanging and changing at the same time. They are unchanging in that there are certain characteristics that all humans across all societies have in common: they need food, water, and sleep to survive; reproduce through sex; have brains; are social animals who communicate through language; experience emotions; and so on.[[#12BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|12]] As Rocker wrote: “We are born, absorb nourishment, discard the waste material, move, procreate and approach dissolution without being able to change any part of the process. Necessities eventuate here which transcend our will. . . . We are not compelled to consume our food in the shape nature offers it to us or to lie down to rest in the first convenient place, but we cannot keep from eating or sleeping, lest our physical existence should come to a sudden end.”[[#13RockerNationalismandCult|13]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-60.jpg 70f][Double-headed Serpent]]
-One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans as a species is their consciousness. Bakunin argued that, since this is the product “of the cerebral activity of man” and “our brain is wholly an organization of the material order . . . it follows that what we call ''matter'', or ''the material world'', does not by any means exclude, but, on the contrary, necessarily embraces the ideal world as well.”[[#14BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|14]] With this consciousness, humans think about themselves, other people, the world in which they live, and worlds that they have imagined. They make plans for the future and reflect on past events. They direct and alter their behavior. In short, humans are able to mentally stand apart from their immediate experience and make their own life an object of their thought.[[#15BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|15]] According to Reclus, “humanity is nature becoming self-conscious.”[[#16QuotedinJohnClarkAnIn|16]] Cafiero wrote that “the feeling of one’s ''self'' is without doubt the dominant sentiment of the human soul. The awareness of one’s being, its development and betterment, the satisfaction of its needs, these make up the essence of human life.”[[#17CafieroRevolution3|17]] Each individual human always possesses a particular form of consciousness, by which I mean the specific ways in which they experience, conceptualize, and understand the world in which they live. I will refer to this as “consciousness” for short.
+Fortunately for us, one of the greatest of Maya painters[61] left us an eloquent representation of the cosmos as his people understood it to exist. This image was painted on a tripod plate which was intended to hold the blood that helped open a portal to the Otherworld (Fig. 2:4). The opened portal itself is depicted as the Maw of the Underworld, a great bearded and skeletal-jawed serpent. Out of the jaws of this serpent come the pure, life-bearing waters of the earth and below them flow the dark, fecund waters of the Underworld. Along the upper edge of the image arches the living sky, the Cosmic Monster, which contains within its body the great ancestral Sun and Venus. The rains, its holy blood, flow in great scrolls from the mouth of its crocodilian head and from the stingray spine on the Quadripartite Monster at the opposite end. The World Tree, Wacah Chan, emerges from the head of the god Chac-Xib-Chac (the Eveningstar) as he rises from the black waters of the portal. The trunk of the World Tree splits to become the Vision Serpent, whose gullet is the path taken by the ancestral dead and the gods of the Otherworld when they commune with the king as the forces of nature and destiny.
-Since these characteristics are constant across all humans, they must stem from certain basic facts about human biology. Human biology and the natural environment are the starting points for human activity and the parameters in which it occurs. Crucially, human nature was not viewed by anarchists as a fixed, entirely static entity or an abstract essence that exists outside of history. They distinguished between the fundamental raw materials of human nature that constitute all humans and what these materials are shaped into during a person’s life within a historically specific society. Bakunin distinguished between innate “faculties and dispositions” and “the organization of society” that “develops them, or on the other hand halts, or falsifies their development.”[[#18BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|18]] Given this, “all individuals, with no exception, are at every moment of their lives what Nature and society have made them.”[[#19BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|19]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-61.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:4 The Maya Cosmos Venus as Eveningstar rising from the Underworld in its first appearance after superior conjunction]]
-Kropotkin, who was a geographer, similarly thought that “man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education.”[[#20PeterKropotkinMutualAid|20]] Although there are “fundamental features of human character” that “can only be mediated by a very slow evolution,” the extent and manner in which these characteristics are expressed, Kropotkin claimed, is a result of a person’s social environment and the forms of activity they engage in.[[#21PeterKropotkinProposedC|21]] One of these fundamental characteristics with a strong biological basis, he believed, was the tendency for humans to cooperate with one another and engage in mutual aid in order to survive. Yet he also held that “the relative amounts of individualist and mutual aid spirit are among the most changeable features of man.”[[#22KropotkinProposedCommuni|22]]
+Once brought into the world of humanity, these Otherworld beings could be materialized in ritual objects, in features of the landscape, or in the actual body of a human performer.[62] Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument of this materialization.[63] The ritual of communication was performed on the pyramids and in the plazas of the Maya cities, which replicated in symbolic form the sacred landscape generated by the gods at creation.
-Similar views were expressed by other anarchist authors. Emma Goldman declared that “those who insist that human nature remains the same at all times have learned nothing. . . . Human nature is by no means a fixed quantity. Rather, it is fluid and responsive to new conditions.”[[#23EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|23]] The extent to which anarchists thought that the expression of human nature was malleable or plastic can be seen in the fact that several anarchists claim that there is an infinite number of different kinds of person. Malatesta, for example, wrote that in an anarchist society “the full potential of human nature could develop in its infinite variations.”[[#24MalatestaMethodofFreedom|24]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-62.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:5 A forest of tree-stones at Copan]]
-This was not to say that humans could transform themselves into anything they wanted. The nature of the raw materials that constitute humans places definite limits on what they can be shaped into. Humans cannot morph their arms into wings or lay eggs like a chicken. This is because, although a human can become an incredibly wide variety of different things during the course of their finite existence, the scope is predetermined by the kind of animal they are. As Rocker wrote, “man is unconditionally subject only to the laws of his physical being. He cannot change his constitution. He cannot suspend the fundamental conditions of his physical being nor alter them according to his wish.”[[#25RockerNationalismandCult|25]]
+The names for various parts of the Maya cityscape reinforced this symbolism. The slab-shaped monuments they carved with the images of kings were called te-tun, “tree-stone.” Plazas filled with these tree-stones I then represented the earth covered by a tropical forest (Fig. 2:5). The Maya word for temple was yotot (“his house”[64]) or ch’ul na, “holy edifice.” The doors of such buildings were formed to represent the mouth of a monster (Fig. 2:6) in echo of the Maya phrase for door—“mouth of the house” (ti yotot).
-Stereotypes of anarchists depict them as having naive conceptions of human nature in which it is imagined that humans are innately good and kind. In reality, anarchists held that humans were defined by two main distinct tendencies: struggle/strife and sociability/solidarity.[[#26CafieroRevolution58Ma|26]] Malatesta thought that humans possessed both the “harsh instinct of wanting to predominate and to profit at the expense of others” and “another feeling which draws him closer to his neighbor, the feeling of sympathy, tolerance, of love.”[[#27ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|27]] As a result, human history contained “violence, wars, carnage (besides the ruthless exploitation of the labor of others) and innumerable tyrannies and slavery” alongside “mutual aid, unceasing and voluntary exchange of services, affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[[#28MalatestaLifeandIdeas6|28]] This position was shared by Kropotkin, who wrote in his ''Ethics'' that there are “two sets of diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man. . . . In one set are the feelings which induce man to subdue other men in order to utilize them for his individual ends, while those in the other set induce human beings to unite for attaining common ends by common effort: the first answering to that fundamental need of human nature—struggle, and the second representing another equally fundamental tendency—the desire of unity and mutual sympathy.”[[#29KropotkinEthics22Seea|29]]
+Pyramids and temples were often decorated with images of Witz Monsters[65] (Fig. 2:7) to define them as sacred mountains (witz[66] is the Mayan word for “mountain” or “hill). In this metaphor, the door of the temple is also the cave leading into the heart of the mountain. Inside the sanctum of the cave sat the portal, depicted as the skeletal Maw of the Otherworld. The royal mountain thus contained the cave that formed part of the path that led to the supernatural world. Within this cave grew the Tree of the World marking the center, the place of the portal,[67] in replication of the great ceiba trees that often grow from the entrances of caves in the natural world. A group of temples set together on a platform represented a mountain range towering over the forest of tree-stones in the plazas below. The architecture of ritual space thus replicated the features of sacred geography—the forest, the mountain, and the cave.
-'''The Theory of Practice'''
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-63.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:6 Doorway Sculpture from Temple 1 at Tabasquena, Campeche]]
-One of the main processes that modifies and develops the raw materials of human nature is human activity itself. This makes fundamental social change possible. If humans are conscious creatures who are able to modify themselves significantly through activity, then how humans are today is not inevitable or fixed but something that they can consciously change themselves. Human activity is conceptualized by anarchist social theory in terms of practice. By practice I mean the process whereby people with particular consciousness engage in activity—deploy their ''capacities'' to satisfy a psychological ''drive''—and through doing so, change the world and themselves simultaneously.
+These same metaphors were also used by patriarchs and shamans in the humble settings of the village. Today, Yucatecan village shamans make their models of the natural world out of green saplings and corn stalks and set them up in the middle of fields, at the mouths of caves, or at the bases of natural hills.[68] Maya peasants throughout the region similarly decorate their altars and images with flowers, leaves, pine boughs, and other living links to surrounding nature. The remarkable correspondences between modern peasant shamanistic practices and ancient royal practices suggest that the ancestral shamans of the peasants, presumably also villagers, carried out modest versions of the noble ceremonies. Nevertheless, these humble rituals activated the sacred energies just as effectively as their counterparts in the great urban centers.[69]
-A ''capacity'' is a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be, such as playing tennis or being physically fit. It is composed of two elements: (a) a set of external conditions which enable a person to do and/or be certain things, and (b) a set of internal abilities which the person requires in order to be able to take advantage of said external conditions. For example, a person’s capacity to play tennis consists of external conditions like a tennis court, a tennis racket, someone to play against, and so on. Internally, it consists of abilities such as being able to hold a racket, hit a ball, and know the rules of the game. In the absence of either the external or internal conditions, a person lacks the real possibility to achieve the doing of playing tennis and therefore lacks the capacity to play. A ''drive'', in comparison, is a person’s particular desires, intentions, motivations, goals, values, or concerns—such as wanting to play tennis.[[#30Thisinterpretationofcapac|30]]
+So powerful were the effects of these rituals that the objects, people, buildings, and places in the landscape in which the supernatural materialized accumulated energy and became more sacred with repeated use.[70] Thus, as kings built and rebuilt temples on the same spot over centuries, the sanctums within them became ever more sacred. The devotion and ecstasy of successive divine ahauob sacrificing within those sanctums rendered the membrane between this world and the Otherworld ever more thin and pliable. The ancestors and the gods passed through such portals into the living monarch with increasing facility. To enhance this effect, generations of kings replicated the iconography and sculptural programs of early buildings through successive temples built over the same nexus.[71]
-Anarchists used a variety of different terms to describe this process. They mostly referred to the deployment of “capacities,” “powers,” or “capabilities” in order to satisfy “drives,” “urges,” “wants,” “desires,” or “needs.”[[#31ForexamplesseeBakuninPo|31]] Malatesta, for example, wrote that “social life became the necessary condition of man’s existence, in consequence of his capacity to modify his external surroundings and adapt them to his own wants, by the exercise of his primeval powers in co-operation with a greater or less number of associates. His desires have multiplied with the means of satisfying them, and they have become needs.”[[#32MalatestaMethodofFreedom|32]] In order to avoid confusion, I shall generally refer to capacities and drives.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-64.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:7 Witz Monster Masks on the Southwest Corner of Temple 22 at Copan]]
-As humans exercise their capacities to satisfy their drives, they continually develop and shape their existing capacities and drives, while also developing entirely new ones. A person who frequently plays the guitar will become better at playing a particular chord and finds their preexisting motivation to play grows. They learn whole new guitar techniques and discover drives that they did not have when they started, such as the desire to play heavy metal. As Alexander Berkman wrote, “the satisfaction of our wants creates new needs, gives birth to new desires and aspirations.”[[#33AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|33]] Were they to stop playing, their capacity to play guitar would diminish over time along, perhaps, with their inclination to do so. Capacities and drives are not fixed or static, but are rather in constant motion as human action maintains, alters, erodes, destroys, and creates them over time. When humans produce anything, they engage in an act of double-production. They simultaneously produce a particular thing, such as a good or service, and the capacities and drives exercised, developed, or created during the activity of production itself. When people engage in practice, they are also changing themselves. This theory can be seen in Kropotkin’s advocacy of “teaching which, by the practice of the hand on wood, stone, metal, will speak to the brain and help to develop it” and thereby produce a child whose brain is “developed at once by the work of hand and mind.”[[#34KropotkinDirectStruggle|34]]
+The result was a layered pattern of power points particular to each Maya royal capital, a dynamic pattern that was both conserved and elaborated upon by successive rulers. On the larger scale, dynastic histories affected the sacred geography that had been created by the gods. As kings and nobles built temples to consolidate their power, and as king and commoner buried their dead in the houses they built, human action both added to and shifted the great magnetic centers of supernatural power that dotted the landscape. Sacred geography was affected as much by the unfolding of human history as by the intrinsic structure of the cosmos. But of course, for the Maya these were connected aspects of the same basic forces of nature.
-Engaging in practice not only affects a person’s capacities and drives, but also has a significant impact on their consciousness. Learning music theory will not only, for example, make us better at reading sheet music or acquire the motivation to learn more about the subject. It also changes how we experience, conceptualize, and understand music—or life in general—such as noticing a feature of a song or thinking of oneself as a person of culture and sophistication.
+The strategies of political competition were conceived and executed within this matrix of sacred power. Ritual, war, trade, marriage, accession, and other social activities were more likely to succeed if they were conducted at the proper place and time. Specialists in the complex patterns of time and in the movements of the heavens, like Western astrologers, kept track of the movements of the stars and planets to discover when it was favorable to proceed. As the Maya exploited the patterns of power in time and space, they used ritual to control the dangerous and powerful energies they released. There were also rituals which contained the accumulated power of objects, people, and places when they were no longer in active use.[72] And conversely, when the community became convinced that the power was gone from their city and ruling dynasts, they just walked away.
-This is not to say that anarchists viewed the process of development as automatic or predetermined. Different people can develop different drives in response to the exact same kinds of practice. One person might eat dark chocolate and want to consume it daily, while another wants to avoid it at all costs. Two people can read the same book and develop distinct thoughts and feelings in response to it. Despite this, generalizations can still be made, such as the fact that people socialized to reproduce patriarchal gender roles will in general do so or that the activity of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the police (or both) will, in general, bring out the worst in someone.
+The Maya described the inhabitants of their world, both human and superhuman, in elaborate and powerful stories. These myths, like those in the Bible, not only described but also explained the nature of those beings and their relationships. Because the Maya wrote primarily upon perishable paper, our understanding of their literature and of the many forms such stories must have taken is severely limited. There is one example, however, of a Maya Bible,[73] a compilation of stories that explains the essence of living experience. It is called the Book of Council or the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya[74] people.
-This theory of practice can be clearly seen in the writings of Bakunin. He wrote that “all civilization, with all the marvels of industry, science, and the arts; with all the developments of humanity—religious, esthetic, philosophic, political, economic, and social” was created by humans through “the exercise of an active power . . . which tends to assimilate and transform the external world in accordance with everyone’s needs.”[[#35BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|35]] Bakunin thought that, as humans exercise their capacities, they develop them. Whereas “ants, bees, beavers, and other animals which live in societies do now precisely the same thing which they were doing 3,000 years ago,” humans have developed their powers such that they have invented new technology and gone from living in “huts” and using bows or spears to building “palaces” and manufacturing guns and artillery.[[#36BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|36]]
+Fragmentary versions of these stories and others were written down by Maya literate both in their own script and that of their new masters, the Spanish. Many of these accounts were requested by the Spanish and incorporated into their official documents, but some made their way into carefully guarded caches of books saved by the Maya from the great burning. Other versions were transferred orally from generation to generation of living Maya, making it possible for modern scholars to record them. In fact, one version or another of the creation stories related in the Popol Vuh are found in all periods of Maya history: on the monuments of Preclassic cities like Izapa and Cerros,[75] on Classic period pottery and public art, in documents from the Colonial period, and in the modern oral tradition. There can be no doubt that the creation mythology of the ancient Maya later inspired the genesis stories of the Popol Vuh and that the Precolumbian versions of these stories described the shared world view which linked farmer and king together into a unified society.
-Such processes of development are, of course, not an entirely individual matter. Humans are, in Malatesta’s words, “a social animal whose existence depends on the continued physical and spiritual relations between human beings,” which are “based either on affinity, solidarity and love, or on hostility and struggle.”[[#37MalatestaLifeandIdeas6|37]] Humans experience life immersed in the actions, emotions, and ideas of other people, which in turn conditions and alters how people develop as individuals. A child will be taught to read and write by adults who are already literate, while a dancer may develop the desire to dance in a new style after watching a ballet performance. We adopt a particular perspective on the world due to reading books written by other people or by thinking with concepts that have been collectively produced and reproduced by our culture.[[#38BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|38]]
+The Heroes of Maya myth were twins. In the seventeenth-century Popol Vuh myth, they were called Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The names most securely associated with them in the Classic period are Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In the version of the myth preserved in the Popol Vuh, these twins were the offspring of an older set of twins who had been called to Xibalba for making too much noise playing the ballgame. Named Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu,[76] these older twins were tricked by the Lords of Death, defeated, and sacrificed. The Lords of Death buried one twin under the ballcourt in Xibalba and hung the skull of the other in a gourd tree as a warning to others so ill advised as to offend the powerful Xibalbans. Found by the daughter of a Lord of Death, the skull impregnated her by spitting in her hand. Frightened by her enraged father, the girl fled Xibalba to the Middleworld, where she wandered until she found the grandmother of the dead twins. The grandmother sheltered her and eventually she gave birth to a new set of twins, named Hunahpu and Xbalanque.
-What capacities, drives, and consciousness people develop varies across social and historical contexts. The capacity to sail a longboat and the drive to die heroically in battle so that you will go to Valhalla developed from living as a warrior in a ninth-century Norse society. These traits are not widespread in modern Nordic societies because people are no longer engaging in that sort of Viking practice. Instead, people engage in practices that develop their capacity to assemble flat-pack furniture or their drive to go to melodic death metal concerts. The social and historical situation in which one lives also determines how universal aspects of human nature are experienced. For example, the universal drive of hunger may be experienced as hunger for beef burgers in a modern North American fast food restaurant, but as hunger for seal meat in a nineteenth-century Inuit house.
+After many adventures, these twins found the ballgame gear their grandmother had hidden after the death of their forebears. The two became great ballplayers and in their turn disturbed the Xibalbans who lived in the Underworld just under the ballcourt. They too were called to Xibalba to account from their unseemly behavior, but unlike the first set of twins, they outwitted the Lords of Death and survived a series of trials designed to defeat them. On the first night they were put in the Dark House and given a torch and two cigars and told to keep them lit all night. They tricked the Lords of Death by putting fireflies at the tips of their cigars and passing a macaw’s tail off as the glow of the torch.
-Anarchist authors emphasized these points again and again. They generally conceptualized human history in terms of a series of economic periods characterized by specific kinds of technology and ways of organizing production. Their descriptive model held that humans had gone from living in hunter-gatherer societies to living in ancient agricultural societies based on slavery, feudal agricultural societies based on serfdom, and finally modern industrial societies based on wage labor.[[#39BakuninSelectedWritings|39]] This view of history included an awareness of the fact that European colonialism, and so the development of industrial societies, involved the enslavement of Black people.[[#40KropotkinDirectStruggle|40]] Anarchists were also aware that hunter-gatherer societies existed at the same time as industrial societies.[[#41BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|41]]
+The following day the twins played ball with the lords and allowed themselves to lose. They had till morning to come up with the four bowls of flowers that were bet on the outcome. Thinking to distract Hunahpu and Xbalanque from finding a solution to this problem, the lords had put the twins in Razor House, a place full of stone blades which were constantly looking for something to cut. The twins got the blades to stop moving by promising them the flesh of animals. This accomplished, they sent leaf-cutting ants to the gardens of the Lords of Death to bring back the bowls of flowers. In the morning the lords were enraged to find that they had been paid with their own blossoms.
-Anarchists inherited the broad model of human history as a series of economic stages from the French and Scottish Enlightenment and read it in early anthropology.[[#42Foranoverviewofhowthis|42]] Although the specifics of this model are outdated in light of the latest research, they nonetheless highlight what anarchists thought about capacities, drives, and consciousness. Different economic systems were constituted by specific kinds of practice, such as hunting with a bow and arrow as a nomad, collecting the harvest as a peasant, or working in a car factory as a wage laborer, and so developed distinct characteristics within people. This way of thinking can especially be seen in anarchist discussions of drives. Luigi Galleani, for example, thought that when a human develops themselves they acquire “a series of ever-more, growing and varied needs claiming satisfaction.”[[#43LuigiGalleaniTheEndofA|43]] These “needs vary, not only according to time and place, but also according to the temperament, disposition, and development of each individual.”[[#44GalleaniEndofAnarchism|44]] He wrote,
+The twins continued to play ball with the Lords of Death by day and allow themselves to be tested by night. They survived the Cold House, which was full of freezing wind and hail; Jaguar House, a place filled with hungry jaguars; Fire House, a place filled with raging flames; and a house filled with shrieking bats which they escaped by spending the night curled up inside their blowguns.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">A farmer who lives in an Alpine valley, in the present conditions of his development, may have satisfied all his needs—eaten, drunk, and rested to his heart’s content; while a worker who lives in London, in Paris, or in Berlin, may willingly give up a quarter of his salary and several hours of his rest, in order to satisfy a whole category of needs totally unknown to the farmer stranded among the gorges of the Alps or the peaks of the Apennine mountains—to spend an hour of intense and moving life at the theater, at the museum or at the library, to buy a recently published book or the latest issue of a newspaper, to enjoy a performance of Wagner or a lecture at the Sorbonne.[[#45GalleaniEndofAnarchism|45]]</div>
+They did not escape the Bat House completely unscathed, however. As morning approached and the bats grew quiet, Hunahpu peeked out of the muzzle of his blowgun for a look around. Just at that moment a large bat swooped down and knocked off his head, which rolled onto the Xibalban ballcourt. Xbalanque, however, managed to replace the head with a squash, which he carved to resemble his brother’s face.
-The social environment in which capacities, drives, and consciousness develop is itself produced by practice. Society is the totality of social relations that individual and collective actions continuously constitute, reproduce, and transform. As Bakunin noted, “the real life of society, at every instant of its existence, is nothing but the sum total of all the lives, developments, relations, and actions of all the individuals comprising it.”[[#46BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|46]] Kropotkin likewise held that “humanity is not a rolling ball, nor even a marching column. It is a whole that evolves simultaneously in the multitude of millions of which it is composed. . . . The fact is that each phase of development of society is a resultant of all the activities of the intellects which compose that society; it bears the imprint of all those millions of wills.”[[#47KropotkinFugitiveWritings|47]] An implication of this, as Malatesta saw, is that social action “is not the negation, nor the complement of individual initiative, but it is the sum total of the initiatives, thoughts and actions of all the individuals composing society: a result which, other things equal, is more or less great according as the individual forces tend toward the same aim, or are divergent and opposed.”[[#48MalatestaMethodofFreedom|48]]
+In the ballgame the next day, the Xibalbans used the brother’s severed head as the ball, but Xbalanque was ready for their tricks. He kicked his brother’s head into the high grass at the side of the court. Out of the grass jumped a rabbit who bounced away like a ball, taking the Xibalbans with him. Xbalanque retrieved his brother’s head, replaced it on his body, and put the squash in its place. He yelled at the Xibalbans that he had found the lost ball and, when play resumed, the squash splattered into bits on the court. The Lords of Death were furious when they realized they had been outsmarted once again.
-Imagine a group of hunters who cooperate to find and kill animals for food. During this process, these hunters produce social relations among themselves, such as the most experienced member leading the hunt or everyone singing a song in victory afterward. The social relations that collective practice produce, in turn, determine the nature of the practice, since the practice is itself performed through these social relations. How hunters hunt both produces the social relation of singing songs in victory and is altered by this social relation. Importantly, collective practice is not necessarily friendly or egalitarian practice. The slave master owns and controls the slave. They nonetheless both engage in the collective practice of a cotton plantation, albeit in very different roles.
+As a last resort the Lords of Death decided to burn Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Learning of this, the twins instructed two seers, Xulu and Pacam, telling them what they should say when the lords asked for advice in disposing of their remains. The twins cheerfully accepted an invitation to see the great stone fire pit where the Xibalbans were brewing an alcoholic beverage. When challenged to a game of jumping over the pit, they simply jumped in.
-This interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice. They enable it by developing in people the necessary internal abilities, drives, and consciousness for practice and by producing many of the external conditions that the exercise of the internal abilities is preconditioned on. They teach people how to hunt and they organize the manufacture of hunting equipment. Social structures constrain practice by imposing limits and exerting pressure on which and how capacities are deployed, what drives are satisfied, and the direction in which new capacities, drives, and consciousness are developed. A hunter is unlikely to develop the desire to become a vegetarian.
+Thinking they had won, the lords followed the advice of the two seers and ground the twins’ bones, casting the powder into the river. After five days Hunahpu and Xbalanque were resurrected with the faces of catfish. On the following day they took on human form again, put on the guise of vagabond actors, and began to perform miraculous dances. Hearing of these remarkable new performers, the Lords of Death invited them to demonstrate their skills at court.
-Social structures are relatively stable, but they are not fixed entities. They are processes reproduced over time by the practice of humans, who are continually modifying themselves through action, and being modified by the action of others. In Bakunin’s words, “every man . . . is nothing else but the result of the countless actions, circumstances, and conditions, material and social, which continue shaping him as long as he lives.”[[#49BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|49]] Berkman also emphasized the manner in which people are shaped by simultaneous three-way interactions between social structures, consciousness, and their actions: “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are.”[[#50BerkmanAnarchism99|50]]
+The lords were most anxious to see the remarkable dance of sacrifice in which one twin decapitated and dismembered the other. Commanded to perform, Xbalanque dismembered his brother and then brought him back to life. The Lords of Death were overwhelmed and begged to have it done to themselves. The Hero Twins gladly acquiesced, but then they did not bring the lords back to life. Thus was death outwitted and hope brought to humankind. A soul called to Xibalba in death goes with the hope that it too will outwit the Lords of Death, to emerge, like the Hero Twins, in triumph and become venerated as an ancestor.
-These changes to the humans that compose the social structure can, in turn, lead to the modification of the social structure itself. The group of hunters who sing songs to celebrate could, over time, become primarily concerned with their music and sing more often during hunts. They could even create a whole new social structure, such as deciding to form a band. As Rocker noted, “every form of his social existence, every social institution . . . is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends.”[[#51RockerNationalismandCult|51]]
+Xibalba, like the world of humanity, contained many kinds of beings, some of which were found in both worlds and some of which were unique to one or the other.[77] The myth of the Heroes suggests, however, that while people could enter Xibalba, the Lords of Death could not visit the Middleworld except in their nonphysical manifestations—rot, disease, and death. They could not rule as sentient beings here. It was thus the human form of godhood that spanned the worlds, rather than the supernatural form, and that human form was ultimately the king. He was the earthly manifestation of the Hero Twins and he reenacted their triumph over death through ritual.
-The kinds of practice that people within social structures engage in is significantly determined by the social structure in question, due to its enabling and constraining aspects. People engage in the practices that turn them into people capable of, and driven to, reproduce the social structure itself. In Malatesta’s words: “Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are.”[[#52MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|52]] Given this, “man, like all living beings, adapts and habituates himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus being born and having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man . . . believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and liberty seemed to him an impossible thing.”[[#53MalatestaMethodofFreedom|53]] Social structures that consistently shape people in this manner come to be dominant structures when they underpin the reproduction and relative stability of the society in which they are embedded.
+Maya artists often represented Xibalba as being underground,[78] but they also pictured it underwater with its denizens upside down relative to the human world. In at least one version (Fig. 2:4), Xibalbans lived foot to foot with humans, exactly as if they were mirror people. Xibalba was, furthermore, not always underfoot, for at night it circulated to take its place above in the night sky. The Maya saw stars and constellations, the planets and the moon, as living beings who interacted with the cycles, natural and social, of the Middleworld. To the ancient Maya the world of the stars was as alive as the world of humankind. Astronomical observation was not a matter of simple scientific curiosity, but a source of vital knowledge about Xibalba and its powers. Sky patterns reflected the actions and interactions of those gods, spirits, and ancestors with the living beings of the Middleworld. Both king and commoner adjusted their living to those patterns or suffered the consequences.
-Anarchist authors disagreed with one another about which dominant structures played the most important role in history or contemporary society. They also had distinct views on how to conceptualize the manner in which dominant structures interact with, shape, and mutually constitute one another. A significant number of historical anarchists endorsed various forms of economic determinism. Malatesta, who would later reject economic determinism, wrote in 1884 that, since “man’s primary need and the essential prerequisite of existence is that he is able to eat, it is only natural that the character of a society is determined primarily by the manner in which man secures the means of survival, how wealth is produced and distributed.”[[#54MalatestaMethodofFreedom|54]] He went so far as to claim that “''the economic question is fundamental'' in Sociology” and “other matters—political, religious, etc.—are merely its reflections, perhaps even the shadows it casts.”[[#55MalatestaMethodofFreedom|55]] If “political institutions and moral sentiments derive their raison d’être from economic conditions,” then it followed that “''economic inequality is the source of all moral, intellectual, political, etc. inequalities''.”[[#56MalatestaMethodofFreedom|56]]
+From the myth of the Hero Twins came three great axioms that appear repeatedly in the imagery of Classic Maya religion and politics. First, the Hero of the Maya vision did not overpower his enemies: He outwitted them. In the myth, the Twins tricked the Lords of Death into submitting to sacrifice. Secondly, resurrection and rebirth came through sacrifice—especially death by decapitation. The Hero Twins were conceived when the severed head of their father spit into the hand of their mother. They defeated death by submitting to decapitation and sacrifice. Finally, the place of confrontation and communication was the ballcourt. The ballgame, as we shall see in later chapters, was the arena in which life and death, victory and defeat, rebirth and triumph played out their consequences.
-Anarchists who advocated economic determinism appear to have done so due to the influence of inaccurate interpretations of Marx’s theory of history, which were popularized by socialist parties at the time. In 1887, the American anarchist Albert Parsons claimed that “the mode and manner of procuring our livelihood affects our whole life; the all-pervading cause is economic . . . and social institutions of every kind and degree result from, grow out of, and are created by the economic or industrial regulations of society.”[[#57AlbertParsonsAnarchismI|57]] The fact that Parsons was influenced by Marx can be seen in the fact that he quotes large sections of Marx’s ''Capital ''and ''Manifesto of the Communist Party''.[[#58AlbertParsonsAnarchism2|58]] Parsons was not unique in this respect. Rocker claimed that, in London during the 1880s, “the Jewish anarchists at that time and for some time after accepted the idea of economic materialism” and “the Marxist conception of history.”[[#59RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|59]] Malatesta noted in 1897 that, prior to the period in which anarchists discarded the mistakes of Marxism, they had been “more consistent or even more orthodox advocates” of Marxist theory “than those who professed to be Marxists and, perhaps, than Marx himself.”[[#60ErricoMalatestaALongand|60]] Elsewhere, he claimed that in Italy during the early 1870s, “though none of us had read Marx, we were still too Marxist” due to the influence of Bakunin’s views on political economy and history.[[#61MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|61]] The Italian anarchist Cafiero subsequently read Marx while in prison and published a summary of Marx’s ''Capital ''in 1879,'' ''which Marx himself approved of.[[#62NunzioPerniconeItalianAn|62]]
+The rules and scoring of the bailgame remain elusive to us, but we have images of Classic people in play.[79] The ball was made of solid latex rubber shaped into a sphere slightly larger than a modern basketball. Players wore heavy padding called yokes around their waist to protect them from the bruising hardness of the ball. They also wore heavy padding on one knee and forearm to protect themselves from injury as they hit the ball or threw themselves under the flight of the ball. In bailgame scenes, players are often shown on one knee as they prepare to return the ball, and there are several examples where they have thrown themselves to the ground to prevent it from hitting the floor.
-Bakunin had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward what he regarded as Marx’s social theory. In 1872, he simultaneously praised Marx for drawing attention to the importance of economic factors in history, while arguing that Marx wrongly ignored “other elements in history, such as the effect—obvious though it is—of political, judicial and religious institutions on the economic situation.”[[#63BakuninSelectedWritings|63]] This included the manner in which the temperament of specific cultures, which were “the product of a host of ethnographic, climatological and economic, as well as historical causes . . . exert a considerable influence over the destinies and even the development of a country’s economic forces, outside and independent of its economic conditions.”[[#64BakuninSelectedWritings|64]] Rocker and Kropotkin later developed a model in which a range of social structures—economic, political, religious, cultural etc.—were taken to mutually determine one another but no social structure or causal factor was thought to be necessarily primary. Which causal factor played the most important role varied among different moments and so could only be established through empirical investigation on a case-by-case basis.[[#65RockerNationalismandCult|65]]
+The floor of the ballcourt was usually I-shaped, but the side walls could vary considerably, although the Classic Maya generally preferred slanted walls. Markers of various sorts—stone circles at Chichen Itza, macaw heads at Copan—were mounted high on the side walls, although we do not know if they were used in scoring the play. The center ally of the I-shape usually had three round markers about a meter in diameter distributed down its center line. These markers depict one of three kinds of scenes: bound captives, play between historical people, or play between the Hero Twins and the Lords of Death. While we do not know the rules, the iconography and archaeology associated with ballcourts clearly associate them with captive sacrifice and political pomp and circumstance.
-Irrespective of where anarchists stood on the question of economic determinism, they thought in terms of multicausal explanations in which events were the products of the relations between several social structures. Goldman, for example, insisted in 1910 that “it would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital,” such as gender relations or cultural norms around sex.[[#66GoldmanRedEmma181|66]] Rocker similarly argued that “all social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes.”[[#67RockerNationalismandCult|67]]
+ The Shape of Time
-This commitment to multicausality accompanied the view that dominant structures do not ever include or exhaust all the elements that constitute a particular society. Rather, they exist alongside a wide variety of less influential or smaller social structures that are constituted by and reproduced through distinct kinds of practice and their accompanying capacities, drives, and consciousness. These smaller social structures include ways of life as diverse as Romanticism, punk, Scientology, and the microstructure of a particular family. It is because of the existence of these less influential or smaller social structures that it is possible for alternative practices to emerge and modify or replace existing dominant structures. As Kropotkin argued, even within capitalist societies based on hierarchical social relations, production for profit, and economic competition, there are also numerous instances of people organizing horizontally to satisfy each other’s needs and engage in mutual aid. Such voluntary associations are “the seeds” of a “new life.”[[#68KropotkinModernScience3|68]] I will describe these forces that are fundamentally at odds with existing dominant structures as ''radical'': if universalized they would transform society and replace one dominant structure with another. The drive to not oppress women, for instance, is radical within a patriarchal society because its universalization is incompatible with the ongoing existence of patriarchy.[[#69Thislanguageisborrowedfr|69]]
+As this page is written, our world approaches what we conceive of as two great benchmarks in time—great chronological nodes when we contemplate the symmetries of history and evaluate the progress of our species as a social organism. The year 1992 will mark the five-hundredth year since Columbus “discovered” the Americas and began the process of making us into a global community aware of who and what we are. The second great anniversary will be celebrated in the Christian world, where most of us alive now will see the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, known among non-Christian peoples as the “common era.” The first millennium brought expectations of Christ’s return—the second sees us as a species standing on the edge of what could be a great adventure into the cosmos or the extinction of all people everywhere.
-Anarchists held that a crucial factor in the modification or replacement of dominant structures are the attempts by both dominant and oppressed groups to shape society in their interests. Kropotkin noted that “history is nothing but a struggle between the rulers and the ruled, the oppressors and the oppressed.”[[#70KropotkinDirectStruggle|70]] Malatesta likewise held that “through a most complicated series of struggles of every description, of invasions, wars, rebellions, repressions, concessions won by struggle, associations of the oppressed united for defense and of the conquerors for attack, we have arrived at the present state of society.”[[#71MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|71]] Such conflicts between the oppressors and the oppressed are conflicts over how practice, and so the development of capacities, drives, and consciousness, is organized. They are, in short, struggles to determine what kinds of humans society produces.
+On both of these days, we will pause to consider where we have been, what we have done, and what the future may have in store for us. Yet neither of these days has any intrinsic magic of its own. The millennium, for example, will turn on the first day of the month January, which happens to fall on a Sunday. The moon will be in its last quarter, Venus will be sixty days after its maximum distance from the sun as Morningstar, and we will be eleven days past the winter solstice. It will also be seven days after Christmas and twenty-live days after the 58<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Pearl Harbor. That year will see the 224<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
-Ultimately, according to anarchists, to change society, it is necessary to engage in forms of practice that develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness and thereby replace existing dominant social structures with alternative social structures that produce fundamentally different kinds of people. This, of course, raises the question: why did anarchists think society should be changed, and what did they want it changed into?
+We give meaning to days like this because they are the benchmarks we use to perceive that linear time has passed. By observing them we give form to the flow of time and shape to the conceptions of origins and happenings that we call history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#12|1]]. For previous reconstructions of the theory of practice, see Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ''We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism'' (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 21–59; Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 40–59.</div>
+Time for the Maya was no different. They too devised ways of recording the passage of time. Like us, they named days in many different ways and acknowledged linkages between days and events. In this way they attempted to understand the order underlying human affairs and the cycles of the living cosmos. We count with our fingers and base our numbers on units of ten. The Maya counted with the full person, both fingers and toes, and based their system on units of twenty. The symmetries generated by these two number systems are different, but their purposes are the same. We mark the passage of decades, centuries, and millennia; they marked the passage of 20-year cycles, which they called katuns, and 400-year cycles (20x20 years), called baktuns.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#22|2]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''57, 60–68; Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''89–92, 100–101, 125; Peter Kropotkin, ''Ethics: Origin and Development ''(London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1924), 1, 3–4;'' ''Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 137; Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''38, 132. For examples of Christian anarchists who rejected materialism, see Peter Ryley, ''Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain ''(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 135–47.</div>
+In our reckoning of the solar year, we use fractions, calculating that a full year is 365.25 days. Yet how is it possible to make a quarter day? It can’t be done—so instead we accumulate these quarters until we have a full day and add that day every four years to make a leap year. The Maya did not make life so complicated. Their fundamental unit was the whole day with its two halves—night and day.[80] They never altered the endless replacement of one day by the next and any fractions of years left over were simply ignored.
-[[#32|3]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 54.
+This endless succession of time was given order by grouping days into ever-repeating cycles ranging from the small to the inconceivably huge. Some of these cycles came from the observation of the natural world, for example, the cyclic movements of the moon, the planets, and the constellations. Others derived from the symmetries intrinsic to the numbers themselves, for example, the practice of counting in twenties. Other numbers and their repetitions were sacred and had magical properties.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#42|4]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 3. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 163; Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993),'' ''100–104; Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3–4.</div>
+This succession of days, like locations in space, were conceived as falling within a structure divided into quadrants, each with its appropriate direction and color. When the Spanish arrived, the Maya used this directional structure in their New Year’s ceremonies. Their ancient forebears used this four-part structure differently: They divided the progression of time into quadrants of 819 days each. In the inscriptions recording this cycle, they said that God K,[81] a small manikin-like god who was called Kawil (see the Glossary of Gods), ruled the appropriate direction during that quadrant of time. There were four such gods, each characterized by a long-nosed face, a mirror in the forehead, a smoking celt piercing the mirror, and often a serpent foot. In this context, each of the four was distinguished by his color: the red Kawil of the east, the white Kawil of the north, the black Kawil of the west, and the yellow Kawil of the south. The exact reason for choosing 819 days as the base of this cycle is not known, but the sum is the result of 7x9X 13, all numbers sacred to the Maya.[82]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#52|5]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''39. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 57, 69, 83–91; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''125.</div>
+These quadrants provided one kind of structure to time—one that directly reflected their directional and color organization of space. Yet each whole day also fell into many other cycles, both smaller and larger. The name and character of a day were derived from the combination of positions it occupied in these many different calendric cycles. The most important of these was the 260-day cycle, called a sacred round or tzolkin by modern scholars (Fig. 2:8). Composed of thirteen numbers consecutively combining with twenty day names, this cycle was shared by all the peoples of Mesoamerica. The tzolkin begins with the number 1 combined with the day name Imix, and proceeds to 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, and 4 Kan. After thirteen days the number cycle returns back to one. At this point, because there are more names than numbers, 13 Ben is followed by 1 lx and so on. When we pass the 260<sup>th</sup> permutation of number and day name, 13 Ahau, we have once again arrived at the first day, 1 Imix. One easy way to visualize how the tzolkin works is to use letters for the day names so that the first twenty-five days fall in the following pattern: 1 A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6F, 7G, 8H, 91, 10J, UK, 12L, 13M, IN, 20, 3P, 4Q, 5R, 6S, 7T, 8A, 9B, IOC, 1 ID, 12E. It takes 260 days for the combination 1A to recur. The tzolkin continues to repeat throughout eternity—one day following the other just as for us Monday follows Sunday every seven days forever.
-[[#62|6]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 54.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-65.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:8]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#72|7]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 155.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-66.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:9 The Calendar Round and How It Worked (after National Geographic, December 1975)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#82|8]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 232,'' ''217.</div>
+A second cycle used by the ancient Maya consists of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days, with five days left over at the end of the year. This short five-day month is called Uayeb, “the resting or sleep”[83] of the year (Fig. 2:9). Called both a haab and a vague year by modern scholars, this cycle mimics the solar year, but like the 260-day cycle, it is a count of whole days, one following the other in endless progression without any adjustment to the fractional remainder of the true solar year.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#92|9]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), xxx.</div>
+Each of these months had a name as do our own. Any day was named by a combination of its numerical position within the month and the name of the month itself; so, for example, the fifth day of the first month was called 5 Pop. The Maya conceived, however, that the last day of any month could also be thought of as the time that the following month was set in place. They could record this last day as the “end of” the current month, but the ancient Maya preferred to call it the “seating” (chum) of the upcoming month. In this haab cycle, the last day of the year would tall on “the seating of Pop” (0 Pop) and New Year’s would be on 1 Pop. Conventionally, modern scholars transcribe this seating day into Arabic notation as 0, giving the impression to many beginners that the days of a Maya month were numbered 0 to 19. This impression is incorrect: they were numbered 1 to 19 or (during five-day months) 1 to 4, making the final day the seating of the following month.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#102|10]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''162. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''76.</div>
+The famous 52-year cycle of the Mesoamerican calendric system reflects the combination of the name of a day in the 260-day tzolkin with its name in the 365-day haab—for example, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. The combination of these two names recurs every 18,980 (52x365) days. In the Maya system, this 52-year cycle is called a Calendar Round.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#112|11]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937),'' ''25, 26.</div>
+In addition to the three cycles discussed above, each day was also ruled by one of the Nine Lords of the Night, who succeeded each other in endless progression like our days of the week. The Maya also kept track of the age of the moon on each particular day and of where each day fell in the cycles of Venus and the other planets. All of these factors provided the detailed combination of cyclic information that gave each day its personality in time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#122|12]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''85–86, 92–93, 100; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''19, 121–22, 446–47, 456; Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''184; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 6, 21.</div>
+The Maya also reckoned each day in an era-based calendar that counted whole days accumulated since day zero, which they apparently conceived of as the beginning of the current manifestation of the cosmos, the fourth version of creation to exist.[84] Modern scholars call this era-based calendar the Long Count. Its basic unit was a 360-day year, which the Maya called a tun or “stone” because they marked the end of each of these years by setting a stone in the ground.[85] Each of these tuns consisted of eighteen months of twenty days. The months were called uinic (after the Maya word for “human being,” since humans had twenty fingers and toes)[86] and the days kin. Twenty tuns composed a katun, 400 made a baktun, 8,000 made a pictun, and 160,000 made a calabtun—and so on, in multiples of twenty, toward infinity. Since we have no equivalent cycles in our own calendar, we use the Maya words as the English names for the various periods in this calendar.[87]
-[[#131|13]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''24.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-67.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:10 Maya Numbers and How They Work in the Calendar]]
-[[#141|14]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''67.
+To write the number of years that had accumulated since the base date, the Maya used a place-notation system much like ours. Instead of placing their highest numbers on the left and their lowest numbers on the right, however, they placed their highest numbers at the top of a column and their lowest at the bottom, and read them in that order. While we need ten signs to write our numbers, the Maya needed only three: a dot for one, a bar for five, and one of a number of signs for zero (Fig. 2:10). A single day was written with a dot, four days with four dots, six with a dot and bar, nineteen with three bars and four dots, and so on. To write the number twenty, they put a zero sign in the lowest position and a dot in the next one above it. Since there are only 360 days in this kind of year, there could never be a number larger than seventeen in the month position. Eighteen months was written as one year, no months, no days.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#151|15]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''84–85,'' ''92–94, 100–101, 108.</div>
+In the Maya conception, the zero day of this era-based calendar fell on 13.0.0.0.0[88] of the Long Count, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku of the Calendar Round, and on a day when the ninth Lord of the Night was ruling (Fig. 2:11). Once these day names had been juxtaposed in this way, the calendar was set for all eternity. All the simultaneous cycles that constituted time would now simply click forward one day at a time. The next day was 13.0.0.0.1 5 Imix 9 Cumku, with the first Lord of the Night ruling; followed by 13.0.0.0.2 6 Ik 10 Cumku, second Lord of the Night; and 13.0.0.0.3 7 Akbal 11 Cumku, third Lord of the Night. In our calendar, their zero day corresponds to August 11, 3114 b.C.[89]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#161|16]]. Quoted in John Clark, “An Introduction to Reclus’ Social Thought” in Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''3.</div>
+Above we talked of the turning of the millennium as one of our own milestones in time. In the near future Maya time also approaches one of its great benchmarks. December 23, 2012, will be 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, the day when the 13 baktuns will end and the Long Count cycles return to the symmetry of the beginning. The Maya, however, did not conceive this to be the end of this creation, as many have suggested. Pacal, the great king of Palenque, predicted in his inscriptions that the eightieth Calendar Round anniversary of his accession will be celebrated eight days after the first eight-thousand-year cycle in the Maya calendar ends. In our time system, this cycle will end on October 15, 4772.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#171|17]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''3.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-68.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:11]]
-[[#181|18]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''155.
+Just as we can transcribe the great milestones of their time into our system, so can we express the day on which our second millennium falls in their calendar system. January 1, 2000, will fall on 9 Ahau in the 260-day Sacred Round and on the eighth day of Kankin in the 365-day haab. The Calendar Round designation is 9 Ahau 8 Kankin, which will be ruled by the third Lord of the Night. On that day, the moon will be 25 days old. Venus will be 133 days after inferior conjunction; and Jupiter will be 69 days, and Saturn 51 days, after opposition to the sun. It will be 2 years, 50 days after the beginning of the 2,282<sup>nd</sup> quadrant of the 819-day count in which the white God K will rule the north sky. And finally, that day will fall on the 1,867,260<sup>th</sup> day since the Maya zero date, expressed in the Maya Long Count as 12.19.6.15.0.
-[[#191|19]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''155.
+Our millennium day, of course, had no particular importance to the ancient Maya: Yet they had many such central and transitional days in their own cycles of time and they celebrated them with no less enthusiasm than we celebrate Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July. For the Maya, however, what happened on such days was not merely a remembrance of days past. It was an actual reiteration of the essential events that had happened, continued to happen, and would always happen on those days. Just as we will contemplate both our past and our hopes for the future on January 1, A.D. 2000, so the Maya regularly contemplated their own history and future potential on the important days of their calendar. For the Maya, history affected the structure of time just as ritual affected the nature of matter.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#201|20]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution ''(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006),'' ''228.</div>
+Political strategies and social events had to be calculated within a complex geography of sacred time, just as they were in sacred space. It was vitally important to know not just the character of a day in the major cycles of the tzolkin and haab, but its position in all of the permutations of cyclical time they measured. Certain days were important because of their relationship to Xibalba and the cosmos. The Maya reckoned this kind of importance with their own form of numerology.[90] The four surviving Maya books[91] describe which gods do what actions on different days in the many permutations of the Maya calendar. These patterns of divine action are far more complex than the relatively simple patterns we ascribe to the planets in Western astrology. For the Maya, on any given day hundreds of gods were acting and the pattern of their actions and interactions affected and were effected by the shape of sacred time and space.[92]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#211|21]]. Peter Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside,” ''The Newcastle Daily Chronicle'', February 20, 1895.</div>
+Yet the relationship of the kings to this timescape was not passive. While it was true that some social events, like planting and harvesting, were regular and cyclic, the actions of important humans, their births and deaths, triumphs and defeats, their records as builders and leaders, did leave their individual marks on time. Days in the history of each kingdom took on sacredness derived from the dynasts who ruled. Kings legitimized their current actions by asserting that they reiterated ancestral history. Kingly actions were likened to godly actions and exceptions to the norms of legitimate descent were explained as the reenactment of mythological or legendary history. The Maya linked their actions to gods before, during, and after the present creation and to the history of the legendary first civilization of their world—the Olmec.[93] As history accumulated for each kingdom, particular dates were remembered and celebrated for their local importance, much as different independence days are celebrated by different countries in North America. Thus, the patterns of time, like those of the physical world, had form both on the cosmic and the human scale.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#221|22]]. Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement.” See also Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''77–78.</div>
+ The Community of Human Beings
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#231|23]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 438. See also, 73.</div>
+The Maya community was embedded in the matrix of this sacred space and time. Socially, the Maya people organized themselves into families that reckoned blood membership through males and marriage membership through females. This method of organizing kinship relationships is known as patrilineal descent. The principle of selecting a single inheritor of supreme authority in the family from each successive generation usually focused on the eldest male child. This is called primogeniture[94] and it is a principle underlying hierarchical family organization from ancient China to medieval Europe. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Maya families were large, and included several generations of people under one roof or within one household compound.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#241|24]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''402. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''149–50, 153–54, 330–31; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''105.</div>
+The principle of reckoning through the male line made it possible for extended families to combine into larger groups, called lineages, which acknowledged a common ancestor. The Maya further combined lineages sharing an even more distant common ancestor into clans. These clans could function as very big families as circumstances warranted, often crosscutting differences in wealth, prestige, and occupation.[95] Maya families still have such clan structure in some communities today.
-[[#251|25]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'', 27.
+Some patrilineal systems regarded families within clans to be equal in status, but the structure also lent itself to hierarchical organization. One particular family could successfully claim a higher status if it could prove that it was on the direct line of descent from the founding ancestor. This was done by demonstrating that direct descent had passed through only one member of each generation. Once primogeniture designated a single inheritor of the line in each generation, it was possible to claim that there was a single line of males stretching back to the beginning of the clan, and that all other member families were descendants of a second rank. Internal ranking could be quite complicated, depending as it did on the reckoning of relative distance or closeness to the central lines of males. The principle was essentially open-ended in this respect, and the logical extreme was the ranking of each individual in each family in a pyramid of people stretching back to the beginning. While most societies, including the Maya, quit far short of this extreme, our point is that family ties were a flexible and powerful means of establishing social hierarchy.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#261|26]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''5–8; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''121.</div>
+The Maya institution of kingship was also based on the principle of inheritance of the line by a single male individual within any one generation leading back to a founding ancestor.[96] Furthermore, families and clans were ranked by their distance or nearness to the central descent line manifested in the king. Political power based on family allegiance may appear to be relatively simple compared to our own social-classes system, but it effectively integrated states composed of tens of thousands of people.[97]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#271|27]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 65–6.</div>
+Not surprisingly, the Maya applied the principle of primogeniture and the reckoning of the central line to other important social statuses in addition to the kingship. At Copan, for example, a lineage house was excavated whose patriarchs specialized in the arts of writing.[98] Their status as scribes gave the family sufficient prestige to warrant their special acknowledgment by the royal house of Copan. In the west along the Usumacinta river, members of another noble rank, cahalob,[99] provided administrators for the king and shared many of the prerogatives of the ahauob. The cahal rank was also inherited through family lines. Archaeology, text translation, and art historical interpretation give us glimmerings of many other types of kinship-based statuses. This principle of inherited status permeated the entire society and affirmed the legitimacy and prerogatives of the most exalted, as well as the most humble, of society’s F members.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#281|28]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''65,'' ''68.</div>
+Recent archaeology at Copan gives us a good example of the way in which the humble and the well-off maintained their integrity, even when living side by side. The residential compounds of kin groups have been classified by size and complexity into four ranks, ranging from Type 1, the lowest, to Type 4, the highest. Group 9N-8, also known as the Scribe’s Compound, is a Type 4 site—a great sprawling compound with multiple courtyards and many residential buildings. Next to it sits a Type 1, the lowest rank—the residence of a family we would call, in our system, low-middle or upper-lower class. Compared to its high-status neighbor, the Type 1 compound is humble, consisting of only a single, small courtyard, surrounded by two houses and kitchen buildings. The houses have stone walls, but the interior rooms are small, even by comparison to Copan’s tradition of tiny interiors. As humble as the Type 1 site was, excavations show that the lineage living there held its own against the neighboring lineage, even as the higher-ranked group expanded into more and more plaza compounds built as the family grew in size. Throughout its history, the lower-ranked compound remained spatially and, we deduce, socially independent. Within the social system of the Maya, the rights and independence of the lower-ranked lineages were protected as vigorously as those of the exalted.[100]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#291|29]]. Kropotkin, ''Ethics'','' ''22. See also Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 38–39.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-69.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 10]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#301|30]]. This interpretation of capacities and drives is based on Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics'', 41–9; Paul Raekstad, ''Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism'' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 23–41.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-70.jpg 70f][Yaxchilan Stela 11<br>Fig. 2:12]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#311|31]]. For examples see Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''86–88, 93–95; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 21, 26, 85; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007),'' ''137–8, 206; ''Direct Struggle'','' ''651–52.</div>
+Public monuments erected by the Maya king during the Classic period emphasize not only his role as shaman, but also his role as family patriarch. A large percentage of the texts on stelae focus on his genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. Not only were statements of his parentage regularly included in his name phrase, but pictorial records of all sorts show the parents of the king observing the actions of their offspring, even after these parents had died (Fig. 2:12).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#321|32]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''122.</div>
+The titles of kings also included their numerical position in a line of succession reckoned from the founders of their lineages. These founders were usually real historical persons, but they could also be supernaturals.[101] In the realm of Copan, however, we see another type of situation. There the small population center of Rid Amarillo was governed by a group of lords belonging to a lineage who claimed descent not from the founding ancestor of the high king but from a local founder.[102] The existence of this state of affairs confirms that many subordinate lineages did not bear a real kinship status to the royal line and hence constituted allied vassals rather than relatives of inferior status. Nevertheless, the overriding metaphor of kingly authority was kinship. Kings at Copan and elsewhere used the regalia and ritual of their office to claim identity with the mythical ancestral gods of the Maya. In this way they asserted ultimate kinship authority over all of their subjects, including such subordinates as the Rio Amarillo lords.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#331|33]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''175.</div>
+Problems with legitimate descent, such as the lack of a male heir or the death of one in war, were solved in extraordinarily creative ways. Some of the most innovative programs in the sculpture and architecture at Yaxchilan and Palenque were erected to rationalize such divergences from the prescribed pattern of descent, problems that are discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. So critical was the undisputed passage of authority at the death of a king that the designation of the heir became an important public festival cycle, with magical rituals spreading over a period of a year or more. At the royal capital of Bonampak on the great Usumacinta River, exquisite polychrome murals show that these rites included both the public display of the heir and his transformation into a special person through the sacrifice of captives taken for that purpose.[103]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#341|34]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 645.</div>
+The sculptural record also shows the shamanistic nature of Maya / kingship, central to the Classic conception of the cosmos, by depicting the divine ahau as a conductor of ritual. From the very beginning, royal monuments, such as the miniature Hauberg Stela and the San Diego cliff carving looming high above some forgotten kingdom, have depicted kings as manipulators of the supernatural domain (Fig. 2:13). Both these sculptures show a king with the supernaturals he has materialized by the ritual of shedding his blood. In the case of the Hauberg depiction, we know that this bloodletting preceded the protagonist’s accession to kingly office by fifty-two days.[104] This ritual was most likely a public affirmation of his ability to open a portal to the supernatural realm. Although the verb in both these monuments is “he let blood,” the Maya of these earlier times preferred to depict the materialization of the ancestor or god rather than the actual act of taking blood. There was a logical reason for this preference. By featuring the vision, rather than the sacrifice, the successful performance of the king as shaman could be documented publicly. Throughout the Classic period, Maya public art remained focused on the ritual performances of the king, whether these rituals were part of the regular festivals that punctuated Maya life, such as the calendrically timed ritual of period endings, or special celebrations triggered by dynastic events, such as marriages, births, or deaths.
-[[#351|35]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''86.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-71.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:13]]
-[[#361|36]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''88.
+While the ritual lives of villagers and farmers were not portrayed on the public art of the ancient Maya, high-ranking nobles did have the privilege of erecting monuments. Some of these nobles erected monuments at the subsidiary sites they ruled on behalf of high kings, while others placed monuments within the courts or buildings of their own lineage compounds. These depictions take two forms: the noble acting with his king, and the noble acting alone as the protagonist. In the first type of composition, the noble can be easily distinguished from the king by his smaller size, his characteristic clothing, and his name phrases. In the second type, however, we would never know the actor was a noble, instead of a king, without being able to read the text (Fig. 2:14).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#371|37]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''65.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-72.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:14 Yaxchilan Lintel 39]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#381|38]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''159, 164, 167–68.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-73.jpg 70f][Lacanja Lintel 1]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#391|39]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 121; Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 174, 188–91; Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''5–34; Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''44. Kropotkin had a more complicated model but the basic point remains the same. See Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid'', 62–247; Kropotkin, ''Ethics'','' ''17–18; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''276–77.</div>
+During the Classic period, the heart of Maya life was the ritual of bloodletting.[105] Giving the gift of blood from the body was an act of piety used in all of their rituals, from the births of children to the burial of the dead. This act could be as simple as an offering of a few drops of one’s blood, or as extreme as the mutilation of the different parts of the body to generate large flows of this precious fluid. Blood could be drawn from any part of the body, but the most sacred sources were the tongue for males and females, and the penis for males. Representations of the act carved on stelae depict participants drawing finger-thick ropes through the wounds to guide the flow of blood down onto paper. Men with perforated genitals would whirl in a kind of dervish dance that drew the blood out onto long paper and cloth streamers tied to their wounded members. The aim of these great cathartic rituals was the vision quest, the opening of a portal into the Otherworld through which gods and the ancestors could be enticed so that the beings of this world could commune with them. The Maya thought of this process as giving “birth” to the god or ancestor, enabling it to take physical form in this plane of existence. The vision quest was the central act of the Maya world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#401|40]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 609–10; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 150, 153; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 125.</div>
+The practice of personal bloodletting took place not only in the temples of the mighty but at altars in the humble village as well. This fact is witnessed to by the presence of obsidian, one of the main implements of the ritual, at many ancient village sites. Obsidian is volcanic glass spewed forth from the towering fire mountains in highland regions of the Maya country. Skilled craftsmen made long thin, razor-sharp blades of the black glass, and such blades are found in virtually every lowland community context of the Maya—albeit in small quantities outside of great cities or the manufacturing towns near the natural sources of the stone. Obsidian was prized for many reasons—not only for its rarity, but for its unsurpassed ability to make clean, quick wounds. No doubt obsidian blades were used for a wide variety of cutting tasks once their main function as bloodletters was at an end, but for this primary ritual use, obsidian was to Maya propitiation of the divine what wine and wafers are to the Christian communion. What the great kings did with obsidian on behalf of all, the farmer did on behalf of his family. To be sure, the gift of obsidian from a king to his subject in return for labor, tribute, and devotion was a kind of subtle coercion. We can say this in light of the fact that the king held a virtual monopoly over the supply of obsidian and chose who was to receive it and who not. But this gift was also an affirmation of a common covenant with the divine and a common means of sustaining this covenant.[106]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#411|41]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 229, 231; Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid'', 64, 68–69; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 213–18.</div>
+The king upheld his part in this divine covenant through his enactment of many rituals of power performed for his people. Indeed he was power, power made material, its primary instrument. On public monuments, the oldest and most frequent manner in which the king was displayed was in the guise of the World Tree. Its trunk and branches were depicted on the apron covering his loins, and the Doubled-headed Serpent Bar that entwined in its branches was held in his arms. The Principal Bird Deity (see the Glossary of Gods) at its summit was rendered as his headdress (Fig. 2:15). This Tree was the conduit of communication between the supernatural world and the human world: The souls of the dead fell into Xibalba along its path; the daily journeys of the sun, moon, planets, and stars followed its trunk. The Vision Serpent symbolizing communion with the world of the ancestors and the gods emerged into our world along it. The king was this axis and pivot made flesh. He was the Tree of Life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#421|42]]. For an overview of how this view of history developed, see Ronald L. Meek, ''Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought ''(Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 1977), 18–32; Christopher J. Berry, ''The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 91–115; Adam Kuper, ''The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth ''(London: Routledge, 2005), 3–81.</div>
+For the Maya, trees constituted the ambient living environment, the material from which they fashioned homes and tools, the source of many foods, medicines, dyes, and vital commodities such as paper. They provided the fuel for cooking fires and the soil-enriching ash that came from the cutting and burning of the forest. Trees were the source of shade in the courtyards and public places of villages and cities, and the home of the teeming life of the forest. It was natural that the Maya would choose this central metaphor for human power. Like other trees, the king was at once the ambient source of life and the material from which humans constructed it. Together, the kings of the Maya realms comprised a forest of sustaining human World Trees within the natural forested landscape of the Maya world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#431|43]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 43.</div>
+The king sustained his people, but he also required much from them in the way of service. The regularities of the Maya calendar and the celebration of local history generated endless rounds of feasts and festivals.[107] The rich ceremonial life of the great public centers, reflected in the smaller towns and villages surrounding them, drew deeply upon the natural and human resources of the Maya. The king and his court commanded the skilled and unskilled labor of many craftsmen and commoners, whose basic needs had to be met by an even larger population of farmers, hunters, and fishermen. It is hard for us to imagine just how much patience, skill, and effort went into the creation of the elaborately decorated objects and buildings used by the king in his performance of ritual. A single small jade F carving must have taken a craftsman months to complete, and we can document the fact[108] that great temples took many years of skilled work by construction specialists, carvers, plasterers, and painters as well as common laborers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#441|44]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 45. See also Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''4; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 122, 456; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''163, 598; ''Conquest of Bread'','' ''137–9.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-74.jpg 70f][Fig. 2:15 The Maya King dressed as the World Tree]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#451|45]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''44–45.</div>
+The tribute which the community gave to the royal court to finance such work was no doubt a real burden, but not necessarily a severe hardship. In times of general prosperity, which existed for most of Classical Maya history, the common folk enjoyed ready access to the basic necessities of life, both practical and spiritual. In times of hardship and privation, the commoners and nobles all suffered alike. The ancient Maya view of the world mandated serious and contractual obligations binding the king and his nobility to the common people. Incompetence or exploitation of villagers by the king invited catastrophic shifts in allegiance to neighboring kings, or simple migration into friendlier territory.[109] Such severe exploitation was a ruler’s last desperate resort, not a routine policy. The king and his elite lived well, they enjoyed the most favored loods, the most pleasant home sites, the finer quality of clothing.[110] But the great public displays of the Maya were not designed just to exhibit the personal wealth of the king. They also exhibited the community’s property entrusted to the king, fashioned by the hard work and inspiration of many people, and ignited into luminous power by their most prized possession, the king himself.
-[[#461|46]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''158.
+The practical arrangements of economic matters were never documented in the public record of ancient Maya communities. However, we can surmise that the major economic institution was the public fair[111] that accompanied every major festival in centers great and small. 1 hese public fairs were, along with daily markets in the major towns and cities, the context in which the Maya carried out their business transactions. Even as late as this century, the yearly festival of the Señor de Escupu/as, Christ in the Sepulcher, turns a sleepy little town near the ancient center of Copán into a teeming bazaar of tens of thousands of Maya from all over that part of their country. In a single week at that festival, British merchants from neighboring Belize carried out the better part of their annual indigo trade with the Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#471|47]]. Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''119–20.</div>
+These festivals were a major part of Maya public life throughout their history. They had the practical advantage of being held on days in the calendar cycles known to everyone in the region, and were advertised far and wide by royal invitation. Many of them were occasions for visits by nobles and royalty of one kingdom to the other.[112] In the fairs which accompanied the festivals, and in the market towns in border areas between kingdoms, the Maya merchants and craftsmen transacted business under the watchful eyes of local magistrates and lords who judged contractual disputes and kept the peace of the market.[113] Family patriarchs also kept watch over merchants within their kin group and had to report directly to the king if something was amiss. Merchants calculated exchange contracts in the dirt, using pebbles and sticks to write out their numbers,[114] and honored such agreements verbally—without legal documents.[115]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#481|48]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''132–33. See also Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''208.</div>
+The ancient Maya used various precious commodities for money— carved and polished greenstone beads, beads of red spiny oyster shell, cacao beans, lengths of cotton cloth, and measures of sea salt.[116] Such currencies were in wide demand throughout the Mesoamerican world.[117] Although currencies were probably fixed in value by the king and court within particular realms, merchants working in the uncontrolled lands between kingdoms could speculate on marginal differences in value and scarcities.[118] Even the Maya had their arbitragers.
-[[#491|49]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''95.
+Everyone used such money, and everyone participated in the markets and tairs. Farmers had the option of bartering for goods or turning part of their maize crop into currency for important social transactions,[119] such as marriages, christenings, funerals, and house-building parties. All such activities were expensive and required feasts and gifts. Maya men and women wore the hard currencies, jade and shell, as jewelry to display the hard work and enterprise of their families. Farmers might use money to pay tribute to their rulers, but usually they preferred to provide labor on building projects in the urban centers or service on the farms of their kings and lords. These activities enabled them to participate directly in sustaining the lives of those who sustained the prosperity of the community at large. The economy of every kingdom was administered strategically by the king and court, through both the control of the prices of Maya currencies and commodities and the management of contractual disputes and fraud in the fairs and markets.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#501|50]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99.</div>
+Merchants operating beyond the borders of the kingdom were thought of euphemistically as state ambassadors bearing “gifts” to royal neighbors who acknowledged these with reciprocal “gifts.”[120] Such royal business was so economically vital that the merchants involved in it were high nobles and even members of the royal household. Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, high merchants traveled to the great festivals of neighbors and distant states that controlled especially strategic goods.
-[[#511|51]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''27.
+The currencies used by the Maya—jade, obsidian, red spiny oyster shell, cloth, salt, and especially chocolate beans (cacao)—were prized beyond their territories and traded to all of the civilized peoples of the Mesoamerican world. In turn, different peoples produced and controlled different commodities, and traded regularly over long distances to obtain those that were outside their political domains. International relations thus were of central importance to the economic well-being of every state. The Maya king carried the burden of gathering the goods within his realm, exchanging them over long distances, and distributing the cherished goods received in return to his lords and allies. These in turn distributed the goods to their constituents in the form of gifts or exchanges. In this way, a portion of these commodities eventually filtered down into the general everyday transactions of the common folk.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#521|52]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48.</div>
+In addition to managing the distribution of goods produced by his people, a Maya king also implemented agricultural work programs in the low-lying swamplands and river margins found in many parts of Maya country. In these regions, the land was not easily worked by individuals and families in a village farming community. Excavating the muck at the I bottom of the swamps to create a system of raised fields and canals took organization of time and labor. The result was worth the effort: Fields were adjacent to steady supplies of water, and the canals became home to teeming schools of fish sustained by waterlilies and other evaporationretarding plants.[121] The bottom mud became loaded with nutrients from fish excretions, thus providing rich fertilizer for the fields. It was a delicate and difficult system to maintain, but one with the prospect of enormous productivity, resulting in two or three crops a year.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#531|53]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''110. See also Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''272; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''66–68.</div>
+So important was such swamp and river-edge agriculture to the Maya state that the kings adopted waterlilies as a primary metaphor of royal power. Nobles were, literally, Ah Nab “Waterlily People.” The heartland of Maya country is swampland, and it is more than likely that the kingdoms of the high forest, as well as the wetlands of the Peten, of the Lacandon Forest, and of northern Belize, were the greatest producers of the strategic agricultural commodities, cacao and cotton, in all of the Mesoamerican world. In these regions, the vast swamps surrounding Maya centers supported large systems of raised fields. Most of these were owned and maintained by patrilineages, but a proportion (perhaps significant in size) were maintained as royal farms through tribute labor. Both these farmers and their communities benefited in turn from the resulting prosperity of the realms. Maya kings were not only central to the economic well-being of their own constituencies. They were essential to the economic well-being of their trade partners in other parts of Mesoamerica, who depended upon them for the reliable supply of their currencies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#541|54]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 19.</div>
+The understanding of currency in Mesoamerica did not parallel ours in every sense. Currency had value as a unit of economic exchange, it is true; but it also symbolized other values, far removed from the world of economics. A piece of red spondylus shell could buy something, but the same shell bead worn over the loins of a girl child represented her childhood and, when cut off in her baptism, displayed her newfound social maturity. Whole, the shell carried hematite in a dedication offering that brought the gods and sacred energy to reside in a newly built temple. A jade bead could be exchanged for some other commodity, but when placed in the mouth of a beloved grandparent who had passed on into death, it gave sustenance for the journey to Xibalba. Smeared with blue bitumen and human blood, it was cast by a shaman to divine the patterns of the sacred world and time. Carved with imagery, both the spondylus shell and the jade could be worn by a king to convey his wealth or to focus supernatural power in ritual. For the Maya things did not have an intrinsic meaning in themselves. Rather, meaning was acquired through the context of use and the way people shaped materials to function in their everyday lives and in the public life of the community.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#551|55]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 23.</div>
+For the Maya all things were alive and had meaning, but not everyone in Maya society was fully literate in all the levels of meaning. The farmer offering a gourd bowl of water and white corn gruel to the spirits of his field was less knowledgeable about the intricacies of royal symbolism and religion than the king who, standing in one of the great plazas of his city, offered his blood in a painted clay plate to the ancestors of all Maya. Yet the farmer knew that what he did was essentially the same. When he attended the great ceremonies in the king’s plaza, the farmer could not have read the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tree stones around him, any more than he could have expounded on the subtleties of meaning in the state religion and mythology. But then, neither can most of us expound on the principles of nuclear physics. The point is that we do not have to in order to live in our world and know it is affected by such knowledge.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#561|56]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' 24, ''39. For Malatesta’s later rejection of this position see Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 45–57; ''Method of Freedom'', 363–73, 445–48.</div>
+The king and the farmer inhabited the same world. Even though they understood the symbology of that world on different levels, their lives in it were dynamically interconnected. The successful performance of the king as the state shaman enriched the farmer’s life in spiritual and ceremonial ways. His performance in economic affairs brought wealth to his kingdom and gave his constituents access to goods from far places. Royal celebrations and rituals generated festivals that touched all parts of the community emotionally and materially. The great public works commissioned by the kings created the spaces in which these festivals and rituals took on meaning. The histories written and pictured by the kings on the tree stones standing before human-made mountains gave form to time and space in both the material and spiritual worlds.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#571|57]]. Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 97.</div>
+. Cerros: The Coming of Kings
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#581|58]]. Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism'','' ''22–48.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-75.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#591|59]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 58.</div>
+In an age when the word invention has become synonymous with technological progress, it is difficult for us to imagine any other kind of invention. One of the great myths of our culture, the Myth of the Industrial Age, teaches us that the capture of fire and the invention of the wheel led inevitably to the combustion engine, flight, and atomic energy. In this myth of progress, only the energy harnessed by technology drives cultural advancement. In turn, we believe that civilized people have the responsibility to perpetuate technological progress and to invent a viable future through such means. We in the West see ourselves as the inheritors of a great hope—the tradition that technology and scientific discovery will be the salvation of humankind. However, another and more fundamental form of invention exists.
-[[#601|60]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 302.
+If we judge the Maya only by our own definition of progress, they had few technological wonders.[122] By our standards, they were a Stone Age people lacking even such rudimentary developments as the uses of metal[123] and the domestication of beasts of burden.[124] Yet few people today would deny that they possessed a high civilization and a complex social order. If the Maya did not invent an advanced scientific technology that harnessed natural energy, what then did they invent? The answer to this question is simple: They invented ideas that harnessed social energy. The genius of the Maya was expressed through the creation of new visions of power. They invented political symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#611|61]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 198–99.</div>
+It would be untrue to say that there were no technologies associated with these transformations. The writing and pictorial imagery used to interpret and record these social institutions comprised a particular type of technology—similar in nature to what in our time we call the media. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Maya kingship and Maya writing emerged simultaneously in the century before the Common Era, for the technology of writing served the hierarchical institutions of Maya life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#621|62]]. Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''135; Carlo Cafiero, ''Compendium of Capital'', trans. Paul M. Perrone (London: The Anarchist Communist Group, 2020).</div>
+Our own social institutions seem so basic and intrinsic to daily activity that we do not often realize that, like the technological side of our lives, they too are inventions. The same is true for the Maya. Their hierarchical institutions, which we recognize as the hallmarks of civilization, were invented as problem-solving tools during times of cultural strife.
-[[#631|63]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''256.
+Many of the great inventions of antiquity were social inventions. Just as the Athenian Greeks, whom we revere as spiritual forebears, invented democracy, so the Maya invented the ideas which cemented their survival as a civilization. The most powerful of these social innovations, and the cultural adaptation which instituted their great Classical florescence, was the invention of the institution of kingship. In the brief space of a century, the Maya translated the politics of village life into the politics of governance by the great ahauob, the high kings.[125]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#641|64]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''256. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''64–65; Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''142. It is important to note that Bakunin is critiquing a strawman, since Marx held that the economy and other aspects of society mutually determined one another. In later editions of ''Capital'', which appeared just before Bakunin wrote his October 1872 critique,'' ''Marx added a footnote that clarified that during certain historical periods aspects of the superstructure could play a chief causal role, such as politics in ancient Athens and Rome or religion in the Middle Ages. The economy was nonetheless primary since it enabled politics or religion to play a chief part, such as by producing the food necessary for survival. See Karl Marx, ''Capital, A Critique of Political Economy'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(London: Penguin Books, 1990), 175–76n35.</div>
+It would be misleading for us to say that they invented this new institution whole-cloth from their own experience, because kings had been around in Meosamerica for a long time—at least a thousand years. As technological invention in our world is born of old knowledge and known technology, so the Maya transformed ancient ideas into something new and uniquely their own. Our own form of government is no different—we see it as an invention and a great experiment in human experience. Yet it is a transformation of ideas from Greece, Rome, and twenty-five hundred years of social experience inherited from our forebears.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#651|65]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'', 23–41; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 125–28, 183–84, 197–99.</div>
+At the time when the institution of kingship was invented, the Maya were faced with cultural tensions so great they threatened to tear their society apart. Outside forces were upsetting the heretofore carefully maintained system of social egalitarianism. Trade, both between Maya communities and between the Maya and their Mesoamerican neighbors, such as Mije-speaking peoples of the Pacific Coast, the post-Olmec people of the Gulf Coast, the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Teotihuacanos T of the central Valley of Mexico, was generating a flow of wealth that was unequally distributed among the people. In a culture which regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration, this turn of events created unease and social strife. At the same time, the development of raised-field agriculture and extensive water-management systems created prosperity in regions which had the means to organize the labor pool necessary to maintain these systems. As contacts with trading partners already organized into kingdoms intensified, ideas of rank and privilege further exacerbated the differences in wealth and status that had grown with the success of these commercial and agricultural enterprises. A new leadership appeared within many Maya communities—one that was hierarchical in its nature.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#661|66]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''181.</div>
+We know that the problem the Maya were trying to resolve was one of social inequality because that is precisely the state of affairs that the institution of ahau defines as legitimate, necessary, and intrinsic to the order of the cosmos.[126] The development of a high civilization always creates problems of social inequality, but such differences between people need not be manifested negatively. For the Maya, kingship became the primary symbol of and rationale for the noble class, the ahauob. Kingship addressed the problem of inequality, not by destroying or denying it, but by embedding the contradictory nature of privilege into the very fabric of life itself. The rituals of the ahauob declared that the magical person of the king was the pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, the summit of a ranking of families that extended out to incorporate everyone in the kingdom—from highest to lowest. His person was the conduit of the sacred, the path of communication to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead, and indeed of surviving death itself. He was the clarifier of the mysteries of everyday life, of planting and harvesting, of illness and health. He wielded his knowledge and influence to create advantageous trade agreements for his people. He could read in the heavens the signs which told him when to war and when to maintain the peace. The farmer, the stonemason, and the craftsperson might have to pay tribute to the king, but the king compensated them for their service by giving them a richer, more enjoyable, more cohesive existence. The people reaped the spiritual benefits of the king’s intercession with the supernatural world and shared in the material wealth his successful performance brought to the community.
-[[#671|67]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''28.
+The Late Preclassic town of Cerros (Fig. 3:1) was one of the Maya communities to experience the advent of kingship during the period of its invention.[127] This village of fisherfolk, farmers, and traders was strategically situated to command the mouth of the New River where it emptied into Chetumal Bay on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The people of Cerros built the early community of clustered households, and the later public center which buried it, directly on the water’s edge. Edges for the Maya, whether between the surface of the earth and the underground as in a cave, between night and day, or between the sea and the shore, were intrinsically powerful and ambiguous. Cerros was at such an edge, not only physically but also culturally, for the people of this village were seafarers[128] and traders familiar with distant peoples.[129]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#681|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 367. See also 212–15; ''Mutual Aid ''188–89, 219–41.</div>
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#691|69]]. This language is borrowed from Cox and Nilsen, ''We Make Our Own History'', 42–44, 53.</div>
+Let us imagine a day in the lives of the Cerros people at the time they had decided to adopt the institution of kingship. It is late afternoon and the heat of the day has begun to yield its brilliance to the shadows cast by the tall thatched roofs of the white one-roomed houses. Each dwelling is grouped around an open paved patio space filled with the cacophony of playing children. Dogs nap in the shadows and villagers busy themselves with a hundred different tasks. The women toil over large red and T brown coarsely made bowls, full of maize soaking in lime, which they will grind into dough on the pink granite stones sitting before them on the plaza floor. Engrossed in quiet conversation, people are working in the shade of the house walls, weaving cotton cloth on backstrap looms, repairing nets for the fishermen, and fashioning tools of hardwood, using chipped-stone adzes made from the honey-brown chert which is abundant a few miles to the south.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#701|70]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 611.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-76.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:1]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#711|71]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''44.Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-77.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:2 Structure 2A-Sub 4-1<sup>st</sup>]]
-== {{anchor|Chapter3ValuesCritiqueand}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook6}} {{anchor|Chapter3ValuesCritiqueand1}} Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision ==
+Suddenly, from farther up the coast, comes the sound of the conchshell trumpets and wooden drums of the lookouts announcing the arrival of a trading party. Some of the elder men, who have been expecting this event by their day counts, move with dignity to the white stone and lime plaster docking area. This dock, which fronts the community’s public square, creates a sharp, human-made shore for the mottled green water of the bay. The elders in their painted and dyed cotton cloaks, colorful hip cloths and turbans, jade earrings, and strings of bright orange shell beads, are unspoken testimony to the wealth and power of the community. The dignity they project is dampened somewhat by the noisy gathering of excited villagers and farmers coming in from the fields and orchards and filling the plaza behind them.
-Anarchists were antistate socialists. They sought the emancipation of humanity and the abolition of all structures of domination and exploitation through the self-emancipation of the working classes. This position was grounded in a set of ethical principles that forms the value system of anarchism, an analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles, and a vision of alternative, achievable social relations and structures that promote these ethical principles.
+The vanguard canoes of the visitors round the point of the turbulent outer bay and enter the calmer waters close to shore. These seagoing canoes are over forty feet long, hewn from single trunks of massive trees, and propelled by multiple paddlers who both stand and sit. The paddlers attack the water in unison and with special energy as they come within sight of the community, where bonfires and billowing incense rise in greeting. From the bay, the village is a slash of white against the uniform green of fallow fields within the young forest which stretches indefinitely in both directions. While some of the boats separate from the main group to land next to the homes of trading partners, the principal voyagers disembark directly onto the dock. They are followed by a crew heavily laden with gifts for their partners and friends and for the patriarchs of the village. The leaders of each party greet each other as equals, formally and briefly, saving the speeches and conversations for the evening banquet.
-'''The Value System'''
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-78.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:3 Reconstructed by Robin Robertson]]
-Anarchism’s central ethical value is that individuals should lead free lives. Although anarchists focused on the freedom of the individual, they did not conceptualize this freedom in terms of an isolated, abstract entity who stands outside of society. For anarchists, an individual can, given the kind of animal that humans are, only be free if they belong to a community of equals bonded together through relations of solidarity.[[#1MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|1]] As the Black anarchist Lucy Parsons’s put it, “emancipation will inaugurate liberty, equality, fraternity.”[[#2LucyParsonsFreedomEquali|2]] Anarchists viewed the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity as interdependent such that they cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The realization of one of these values can only be achieved through the realization of all three at once.
+The visiting traders are themselves patriarchs, wise in the ways of the neighboring Maya cities and the foreign peoples beyond. They are knowledgeable in magical power and its instruments, which they have brought to trade or to give as gifts, and they are warriors capable of defending themselves both at home and abroad. Amid loud music, noise, excitement, and confusion, the group moves slowly across the plaza to a low red platform which has been built to look like a stone model of a house (Fig. 3:2).[130] Sloping panels above the platform resemble thatched roofing and lower inset panels resemble the walls of the house. Instead of a doorway leading inside, however, there is a stairway leading up to an unobstructed summit. In solemn dignity, the leaders ascend the platform and spatter strips of paper with blood drawn from their ears and arms. They then burn these papers with pellets of tree-gum incense in open bowls resting upon clay, drum-shaped stands bearing the masks of the Ancestral Twins (Fig. 3:3).[131] This ritual is an act of thanksgiving to the gods and the ancestral dead for a safe and successful trip. Several curers and sorcerers of the village pray over the patriarchs and bless them on behalf of the spirits of this place.
-Anarchists conceptualized freedom in two main ways: not being subject to domination or having the real possibility to do and/or to be. Although anarchist authors consistently valued both of these things, they did not all label them as freedom. Wilson, for example, defined freedom as nondomination, while at the same time arguing that having the real possibility to do and/or to be is important for human development and flourishing.
+At the moment when the sun plunges into the sea to begin its daily journey through the Underworld, the elders sit down to a lavish feast consisting of red-fleshed deep-water fish, young sea turtle, pit-roasted deer, endless varieties of steamed maize and vegetable dishes, and fresh fruits from nearby orchards.[132] The last toasts of honey mead, quaffed from ritual red-clay cups,[133] won’t be sworn until the sun and his brother Venus, the Morningstar, end their journey through the Underworld and rise from the eastern sea.
-Freedom as nondomination holds that individuals are free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the power to impose their will on them. If a person is subject to the arbitrary power of another then, even if it is not currently being exercised, they are being dominated. To be free is to be able to live in accordance with one’s own will, rather than being subject to the will of another.[[#3Anarchismsharesthisemphasi|3]] In 1869, Bakunin claimed that freedom consists in “the full independence of the will of the individual with respect to the will of others.”[[#4MichaelBakuninTheBasicBa|4]] In the same text, he defines “freedom” as “independence … with respect to all laws that other human wills—collective and isolated [from the collectivity] impose.”[[#5BakuninBasicBakunin124|5]] During his subsequent 1871 lectures to Swiss members of the International, he said that “the negative condition of freedom is that no person owe obedience to another; the individual is free only if his will and his own convictions, and not those of others, determine his acts.”[[#6BakuninBasicBakunin46S|6]] In 1870, Bakunin explicitly connected this idea with nondomination when he advocated “''self-determination''” and “''the fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination''.”[[#7BakuninSelectedWritings1|7]]
+Through the night the firelight flickers on the angular, bright-eyed faces of the leaders, who have painted images over their features to encourage the illusion of their resemblance to the gods. The conversation drifts from accounts of past glories in shared battles, to raids against enemies, to gossip on the planned alliances of neighbors. There are practical reports to be made on how the cotton and cacao crops are faring at home and abroad.[134] There is also speculation about the current reliability of the kings of the southern highlands who jealously trade from their sources of the black volcanic glass, obsidian, and the precious greenstones needed in the rituals that materialize the gods and insure that the earth and sea yield up their harvest.
-The same position was expressed by other anarchist authors. Wilson referred to the “impulse in men to dominate their fellows, i.e., impose their will upon them and assert their own superiority.”[[#8CharlotteWilsonAnarchistE|8]] She advocated the abolition of domination in favor of freedom such that every person had an equal claim to “direct his life from within by the light of his own consciousness,” rather than be subordinate to “the will of any other individual or collection of individuals.”[[#9WilsonAnarchistEssays54|9]] Galleani similarly defined “the broadest individual autonomy” in terms of “absolute independence from any domination by either a majority or a minority.”[[#10LuigiGalleaniTheEndofA|10]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-79.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:4 The Jewels of Kingship Found in an Offering at the Summit of the Second Temple]]
-According to the real possibilities view of freedom, an individual becomes more free as what they can do and/or be increases, that is, the activities they can perform and the states they can experience. The possible beings and doings available to a person, and so the extent to which they are free, are a product of (a) the external conditions within their social and natural environment and (b) their internal abilities, which enable them to take advantage of external conditions. In order to have the real possibility to read ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar'','' ''a child must, among many other requirements, know how to read (internal ability), live in a society where ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar ''is produced, and possess a copy of the book (external conditions). As they grow older, they become better at reading (development of internal ability) and acquire a greater number of books (expansion of external conditions). This marks an increase in their freedom, since their range of possible beings and doings has increased. They can now become an expert on the history of the potato or read the ''Poetic Edda''.
+Finally, deep into the night, the gray-haired leader of the visitors broaches the subject everyone has been waiting for. He pulls a small, soft deerskin bundle from within the folds of his cloak and opens it carefully onto his palm, revealing five stones of glowing green jade carved in the images of gods. Four of these stones are sewn onto a band of the finest cotton, ready to be tied around the head of an ahau. The fifth, a larger image that looks like the head of a frowning child, will ride on the king’s chest suspended from a leather band around his neck. The trader has brought the jewels of an ahau to the patriarchs of Cerros (Fig. 3:4).[135]
-An individual’s freedom is restricted when obstacles decrease the number of real possibilities open to them. A slave owner who prevents their slaves from reading, further limits what possibilities they have and thereby makes them even less free. Such obstacles do not have to be directly established by the threat or exercise of violence. The cultural norm that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral can, by itself, limit a person’s opportunity to be gay, due to them internalizing these ideas and sensitizing them to the judgement of others. Crucially, though, obstacles can be removed or overcome. For instance, slaves can rise up and kill their slave masters, or gay people can gain the confidence to be themselves, and not care what homophobes think.
+The dark eyes of the principal patriarch glitter in the light of the fire. He sees before him the tools he needs to sanctify his rank among his own people. These kingly jewels assert the inherent superiority of their wearer within the community of human beings, transforming a person of merely noble rank into a being who can test and control the divine forces of the world. To have ahauob and an ahau of the ahauob will establish the Cerros community as a presence among the kingdoms of the mighty and the wealthy who rule the wetlands of the interior. Now that the people of Cerros have the means to declare themselves a place of kings, they will be able to deal with the new and changing world of kingdoms and divine power.
-This emphasis on having the actual means to lead a specific kind of life can be seen in Malatesta’s claim in 1884 that “true freedom is not the right but the opportunity, the strength to do what one will” and in his observation, decades later, that “freedom is a hollow word unless it is wedded to ability, which is to say, to the means whereby one can freely carry on his own activity.”[[#11ErricoMalatestaTheMethod|11]] Yet, people’s real possibility to do and/or to be can be restricted through domination by others. Malatesta also wrote that freedom “presupposes that everybody has the means to live and to act without being subjected to the wishes of others.”[[#12MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|12]] As a result, he advocated “the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man.”[[#13ErricoMalatestaTowardsAn|13]]
+Slowly and deliberately, the principal patriarch lakes the bundle from the visitor and puts it into a small jar, with four nubbin feet, covered with red wavy scrolls. Placing the jar at his side in the momentary quiet, he stares into the fire as if to seek his destiny. His companions silently raise their right arms across their chests and clasp their left shoulders in a reverent salute. The Cerros patriarch is in his prime. He has already proven himself in battle and he knows the rituals which call forth the gods and the ancestors from Xibalba. His family is ancient and respected in the community, and wealthy in land and water-going vessels. His gesture of acceptance is the culmination of careful discussion among the families of the village; and it carries with it the blessings of the sorcerers and curers who have prayed, sacrificed, and cast their divination stones. Some unhappy rivals and their followers will leave as enemies, but many new families will join the village as the word spreads of the new king. Cerros is too wealthy a prize to exist for long without a king, and too important a link in the trade network to pretend obscurity. The people of the community also need the resolution that kingship will bring to their own ambiguous feelings toward the wealthy and powerful among them.
-Malatesta was not the only anarchist to define freedom as a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be. In 1927, Berkman distinguished between “negative liberty,” which is freedom from something, and “positive freedom,” which is “the opportunity to do, to act.”[[#14AlexanderBerkmanADecade|14]] Two years later, he wrote that “freedom really means opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants. If your freedom does not give you that opportunity, then it does you no good. Real freedom means opportunity and well-being. If it does not mean that, it means nothing.”[[#15AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|15]] His comrade Goldman similarly wrote in 1914 that “true liberty . . . is not a negative thing of being free from something. . . . Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”[[#16EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|16]]
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-All anarchists thought that one of the main reasons why freedom is valuable is that it is a prerequisite for full human development in the sense of people improving their internal abilities in multiple directions and, in so doing, truly realizing their potential. Rocker claimed that “freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him.”[[#17RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi|17]] Goldman argued that “authority stultifies human development, while full freedom assures it.”[[#18GoldmanRedEmma438See|18]] Elsewhere she declared that “only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundations of a normal social life.”[[#19GoldmanRedEmma7273|19]]
+While it is true that we have told a tale, we have tried to be faithful to the thoughts and motivations of the individuals involved. The people of Cerros did decide consciously to embrace kingship as an institution and the consequences of that decision were profound for all. In the space of two generations, this small fishing village transformed itself into a mighty acropolis. Every living soul in Cerros participated in that transformation, from the lowliest fishermen and farmers who provided food for the laborers, to the most gifted stonemasons who carved the building facades, to the shamans who gave the temples their blessing. It is difficult for us to imagine such complete and rapid social metamorphosis, but what happened at Cerros constituted nothing less than a paradigm shift.
-The same position was articulated by anarchists who defined freedom in terms of nondomination. Wilson thought that “the creed of Anarchism is the cultus of Liberty, not for itself, but for what it renders possible. Authority, as exercised by men over their fellows, it holds accursed, depraving those who rule and those who submit, and blocking the path of human progress. Liberty indeed is not all, but it is the foundation of all that is good and noble, it is essential to that many-sided advance of man’s nature, expanding in numberless and ever-conflicting directions.”[[#20WilsonAnarchistEssays27|20]]
+We will never know the names of the individuals who participated in the decision to embrace kingship or of those who bore the rank and responsibilities of ahau. Because the kings of Cerros did not write the details of their lives on stone or clay, they must remain forever anonymous, but their deeds and those of their devout followers clearly declare their commitment to the vision of ahau. In the temples and buildings which remain, we have proof of the awesome energy with which they executed that vision.
-Although anarchist authors used different definitions of freedom, they agreed that not being dominated, having the real possibility to do and/or to be a broad range of things, and developing oneself as a human, were all valuable. This is because they feed off one another. In order to develop one’s internal abilities in multiple directions, a person must have the real possibility to do so, and in order to have this real possibility they must, among other things, not be subject to domination that deprives them of these real possibilities.
+Around 50 B.C., the community of Cerros began the revolutionary program of “urban renewal” which buried their village completely under broad plastered plazas and massive temples. Families conducted sacrifices over the foundations of their old homes, acknowledging for one last time the ancestors who lay buried below the floors and patios. They then smashed the vessels of their leavetaking feast, broke jade jewelry with great rocks, and scattered the bits and pieces over the homes they would never see again. Finished with one way of life, they walked outward and began building new homes in a halo some 160 acres in breadth around the new center. To confirm their participation and approval of this new way of life, some patriarchs built their front doorways facing the site of the new temple rather than the sun path. Cerros had begun the transformation that would turn it from village to kingdom.
-Anarchists held that the freedom of the individual, however defined, is only possible in and through society. Humans are by nature social animals and so cannot achieve freedom outside of a social context. To quote Bakunin, “man completely realizes his individual freedom as well as his personality only through the individuals that surround him, and thanks to the labor and the collective power of society. . . . Society, far from decreasing his freedom, on the contrary creates the individual freedom of all human beings. Society is the root, the tree, and liberty is its fruit.”[[#21MichaelBakuninBakuninon|21]] Furthermore, “being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection.”[[#22BakuninSelectedWritings|22]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-80.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:5 The Sacred Precinct and the Ballcourt Group]]
-For anarchists, in order for a society to be free over an extended period of time, it must be structured so that it both enables the freedom of the people who comprise it and prevents individuals from being able to oppress others. The social structures and relations that ensure the ongoing freedom of individuals are necessarily egalitarian ones. Anarchists thought that freedom and equality are so interconnected that it is in practice impossible to have one without the other. Bakunin wrote, “I am a convinced supporter of ''economic and social equality'', because I know that, outside that equality, freedom . . . will never be anything but lies.”[[#23BakuninSelectedWritings|23]] Kropotkin echoed this sentiment: “to have the individual free, they must strive to constitute a ''society of equals''.”[[#24KropotkinDirectStruggle|24]]
+These elders also participated in the rituals that prepared the site of the new temple. Various ceremonies, the breaking of dishes from ritual meals and the burying of water lilies and flowers in the white earth of the temple’s foundation, all helped to thin the membrane between the human world and the Otherworld at this spot and establish it as a place of power. This temple, called Structure 5C by archaeologists, was built directly at the water’s edge, the source of the community’s livelihood. Facing south (Fig. 3:5), it constituted the northern apex of an axis that ran southward through the new urban center. This axis would end eventually in a great ballcourt built just within the reservoir canal the inhabitants had dug to define the limits of their royal capital (Fig. 3:5). Thus, while the king mandated the burial of the old village, he planned the new town that would replace it. The first temple was also in the center of the vertical axis that penetrated the earth and pierced the sky, linking the supernatural and natural worlds into a whole. This plan set the temple between the land and the sea on the horizontal axis and between the heavens and the Underworld on the vertical axis. It materialized the paths of power the king traveled through during ecstatic performance.
-It is apparent that anarchists advocated equality, but it is not yet clear what exactly they meant by the term. My interpretation is that anarchists conceptualized equality as the ''equality of freedom'', or as Malatesta phrased it, the “equal freedom for all.”[[#25MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|25]] This is the idea that society should be structured such that there is, as far as is possible, equality of self-determination and equality of opportunity. Equality of self-determination was connected with nondomination, while equality of opportunity was connected to human development and the real possibility to do and/or to be.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-81.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:6 The First Temple at Cerros (reconstructed projection)]]
-Equality of self-determination was conceptualized as having two components. First, each individual is equally free to live in accordance with their own will, unless they subject another person to their will through coercion—because doing so would establish a relation of domination, and thereby violate the equal freedom of all. As Berkman put it, “you are to be entirely free, and everybody else is to enjoy equal liberty, which means that no one has a right to compel or force another, for coercion of any kind is interference with your liberty.”[[#26BerkmanAnarchism156|26]] Malatesta similarly argued that anarchists advocate “freedom for all and in everything, with no limit other than the equal freedom of others: which does not mean . . . that we embrace and wish to respect the ‘freedom’ to exploit, oppress, command, which is oppression and not freedom.”[[#27MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|27]]
+Since this first temple functioned as the instrument that would convey the king as shaman on his sacred journeys, the builders designed it as a public stage. The rituals that enabled the king’s journey into the sacred world would be enacted in public space so that the full community could witness and affirm their successful performance. That first temple at Cerros was a masterly expression of the Maya vision, one whose effectiveness is equally impressive today. It represented not an experimental beginning, but a complete and resolved statement of a new social and cosmic order (Fig. 3:6).
-Second, organizations are structured in a horizontal, rather than hierarchical, manner such that there are no divisions between rulers who make decisions and subordinates who do as instructed and lack decision-making power. In horizontal organizations, each member has an equal say in collective decisions and so codetermines the organization with every other member.[[#28MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|28]] According to Malatesta, this kind of equality emerges from the fact that individuals within a group have three choices. Either they “submit to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his will (be in authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all (be an associate).”[[#29MalatestaLifeandIdeas7|29]] Anarchists choose to be associates.
+How did a people who had heretofore built only houses and small buildings obtain the know-how to build temples on such a grand and architecturally complex scale? No one can be certain of the answer, but it is likely that this knowledge came from many sources. The Maya were not the first people in Mesoamerica to build pyramids. The Olmec had raised artificial “mountains” a thousand years earlier and passed the architectural form on to their successors. The pyramidal form developed primarily from the way Mesoamericans built tall buildings by piling up dirt and rock to create a mound on which they could construct a summit temple. The resulting shape emulated the shape of a mountain and created a symbolic landscape in which religious activity took place. Like the cathedrals in Europe, the pyramid temples in Maya country emerged from a long cultural tradition shared by all the peoples of the region. The lowland Maya, however, invented a new way of using the pyramid-temple: They made it a carrier of political messages by adding elaborately modeled and painted plaster facades to both the pyramid below and the temple above. These great sculptural programs became a primary expression of the political and religious doctrines underlying their form of kingship.[136]
-These two components of equality of self-determination can be seen in Bakunin’s remark that domination must be prevented by not giving anyone the opportunity, which should be achieved “''by the actual organization of the social environment, so constituted that while leaving each man to enjoy the utmost possible liberty it gives no one the power to set himself above others or to dominate them, except through the natural influence of his own intellectual or moral qualities'', which must never be allowed either to convert itself into a right or to be backed by any kind of political institution.”[[#30BakuninSelectedWritings|30]]
+The people of Cerros very probably also had the help of master builders,[137] stonemasons, and artisans from already established royal capitals to help them in their first building projects. It is also possible that local artists and builders had sojourned in other communities to learn necessary skills. One thing is certain: The people of Cerros did not invent the royal pyramid, but rather were part of a large number of Maya people who developed and refined its construction.
-Equality of opportunity, or what Bakunin termed “''equality at the outset'',” was understood by anarchists to refer to a situation in which each individual had equal access to the external conditions necessary for the real possibility to do and/or to be, such as food, healthcare, and education.[[#31BakuninSelectedWritings|31]] According to Malatesta, anarchists “call liberty the possibility of doing something,” and, in order for this to be realized, society must “be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development.”[[#32ErricoMalatestaAttheCaf|32]] In the opinion of Berkman, “far from leveling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development.”[[#33BerkmanAnarchism165|33]] It would, in other words, result in an expansion of human development.
+To begin their task, the builders at Cerros laid the foundation of the new temple and its plaza in layer upon layer of white earth, the soft lime marl underlying the hard capstone of this area. It was the common stuff the people used to build the platforms and patios of their houses. Then they and the elders of the community shattered precious pottery vessels, both the local work of their own craftspeople and pots obtained from trade with the south, and mixed the sherds into the white earth. To the earth and pottery, they added the flowers of fruit trees from their orchards which surrounded the new town.[138] From the foundation upward, the people made this building not only for, but with, devout and sacred action.
-Anarchists held that freedom and equality are generally maintained over time by solidarity between individuals and groups.[[#34Thefollowinginterpretation|34]] By ''solidarity'', anarchists meant two different kinds of social relation. The first consisted in individuals cooperating with one another in pursuit of a common goal. This is the concrete means through which the external conditions necessary for people to exercise capacities and satisfy drives are established, such as the organization of a school where children can develop and transform themselves or the coordination of an economy that provides the materials a school needs. As Kropotkin noted, a free society “could not live even for a few months if the constant and daily co-operation of all did not uphold it.”[[#35PeterKropotkinModernScie|35]] According to Malatesta, “liberty,” in the sense of one’s real possibility to do and/or to be, “becomes greater as the agreement among men and the support they give each other grows.”[[#36MalatestaCafe57|36]]
+The ritual of beginning ended, the builders then laid down a pavement of flat hard stones upon the layers of white earth. They raised a broad platform that would hold both the temple and its plaza. Within this platform masons built a lattice of internal walls that would buttress the internal fill to keep it from spreading as the upper structures were built upon it. The spaces between these walls were filled in with vast quantities of coarse, broken limestone which laborers hauled up from nearby pits that had been driven down to excavate the white earth. When they finally finished this platform, the laborers capped the top of it with soft white lime earth into which they mixed more pottery broken in rituals of devotion and dedication. Upon this surface, the master builders then drew the outline of the temple,[139] a great T shape. The stem of this T represented a long stairway beginning at the bottom of the pyramid and extending southward onto the raised plaza, which constituted the arms of the T (Fig. 3:7). Following this outline, the builders would raise the temple and its stairway simultaneously, an effort of master builders, masons, and laborers drawn from the community, coordinated by the ruler and his counselors.
-The second kind of solidarity anarchists advocated was individuals forming reciprocal caring relationships, in which each individual acts to ensure the ongoing freedom and equality of those around them. Malatesta praised solidarity in the sense of “affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[[#37MalatestaLifeandIdeas61|37]] For him, “''solidarity'', that is, harmony of interests and sentiments, the sharing of each in the good of all, and of all in the good of each, is the state in which alone man can be true to his own nature. . . . It causes the liberty of each to find not its limits, but its complement, the necessary condition of its continual existence—in the liberty of all.”[[#38MalatestaMethodofFreedom|38]] In short, anarchists understood that, in order to be free, an individual needs positive social relationships, such as loving parents, a supportive teacher, and good friends. For anarchists, such reciprocal caring relationships could only genuinely occur between equals who horizontally associate with one another. As Reclus wrote, “between him who commands and him who obeys . . . there is no possibility of friendship” since “above is either pitying condescension or haughty contempt, below either envious admiration or hidden hate.”[[#39EliseeReclusAnAnarchist|39]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-82.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:7 Cerros: Plan of the First Temple (Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>)]]
-'''Critique of Existing Society'''
+The temple platform rose in the form of a steep pyramid with smooth outer walls made of small loaf-shaped blocks. The master builders carefully calculated the proportions of the pyramid in advance in order to accommodate the long stairway and the dimensions of the four elaborately decorated panels which would be mounted on the main, southern side of the building, facing the new plaza. While laborers built up the rubble core of the pyramid, masons fashioned four deep well-like holes which were placed symmetrically to the left and the right of the north-south axis (Fig. 3:7). These holes would contain the great trees of the four directions that T would soar above the thatched roof of the temple.[140]
-Equipped with this value system, anarchists critiqued existing society on the grounds that it systematically fails to promote freedom, equality, and solidarity. They understood that society is not the way it is merely because of the negative personality traits of some bad rulers. Rather, it is the consequence of the fundamental structure of society and the forms of practice that constitute and reproduce it over time. As Malatesta explained to a jury while on trial in 1921, “social wrongs do not depend on the wickedness of one master or the other, one governor or the other, but rather on masters and governments as institutions; therefore, the remedy does not lie in changing the individual rulers, instead it is necessary to demolish the principle itself by which men dominate over men.”[[#40MalatestaMethodofFreedom|40]]
+When the front face of the pyramid approached its full height, master masons were called in to cut and lay the special stones that would function as the armatures of the great masks and ear ornaments which would be modeled on the two upper panels (Fig. 3:8). While some masons worked on these upper panels, others supervised the construction of the stairway which linked the temple at the summit to the plaza below. Much more than a simple means of access, this stairway was the central focus of the whole design, the place where the king would perform his public rituals. This stairway had to be much longer than simple practicality required, for it contained two broad landings, one in the middle of the stairway and one at the threshold of the summit temple. During ritual, the king would pause on the middle and the top landings to perform his ecstatic dance and carry out sacrifice in view of his followers gathered on the plaza below (Fig. 3:9). Four stairs led to the first landing, and nine stairs to the summit threshold. These sacred numbers dictated the length of the whole.
-Anarchists are best known for advocating the abolition of the state. While it is true that anarchists are anti-statists, it must also be emphasized that they do not view the state as the main oppressive social structure, or the singular root cause of social problems. Anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries critiqued three main dominant structures: capitalism, landlordism, and the state. The structures of economic oppression (capitalism and landlordism) and political oppression (the state) were taken to constitute an interconnected global social system that I shall call ''class society''. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the anarchist opposition to capitalism and the state and not discuss landlordism in the sense of feudal or semi-feudal economic relations.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-83.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:8]]
-Anarchists viewed capitalism as a social system constituted by: (a) private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) wage labor; and (c) production of commodities for profit within a competitive market. Under capitalism, society is divided into two main economic classes: a minority of capitalists and landowners who privately own land, raw materials, and the means of production; and a majority of workers who do not own private property and who sell their labor to capitalists and landowners. The labor of workers produces goods and services that are sold by capitalists and landowners on the market in order to generate profit and thereby expand their wealth. Workers, in comparison, receive only a wage, which they then use to buy the necessities of life—food, shelter, and clothing—and thereby reproduce themselves.[[#41BerkmanAnarchism78Pet|41]]
+At this point in the construction, it was necessary for the master builder to pause and consult with the king, the patriarchs, and the shamans. The king had a particular decorative program in mind for this building and it was important to follow this program in every respect. The tricky part of the design was about to commence: the building of the front walls of the lower terraces. These walls, like the panels already established on the pyramid face above, would carry great masks. The builders had to establish where to construct the retaining walls of the lower terraces so that the king, when standing on the middle landing, would appear to be in the center of these four great masks. Obviously, this presented a knotty problem in optics. To create this visual impression, they had to set the lower terrace far out in front of the pyramid core, an architecturally awkward solution. The builders had no real choice in this matter, for the ritual function of the facade was more important than its architectural perfection.
-The terms ''working class'' and ''proletariat'' are sometimes used only to refer to industrial wage laborers who engage in manual labor, especially within factories. Anarchists often used these words in a much broader sense. In 1884, Malatesta wrote that humanity is divided “into two castes: one caste of haves, born with an entitlement to live without working; the other of proletarians whose lot from birth is wretchedness; subjection; exhausting, unrewarded toil.”[[#42MalatestaMethodofFreedom|42]] He defined a worker as “anybody plying a useful trade who does not exploit another person’s labors.”[[#43MalatestaMethodofFreedom|43]] Anarchists who claimed that society was divided into two main economic classes did not think that there were no subdivisions within the working class or proletariat broadly construed. They generally distinguished between urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans, and landless peasants.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-84.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:9 Stations designed for the king to perform ritual in his processional ascent and descent of the temple]]
-Which specific classes anarchists referred to varied depending upon the context they were writing in. In 1873, Bakunin wrote that “Italy has a huge proletariat. . . . It consists of 2 or 3 million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some 20 million landless peasants.”[[#44MichaelBakuninStatismand|44]] He went onto claim that “the Slavic proletariat . . . must enter the International en masse [and] form factory, artisan, and agrarian sections.”[[#45BakuninStatismandAnarchy|45]] As capitalism developed, and the number of artisans dramatically declined due to their inability to compete with large-scale industry, anarchists updated their language and began to refer only to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, and landless peasants. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, who came from a society where peasants were still the majority of the population, claimed that capitalist society is split into “two very distinct camps . . . the proletariat (in the broadest sense of the word) and the bourgeoisie.”[[#46TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|46]] The proletariat so understood included “the urban working class” and “the peasant masses.”[[#47TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|47]]
+Once they had agreed upon the position of the lower terrace walls, the masons began laying a second set of armatures into the retaining wall to support the lower pair of masks. These masks had to be of the same scale and proportion as the upper ones. The Maya used strings, plumb lines, and water levels to measure the new mask armatures, but in the end the highly skilled masons adjusted the final proportions by sight. While the building designers worked out the details of each panel, masons built a lattice of walls between the outer retaining wall and the inner pyramid core. The spaces within this lattice would later be filled with loose rock and earth, and the entire terrace capped with smooth plaster.
-Berkman, in an analysis for a predominantly North American audience, adopted a narrower definition of the working class or proletariat in 1929. He defined them as those people employed by capitalists in a range of industries—in mills and mines, in factories and shops, in transportation, and on the land.[[#48BerkmanAnarchism4|48]] For him, “the working class consists of the industrial wage earners and the agricultural toilers” or “farm laborers.”[[#49BerkmanAnarchism190|49]] Berkman only used the word “peasant” in descriptions of classes in Russia and continental Europe and consistently framed them as being distinct from “the proletariat” or “workers.” When Berkman referred to wage laborers and peasants as a group, he did so with such expressions as “the toilers” or “the masses.” Artisans, who were defined as skilled, self-employed laborers who own their own tools and small workshops, only featured as part of Berkman’s description of how the development of capitalism forced them to become wage laborers.[[#50BerkmanAnarchism125181|50]]
+During the construction of the pyramid and its terrace, woodcutters prepared the massive tree trunks that would be set in the four sockets in the floor of the summit temple. These would represent the trees of the four directions. After floating them as close to the construction site as possible, T the people hauled and rolled these gigantic logs up into the temple where they were shaped and dropped into the floor sockets. Once anchored securely, these trees were ready for the woodcarvers and painters who would transform them into the supernatural trees at the four corners of the cosmos. The king presided over the raising of the world trees, a ceremony commemorating events that occurred at the beginning of creation.[141] Once the building was partially sanctified and activated, it had to be completed rapidly, for the raw power within it was potent and needed the containment that only ritual use by the king could provide. Within this sacred space the king, as shaman, could commune with the supernatural forces of the cosmos.
-In this book, I will use the phrase ''the working classes'' to refer to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans who did not exploit anybody else’s labor, and landless peasants. It should be kept in mind that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A person born into the peasantry could, for example, work as a wage laborer in a city during one season, and as a small farmer in the countryside during another.[[#51ThehistorianBernardMossh|51]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-85.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:10 The Parallelism Between the Path of the Sun and the Path of the King]]
-Anarchists advocated the abolition of capitalism because it is based on the oppression and exploitation of the working classes. Wage laborers allegedly choose to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners, but only do so because they have no other option. Under capitalism, a small minority owns the land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions, such as their hat or sewing kit, but they do not own private property like a factory or mine. As a result, the majority of the population lacks the means to survive independently through their own labor. In order to gain access to the goods and services they need to survive—such as food, clothing, and shelter—workers have to purchase them with money. Given their social position, the only realistic way to earn this money is to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage.[[#52MalatestaMethodofFreedom|52]] Workers choose to engage in wage labor in the same manner that a person might choose to hand over their possessions to an armed robber. The robbery victim makes this choice because the only realistic alternative is being attacked. Workers similarly sell their labor to capitalists and landowners because the only realistic alternative is extreme poverty, homelessness, starvation, and so on. It is an involuntary decision forced upon workers by the fundamental structure of capitalist society.[[#53BerkmanAnarchism1112M|53]]
+The masons working at the summit of the pyramid constructed the floor of the temple proper in two levels by raising the rear half of the floor a step above the front half. These two halves were separated by a wall. This design followed that of the fancy homes of prominent people within the community, who preferred a “public” space at the front of the house and a raised, more “private” back area. Unlike the homes of patriarchs at Cerros, however, the temple had walls of stone rather than walls of wood and white earth.
-Wage labor is not only involuntary. It is based on a relationship of domination and subordination in which capitalists and landowners have the power to command workers to do as instructed. Malatesta described capitalism as a society in which “a few individuals have hoarded the land and all the instruments of production and can impose their will on the workers, in such a fashion that instead of producing to satisfy people’s needs and with these needs in view, production is geared toward making a profit for the employers.”[[#54MalatestaCafe32|54]] Goldman similarly wrote that, under capitalism, workers “are subordinated to the will of a master.”[[#55GoldmanRedEmma50|55]]
+It was ritual need more than prosaic convenience that ultimately dictated the plan of the rooms within the pyramid. The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.
-The economic ruling classes also determine what forms of labor workers engage in and so the kind of capacities, drives, and consciousness they develop during the process of production itself. Workers lack control over the kind of people they develop into. They engage in forms of labor that maximize profit but actively harm them. The process of capitalist production produces not only goods and services, but also broken people unable to develop in a positive direction and fulfill their human potential. This point was frequently made by anarchists through the metaphor of workers being turned into machines.[[#56RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|56]] Wilson thought that capitalism had a tendency to transform workers into a “steam-engine with wages for coal.”[[#57WilsonAnarchistEssays63|57]] For Goldman, each worker became “a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality and the interests in, or desire for, the things he is making.”[[#58GoldmanRedEmma67|58]] As a result, workers are reduced to being “living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a grey, dull, and wretched existence for themselves.”[[#59GoldmanRedEmma50|59]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-86.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:11 The Jaguar Sun mask from the east side of Temple 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>]]
-Under capitalism, labor is but one commodity for sale. Capitalism is a market economy in which “the whole economic life of society . . . [is] regulated by the ''competition'' and ''profit'' principle.”[[#60MalatestaMethodofFreedom|60]] The negative consequences of this are numerous. Capitalists hire a small number of workers and force them to work long hours in order to reduce costs, maximize profit, and out-compete rival companies. Improvements in technology make workers unemployed rather than enabling them to work less. Companies produce more commodities than they can sell and are then forced by this overproduction to close down and fire their workforce. This, in turn, leads to regular economic crises. Even when the capitalist market is operating more smoothly, it is based on an irrational organization of production in which a vast number of human needs that society has the means to fulfill are not satisfied because there is no profit in doing so, such as housing homeless people or adequately feeding poor people. On the international scale, economic competition, alongside a range of other factors like ambition and greed, results in states engaging in colonialism, imperialism, and war in order to find new markets, establish monopolies, maximize capital accumulation, and serve the interests of capitalists in their respective countries, especially those involved in the manufacturing of weapons, ammunition, warships etc.[[#61MalatestaMethodofFreedom|61]]
+The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery of the temple (Fig. 3:10). To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled into the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction— thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west.
-According to anarchists, the oppression and exploitation of capitalism is maintained over time by the violence of the modern state.[[#62Anarchistsdidnotalluset|62]] Bakunin claimed that “the historical formation of the modern concept of the state” occurred “in the mid-sixteenth century” and consisted in an ongoing process of “military, police, and bureaucratic centralization.”[[#63BakuninStatismandAnarchy|63]] This process of state formation occurred due to the requirements of “modern capitalist production,” which needed “enormous centralized states” in order to subject “many millions of laborers to their exploitation.”[[#64BakuninStatismandAnarchy|64]]
+This little room, then, was the heart of the temple, the place where the king carried out in solitude and darkness the most intimate phases of his personal bloodletting and the most terrifying phases of his communion with the Otherworld.[142] Here he would prepare himself to meet the ancestors and the gods, fasting and practicing other kinds of trance-inducing physical mortifications. It was here also that the ritual perforation of his genitals took place and that he experienced the first shock of blood loss and the first flood of religious ecstasy. From this little room, he would travel like the sun rising from the earth to appear on the stairway before his people (Fig. 3:6). Dressed in bleached white cotton cloth that clearly showed the stains of his bloodletting, the king would speak to the ancestors on behalf of all.
-Kropotkin later expanded upon this narrative by arguing that, the modern state developed as “a mutual insurance company formed by the landlord, the military, the judge, the priest, and later on the capitalist in order to assure each of them authority over the people and the exploitation of [their] poverty.”[[#65KropotkinModernScience1|65]] As a result, “the State, as a political and military power, along with modern governmental Justice, the Church, and Capitalism appear in our eyes as institutions that are impossible to separate from each other. In history these four institutions developed while supporting and reinforcing each other. . . . They are linked together by the bonds of cause and effect.”[[#66KropotkinModernScience1|66]] Rather than positing a one-sided perspective in which the modern state was created by capitalism, anarchists held that the modern state and capitalism cocreated one another.[[#67KropotkinModernScience2|67]]
+With the completion of the stone construction of the pyramid, the plasterers set to work covering the walls and the stones of the stairway j with the fine creamy white plaster that produced the softly modeled contours of early Maya architecture. While the plaster was still damp, they painted these surfaces bright red to provide a dramatic contrast to the dominant green of the surrounding forest.
-Through an analysis of the modern state (henceforth referred to as the state) as an actually-existing social structure, anarchists came to define it in terms of both its functions and its particular organizational forms and characteristics. The primary function of the state is to reproduce the power of the economic ruling classes through violence. For Malatesta, its “essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters,” and, even when it performs other functions—such as acknowledging certain legal rights, maintaining roads, and organizing healthcare—it does so “with the spirit of domination” and remains a committed defender of the economic ruling classes.[[#68MalatestaMethodofFreedom|68]] The same point was made by Reclus, who held that “the present function of the state consists foremost of defending the interests of landowners and the ‘rights of capital.’”[[#69EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|69]]
+The final work on this temple can only be described as a magnificent performance of consummate skill and cooperative effort. The panels of stone on the terraces of the pyramid base stood ready to be adorned with divine images. The artisans who applied the wet plaster and modeled the elaborate details of these four masks and their complex earflare[143] assemblages and sky frames had to work rapidly and surely (Fig. 3:11). These artisans used a few previously prepared appliqué elements that could be stuck on with plaster glue, but for the most part they had to know what the final images would look like even before they started. It was vital to shape the plaster before it cured. Even with retardants added to the plaster, the sculptors had about thirty minutes in which to apply and work the material before it hardened under their hands.
-The capitalist state performs its essential function through many different means. Most obviously, it enforces private property rights. In Malatesta’s words, “the landowners are able to claim the land and its produce as theirs and the capitalists are able to claim as theirs the instruments of labor and other capital created by human activity” because “the dominant class . . . has created laws to legitimize the usurpations that it has already perpetrated, and has made them a means of new appropriations.”[[#70MalatestaCafe45|70]] The state, in addition to this, aids the economic ruling classes by establishing monopolies, subsidizing private companies, repressing social movements via the police and prisons, and maintaining an army in order to keep “the people in bondage” and conquer “new markets and new territory, to exploit them in the interests of the few.”[[#71KropotkinModernScience3|71]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-87.jpg 70f]]
-The state can nonetheless not be defined solely in terms of its essential function. The state as a really existing institution is also characterized by a specific organizational form. Actual states are institutions that (i) perform the function of reproducing the power of the economic ruling classes; (ii) are hierarchically and centrally organized; (iii) are wielded by a minority political ruling class who sit at the top of the state hierarchy and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.[[#72MichaelBakuninThePolitic|72]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-88.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:12]]
-This definition of the state was mostly clearly expressed by Kropotkin and Malatesta. According to Kropotkin, the state “not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a ''territorial concentration'' and a ''concentration of many functions in the life of societies in the hands of a few''. . . . A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing is developed to subject some classes to the domination of other classes.”[[#73KropotkinModernScience2|73]] The state is therefore the “perfect example of a hierarchical institution, developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all of their possible groupings to the central will. The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian—or it ceases to be the State.”[[#74KropotkinModernScience2|74]] Malatesta, in comparison, wrote that
+The artisans inherited some unexpected challenges from the master builders and masons: For example, the panels on the western side of the pyramid were more narrow than those on the eastern side.[144] The sculptors compensated by compressing the composition to fit the western panels. They accomplished this primarily by reducing the size of the earflares and then directing the painters to put in any details lost in the places where the plaster could not be modeled.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">For us, the government is the aggregate of the governors, and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, members of parliament, and what not—are those who have the power to make laws, to regulate the relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws. . . . In short, the governors are those who have the power, in a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the collective force of society, that is, of the physical, intellectual, and economic force of all, to oblige each to do the said governors’ wish. And this power constitutes, in our opinion, the very principle of government, the principle of authority.[[#75MalatestaMethodofFreedom|75]]</div>
+While the plaster was still damp, the painters began their work, adding red, pink, black, and yellow line to highlight the natural cream color of the raw plaster and to render even finer details in the images. As we saw above, the painters often put in necessary design elements that the plaster modelers left out in their haste. To finish their work before the plaster dried, the artists had to work frantically, dripping and throwing paint with the force of their strokes. Yet even these drip patterns were incorporated as part of the imagery.
-Given this, anarchists did not define class solely in terms of a person’s relationship to the means of production. Class is also about a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. Those who directly controlled state power, such as politicians, monarchs, heads of the police, etc., were taken by anarchists to constitute a distinct political ruling class with interests of their own. As Malatesta wrote, while “the State is the defender, the agent, and the servant of the propertied class,” it “also constitutes a class by itself, with its own interests and passions. When the State, the Government, is not helping the propertied to oppress and rob people, it oppresses and robs them on its own behalf.”[[#76MalatestaPatientWork212|76]] This is not to say that these two classes are mutually exclusive. An individual can, for example, be a capitalist and a politician at the same time.
+The mastery of their craft is evident in the sureness of their drawing and the confidence of their swirling lines. The painters and sculptors knew exactly what the finished panels should look like because, just as with the written word, the panels were designed to be read as symbolic statements about the nature of the kingship and its relationship to the cosmos. And if the artisans were literate in the images of this new, revolutionary religion, then how much more so must their patron the king and his principal followers have been.
-Anarchists opposed the state, to quote Bakunin, because it “is placed by its very nature and position above and outside the people and must inevitably work to subordinate the people under rules and for objectives foreign to them.”[[#77QuotedinZurbruggIntrodu|77]] In short, it “''means'' coercion, domination by means of coercion.”[[#78BakuninStatismandAnarchy|78]] Through this domination, the state not only prevents the working classes from living in accordance with their own wills, but also hinders their development as people and limits their real possibility to do and/or to be. It oppresses humanity in two main ways: either directly by physical violence, or indirectly, by enforcing private property rights and thereby depriving the majority of the population of access to the means of existence such that they are forced to work for the economic ruling classes.[[#79PeterKropotkinWordsofa|79]] In so doing, the state violates the equal freedom of all and promotes social relations of strife over solidarity because, “''so long as political power exists, there will be persons who dominate and persons dominated, masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited.''”[[#80BakuninSelectedTexts63|80]]
+We know that the images on this temple were designed to be read because we can read them ourselves. As for actual written text, however, there is very little. While the lowland Maya of those times were literate and wrote brief, rudimentary texts on small objects,[145] they did not write full texts on any of the Late Preclassic buildings discovered so far. Instead, they used isolated glyphs as labeling devices, <verbatim>“tagging"</verbatim> objects and images to clarify and amplify their meaning.[146] Our interpretation of the art on the temple at Cerros is enhanced by such strategic glyphic clues.
-Anarchists thought that this critique of the state applied not only to monarchies and dictatorships but also democratic republics in which a segment of the political ruling class were elected by the citizenry. Even if a state was somehow genuinely democratic, in the sense that it was one in which the majority ruled, it was still a state and so incompatible with freedom, equality, and solidarity. All states are social structures in which those who rule have the power to impose decisions on everyone within a given territory via institutionalized methods of coercion, such as the legal system, police, prisons, and the army. The rule of the majority would, even if it was preferable to the rule of the few, result in the domination of various minorities due to them being subject to this coercive power.[[#81GalleaniEndofAnarchism|81]] In a fundamentalist Christian society, for example, majority rule would most likely result in laws oppressing atheists, scientists, and gays. Anarchists did not, however, think that actual states have ever been based on majority rule. They consistently described them as institutions based on minority rule by a political ruling class in their interests and the interests of the economic ruling class. Malatesta, to give one example, wrote in 1924 that “even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force.”[[#82MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|82]] As a result “Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class.”[[#83MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|83]]
+The huge masks in the center of each of the four panels of the temple at Cerros derive their meaning from both the glyphic tags and the complex imagery that surrounds them. The lower masks are snarling jaguars emerging totem-pole fashion from the heads of long-snouted creatures whose lower faces merge with the pyramid. These jaguars are marked with the four-petaled glyphs denoting the sun, kin, identifying these beings as the Jaguar Sun God (Fig. 3:12).[147]
-Although capitalism and the state were two of the main social structures anarchists sought to abolish, they were not the only ones. Wilson concluded that “the solution of the social problem can only be wrought out from the equal consideration of the whole of the experience at our command, individual as well as social, internal as well as external.”[[#84WilsonAnarchistEssays50|84]] Kropotkin similarly thought “that the whole of the life of human societies, everything, from daily individual relationships between people to broader relationships between races across oceans, could and should be reformulated.”[[#85KropotkinDirectStruggle|85]] As a result, anarchists understood that humans are oppressed by a myriad of other social structures that must also be abolished if the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity are to be truly realized. These included racism,[[#86BerkmanAnarchism18990|86]] patriarchy,[[#87BakuninSelectedWritings|87]] homophobia,[[#88TerenceKissackFreeComrad|88]] hierarchically organized religion,[[#89BakuninSelectedWritings|89]] and authoritarian modes of education.[[#90GoldmanRedEmma13149P|90]] Some anarchists, such as Reclus, went beyond a singular focus on human emancipation and advocated vegetarianism, animal liberation, and the protection of the natural environment.[[#91ReclusAnarchy1367156|91]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-89.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:13 Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and the Cosmos]]
-Unfortunately, a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory. To give a few examples: Bakunin was an antisemite,[[#92ZoeBakerBakuninwasaRa|92]] most male anarchists were sexist toward women in the movement,[[#93MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|93]] and some anarchists opposed Goldman giving talks on homosexuality for fear it would damage the reputation of the movement to discuss “perverted sex-forms.”[[#94EmmaGoldmanLivingMyLife|94]]
+Like a puzzle with one key piece, the whole message of the temple comes into focus with these Sun Jaguars. Since this building faces to the south, a person gazing at its colorful facade would see the sun in its jaguar aspect “emerging” from the sea on the eastern side of the building and “setting” into the sea on the western side. Thus, these terrace panels symbolize the sun at the two most spectacular moments of the tropical day: dawn and dusk. Together, these sun masks display both linear time in the duration of time through the day and year and cyclical time in the return of the cycle to its beginning point over and over again; and it is significant that this path encircles the stairway along which the king must travel on his ritual journeys (Fig. 3:10). Indeed, as we shall see in the passage that follows, these masks made a special statement about kingship.
-'''Vision of an Alternative Society'''
+We know that, for the Maya, the Sun Jaguar represented more than a celestial body. In Classical theology, Yax-Balam, the younger of the Ancestral Hero Twins, is symbolized by the sun.[148] The older brother, Hun-Ahau, in turn, was similarly linked to the planet Venus, that bright celestial body that dances with the sun as Morningstar and Eveningstar. The logic of reading the masks that hover above the Sun Jaguars on the temple as Morningstar and Eveningstar is compelling: (1) if the lower masks denote a celestial body, so then should the upper masks in order to complete the pattern; (2) the upper image should then correspond to some celestial phenomenon hovering above the sun at dawn and dusk; (3) in astronomical terms, the heavenly body associated with the sun in exactly this relationship is the Morningstar which rises in the hours before sunrise and the Eveningstar which follows the path of the sun into the earth in the hours after sunset (Fig. 3:13).
-Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state should be abolished in favor of a society in which humanity as a whole was free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society anarchy. In advocating anarchy as their ultimate end goal, anarchists were not using the term in the sense of a disorganized and chaotic society, a war of all against all. They were instead referring to a stateless, classless, and nonhierarchical society. In 1897, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy signifies ''society organized without authority'', authority being understood as the ability to ''impose'' one’s own wishes” on others through “coercion.”[[#95MalatestaPatientWork150|95]] A few years later in 1899, Malatesta defined “Anarchy” as “a society based on free and voluntary accord—a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community.”[[#96MalatestaMethodofFreedom|96]]
+There is other evidence to support a reading of the upper masks of the temple as Venus. Both upper masks have the long snouts that became characteristic of the Cosmic Monster, a being that was especially associated with Venus and the sun as they moved through the heavens.[149] The crowns worn by these masks consisted of three jewels mounted on a headband in the same distinctive pattern as that found on the diadems of early Maya kings (Fig. 3:11). The central symbol of the kingly crown during the Classic period was the three-pointed shape in the center of this band. In its personified form, known as the Jester God,[150] it has a long-nosed head below the three-pointed shape and was worn mounted on a cloth headband by both gods and humans (see the Glossary of Gods). Since it occurs in the writing system as a glyph for ahau, “lord” (Fig. 3:14),[151] we can be reasonably sure that it has the same meaning as a I costume element. We believe that the upper masks of this temple wore these Jester God headbands to mark them as ahau, and therefore, symbolic representations of the first king of Cerros. The Ancestral Twins, of course, are the prototypes of kingship; and in Classic imagery the Jester God headband is a diagnostic feature of the elder twin, named, not surprisingly, Hun-Ahau.[152] This headband marks the upper masks as Hun-Ahau, while the kin sign marks the lower as Yax-Balam, his brother.
-Anarchist authors outlined visions of what anarchy would look like in numerous texts. They did not view themselves as utopians in the style of Charles Fourier who elaborated incredibly detailed blueprints of what a postcapitalist society would look like. Bakunin himself explicitly critiqued “Fourierists” for wrongly assuming “that it was theoretically and ''a priori'' possible to build a social paradise in which all of future humanity could recline. They had not realized that while we may well define the great principles of its future development we must leave the practical expression of those principles to the experience of the future.”[[#97BakuninSelectedWritings|97]] This way of thinking was shared by Malatesta, who wrote in 1891 that anarchists cannot, “in the name of Anarchy, prescribe for the coming man what time he should go to bed, or on what days he should cut his nails!”[[#98MalatestaMethodofFreedom|98]] Such practical questions can only be answered by those who actually live in and self-managed the future classless society. All any present-day anarchist can do is desire “that a society be constituted in which the exploitation and domination of man by man are impossible” and “indicate a method” to achieve this.[[#99MalatestaMethodofFreedom|99]] By this, Malatesta meant that anarchists should:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">envision anarchy as a society that successfully instantiates certain social conditions, such as people being free from domination, people having access to the external conditions that are necessary to develop themselves, or social relations being infused with a sense of solidarity.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-90.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:14 The Jester God]]
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">articulate general anarchist methods of organization and association that could successfully actualize these conditions, such as each person in a group having a vote, smaller groups federating together to form larger groups, or organizations electing instantly recallable mandated delegates to perform administrative tasks.</div>
+The temple decoration was, therefore, more than just a model of the sun’s daily path. It was a depiction of the Ancestral Twins, and was designed to be read in that manner by the king’s constituents. When the king stood upon the stairway landing between the four great masks (Fig. 3:6), he represented the cosmic cycle of the day,[153] but he was simultaneously at the center of a four-part pattern,[154] representing the lineage cycle of the Hero Twins as his founding ancestors—the first ahauob (Fig. 3:15). The lowland Maya established kingship by first crowning their gods[155] and then by proclaiming their living counterparts, the kings, as the direct descendants and spiritual manifestations of these gods.[156] The Maya manipulated their reality through art, and they did so on many levels. The images on this temple were meant to be read not only as eternal, transcendent messages, but also as political statements to be affirmed by congregations who saw them and witnessed the human performances within them. The king of Cerros as the primary ahau could exist, ultimately, because the gods of his community were also ahauob.[157]
+As mentioned above, not all of the king’s constituents were equally literate in the new imagery. A farmer, a noble, or a shaman reading the temple would all differ in the depth of their understanding. The point we wish to make, however, is that, on some level, the imagery was recognized and understood by everyone in the community and was an intrinsic part of their reality. We have examples in our own culture of symbols that are universally recognized. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who has not heard of Einstein’s famous equation E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc<sup>2</sup>. The levels of understanding of that formula, however, would differ from person to person. One individual might simply recognize it as Einstein’s equation. Others, because they had taken a physics course, might even know what the letters stood for and what, on a rudimentary level, the Theory of Relativity means. The highest level of understanding, corresponding to that of a Maya ahau or shaman, would be that of a practicing physicist. Regardless of how well we can talk about E <verbatim>=</verbatim> mc<sup>2</sup>, it affects our reality. In a very real sense we live in Einstein’s universe, just as the Maya of the Classic period lived in a reality defined by the presence of divine kings.
-According to this view, anarchists could not know with absolute certainty how, say, the education of children would be organized under anarchy, but they were in a position to indicate the method through which it would be organized. Parents, teachers, and other adults interested in the positive development of children would come together as equals within general assemblies to “meet, discuss, agree and differ, and then divide according to their various opinions, putting into practice the methods which they respectively hold to be best” and, in so doing, establish through a process of experimentation what the best system of education was.[[#100MalatestaMethodofFreedo|100]] How anarchy was organized would “be modified and improved as circumstances were modified and changed, according to the teachings of experience.”[[#101MalatestaMethodofFreedo|101]] It was for this reason that Malatesta saw anarchist ideals as “the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization.”[[#102MalatestaMethodofFreedo|102]]
+When the Maya of Cerros built their first royal temple, they gathered the strength of the entire community, the simple hard work of fisherfolk and farmers, the food prepared and served by their women, the leadership of their patriarchs, elders, and shamans. These individuals joined forces with the master builders, masons, and artisans (some local, some probably from other realms) to perform as an act of community the building of a sacred mountain, a portal to the Otherworld. This partnership of effort laid down in rock and white earth shows the people of Cerros as a whole acknowledging and accepting the arrival of kingship in their midst. Throughout the history of the Maya, this phenomenal cooperation was evident anytime a community embraced the institution of kingship.
-Some anarchist authors did articulate detailed models of how an anarchist society would function. They generally focused on how workers should reorganize production and distribution during a revolution and, as a result, largely discussed practical issues. The Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregori Maximoff, for example, developed proposals for how an anarchist revolution could reorganize agriculture, cattle rearing, fishing, hunting, manufacturing, forest management, mining, construction, transportation, healthcare, sanitation, and education. These proposals largely specify (a) how organizations should be structured, make decisions, and coordinate with one another; (b) what kind of organization is responsible for a specific aspect of the economy; and (c) general principles that should be implemented, such as the abolition of rent or both men and women receiving an education.[[#103GregoriPMaximoffProgra|103]]
+However unsettling the advent of kingship might have been to the rivals of Cerros, or even to some of its inhabitants, a new social paradigm had taken root in the community. This little royal temple was only the beginning of an enormous release of social enthusiasm and energy. Within a few years, a generation at most,[158] a new and very much more ambitious construction effort eclipsed the original temple and greatly amplified the royal focus of the community. This new building, called Structure 6 by TI the archaeologists, can truly be called an acropolis (Fig. 3:16). Measuring sixty meters long by sixty meters wide, its basal dimensions were more than three times those of the first temple. Its raised plaza stood sixteen meters above the level of the surrounding surface and was well out of view of the populace below. The function of this plaza was clearly different from that of the original temple, which was low enough to allow events upon it to be visible to anyone standing at ground level. Here, at the summit of the new acropolis, the king could carry out actions of the most intimate nature on an open surface rather than inside the walls of the temple (Fig. 3:17).
-The theorists of anarchism were not naive and understood that it would not be possible to establish anarchy as an ideal during or immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state. Cafiero distinguished between anarchy today and anarchy in the future: “Anarchy today is indignation, deadly hatred and eternal war against every oppressor and exploiter on the face of the earth. . . . But tomorrow, once the obstacles have been overcome, anarchy will be solidarity and love—complete freedom for all.”[[#104CafieroRevolution41|104]] He thought it would take a significant amount of time to achieve full anarchy. This can be seen in his claim that one generation would fight in the revolution and the next generation would work toward full anarchy in a postrevolutionary world. He wrote that contemporary anarchists would:
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-91.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:15]]
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">perhaps perish in a skirmish or during the first shots of the great day; some perhaps will be fortunate enough to see the first dawning of humanity’s great event. In all cases, we shall fall satisfied. Satisfied with having contributed to the certain ruin of this unjust, cruel and rotten world, whose collapse will bury us in the most glorious tomb ever made for a fighter.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-92.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:16 The Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros]]
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Other men will be born from the very entrails of the fertile revolution and take on the task of carrying out the positive, organic part of anarchy.</div>
+It was now possible for the king to enter the Otherworld through bloodletting and sacrifice in full view of those few privileged enough to climb the grand stairway at the front of the pyramid, pass through the doorways of the portal temple, and stand with him on the sacred ground of the upper plaza. This change of architectural strategy was a logical development, for it took the guesswork out of the witnessing and legitimizing roles of the emergent nobility as they played their part in the establishment of royal power. Now they too could see the awesome visions of the supernatural conjured up by the magical performances of their king.[159]
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">For us—hatred, war and destruction; for them—love, peace and happiness.[[#105CafieroRevolution49|105]]</div>
+Below this upper plaza was an even larger platform similar in principle to the one underlying the original temple to the north. Not so exclusive as the upper plaza, this space was still not physically or visually accessible to all, for it was partially closed off along its front edge by long buildings. This platform plaza, in turn, gave way by means of a broad grand stairway to a final lower plaza that extended 120 by 125 meters, a huge and fully accessible plaster-covered expanse capable of accommodating festival crowds numbering in the hundreds with room to spare. The new temple precinct thus had a much more complex arrangement of ritual space: three different kinds of space, all interconnected by broad stairways upon which the king could perform. Such complexity of space reflects the growing complexity of ritual activity surrounding the king and the social status attached to participation in such activity. When the king came dancing down the stairs in an ecstatic trance following a bloodletting ritual, supported on either side by his elite nobles, the first people to see him were those standing on the middle platform. These people could then join his procession and follow him down into the immense lower plaza where the general populace awaited.
-Malatesta, in comparison, conceded that “some comrades” mistakenly “expect Anarchy to come with one stroke—as the immediate result of an insurrection which violently attacks all that which exists and replaces it with institutions that are really new.”[[#106MalatestaMethodofFreedo|106]] These comrades, he said, were wrong, because the full achievement of anarchy requires that “all men will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command . . . [and] have understood the advantages of solidarity and know how to organize a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition.”[[#107MalatestaMethodofFreedo|107]] Such a significant transformation of individuals and social structures would take a long time to achieve.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-93.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:17 Reconstruction of the Second Temple Complex Built at Cerros. Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and Chetumal Bay are in the background drawing by Karim Sadr]]
-Malatesta thought that society immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state “would not be Anarchy, yet, or it would be only for those few who want it, and only in those things they can accomplish without the cooperation of the non-anarchists.”[[#108MalatestaMethodofFreedo|108]] The development toward anarchy would be a product of “peaceful evolution” in which anarchist “ideas . . . extend to more men and more things until it will have embraced all mankind and all life’s manifestations.”[[#109MalatestaMethodofFreedo|109]] For Malatesta, “Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.”[[#110MalatestaMethodofFreedo|110]]
+The very existence of this pyramid with its carefully differentiated viewing spaces indicates the high degree of social stratification that was present at Cerros. For as long as the kingship at Cerros lasted, these social differences worked to the advantage of the government. The organization necessary to coordinate the construction of the new royal precinct required many times the effort put into the first temple. A large labor pool was required, as well as the civil machinery to guide and control it. As mentioned above, however, the coercion of local labor was alien to the Maya. This new project, like the one before it, was done by and for every member of the community, regardless of their social status.
-Similar points were made by other anarchist authors. Berkman argued that the “revolution is the ''means'' of bringing Anarchy about but it is not Anarchy itself. It is to pave the road for Anarchy, to establish conditions which will make a life of liberty possible.”[[#111BerkmanAnarchism231|111]] Maximoff likewise thought that, during the process of abolishing capitalism and the state, there would be a transitional phase that laid the foundations from which anarchy would eventually arise. As a result, he was careful to distinguish between the “communal structure, which is the transitory step” and “the structure of full communism and anarchy.”[[#112MaximoffProgramofAnarch|112]]
+For the people of Cerros. becoming a kingdom created liabilities as well as benefits. The new building program buried much of the original village under its immense plastered plaza. Albeit willingly, the people living in the old village proper were forced to relocate to the lands surrounding the emerging urban center. That land, however, was also being extensively quarried for the thousands of tons of rock and white earth required by the construction workers. In the course of building the temples at Cerros, its inhabitants effectively lowered the surrounding land so significantly it became necessary to build a complicated system of drainage ditches, reservoirs, and canals to keep their homes and patios from becoming flooded during the rainy season (Fig. 3:18).[160]
-Anarchists, in other words, viewed the abolition of capitalism and the state as an act that created the preconditions for the achievement of anarchy and moved society closer to it but would not alone create anarchy as an ideal, universal social system. The task of anarchists during and immediately after the social revolution was to establish the basic forms of organization and association that would exist under anarchy and thereby establish the social conditions from which anarchy could emerge. In order to clearly differentiate these basic social structures from anarchy, I shall refer to the totality of these social structures as an anarchist society.
+Another problem people faced, as they moved out from the old village, was the shortage of building materials. The amount of wealth and rank a family possessed suddenly became strikingly apparent in the type of new home they could afford to construct. Some individuals were able to build their new houses on raised platforms of considerable size, while other families lived on small platforms, and still others had homes at ground level. Control of all available construction materials reinforced the power of the king, for he could then dispense them as rewards for loyalty and support.
-Anarchists generally envisioned an anarchist society as having four main components.[[#113CafieroRevolution4962|113]] These were:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Humanity as a whole collectively owns land, raw materials, and the means of production. The division of society into economic classes is abolished such that there are no longer workers or proletarians but only people who engage in acts of production and consumption. Those who occupy or use a piece of land, raw materials, or the means of production on a daily basis directly control and self-manage the relevant sphere of production or distribution. Individuals can only own possessions they personally use without exploiting the labor of others. In other words, humanity owns the watch factory, those who labor in the watch factory directly control and self-manage watch production, and individuals own their personal watches.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-94.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:18 Topographic Map and Drainage System at Cerros]]
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Workplaces and communities are self-managed by the people who constitute them through general assemblies in which everyone involved has an equal say in collective decisions.[[#114Thissystemofdecisionmak|114]]</div>
+The political message of the second temple is harder to read than that of the first. The decorations on the uppermost facade, the only one excavated so far,[161] were badly damaged by natural erosion and the fires banked against them in the termination rituals conducted by the Maya when kingship at Cerros failed and the temple was abandoned. Even though only fragments of the imagery survived, we can still tell it was the same as that of the first temple: four great masks, probably of the Ancestral Heroes, flanking a stairway. The fine quality of the modeled stucco elements that were preserved, and their rich, more elaborate painted detail, demonstrate the high level of artistry involved in the decoration of this pyramid. The beauty and complexity of this building is concrete testimony to the charismatic power of the Cerros king, a ruler strong enough to attract and retain the services of skilled artisans literate in the complex theology and imagery of the new religion.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Markets and money are replaced by a system of decentralized planning.</div>
+By this time in the history of Cerros, the first king had died and been replaced by a successor. We know this because of a special political message placed in the second temple. Below the summit where the new king stood for public rituals, he buried a set of royal jewels, including the jades of a royal headband and the chest pectoral of a king.[162] Laid carefully face downward in the bottom of a large clay bucket, the four headband jewels were deliberately arranged in the same fourfold pattern we saw in the great masks of the first temple (Fig. 3:19). In the middle of this pattern, the king set the larger greenstone pectoral, face upward. This particular positioning was both deliberate and symbolic. This ahau pectoral rested within a fourfold pattern, just as the first king had stood within the fourfold pattern of the masks on the first temple. These powerful and magical objects were then covered (Fig. 3:20) with layers of mosaic mirrors made of bright blue hematite crystals glued to mother-of-pearl cutouts,[163] and with red-orange spiny oyster shells of the kind worn by later Maya nobles on their robes. A large red pottery plate served as the lid for the bucket, and surrounding it were four of the small pottery cups used for drinking and a jug for pouring beverages.[164]
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">The rigid capitalist division of labor is abolished such that people do a combination of mental and physical labor, and unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers. Individuals would still specialize in specific skills, such as learning how to drive a train or build a house, but they would not be limited to one sphere of activity such that they only drove trains or built houses. This would go alongside a significant reduction to the length of the working day, such as four hours instead of ten.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-95.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:19 The Arrangement of the King’s Jewels in the Offering Bucket of Structure 6B]]
+This cache was more than a simple offering of precious materials to the gods. We believe these jewels were valued because they were the very ones owned and used by the first king of Cerros (the kingly jewels of our story). The pattern in which the precious materials were arranged echoed the pattern of power we have already seen in the first temple and established it within the summit of the second one. The second king buried them in his own temple to invoke this power and to link himself with the former king, who was presumably his ancestor. These jewels would aid T him in his communication with the sacred world of the supernatural.
+Later Maya kings, like the great Pacal of Palenque, would define their temples as sacred mountains and have themselves buried therein. At the beginnings of the institution of ahau, however, power lay not in the physical remains of the first king, but in the performance and settings of ritual, and in the objects of power themselves. Instead of focusing on the burial of the first king, his successor manipulated the power objects left by him in order to ensure the act of linkage between their reigns. All of those who worked on the new acropolis, thereby affirming the legitimacy of the succession, understood that symbolism. Just as the people of the community gave their most precious possessions in the form of labor to raise the new building, so the new king sacrificed his most precious heirlooms to its construction.[165]
-In an anarchist society, “the relations between its members are regulated, not by laws . . . not by any authorities—whether they are elected or derive their power by right of inheritance—but by mutual agreements, freely made and always revocable, as well as [social] customs and habits, also freely accepted.”[[#115KropotkinModernScience|115]] Such statements are not advocating a society in which people are free to do absolutely anything, including acts that oppress others. Anarchists argued that, if a person imposes their will on another via violence or coercion, they are engaging in an act of domination and should be prevented from doing so, by force if necessary. Such force, providing it is proportionate and does not reconstitute the state, would not be a form of authority or a violation of the equal freedom of all. It would rather defend the freedom of all in a manner compatible with the goal of anarchy.[[#116MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|116]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-96.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:20 The Dedicatory Offering from the Summit of Structure 6B]]
-Collective decisions within an anarchist society would be made within workplace and community assemblies via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two.[[#117Anarchistauthorsusedava|117]] Malatesta personally thought that in an anarchist society, “everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator.”[[#118ErricoMalatestaBetweenP|118]] This is not to say that an anarchist society was based on the rule of the majority over the minority. Anarchists believed in free association and so held that decisions should not be imposed on others via the exercise or threat of violence. Given this, they rejected both the rule of the minority over the majority and the rule of the majority over the minority. Within a free association that makes collective decisions via majority vote, the majority and minority positions would coexist with one another when this was possible. If a collective decision required everyone involved to agree on a single course of action, such as when the next meeting would take place or what color a room would be painted, then minorities would voluntarily defer to the majority decision. If the minority strongly disagreed with this decision then they were free, not only to persuade others of their point of view, but also to leave and voluntarily disassociate. This freedom of association also included the freedom of majorities to voluntarily dissociate from minorities, such as a person who constantly shouted at and bullied other people during meetings being expelled from a group.[[#119MalatestaMethodofFreedo|119]]
+Following the triumphant completion of the new royal temple, the community of Cerros began its most ambitious construction project to date: the establishment of an east-west axis to complement the north-south axis laid down by the first king. The rapidity with which the new construction project followed that of the second temple suggests that they were both part of the program of the second king of Cerros. If this is the case, then the ruler of this early kingdom truly enjoyed extraordinary power.
-Although anarchists thought that collective decisions should be made in general assemblies, they also understood that it is often necessary or practical for an individual, or small group of people, to complete a specific task. As Malatesta wrote, “in every collective undertaking on a large scale there is need for division of labor, for technical direction, administration, etc.”[[#120MalatestaMethodofFreedo|120]] In such circumstances, anarchists proposed that general assemblies would elect mandated delegates to complete a task or perform a role, such as corresponding with other groups, editing a newspaper, or drawing up plans for a new public transportation system. These delegates would not be governors who wielded authority, since they did not have the right to command others and force people to obey them. Decision-making power would remain in the hands of the general assembly who elected them and retained the right to recall delegates, give them new instructions, accept or reject their suggestions, and so on.[[#121MalatestaBetweenPeasants|121]]
+Directly east of the second temple (Fig 3.1), the king erected the largest of the temples at Cerros, an eastward acropolis called Structure 4. We know that the king rebuilt this structure at least once because the foundation of an earlier temple lies almost directly beneath the present structure. This practice of building one structure on top of the razed foundation of another was not uncommon with the Maya, for they believed that a location accumulated power with time. Once the portal to the Otherworld was opened, once the points of power were set in place, the membrane between the worlds was made thinner with subsequent use.
-In an anarchist society, decision-making would flow “from the bottom upwards and from the circumference inwards, in accordance with the principle of liberty, and not from the top downwards and from the center outwards, as is the way of all authority.”[[#122BakuninSelectedWritings|122]] Within such a society, “the free association of all” would establish “a social organization” structured “from the low to the high, from the simple to the complex, starting from the more immediate to arrive at the more distant and general interests.”[[#123MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|123]] Anarchists envisioned a decentralized and bottom-up system of decision-making in which workplace and community assemblies made their own decisions about how they operated at a local level. They then associated with one another via free agreement in order to form a network capable of achieving coordination and cooperation on a large scale. As will be explained in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, there were two main positions on how to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation during both the struggle against class society and the reproduction of an anarchist society. Antiorganizationalists, who appear to have been in the minority during the period I am examining, argued that coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks. Galleani, for example, endorsed “a society functioning on the basis of mutual agreement” between “free social groupings,” while rejecting formal organizations that had administrative committees, congresses, and constitutions.[[#124GalleaniEndofAnarchism|124]]
+Whereas the old temple had faced the village, the new temple faced the rising sun and towered over a broad plaza of gleaming white plaster. At sixty meters along each side and twenty-two meters high, this was a building of respectable proportions by any Maya standards. This new acropolis, like the earlier two, buried homes and shrines that were the last S vestiges of the old village and the way of life that went with it.
-Organizationalists, in comparison, also advocated the establishment of formal federations.[[#125Thefollowingaccountisba|125]] These federations took three main forms: federations of producers belonging to the same branch of production; federations of all the workplace assemblies, regardless of industry, in a given geographical area; and federations of community assemblies in a given geographical area. Federations are free associations of autonomous groups that are formed in order to achieve shared objectives. Within a federation, these autonomous groups are formally linked together through a common program, a bottom-up organizational structure, and the various agreements made at meetings and congresses. In an anarchist society, the basic unit of a federation would be a group in which collective decisions were made in a general assembly. The different assemblies in a given area would voluntarily associate with one another to form a local federation. The local federations in a given region would then voluntarily associate with one another to form a regional federation. The regional federations would associate to form a national federation and the national federations of the world would form an international federation. Federations of federations were often called confederations. Although organizationalist anarchists advocated creating national confederations before and during a social revolution, it is likely that, in a stateless society without borders, new labels would be used to refer to a federation of this size.[[#126AnarchiststhroughoutLatin|126]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-97.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:21 Construction Pens Inside Structure 4A, the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]
-Federations would enable coordination at various scales. Collective agreements between different groups would be made at regular congresses held at local, regional, national, and international levels, each attended by delegates from smaller groups comprising the federation. Proponents of federations disagreed about whether resolutions passed at congresses by majority vote should be binding on every individual or group involved in the decision-making process, or on only those who voted in favor of the majority position.[[#127CompareMalatestaMethodo|127]] Between congresses, the day-to-day administration of a federation would be organized by a committee composed of elected delegates. What tasks these administrative committees performed would vary depending upon the kind of federation but would include such things as facilitating the exchange of information between sections, publishing bulletins on behalf of the federation, or compiling statistics.
+As with the earlier temples at Cerros, the master builders, laborers, and masons raised the new acropolis in a single enormous effort. Because of its huge size, this building required an extensive honeycomb of internal buttressing walls. Once the masons had raised these walls, laborers hurried to fill the spaces between them with alternating layers of loose boulders, gravel, and white earth. The completion of these square “construction pens” (Fig. 3:21)[166] required a good deal of work, contributed by gangs of farmers and fishermen under the watchful supervision of their patriarchs. As was always the case with the Maya, work on the temple was an act of devotion. The laborers threw their maize grinding stones, fishnet weights, and some of their personal household objects into the rubble as offerings to the ancestral gods.
-The delegates of a federation, in contrast to representatives in capitalist parliaments, are not granted the power to make decisions independently and impose them on others. They can only act as spokespeople for the group that elected and mandated them on what to say and how to vote. If they fail to implement the group’s mandate, they can be instantly recalled and replaced by a newly elected delegate. The same principle would apply to delegates who perform other roles for the federation, such as the members of the administrative committees. As Kropotkin explained, within a federation, the members of a local group discuss “every aspect of the question that concerns them,” reach a decision, and then “choose someone and send him to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind.”[[#128KropotkinRebel133|128]] At this meeting “the delegate is not authorized to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse.”[[#129KropotkinRebel133See|129]] Malatesta similarly claimed that “the respective delegates would take their given mandates to the relative meetings and try to harmonize their various needs and desires. The deliberations would always be subject to the control and approval of those who delegated them.”[[#130MalatestaBetweenPeasants|130]]
+Very little of the sculptural decoration of this building survived, but it was clearly meant to be the tomb of a king. Built with a steep-sided contour, it had a sepulcher at its summit. This mortuary chamber was long and rather wide as Maya tombs go, and at its northern end there was a plastered bench which would have served as the final resting place of the king (Fig. 3:22). The roof of the tomb was spanned with great stone slabs in an early example of corbel-arch construction. Strangely enough, the tomb was never occupied by its patron, a problem to which we will return.
-All anarchists, regardless of where they stood on the topic of federations, did not think that workplace and community assemblies would be the only organs of self-management in an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, advocated a society constituted by an “interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national, and international—temporary or more or less permanent—for all possible purposes,” including not only production and consumption but also “communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection,” and “the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.”[[#131KropotkinDirectStruggle|131]]
+Now that the east-west axis of the community was clearly defined, the current ruler went to work on the remaining axis. Built to the south, a westward-facing temple, Structure 29C (Fig. 3:23), complemented the eastward-facing tomb of the king and completed the north-south axis of Cerros. This last great structure was closely associated with the north and south ballcourts, which formed a triangle arrangement with the new acropolis (Fig. 3:1; 3:24).
-The forms of organization and decision-making that anarchists advocated were not invented by isolated theorists imagining abstract social possibilities from their studies. The anarchist vision of a future society was instead the generalization of the forms of association that working-class social movements had themselves developed and implemented during the course of the class struggle. As Kropotkin argued, “Anarchy” is an “ideal society” based upon “''the study of tendencies already emerging in the evolution of society''.”[[#132KropotkinModernScience|132]] One of the main tendencies Kropotkin focused on was the labor movement. He noted that the anarchist vision of a future society was “worked out, in theory and practice, from beneath” by workers themselves within the local sections, national federations, and international congresses of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals.[[#133PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|133]] This occurred through a process of workers collectively generating ideas via discussion, dialogue, and drawing upon their knowledge of a specific trade or region. They not only made proposals about how the future society should be organized, but based these proposals on their own experiences of participating in “a vast federation of workers groups representing the seeds of a society regenerated by social revolution.”[[#134KropotkinModernScience|134]]
+The new pyramid was smaller than the eastward-facing acropolis discussed above, but its builders created a distinctive—and for Cerros, atypical—plan for the summit. They erected three separate temple platforms atop this pyramid, the center one facing toward the west (Fig. 3:23). Each of these platforms had a central stairway flanked by a special iconography. On the middle pyramid, the builders mounted carved jaguar heads with great flowing scrolls pouring out of their mouths, and small snarling human heads emerging from the stonework above them (Fig. 3:25). These bloody images were meant to depict the severed head of the Sun Jaguar— the ancestral brother who died in sacrifice and was reborn as the means of defeating the Lords of Xibalba.
-Although anarchists agreed that land, raw materials, and the means of production should be owned in common by humanity as a whole, they disagreed about how the products of labor should be distributed in an anarchist society. Anarchist collectivists argued that the products of labor should be owned by those who produced them so that, as they saw it, each producer enjoyed the full product of their labor.[[#135BakuninSelectedWritings|135]] Bakunin, the most famous anarchist collectivist, proposed in 1868 that society should be structured such that it “allows each to share in the enjoyment of social wealth—which in fact is produced only by labor—only to the extent that he has contributed his own to its production.”[[#136BakuninSelectedWritings|136]] Anarchist collectivists within the First International did not initially specify how the products of collective labor would be distributed to those who produced them and argued that the question would be resolved in various ways by communities themselves depending upon their circumstances.[[#137GuillaumequotedinBakunin|137]] For example, at the 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, Spanish anarchist collectivists advocated a society based on the collective ownership of the means of production and land, which “gives autonomy to each community of producers and each receives according to his production.”[[#138QuotedinCarolineCahmKr|138]] They did not, however, specify how this system of distribution would actually be organized.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-98.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:22 The Unused Tomb in the Eastward-facing Acropolis]]
-A more concrete proposal was made by the anarchist collectivist Guillaume in 1874. He reaffirmed the collectivist position that each community should decide for itself how to distribute the products of labor, while suggesting a system of labor vouchers in which individuals receive a certain number of vouchers per hour of work or per type of work performed and then use them to acquire items at stores. Once the postrevolutionary society had stabilized and abundance was achieved, he thought this should be replaced by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs.”[[#139GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|139]]
+The image of the severed head is a central symbol of royal power on stelae and panels of the Classic period. Kings during this period sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by decapitating them. The jaguar adorned with waterlily scrolls presided over such warfare and provided it with its central metaphor: battle as the royal hunt. Noble warriors were either prey or predator, depending on their luck; and kings would go into battle with ropes tied around their arms as if daring their adversaries to capture them. This war-sacrifice complex is the central imagery we will see in the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, the monument raised by king Chan-Bahlum to celebrate his designation as heir to the throne. The westward-facing temple of Cerros, adorned with jaguar heads, was the prototype of the later Classic period complex: it was meant as a war monument.
-From 1876 onward, a number of prominent anarchists, including Malatesta, Cafiero, and Reclus, rejected anarchist collectivism in favor of anarchist communism. This soon came to be the dominant position within the anarchist movement, although anarchist collectivism continued to be advocated by a significant segment of anarchists in Spain during the 1880s. Anarchist communism was seen as a society in which each person voluntarily contributes to production according to their abilities and the products of labor are collectively owned by humanity as a whole and distributed according to need. This would, during and immediately after the social revolution, be organized through a system of rationing. Once the economy was sufficiently developed and stable, rationing would be abolished in favor of free access to the products of labor. In contrast to Guillaume, who had previously proposed distribution according to need as the long-term goal, anarchist communists rejected the idea of distribution via labor vouchers as an intermediary system.[[#140MalatestaMethodofFreedo|140]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-99.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:24 The playing court from Complex 50 near the westward-facing acropolis]]
-Over time, the debate between anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists became increasingly hostile, most notably in Spain during the 1880s where it was entangled with wider strategic debates.[[#141GeorgeRichardEsenweinAn|141]] In response, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Ricardo Mella formulated the idea of “anarchism without adjectives” in 1889. They argued that it was not possible for people living in class society to know with certainty which specific system of distribution would best realize anarchist values after the revolution. As a result, anarchists existing under capitalism should adopt a nondogmatic stance whereby collectivism and communism would coexist in the postrevolutionary society and the argument over which system was superior would be settled through actual experimentation in different economic arrangements. Until this had occurred, anarchists could make proposals about how they personally thought the economy would best be organized, but they would not be in a position to identify as either collectivist or communist. So long as anarchists lived within class society, they should simply call themselves anarchists who advocated socialism and not add to this label any particular adjective denoting a future system of distribution.[[#142MellaAnarchistSocialism|142]]
+The remaining two temple platforms faced inward toward the central temple.[167] The stairways of these flanking platforms sat between longsnouted masks, also surmounted by snarling human faces (Fig. 3:26). The jaguar images on the middle temple correspond to the lower jaguar masks of the first temple built at Cerros; and the long-snouted masks of the flanking temples echo the masks on the first temple’s upper terraces. We can conclude then that the long-snouted characters on the flanking platforms represent Venus, the elder brother of the Ancestral Twins. This elder brother, as we mentioned above, sacrificed his brother, the Jaguar Sun, and then brought him back to life in order to defeat the Lords of Death in Xibalba. In the Classic Period, whenever jaguar imagery appeared, flanked on either side by Venus, the elder brother, it represented the king flanked by his kinsmen. These kinsmen were usually his father, or his mother and father, from whom he received his right to the throne.[168]
-This position would go onto influence some anarchists outside of Spain. A notable example is the American anarchist de Cleyre, who was initially an individualist anarchist and advocate of market socialism. Her perspective on anarchism changed due to her four-month visit to England and Scotland in 1897. During her lecture tour, she met and conversed with a variety of anarchist communists. This included both groups of English, Scottish, French, Spanish, and Jewish anarchist workers, and prominent anarchist authors and public speakers, such as Kropotkin, Nettlau, Grave, and Louise Michel. De Cleyre claimed that one of the most impressive people she met was Tarrida del Mármol, the advocate of anarchism without adjectives.[[#143PaulAvrichAnAmericanAn|143]] From at least 1900 onward, she advocated a stateless socialist society in which the means of production were owned in common, while referring to herself as an anarchist without economic label attached. In contrast to early Spanish advocates of anarchism without adjectives, de Cleyre claimed that experiments in different socialist economic arrangements would not only settle the debate between collectivists and communists. It would also establish an answer to the largely American debate between proponents of market socialism and advocates of a planned economy.[[#144AvrichAnAmericanAnarchi|144]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-100.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:25 Snarling Jaguars from the Central Platform on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]
-For Kropotkin, who played a significant role in theorizing and popularizing anarchist communism, it was important to describe the nature of the future society, because how one envisions the future shapes how one acts in the present. A socialist who envisions a society based on producers owning and self-managing the means of production themselves will act differently, both under capitalism and during a revolution, from a socialist who envisions a society based on the state owning and managing the means of production through a vast bureaucracy. They each have a different vision and so will act differently to try and create very different worlds.[[#145KropotkinRebel2014|145]] This perspective can be seen in Kropotkin’s 1913 remark that the anarchist vision of a future society “soon separated the anarchists in their means of action from all political parties, as well as, to a large extent, from the socialist parties which thought they could retain the ancient Roman and Canonical idea of the State and carry it into the future society of their dreams.”[[#146KropotkinModernScience|146]]
+The ballcourts nearby were built in relationship to both the northsouth and the east-west axes of the city. Within these ballcourts rituals of war and sacrifice were played out as were rituals legitimizing the descent of the new royal line. The bailgame was played for many purposes. In a more ordinary setting it could be played between friends or professionals for sport or for wager; but it more often took on a ritual or sacred aspect. Highborn captives were frequently forced to play the bailgame as members of the community looked on. As in the Popol Vuh myth, the losers were sacrificed by decapitation. Often these sacrificial victims were bound into a ball-like form and hurled down the stairs of a temple. In its most elevated form the ballgame was played as a reenactment of the Ancestral Twins’ defeat of the Lords of Death in Xibalba, as related in the Popol Vuh.
-If the achievement of anarchy required that the working classes engage in forms of practice that actually produce an anarchist society, such as establishing workplace or community assemblies, then the working classes must first develop both the awareness of what an anarchist society would look like and the motivation to create such a society. As Kropotkin wrote, “no struggle can be successful . . . if it does not produce a concrete account of its actual aim. No destruction of what exists is possible without, during the struggles leading to the destruction and during the period of destruction itself, already visualizing mentally what will take the place of what you want to destroy.”[[#147KropotkinModernScience|147]]
+These games provided the metaphorical setting for the sacrificial events by which a king or heir promoted his legitimate authority.[169] Whether the king was taking the role of supreme athlete, acting out the role of one of the Ancestral Twins, or sacrificing a captive king or noble, the ballgame had deep religious significance.
-The role of anarchist authors like Kropotkin or Cafiero was to articulate and spread this vision among the working classes, and thereby instill in them the radical drives that were necessary for achieving an anarchist society. Anarchists had to decide not only on “the ''aim'' which we ourselves propose to attain” but must also “make it known, by words and deeds, in such a way as to make it notably popular, so popular that on the day of action it will be on everybody’s lips.”[[#148KropotkinRebel203|148]] In outlining these visions of what an anarchist society would look like, anarchists did not think that they were establishing the permanent means through which society would be organized after the social revolution. Instead, they assumed that people living in a future anarchist society would develop new and better ways of organizing that they had not considered, and had not even been in a position to conceive.[[#149RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|149]]
+We do not know if the builder of the ballcourts and the westward-facing temple was the second or third ruler of Cerros, but that knowledge is not critical to our understanding of the development of kingship at Cerros. Expanded building programs indicate expanded ambition, if nothing else. ! he very existence of a war memorial and a ballcourt indicate that Cerros was looking outward, and that its new royalty was taking a growing part in the cosmopolitan and competitive world of lowland Maya kingdoms.
-'''The Problem of Socialist Transformation'''
+In the long run, however, the pressures from within and without upon this newborn kingdom were evidently more than it could withstand. The king who planned to bury himself in the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis never occupied his sepulcher—it was left open and empty. Why this happened we do not know. One possibility is that this unfortunate king may have died far from home, taken captive in battle. Regardless Sc of what the true story may have been, his successor ultimately failed to fulfill the promise inherent in the Maya vision of kingship.
-Anarchists not only advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. They also constructed effective strategies for how to set about achieving their goals. One of the central problems that their strategies had to overcome was that both the abolition of class society in favor of an anarchist society and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society require the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the ability to make collective decisions in general assemblies, the desire to not dominate or exploit others, and the understanding that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society, however, produce people fit for the reproduction of that oppressive and unequal society, rather than its abolition. Class society cannot, by itself, produce the kinds of people that an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-101.jpg 70f][Fig. 3:26 Long-snouted Monster from the NOrth and South (Side) Platforms on the Top of the Westward-facing Acropolis (Structure 29C)]]
-Such individuals would arise in a properly functioning anarchist society due to the forms of practice they engaged in on a daily basis, such as participating in a workplace assembly or being taught how to horizontally associate as a child. These are exactly the kinds of people that anarchist social movements need in order to succeed. Anarchists, unfortunately, live in a class society. They therefore have a problem: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society. How then could anarchist social movements effectively transform society? This problem was succinctly expressed by Malatesta:
+The failed attempt to bury a king at the summit of the eastward-facing acropolis marked the beginning of the end of the experiment with \ kingship at Cerros. The heir to that ruler did manage to rally the people temporarily and to launch the construction of another temple along the designs of the first and second ones. Situated directly south of the great eastward-facing acropolis, the final temple reiterated the north-south axis of the community. It faced southward like the original two temples. This new acropolis outwardly resembled the other temple complexes, but its construction work was shoddy and no offerings were deposited in the building’s summit.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society must be changed. Poverty brutalizes man, and to abolish poverty men must have a social conscience and determination. Slavery teaches men to be slaves, and to free oneself from slavery there is a need for men who aspire to liberty. . . . Governments accustom people to submit to the Law and to believe that Law is essential to society; and to abolish government men must be convinced of the uselessness and the harmfulness of government.[[#150MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|150]]</div>
+Shortly after this final effort, the Maya of Cerros gave up their brief embrace of kingship and systematically released the power from the sacred mountains which they had lifted up from their own earth. The kings were gone. The nobility, once attracted by the promise of a great kingdom, abandoned the city and returned to their estates in the surrounding countryside. The remaining people banked great fires against the masks of their ancestors and lords. They sprinkled layers of white marl over the fires and then reset them. They pulled out their jade earflares (the special ear ornaments that were shaped like the end of a trumpet) and smashed them into bits, sprinkling the pieces on the piles of debris accumulating at the TI bases of the decorated panels. They broke the pottery from their final ritual meals as they brought the termination ritual to an end. At the last, they went down to their homes and continued to live around the ruins of their greatness as fisherfolk and farmers once more.
-Despite the self-reproducing nature of dominant structures, social change remains a possibility. This is because existing society is not solely the product of the “will of a dominating class” but is also “the result of a thousand internecine struggles, of a thousand human and natural factors acting indifferently, without directive criteria.”[[#151MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|151]] Social structures are not fixed monoliths, but webs of interconnected processes that “contain organic contradictions and are like the germs of death, which, as they develop, result in the dissolution of institutions and the need for transformation.”[[#152MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|152]] This can be seen in the history of class struggle, which contains numerous examples of the oppressed and exploited choosing to rebel against, modify, and sometimes overthrow, self-reproducing social structures. Given this, anarchists who “are besieged and buffeted on every side by hostile realities” must not “accept everything, and defer to everything because this is the situation in which history has placed us,” but should instead choose to “combat these realities” and thereby change what reality is.[[#153MalatestaMethodofFreedo|153]] De Cleyre said much the same. She argued in 1910 that, although humans are shaped by their circumstances, they are also at the same time “an active modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely.”[[#154DeCleyreReader37|154]]
+Many years later, after the eastward-facing temple had begun to fall into ruin, devotees returned to the summit to carry out rituals of termination to release the power of the place. Their clay offering vessels stood in solitary stacks until the stone roof of the tomb collapsed and crushed them.
-It is therefore possible for one segment of society to choose to engage in actions that, given the theory of practice, would simultaneously change social relations and themselves, constructing new social structures. To quote Mella,
+We will never know exactly why the ahauob of Cerros failed, but we can hypothesize. A major difficulty might have been a problem in the transference of power between the generations within the royal line. In a system that depended less on the rules of succession than on the personal charisma and power of a leader, a weak king would not have been tolerated for very long. Another problem the people of Cerros might have experienced was the difficulty of coping with the novelty of a large scale society. While it is true that this community enthusiastically embraced kingship, intention and execution are two different things. At this point in the history of the Maya, the institution of kingship was newly invented and its practitioners were still improvising as they went along. A society based on a great experiment is a potentially unstable society.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">We must realize that we will not suddenly find ourselves, one day, with men made in accordance with the future, suitable to realize the content of new ideals. And we must surrender to the evidence that, without the continual and growing exercise of individual faculties, without the habit of autonomy, as broad as possible, free men or at least men in conditions to be free will not be made so that the social deed changes the face of things. External and internal revolutions presuppose one another and should be simultaneous in order to be fruitful.[[#155MellaAnarchistSocialism|155]]</div>
+There are reasons to suspect that these problems were common to the times in the Maya lowlands, for other early kingdoms also failed precipitously. At Cerros, however, collapse of the institution was not a matter of sudden abandonment of the place by all of its people. Just as they had once opted for kingship, now they opted against it. Maya kingdoms never maintained a standing army or a police force, so there was no one to make the people obey the king. Without the willing cooperation of the people, nobles and commoners alike, the king could do nothing.
-For example, workers choose to go on strike and win. In so doing, they change social relations—wages increase and workers gain more power over their bosses—and change people—workers learn how to organize a strike, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another and see the economy in a fundamentally different way. During the course of the strike, they construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a trade union. Long-term participation in this trade union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness in new directions. This would make the organization of new actions possible, such as strikes that mobilize workers in multiple industries. These kinds of action could continue and multiply over time as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. The anarchist solution to the problem of socialist transformation was, in short, that the working classes could become capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state, and establish and reproduce an anarchist society through engaging in revolutionary practice. As Malatesta put it, “progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between men and their environment.”[[#156MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|156]]
+The ahauob of Cerros re-created their world, literally transforming the place in which they and their people lived from a village into a place of kings. They could do this because their people wanted to follow their vision and celebrate its power. As mentioned above, the charisma of the king was not absolute in the Maya vision. It was subject to critical testing in performance: the abundance of crops, the prosperity of trade, the health of the people, victory in battle. We will see in later chapters that Maya kings always faced the possibility of a failure of one sort or another that could cripple a dynasty or bring it down decisively. Much of the public art erected by Maya kings was political propaganda, responding to crises resulting from these kinds of failures.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#13|1]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 148–49; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 70.</div>
+To some, this new form of Maya government might appear as a fragile sort of adaptation, subject as it was to the character and ability of a few central people and their close kin. Yet the vision of the ahau exploded into brilliant colored stucco clarity throughout the lowlands in the first century before the present era. The first Trees of Life propagated a forest of kings from the outset—in good tropical ecological adaptation, a dispersal of the species insuring that some would always survive any localized catastrophe. Individual kingdoms might fail, but the vision of the ahau as ruler endured, the most geographically extensive and long-lasting principle of governance in the history of ancient Mesoamerica.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#23|2]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 38.</div>
+The ahauob of Cerros—and those of Lamanai, Tikal, El Mirador, and Uaxactun, among the known early kingdoms—were masked, anonymous rulers who left little record of their personal histories among the grand royal statements of their successes and victories. This would soon change, for in the first two centuries of the present era, the written script crystallized and kings began to emerge as the chronicled tigures of royal drama. In spite of their anonymity, the ancestral kings of the Preclassic period did leave a heritage to their successors in the form of their mute complexes of temple, pyramid, plaza, and plaster mask. They promoted the principle of hierarchy, focusing on architectural construction and reconstruction as the means of achieving their political objectives—principally, perpetuation of the dynasty. They created the first centers and, in the act of establishing them, also defined the notion of dominion. Like the trees of the four directions, which raise up the sky over the earth, the king was the central pillar—the Tree of Life who raised the sky that arched over his entire realm.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#33|3]]. Anarchism shares this emphasis on nondomination with republicanism. See Kinna and Alex Prichard, “Anarchism and Non-domination,” ''Journal of Political Ideologies'' 24, no. 3 (2019): 221–40.</div>
+. A War of Conquest: Tikal Against Uaxactun
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#43|4]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985),'' ''121.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-102.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#53|5]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''124.</div>
+During the explosive first flush of civilized life in the Maya world, cities, like Cerros, blossomed in the towering rain forests of the lowlands. El Mirador,[170] located in the swamps and low hills of Peten, the geographic heart of the Yucatan peninsula, was the greatest of these Preclassic cities. Yet even at the height of El Mirador’s glory, when its ahauob were reigning over vast temples, contenders for its greatness were growing to maturity forty miles to the south. These nascent rivals, Uaxactun and Tikal, grew steadily in power, population, and the ability to create magnificent public art throughout the Late Preclassic period, cultivating their ambition until they were ready to step into the political vacuum left by the decline of El Mirador at the outset of the Classic era.[171] Located less than twelve miles apart—not even a day’s walk—Tikal and Uaxactun were perhaps too closely situated for both of them to become kingdoms of the first rank. Their competition, which is the focus of our next story, was resolved violently in A.D. 378 by means of an innovative type of warfare we call Tlaloc-Venus war, or sometimes simply “star wars.”[172] The imagery and method of this new type of conflict was borrowed from the other great Mesoamerican civilization of this time, Teotihuacan, the huge city that had grown to maturity in the Valley of Mexico during the third and fourth centuries. With the advent of this new kind of warfare, a new concept was incorporated into the Maya culture: the idea of empire.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#63|6]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''46. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''64, 148.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-103.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:1]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#73|7]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191. Bakunin labels restrictions on freedom as domination on multiple occasions. See ibid., 136, 150, 167, 192, 212, 254.</div>
+Like other great Maya capitals of the interior lowland, Tikal began as a village of farmers nestled on the high ground between vast swamps. By 600 B.C., the first small groups of people had settled on the hilltop that would become the central area of the city (Fig. 4:1). These people left the debris of their lives under what would, in future years, be the North Acropolis, sanctum of Tikal’s kings (Fig. 4:2), and in a chultun[173] located about a mile to the east of the Acropolis.[174] Even this early in their history, the villagers were using this site as a burial place. Amid the humble remains under the North Acropolis, the interred body of an adult villager was found. Lying nearby was a sacrificial offering in the form of a severed head.[175] This sacrificial practice, begun so humbly, would later be incorporated into the burial ceremonies of Tikal’s kings. The household debris surrounding this burial place contained the shells of freshwater snails, which were part of the diet of these pioneers, and obsidian and quartzite flakes, both imported goods—obsidian from the highlands and quartzite from northern Belize.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#83|8]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 54.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-104.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:2 Cross-section of the North Acropolis at Tikal with Preclassic Construction Marked]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#93|9]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 54, 58–59.</div>
+We do not know much about the individual lives of these early inhabitants, but during the next four centuries they continued to multiply and prosper. By the second century B.C. they had already expanded into much of the “downtown” area of Tikal. At that time, they began to define a center for the community by building stone platforms displaying the sloping moldings and inset panels preferred by all the lowland Maya. These platforms were the harbinger of the North Acropolis and no doubt they facilitated the rites of patriarchs and shamans defining their emergent community in relation to their neighbors and the world at large.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#103|10]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 50. See also, 61, 62–63. 68.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-105.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:3 The Painting on the Outer Walls of Structure 5D-Sub-10-1<sup>st</sup> at Tikal]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#113|11]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''40, 446. See also Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 249, 366; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 38.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-106.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:4 Tikal Burial 85 and the Pectoral of a King]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#123|12]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 41.</div>
+The first century B.C. witnessed expansion and elaboration of this Acropolis, via large public buildings and chambered burial vaults of kings and high-ranking nobles. These public buildings prefigured all the characteristics of later state architecture: large apron moldings, pyramidal platforms, steeply inclined stairs, and most important, terraces surmounted by large painted plaster masks depicting the gods fundamental to the newly emerged institution of kingship.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#132|13]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''56.</div>
+The North Acropolis tombs from this era reveal a unique glimpse of the newly emergent Maya ruling elite,[176] who had themselves buried in vaulted chambers set under shrinelike buildings. We find, interred in these chambers, not only the physical remains of these people and the objects they considered of value, but even some pictorial representations of them. In one of these tombs, images of Maya nobles were drawn in black line on the red-painted walls. These figures were perhaps the ancestors or kinsmen of the woman[177] buried inside the chamber. The paintings, along with the rich burial goods laid around the woman’s body, mark the tomb as the “earliest interment of someone of patent consequence”[178] at Tikal. It is interesting that the deceased person in this tomb was a woman, for the Maya of Tikal, like other Maya, gave primacy to males in the reckoning of social status through the principle of patrilineal descent. This tomb, however, shows that status had transcended gender and was now ascribed to both the men and women of noble families. The foundations were laid for a hereditary elite, the clans of the ahauob.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#142|14]]. Alexander Berkman, “A Decade of Bolshevism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 119.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-108.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#152|15]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''13.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-109.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:5]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#162|16]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 121.</div>
+Other burials from the same century also featured vaulted chambers with shrines and rich offerings of pottery, food, stingray spines, and human sacrifices (if the disarticulated skeletons of an adult and an infant can be so identified). Among the buildings constructed during this time was 5D-Sub-10-lst, a small temple blackened inside by the smoke of sacrificial fires. Outside, artists decorated the shrine with elegant polychromatic paintings that were later piously defaced during the termination rituals of this phase of the Acropolis. These paintings are of people or, perhaps, of gods in the guise of people; but because the North Acropolis is the royal sanctum throughout its later history, we think these paintings depict the Tikal ruler and other nobles,[179] suspended in the red-painted blood scrolls of the Vision Rite (Fig. 4:3).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#172|17]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 16.</div>
+Finally, a very rich tomb, called Burial 85 by the archaeologists (Fig. 4:4), contained a headless, thighless corpse tied up in a cinnabar-impregnated bundle along with a spondylus shell and a stingray spine (both instruments of bloodletting rituals).[180] Sewn to the top of the bundle was a green fuchsite portrait head that once served as the chest pectoral of the ruler buried therein.[181] The human face on this pectoral wears the Jester God headdress that would be the crown of kings for the next thousand years.[182] We do not know why some of the king’s bones were missing. The Maya are known to have retained bones of important relatives for relics, so that the skull and thighbones may have resided in the house of his descendants for many generations. Without further evidence the answer must remain a mystery.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#182|18]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 438. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 119; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 164; Makhno, ''Struggle'', 62.</div>
+The noble status of the individuals we find in these tombs is demonstrated not only by the wealth they took with them to the Otherworld, but by the physical condition of their bones. They are larger and more robust than the common people of the kingdom who were buried in other parts of the city.[183] They had a better diet than the people they ruled and were generally taller.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#192|19]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 72–73.</div>
+This new, ambitious elite commissioned more than just one or two buildings. During the first century B.C., the lords called upon their people to remodel the entire central area of Tikal—no doubt with an eye to the works of their rivals at El Mirador and Uaxactun. This construction proceeded in three stages. The first stage[184] involved both the renovation of the North Acropolis and the initial leveling and paving of both the Great Plaza and the West Plaza. During the second stage, the huge East Plaza was leveled and paved. The North Acropolis in the city’s center was now flanked on the east and the west by two huge paved areas.[185] In the third phase, the same three areas were repaved once again, perhaps under the direction of the ruler found in Burial 85 or perhaps shortly after his interment.[186] These large plazas were the gathering places from which the common people witnessed the ritual performances of the king. The labor costs in quarrying stone, burning limestone to yield plaster, and finally building the structures, must have been enormous. If the elite of Tikal were constantly expanding this public space, we can assume that the prosperity and prestige of this kingdom were attracting a steady influx of new people whose participation in the ritual life of the kingdom had to be accommodated.[187]
-[[#202|20]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 27.
+During the same six centuries, Uaxactun to the north underwent a florescence as substantial and dramatic as that of its neighbor Tikal. Late Preclassic platforms in Uaxactun underlying Groups A, E, and H (Fig. 4:5) bear some of the most remarkable Late Preclassic sculpture to have survived into modern times. Temple E-VII-Sub, with its elaborately decorated platform and great plaster masks, was the first of the great Late Preclassic temples to be excavated by archaeologists.[188] At that time it was believed that, up until about A.D. 300, the Maya had possessed only the most simplistic type of farming culture. That vision of Maya history could not accommodate such an elaborate building, so for fifty years that temple stood as an oddity in Maya archaeology. Since then, excavations at Tikal, Cerros, Lamanai, El Mirador, and other sites have uncovered similar structures and shown that Temple E-VII-Sub is a typical expression of Late Preclassic kingship.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#212|21]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 236.</div>
+E-VII-Sub is no longer an oddity even at Uaxactun itself. Deep within and beneath the complex of the South Plaza of Group H[189] (Fig. 4:6) lies a remarkable assemblage of buildings displaying the largest program of Late Preclassic monumental masks yet discovered. This group, composed of six temples mounted on a small acropolis, was superficially buried by an Early Classic acropolis built at a later date. The largest of the masks on this buried complex can be found on the main eastern building (Sub-3) (Fig. 4:7). These massive stucco sculptures decorate the panels of the upper and lower terraces in typical Maya architectural fashion, similar to the decorative programs we have seen at Cerros. Here, however, the visual “stack” of masks does not display the celestial cycle of the sun and Venus, as found on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros (and also on Structure E-VII-Sub at Uaxactun).[190] Instead the masks featured here are models of the sacred living mountain (Witz) rising through the layers of the cosmos.[191] The lower panel displays a great Witz Monster sitting in fish-laden primordial waters with vegetation growing from the sides of its head. Above, on the upper panel, sits an identical Monster (probably the mountain peak above the waters)[192] with a Vision Serpent penetrating its head from side to side.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#222|22]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 147.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-110.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:6 Uaxactun, Group H, the South Plaza after Valdes 1988]]
-[[#232|23]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''197.
+It is important to realize that the facade of Uaxactun Structure H-Sub-3 is simply another version of the sacred cosmos, parallel in function to the sun/Venus iconography of the kings at Cerros. In this particular representation of the cosmos, we see the sacred mountain rising from the primordial sea to form the land, just as the land of Peten rose above its swamps. As always, the Vision Serpent is the symbol of the path of communication between the sacred world and the human world. Here, the Vision Serpent’s body penetrates the mountain just as the spiritual path the king must take penetrates down through the rock floor of the pyramid and reaches into the heart., of the earth itself. Like his counterparts at Cerros and Tikal, the ahau of Uaxactun materialized that path through the rituals he conducted on the temple stairway, the physical representation of the path to the Otherworld. Behind him stood his living sacred mountains, signaling and amplifying his actions.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#242|24]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 202–3. This exact same language was used by Mella. See Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 117–18.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-111.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:7 The Cosmos as Rendered on Uaxactun Structure H-X-Sub-3 after Valdes 1988]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#252|25]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 40.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-112.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:8 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Sculptures from the Portal Building Leading to the Inner Plaza of the Acropolis pop , “mat,” sign after Valdes 1987]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#262|26]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 156.</div>
+The ahau who commissioned this group portrayed himself on a gateway building situated in the center of the acropolis’s western edge.[193] Designed to create a formal processional entrance along the east-west axis of the complex, this small Sub-10 temple has both eastern and western doors. The king and his retainers could enter through this gateway in ceremony, and at certain times of the year the light of the setting sun would shine through it as well. The stairways leading to each of the gateway doors were flanked by stucco jaguar ahau masks[194] surmounted by panels set into the walls of the temple itself. These panels carried modeled-stucco with oven-mat patterns, one of the main symbols of kingship (Fig. 4:8). Stucco portraits of the king (Fig. 4:9) stood in vertical panels between these mats.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#272|27]]. Malatesta,'' Towards Anarchy'','' ''149. See also, 141.</div>
+We know this is the king for several reasons. First of all, the figure represented here wears the royal costume—an elaborate ahau head and celt assemblage on a belt above a bifurcated loin apron. This apparel would become the most sacred and orthodox costume of the Classic king. This figure also stands atop a throne mat. Most important, he is encircled by the same scroll signs we saw surrounding his contemporary, the ruler of Tikal (Fig. 4:3). Here, and in the comparable shrine 5D-Sub-10-lst at Tikal, we see Late Preclassic kings memorializing themselves for the first time. They do so at the front of their principal temples, on the main axis of their sacred precincts. This practice is a prototype of what is to come, for the kings of the Classic period will also raise their stelae portraits in such a place and in such a manner.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#282|28]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''73, 93–94, 130, 133.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-113.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:9 Uaxactun Group H: Stucco Figures of the King Standing amid Blood Scrolls after Valdes 1987]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#292|29]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''78.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-114.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]
-[[#302|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''153.
+Throughout the first century A.D., neither Tikal nor Uaxactun managed to outproduce or dominate the other, but both cities continued to support the institution of kingship. We can see this by the elaborate public architecture and other, smaller ritual objects that have come into our knowledge through archaeological excavation. The imagery each city used to define its kings and to demonstrate the sacred foundations of kingly authority partook of the same fundamental understanding of the world and how it worked. Though Uaxactun may perhaps have had a slight edge, the public constructions of the two kingdoms were relatively equal in scale and elaboration.[195] Tikal and Uaxactun moved into the Classic period as full equals, both ready and able to assume the role of El Mirador when that kingdom disintegrated.[196]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#312|31]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 76–77.</div>
+Tikal’s inscriptions tell us of a single dynasty which ruled the kingdom from Early Classic times until its demise in the ninth century, a dynasty that could boast of at least thirty-nine successors in its long history. The historical founder of this extraordinary dynasty was a character (Fig. 4:10) known as Yax-Moch-Xoc.[197] We have no monuments from his reign, but we can reconstruct that he ruled sometime between A.D. 219 and A.D. 238[198]—that is, at least a century and a half later than the ahau who commemorated himself on Structure 5D-Sub-10—1 st in the North Acropolis. This founder, then, was not the first ruler of Tikal, but he must have performed in such an outstanding fashion that later descendants acknowledged him as the leader who established their dynasty as a power to be reckoned with. The recognition of Yax-Moch-Xoc as founder by later Tikal kings is important for another reason. It constitutes the earliest example yet recognized in ancient texts of the principle of the anchoring ancestor. From this man would descend the noble families that would comprise the inner community of the court, the royal clan of Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#322|32]]. Errico Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 57; ''Towards Anarchy'', 56.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-115.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:10 Yax-Moch-Xoc, the Founder of Tikal’s Dynasty]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#332|33]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 165.</div>
+The earliest historical Tikal king we have in portraiture is the man i depicted on Stela 29, dated at 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Zip (July 8, A.D. 292).[199] This king, Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar[200] (Fig. 4:11), appears surrounded by a complicated system of emblems which designate his rank and power. The twisted rope that hangs in front of his earflare transforms his head into the living embodiment of the glyphic name of the city. He is the kingdom made flesh.[201] Floating above him is an apparition of the dynastic ancestor from whom he received his right to rule.[202] The king’s “divine” right to the throne is manifested in another kind of imagery: In his right arm, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar from which the sun emerges in its human-headed form. This human-headed manifestation of the sun is none other than GUI of the Triad Gods, one of the offspring of the first mother who existed before the present creation. GUI is also the prototype of the second born of the Ancestral Heroes, whose Classic name was Yax-Balam (“First Jaguar”). The Serpent Bar demonstrates the ability of the king to materialize gods and ancestors in the world of his people.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#342|34]]. The following interpretation of solidarity differs from but is indebted to the discussion of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s understanding of solidarity in John Nightingale, “The Concept of Solidarity in Anarchist Thought” (PhD diss., Loughborough University, 2015), 34–108.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-116.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:11 Stela 29, the Earliest Dated Monument at Tikal and the King Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#352|35]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''478.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-117.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:12 The Leiden Plaque and Zero-Moon-Bird]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#362|36]]. Malatesta, ''Café'','' ''57.</div>
+Another image of the Yax-Balam head adorns the chest of the king and a third stares out from his uplifted left hand. The imagery of the disembodied head as a symbol of kingship descends directly from Preclassic times in Mesoamerica. The Olmec, for example, were one of the first cultures to use this symbol, portraying their shaman kings in the form of enormous heads the height of a man. The bundle glyph that signified the kingdom of Tikal appears, surmounting the head attached to the king’s belt and the one he materializes in the mouth of the Serpent Bar, while the king’s own name glyph, a miniature jaguar with a scroll-ahau sign, rides upon the head in his left hand. This is the type of complex imagery the Maya used to designate their rulers and the reason their artistic vision was so powerful and potent.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#372|37]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''68.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-118.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:13 Pre-conquest Stelae from Uaxactun<br>drawing by Ian Graham]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#382|38]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 124.</div>
+The next Tikal ruler we can identify, Moon-Zero-Bird,[203] is portrayed on a royal belt ornament called the Leiden Plaque (Fig. 4:12). The inscribed text on the reverse side of this ornament records Moon-Zero-Bird’s seating as king on September 17, A.D. 320. Like his predecessor, he stands holding a Serpent Bar. This time, however, we see emerging from the serpent’s mouth not only the sun, but God K, the deity of lineages. This king also wears an elaborate royal belt. Hanging from this, behind his knees, is a chain with a god suspended from it. The ruler wears a massive headdress, combining the imagery of the Jester God and the jaguar, thus declaring his affiliation with both and his rank as ahau. At his feet a noble captive struggles against his impending fate as sacrificial victim.[204]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#392|39]]. Élisée Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 144.</div>
+The presence of this captive documents the crucial role played by war and captive taking in early Maya kingship. The Maya fought not to kill their enemies but to capture them. Kings did not take their captives easily, but in aggressive hand-to-hand combat. A defeated ruler or lord was stripped of his finery, bound, and carried back to the victorious city to be tortured and sacrificed in public rituals. The prestige value a royal captive held for a king was high, and often a king would link the names of his important captives to his own throughout his life. Captives were symbols of the prowess and potency of a ruler and his ability to subjugate his enemies.[205]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#402|40]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 415. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''400; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''74; Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” 147.</div>
+Uaxactun, like Tikal, entered the Classic period with a powerful dynasty and, as with Tikal, the first public records of this royal family are fragmentary and incomplete. Uaxactun’s earliest surviving monument, Stela 9, is dated at 8.14.10.13.15 (April 11, A.D. 328). The ruler depicted on it is anonymous because the glyphs containing his name are eroded beyond recall. The ritual event being recorded here is dated thirty-six years later than Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar’s Stela 29 and some eight years after Moon-Zero-Bird’s accession to the throne of Tikal. Although badly eroded, the scene (Fig. 4:13a) depicts essentially the same images as those found on contemporary stelae from Tikal: The elaborately dressed ruler holds a god head in the crook of his arm. We cannot identify the nature of the event taking place because that information did not survive the ravages of time and wear. But we do know, from the date, that this stela commemorated a historical occasion in the king’s life and not an important juncture in the sacred cycles of time, such as a katun ending. As on the Leiden Plaque, a sacrificial victim cowers at the feet of the king,[206] emphasizing war and captive taking as an activity of crucial public interest to the ruler.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#412|41]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''7–8; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007),'' ''58–60, 100–101.</div>
+Uaxactun boasted the earliest surviving Maya monuments to record the public celebrations at the ending of a katun—Stelae 18 and 19 in Group E.[207] The image carved on Stela 18 has been lost to erosion, but Stela 19 (Fig. 4:13b) repeats the royal figure on Stela 9 and underscores the conventional nature of Uaxactun’s manner of presenting rulers. The king wears the royal belt with its god image suspended on a chain behind his legs, while he holds either a god head or a Serpent Bar in his arms. A captive of noble status kneels before him with bound wrists raised as if in a gesture of supplication. We can assume from the recurrence of this captive imagery that the festivals associated with regularities in the Maya calendar required the king of Uaxactun to undertake the royal hunt for captives, just as he was required to do for accession rituals and other dynastic events. The likely source of his victims: Tikal, his nearby neighbor to the south.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#422|42]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 38–39.</div>
+The rivalry between these two cities comes into dramatic focus during the reign of an extraordinary king. Great-Jaguar-Paw, the ninth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, came to the throne sometime between A.D. 320 and 376. This ruler changed the destiny not only of Tikal and Uaxactun, but also the nature of Maya sacred warfare itself. Under his guidance, Tikal not only defeated Uaxactun, but emerged as the Early Classic successor to the glory and power of El Mirador as the dominant kingdom in the Central Peten region.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#432|43]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 63. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 109–10.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-119.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:14 Tikal Stela 39 and Great-Jaguar-Paw]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#442|44]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 7.</div>
+Despite the fact that he was such an important king, we know relatively little about Great-Jaguar-Paw’s life outside of the spectacular campaign he waged against Uaxactun. His reign must have been long, but the dates we have on him come only from his last three years. On one of these historical dates, October 21, A.D. 376, we see Great-Jaguar-Paw ending the seventeenth katun in a ritual depicted on Stela 39[208] (Fig. 4:14). This fragmentary monument[209] shows him only from the waist down, but he is dressed in the same regalia as his royal ancestors, with the god Chac-Xib-Chae dangling from his belt. His ankle cuffs display the sign of day on one leg and night on the other. Instead of a Serpent Bar, however, he holds an executioner’s ax, its flint blade knapped into the image of a jaguar paw. In this guise of warrior and giver of sacrifices, he stands atop a captive he has taken in battle. The unfortunate victim, a bearded noble still wearing part of the regalia that marks his noble station, struggles under the victor’s feet, his wrists bound together in front of his chest. He will die to sanctify the katun ending at Tikal.[210]
-[[#452|45]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 51.
+Warfare was not new to the Maya. Raiding for captives from one kingdom to another had been going on for centuries, for allusions to decapitation are present in even the earliest architectural decorations celebrating kingship. The hunt for sacrificial gifts to give to the gods and the testing of personal prowess in battle was part of the accepted social order, and captive sacrifice was something expected of nobles and kings in the performance of their ritual duties. Just as the gods were sustained by the bloodletting ceremonies of kings, so they were nourished as well by the blood of noble captives. Sacrificial victims like these had been buried as offerings in building terminations and dedications from Late Preclassic times on, and possibly even earlier. Furthermore, the portrayal of living captives is prominent not only at Uaxactun and Tikal, but also at Rio Azul, Xultun, and other Early Classic sites.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#462|46]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 195.</div>
+The war waged by Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal against Uaxactiin, however, was not the traditional hand-to-hand combat of proud nobles striving for personal glory and for captives to give to the gods. This was war on an entirely different scale, played by rules never before heard of and for stakes far higher than the reputations or lives of individuals. In this new warfare of death and conquest, the winner would gain the kingdom of the loser. Tikal won the prize on January 16, A.D. 378.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#472|47]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 199.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-120.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:15 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#482|48]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 4.</div>
+The date of the victory, 8.17.1.4.12 11 Eb 15 Mac, is recorded twice at Uaxactun (on Stela 5 and retrospectively on Stela 22) and twice at Tikal (retrospectively on Stela 31 and on a Ballcourt Marker found in Group 6C-XVI). This is one of the few non-period-ending dates ever recorded by the Maya at more than one site. As we shall see, it was a date of legendary importance for both cities. The two primary characters in this historical drama were the high king of Tikal, Great-Jaguar-Paw’, and a character named Smoking-Frog.[211]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#492|49]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 190.</div>
+The single visual representation of this event occurs at Uaxactun on Stela 5 (Fig. 4:15), which depicts Smoking-Frog as the triumphant leader of the Tikal forces. On the rear of the monument, he proudly names himself as an ahau of Tikal, while on the front he wears the full regalia of a warrior. He grips an obsidian-bladed club, while a bird, perhaps a quetzal, flutters beside his turban. A cluster of long tails arches from the back of his belt and he stands in front of a censer much like the one that appears with Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39 at Tikal (Fig. 4:16).[212]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#502|50]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 125,'' ''181, 211, 218, 229, 7. The exact same class analysis features in Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 19–26, 47–48, 66, 72.</div>
+Aside from the fact that it commemorates the war between Tikal and Uaxactun, this stela is important for another reason. On it we see depicted the first visual representation of the Tlaloc-Venus cpstyme. This costume, with its balloon-shaped headdress and its spearthrower, is profoundly different from that which we have seen adorning Maya ahauob celebrating war and sacrifice at both Tikal and Uaxactun in earlier times. We know that this kind of regalia marks the occasion of a new type of war— conquest war. Smoking-Frog’s celebration of this conquest on Stela 5 may mark the first known display of this complex in the imagery of public monuments, but the costume in several variations (Fig. 4:17) became one of the standard uniforms of the king as conqueror and warrior.[213]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#512|51]]. The historian Bernard Moss has argued that the term “artisan” is misleading, due to it conflating “independent artisans, master artisans and skilled wage earners” into one social group. See Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 13. To avoid this misunderstanding, I have added the qualification that the artisans anarchists referred to did not exploit the labor of others.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-121.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:16 The Tri-lobed Bird and the Place Names of Tikal, Uaxactun, and Copan]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#522|52]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 493.</div>
+The Maya borrowed the costume, and probably the rituals that went with it, from the great central Mexican city, Teotihuacan, whose emissaries appeared in the lowlands at about this time. Although initially adopted as a rationale for conquest, the Maya quickly made these symbols and rituals their own. This imagery held firm at the heart of Maya culture for the next thousand years. For the Maya, among many other peoples in Mesoamerica, this particular costume came to have an overwhelming association with war and sacrifice.[214] Soon after they adopted this kind of war, which we shall call Tlaloc-Venus war,[215] the Maya began timing their battles to particular points in the Venus cycle (especially the first appearance of Eveningstar) and to the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn.[216]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#532|53]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 11–12; Malatesta, ''Café'', 45.</div>
+We do not know why the Maya saw this association with the planets, especially Venus, as important to their concepts of war. However, the fact that later groups, such as the Aztec and Mixtec, also had such associations, which they may have inherited from either the Teotihuacanos or the Maya or both, suggests they were part of the wider Mesoamerican tradition. The date of the Uaxactun conquest, January 16, A.D. 378, has no astronomical significance that we can detect, but this event is also the earliest known appearance of the international war ritual. The astronomical associations may have come later and then spread to other societies using this type of warfare. Certainly, the association clearly had been made within forty years of the conquest because two related events in the reigns of the next two Tikal kings, Curl-Snout and Stormy-Sky, were timed by astronomical alignments (see Notes 57 and 58–5).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#542|54]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 32.</div>
+The subjugation of Uaxactun by Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog, which precipitated this new kind of war and its rituals, survives in the inscriptional record almost entirely in the retrospective histories carved by later rulers at Tikal. The fact that these rulers kept commemorating this event shows both its historical importance and its propaganda value for the descendants of these conquerors. Stela 31, the first of these texts, tells us that the conquest took place twelve days, four uinals, and one tun after the end of the seventeenth katun (Fig. 4:18). The passage records two actors: Smoking-Frog, who “demolished and threw down (homy’ the buildings of Uaxactun,[217] and Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal, who let blood from his genitals[218] to sanctify the victory of his warriors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#552|55]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 50.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-122.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:17 Tlaloc War Costume in Late Classic]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#562|56]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''25; Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 10.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-123.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:18 Tikal’s Record of the Conquest of Uaxactun drawing by John Montgomery]]
-[[#572|57]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'','' ''63.
+The Ballcourt Marker, the second of these inscriptions, records the event (Fig. 4:19) using a glyph in the shape of the head of an old god. This god has a trifurcated blade over his eye and a four-petaled flower on the side of his head. This same god appears as a full-figured effigy in Burial 10 at Tikal. There he sits on a stool made of human leg bones and holds a severed human head on a plate. We do not know the precise word value intended by this glyph, but the god is clearly a deity of human sacrifice, probably by decapitation. In this conquest text, the portrait of his head is used to record one of the actions taking place on that particular day, very probably to the unfortunate captives taken at Uaxactun. These captives were very likely sacrificed by decapitation, perhaps in honor of this gruesome deity. For all of the distinctiveness of the international regalia marking this war and its political consequences, the ultimate ritual of decapitation sacrifice was the same as that which had been practiced by ahauob since time began. We shall see, however, how this international symbolism, grafted onto orthodox Maya practices, functioned as part of the propaganda that enabled Smoking-Frog to be installed as usurper king at Uaxactun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#582|58]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 67.</div>
+Pictorial representations of the battle for Uaxactun have not survived, but we know enough about the way the Maya conducted warfare to reconstruct what this struggle might have been like.[219] One thing is clear: This battle would have been unlike anything the seasoned warriors on either side had ever experienced. And for the people of Uaxactun, it would be more devastating than their wildest imaginings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#592|59]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 50.</div>
+<br>Imagine the growing sense of horror felt by the people of Uaxactun as they watched their vanquished nobility straggle into the central, dazzling white plazas of their city. The clear, hard winter light of the yax-colored sky was the backdrop to a world changing before their frightened eyes. High above them on the bloodred flank of his living mountain, their king struggled to calm himself so that he might enter into the darkness of his portal with a mind clear and purposeful, to challenge his ancestors. Why this violation of all rules of the way men fight? Where was the path to escape this disaster?
-[[#602|60]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''49.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-124.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:19]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#612|61]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''49–50, 149, 151–53; Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''25–38; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''79.</div>
+It had begun well enough. He had led his warriors through the days of tasting, the rites of purification and sacrifice. Deep in the night, with his own hands he painted the strong faces of his kinsmen. In the flickering torchlight of the many-chambered men’s hall, he adorned them with the black and red patterns that would terrify any who dared come against them. How proud he had been when their wives handed them the great honey-colored knives of stone and the shields which they rolled up and hung across their backs. Lastly, their wives gave them the great lances hafted with teeth of lightning, the great flint blades flaked to slice smoothly into the flesh of their enemies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#622|62]]. Anarchists did not all use the same terminology. Malatesta argued in 1891 that anarchists should use the term “government,” instead of “the state.” To avoid confusion, I shall consistently refer to the state. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 111–12.</div>
+The king’s principal wife, who was pregnant with their next child, had waited until the men of lesser status were prepared before she brought his battle gear.[220] His second wife stood nearby holding their infant child, and his firstborn child by his principal wife watched the proceedings with wide eyes. One day, he, like his father, would lead the men into battle in defense of the portals of the sacred mountains. Dressed in his full regalia, the king smiled at his son and led his family out into the darkness of the predawn morning.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#632|63]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 9, 26. In 1871, two years before the publication of ''Statism and Anarchy'', Bakunin had dated the “foundation of modern States” to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kropotkin dated the rise of the modern state to the sixteenth century. See Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 137; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 183, 234, 252.</div>
+In the still darkness his warriors awaited him, already dressed, their battle jackets tied loosely closed across their muscled chests. When he appeared in the flickering torchlight, a low-throated shout greeted him and his army began their last stages of preparation. They strapped on their helmets emblazoned with the images of their animal protectors. His ahauob donned the fearsome god masks, made in the image of the ax-wielding executioner Chac-Xib-Chac and the other denizens of the Other-world. They draped the wizened, shrunken heads of now-dead captives around their necks to let the enemy know they faced seasoned men of high reputation and proven valor.
-[[#642|64]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 13.
+Then there had been the rush of fear and the anticipation of glory as the warriors of Uaxactun reached the open savanna south of the city. There the battle would be fought against the age-old rivals who lived among the swamps to the south, at the right-hand side of the sun. The warming light of the rising sun had burned away the ground mist to reveal the warriors arrayed in tension-filled stillness as they waited to join in battle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#652|65]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 184.</div>
+It had begun in the old ways of battle, following twenty katuns or more of honorable precedent. Standing in the waist-high grass, the old men sounded the great wooden trumpets whose piercing song cut through the bass thunder of the great war drums, the tunkul, filling the forest with the sound of great deeds in progress. His people stood together like a c writhing vision of multicolored glory against the green of those trees, shouting insults about the ancestry of the Tikal enemy ranked in their hundreds across the sea of grass. One after another, singly or in groups, I his ahauob shouted their challenges toward their counterparts across the savanna. Charging out onto the battle ground, they screamed their insults, then retreated once again to the massed safety of their own side. Their bravado and rage rippled through the ranks, transforming them into a pulsing sea of hysterical faces and trembling bodies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#662|66]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 183–84.</div>
+Suddenly, the tension became unbearable. Ihe warriors’ rage exploded into frenzied release as the two armies charged across the grass, trampling it into a tight mat under their thudding feet. They merged in the middle of the field in a screaming discharge of released energy, lightning blade clashing against woven shield in the glorious and dangerous hunt for captives to give as gifts to the gods.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#672|67]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''299, 317–19.</div>
+The lines struck and intermingled in crazed chaos, screams of pain punctuating the cries of challenge. There was a brief flare of victory as Uaxactun’s surging mass of men flowed across the field like a summer flood, sweeping first toward the clump of men who protected Great-Jaguar-Paw, Tikal’s high king, and then back northward toward the Uaxactun lines. The entangled horde of men finally separated, and bloodied, exhausted warriors fell back toward the safety of their own side in the glaring light of midmorning. They needed to wet their dry throats with water and bind up their oozing wounds with strips of paper. Some of the warriors had taken captives who had to be stripped naked and tied down before they escaped in the heat and confusion of the battle. With such great numbers present from each city, the battle would last all day.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#682|68]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''118.</div>
+It was then that the treacherous enemy lord struck. Smoking-Frog, the war chief of Tikal’s army, flashed an unseen signal and from the forest came hundreds of hidden warriors. In eerie silence, never once issuing challenge, they hurled a cloud of spears into the thick ranks of the Uaxactun warriors. Shocked and horrified, the king realized the enemy was using spearthrowers, the hunter’s weapon, killing his people like food animals gathered for slaughter.[221]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#692|69]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147. See also Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''140; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''11–15.</div>
+The surprise of the attack was too great and many of his very best warriors fell to the flying lances, unable to get to safety in time. Many died and even more were crippled by a weapon that the king had seen only foreigners use in war, the foreigners who had come into their lands from Teotihuacan, the giant capital to the far west. The hidden hundreds of Tikal’s militia advanced, all carrying bunches of light, obsidian-tipped darts and throwing-sticks. He heard one of his kinsmen scream as a spear drove through his cheek, turning his black-painted face red with blood.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#702|70]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 45.</div>
+Shouting their hatred for the enemy, the king and his captains leaped toward the Tikal general, Smoking-Frog, where he stood on the far side of the field. Jamming a wedge of bloody spears through the twisting bodies of Tikal’s young men, the warriors’of Uaxactun tore a pathway through enemy ranks for their vengeful king. But it was too late. Above the blare of the long wooden trumpets and the moan of the conch-shell horns, the high chants of Tikal’s triumph sounded in the broken, corpse-strewn meadow. More spears rained down and the king of Uaxactun was forced to pull back to the forest with the shattered remnant of his army. The young men of the royal clan and many valiant men of the great families of Uaxactun lay dead or bound, resigned to suffer the torture that awaited them at the hands of Smoking-Frog and his ahauob.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#712|71]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306. See also, 313–17, 234 and, for anarchist critiques of the police and prisons, 499–508; Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''42–59; Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''332–46; Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''151–72.</div>
+Now in the darkness of his sanctum, the king of Uaxactun heard again that awful chant of victory. The warriors of Tikal were entering his city and he could feel the ancestral gift of his world slipping from his grasp. An unthinkable disaster had befallen him and his people. He emerged into the blinding daylight; and as his vision cleared, he saw smoke billowing from the fires of destruction, which consumed the spacious homes and public halls of his city’s center. Screaming taunts of desperation, the lords of Uaxactun gathered on the sides of their living mountains, throwing their stabbing spears, rocks, and finally their bodies at the advancing and implacable Tikal forces.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#721|72]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''210–11; ''Bakunin'' ''on Anarchism'', 317–20; Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''56.</div>
+In spite of all their efforts, Smoking-Frog and his company swirled around the base of the king’s pyramid, killing and capturing the valiant warriors of the Uaxactun royal clan. The king and his men fought to the last. At the moment of his capture, the king of Uaxactun reached furiously for Smoking-Frog’s throat. Laughing, the Tikal lord jerked him to his knees by his long bound hair. The defeated king glared up at the arrogant Smoking-Frog, costumed in the regalia of the new, barbarous warfare— the round helmet, the spearthrower, and the obsidian club. He cursed him as his captor’s minions stripped him bare and tied his elbows behind his back with rough sisal rope.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#731|73]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 234.</div>
+They would all die. There would be no ransom. Under the code of this new, foreign battle strategy, Smoking-Frog would be able to bring his own Tikal ancestors to the portal of Uaxactun. He and his descendants would rule not only the people of the city but their venerated ancestors as well. It was an act of audacity beyond imagination: war to take not only the king but also his portal—and if possible to hold that portal captive. For as long as Smoking-Frog and his kin reigned, the people of Uaxactun would be cut off from the loving guidance of their ancestors, a people stripped of their very gods.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#741|74]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 226–27. Kropotkin claims that the state is necessarily centralized and hierarchical multiple times in this text and others. See ibid., 199, 275, 310; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''566.</div>
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#751|75]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''113. See also, 136.</div>
+In time to come, this kind of war would require a novel alliance with the denizens of the Otherworld—an unleashing of the forces of Xibalba, particularly Venus, to conquer not only the living royal clan but also all of the apotheosized ancestors of that clan. Kings now had a policy and a strategy that would inspire dreams of conquest throughout the Maya world. Venus would prove a powerful, but treacherous ally in the realization of these dreams.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#761|76]]. Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 212–13. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 29, 44.</div>
+The most tantalizing mystery surrounding the conquest of Uaxactun is the identity of Smoking-Frog. Who was this warrior who appears in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal? We know he was an ahau of Tikal because he consistently included the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Second, we know he was the principal actor in the conquest of Uaxactun, despite the fact that the conquest took place under the authority of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal. All of this leads us to believe that he was most likely the war chief who led Tikal’s army against the rival kingdom, and as a result of his success, was installed as the ruling ahau of Uaxactun by the victorious Tikal king. We know that eighteen years after the conquest, Smoking-Frog was still at Uaxactun. On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396) he conducted a ritual to celebrate the katun ending, an event he depicted on Stela 4 (Fig. 4:20), which he planted next to his portrait as the conqueror (Fig. 4:5). The people of Tikal didn’t forget him on this occasion either. Back at his home city, Smoking-Frog was named on Stela 18 (Fig. 4:20) which recorded the celebration of the same katun ending. He was also prominently named in the retrospective histories recorded on Stela 31 and the Ballcourt Marker.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#771|77]]. Quoted in Zurbrugg, “Introduction,” in Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''15.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-125.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:20 Smoking-Frog at Tikal and Uaxactun]]
-[[#781|78]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''24.
+Yet even considering his prominence in the inscriptions of both Uaxactun and Tikal, we are reasonably sure that Smoking-Frog never ruled Tikal as its king. Instead, another ahau named Curl-Snout (Fig. 4:20) became high king of Tikal on September 13, 379, less than two years after the conquest. Curl-Snout apparently held his throne, however, under the sufferance of Smoking-Frog, who appears to have ruled the combined kingdom that was forged by the conquest. We would like to put forward the hypothesis that Smoking-Frog was the brother of Great-Jaguar-Paw, the high king of Tikal at the time of the battle of Uaxactun, and that Curl-Snout was his nephew.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#791|79]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 25, 27; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''115, 118.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-126.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:21 Stela 31: Curl-Snout in the Land of Smoking-Frog drawing by John Montgomery]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#801|80]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 63.</div>
+There are several clues leading to this conclusion. One of the ways we can infer the relationship between Curl-Snout and Smoking-Frog is from the inscriptions at Tikal, which always name Curl-Snout either as the yahau “the noble of” (in this case, “the vassal of”) Smoking-Frog (Stela 18) or as acting u cab “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (Stela 31). When Curl-Snout depicted himself acceding to Tikal’s kingship on Stela 4 and ending Katun 18 on Stela 18, he found it advisable to record publicly his relationship to Smoking-Frog. Perhaps the most important reference to their relationship occurs on Stela 31 where an important event in Curl-Snout’s life, possibly his accession, is said to have taken place “in the land of Smoking-Frog” (Fig. 4:21).[222] From these references we surmise that Curl-Snout ruled Tikal, but under the aegis of Smoking-Frog.[223]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#811|81]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 42, 50, 61; Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 73–79.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-127.jpg 70f][Fig. 4:22 Kinship Relationships of Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal]]
-[[#821|82]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 78.
+There are additional hints as to the identity of Smoking-Frog and his relationship to Curl-Snout. The text on the Ballcourt Marker names Smoking-Frog as the ihtan,[224] “sibling,” of a person named “Spearthrower-Owl.” It is interesting that Stela 31, erected many years later by Curl-Snout’s son and heir, Stormy-Sky, names Curl-Snout as the “child of” a person named by an almost identical glyph, “Spearthrower-Shield” (Fig. 4:22). We have now realized that these two seemingly different glyphs are merely different ways of writing the same thing—the shield-owl-spear-thrower substitution that would become Pacafs name at Palenque and the name of the third Lord of the Night.[225] If this substitution is correctly identified, then we can assert that Smoking-Frog was the brother and Curl-Snout the son of the same man. Our remaining task is to determine the identity of the person whom these “spearthrower” glyphs name.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#831|83]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 77. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 13, 23.</div>
+The solution to this mystery involves some complicated detective work. The “spearthrower” name also occurs on Stela 31 in another context. It is the title on the headdress Stormy-Sky holds aloft, prior to donning it in the public ritual depicted on the front of the monument (Fig. 4:23). A medallion attached to the front of the headdress depicts an owl with a shield on its wing and a throwing dart piercing its breast. Stormy-Sky is about to become a “spearthrower-owl-shield” person by putting on this headdress.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#841|84]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 50. This idea was later repeated almost word for word by Goldman. See Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 64.</div>
+The last readable clause of the text on this monument tells us that Stormy-Sky performed this ritual on June 11, A.D. 439, when Venus was near its eastern elongation.[226] The glyph that records this ritual action is the same as the one recording the bloodletting event (Fig. 4:23) that Great-Jaguar-Paw performed on the day Uaxactun was conquered. The use of the same verb in both contexts is to declare a “like-in-kindness” between the two actors. If Stormy-Sky became the “spearthrower-owl” person by performing this rite, we may assume that Great-Jaguar-Paw had taken on this identity in the same ritual context. The “spearthrowerowl” named as the brother of Smoking-Frog and the father of Curl-Snout was none other than the first great Tikal king to call himself by that title—Great-Jaguar-Paw, the king who made war with spearthrowers his own. Furthermore, it is this very equation between grandfather and grandson that Stormy-Sky intended to portray in the first place. It is not by accident that he designated himself the “spearthrower-shield” when he reenacted his ancestor’s bloodletting event. By doing so, he intended to remind his people that he was the grandson of this powerful and innovative man.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#851|85]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 197–98.</div>
+[[][Fig. 4:23 The Spearthrower Title and Stormy-Sky at Tikal<br>drawing of text and stela by John Montgomery]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#861|86]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''189–90, 203, 207; Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'','' ''70; Rudolf Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937),'' ''298–339; Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 71–72, 182, 188; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 120–143.</div>
+In the scenario we have reconstructed, forces from Tikal under the military leadership of Smoking-Frog, the brother of the high king, attacked and defeated the forces of their neighboring kingdom, Uaxactiin, on January 16, 378. The victory placed Smoking-Frog on the throne of Uaxactun, where he oversaw the accession of his nephew, Curl-Snout, to Tikal’s throne on September 13, A.D. 379. For the next eighteen years, and perhaps as long as twenty-six years,[227] Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, possibly marrying into its ruling family as well. Even though Smoking-Frog ruled Uaxactun, however, he remained extremely important at Tikal. It’s possible he was the overall ruler of the new combined kingdom that resulted from his victory in battle.
-[[#871|87]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''174; ''Bakunin on Anarchism'','' ''396–7; Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 175–189; Emma Goldman, ''Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation'','' 1896–1926'','' ''ed. Shawn P. Wilbur (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'','' ''79, 92–93.
+That the conquest of Uaxactun remained a glorious event of historical memory both at Uaxactun and Tikal is clear from the inscriptions at both sites. The descendants of Smoking-Frog continued to erect monuments at Uaxactun on a regular basis. One hundred and twenty-six years after the conquest, on 9.3.10.0.0 (December 9, 504), a Uaxactun ruler celebrated the conquest by erecting Stela 22. The day of the victory, 11 Eb, appears with the same conquest verb (hom, “to knock down or demolish buildings”) describing the action. Even at such a late date, the borrowed glory of the battle of Uaxactun could burnish the deeds of Smoking-Frog’s progeny.
-[[#881|88]]. Terence Kissack, ''Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States'','' 1895–1917'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008); Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'','' ''169–180.
+Another example of this “glory by association” can be seen on the above mentioned Stela 31, erected at Tikal. This monument was commissioned by Stormy-Sky, the grandson of the conqueror, and focused on the defeat of Uaxactun.[228] Stormy-Sky’s motivation in featuring this conquest was, of course, to remember the glories of his grandfather and the triumph of his kingdom against an old rival; but he also gained personal prestige by reminding his people of this event. By concentrating on retrospective historical events on this stela, Stormy-Sky was also able to emphasize the extraordinary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus on 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, A.D. 411, see Note 58–5) which occurred during his father’s, Curl-Snout’s, reign. He then used the conquest and the hierophany as a background to emphasize the importance of his own bloodletting on June 10, 439. So effective was this strategy that his own descendant, Ah-Cacaw, remembered and celebrated this same bloodletting event thirteen katuns later (9.13.3.9.18 or September 17, 695).[229]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#891|89]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 111–135; Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''150–57.</div>
+The most extraordinary record of the conquest was inscribed on the Ballcourt Marker[230] that was recently discovered in a lineage compound south of the Lost World group. The bailgame with its decapitation and sacrificial associations had been a central component of Maya ritual since the Late Preclassic period, but the marker recording the Uaxactun conquest is not typical of the floor-mounted stone disk used in the Maya ballcourts. This Tikal marker, in the shape of a thin cylinder surmounted by a sphere and disk, is nearly identical to ballcourt markers pictured in the murals of the Tlalocan at Teotihuacan itself.[231] It rests on its own Teotihuacan-style platform and a two-paneled inscription wraps around the cylinder base (Fig. 4:19c). Its form emulates the style of Teotihuacan ballcourt markers as a reflection of the importance of the Tlaloc-Venus war in its records.[232]
-[[#901|90]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 131–49; Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 6–18.
+The inscription is as extraordinary as the object itself. One panel records the conquest of Uaxactun by Smoking-Frog (Fig. 4:19a), while the opposite side records the accession to office of the fourth lord to rule the lineage that occupied this compound.[233] This was presumably the lineage head who went to war under the leadership of Smoking-Frog. The Ballcourt Marker itself was planted in the altar on January 24, 414, some thirty-six years after the conquest of Uaxactun, but it was not commissioned by a king. It was erected by a lord who named himself “the ahau (in the sense of “vassal’) of Smoking-Frog of Tikal” (Fig. 4:19c).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#911|91]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 136–7, 156–62, 233; Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'','' ''160–1; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', 136. For a discussion of vegetarianism in the Spanish anarchist movement see Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 87–8, 161–2.</div>
+The people who lived and worked in this ritual/residential complex were members of one of the important, nonroyal lineages of the kingdom. They were not themselves kings; but like their king and his descendants, they remembered the conquest of Uaxactun as the most glorious event in living memory. Like Stormy-Sky, they gained prestige by celebrating its memory in texts recording the history of their own lineage. This lineage presumably provided warriors, perhaps even leaders, for Smoking-Frog’s army and forever gained recognition and glory by their participation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#921|92]]. Zoe Baker, “Bakunin was a Racist,” Anarchopac.com, October 31, 2021, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-bakunin-was-a-racist.</div>
+The war and its aftermath affected more than just the two kingdoms and the people directly involved. Tikal’s victory gave the lords who ruled that kingdom the advantage they needed to dominate the central Peten for the next 180 years. However, this great victory also coincided with an intensified interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan, whose influence, as we have seen, appeared in Maya symbolism just about the time this war was fought. What did this interaction mean for the Maya culture and how far did their involvement with the civilization of Teotihuacan go? To answer this question, we must examine a little history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#931|93]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 115–8; A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 34–5. See also endnote 10 in the introduction.</div>
+During the same centuries that saw the development of lowland Maya kingdoms, the new state of Teotihuacan had simultaneously been growing to maturity in the valley of Mexico (Fig. 4:24). We know that the lowland Maya and the Teotihuacanos had been in contact with each other from at least the first century A.D. Offerings of the distinctive green obsidian mined by the Teotihuacanos have been discovered in Late Preclassic Maya sites at Nohmul and at Altun Ha in Belize.[234] Furthermore, the exchange of material goods was not just in one direction. Just as Teotihuacan-style objects occur at Tikal and elsewhere in the lowlands, Maya-style objects also occur at Teotihuacan. Yet even in light of this long-term exchange of exotic goods between the two regions, something very special and different, at least in scale, took place on the occasion of the war against Uaxactun. What was exchanged this time was not just goods, but a whole philosophy. The Maya borrowed the idea and the imagery of conquest war from the Teotihuacanos and made it their own.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#941|94]]. Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 555.</div>
+On Stela 5 at Uaxactun (Fig. 4:15), the conqueror, Smoking-Frog, chose to depict himself in ritual war regalia of the Teotihuacan style. On Stela 4 at Tikal (Fig. 4:20), Curl-Snout, the son of Great-Jaguar-Paw, ruler of Tikal at the time of the conquest, depicted himself wearing a shell necklace, also in the style of Teotihuacan, when he acceded as king. ^ Curl-Snout appears again on the sides of Stela 31 (Fig. 4:25), but this time in the same war regalia worn by Smoking-Frog at Uaxactun. If we recall that the Maya utilized their public art for purposes of propaganda, we can see the reasoning behind this costume. When Stormy-Sky acceded to the throne, he needed to present his father (the forebear upon whom his right to rule depended) in the most powerful light possible. What could be more prestigious than for Curl-Snout to appear in the costume worn by Smoking-Frog at the moment of his greatest triumph?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#951|95]]. Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 150, 151.</div>
+[[][Teotihuacan: the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#961|96]]. Malatesta,'' Method of Freedom'', 299. For other definitions of anarchy, see Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 120–21; Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 144; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 133–34; Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 40; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 26, 58; Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'', 38.</div>
+[[][The Talud-tablero Style of Architecture Characteristic of Teotihuacan<br>Fig. 4:24]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#971|97]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 99. See also Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 15–16.</div>
+To give the impression that we are seeing Curl-Snout standing behind his son, Stormy-Sky represented him twice, on opposite sides of the stela. On one side we see the inside of his shield and the outside of his spearthrower; on the other we see the inside of the spearthrower, and the outside of the shield. Upon his shield we see the image of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed deity that the Maya would come to associate with this particular kind of war and bloodletting ritual.[235]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#981|98]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 140</div>
+Burials from this period at Tikal also give evidence of the Maya interaction with Teotihuacan. Two of our protagonists were buried in the North Acropolis at Tikal: Curl-Snout in Burial 10 and Stormy-Sky in Burial 48.[236] Both tombs include significant numbers of pots made in the style of Teotihuacan, emulating imagery particularly associated with that city. Even more to the point, a special cache at Tikal called Problematic Deposit 5O[237] included what may very well be the interred remains of resident Teotihuacanos of high rank. The most interesting object in this deposit is a vase that appears to depict the arrival of a group of Teotihuacanos at a Maya city (Fig. 4:26).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#991|99]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 141.</div>
+[[][Fig. 4:25 tails Curl-Snout as the Spearthrower Warrior on the Sides of Stela 31]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1001|100]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 142.</div>
+On this vase six Teotihuacanos, marked by their clothing, walk away from a place of talud-tablero-style architecture, the ethnic signal of Teotihuacan (Fig. 4:24), to arrive at a place that has both talud-tablero temples and stepped pyramids of Maya design. At the city of departure, they leave a child and a squatting figure, perhaps representing the family members who see them off on their long journey. Four of the <verbatim><</verbatim> Teotihuacano visitors wear the long-tailed costume we have seen at Uaxactun and Tikal. These same persons carry spearthrowers and appear to escort two other characters who carry lidded cylinders, a pottery shape particularly associated with Teotihuacan.[238] At the end of this “journey,” the arriving Teotihuacanos are greeted by a person dressed like a Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1011|101]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 128.</div>
+We do not know for sure which cities the artist intended to represent on this vessel—although it would seem logical to identify Teotihuacan as the starting point and Tikal as the point of arrival.[239] The four Teotihuacanos carrying weapons constitute a warrior escort for the two vase-carrying individuals behind them. The rear figures are distinguished by tasseled headdresses of the type that also show up prominently at Kaminaljuyu and Monte Alban in contexts where Teotihuacan symbolism have merged with local traditions. The individuals who wear these headdresses are most likely special-status people who traveled as emissaries, or professional merchants representing their great city throughout western Mesoamerica.[240]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1021|102]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 302. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''304. The same point is made by Mella,'' Anarchist Socialism'', 1–9, 27.</div>
+[[][Fig. 4:26 A Visit by Teotihuacanos Carved on a Black Cylindrical Vase from Problematic Deposit 50]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1031|103]]. Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015). For other examples, see James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''247–67; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread''<nowiki>; Diego Abad de Santillán, </nowiki>''After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain'', trans. Louis Frank (New York: Greenberg, 1937).</div>
+The appearance of this kind of imagery at Tikal has been explained in several ways, ranging from the military conquest of these sites by Teotihuacan to the usurpation of Tikal’s throne by lords from Teotihuacan or Kaminaljuyu.[241] The last alternative seems unlikely. The status of Curl-Snout as Stormy-Sky’s father is certain. If we are accurate in our analysis of the “spearthrower-shield” glyph, Great-Jaguar-Paw was Curl-Snout’s father and Smoking-Frog’s brother. If these relationships are correctly deciphered, then we can verify an unbroken descent in the Tikal royal line during the very time Teotihuacano imagery begins appearing in such prominence.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1041|104]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 41.</div>
+If we dismiss conquest and usurpation, then what does the presence of this imagery imply? There is little doubt that the Teotihuacanos were physically present at Tikal, at least in small numbers, just as small numbers of lowland Maya were also present at Teotihuacan. The reason for this was not military occupation. Rather, during the fifth and sixth centuries, Teotihuacan had established a network binding the individual societies in Mesoamerica together in a great web of trade and exchange.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1051|105]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49</div>
+When the Teotihuacanos departed their city to travel among the different areas participating in that trade network, they went as tasselheaded ambassador-traders, protected by warriors. Sacred war as they defined and practiced it is registered in the murals of Atetelco and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in their own great city.[242] The symbology in these images is clearly related, if not identical, to the Tlaloc warfare practiced by the Maya. As these Teotihuacanos spread out from their sacred city, which they believed to be the point on earth where the supernatural world was embodied,[243] they took their form of war and sacrificial rituals with them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1061|106]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 299.</div>
+The arrival of the Teotihuacan trader-ambassadors in the central Peten may have intensified the rivalry that already existed between Uaxactiin and Tikal. At the very least their presence inflated the stakes at risk—the wealth in material goods and ideas that came with controlling the trade network of the central Peten region. Certainly when Smoking-Frog depicted himself—and later on, his father—in the costume worn by the Teotihuacan warriors, it was because this costume was prestigious and important propaganda to his people. How much more impressive must the Teotihuacan symbolism have been to the people of the whole Peten region when its adoption by Tikal’s rulers coincided with their conquest of Uaxactun?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1071|107]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 300.</div>
+Both the son and grandson of the triumphant Great-Jaguar-Paw knew the propaganda value of the Tlaloc complex. They enthusiastically adopted the imagery and its associated rituals, and then quite deliberately commemorated their ancestor’s great feat whenever possible on their own public monuments. By the time Stormy-Sky erected Stela 31, this war and sacrifice ritual was firmly associated with Venus or Venus-Jupiter-Saturn hierophanies, most probably a Maya adaptation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1081|108]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 302.</div>
+With the enthusiasm of the newly converted, the Maya adopted this ritual and made it their own. It survived the collapse of the Classic period civilization and is prominent at Chichen Itza and other northern sites of the Postclassic period. It may even have traveled back to central Mexico via Cacaxtla and Xochicalco: For it is the Maya version of the Tlaloc complex that appears at those sites at the end of the Classic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1091|109]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 301, 302.</div>
+Why did the Maya take to this new ritual so readily and enthusiastically? Perhaps the best answer is that it helped Tikal win a staggering victory that made her kings the dominant ahauob of the central Peten. Intensified trade and political association with Teotihuacan were other likely results of this victory. As a ruler of empire, Tikal experienced an inflation of prestige perhaps unprecedented in Maya history and rarely replicated again. This conquest was the stuff of legends and the people of Tikal never let the story pass from memory. Thirteen katuns later another descendent memorialized this legendary conquest when he sought to rebuild the glory of Tikal after a disastrous defeat on the battlefield.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1101|110]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 300.</div>
+But there is more to this scenario than just the adoption of a new art of war. From early in their history, the Maya honored offerings of blood above all others as the most sacred gifts to the gods. Individuals were often sacrificed to sanctify the construction of a new building. Indeed, the people of Cuello killed and dismembered twenty-six individuals to place under the floor of a new platform they built around 400 B.C.[244] Bloodletting regalia and caches are consistently found at Late Preclassic sites. Some early communities were also fortified, suggesting that ritual war for the taking of sacrificial victims was an important part of Maya life from a very early time. The trifurcated scrolls representing blood, which flow from the mouth of the Tlaloc image, are found on the great plaster masks of Late Preclassic Maya architecture. The symbolism and ritual of the Teotihuacanos’ war imagery fell on fertile ground.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1111|111]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 231.</div>
+The Maya did more than just borrow the imagery and ritual: They adapted it to their needs. To the Maya the Tlaloc complex with its associated jaguar, bird, spearthrower, and mosaic headdress imagery (see Note 45) meant war and sacrifice above all things. The association of this war/sacrifice complex with planetary conjunctions may have been present at Teotihuacan, but we can never test for that since the Teotihuacanos did not record dates in their art. We do not know when their rituals occurred or if the murals at Teotihuacan even represent specific historical acts. For the Maya, however, the Tlaloc complex became associated with war and sacrifice timed by the apparitions of Venus and Jupiter.[245]
-[[#1121|112]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 47.
+The prominence of Teotihuacan-style imagery in the tombs and on &’the stelae of Tikal lasted only through Stormy-Sky’s reign. By A.D. 475, the rulers of Tikal abandoned this way of representing themselves and concentrated on other aspects of kingship. The intensive interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan lasted for only a hundred years, shifting thereafter to the neutral ground at Kaminaljuyu.[246] Contact between the Teotihuacanos and the lowland Maya must have continued at least until the eighth century when Teotihuacan ceased to be a major intercultural power. The first flush of intense contact is what we have observed at Tikal and it brought prestige and wealth to both parties.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1131|113]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49–62; Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 156–68, 215–30.</div>
+From the Teotihuacanos the Maya gained a sacrificial ritual and a new kind of warfare that would remain central to their religion at least until the ninth century. We know less about what Teotihuacan gained from the interchange. The end result, however, was the establishment of an international network of trade along which moved material goods and ideas. This interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica resulted in a florescence of civilized life, a cultural brilliance and intensity that exceeded even the accomplishments of the Olmec, the first great civilization to arise in Mesoamerica.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1141|114]]. This system of decision-making is often referred to as direct democracy without the state by modern anarchists. This language was largely not used by historical anarchists because they used the word “democracy” to refer to systems of government that were incompatible with anarchism, such as bourgeois parliamentary representative democracy or Ancient Athens. For an overview of this topic, see Baker, “Anarchism and Democracy,” Anarchopac.com, April 15, 2022, https://anarchopac.com/2022/04/15/anarchism-and-democracy.</div>
+. Star Wars in the Seventh Century
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1151|115]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 133.</div>
+The kingdom of Tikal throve after the conquest of Uaxactun, fulfilling the promise of its victory by becoming the largest and most prosperous Early Classic kingdom in the Maya heartland. This prosperity can be seen in the astounding proliferation of temples and public art commissioned by the ahauob of ensuing generations. The descendants of the victorious king, Great-Jaguar-Paw, launched an ambitious building program that changed the face of the city and studded the terrace in front of the North Acropolis with a forest of tree-stones. These stelae tell us something about the changing emphasis of kingship in Tikal, for the kings who reigned after Great-Jaguar-Paw’s grandson, Stormy-Sky, chose a different style of representing themselves, one that emphasized their humanity by simplifying the cluster of symbolism surrounding them.[247] In place of the old-style portraits that depicted them in full royal regalia, these rulers depicted themselves (Fig. 5:1a and b) holding simple decorated staffs in rituals celebrating period endings in the Maya calendar.[248] In this manner they removed the focus of history from the arena of personal and dynastic events, like birth, accession, and conquest, and placed it instead upon the rhythms of time and the great festival cycles by which these rhythms were celebrated.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1161|116]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 148–49; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 614. For a few different proposals on how an anarchist society could respond to people who engaged in acts of violent oppression, see Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 260–61; Malatesta, ''Café'', 130–35; Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''46–48.</div>
+[[][Fig. 5:1]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1171|117]]. Anarchist authors used a variety of different terms when referring to assemblies, such as associations of production and consumption, labor councils, popular assemblies, communal assemblies, and communes. To avoid confusion I have chosen to use the language of workplace, community, and general assemblies.</div>
+After thirty years of depicting themselves in this style, the rulers of Tikal began experimenting again, encouraging their artisans to expand the frontiers of tradition into fresh and innovative areas. These artists created new styles by an imaginative combination of elements both old and new. Around 9.4.0.0.0 (A.D. 514), for example, the manner of depicting kings on stelae switched to a front view carved in a relief deep enough to model the king’s face three-quarters in the round. Sculptors also experimented with formats that placed the king’s parents on either side of the stela (Fig. 5:1c) in a modern echo of Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece, Stela 31. Old themes, like the bound captive lying at the feet of the king (Fig. 5:Id), returned to stelae compositions. Eventually the styles for representing kings took their inspiration from even earlier times, creating the Maya version of the adage “Everything old is new again.” In 557, the twenty-first successor, Double-Bird, commissioned a monument in a style that was popular during Tikal’s first flush of conquest glory, depicting himself in shallow relief, standing profile to the viewer (Fig. 5:5). Double-Bird’s monument, Stela 17, holds a unique place in the commemorative art of Tikal. It was the last monument erected before a 130-year period of silence fell upon the inscribed history of this great capital. The reason for this long silence was the conquest of the city by a new kingdom that had grown to maturity m the region to the southeast.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1181|118]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy ''(Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d.),'' ''30. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''17–19, 390–91; ''Towards Anarchy'', 74; ''Method of Freedom'', 488.</div>
+Piecing together the true story of Tikal’s two centuries of cultural innovation is a difficult and painstaking task. Many of the existing stelae and art objects were deliberately effaced or smashed by the conquerors in the time following the erection of Stela 17. Even in such a shattered form, however, one can see the extraordinary beauty and power of Tikal’s artistic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the written history that has come to us from this period is as poor and spotty as the visual one. Many of the texts that survived the destructive frenzy of Tikal’s nemesis treat only of the period-ending celebrations that had become the focus of Tikal’s ritual life. Although the records of the actors who entered and left the stage of history during this period are sketchy, they still provide at least a partial account of the kings who held Tikal’s throne.[249] The kings we currently know from this period are as follows:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1191|119]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''488; Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'','' ''67, 69–70.</div>
+| <strong>Date</strong> | <strong>Name</strong> | # | <strong>Monuments</strong> | <strong>Date</strong> |
+| | <strong>Staff Stela</strong> | | | |
+| 9.2.0.0.0 | Kan-Boar | 12<sup>th</sup> | St. 9, 13 | 475 |
+| | Mah-Kina-Chan | 13<sup>th</sup> | Pot, St. 8? | |
+| 9.2.13.0.0 | Jaguar-Paw-Skull | 14<sup>th</sup> | St. 7 | 488 |
+| 9.3.O.O.O | | | St. 3,15,27 | 495 |
+| 9.4.0.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 6 | 514 |
+| | <strong>Frontal Style</strong> | | | |
+| 9.3.9.13.3 | birth, Lady of Tikal | ??? | St. 23 | 504 |
+| 9.3.16.18.4 | accession, ?? | .??? | St. 23 | 511 |
+| 9.4.3.0.0 | ??? | ??? | St. 25 | 517 |
+| 9.4.13.0.0 | Curl-Head | 19<sup>th</sup> | St. 10, 12 | 527 |
+| 9.5.O.O.O? | ??? | | St. 14 | 534 |
+| | <strong>Profile Style</strong> | | | |
+| 9.5.3.9.15 | Double-Bird | 21<sup>st</sup> | St. 17 | 537 |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1201|120]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 136.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-49.jpg 70f][The Sequence of the History of the Caracol-Tikal-Naranjo Wars]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1211|121]]. Malatesta, ''Between Peasants'', 28–29.</div>
+| Maya date | A.D. | Tikal | Naranjo | Dos Pilas | Caracol | Calakmul |
+| 9.5.3.9.15 | 12/31/537 | Double-Bird acts (accedes) | |
+| 9.5.12.0.4 | 5/7/546 | | Ruler I accedes |
+| 1Q1 7 | 4/1R/SS1 | | | | Lord Water accedes |
+| 9.6.2.1.11 | 4/11/556 | | | | ax-war against Tikal |
+| 9.6.3.9.15 | 9/17/557 | Double-Bird’s last date |
+| 9.Ó.8.4.2 | 5/1/562 | | | | star-war at Tikal |
+| 9.9.4.16.2 | 3/9/618 | | | | Lord K3” 11 accedes |
+| 9.95.13.8 | 1/9/619 | | | | | lord acts at Naranjo |
+| 9.9.13.4.4 | 5/28/626 | | | | sacrifice of “he of Naranjo” |
+| 9.9.14.3.5 | 5/4/627 | | | | bailgame and sacrifice |
+| 9.9.17.11.14 | 10/4/630 | | | | death of Naranjo lord |
+| 9.9.18.16.3 | 12/27/631 | | | | star war against Naranjo |
+| 9.10.3.2.12 | 3/4/636 | | | | star war against Naranjo |
+| 9.10.4.16.2 | 11/24/637 | | | | 1 katun of rule, Lord Kan II |
+| 9.10.10.0.0 | 12/6/642 | | victory stair dedicated by Caracol |
+| 9.10.12.11.2 | 7/5/645 | | | Flint-Sky-God K accedes |
+| 9.10.16.16.19 10/9/649 | | | | | | Jaguar-Paw born |
+| 9.11.11.9.17 | 3/2/664 | | | capture of Tah-Mo’ |
+| 9.12.9.17.16 | 5/6/682 | Ah Cacaw accedes |
+| 9.12.10.5.12 | 8/30/682 | | Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau arrives from Dos Pilas |
+| 9.12.13.17.7 | 4/6/686 | | | | Jaguar-Paw accedes |
+| 9.12.15.13.7 | 1/6/688 | | Smoking-Squirrel born |
+| 9.13.0.0.0 | 3/18/692 | katun ending and Stela 30 twin pyramid complex |
+| 9.13.1.3.19 | 5/31/693 | | Smoking-Squirrel accedes |
+| 9.13.1.4.19 | 6/20/693 | | Kinichil-Cab captured |
+| 9.13.1.9.5 | 9/14/693 | | smoke-shell event |
+| 9.13.1.13.14 | 12/12/693 | | smoke-shell event |
+| 9.13.2.16.0 | 2/1/695 | | war against Ucanal |
+| 9.13.3.7.18 | 8/8/695 | Ah-Cacaw captures Jaguar-Paw of El Perú | | | | Jaguar-Paw captured |
+| 9.13.3.8.11 | 8/21/695 | sacrifice of captives |
+| 9.13.3.9.18 | 9/17/695 | dedication of Temple 33-lst with bloodletting rituals |
+| 9.13.3.13.15 | 12/3/695 | sacrificial (war?) ritual with Ox-Ha-Te of El Peru |
+| 9.13.6.2.0 | 3/27/698 | | | Shield-God K accedes |
+| 9.13.6.4.17 | 5/23/698 | | smoke-shell event with Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal |
+| 9.13.6.10.4 | 9/7/698 | | smoke-shell event with Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal |
+| 9.13.7.3.8 | 4/19/699 | | sacrificial rite with Lady Wak-Chanil-Ahau |
+| 9.13.10.0.0 | 1/26/702 | | Smoking-Squirrel dedicates stela |
+| | | | and displays Shield-Jaguar in sacrificial rites |
+| 9.13.18.4.16 | 3/23/710 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Yaxha |
+| 9.13.18.9.15 | 6/28/710 | | sacrifice of Yaxha captive |
+| 9.13.19.6.3 | 4/12/711 | | Smoking-Squirrel attacks Sacnab |
+| 9.14.0.0.0 | 12/5/711 | | Venus and period-ending ceremonies |
+| | | Stela 16 twin-pyramid complex |
+| 9.14.0.10.0 | 6/18/711 | summer solstice and Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal in sacrificial rite |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1221|122]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170.</div>
+While we know little of the personal history of these rulers, they did leave their permanent mark upon the city in the form of the magnificent buildings raised under their patronage. Much of this construction took place in the sacred precincts of the North Acropolis. One of the most extraordinary projects commissioned there was the new version of Temple 5D-33—2<sup>nd</sup> (Fig. 5:2), a temple that covered the tomb of the great ruler Stormy-Sky.[250] During the ensuing centuries, this magnificent new temple served as the central stage front of the face of the North Acropolis, which looked out onto the Great Plaza to the south. It was an important symbol of kingship during the middle period of Tikal’s history and the backdrop for all dynastic rituals conducted within the Great Plaza.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1231|123]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''128.</div>
+In contrast to the novelty of the stelae of this era, Temple 5D-33-2<sup>nd</sup> was a model of tradition. The great plaster masks that surmounted its pyramid and its temple walls restated the symbolism of the Late Preclassic period. This symbolic message was similar to the one we saw on Group H at Uaxactun, a cosmology based upon the Sacred Mountains rather than the arch of the sun and Venus.[251] The lowest masks on Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> are Witz-Mountain Monsters, whose mouths have been rendered as caves (Fig. 5:2). The middle masks represent more Witz Monsters. These have small, severed human heads and blood scrolls (or perhaps maize) emerging from their summits. The masks on the very top level of the temple depict dragons in the shape of what is probably Venus, representing the front head of the Cosmic Monster. Vines, representing the forests of the world, sprout from the top of these open-mouthed heads.[252] As the king performed his sacred rituals, this facade, like the great mask assemblages of Preclassic Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun discussed in earlier chapters, enveloped him in the ancient, orthodox, and transcendent cosmology of the Maya people.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1241|124]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 105, 58, 73–75.</div>
+Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> was but one building in a rash of construction (Fig. 5:3) that continued into the sixth century. This renovation took place over a period of seventy years under the direction of ten successive rulers, many of whom sat the throne for only a short time.[253] The reason for the brief length of their reigns is not known, but it is possible that what we see here is the passing of the kingship from sibling to sibling at the death of a brother.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1251|125]]. The following account is based on Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170–71, 179, 206; Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 253, 264–66; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60–63; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 105, 188; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''60–65.</div>
+Beginning around 9.4.0.0.0, these rulers reworked the summit of the North Acropolis into a pattern of eight buildings, a unique pattern that all future Tikal kings would honor and maintain. One of the most lasting innovations of this time, however, was the twin-pyramid complex, whose prototype was erected in the center of the East Plaza.[254] This new type of architecture, with its uncarved pillars and lack of focus on personal history, facilitated the celebration of period-ending rites, a practice that had been initiated at Tikal by Curl-Snout on Stela 18. His successors sustained that practice, developing what would henceforth be an architectural hallmark of this city and a principal focus of Tikal’s festival cycle for the rest of its history.[255]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#126|126]]. Anarchists throughout Latin America referred to national federations as the regional federations of a country in the world—for example, the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA), rather than the Argentine National Workers’ Federation. See Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 5–6, 63.</div>
+Suddenly, amid the exuberant brilliance of sixth-century life, the fortunes of Tikal’s twenty-first king took a disastrous turn for the worse. He and his kingdom fell victim to a new and dangerous dynasty that had been on the rise throughout the fifth century in the forests to the southeast of Tikal. The bellicose rulers of this new kingdom, called Caracol by archaeologists, would take not only Tikal but the entire Petén region by storm, eventually controlling the politics of the Classic Maya heartland for more than a century.[256]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#127|127]]. Compare Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90 and Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 240–41.</div>
+ Caracol Goes on the Rampage
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#128|128]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 133.</div>
+The portion of Caracol’s dynastic history that survives in its inscriptions begins in A.D. 495; but the protagonist of our story, a king named Lord Water, did not accede to the throne until April 18, A.D. 553 (9.5.19.1.2). Lord Water recorded part of his personal history on Stelae 6 and 14; but until archaeologists discovered a new altar in recent excavations at Caracol, we had no idea what a deadly and pivotal role this ruler played in the drama at Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#129|129]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 133. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 475.</div>
+The impact of Lord W’ater upon the Maya world was of such proportions that even before the discovery and translation of the key texts, archaeologists and epigraphers had detected the presence of a cataclysmic pattern. The modern story of this history began in 1950 when the great Mayanist, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, published her seminal study of “style” in Maya sculpture.[257] Noting an absence of monuments between the years 9.5.0.0.0 (A.D. 534) and 9.8.0.0.0 (A.D. 593), she proposed that there must have been a hiatus[258] in Maya civilization during this time. She also noted that this hiatus corresponded to the change in ceramics styles, from the Early Classic period to the Late Classic. Another great Mayanist and a colleague of Proskouriakoff’s, Gordon Willey,[259] also suggested that the Maya experienced a regional crisis at this time—a crisis so great it foreshadowed in scale and impact the great final collapse that would come in the ninth century.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#130|130]]. Malatesta, ''Between Peasants'', 30.</div>
+Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s second great contribution to Maya studies, the “historical hypothesis,”[260] contracted the time span of the hiatus somewhat. Up until the publication of this hypothesis in the 1960s, the prevailing view of the Classical Maya was that they were benign calendar priests, peacefully recording endless cycles of time on stelae whose written texts would never ultimately be translated. Proskouriakoff proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these texts not only could be read but were the history of kings and kingdoms. The retrospective histories made possible by her discovery filled in some of the gaps in time at various sites. Nevertheless, archaeologists working at Tikal still have found no stela to fill the gap between Stela 17 dated at 9.6.3.9.15 (September 17, 557) and Stela 30 dated at 9.13.0.0.0 (March 18, 692). Moreover, as we have pointed out earlier, stelae erected before this Tikal hiatus were deliberately effaced by abrading or shattering the stone.[261] Obviously, someone intentionally removed this history from the record. We suspect now that the culprit was none other than Lord Water, the rapacious king of Caracol, who opened a campaign of military conquest by attacking his huge neighbor Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#131|131]]. Kropotkin,'' Direct Struggle'','' ''163.</div>
+The first clue to his role as Tikal’s nemesis came in 1986 when archaeologists working at Caracol excavated a ballcourt.[262] On its central axis, they discovered a round marker (Fig. 5:4) with a long 128-glyph text circling its upper surface. The text on this “altar” begins with the birth of the king who commissioned the monument, Lord Kan II, and tells of the accession of his ancestor, Lord Water, on April 18, A.D. 553. From our point of view, however, the most important information on this marker is the text recording Lord Water’s aggression against Tikal. This text tells us that on April 11, 556 (9.6.2.1.11), following the end of Katun 6, Caracol conducted an “ax-war” action “in the land of” the ahau of Tikal.[263]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#132|132]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 134.</div>
+We know, however, that this initial “ax war” wasn’t fatal to Tikal. Shortly thereafter, on September 17, 557, the city’s ruler, Double-Bird, raised his Stela 17 to commemorate a one-katun anniversary—perhaps of his own accession (Fig. 5:5). Those rituals, however, were the last recorded in the public history of Tikal for a very long time. As the scribe of Altar 21 at Caracol exults, a “star-at-Tikal” war event, usually lethal to the loser, took place five years later, on May 1, 562 (9.6.8.4.2).[264] The tables had been turned. Caracol had mastered the same Tlaloc-Venus war that had defeated Uaxactun two centuries earlier. The long darkness at Tikal had begun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#133|133]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 376.</div>
+The correspondence of Caracol’s claim of victory to the all-out destruction at Tikal shows us this claim was not a fabrication. Lord Water’s war had indeed broken the back of Tikal’s pride, independence, and prosperity. We are not sure, however, to what extent, or for how long, Caracol was able to maintain political dominance over its huge rival.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#134|134]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 163. See also Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 46–51.</div>
+Present archaeology does offer us certain clues to Caracol’s ubiquitous presence in the lives of Tikal’s citizens. For example, Tikal’s art and funerary practices exhibit influence from the region of Caracol[265] beginning with this period. We can also see, as we mentioned above, that DoubleBird and his dynasty ceased to erect stelae and other monuments, and that the building of temples and pyramids slowed down. We can speculate as to the reasons for this. Double-Bird had no doubt been captured and killed, his dynasty ended, and his remaining ahauob cut off from the vast trade routes that provided their wealth. We can vividly see the effects of this impoverishment in their burial practices. The well-stocked tombs of the Tikal nobility gave way to meager caricatures of their former glory, lacking both the quantity and quality of earlier grave goods. Tikal’s oppressors permitted only one tomb of wealth—Burial 195, the resting place of the twenty-second successor of the Tikal dynasty. Never permitted to erect public monuments, this man was at least allowed the privilege of a rich burial and a dignified exit to the Otherworld, perhaps to offset the humiliation of being denied his place in history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#135|135]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 90; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 9, 46, 96; “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” in Appendix to René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 183.</div>
+Lord Water enjoyed an unusually long and prosperous reign—prosperous for Caracol at least. After forty-six years as king, he died and left the throne to the eldest of two brothers, who were presumably his sons.[266] Born in 575, the older brother became king on June 26, 599, and reigned lor nineteen uneventful years. The younger brother, however, was a king in the mold of his father. After acceding on March 9, 618, this young ruler took his father’s name as his own and then set out to prove that the earlier victories of Lord Water had not been historical accidents. He launched a campaign that would eventually result in the defeat of Naranjo, a major kingdom located to the east of Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#136|136]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 108. See also, 78.</div>
+Lord Kan II recorded the history of his wars on Stela 3 in his own capital and on the Hieroglyphic Stairs erected in the capital of his defeated enemy, Naranjo. The earliest events of Kan H’s reign still resist decipherment, but we do have allusions to a strategic alliance he formed soon after becoming king. On 9.9.5.13.8 (January 9, 619), we read that Lord Kan II performed an important but unidentified action in “the land of” an ahau of Calakmul (Fig. 5:6a), a huge kingdom lying to the north of Tikal within sight of the abandoned mountain-temples of El Mirador.[267] Whatever this action may have been, its declaration marked the beginning of an bond between Kan II and the kings of Calakmul that would prove fateful for both Tikal and Naranjo in the katuns to come. Through this alliance, and others like it, the king of Caracol would surround his intended victims with a ring of deadly enemies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#137|137]]. Guillaume quoted in Bakunin,'' Bakunin on Anarchism'', 158–59; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''170–71, 186–87; The Jura Federation, “Minutes of the Jura Federation Congress (1880)” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters'', 283.</div>
+Calakmul was not new to the stage of Maya history. The city had monuments dating from the Early Classic period and was still going stiong by the Late Classic. Calakmul was most probably the inheritor of El Mirador s power in the north and was a long term rival of Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#138|138]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''59.</div>
+he firs, major mention of a Calakmul king in the interkingdom politics of the times appears in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, a city to the west of Tikal. A passage found on Lintel 35 of the Early Classic Structure 12 records that a vassal lord of the king of Calakmul participated in a ritual at Yaxchilan on 9.5.2.10.6 (January 16, 537). The king of Calakmul is named with a Cauac-in-hand-Ix glyph, but we shall refer to him hereafter simply as “Cu-Ix.”[268]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#139|139]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 251, 255–57. A similar proposal about labor vouchers was made by Kropotkin in 1873 before he became an anarchist communist. In 1879, he proposed “Anarchist communism” as the long-term goal and “collectivism as a transitory form of property.” By 1880, he had abandoned this view and only advocated anarchist communism. See Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''29–30, 34–35; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 48–58.</div>
+The name Cu-Ix also appears on Stela 25 at Naranjo, accompanied by the date 9.5.12.0.4 (May 7, 546). This was the most important date in the life of Naranjo’s king, Ruler I, for he repeatedly celebrated anniversaries of it throughout his lifetime. We have presumed that the event was his accession, but whatever it was, the text on Stela 25 records that it took place a cab “in the territory” of Cu-Ix, the Ahau of Calakmul. This text suggests that the Calakmul king was important, if not instrumental, in the installation of Ruler I as the king of Naranjo. Certainly, these two references demonstrate the far-flung influence of the Calakmul king. They also suggests an envelopment strategy against Tikal involving Calakmul in the north, Caracol in the south, Naranjo in the east, and, perhaps, Yaxchilan in the west.[269]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#140|140]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''11–12, 46–48, 95–99; Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49–62. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 215–19; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 74–78; 102–106. For the history of anarchist communism, see Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 36–67; Davide Turcato, “Anarchist Communism,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 237–47.</div>
+If Naranjo ever was allied with Calakmul, however, that alliance did not last long. We do not know what happened between Ruler 1 of Naranjo and his erstwhile ally at Calakmul; but we have evidence that in later years, the kings of Caracol felt free to skirmish with Naranjo without endangering their own alliance with Calakmul. Thus, on May 28, 626, Lord Water’s second son, the rapacious Lord Kan II, launched a full-scale campaign against Naranjo. He began his military aggression by committing what we can only broadly interpret as an aggressive or sacrificial action against a lord designated in the text of Caracol Stela 3 simply as “he of Naranjo” (Fig. 5:6b). On that day, Venus was at its stationary point as Morningstar,[270] a position believed to be favorable for victory in battle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#141|141]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 98–116; Temma Kaplan, ''Anarchists of Andalusia'','' 1868–1903'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 139–142.</div>
+On May 4, 627, one year after the initial battle, Lord Kan II staged his second confrontation with Naranjo. The result was again a war or sacrificial ritual, but this time events took place in his own city (Fig. 5:6c). This event was also commemorated on the stairway text at Naranjo, but here it was clearly referred to as a ballgame (Fig. 5:6d).[271] Although we do not know exactly what was meant by “ballgame” in this context, we do know that the game was often used as a ritual for the disposition of captives. The person recorded here as the “player” (read “captive”) did not die, however, for another three years. His name can be found next to a glyph recording his death on October 4, 630 (Fig. 5:6e). We can’t be sure, but we think this person was Ruler I, the king who had been installed by the Calakmul king in A.D. 546 (9.5.12.0.4). Since the inscription of Naranjo Stela 27 describes Ruler I as “five-katun-ahau,”[272] we surmise that he was over eighty years old when he died.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#142|142]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 9–17, 60–62; Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology'', 134–54. Similar views were advocated by Malatesta in 1889. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 95–99.</div>
+Whether Lord Kan II was recording Ruler Ts death or that of some other powerful noble in his account of these events, the end result was the same. The death of this individual created a power imbalance at Naranjo which invited the next stage of Caracol’s war. In the following year, on December 27, 631, when Venus as the Eveningstar first appeared in the skies over Naranjo,[273] Lord Kan II attacked that kingdom and decisively defeated its hapless warriors (Fig. 5:7a-b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#143|143]]. Paul Avrich, ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 46–47, 58, 107–120, 144–46; de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 9.</div>
+Why did Lord Kan II of Caracol choose Naranjo as his next target after his victory over Tikal? Ironically, Ruler I of Naranjo may himself have been responsible for this state of affairs. After Tikal was defeated and its nobility stripped of their wealth and influence, the resulting power vacuum may have tempted the king of Naranjo to betray his former allies. He apparently reached out to Tikal in friendship and alliance, involving himself somehow in the politics of that kingdom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#144|144]]. Avrich, ''An American Anarchist'','' ''147–49; Voltairine de Cleyre, ''Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist'','' Anarchist'','' Genius'' (State University of New York, 2005), ed. Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, 105; de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 31–32, 60, 107–8, 173–74; de Cleyre, “A Suggestion and Explanation” in ''Free Society'' 6, no. 29 (June 3, 1900): 1. In 1908, ''Mother Earth'' published a lecture by de Cleyre titled “Why I am an Anarchist.” During the lecture, she advocates a moneyless society based on distribution according to need. It is unclear when this was written. ''Mother Earth'' claimed that the lecture was delivered in Hammond, Indiana but I have been unable to find a date for this talk. De Cleyre had previously given a talk with the exact same title during her 1897 visit to England. She could have given the same talk multiple times or given different talks with the same title. As a result, it is unclear if she advocated a moneyless society based on distribution according to need before or after adopting anarchism without adjectives. See Avrich, ''An American Anarchist'','' ''120; de Cleyre, ''Exquisite Rebel'', 51–65.</div>
+Behind all these gestures of friendship, however, might linger something even more intriguing: a love story. Sometime in the early seventh century, nobles of Tikal mourned the death of a woman of high rank and special status. This Tikal noblewoman was buried with extraordinary pomp and honor. The Tikal ahauob cut her resting place into the living rock, down under the central axis of Structure 5G-8 in the suburbs of their benighted city. The masons then vaulted the chamber with stone in the manner of the great ancestors of the North Acropolis, the only other people of Tikal to have been honored with vaulted tombs. Their parting gift to the spirit of this woman was a single beautiful polychrome bowl with painted images of the Celestial Bird (Fig. 5:8). On its rim is a text recording that its original owner was Ruler I of Naranjo. How it came to Tikal we do not know, but its presence in the tomb of this woman suggests she had some special association with Naranjo, either through marriage or through the exchange of gifts. The occasion symbolized by this bowl may have called down the wrath of Caracol on the aged king of Naranjo.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#145|145]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''201–4.</div>
+Neither of the accounts of this “star-war” event found at Caracol and Naranjo actually records the name of the king of Naranjo as a captive. This deletion does not prove, however, that the victim was not the king. We know for certain that some Naranjo notable was eventually sacrificed in a rather gruesome victory celebration which took place in the city of Caracol’s ally, Calakmul. The Hieroglyphic Stairs the defeated Naran-janos were forced to build as a subjugation monument record that a nasty follow-up event spelled k’uxah[274] (“to torture” or perhaps “to eat”) was perpetrated upon this individual “in the land of” the king of Calakmul (Fig. 5:7c). For the time being, Calakmul would benefit from its alliance with the top dog, Lord Kan II; but in the end, as we shall see, it would pay dearly for its role in this deadly game of war and sacrifice.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#146|146]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 131–32.</div>
+This victory seems to have temporarily sated the ambitions of Lord Kan II, for he neither attacked Naranjo nor took any more of its lords hostage for the next five years. Instead, he was content to watch and wait for Venus to once again reach an optimum battle position. On 9.10.3.2.12 (March 4, 636), such a favorable position occurred. When the Morningstar was fifteen days and .6° past its maximum elongation, he attacked Naranjo yet again. This time when he recorded his participation in the battle, he prominently featured his personal capture of a lord named 18-Rabbit (Fig. 5;7d). Ironically, 18-Rabbit gained his own kind of immortality by being the victim.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#147|147]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 130–31.</div>
+A little over a year later, on 9.10.4.16.2 (November 24, 637), Lord Kan II completed the final act in this long drama by celebrating the completion of his first katun of reign (Fig. 5:7e). Adding insult to injury, he recorded these rites not at his home city but at Naranjo on its subjugation monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs. This ceremony must have rubbed a great deal of salt into the wound of Naranjo’s defeat.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#148|148]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 203.</div>
+Caracol’s rampage through the Peten changed the lives of noble individuals in many proud and ancient cities. Lord Kan II and his allies no doubt claimed many valuable goods from the losers as tribute. Defeated cities were forced to give up precious commodities like obsidian, shell currencies, heirlooms, craftsmen, handwoven cloth, and highly skilled artists. This tribute was the key to the domination Caracol held over this region. Because the Maya had no standing armies, conquering troops could not be garrisoned as watchdogs in a defeated city. But such policing was unnecessary. A city stripped of its wealth and its king could rarely strike back at its enemies. Loss of prestige resulted in far more than humiliation. It meant waning or destroyed political influence and the inability to recruit population and goods from the hinterlands. Without these people and goods, a city could not hope to prosper and grow.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#149|149]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 15–16; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 109.</div>
+Perhaps one of the most devastating results of defeat, however, was the stripping away of all public art. When Caracol effaced the monuments of its enemies and impoverished them to the point where they could erect no others, it was taking away their most cherished possession—history. Both Tikal and Naranjo suffered terribly in this sense. In the 130 years after the defeat of Tikal, only one king, the twenty-second, left his name in the inscribed history of the kingdom, and this not in a public space. We would not have known of him at all but for the pottery and wood texts deposited in his tomb, Burial 195, perhaps in defiance of Caracol’s rule.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#150|150]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48. This problem has since been articulated by a number of modern socialist theorists drawing upon Marxism. See Al Campbell and Mehmet Ufuk Tutan, “Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks,” ''Studies in Political Economy'' 82, no. 1 (2008): 153–70; Sam Gindin, “Socialism ‘With Sober Senses’: Developing Workers’ Capacities,” ''The Socialist Register'' 34 (1998): 75–99.</div>
+The lords of the allied city of Uaxactun also suffered in the wake of Caracol’s victories, while no doubt appreciating the bitter irony of the situation. 1 ikal had been undone by the very same Tlaloc-Venus war that the brothers Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had waged against Uaxactun 180 years earlier: The victors of that conflict were hoisted by the same petard of warfare they had introduced among the Maya. Yet rather than being able to celebrate the irony of the situation, the Uaxactun nobility, as part of Tikal’s hegemony, found themselves deeply affected by this defeat as well. With the demise of the royal dynasty at Tikal, Uaxactun also lost the kingship, and the public ritual life of that city virtually stopped. Its leaders ceased erecting monuments in 9.6.0.0.0[275] and did not resume the practice for two hundred years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#151|151]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48.</div>
+At Naranjo, the impact of defeat was shorter-lived, but no less dramatic. On December 6, 642 (9.10.10.0.0), the victorious Caracol ruler lorced the defeated people of Naranjo to dedicate the Hieroglyphic Stairs, a monument that glorified his triumph over them. This kind of stairway not only celebrated defeat and victory, but was used to dispose of captives, who were trussed into bundles and rolled down it after sacrifice in the ballgame. In their stairway, the surviving elite of Naranjo had a constant reminder of the hegemony of Caracol. That disgraceful monument was the last written record placed in public space for the next forty years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#152|152]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 49.</div>
+As the katuns ground slowly by, new lords bent on revenge and on rebuilding the reputations of their cities lit sacred fires on the altars of the Peten to lighten the pall of disaster over Tikal and Naranjo. Unlike Smoking-Frog of Tikal, whose triumphs at Uaxactun inspired the admiration and imagination of an entire region, Lord Kan II and his Calakmul allies never succeeded in quelling the hatred and consolidating the submission of their enemies. In the short term, their failed experiment in empire building fired the ambitions of new challengers from the Petexbatun region to the south. These new lords from the kingdom of Dos Pilas would eventually pull Naranjo up from the ashes of defeat and jar Tikal into taking back its own. In wreaking vengeance against the former victors, however, the lords of Dos Pilas would seal the Maya doom even as they rejuvenated the dynasts of the defeated kingdoms. In the long run, the Maya struggle to forge a political unity powerful enough to match their shared vision of divine power would break on the pride of kings and their thirst for vengeance.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#153|153]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''450.</div>
+ Dos Pilas Joins the Party
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#154|154]]. De Cleyre, ''Reader'', 37.</div>
+In an era of great kings who strove to stretch their power beyond traditional boundaries, the long and illustrious career of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas stands out as one of most remarkable of his times. His home was a hilltop city located near Lake Petexbatún and the Pasión River in a region that had played a significant role in Maya cultural history since the Middle Preclassic Period. Here, in the middle of the seventh century. Flint-Sky-God K declared a new kingdom, perhaps carrying with it the hopes of the house of Great-Jaguar-Paw of Tikal. This new kingdom, Dos Pilas, shared its Emblem Glyph with that ancient kingdom; and it is possible that its ruling family was an offshoot of the Tikal royal lineage— highborn individuals who left Tikal sometime after its downfall and found their way to this new region.[276]
-[[#155|155]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''81–82.
+Flint-Sky-God K was a master strategist in the game of politics and domination. He declared kingship at Dos Pilas on 9.10.12.11.2 (July 5, 645) and immediately began to consolidate his power with a series of marriage alliances with nearby kingdoms. He married a woman from the kingdom of Itzan, who bore him two sons. One son inherited both the kingship and his father’s military brilliance. The other son is mentioned in the inscriptional record but never acceded to the throne.[277] Flint-Sky-God K also sent women of his own house, perhaps sisters or daughters, to marry rulers from nearby El Chorro and El Pato.[278]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#156|156]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 49. This same idea was expressed by Marx. See Karl Marx, ''Selected Writings'', ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172; Marx and Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 5'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 214.</div>
+At the same time, Flint-Sky-God K began a dynastic tradition of rule by conquest. He and his nobles terrified their enemies in a campaign spanning twenty years, from A.D. 664 to 684. He began his glorious saga with the capture of a lord named Tah-Mo’ (“Torch-Macaw”) on March 2, 664 (Fig. 5:9a). In a fashion typical of Maya warriors, Flint-Sky-God K recorded the personal names of his captives, but not the names of their kingdoms, so we do not know what city this hapless man was from. Flint-Sky-God K followed up this victory with a whole series of wars, including several of the Tlaloc-Venus variety. His ambition led him ultimately to intervene in the affairs of the central Petén kingdoms under Caracol’s sway, but he did so in a cunning and circuitous way, as we shall later see.
-== {{anchor|Chapter4AnarchistStrategy}} {{anchor|Chapter4AnarchistStrategy1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook7}} Chapter 4: Anarchist Strategy ==
+The power he gained through his successful campaigns eventually brought Flint-Sky-God K to the attention of the powerful kingdom of Calakmul, the erstwhile ally of Caracol and the deadly enemy of Tikal and Naranjo. Part of the story of the contemporary Calakmul king, Jaguar-Paw, is told on a series of panels looted from the region of Calakmul, and part in passages from the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas. One of these looted panels lists Jaguar-Paw’s birth date as October 9, 649 (Fig. 5:9c). Another tells us that around 9.11.10.0.0,[279] this young prince participated with Flint-Sky-God K in a ceremonial event at a place called Yaxhá (Fig. 5:9b), which was perhaps the lake region located near Naranjo. On February 25, 683, Jaguar-Paw returned to the Petexbatún region for another ritual’celebration held on Lake Petexbatún near Dos Pilas[280] (Fig. 5;9d). We are not sure of the nature of these ceremonies, because that part of the text is missing, but they imply some kind of significant connection, perhaps an alliance, between Jaguar-Paw and the vigorous Dos Pilas warlord.
-Anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that one must not merely critique existing institutions or aspire for a better society. One must also form social movements that engage in class struggle against the ruling classes and thereby bring about fundamental social change. To quote Bakunin, “neither writers, nor philosophers, nor their books, nor socialist journals, would reconstitute a socialism that was alive and vigorous. It is only through enlightened revolutionary instincts, through collective will and through the real organization of the working masses themselves that the latter has a real existence, and when instinct, will and organization are lacking the best books in the world will be nothing more than empty theories and powerless dreams.”[[#1MichaelBakuninSelectedTex|1]] In order to engage in effective action and achieve their goals, working-class social movements had to be guided by an overarching strategy that was both appropriate to their situation and capable of actually bringing about an anarchist society. As Kropotkin succinctly put it, “theory and practice must become one if we are to succeed.”[[#2PeterKropotkinWordsofaR|2]]
+Whatever the relationship between the two men, it was an important one that led to the participation of Flint-Sky-God K in Jaguar-Paw’s accession as king of Calakmul on April 6, 686 (Fig. 5:10a and b).[281] Jaguar-Paw’s accession was also recorded at the kingdom of El Perú, to the north of Dos Pilas. We find this passage on a pair of looted stelae, recorded in association with the period-ending rites conducted by the El Perú king Mah-Kina-Balam and his wife. On one of the monuments, the El Perú lord noted that he had displayed the God K scepter in the company of Jaguar-Paw. These texts suggest that the kings of the western kingdoms traveled to Calakmul to participate in the accession ritual of Jaguar-Paw, who in turn made reciprocal visits to their kingdoms.
-A crucial aspect of anarchist theory was, therefore determining what methods of action to engage in. According to Malatesta, “to be able to act, to be able to contribute to the realization of one’s cherished ideas, one has to choose one’s own path. In parties, as more generally in life, the questions of method are predominant. If the idea is the beacon, the method is the helm.”[[#3QuotedinDavideTurcatoMak|3]] It is for this reason that “we are anarchists in our goal… but we are anarchist in our method too.”[[#4QuotedinTurcatoMakingSen|4]] Elsewhere Malatesta defined anarchism as “the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[[#5ErricoMalatestaTheAnarchi|5]]
+At Dos Pilas, Flint-Sky-God K commemorated his participation in Jaguar-Paw’s accession on his own Stela 13 (Fig. 5:10b), which he mounted on the platform supporting his great war monument, the Hieroglyphic Stairs 2. The juxtaposition of Jaguar-Paw’s coronation text next to Flint-Sky-God K’s war memorial associates the founding of Dos Pilas with the accession at Calakmul. By doing so, Flint-Sky-God K was paying Jaguar-Paw a powerful compliment.
-Anarchists understood that creating appropriate methods of action was not a matter of inventing abstract strategies fit for all times and places, and following them as if there were an instruction manual for producing a revolution. Anarchism, to quote Kropotkin, contains “no ready-made recipes for political-cooking.”[[#6QuotedinRuthKinnaKropotk|6]] Building an anarchist society requires action within a specific context and, since this context varies according to time and place, it follows that, in Goldman’s words, “the methods of Anarchism . . . do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances” but “must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.”[[#7EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeaks|7]] As Malatesta wrote, “the problem facing us anarchists, who regard anarchy not so much as a beautiful dream to be chased by the light of the moon, but as an individual and social way of life to be brought about for the greatest good of all . . . is to so conduct our activities as to achieve the greatest useful effect in the various circumstances in which history places us. One must not ignore reality, but if reality is noxious, one must fight it, resorting to every means made available to us by reality itself.”[[#8ErricoMalatestaTheMethod|8]]
+This all-glyphic Stela 13 conveys first that Jaguar-Paw acceded on 9.12.13.17.7 (April 6, 686). Second, it says that this accession ritual “was seen (yilahy[282] by Flint-Sky-God K, captor of Tah-Mo’, at a place called Nab Tunich, the toponym designating a location somewhere within the kingdom of Calakmul.[283] Presumably, Flint-Sky-God K traveled to Nab Tunich to observe and to participate in the accession rites of Jaguar-Paw.
-Despite anarchist methods of action varying depending upon the historically specific context, there were common views on strategy and social change that pervaded the anarchist movement. These were: (a) the advocacy of social revolution, the unity of means and ends, prefiguration, direct action; the spirit of revolt; and (b) the rejection of attempting to achieve social change via the conquest of state power. In this chapter, I shall explain the first group of topics and then, in chapter 5, I shall turn to the anarchist critique of conquering state power. Throughout both chapters, I shall demonstrate that anarchists advocated the strategies they did due to their beliefs about what forms of practice constituted them and how these practices would simultaneously transform people and social relations.
+Regardless of the “friendliness” of this association, there is some evidence that Jaguar-Paw—perhaps before he became the king—was in a subservient position to Flint-Sky-God K, at least in some circumstances. In a scene on a looted pot,[284] Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul is painted kneeling in the position of subordination before a Dos Pilas Lord (Fig. 5:10c). We presume this Dos Pilas lord was Flint-Sky-God K or perhaps his heir.[285] The question that arises, however, is: How’ did a lord of Calakmul and ally of the powerful Caracol find himself in this position in the first place? Since the evidence does not exist to accurately answer that question, we can only suggest various scenarios. Perhaps Flint-Sky-God K was playing “godfather” to Jaguar-Paw, cultivating this young prince before he became the king to secure his support for the new Dos Pilas hegemony in the west. Or, in light of Flint-Sky-God K’s military campaign in the Peten at this time, it is just possible that he wished to establish his own alliance with Calakmul—or at least the promise from its king that he would not interfere with the ambitions of Dos Pilas. At any rate, somehow Flint-Sky-God K made the Calakmul lords an offer they couldn’t refuse.
-'''Social Revolution'''
+Whatever the scenario might have been, by neutralizing the king of Calakmul, Flint-Sky-God K was able to extend his influence eastward toward the defeated city of Naranjo. It was a strategy that effectively removed Caracol as a major player in the events to come. Flint-Sky-God K’s command of the primary political instruments of his time, war and marriage, forged the foundation of a new pattern of power in the Peten.
-Anarchists held that the abolition of class society could “only be achieved by means of a revolutionary movement” instigating a social revolution.[[#9JamesGuillaumeIdeasonSo|9]] It is common for modern academics who study the history of revolutions to define a “revolution” as necessarily involving the transformation of the state from one form into another.[[#10ForexampleCharlesTillyE|10]] Anarchists wanted to abolish the state, rather than seize its power, and so did not define a social revolution in such a state-centric manner. They attempted to create a social revolution that fundamentally transformed “the foundations of society, its political, economic and social character” and so was distinct from a statist revolution in which there is “a mere change of rulers, of government.”[[#11AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|11]]
+Part of Flint-Sky-God K’s genius as a leader in this complex and interconnected arena of power politics was this very ability to implement different policies in different kingdoms as the situation warranted. While he was neutralizing Calakmul to the north, Flint-Sky-God K was also expanding eastward into the power vacuum left by the defeat of Tikal and Naranjo. Curiously enough, he concentrated his efforts on the lesser prize, Naranjo. This time he resorted to marriage, rather than war or political alliance, as his strategy. He sent a daughter[286] named Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau (“Six Celestial Lord”)[287] to Naranjo in order to reestablish a royal house at this ancient community after its destruction at the hands of Caracol. Although we do not know all the particulars, we can visualize s her pilgrimage.
-This fundamental transformation of society required, according to Kropotkin, “completely reconstructing all relationships” between people, from the relationships within a household, factory, or village to those between urban and rural areas.[[#12PeterKropotkinModernScie|12]] The same idea was expressed by Wilson, who advocated “a revolution in every department of human existence, social, political and economic.”[[#13CharlotteWilsonAnarchist|13]] Anarchists did not limit the scope of revolutionary transformation to the public sphere of the community or workplace. For the revolution to be meaningful, it had to also transform the so-called private sphere of sexual relationships, parent-child relationships, housework, and so on. Goldman, to take one example, argued that the compulsory social relations of marriage should be replaced by free love in which “love can go and come without fear of meeting a watch-dog,” and neither partner acts or views themselves as the owner, controller, and dictator of the other.[[#14GoldmanRedEmma22021|14]] The extent to which some anarchists viewed emancipation within the private sphere as essential can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence that “a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.”[[#15PeterKropotkinTheConques|15]]
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-Although anarchists sometimes claimed that the social revolution should be “spontaneous,” the majority of anarchists did not expect it to appear suddenly without any planning and preparation. Nor did anarchists think that the social revolution would occur independently of anarchists influencing other workers through words and deeds. They instead meant that the social revolution should not be imposed on society by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the people. For a revolution to be “spontaneous” in this sense of the term was for it to be voluntarily launched and self-determined by workers themselves. A worker acted spontaneously when they acted of their own volition, even if their actions were inspired by the actions of those around them.[[#16MichaelBakuninStatismand|16]] Anarchists were, in other words, committed to the famous words of the 1864 preamble to the statutes of the First International: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”[[#17KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|17]] This line from the preamble was consistently repeated by anarchist authors or rephrased in slightly different language, such as Malatesta’s remark that “we anarchists do not want to ''emancipate'' the people; we want the people to ''emancipate themselves''.”[[#18ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|18]]
+The journey to her new home was difficult and dangerous, for the route she had to take crossed the war-torn heart of the Peten region. In spite of the danger, the wedding party traveled in ceremonial splendor, braving the dangers hidden in the arching forest and the hot fields that lined the way to Naranjo. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau sat in her sedan chair of dark polished wood upon royal pillows of stuffed jaguar skin, veiled from the prying eyes of village spies by a canopy of fine cotton gossamer. A company of sturdy bearers surrounded the four sweating men who carried the long poles of the sedan chair on their shoulders, ready to relieve them in the work of relaying their precious burden to its final destination. Behind came more bearers with bundles of cotton and bark cloth laden with gifts of jade, painted pottery, embroidered textiles, perfumed wooden boxes, and carved-shell diadems.
-The necessity of a social revolution emerged from the fact that a ruling class had never in history given up their power voluntarily. In every instance, it had required violence or at least the threat of it.[[#19BerkmanAnarchism174|19]] Although anarchism aimed at, to quote Malatesta, “the removal of violence from human relations,” the vast majority of anarchist authors advocated revolutionary violence as a means to overcome the violence that defended and maintained class society.[[#20MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|20]] This revolutionary violence took two main forms: the forceful expropriation of the economic ruling classes and the violent destruction of the state. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “an armed, violent revolution” that would “smash the army and police” and achieve the “forcible expropriation of property owners” and “the abolition of all political authority.”[[#21MalatestaMethodofFreedom|21]] This position emerged from an awareness that, as Malatesta explained in 1892, “the means we employ are those that circumstances make possible or necessary . . . we have to make our fight in the world as it is, or else be condemned to be nothing but fruitless dreamers.”[[#22MalatestaMethodofFreedom|22]] Class society is violently enforced by “powerful military and police organizations which meet any serious attempt at a change with prison, hanging, and massacre. . . . Against the physical force that blocks our way there is no appeal except to physical force.”[[#23MalatestaMethodofFreedom|23]]
+At the head of this party, the bravest and most experienced of the noble warriors of Dos Pilas strode in full battle gear, resplendent and frightening in their helmets of stuffed deer, peccary, and jaguar. The bright plumage of forest birds and the shrunken heads of defeated enemies dangled from their chests and waists. They carried throwing darts and spearthrowers, stabbing spears tipped with long leaf-shaped points of stone, and clubs studded with razor-sharp imported obsidian blades. Takers of captives and sacrificers, these men would not negotiate if confronted on the trail: They would die to the last man before letting their lady fall into the hands of the enemy. Finally, the best woodsmen of the Dos Pilas household were deployed in a wide circle around the route, moving swiftly and cautiously, alert for treachery.
-The same position was consistently advocated by Kropotkin over several decades. In 1877, he endorsed “the expropriation and suppression of the bourgeoisie.”[[#24QuotedinGeorgeWoodcockan|24]] A few years later in 1881, he wrote that workers must “seize all of the wealth of society, if necessary doing so over the corpse of the bourgeoisie, with the intention of returning all of society’s wealth to those who produced it, the workers.”[[#25KropotkinDirectStruggle|25]] In 1906, he claimed that in order to achieve “the complete destruction of Capitalism and the State, and their replacement by Anarchist Communism” it was necessary to engage in “armed struggle against the dominating order” and expropriate the ruling classes.[[#26KropotkinDirectStruggle|26]] In 1913, he argued that “economic emancipation” required “smashing the old political forms represented by the State.”[[#27KropotkinModernSciencean|27]] A year later, he wrote that “two things are necessary to be successful in a revolution . . . an idea in the head, and a bullet in the rifle! The force of action—guided by the force of Anarchist thought.”[[#28KropotkinDirectStruggle|28]] The extent to which Kropotkin was a proponent of violence against the forces of state repression can be seen in the fact that, in 1877, he attended a demonstration in Switzerland armed with a gun. He was ready, in his own words, to “blow out the brains” of the police if they attacked.[[#29QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|29]] In the wake of the 1905 Russian revolution, when he was in his sixties, Kropotkin practiced shooting with a rifle in case he returned to Russia and needed to participate in street fighting.[[#30WoodcockandAvakumovicFro|30]]
+We can imagine the courage and resolution of the Dos Pilas princess, a living declaration of war against the most powerful enemies of her family, as she traveled to her new home. The first sacred rituals she performed after her arrival lasted three days, beginning on August 30, 682 (9.12.10.5.12), in the time of the beneficent rains of late summer. One hundred and sixteen days earlier, Ah-Cacaw had resurrected the kingship at Tikal. Four years would pass before her father’s journey to Calakmul to participate in Jaguar-Paw’s accession rituals. In this time of changing destinies, a young queen stood at the center of the Maya world. High on her pyramid she spilled her blood in rapture, calling forth the ancestors to witness and confirm the new destiny she brought to this place, while the gathered hosts of the city danced and sang in the broad plazas below, jeering the authors of the hated Hieroglyphic Stairs in their midst. The red towering temple mountains of Naranjo reverberated with the pulsing call of the drums and the deep moan of the shell trumpets reaching friend and foe alike across the vast green canopy of the forest: The royal ahauob of Naranjo were back. The lady from Dos Pilas and her new nobility would reckon their history from this joyous celebration for katuns to come; and under the leadership of her son, Smoking-Squirrel, they would bring back enemies to writhe and die before the monuments commemorating that fateful day.
-Malatesta and Kropotkin were not unique in this respect. Countless other anarchists can be quoted making the exact same points.[[#31ForexampleBakuninStatism|31]] Adolph Fischer claimed in 1887 that “only by the force of arms can the wage slaves make their way out of capitalistic bondage,” “expropriate the privileged,” and achieve “the abolition of political authority, the state.”[[#32QuotedinAlbertParsonsAn|32]] Rocker insisted in 1920 that “we already know that a revolution cannot be made with rose-water. And we know, too, that the owning classes will never yield up their privileges spontaneously. On the day of victorious revolution the workers will have to impose their will on the present owners of the soil, of the subsoil and of the means of production.”[[#33RockerTheSovietSystemo|33]] In order to do so, workers would also have to demolish the state, since it is “the fortress” that violently maintains the power of the ruling classes.[[#34RockerTheSovietSystemo|34]]
+There are four separate texts recording the events surrounding Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival in Naranjo, but only two of them are still legible today. In both of these texts (Fig. 5:1 la-b), the glyph describing her ritual actions resembles the hand (hom) glyph[288] that Stormy-Sky used to record the conquest of Uaxactun on Stela 31 at Tikal. Here, however, conquest in the sense of “the destruction of buildings” couldn’t possibly be the intended meaning. The action recorded on these stelae is one that led to the dedication of a pyramid three days later (Fig. 5:11c) and most likely the reestablishment of the royal house of Naranjo. As we have described in our historical reconstruction above, we believe both these events were direct results of the marriage of the daughter of the king of Dos Pilas to a noble of Naranjo. One meaning of horn is “borders or boundaries” and certainly these are essential qualities of a viable state. When Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau dedicated the pyramid three days after her marriage, she was reopening the portal to the Otherworld, reestablishing the sacred connection to the ancestors, which had been broken by Naranjo’s enemies so many years ago. This interpretation of events is further borne out by the fact that the pyramid used the Naranjo Emblem Glyph as part of its proper name, indicating that it was the Otherworld portal of this new dynasty. Naranjo had again become a place of kings, a power to be reckoned with once more.
-The forms of violence that anarchists advocated and engaged in covered a wide spectrum of behavior and varied among different contexts. It included, but was not limited to, riots; fighting the police with fists, sticks, and stones; assassinating class enemies; and engaging in armed conflict with the military. This is not to say that anarchists who advocated revolutionary violence agreed with one another on which forms of violence were ethically acceptable or strategically advisable. Johann Most wrote several articles during the 1880s in which he actively encouraged anarchists to engage in violent acts of vengeance against the ruling classes.[[#35AndrewRCarlsonAnarchism|35]] Malatesta, in comparison, argued in the 1890s that although anarchists should use violence to overthrow systems of oppression, they should not engage in violence to achieve revenge.[[#36MalatestaMethodofFreedom|36]]
+ Naranjo Strikes Back
-A significant number of anarchists saw potential dangers in revolutionary violence. In 1896, Malatesta argued that “let us have no unnecessary victims, not even in the enemy camp . . . a liberating revolution cannot be born of massacre and terror, these having been—and ever so it shall remain—the midwives to tyranny.”[[#37MalatestaMethodofFreedom|37]] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1892 that “slaughtering the bourgeois so as to ensure that the revolution succeeds is a nonsensical dream” since “organized and legalized Terror . . . serves only to forge chains for the people” and “lays the groundwork for the dictatorship of whoever will grab control of the revolutionary tribunal.”[[#38KropotkinDirectStruggle|38]] Even Most told an audience in Baltimore that “we are revolutionists not from love of gore” but “because there is no other way to free and redeem mankind.”[[#39QuotedinPaulAvrichTheH|39]]
+Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s efforts to found a new dynasty were not in vain. On January 6, 688, five years after the dedication of the Naranjo royal house, a male heir, named Smoking-Squirrel, was born to the royal family. This youngster was only five years old when, on May 31, 693, he became the king of Naranjo.[289] Never in all the historical texts of Naranjo do the scribes acknowledge the parentage of Smoking-Squirrel, so for many years his origins remained a mystery. It took the insight of the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff to realize that Smoking-Squirrel was most likely 5 the child of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.
-In the popular imagination, revolutions are typically equated with violent acts of destruction, such as fighting the police and army or storming parliament. Anarchists advocated these acts, but they did not reduce the social revolution to them. For them, the social revolution was above all an act of creation. The old world had to be destroyed only because this was a prerequisite to the construction of a new social order. In 1873, Bakunin claimed that although “the real passion for destruction . . . is far from sufficient for achieving the ultimate aims of the revolutionary cause . . . there can be no revolution without widespread and passionate destruction, a destruction salutary and fruitful precisely because out of it, and by means of it alone, new worlds are born and arise.”[[#40BakuninStatismandAnarchy|40]] For anarchists like Berkman, a revolution “''begins'' with a violent upheaval,” but this is only “the rolling up of your sleeves” before “''the actual work''” of revolution occurs, namely “the reorganization of the entire life of society.”[[#41BerkmanAnarchism18384|41]]
+There are many clues leading to this assumption. Not only does Wac-Chanil-Ahau live long into Smoking-Squirrel’s reign, but every time he erected a monument to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, he paired it with a monument dedicated to this woman. These monuments always featured the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival at Naranjo and depicted her engaging in the exact same rituals of state as her son (Fig. 5:12).[290] Smoking-Squirrel constantly portrayed himself with his mother in this fashion for one very important reason: She was the source of his legitimacy and his link to the throne.
-As Kropotkin noted, the “first skirmish” of a social revolution, when the people rise up in insurrection, “is soon ended, and it is only after the overthrow of the old constitution that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.”[[#42KropotkinConquestofBread|42]] This did not mean that violence was not an important aspect of launching and defending the social revolution. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution would most likely result in a civil war, due to the ruling classes launching a counterattack against the working classes.[[#43PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|43]] Anarchists were instead drawing attention to the fact that the core of the social revolution was people internalizing anarchist ideas and reconstructing and reorganizing society according to them. The social revolution, in other words, rested on the simultaneous transformation of social structures and of the people who constituted, produced, and reproduced them. It required a change not only in how society was organized, but also a corresponding change to what drives and capacities people exercised and developed. Above all, for anarchists like Goldman, it required people to develop revolutionary consciousness, such as a “sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood.”[[#44GoldmanRedEmma400|44]] This aspect of the social revolution would continue long after the ruling classes had been successfully overthrown.
+Smoking-Squirrel did not, however, find it to his advantage to feature his father on any of his monuments. His male parent was probably a local man whose modest achievements and social rank did not lend prestige to his son. Instead, Smoking-Squirrel capitalized on the celebrity that came from his mother’s pedigree as the child of the illustrious Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas (Fig. 5:13), his maternal grandfather. The texts suggest that this pedigree from Dos Pilas was considered more historically important and politically significant than even his own status as son to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau.
-Therefore, anarchists did not expect the social revolution to occur quickly. Kropotkin predicted in 1885 that “it is not by a revolution lasting a couple of days that we shall come to transform society in the direction posed by anarchist communism. . . . It is a whole insurrectionary period of three, four, perhaps five years that we must traverse.”[[#45KropotkinRebel72Seeal|45]] During and after this insurrectionary period, society as a whole would be restructured not from the top down by means of government decree but from the bottom up by millions of workers, in both urban and rural areas, reorganizing their workplaces, communities, and households according to anarchist ideas. Fabbri went further and noted in 1922 that “however extensive and radical a revolution may be, before it manages to be victorious completely and worldwide not one but many generations must elapse.”[[#46LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|46]] In other words, anarchists viewed “the social revolution” as a “process” that stretched over an extended period of time.[[#47NabatProceedingsofNabat|47]]
+The revival of the dynasty and the ascendancy of this child to the ancestral throne of his kingdom smashed the fragile peace of the central Peten. The revived Naranjo nobility launched a campaign to reestablish the power of their royal family, challenging their enemies to meet them on the battlefield. There under a relentless tropical sun, fortune delivered many sons of noble families into their hands.
-Anarchists divided the process of social revolution into moments of destruction and construction.[[#48Thefollowingaccountofsoc|48]] The working classes would destroy the old world by overthrowing and abolishing the state and expropriating land, raw materials, the means of production, and the necessities of life, such as warehouses of food and clothing or apartment blocks, from the ruling classes.[[#49Anarchiststypicallyclaimed|49]] The working classes would build the new society on the ruins of the old by establishing the communal ownership of these things, building organs of self-management—workplace and community assemblies—and, through these, organizing the ongoing reproduction and restructuring of society. As noted in the previous chapter, most anarchists thought that in order to coordinate production, distribution, and revolutionary activity on a large scale, these assemblies should establish formal local federations that would, in turn, federate together to form regional, national, and ultimately, if the social revolution goes as hoped, international federations. A minority of anarchists opposed the establishment of formal federations and argued that large-scale coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks.
+Naranjo’s first victim was not its enemy Caracol, but rather a strategic border community called Ucanal which stood between Naranjo, Tikal, and the city of Lord Kan II. The kingdom of Ucanal had a hilltop capital to the south of Lake Yaxha[291] on the west bank of the Mopan River. Probably an ally of Caracol, since it straddled the shortest route Lord Kan’s marauders could take on their forays into the Peten, Ucanal was targeted perhaps as much to humiliate the kings of Caracol as to gain military victories for Naranjo.
-The defense of the social revolution would be achieved through the formation of worker militias, rather than through the seizure of state power. These worker militias would act as organs of class power. As early as 1868, Bakunin, who had previously joined the barricades during the 1848 revolution in Paris and Prague and an 1849 insurrection in Dresden, argued that revolutionaries must “organize a revolutionary force capable of defeating reaction,” which would include the “federation of the Barricades.”[[#50BakuninSelectedWritings|50]] This view was repeated in 1870, when he wrote that, during an anarchist revolution, workers would be “armed and organized” in order to coordinate “common defense against the enemies of the Revolution.”[[#51BakuninSelectedWritings|51]] Decades later in 1922, Malatesta advocated “the creation of voluntary militia, without powers to interfere as militia in the life of the community, but only to deal with any armed attacks by the forces of reaction to reestablish themselves, or to resist outside intervention by countries as yet not in a state of revolution.”[[#52MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|52]] Berkman similarly argued in 1929 that “the armed workers and peasants are the only effective defense of the revolution.”[[#53BerkmanAnarchism232See|53]]
+The campaign began on June 20, 693, only twenty days after the five-year-old boy was placed on the throne. It was the day before the summer solstice, and the Eveningstar was gleaming its last before it would disappear into the glare of the sun on its journey to become the Morningstar. The warriors of Naranjo struck, taking captive a lord of Ucanal named Kinichil-Cab (Fig. 5:14). Doubtless the young king, Smoking-Squirrel, was still too tender in age to have led his army personally. Instead, it appears that Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau took credit for the capture of the unfortunate Kinichil-Cab, for on Stela 24, she stands upon his battered body (Fig. 5:15b).
-Advocating workers’ militias was not limited to the writings of famous anarchist authors. It can also be seen in the resolutions of anarchist organizations. The resolutions passed at the Spanish National Confederation of Labor’s (CNT) May 1936 Zaragoza Congress acknowledged “the necessity to defend the advances made through the revolution” from both “foreign capitalist invasion” and “counterrevolution at home.”[[#54QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|54]] This would be achieved through arming the populace with an array of weapons including not only pistols and rifles but also “planes, tanks, armored vehicles, machine-guns and anti-aircraft cannon,” creating a workers’ militia of “all individuals of both sexes who are fit to fight,” which would coordinate its action via their local “commune” and the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[[#55QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|55]] Anarchists put this theory into practice and formed workers’ militias to defend the revolution during the Russian revolution and civil war of 1917–23, and the early phases of the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39.[[#56Thecomplexhistoryofanarc|56]]
+This battle and the capture of a lord of Ucanal were but the opening blows against Caracol’s hold on the Peten. Naranjo continued to chip away at its enemy’s strength, harassing them at every turn. One hundred days after the first attack, on September 14, 693, the warriors of Naranjo engaged Ucanal in yet another battle, this one probably on the order of a skirmish. They attacked again on December 12 of the same year. This military campaign culminated on February 1, 695, when Naranjo once <verbatim></verbatim> again engaged the main forces of Ucanal in bloody combat, this time with a lord of Dos Pilas in attendance to participate in the victory. The major prize taken in this second full-scale battle of the war was the lord Shield-Jaguar, the unfortunate captive who is featured in the grim rites recorded on both Stela 22 (Fig. 5:15a) and Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17).[292]
-The manner in which anarchists described the social revolution can give the false impression that they thought it would occur all at once and imagined that, to pick a country at random, all or most of France would simultaneously rise up, overthrow the ruling classes and build an anarchist society. This interpretation ignores that Kropotkin routinely pointed out that the social revolution would most likely: (a) occur alongside a parallel statist revolution launched by republicans or state socialists; (b) develop out of a statist revolution or a series of smaller insurrections; and (c) begin with local uprisings in particular regions, such as Paris, or by particular groups of people, such as miners, and spread to the rest of the country (and hopefully the world) as people in other regions and industries heard of these uprisings and were inspired to join the emerging revolutionary process.[[#57KropotkinDirectStruggle|57]]
+Now the star of war glinted brightly for Naranjo. Smoking-Squirrel, like his earlier counterpart at Caracol, timed his battles and war-related rituals according to the position of Venus. He declared his kingship as Venus hovered on the stationary point before inferior conjunction. His S first war event occurred at the helical setting of Eveningstar on the eve of the summer solstice. Finally, his second triumphant battle against Ucanal was waged when Venus rose helically as the Morningstar, exactly one cycle later.
-As has already been mentioned, anarchists held that these uprisings, and the social revolution at large, should involve the forcible expropriation of the ruling classes. They thought that any social revolution that did not engage in expropriation would be doomed to failure. If a social revolution were to succeed, the population as a whole must be fed, clothed, and housed. If this did not happen, workers would never support the social revolution, because it does not improve their lives directly or causes a decline in living conditions. Without the support of the masses, the social revolution would fail and reactionaries would be able to restore class society with the promise of bringing stability. Anarchists, in other words, understood that “it is not enough to cherish a noble ideal. Man does not live by high thoughts or superb discourses, for he needs bread as well.”[[#58KropotkinRebel218Thef|58]] It is essential that, once a social revolution begins, people immediately expropriate and redistribute food, clothing, and housing among the population. The expropriation of the means of production and land would, in turn, enable the working classes to produce the necessities of life needed to sustain the population over a longer period of time and prevent food shortages from defeating the social revolution.[[#59KropotkinRebel2072182|59]]
+As we have mentioned before, prestigious captives taken in battle were often kept alive for years on end. They were displayed in public rituals and often participated in these rituals in gruesome, humiliating, and painful ways. Smoking-Squirrel and Wac-Chanil-Ahau were enthusiastic practitioners of this sacred tradition. Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal survived his capture to reappear four years later, on May 23, 698, in an event that was in all probability a sacrificial ritual of some sort (Fig. 5:14). Later in the same year, on September 23, Shield-Jaguar suffered through the same rite in “the land of Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo.” A year later, on April 19, 699, it was Lady Wac-Chanil’s turn. The hapless Kinichil-Cab appeared again in a public ritual she conducted. On Naranjo Stela 24 (Fig. 5:15b) we see her standing on the bound, nearly naked body of this unfortunate warrior. Finally, on 9.13.10.0.0 (January 26, 702), the day Smoking-Squirrel dedicated both Stela 22 and Stela 24, the young king displayed his famous captive, Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal, in a public blood-letting ritual (Fig. 5:15a). As depicted, the ill-fated captive is nearly naked, stripped of all his marks of rank and prestige, holding his bound wrists up toward the magnificently dressed fourteen-year-old king who sits high above him on a jaguar-pillow.
-Several anarchists in the late nineteenth century predicted that, even if a country were able to achieve this, the social revolution would likely fail unless it occurred internationally. Guillaume argued in 1874 that “the Revolution cannot be confined to a single country; on pain of death, it is obliged to subsume into its movement, if not the whole world, then at least a considerable portion of the civilized countries.”[[#60GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|60]] No country can be entirely self-sufficient and were the states neighboring a country in revolution to impose a blockade, let alone invade, then “the Revolution, being isolated, would be doomed to perish.”[[#61GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|61]] Kropotkin shared this concern and developed a detailed response to the problem of economic isolation in his famous 1892 book ''The Conquest of Bread''.'' ''He attempted to demonstrate in exhaustive detail how a country could reorganize production and distribution during a revolution with the use of the technology and productive capacities of the time, such as through the extensive use of green houses in urban areas.[[#62KropotkinConquestofBread|62]] Decades later, Berkman witnessed the blockade that was imposed on the 1917 Russian revolution by capitalist states. In 1929, he wrote in response to these experiences that “the revolution is ''compelled'' to become self-supporting and provide for its own wants.”[[#63BerkmanAnarchism228|63]]
+In spite of his achievements, this energetic young king was still far from the fulfillment of his military ambitions. When Katun 14 was nearing its end, he began yet another series of battles, which he later recorded on Stela 23 (Fig. 5:16). This time his target was a nearer kingdom, Yaxha, located to the south on the shores of a lake bearing the same name. It was perhaps there that his grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul had acted together in a ritual years before. On March 23, 710, just after the spring equinox, Smoking-Squirrel attacked Yaxha, accompanied by an individual who was the sibling of either his mother or his wife.[293] On this day, Venus was making its last appearance as Morningstar and Jupiter and Saturn hung in conjunction at their second stationary points.[294] Ninety-seven days later, on June 8, shortly after the summer solstice, there was an even more spectacular alignment in the heavens, this time among Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury.[295] On this occasion Smoking-Squirrel conducted a ritual with a prisoner from Yaxha. We have not yet deciphered the glyphs describing this ritual, but at least part of it included the scattering of blood. A year after this rite, on April 12, 711, when Venus again appeared as Morningstar, Smoking-Squirrel went to war once more, this time on the shore of a lake adjacent to Yaxha, a place known as Sacnab, or “Clear Lake.”[296]
-The anarchist fear that an isolated revolution would be defeated, alongside their commitment to universal human emancipation, led them to place a great deal of importance on opposing the patriotism and nationalism of the state and fostering internationalism among the working classes. Bakunin understood that “a real and definite solution to the social question can be found only on the basis of an international solidarity of workers of every land,” because “no isolated local or national workers’ association, even one based in the largest of European countries, can ever triumph in the face of a formidable coalition of every privileged class, of every wealthy capitalist, and of every state in the world.”[[#64BakuninSelectedTexts34|64]] To overcome this coalition of reaction, workers had to achieve “the unity of all local and national bodies” through the formation of “one universal association—the great ''International Workers’ Association of every land''.”[[#65BakuninSelectedTexts43|65]] This point was reiterated by Rocker decades later when he argued that “the effective basis . . . for the international liberation of the working class” will only be laid “when the workers in every country . . . come to understand clearly that their interests are everywhere the same, and out of this understanding learn to act together.”[[#66RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi|66]]
+Stela 23’s history ends with the battle at Sacnab, but we can pick the story up again on Stela 2 (Fig. 5:17). There Smoking-Squirrel begins his account with the celebration of the period ending on 9.14.0.0.0 at the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar. This heavenly event was celebrated not only at Naranjo but at Copan and Tikal as well, showing how widespread these Venus rituals had become in the Maya world.[297] Two hundred days later, on the summer solstice (June 22, 712), Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal reappears in a rite which is enacted on the occasion of the maximum elongation of Eveningstar. Eighteen years of public humiliation had passed since his capture. We suspect this long-suffering prisoner did not survive this ritual, for with this date he disappears from the record.
-The outcome of this internationalism would, to quote Malatesta, be workers coming to view “the whole world as our homeland, all humanity as our brothers and sisters.”[[#67MalatestaCafe137Seeal|67]] Under capitalism, this internationalism would be grounded in an understanding of the working class’s shared interests, such that any “worker, the oppressed, Chinese or Russian or from any other country, is our brother, just as the property-owner, the oppressor, is our enemy, even if he is born in our home town.”[[#68MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|68]] This belief in working-class internationalism led anarchists in Europe and the United States to form multiethnic and multiracial social movements or organizations. The aptly named International Group of San Francisco brought together Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, French, Italian, and Mexican anarchists in order to organize discussion groups, lectures, picnics, dances, plays, concerts and dinners.[[#69ZimmerImmigrants18288|69]] In 1931, the paper ''L’Emancipazione'', which was collectively produced by members of the group, declared its goal to be “overcoming all race hatred for the solidarity of all peoples, [and] the destruction of all borders: to inaugurate the true and sincere pact of human solidarity.”[[#70QuotedinZimmerImmigrants|70]]
+[[][Fig. 5:18 Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau at Her Son’s First Anniversary of Rule]]
-Numerous other examples can be found in the history of anarchism in the United States, which was largely a social movement of immigrants. Anarchists played a key role, alongside other socialists, in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at a convention in 1905. The constitution of the IWW, in contrast to other trade unions at the time, included an explicit commitment to organizing all workers, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. This was reflected in the IWW’s subsequent organizing campaigns, which included the formation of interracial unions among Black and white timber workers in the South and Northwest, and Black and white dockworkers on the Philadelphia waterfront. The IWW’s multiethnic and interracial character can also be seen in the fact that French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Finnish, Swedish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Japanese, and African American anarchists participated within the trade union as members of local sections, organizers of strikes, and editors of, or writers for, newspapers. On the West Coast, Japanese anarchists, including Takeuchi Tetsugoro, translated IWW literature into Japanese, published a bilingual newspaper to promote the IWW, and organized 2,000 Japanese grape pickers via the Fresno Labor League. In September 1909, the Fresno Labor League held a joint rally with the local branch of the IWW, which was primarily composed of Mexican and Italian workers. After the organization dissolved in 1910, many members joined the local branch of the IWW and went on to organize hundreds of Mexican and Japanese orange pickers in 1918.[[#71PeterColeDavidStruthers|71]]
+Smoking-Squirrel’s rampage through the central Peten finally ended, to the relief of neighboring kingdoms, on February 16, 713, with the first katun anniversary of his accession. As he had since the beginning of his reign, Smoking-Squirrel paired the stela commemorating this event with a stela depicting his mother, the founder of his line. Stela 2, which is essentially a war monument, stood adjacent (Fig. 5:12) to Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 3 (Fig. 5:18), which shows her participating in her s son’s anniversary celebration. In this text, Smoking-Squirrel once again memorialized her arrival. He also created some useful political propaganda by linking the date of the first katun anniversary of his own accession to the same anniversary date of Naranjo’s Ruler I. Ruler I was, of course, the king who had fallen victim to Caracol’s victory eighty-one years earlier. With this pair of inscriptions, Smoking-Squirrel completed the circle of defeat and triumph for Naranjo. The glory of that city had been revived by a new and vital dynasty.
-For anarchists, this commitment to universal human solidarity entailed an opposition to imperialism and colonialism and the support of anticolonial national liberation movements, such as those in Cuba, India, and Ireland.[[#72KropotkinDirectStruggle|72]] According to Maximoff, “the Anarchists demand the liberation of all colonies and support every struggle for national independence as long as it is an expression of the will of the revolutionary proletariat and the working peasantry of the nation concerned.”[[#73MaximoffProgramofAnarcho|73]] This support included the belief that the main goal of national liberation movements—emancipation—could only be achieved through the methods of anarchism, rather than the establishment of a new state. As will be explained in chapter 5, anarchists predicted that if national liberation movements seized state power then they would end up replacing foreign colonial oppressors with a new minority ruling class who oppressed and exploited the majority of the population.
+Smoking-Squirrel’s fame as a warrior was no doubt legend in the region of the Fetén. His successful military campaigns upset the destinies of cities as dramatically as the past victories of his hated enemy, Caracol; and his postconquest strategies were cleverly designed to keep his enemies powerless. For example, by keeping his high-ranked captives, Shield-Jaguar and Kinichil-Cab of Ucanal, alive for many years, Smoking-Squirrel most likely disrupted the succession within both their families and their kingdom. This elegant strategy created chaos in a social structure where these individuals could not be replaced until after they were dead. To display these captives in public rituals over many years confirmed the military prowess and the political power of the young king among his own constituency, and sowed fear and respect among Naranjo’s rivals. Smoking-Squirrel also made optimum use of the powerful allies that came to him through his mother’s line. He fought his wars with the support of his formidable and aggressive grandfather, Flint-Sky-God K, and most probably Shield-God K, his mother’s half brother, who became ruler of Dos Pilas on 9.13.6.2.0 (March 27, 698). These battles secured the region surrounding Lake Yaxhá, making the journey between Naranjo and the Petexbatún stronghold held by his mother’s people both easier and safer.
-During World War I, anarchist opposition to imperialism was paradoxically used by a small number of authors, including Kropotkin and Grave, to argue that anarchists should support the French Republic against German militarism on the grounds that Germany had launched a war of aggression and, if victorious, would impose autocracy on the rest of Europe. Most anarchists rejected this argument and refused to side with any state in the conflict since it was a war between rival imperialist powers. As the ''International Anarchist Manifesto Against War'' declared in 1915, “there is but one war of liberation: that which in all countries is waged by the oppressed against the oppressors, by the exploited against the exploiters.”[[#74InternationalAnarchistMan|74]] This opposition to all states in the conflict coincided with multiple attempts to organize resistance to the war, such as launching campaigns against conscription, which resulted in anarchists experiencing a significant amount of state repression.[[#75KinnaKropotkin17783Ma|75]]
+The campaign of battles waged by Smoking-Squirrel and his people was not totally inspired by a spirit of revenge and conquest, however. This campaign was also imbued with a spiritual content, chartered by the now venerable mandates of Venus-Tlaloc warfare. Smoking-Squirrel planned his military actions according to the movements of Venus, calling upon the power of that god of conquest to sanction his aggression. The costume he wears on Stela 2, in fact (Fig. 5:17), is the Late Classic version of the same war costume we saw Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal wear in their first Venus war victories. Timing his attacks by Venus also gave Smoking-Squirrel the opportunity to re-create the same cosmic setting as that in which his own predecessor, Ruler I, had suffered ignominious defeat. Thus, Smoking-Squirrel’s successes worked to neutralize his ancestor’s defeat, proving that the god once again favored Naranjo and accepted the restoration of the dynasty.
-'''Evolution and Revolution'''
+There can be little doubt that Smoking-Squirrel’s ultimate goal had always been to redeem his city from its disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol. He accomplished this by systematically crushing Caracol’s allies, and bringing a resounding finish to Caracol as a force to be reckoned with in the Petén. Once he was certain that he had reestablished the flow of history in Naranjo’s favor, Smoking-Squirrel finally dismantled the hated stairs the victorious Caracol warlords had erected in his capital. Resetting it in illegible order, he created a nonsense chronicle, a fitting end for a monument erected by his enemies to rob his people of their own place in history.
-Anarchists did not expect the social revolution to appear out of nowhere. They viewed social change as a single process that could be divided into periods of evolution and periods of revolution.[[#76MarieFlemingTheAnarchist|76]] During periods of evolution change is slow, gradual, and partial. Evolutionary change includes such things as certain ideas becoming more popular, small groups of people developing radical capacities and drives, or dominant structures being gradually modified. Over time, this evolutionary change builds up and culminates in a revolutionary period during which change is rapid and large scale, fundamentally altering society. Although periods of evolution are in general much longer than periods of revolution, it does not follow from this that revolutions are short. A revolutionary period could last years if, during this period, it involves ongoing, large-scale change that fundamentally alters society. The French revolutionary period that began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, for instance, ended ten years later in 1799 with the seizure of state power by Napoleon Bonaparte.
+One of his most telling acts of revenge was to have one of the stairs’ glyph blocks transported to Ucanal. There he placed it in the center alley of the ballcourt,[298] probably in conjunction with some very unpleasant sacrificial rituals involving the defeated lords of that kingdom. The fine irony of this ceremony was surely not lost on the king of Caracol, who was forced to sit passively and watch from afar the neutralization of the monument with which his ancestor had humiliated Naranjo. What more elegant revenge could Smoking-Squirrel have conceived of than the transfer of this block to the city of Caracol’s own ally?
-Evolutionary and revolutionary change were not seen as separate distinct entities but rather fed off and flowed into one another. An evolutionary period would, if events unfolded as anarchists hoped, develop into a revolutionary period. According to Bakunin, revolutions “come about of themselves, produced by the force of things, the tide of events and facts. They ferment for a long time in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses—then they explode, often triggered by apparently trivial causes.”[[#77BakuninSelectedWritings|77]] In turn, they create or open up new pathways for evolutionary change in the future, while at the same time blocking off other avenues. These new evolutions would lead to new revolutionary change in the future, and so on. As Reclus argued, “evolution and revolution are two successive aspects of the same phenomenon, evolution preceding revolution, and revolution preceding a new evolution, which is in turn the mother of future revolutions.”[[#78EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|78]]
+ The Giant Stirs
-Émile Pouget expressed this same idea in different language. He conceptualized revolution as a single process of social change that includes both gradual modifications to capitalism and the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism. For him, revolutionary syndicalism “does not regard the Revolution as a future cataclysm for which we must wait patiently to see emerging from the inevitable working-out of events. . . . The Revolution is an undertaking for all times, for today as well as tomorrow: it is continual action, a daily battling without let-up or respite, against the forces of oppression and exploitation.”[[#79EmilePougetThePartyof|79]] As a result, when the working classes launch an insurrection that forcefully expropriates the capitalist class it will be “the culmination of preceding struggles” in which they had traversed “stages along the road to human emancipation.”[[#80PougetThePartyofLabour|80]]
+Almost simultaneous with Naranjo’s reemergence as a power in the Peten, Tikal began to reach out and regain its position in the Maya world. The strategy used by its new king exactly paralleled Smoking-Squirrel’s: a successful war waged against the alliance that had once defeated his ancestors.
-Anarchists consistently expressed these ideas about evolution developing into revolution through water-based metaphors. Bakunin wrote in a letter to Reclus that “we are falling back into a time of evolution—that is to say revolutions that are invisible, subterranean and often imperceptible . . . drops of water, though they may be invisible may go on to form an ocean.”[[#81BakuninSelectedTexts251|81]] Guillaume claimed that “it is not in one day that waters rise to the point where they can breach the dam holding them back: the waters rise slowly and by degrees: but once they have reached the desired level, the collapse is sudden, and the dam crumbles in the blinking of an eye.”[[#82GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|82]] For Berkman, evolutionary change leads into revolutionary change in the same way that water in a kettle gradually heats up until it boils.[[#83BerkmanAnarchism179|83]]
+It’s puzzling that the two principal victims of Caracol’s military rampage, Tikal and Naranjo, make little mention of each other’s efforts to throw off the bonds of their mutual enemy. The reason for this rather deliberate silence is not certain. Perhaps the meddling of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas in Naranjo’s affairs sowed distrust between cities that should have been logical allies. In any event, we are not yet certain if the timing of Tikal’s revival was connected in any way to Naranjo’s; nor do we know to what extent these cities’ struggles to recoup themselves might have been mutually reinforcing.
-This did not mean that anarchists viewed evolution and revolution as natural forces that inevitably propel human subjects toward a better society.[[#84Thisideahasbeenfalselya|84]] Reclus understood that “revolutions do not necessarily constitute progress, just as evolutions are not always directed toward justice.”[[#85ReclusAnarchy139|85]] Malatesta similarly held that “there is no natural law that says evolution must inevitably give priority to liberty rather than the permanent division of society into two castes . . . that of the dominators and that of the dominated.”[[#86MalatestaCafe105|86]] These evolutions and revolutions, be they progressive or reactionary, were nothing but the products of humans acting within their historical situation and thereby transforming the world. Mella insisted that “social evolution is constituted by men; these men constitute the means by which it develops.”[[#87MellaEvolutionandRevolu|87]] For Malatesta, “human evolution moves in the direction in which it is driven by the will of humanity.”[[#88MalatestaCafe105|88]]
+We do know that Tikal’s liberation may have begun somewhat earlier than Naranjo’s. Although no stelae dated between the years A.D. 557 and 692 survived at Tikal, we know that a ruler named Shield-Skull began an ambitious remodeling project in the North Acropolis and East Plaza during the middle of the seventh century.[299] Even as the dynasty of Great-Jaguar-Paw was plotting its revenge, its kings had already begun the healing process by rebuilding the center of their city. By this act they began wiping out the evidence of Lord Water’s depredations and reaffirming their own cosmic greatness. The mere fact that they got away with this new, architectural program is telling evidence of Caracol’s weakening grip on the Peten in the waning decades of the seventh century.
-One of the main forms of evolutionary change anarchists engaged in was spreading anarchist ideas through newspapers, pamphlets, books, talks, and demonstrations. Anarchist literature was not exclusively nonfiction and also included poems, songs, short stories, plays, and novels. The majority of anarchist print media was written and edited by workers for free in their spare time after a full day of work. There were a few papers which were run by full-time paid staff, such as Spain’s ''Solidaridad Obrera'' from 1916 onwards, but these were in the minority.[[#89JamesYeomanPrintCulture|89]] Workers who could not read would listen to anarchist texts being read aloud at public meetings, smaller private gatherings, and even at work. Some illiterate workers would deliberately memorize their favorite anarchist articles and then recite them to other workers.[[#90JeromeRMintzTheAnarchi|90]] The medium of transmitting ideas via face-to-face interaction by itself created a social network of anarchist workers in a specific location. This group of workers could then decide to not only absorb and discuss anarchist theory, but also put theory into practice and take direct action, such as by organizing a strike.
+On 9.12.9.17.16 (May 6, 682), just as Flint-Sky-God K was preparing to send his daughter Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau to Naranjo, a new vigorous ruler, named Ah-Cacaw,[300] ascended to the throne of Tikal and began a campaign to restore the honor of its ruling family. A large man for his times, Ah-Cacaw would live into his fourth katun, and be over sixty years old when he died. At 167 cm (5 feet 5 inches), he was a veritable giant,[301] standing ten centimeters above the average height of the men of his s kingdom.
-One of the main sources of content for anarchist papers was the vast number of letters that workers sent to editors and publishing groups. These letters usually contained anarchist theory, stories, poetry, calls for solidarity, news of organizing and meetings, and reports of oppressive or scandalous behavior by capitalists and the police. Through writing letters, these correspondents transmitted information and reflections about a local area to the editors of the paper. The editors would, if they deemed it worthy, print the letter in the paper and then send copies to every correspondent they had across the country. Correspondents would distribute the paper to local workers and collect money for both the publishing costs of the paper and solidarity funds that the paper had set up to support striking workers, anarchist prisoners, or widows of dead comrades. The anarchist press was constituted by a social network in which local correspondents were the nodes through which the anarchist press was channeled out to localities, and the thoughts, experiences, and money from localities were channeled back to publishers. During periods when there were no genuinely national formal anarchist organizations in a country, the informal social networks that connected readers, correspondents, editors, and publishers functioned as the organizational structure of the anarchist movement.[[#91YeomanPrintCulture1619|91]]
+No sooner had he claimed the throne than Ah-Cacaw began a tremendous new building program, rallying the pride and ingenuity of the entire metropolis with his enormous demands for both skilled and unskilled labor. He mobilized clans of masons, architects, painters, and sculptors and put them to work reshaping the most important ritual space in the city: the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza to the south of it. Embodying five hundred years of royal ritual and history, the North Acropolis and the Great Plaza were not merely the heart of the city, they were the enduring expression of the ruling house of Tikal. Significantly, these monuments also bore the marks of the ignominious desecration placed upon them by Tikal’s conquerors. Ah-Cacaw’s visionary plan was not only to reclaim these monuments, but to surround them with the largest buildings ever known in the Maya world, a group of temples that would ring the Great Plaza, the ceremonial center of his revived kingdom.
-Anarchists also spread their ideas through lectures, public debates, and speaking tours. For example, in 1895, the Italian anarchist Pietro Gori went on a vast speaking tour of the United States during which he delivered somewhere between two and four hundred lectures on anarchism in a single year. He began many by singing songs and playing his guitar in order to gather a crowd, before launching into a talk on anarchism, often successfully persuading a number of workers to form anarchist groups.[[#92PietroDiPaolaTheKnights|92]] The dual goal of consciousness-raising and organizing was typically facilitated through the distribution of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals at talks. This had the effect that speaking tours established a local archive of anarchist literature wherever they traveled. The new collection of print media could then be used by workers to educate themselves further and become more committed to anarchism once the speaking tour had left the area. Since periodicals included an address to send letters to, the distribution of print media also ensured that new local anarchists had a means to communicate with other anarchists and become part of the social networks that constituted the movement.[[#93YeomanPrintCulture1474|93]]
+The first step in Ah-Cacaw’s plan was to deactivate the ritual spaces of the North Acropolis by cutting them off visually and physically from the Great Plaza. He then shifted the focus of dynastic celebration into the Great Plaza itself. To do this, he reworked the south side and ceremonial front of the North Acropolis. When he began this work, the south side of the Acropolis already held some of the finest pyramids ever built in the history of the kingdom. These “sacred mountains” stood in a row behind the tree-stone forest of stelae created by Tikal’s great kings (Fig. 5:19). On the right side of this magnificent temple group stood Temple 32–1 st,[302] the structure built over Burial 195, the tomb of the twenty-second ruler of Tikal. Ruling around A.D. 600, this fellow was the first king to endure the darkness of a reign without history under the heel of Caracol. On the opposite end towered Temple 34–1<sup>st</sup>, built over Burial 10, the tomb of Curl-Snout, the son of the conqueror of Uaxactun and the father of Stormy-Sky.
-This emphasis on spreading ideas was motivated by the awareness that, to quote Lucy Parsons, fundamental social change was preceded by “a long period of education” that developed “self-thinking individuals.”[[#94LucyParsonsFreedomEqual|94]] The “first task” of anarchists, according to Malatesta, was “to persuade people. We must make people aware of the misfortunes they suffer and of their chances to destroy them. We must awaken sympathy in everybody for the misfortunes of others and a warm desire for the good of all people . . . arousing the sentiment of rebellion in the minds of men against the avoidable and unjust evils from which we suffer in society today, [and] getting them to understand how they are caused and how it depends on human will to rid ourselves of them.”[[#95MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|95]]
+The centerpiece of the North Acropolis’s facade, however, was the magnificent Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> (Fig. 5:2) built before the disastrous defeat. Raised in the era of the staff kings, its exquisitely modeled and painted stucco masks displayed the original great architectural programs of the Late Preclassic period. This sacred mountain, above all others, had been the orthodox focus of royal ecstasy and the dramatic backdrop against which the stelae commemorating each king’s vision stood for all to witness. Throughout much of the sixth and seventh centuries this temple remained as the indomitable image of Tikal’s kingship. Under its sculptured pyramid lay Burial 48, the tomb of the great Stormy-Sky; and newly set into its base were Burial 24 and Burial 23, which was probably the tomb of Shield-Skull, Ah-Cacaw’s father. It is no wonder then that this s was the location Ah-Cacaw chose to raise his breathtaking Temple 33.
-In other words, anarchists sought to bring about a variety of different changes to the consciousness of the working classes. They sought to improve their theoretical understanding of existing society and how it oppresses them, persuade them that an anarchist society is both possible and desirable, instill anarchist values in them, and, perhaps most importantly, motivate them to actually engage in direct action and emancipate themselves. It was for this reason that Kropotkin sought to use his paper ''Le Révolté'' to inspire workers with hope by documenting “the growing revolt against antiquated institutions,” rather than, as many socialist papers did, drive workers to despair and inaction by focusing too strongly on suffering within existing society.[[#96KropotkinMemoirs39091|96]]
+Ah-Cacaw’s first major political act was to honorably bury two of the desecrated stelae that had been left as trash in the Great Plaza by the victorious Caracol ahauob. We can reconstruct some of what happened during these rededication rites from the archaeological record. At least two of the rituals focused upon the shattered remains of the beautiful Stela 26 (Fig. 5:20) and Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s masterpiece documenting the victory of Tikal over Uaxactun more than three hundred years earlier.
-Anarchist newspapers, pamphlets, books, and talks were but one aspect of a wider revolutionary working-class counterculture that the anarchist movement constructed. There are numerous examples of anarchist workers in Europe and the United States organizing plays, poetry scenes, musical performances, dinners, dances, picnics, and public celebrations of key dates in the revolutionary calendar, such as May Day and the anniversary of the Paris Commune. These social events, which constituted a significant amount of day-to-day anarchist activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not only moments of fun and creativity. They were also instrumental in: (a) drawing workers into a social milieu where they might develop revolutionary consciousness and come to engage in direct action; (b) raising funds for newspapers, strikes, political prisoners, etc.; and (c) forming close social bonds both among anarchist militants and between anarchists and the wider working class in the area. The creation and reproduction of these social networks laid the foundation on which larger acts of revolt and rebellion were organized.[[#97Forexamplesofanarchistco|97]]
+Over a period of several days, Ah-Cacaw buried these stelae with great ceremony within Temples 33 and 34 (Fig. 5:21). He would have regarded this as a time of solemn ceremonial preparation, an initial, pivotal action in his campaign to repair the dishonor done to his ancestral kings by the blasphemous conquerors. In the following passage, we will visualize the events comprising this important historical occasion.
-For decades in Spain, workers came into contact with anarchist ideas via cultural and social centers known as ateneos (athenaeums), which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. These ateneos typically featured a café, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighborhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks, and artistic performances. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the ongoing existence of an anarchist presence within working-class communities. The workers who participated in ateneos organized a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theater clubs that would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, and hiking clubs that allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. Through engaging in these activities, workers developed themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished.
+Ah-Cacaw, a full head taller than his silent companions, halted the procession moving across the broad plaza in the slanting orange light of dawn. His long shadow thrust like a finger from a fist toward the forest of tree-stones standing before the looming temple-mountains. The crooked shadows of the stelae, in turn, fell back onto the steps which led up to the lineage houses holding the earthly remains of his holy ancestors. He raised his eyes to the central temple. The huge plaster faces of the gods, mounted upon this sacred mountain, shone as brightly as they had when first made by his ancestors long before the disastrous defeat of the twenty-first successor of his line. It had taken the entire lifetimes of the four kings before him to bring the kingdom back from that defeat. Now the day of rebirth had finally arrived. As the twenty-sixth successor of Yax-Moch-Xoc, he was determined that his brother kings would learn to respect Tikal once more, as they had when Great-Jaguar-Paw and Smoking-Frog had won their victory over Uaxactun.
-A significant number of anarchist militants, especially women, first encountered anarchist ideas and entered into anarchist social networks through their participation in the ateneos when they were children and teenagers. Young people not only received an anarchist education in ateneos, but also gained experiences of anarchist organizing. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). The FIJL, which was an independent organization linked with the CNT, came to be viewed as one of the main pillars of the anarchist movement. On several occasions, the ateneos were the avenue through which workers mobilized to participate in demonstrations and strikes. They were, in short, social spaces that facilitated working-class self-education, recreation, and class struggle.[[#98MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|98]]
+Two of those four intervening kings were now buried in the great mountain that held the tomb of Stormy-Sky. One of them was Ah-Cacaw’s father, Shield-Skull, who had begun the restoration of the city to its former glory[303] by commissioning monuments in the Central Acropolis and in the large plaza east of the ancestral mountains. Tikal’s twenty-second king lay within the pyramid on the eastern shoulder of Stormy-Sky’s burial temple, placing three of the kings who had suffered through the humiliation of a reign without history in the threshold zone of the ancient acropolis.[304]
-'''Unity of Means and Ends'''
+The silence of his reverie was broken by the grunts of struggling men. Ah-Cacaw turned to face the stelae platform before the westernmost of the three temples at the front of the range of sacred mountains. With a unified cry of effort, six of the men straightened their backs, lifting the enormous chunk of broken stela. The stone, cradled in a net of thick ropes suspended from the thick pole they carried on their shoulders, tore at their strength as they took trembling steps toward the steep stairs that rose toward the dark inner sanctum of the western temple. Here the revered Curl-Snout, father of Stormy-Sky, lay at rest under tons of quarried stone mortared with the sweat of the laboring hundreds who had shaped his tomb into its mountain form. As the first six lords staggered up the steps, a second team of men worked to fasten ropes around the other large fragment of tree-stone that lay broken on the plaza floor. This sacred monument was Tikal history incarnate. It carried the names of the ninth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Conqueror of Uaxactun; his grandson, Stormy-Sky, the eleventh successor; Kan-Boar, the twelfth successor; and the thirteenth successor, Great-Jaguar-Paw, who had been named for his illustrious forebear. Hoisting the carrying pole onto their shoulders, the second cluster of young lords staggered forward in the warming light of the rising sun.
-Anarchists did not think that any form of activity could lead to an anarchist society. They argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating a free, equal, and cooperative society without domination or exploitation. They advocated the unity of means and ends. In 1881, Kropotkin argued that social movements should establish their “final ''objective''” and then “specify a proposed course of action ''in conformity with the ends''.”[[#99KropotkinDirectStruggle|99]] Anarchists like Malatesta often expressed this idea with metaphors of roads and bridges, transit and movement. He wrote,
+It took the young men, all sons of the royal clan and its high-ranking allies, the entire morning to complete their task. Only five or six of them could bring their strength to bear upon the carrying pole at one time. They had to work slowly and in turns, anxious to protect the exquisitely carved text fragments from the further desecration a careless movement might cause. For three hours the king and his closest companions stood upon the steps of the sacred mountain, watching the slow and halting upward progress of the men. A crowd of witnesses gradually formed on the plaza below as patriarchs and their entourages arrived from both the city and the regions beyond. It was a quiet, tense occasion. Finally, Ah-Cacaw’s lords eased the first large fragment of stone into a neat pit they had cut through the floor of the rear chamber. This pit lay just before the blank back wall of the temple, in the rear room that was the inner sanctum and the portal to the Otherworld.[305] Soon thereafter the second fragment of the broken stela was lowered into the pit.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">It is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate means must be used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but instead cannot but be conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the circumstances in which the struggle takes place, for if we ignore the choice of means we would achieve other ends, possibly diametrically opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious and inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the highroad and takes a wrong turning does not go where he intends to go but where the road leads him.[[#100MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|100]]</div>
+When the young men emerged from the temple, Ah-Cacaw went to the place where the tree-stone had lain and picked up a handful of fragments left in dusty disarray on the hard plaster surface of the plaza. Cradling the broken fragments reverently against his naked chest, he carried them up the stairs and into the cool darkness of the temple. There he laid them gently into the pit with the larger pieces. Kinsmen and men of high rank followed his lead, moving single file up the stairs until all that remained of the great tree-stone lay in the pit. Ah-Cacaw had ordered that one large chunk be kept back. This fragment would be placed in another offering pit along with the altar of Stormy-Sky’s tree-stone, soon to be deposited in the central temple. Burying the tree-stone fragment with the altar would link the two ritual burials so that his ancestral dead would understand his motivation. By this act, Ah-Cacaw hoped to erase the desecration visited upon their memory by the victors from the southeast and to summon their spirits to help him in the coming war.[306]
-Goldman made this same point in 1922 when she argued, in response to the Bolshevik seizure of state power during the Russian Revolution, that “means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim” because the “means employed, become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”[[#101GoldmanRedEmma4012|101]] Given this, “revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be ''initiated'' with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitionary period. The latter can only serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”[[#102GoldmanRedEmma404|102]]
+The king waited in silence until the solemn procession had ended. Then he led the shamans and the principal men of his lineage into the rear chamber where the fragments lay in their grave. In front of the pit that held the pieces of the tree-stone were three deep holes dug into the floor. These holes would hold the offerings that would both amplify the power emanating from the ancient stela and seal it into the threshold of the portal.
-Anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends was grounded in the theory of practice, which maintained, as we have seen, that as humans engage in activity, they simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. An anarchist society would be reproduced over time by people engaging in horizontal systems of association and decision-making and, in so doing, continuously creating and re-creating both anarchist social relations and themselves as people with the right kinds of capacities, drives, and consciousness for an anarchist society. These new social relations can only take root if capitalism and the state are abolished through a social revolution and so will have to be created by the people who presently live in, and have been shaped by, class society. It is therefore essential that during the course of the class struggle workers engage in practices that transform them into people who are capable of, and driven to, overthrow class society and establish and reproduce an anarchist society. If social movements make the mistake of using the wrong or inappropriate means then they will produce people who will create a different society than the one they initially intended.
+The mood of the crowd intensified as sounds of drumming echoed throughout the huge plaza. It seemed as if everyone in the city was present. The piercing cry of flutes and clay whistles rose from the children of Tikal. Rattles shivered on the dancing ankles of farmers, masons, and weavers, counterpointing the deep-throated rhythm of the chest-high drums arrayed along the stairs. The people—ahauob and common folk alike—sang and danced a plaintive dirge to rekindle the spirits of the desecrated tree-stones of the ancient kings.[307] At the culmination of this ritual of remembrance and burial, the gods and ancestors would turn their faces once more toward the great kingdom at the center of the world. The lineage of Tikal’s kings would reign once again with honor restored.
-This theory entailed two main commitments. First, a core part of determining what strategies and tactics a social movement should use to achieve their goals is establishing how the forms of practice that constitute them transform individuals and social relations simultaneously. If a social movement’s end goals can only be achieved through a social revolution, then it must choose means during an evolutionary period that build toward this. Kropotkin argued in 1881 that workers should engage in direct struggle against capital, especially via trade unions and strikes, because of the unity of means and ends. He wrote,
+High nobles chosen for their rank and accomplishments moved from the council houses[308] through the swirling crowd. They bore into the sanctum large offering plates called zac lac.[309] The waists of these men were thickly encircled by the wrappings of their hipcloths and skirts, garments made of fine cotton cloth resplendent with painted and woven patterns rendered in the bright hues of forest dyes.[310] The lordly stewards sported turbans of fine fabric, tightly bound around their long black hair with jade-studded leather headbands. Elegant tail feathers arched from the headbands to bob in time with the graceful movements of the procession. Deep-green jade beads and bloodred spondylus shell ornaments gleamed in their earlobes and against their brown chests as they moved with studied dignity, bringing their gifts to the sacred tree-stone.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">A party which proposes a social revolution as its goal, and which seeks to seize capital from the hands of its current holders must, of necessity, and from this day onward, position itself at the center of the struggle against capital. If it wishes that the next revolution should take place against the regime of property and that the watchword of the next call to arms should necessarily be one calling for the expropriation of society’s wealth from the capitalists, the struggle must, on all fronts, be a struggle against the capitalists.[[#103KropotkinDirectStruggle|103]]</div>
+Ah-Cacaw was pleased with the richness of the offerings they carried in the great plates. There were shells and coral from the distant seas to the south, east, and west,[311] purchased from coastal traders and hoarded for this day. Even more precious were the seaweed, sponges, and other living creatures the young men had conveyed inland in saltwater-filled crocks to keep them from spoiling in the tropical heat. The shamans took each offering from its plate as it was presented to them. Beside each cache pit lay a square of beaten-bark cloth. Others were spread on the floor next to the base of the broken tree. With expert grace, the shamans placed each of the offerings in its turn onto the light-brown cloth, all the while singing the story of the dark seas before the gods made the world. When the fresh sea creatures, the shells, and the coral were carefully arranged, they laid the backbones of fish and the spines of stingrays onto the prepared stacks. The royal merchants had not been able to procure enough of the stingray spines, so effigy spines carved from bone were added to the offerings. Together these tokens established the primordial sea of creation around this tree of Tikal, nourishing its spirit just as the sea had nourished the first tree, the axis of the world, at the beginning of creation.
-The second main position entailed by the unity of means and ends is that social movements must structure organizations and make decisions in a manner that causes participants to develop the kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness that are necessary for producing and reproducing the social relations of the future society. A social movement organized in a hierarchical and centralized manner cannot create an anarchist society because it will not produce the right kinds of people for the task. Participants will either act in an authoritarian way or be subject to the authoritarianism of others, such as a small group of leaders monopolizing decision-making power and issuing orders that the membership then implements. This will result in the development of authoritarian tendencies in individuals and the establishment of authoritarian social structures that will, in turn, enable authoritarian modes of practice and constrain antiauthoritarian ones. If a social movement constituted by these self-reproducing authoritarian social structures were to launch or take over a revolution, the result would not be an anarchist society. The authoritarianism of the social movement would instead come to characterize society as a whole. Social movements that aim to create an anarchist society must therefore be constituted by forms of practice that produce self-determining people who associate horizontally with one another. In order to do so, workers must establish social relations in the present that are, as far as possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society.
+Next, an old shaman of the royal court brought forward the divination stones—flakes of obsidian carefully incised with the images of eternal power. Eight of the flakes displayed the Jester God, that most ancient symbol of the kingship. The moon marked three others and two bore pictures of the bag of magical instruments carried by kings in rituals of state.
-The unity of means and ends led anarchists to maintain that, although violence was necessary to defend the revolution from counterattack by the ruling classes, it should not be used to force the working classes into an anarchist society. In Bakunin’s words, “liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below upward.”[[#104BakuninStatismandAnarch|104]] As a result, “a revolution that is imposed, either by official decrees, or by force of arms is no longer a revolution but the opposite of a revolution, because it necessarily provokes reaction.”[[#105QuotedinAWZurbrugg|105]] Malatesta noted that “anarchy cannot be made by force and violent imposition by a few” and “is only possible when it is understood and wanted by large popular masses that embrace all the elements necessary to creating a society superior to the present one.”[[#106MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|106]] There is, in other words, an incompatibility between the means of coercing people into a particular kind of society and the ends of creating a free society in which people voluntarily self-manage social life. A genuine social revolution can only occur if the majority of the population choose to participate within it and reorganize society themselves.
+A warrior prince of the blood came forward next, bearing bundles of soft deer hide. The first was opened, revealing seven faceted flints, small in size but chipped by the finest knappers into irregular shapes resembling tiny amoebalike puddles of water. He unpacked other bundles and took out the blades of spears and spearthrower darts. Still more bundles contained the complex abstract shapes that decorated the wands and staves used during ecstatic ritual performance. The flints glittered in the torchlight, Tikal’s famed workmanship brought to honor the tree-stone and to arm the ancestors. Their shapes focused the power of the Otherworld: Flint and obsidian were the fingernails of the Lightning Bolt, the remnants of Chac-Xib-Chac striking the rock of earth.[312]
-For anarchists, means and ends are not only interconnected in so far as the means you engage in determine the ends you arrive at. They are also identical in the narrow sense that both the means and the ends of anarchism are freedom. As Fabbri wrote, “the libertarian notion of revolution” holds that “freedom is also a means as well as an end.”[[#107LuigiFabbriRevolutiona|107]] Anarchist actions, in other words, create freedom and are instances of freedom at the same time. This can be seen by connecting the anarchist conceptions of freedom discussed in chapter 3 to revolutionary practice. When the working classes collectively struggle against the ruling classes, they are not only fighting for a distant postcapitalist society in which humanity will finally be free. They are also rejecting domination in the present by choosing to act in accordance with their own wills, rather than obeying the wills of their masters and remaining subservient. When the working classes create organizations and social relations in which they horizontally relate to one another, they are both struggling for a future free society and creating a freer society in the here and now by expanding their real possibilities of experiencing a different kind of life and becoming a different kind of person. When the working classes engage in collective struggles or participate in horizontal social structures, they are developing themselves and becoming more free than they were before.
+From his own embroidered bag, the king removed a royal mosaic mirror made of jade and the silver-blue crystalline hematite forged in the southern fire mountains.[313] A precious heirloom of his dynasty, its delicate surface was mounted on a mother-of-pearl backing. He placed the mirror on top of the growing mound of offerings in the principal pit. Small balls of white stone and black obsidian were added to each offering pile. Finally, lineage patriarchs spilled precious red pigment, symbolizing their blood in enduring form, onto the carefully arranged objects. They pulled the jade and greenstone earflares and beads from their ears, smashed and ground them like maize on grinding stones, and sprinkled the fragments across the paint.[314]
-Such a view was not inconsistent with the fact that the majority of anarchists thought violence was necessary to overthrow the ruling classes and defend the social revolution. Using violence to abolish the power of violent oppressors is not a negation of freedom but rather an affirmation of it. As Malatesta put it, “in order to fight our enemies, and fight effectively, we do not need to deny the principle of freedom,” since a commitment to freedom entails “the right to resist any violation of freedom, and to use brute force to resist, when violence is based upon brute force and there is no better way to successfully oppose it.”[[#108MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|108]] Anarchists wish to use violence to expropriate the economic ruling classes “not because freedom is a good thing for the future, but because it is always good, today as much as tomorrow, and the owners deprive us of it by depriving us of the means of exercising it.”[[#109MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|109]] Anarchists, likewise, wish to use violence to overthrow the political ruling classes “because governments are the negation of freedom and we cannot be free without having overthrown them.”[[#110MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|110]]
+The assembled lords and shamans used additional stingray spines to draw blood from their ears and tongues in the ritual that would bring the offerings to life. Then, chanting prayers, they pulled up the corners of the bark wrapping cloths, being careful to preserve the pattern of the offerings within. Folding the cloths carefully, they formed bundles[315] which were decorated with red and blue on their outside surfaces. While one man held each bundle tightly closed, another placed a band of woven fibers around it, drawing these fibers into a tight knot at the top. Cautiously and reverently, they lowered one bundle into each pit. Others were laid against the base of the broken monument.
-'''Prefiguration'''
+As the sun plunged westward toward dusk, Ah-Cacaw thrust an obsidian lancet into the loose skin of his penis, drawing his own blood to both nourish and activate the resanctified tree-stone. Singing a chant to call his ancestors’ attention to his offering, the king smeared his blood across the sides of the stela.[316] Satisfied that his dead had realized the honor he did them and their obligation to unleash the demons of conquest upon his enemies, the king rose, making a trail of his royal blood. Thus the divine ahau created a path for the ancestors to follow as they came out of the mountain and back to Tikal.
-The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends led them to argue that working-class social movements should establish horizontal social relations that are, as far as is possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society. In so doing, workers attempt to construct the world as they wish it to be during their struggle against the world as it is. They also create, through experimentation in the present, the real methods of organization and association that people in the future might use to achieve the states of affairs that characterize an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, argued in 1913 that anarchists “have to find, within the practice of life itself and indeed working through their own experiences, new ways in which social formations can be organized . . . and how these might emerge in a liberated society.”[[#111KropotkinDirectStruggle|111]]
+As the king emerged into the hot glare of late afternoon, ready to dance for his people, master builders hurried into the temple chambers. One of Ah-Cacaw’s chief shamans had stayed behind to guide their work with quiet suggestions. Together, they sealed the pits with plaster so that the floor became even once again. Young men of the minor noble houses vied with one another for the honor of carrying prepared stones from the plaza up to the sanctum. Using these blocks, the master builders began to erect a wall around the broken stela, carefully and reverently placing the stones against it so that it would not be further damaged. They built up the masonry surface with mud and sand mortar until they had made a bench, a throne-altar that filled much of the rear chamber. When they were satisfied with its shape, they coated it with plaster, modeling the bench into a smooth, white surface—forever sealing the ancestral treasure deep inside. Tikal’s history was safe from further depredation and empowered as a living portal awaiting the king’s command. The call to war would soon come.
-During the second half of the twentieth century, this idea was called ''prefiguration'' or ''prefigurative politics''. It should be kept in mind that this term was not used by anarchists historically.[[#112Forthefirstusesofthese|112]] Nonetheless, anarchist organizations generally prefigured the future anarchist society in two ways. First, by embodying the kinds of organizational structure and methods of deliberation and decision-making that a future society would contain. Second, by performing the kinds of functions that organizations in a future society will carry out. Although a social revolution would mark a dramatic shift in social life, there would be no such dramatic shift in anarchist methods of organization and association. The methods would remain the same. What would change is the context and the conditions under which these methods are applied and so the extent to which they can be fully put into practice.
+Festival swirled and eddied across the plazas like the floodwaters of the great rivers. There were dancing processions, pageants, and feasts of special foods and drinks served in exquisite painted vessels crafted by artists of the city and the regions beyond. Members of the royal family drew blood from their bodies and spun in ecstasy across the terraces enclosing the Great Plaza.[317] The witnessing populace responded with great devotional outpourings of their own, emblazoning the plaza in bright red. Finally, when the last light of the sun was sinking behind the horizon and the plaster on the throne-altar had cured into a hard surface, Ah-Cacaw mounted the stairs and entered the temple once again. His shamans and the principal men of his lineage accompanied him for the solemn ceremony that would end this part of the ritual.
-Anarchist organizations built within class society thus have a dual function. In the present they bring people together in order to directly satisfy unmet drives and struggle effectively against capitalism and the state. Through participating in anarchist organizations, workers simultaneously attempt to achieve concrete goals and develop their radical capacities, drives, and consciousness. A tenant union might not only organize a rent strike that wins a reduction in rent or prevents an eviction. The participants could also learn how to make collective decisions in general assemblies and act for themselves through their own direct action. At the same time, they might realize that tenants have shared class interests that are opposed to the class interests of landlords. During the course of the struggle, they begin to understand that society could be organized without landlords, and they may come to aspire for an economic system in which everyone has free access to housing. In changing the world, workers at the same time change themselves.
+The old shaman handed him a obsidian lancet struck free from the core only minutes earlier. Ah-Cacaw made his blood flow until the moment came when he could call forth the Vision Serpent that carried his ancestors to him. As the king sank deeply into the trance state, the shaman took the bark cloth saturated with the king’s blood and laid it in a shallow pit dug in front of the newly made altar. When the blood-stained paper of Ah-Cacaw’s kinsmen had swelled the pile to a respectable size, the shaman added rubber, copal, and wood to make a hot fire. Then he spun the fire drill with a bow, gradually creating enough heat to ignite the dried grass on top of the pile. The fire was slow to catch, but eventually the flames rose along the side of the altar, blackening its face with the mark of a sacrificial offering. In the smoke that swirled up into the vault high inside the roof comb, Ah-Cacaw saw the faces of his ancestors and understood that they crowned with triumph his efforts to restore their glory.
-During a revolutionary period, anarchist organizations would take on new roles and serve as the inspiration for emerging anarchist social forms and/or transform from organizations that struggle against class society into organizations that run a classless society.[[#113Someanarchistsrejectedth|113]] At such a point, they would not only be the dominant structures through which society was generally organized. They would also continually produce and reproduce individuals who want to and are able to freely associate as equals.
+This ritual of communication with the ancestors reopened the portal that had been destroyed by their enemies in the war six katuns earlier. The burial of the tree-stone brought power back to the sacred mountains of the kingdom. In the coming days, as the celebration continued, Ah-Cacaw would also honor the desecrated tree-stone of Slormy-Sky and set it inside the great central temple-mountain. At the conclusion of these ceremonies, his people would begin work on the new mountain that would encompass and protect the repose of the ancestors. They would have to work fast, for the king intended to dedicate the new mountain on the thirteenth katun recurrence of Stormy-Sky’s bloodletting. It was the kind of symmetry of time and action that the ancestors and the gods would admire.
-The strategy of prefiguration was not original or exclusive to the anarchist movement. From the 1840s onward, a tendency within the French socialist movement had proposed the formation of workers’ cooperatives as organizations that would grow in number under capitalism until they displaced capitalist firms and became the nodes of a socialist society.[[#114BernardHMossTheOrigin|114]] During debates within the First International, this idea was extended to the First International itself, including the trade unions affiliated to it. The Belgian Internationalist César De Paepe, who was a collectivist but not an anarchist, proposed in his February 1869 article “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future”'' ''that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and . . . its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order.”[[#115CesarDePaepeThePresen|115]] For De Paepe, “the International contains within itself the seeds of all the institutions of the future. Let a section of the International be established in each commune; the new society will be formed and the old will collapse with a sigh.”[[#116CesarDePaepeThePresen|116]] The influence these ideas had on the developing anarchist movement can be seen in the fact that the article was republished in April 1869 in ''Le Progrès'', which was edited by Guillaume, and in May 1869 by the official organ of the Romance Federation of the First International, ''L’Égalité'', which Bakunin wrote for and edited at the time.[[#117RobertGrahamWeDoNotFe|117]]
+In a state of ecstasy, Ah-Cacaw emerged from the smoking inner sanctum to the roaring shouts of his people. Pillars of fire and incense rose from lineage houses throughout the darkened city below. They knew their king would lead them back to victory and the wealth they had lost. Victory and sacrifice would keep their enemies far from the borders of the kingdom. They understood that the determination of this vigorous new king and his ambition to restore the honor of his dynasty affected all their fates. The greatness of the royal past, now recaptured, would unfold into all their futures. They prayed for the ancient strength of the great kings, knowing that the demons of war had to be driven forward to the lands of their enemies. Once unleashed, they would devour all in their path.
-One of the earliest anarchist endorsements of prefigurative politics occurred when, on November 12, 1871, the Jura Federation issued the “Sonvilier Circular” in response to Marx, Engels, and their supporters converting the General Council of the First International into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections.[[#118ForthecontextoftheSon|118]] As part of their critique of the actions of the General Council they stated that
+Shortly after entombing Stela 26, Ah-Cacaw buried Stela 31, utilizing the same sorts of dedication rituals. The most sacred memorial of Tikal’s glorious military history, Stela 31 was the tree-stone upon which Stormy-Sky himself had engraved the history of the Uaxactun conquest.[318] Enemies had violently torn this magnificent stela from its place in front of Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup>, the building next door to the temple in which Ah-Cacaw later interred Stela 26.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the society of the future should be nothing other than the universalization of the organization with which the International will have endowed itself. We must, therefore, have a care to ensure that that organization comes as close as we may to our ideal. How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning toward authority and dictatorship.[[#119TheJuraFederationTheS|119]]</div>
+Lifting Stela 31 from where it lay in disgrace, the lords of Tikal carried it in honor up the stairs to the old temple. There they replanted it in the shallow pit they had dug into the floor of the rear room of the temple, laid kindling around its base, and lit a fire to disperse the power accumulated in the stone—just as they had done in the rituals described above for Stela 26. This fire also seared away the dishonor that had been done to the stela’s spirit. Members of the court of Tikal, and those nobles from ancient vassal communities courageous enough to declare for the new king against Caracol, brought elaborate pottery censers in which they burned ritual offerings. After the ceremony, these censers were smashed in a termination ritual and the pieces left scattered on the floors of these soon-to-be-buried temple chambers.
-Anarchists, in short, thought that building prefigurative organizations was essential because of the unity of means and ends. As Bakunin wrote, a few months after the “Sonvilier Circular” was published, “the fashion and form of one’s organization arises from and flows as a consequence from the nature of one’s aims.”[[#120BakuninSelectedTexts18|120]] Kropotkin likewise argued in 1873 that revolutionaries must reject social relations within “the revolutionary organization” that contradict the ideals for which it has been formed, relations such as “a hierarchy of ranks which enslaves many people to one or several persons” or “inequality in the interrelations of the members of one and the same organization.”[[#121PeterKropotkinFugitiveW|121]]
+Once Stela 31 was cached in its place, work crews filled the chambers of the old temple, then collapsed its vaults and roof comb, sealing in its power forever. They then covered the old building with a flat-topped pyramid twelve meters tall, which would provide the construction base for a new sacred mountain which would reach 18.8 meters in height. The engineers and masons used the technique of rapid building, for no doubt Ah-Cacaw intended to strike quickly at his enemies once he had completed the reopening of his family’s sacred portal to the Otherworld. Each level of the rising pyramid was divided into rectangular stone construction pens, which were then filled with mud, mortar, and rubble. When the completed temple stood atop it, this towering pyramidal base provided an impressive new backdrop for the stela row in front of the North Acropolis (Fig. 5:21). The pyramid’s huge mass unified the many buildings of the North Acropolis into a range of living mountains with a single supernatural doorway on its northern horizon. Through this doorway the ancestors of Tikal would emerge once again to aid the new king as he strove to reestablish the glory they had forged before the disaster.[319]
-This was important because, as Malatesta explained, “the abolition of government and capitalism is feasible only once the people, organizing themselves, are equipped to perform those social functions performed today—and exploited to their own advantage—by rulers and capitalists.”[[#122MalatestaPatientWork20|122]] To this end, anarchists like Goldman proposed that workers in the present should attempt “to prepare and equip themselves for the great task the revolution will put upon them” by acquiring “the knowledge and technical skill necessary for managing and directing the intricate mechanisms of the industrial and social structure of their respective countries.”[[#123GoldmanRedEmma397|123]] Anarchist organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society were the concrete means through which workers would learn to self-manage their lives and thereby become equipped to create a self-managed society. As Mella wrote in 1911,
+We do not know exactly when the termination rituals for the old building, Temple 33—2<sup>nd</sup>, ended and the work on Temple 33—1<sup>st</sup> began. We can assume, however, that this building project was under way at the same time that Ah-Cacaw was raising his Twin Pyramid Complex. This complex would hold the first stela of his reign, Stela 30, and its altar (Fig. 5:22), both erected to celebrate the end of Katun 13. This Twin Pyramid Complex was the first to be built since the original complex, which had been buried under the East Plaza in Tikal’s old glory days. Ah-Cacaw no doubt chose this particular style of architecture because he wanted to confirm his continuity with the earlier traditions of his dynasty. He also revived the period-ending celebrations initiated by his ancestor Stormy-Sky, especially the staff ritual that had been so prominent in the golden years after Stormy-Sky’s reign. These rituals would remain central to Late Classic Tikal until its demise.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The proletariat continues acquiring the capacity for cooperation and management precisely outside of political action. In workers’ associations, ''especially in those where political practices do not govern'', workers are gaining the power of initiative, management practices, habits of freedom and direct intervention in common affairs, ease of expression and mental assurance, all things whose development is void in political entities that have as a base the delegation of powers, and, therefore, the subordination and discipline, and obedience to the elected. In social associations, initiatives come from below and from below come ideas, strength, and action. In this way, free men are made and are released to walk.[[#124MellaAnarchistSocialism|124]]</div>
+In spite of the fact that he was busily eradicating all remnants of the conqueror’s influence from his city, Ah-Cacaw did not completely reject Caracol’s stylistic influences in the art he created.[320] The round stone altar (Fig. 5:22) he set in front of his portrait, in fact, was carved in a style that was popular in the kingdom of Tikal’s conquerors (Fig. 5:4). This style utilized Caracol’s favorite device of putting the name of the katun in the center of the top surface of the altar and surrounding it with text. It is possible that Ah-Cacaw chose this style for the altar to be placed in front of his first monument precisely because he wished to neutralize the shame of Tikal’s ancient defeat. This conjecture finds further support when we examine his portrait: He chose to depict himself here in a style much like that of Stela 17, the last monument of the hapless twenty-first successor, who had fallen to Caracol so many years ago.
-Decades later in 1932, the Spanish anarchist Isaac Puente argued that just as a child learns to walk or ride a bicycle by trying and failing until they succeed, so too would workers learn to produce and reproduce an anarchist society through experiments in horizontal forms of association. He wrote, “living in libertarian communism will be like learning to live. Its weak points and its failings will be shown up when it is introduced. If we were politicians we would paint a paradise brimful of perfections. Being human and being aware what human nature can be like, we trust that people will learn to walk the only way it is possible for them to learn: by walking.”[[#125IsaacPuenteLibertarianC|125]]
+If we had only the archaeologically excavated construction record of Temple 33 and the deposition of Stela 31, there would be little more we could say about the events surrounding its dedication. But Ah-Cacaw rightfully regarded the rekindling of the spiritual fires of his dynasty, in Temple 33—1<sup>st</sup> and the Great Plaza, to have been the most important events of his life. These were the pivotal scenes he chose to feature when he memorialized his reign on the broad hardwood lintels spanning the doorways of his great funerary house, Temple 1, high atop the huge pyramid that was built over his tomb. On the dark polished surfaces of these lintels we find Temple 33’s history in wonderful detail.
-Anarchists argued with one another about which prefigurative organizations should be built and how these organizations should be structured. Antiorganizationalists advocated small affinity groups and informal social networks, while organizationalists advocated, in addition to this, large formal federations, such as trade unions. Some anarchists advocated forming intentional communities and workers’ cooperatives, while other anarchists rejected this strategy.[[#126BakuninBasicBakunin153|126]] One area where anarchists generally agreed was on the need to construct emancipatory schools. Anarchists of all varieties founded or participated in schools in Spain, Italy, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. These schools lasted for varying lengths of time, ranging from one or two years to over four decades, in the case of the Modern School of New York, which opened in 1911, relocated to Stelton, New Jersey in 1915 and finally closed in 1953.[[#127PaulAvrichTheModernSch|127]]
+The construction of Temple 33-lst must have been finished shortly after 9.13.3.0.0 (March 3, 695), for Lintel 3 tells us that the dedication events began with this period ending (Fig. 5:23). One hundred and fiftyeight days afterward, Ah-Cacaw went to war and took captive King Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. The battle that won him this famous captive was in the same style as Caracol’s war against Naranjo (Fig. 5:6) sixty-eight years earlier, and Smoking-Squirrel’s recent war against Ucanal (Fig. 5:14).[321] It was Tlaloc-Venus war. There was one significant difference, however. Aside from the fact that Jaguar-Paw fell to Ah-Cacaw on August 8, 695, two days after the zenith passage of the sun, there was none of the usual astronomical significance we have come to expect in Maya warfare. Ah-Cacaw timed this victory not by the strict mandates of the heavens but by the history of his own people, marked by the thirteen katun anniversary of Stormy-Sky’s war event celebrated on Stela 31.
-These schools educated children and adults, but also sought to contribute toward fundamental social change. In 1898, a number of prominent anarchists, including Louise Michel, Reclus, Grave, and Kropotkin, signed an article published in ''Les Temps Nouveaux ''that advocated the creation of anarchist schools on the grounds that “education is a powerful means of disseminating and infiltrating minds with generous ideas” and so could become “the most active motor of progress,” acting as “the lever that will lift up the world and will overthrow error, lies and injustice forever.”[[#128ArdouinetalLibertyTh|128]]
+Thirteen days after the battle in which Jaguar-Paw fell, Ah-Cacaw displayed his Calakmul captives in a ritual in which they were humiliated and probably tortured.[322] This dramatic scene, modeled in plaster, can be found on the upper facade of Structure 5D-57, one of the complex of council houses and temples called the Central Acropolis (Fig. 5:24). Here we see one of the captives, seated and with his wrists bound behind his back. He is held by a tether which stretches to the hand of the victorious king. Ah-Cacaw, standing behind the captive, is dressed in the Mosaic Monster garb of the Tlaloc complex associated with Venus war, the same costume worn by his ancestors during Tikal’s conquest of Uaxactun. The captive pictured is not Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul himself, but someone named Ah-Bolon-Bakin, who was an ally or vassal of that captured king.
-One of the most influential anarchist educationalists was Francisco Ferrer, who established a Modern School that taught pupils in Barcelona between 1901 and 1906. He advocated “the establishment of new schools in which, as far as possible, there shall rule this spirit of liberty that we feel will dominate the whole education of the future.”[[#129FranciscoFerrerAnarchist|129]] Ferrer did not think that teachers would be able to establish a fully emancipatory school overnight. He instead argued that teachers should engage in pedagogical experiments that demonstrated, through a process of trial and error, what approaches to education enabled children to develop themselves and become adults who could think independently and horizontally associate with others.[[#130FerrerAnarchistEducation|130]] Ferrer’s experiments in pedagogy were abruptly ended on October 13, 1909, when he was executed by the Spanish government for a crime he had not committed: orchestrating a week-long working-class insurrection against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco. His martyrdom led him to become an internationally known figure and inspired the creation of emancipatory schools around the world.[[#131AvrichModernSchool293|131]]
+Twenty-seven days later, Ah-Cacaw sacrificed these unfortunate captives in the dedication ritual for Temple 33. He recorded this event in a triplet form, giving different types of information about the event with each repetition. This critical record was carved on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 (Fig. 5:23). First, Ah-Cacaw recorded the ritual as a dedication event in which he himself let blood from his tongue.[323] Aswe shall see in the chapter on Yaxchilan, this ritual involved the piercing of the tongue to create a wound-through which a cord was drawn. The blood loss and pain an individual experienced during this self-wounding process elicited a trance state in which the Vision Serpent could appear. This Vision Serpent was the conduit through which the ancestors came into the world and spoke to their descendants. We suspect that Ah-Cacaw called on Stormy-Sky, bringing him up through the sacred portal in Temple 33 to witness the dynastic renewal accomplished by his descendant.
-The theory and practice of anarchist prefigurative politics was largely concerned with the formation and structure of organizations and often did not give sufficient attention to interpersonal relations between people in daily life, especially men and women. In the United States, for example, anarchists only shifted to focusing on prefiguration in daily life in the 1940s, after anarchism had ceased to exist as a mass movement in the country.[[#132CornellUnrulyEquality1|132]] This is not to say that anarchists prior to this did not think it was important to act like an anarchist in daily life. In 1886, Wilson claimed that anarchists should, in parallel with the formation of mass, working-class social movements, “endeavor to discard the principle of domination from our own lives.”[[#133WilsonAnarchistEssays4|133]] Malatesta similarly wrote in 1897 that “we need to start by being as socialist as we can immediately, in our everyday life.”[[#134MalatestaPatientWork14|134]] Nor is it to say that anarchists in this period never explicitly advocated some forms of prefiguration in daily life. In 1907, the Italian anarchist Camillo Di Sciullo argued that anarchists should, “build a little anarchist world within your family.”[[#135QuotedinJenniferGuglielm|135]]
+[[][Fig. 5:23 Texts recording the Dedication Rituals for Temple 33 on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 and Temple 5D-57]]
-The main form of prefiguration in daily life anarchists advocated was free love in the sense of a voluntary sexual relationship between equals that occurred outside of marriage. These relationships were mostly monogamous, although some anarchists did advocate and practice polyamory. Notable examples of anarchists seriously attempting to engage in free love include the relationship between Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop and the one between Guy Aldred and Rose Witkop. In both cases, Rocker and Aldred appear to have treated their partner in a nonpatriarchal manner. However, most evidence indicates that the majority of anarchist men did not build the gender and romantic relations of the future society within their own households. They continued to treat women in a patriarchal manner, such as expecting their partner to become a mother who did the vast majority of housework and childcare. This, in turn, often led to anarchist women lacking the free time to properly participate within the anarchist movement.[[#136AckelsbergFreeWomen46|136]] In 1935, the Spanish anarchist Lola Iturbe complained that anarchist men “however radical they may be in cafés, unions, and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands.’”[[#137QuotedinAckelsbergFree|137]]
+The second passage in the triplet declares that the dedication ritual[324] took place in a location named with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph. This location was very likely the Great Plaza, the community’s spiritual center. In this passage, Ah-Cacaw asserts his legitimate right to open the portal to the Otherworld by declaring his royal pedigree as the child of Lady Jaguar-Throne and King Shield-Skull. The final description of the dedication of Temple 33 links the event to Ah-Cacaw’s accession.
-A similar failure occurred in public organizations. The CNT, for example, was formally committed to the goal of a society in which men and women were free and equal, but this was generally not prefigured within the trade union’s day-to-day social relations. Soledad Estorach recalled in an interview that women would attend a meeting but not return due to experiences of sexism. Even trade union sections whose membership were mostly women were represented at congresses by men and only a few women spoke during a trade union’s local general assembly. Within the FIJL, teenage boys would laugh at girls when they spoke, or were about to speak, at meetings.[[#138AckelsbergFreeWomen77|138]]
+[[][Fig. 5:24 Structure 5D-57 and the Rituals of Dedication]]
-Women in both Europe and the United States responded to patriarchy within the anarchist movement by forming their own groups in order to enable women to more fully participate in the movement, struggling against patriarchal and class oppression simultaneously. The Women’s Emancipation Group—founded in 1897 by the Italian anarchists Maria Roda, Ninfa Baronio, and Ernestina Cravello—had around fifteen members. It was based in Paterson, New Jersey, held regular meetings over seven years, printed and distributed antipatriarchal literature, and inspired other anarchist women to form their own groups, such as the Women’s Propaganda Group in Manhattan.[[#139GuglielmoLivingtheRevol|139]] Anarchist women in Spain similarly formed their own groups in the 1920s. These grew in number until they were formally linked together via the establishment of the national federation Mujeres Libres (Free Women) in 1937 during the Spanish revolution. The organization’s significance can be seen in the fact that it mobilized over 20,000 women.[[#140AckelsbergFreeWomen21|140]]
+How do we know that the events recorded in Temple 1 refer to the dedication of Temple 33 and the refurbished Great Plaza area? The answer is that we don’t, except by inference, but the evidence supporting our deduction is strong. The date of Ah-Cacaw’s dedication ceremony as recorded in Temple 1 is the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last date preserved on the broken Stela 31. We know that the date on the broken stela marked a bloodletting ceremony enacted by the ancient king Stormy-Sky on the occasion of a maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[325]
-One of Mujeres Libres’ most important contributions was taking anarchist ideas on prefiguration and applying them to the emancipation of women. Since the 1860s, anarchists had argued that workers should build organizations that used the same structure and decision-making procedures as an anarchist society because, through participating in them, workers learned how to self-manage their lives and thereby how to create a self-managed society. Mujeres Libres developed this theory by arguing that liberation for women (and the drives, capacities, and consciousness this entailed) was not simply a matter of creating organizations that coordinated action via federations or made decisions via general assemblies. This is because one of the main barriers to women developing themselves through revolutionary practice was sexist treatment by men and women’s own internalization of patriarchal norms.
+The fact that Ah-Cacaw timed his own dedication rites to this thirteenth katun anniversary date was not accidental. Unlike his royal contemporaries who timed their actions in war and peace by the cycles of Venus, Ah-Cacaw chose a cycle that would connect the rebirth of his dynasty to the old Tikal of the glory days. Stormy-Sky was the pivotal hero of the old dynasty from Ah-Cacaw’s point of view. We believe it was no accident that Ah-Cacaw built his magnificent Temple 33 over the tomb of this great king and there buried Stela 31, Stormy-Sky’s beautifully carved war memorial, as part of the termination rites. As we have seen, Ah-Cacaw also timed his war against Calakmul by this thirteenth katun anniversary cycle. This 260-year anniversary was one of the most sacred cycles to the ancient Maya. It alone of the ancient cycles would survive the conquest to be preserved by the Maya in the katun wheel famous in the books of Chilam Balam in Yucatan.
-In October 1938, Mujeres Libres explained that one of the main goals of the organization was “to empower women to make of them individuals capable of contributing to the structuring of the future society, individuals who have learned to be self-determining.”[[#141QuotedinAckelsbergFree|141]] To achieve this, Mujeres Libres organized educational programs specifically for women. These taught not only basic skills, such as reading and writing, but also courses on “social formation” that focused on how women were capable of developing themselves and had to learn to take initiative and act independently of the men in their lives. Members of Mujeres Libres spread these ideas to the countryside during educational trips where they gave talks to other women. During these talks they explained that mothers could be anarchist militants, that men oppressed women, and that women should act themselves to stop this from occurring.[[#142AckelsbergFreeWomen151|142]] In so doing, they were attempting to build the gender relations of anarchy during both the struggle against capitalism and the state and the formation of an anarchist society, rather than waiting till after the revolution for their emancipation.
+More evidence for our claim can be found by comparing the imagery on Stela 31 with the scenes on the lintels of Temple 1. These scenes clearly portray the essential details of the king’s performance in the Great Plaza on the occasion of the dedication of Temple 33. On Lintel 2 (Fig. 5:25b) Ah-Cacaw sits astride a throne covered with a jaguar pelt, his feet resting on a stepped base marked with bands of waterlilies representing the dark and dangerous surface of Xibalba. He wears the balloon headdress of the Tlaloc war complex and a frightful deity mask, the last earthly thing his sacrificial victims were likely to see. In his hands he holds spearthrower darts and a shield. This is the same battle gear worn by his ancestors, Smoking-Frog on Uaxactun Stela 5 and Curl-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. The Mosaic Monster conjured up by the seated Ah-Cacaw looms above him, menacing the foes of Tikal. This monster is the same god of conquest worn by Curl-Snout as a headdress in his portrait on the left side of Stormy-Sky’s Stela 31 (Fig. 5:25a). The imagery of Lintel 2 refers to much more than the individual portraits of the ancestors on Stela 31. The royal house and the city of Tikal had suffered for katuns while the star of war shone for their enemies. Now their luck had changed. Ah-Cacaw once again commanded the monsters of Tlaloc war his forebears had unleashed with the conquest of Uaxactun.[326]
-'''Direct Action'''
+<center>
+<verbatim>  </verbatim>
+</center>
-The primary means by which the working classes would simultaneously transform themselves and the social world was direct action. Individuals or groups engage in direct action when they act themselves to bring about social change, rather than relying upon intermediaries or representatives to act on their behalf. Direct action, to quote Rocker, encompasses “every method of immediate warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors.”[[#143RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|143]] By “immediate warfare,” Rocker meant actions such as strikes, boycotts, industrial sabotage, distributing antimilitarist propaganda and, in certain circumstances, the “armed resistance of the people for the protection of life and liberty.”[[#144RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|144]] Direct action thus includes nonviolent and violent actions that contribute toward both evolutionary and revolutionary change. The social revolution is in a sense the ultimate form of direct action.
+The innermost lintel of Temple 1 depicts Ah-Cacaw in the other costume he wore during rituals of dedication (Fig. 5:26). Again, Stela 31 seems a likely source of inspiration for this lintel. On Stela 31, as you recall, Stormy-Sky stands holding the cruller-eyed GUI, the jaguar-featured member of the Hero Twins, in his arms. From Stormy-Sky’s belt hang two more versions of the Jaguar Sun, an anthropomorphic version in front and a zoomorphic version in back. This jaguar is the great patron deity of Tikal. He is also equated with the jaguar masks modeled on Late Preclassic temples at Cerros, Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Tikal. He is found in the hand of the king in the earliest known royal portrait at Tikal, Stela 29. We suspect “jaguar” may even be one of the names of the kingdom of Tikal itself.[327]
-Anarchists initially did not use the term direct action and instead deployed a variety of equivalent phrases.[[#145ForexampleBakuninSelect|145]] It is difficult to trace, using texts that have been translated into English, when the term direct action was first adopted by the anarchist movement. One early example is Wilson’s 1886 advocacy of “direct personal action” in the first issue of ''Freedom''.[[#146WilsonAnarchistEssays5|146]] The term direct action appears to have become commonly used due to the emergence and growth of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement in France between the 1890s and the early 1900s. During this period, revolutionary syndicalists, many of whom were anarchists, consistently advocated and engaged in what they termed direct action. This phrase initially referred to when workers drew on their own strength to personally struggle against capitalism and thereby achieve their own liberation through their own actions.[[#147VadimDamierAnarchoSyndi|147]]
+On Lintel 3, we see the Gill-Jaguar God again, this time looming protectively over Ah-Cacaw. In this scene, the king again sits on a seat covered with jaguar pelts atop a stepped platform. In his right hand, he holds a God K scepter and in his left a round shield. He is heavily adorned with jewelry marking both his rank and his ritual role. His feathered headdress is mounted on a Roman-nosed profile of the sun god and a remnant of his huge backrack can be seen behind him. To announce his rank as ahau, a Jester God rides on his chest over a large pectoral composed of jade beads of varying sizes. Ah-Cacaw is seated on a palanquin which he has ridden into a ritual space, perhaps the Great Plaza itself, in order to conduct the public sacrifices that were part of the dedication celebrations.[328]
-This perspective can be seen in Émile Pouget’s appropriately titled 1907 pamphlet ''Direct Action''. According to Pouget, who was both an anarchist and a revolutionary syndicalist, direct action meant that “the working class . . . expects nothing from outside people, powers or forces, but rather creates its own conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its methodology. It means that from now on the ''producer'' . . . means to mount a direct attack upon the capitalist mode of production in order to transform it by eliminating the employer and thereby achieving sovereignty in the workshop.”[[#148EmilePougetDirectAction|148]] For Pouget, “direct action is, therefore, merely trade union action . . . without capitalist compromises, without the flirtation with the bosses of which the sycophants of ‘social peace’ dream . . . without friends in the government and with no ‘go-betweens’ horning in on the debate.”[[#149PougetDirectAction3|149]]
+Out of the ruins of Tikal’s broken history, Ah-Cacaw reshaped a formidable new place of power and sacrifice. Using the deeds of his ancestor Stormy-Sky as a bridge, he healed the breach in Tikal’s history caused by the long years of darkness. One question remains, however: Why did Ah-Cacaw attack Calakmul?
-By the early twentieth century, the term direct action had become a staple of anarchist parlance and was used in a much broader sense than can be found in early revolutionary syndicalist texts. In 1910, Goldman argued that “direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”[[#150GoldmanRedEmma7677A|150]] Goldman applied this idea to abolishing patriarchy and argued that women should emancipate themselves through their own direct action, rather than trying to win the right to vote and elect representatives who would act on their behalf. She declared that a woman’s “development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right of anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc. . . . by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free.”[[#151GoldmanRedEmma202|151]]
+Calakmul’s alliance with Caracol in the war against Naranjo no doubt made its young king, Jaguar-Paw, a target for Tikal’s wrath. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the participation of Calakmul’s earlier kings in a strategy that had encircled Tikal with the enemies and allies of Calakmul. One of those erstwhile allies, the first king of Naranjo, had found himself the target of the same alliance in the waning years of his life. His descendants focused their wrathful vengeance to the south against Caracol’s neighbors, while Ah-Cacaw of Tikal turned north toward Calakmul itself.
-This broader notion of direct action was shared by de Cleyre. During a 1912 lecture in Chicago, she said that “every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist.”[[#152VoltairinedeCleyreTheV|152]] Equipped with this more expansive definition, de Cleyre illustrated the idea by referring not only to the actions of unionized workers. She also pointed to abolitionists, who helped slaves escape their owners through the underground railroad, and to John Brown, who killed supporters of slavery and attempted to free and arm slaves through the seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.[[#153deCleyreReader5255|153]]
+What role did Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas play beyond taking advantage of the resulting power vacuum and setting his own descendants on the throne of Naranjo? We are not sure, for in his early years he had courted the young heir to Calakmul’s throne and attended his accession as a powerful friend. Flint-Sky-God K won a great strategic victory at Naranjo in the power politics of the time, but he must have lost prestige when his most prized ally died at the hands of the new I ikal ruler.
-Anarchists themselves engaged in a wide variety of different forms of direct action, both small and large scale. These included, but were not limited to, workplace strikes, rent strikes, combative demonstrations, riots, armed uprisings, prison escapes, industrial sabotage, boycotts, civil disobedience, and providing illegal abortions. A few of the more exciting, small-scale examples provide some sense of the range direct action could cover.
+Flint-Sky-God K was the founder of a vigorous new dynasty which may have been an offshoot of the Tikal royal family, but considering his alliances, he was very likely the enemy of that kingdom during its recovery.
-Anarchists in Paris organized a socialist removal service that would, under the cover of night, move the possessions of poor families from their apartment before they had paid rent. On at least one occasion, anarchists gagged, tied up, and left a landlord or concierge on his bed in order to achieve this.[[#154JohnMerrimanTheDynamite|154]] In 1900, anarchists living in the United States unsuccessfully attempted to free Berkman from prison by digging an underground tunnel through which he could escape.[[#155PaulAvrichandKarenAvric|155]] Five years later, anarchists in the Russian empire defended Jewish people during the 1905 pogroms by organizing mobile defense units armed with pistols and bombs.[[#156MaurizioAntonioliedThe|156]] In 1919, nearly 150 anarchists, mostly women, rioted at the docks in Lower Manhattan, New York. This was in response to their family members and loved ones being arrested by the American government and deported to Russia for being anarchists.[[#157CornellUnrulyEquality7|157]] In September 1923, the Spanish anarchist affinity group Los Solidarios, which included Buenaventura Durruti, stole 650,000 pesetas from the Gijón branch of the Bank of Spain in order to buy weapons for a planned, but never carried out, insurrectionary general strike.[[#158AbelPazDurrutiintheSp|158]]
+The tangle of elite obligations and vendettas we have outlined in this chapter rivals any in recorded history. Caracol conquered Tikal and later, in alliance with Calakmul, conquered Naranjo. A branch of the defeated Tikal family may well have moved into the Petexbatun region to establish the new kingdom of Dos Pilas. Flint-Sky-God K, the founder of the Dos Pilas dynasty, then began a campaign of battles that won him the friendship of the powerful heir and soon-to-be king of Calakmul. He also sent a daughter to Naranjo to reestablish the dynasty there, after the defeat of a king who had been installed in the presence of a former ruler of Calakmul. Tikal attacked Calakmul, the ally of Dos Pilas, while Naranjo rampaged southward toward Caracol, conquering Yaxha (which may have been subordinate to Tikal) and Ucanal. As far as we can tell, CaracoFs response was to duck and hide in the deepest cover it could find, and ride out the crisis. Certainly, its fortunes declined with the reemergence of Tikal and Naranjo as major powers.
-On numerous other occasions, anarchists participated in larger acts of collective direct action carried out by mass movements. In early 1902, Galleani and other anarchists organized a series of meetings among dye workers in Paterson, New Jersey. These culminated in a small strike being launched in mid-April by Italian dye workers. Over the following weeks the strike massively expanded and, on June 17, a general strike was proclaimed that mobilized around 15,000 dye and textile workers in the city and surrounding area. This expansion of the strike was driven forward by the efforts of anarchist militants who distributed local anarchist papers and organized meetings in Italian, German, and English. On June 18, Galleani gave a speech where he called upon the striking workers to “rise up!” and “answer the legal violence of capital with the human violence of revolt!” A group of between 1500 and 2000 striking dyers then marched into Paterson and proceeded to break the windows and doors of several dye works in order to drive out scabs and to close down production. This soon escalated into an extended gun battle with the police during which Galleani, who was armed with a revolver, received a minor gunshot wound to the face. The strike continued over the following week and ended with workers gaining a general wage increase.[[#159ZimmerImmigrants7778|159]]
+ Some Thoughts and Questions
-From these examples, it is clear why anarchists advocated direct action. When successful, it either immediately results in a goal being achieved or imposes costs onto the ruling classes, such that they acquire an incentive to give into the demands of workers. A strike stops production and so a capitalist’s ability to earn profit. If a capitalist wants to stay in business, and is unable to break the strike, they have no choice but to increase wages, reduce hours of work, improve safety conditions, and so on.
+These are some of the spare facts of the matter, and with any luck more will come to light in the future. Already, however, we can sense a more subtle and treacherous diplomatic landscape behind the facts we know. Did, for example, Flint-Sky-God K deliver Jaguar-Paw into the hands of Ah-Cacaw? One can envision the young monarch of Calakmul, trapped on the battlefield and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Dos Pilas warriors who never appear, raging in frustration as Ah-Cacaw draws steadily nearer with his fierce companions. Certainly the house of Dos Pilas benefited from the outcome of this battle. The alliance of Calakmul and Caracol had spanned the entire central Peten region, holding many great families hostage. With that axis broken, with Tikal in a celebratory mood, and with relatives ruling Naranjo to the east of Tikal, the kings of Dos Pilas could enjoy a free hand in the Petexbatun , spending the next eighty years consolidating a substantial conquest state of their own.
-Anarchists advocated direct action not only because it was an effective means for achieving social change but also because it positively transformed those who engaged in it. According to the Austrian anarchist Siegfried Nacht, “it is above all through action that the people can educate themselves. Little by little, action will give them a revolutionary mentality.”[[#160AntonioliedInternationa|160]] Pouget held that “direct action has an unmatched educational value: It teaches people to reflect, to make decisions and to act. . . . Direct action thus releases the human being from the strangle-hold of passivity and listlessness. . . . It teaches him will-power, instead of mere obedience, and to embrace his sovereignty instead of conferring his part upon a deputy.”[[#161PougetDirectAction5S|161]]
+The impact of these maneuvers on Caracol was profound. No inscriptions exist, as far as we know, from the period spanning the end of Lord Kan H’s reign up until the end of Katun 17. That silence lasted for seventy years. At Calakmul, the results were different, perhaps because that kingdom was so huge and so far to the north that it managed to survive the defeat of its king without major effect. By the next period ending following the death of Jaguar-Paw, the people of Calakmul had already begun to erect stelae once more.
-Such a transformation in people was essential for the achievement of anarchist goals. The overthrow of class society and the construction of an anarchist society required the working classes to learn to act for themselves and collectively self-organize and self-determine their lives. This viewpoint was grounded in the theory that there is a connection between means and ends. For Kropotkin, the anarchist vision of a future society “necessarily leads us to develop for the struggle our own tactics, which consist in developing the greatest possible amount of ''individual initiative'' in each group and in each individual—unity in action being obtained by unity of purpose and by the force of persuasion.”[[#162KropotkinModernScience|162]] The social revolution would, after all, only be successful if the working classes had already, to quote Pouget, “acquired the capacity and will” to transform society and overcome “the difficulties that will crop up” through their “own direct efforts, on the capabilities that it possesses within itself.”[[#163PougetDirectAction7|163]] Direct action in the present “lays the groundwork” for the social revolution since “it is the popularization, in the old society of authoritarianism and exploitation, of the creative notions that set the human being free: development of the individual, cultivation of the will and galvanization for action.”[[#164PougetDirectAction20|164]] It was, as Galleani wrote, “the best available means for preparing the masses to manage their own personal and collective interests.”[[#165GalleaniEndofAnarchism|165]]
+Whatever effects Ah-Cacaw’s deeds may have had on the liberation of the Peten, his rituals of dedication and his family’s program of rebuilding seem to have accomplished their primary purpose. Tikal regained its position as one of the largest and wealthiest kingdoms in the central Peten.
-'''The Spirit of Revolt'''
+In spite of these very substantial gains, however, the king did not rest on his laurels. The architectural remodeling of downtown Tikal and the wars of Ah-Cacaw were far from over. Less than a year after the dedication of Temple 33, Ah-Cacaw attacked Calakmul again, this time taking captive a lord named Ox-Ha-Te Ixil Ahau, who was immortalized in one of the most elegant drawings left to us by the Maya (Fig. 5:27). The artist incised the image of this man on two carved bones deposited in Ah-Cacaw’s tomb. On these bones we see Ox-Ha-Te Ixil standing in public humiliation with his head bowed, stripped to his loincloth, his wrists, upper arms, and knees bound together. The battle in which he fell took place in the land of a person named Split-Earth, who was the king who apparently succeeded Jaguar-Paw at Calakmul.[329] This captive was one of his nobles. Ironically, both these Calakmul stalwarts enjoyed the privilege of history only because they accompanied a great enemy king to his grave.
-Malatesta wrote in 1889 that “the great revolution . . . will come as the result of relentless propaganda and an exceptional number of individual and collective revolts.”[[#166MalatestaMethodofFreedo|166]] He was not simply predicting that revolts would culminate in a social revolution. He was also arguing that revolts are a necessary aspect of the process of social change due to the manner in which they, like all forms of direct action, transform workers who participate in or observe them. He thought that “revolts play a huge part in bringing the revolution about and laying its ground-work.”[[#167MalatestaMethodofFreedo|167]] This was because
+At the end of the katun, 9.14.0.0.0, just when Smoking-Squirrel was attacking Yaxha, Ah-Cacaw built his second Twin Pyramid Complex and placed Stela 14 and Altar 5 (Fig. 5:28) in the northern enclosure. On this stela, Ah-Cacaw stands front view with the staff favored by the Early Classic Tikal kings balanced on his forearms. The feathers of his backrack fan out in a torso-high circle behind him. In recognition of the first appearance of the Eveningstar, he wears the skeletal image of this celestial being as his headdress.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">it is deeds that trigger ideas, which in turn react with deeds and so on. . . . How ever could those millions of men—brutalized by exhausting toil; rendered anaemic by inadequate and unwholesome food; educated down through the ages in respect for priest, boss, and ruler; forever absorbed in the quest for their daily bread; superstitious; ignorant; fearful—one fine day perform an about face and emerge from their hovels, turn their backs on their entire past of patient submission, tear down the social institutions oppressing them and turn the world into a society made up of equals and brothers—had not a long string of extraordinary events forced their brains to think? If a thousand partial battles had not nurtured the spirit of rebellion in them, plus an appreciation of their own strength, a feeling of solidarity toward their fellow oppressed, hatred for the oppressor, and had not a thousand revolts taught them the art of people’s warfare and had they not found in the yearned for victory a reason to ask themselves: what shall we do tomorrow?[[#168MalatestaMethodofFreedo|168]]</div>
+Ah-Cacaw may have built one more twin pyramid complex, but this one, which celebrated 9.15.0.0.0, never had any carved monuments erected within it, so we are not sure of the identity of its originator. It was not the custom at Tikal in the Late Classic period to erect stelae recording the details of the kings’ lives. Instead, the kings vested public energy and historical memory into their personal twin pyramid complexes and the rites they conducted on period-endings. This new emphasis began after Stormy-Sky’s death in the fifth century and it was a custom that Ah-Cacaw reinforced. For that reason we have little information about the last twenty years of Ah-Cacaw’s life: A few dates with obscure events appear on the incised bones deposited in his tomb. One clear historical footnote recorded on these bones, however, is the death of Shield-God K, the son of Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas.[330] Surely if Ah-Cacaw had strained good relations with the Dos Pilas family when he took Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul, he must have repaired the breach by the time of his demise.
-Anarchists, in other words, believed that, in order for a social revolution to emerge, an increasingly large number of workers have to choose to engage in acts of revolt that transform them and motivate other workers to rise up against their oppressors. During the early 1880s, Kropotkin argued that this process must be driven forward by anarchist workers engaging in acts that spread, what he called, “the spirit of revolt.”[[#169Thisphrasecontinuedtobe|169]] According to Kropotkin, this was because the majority of workers will not become anarchists during periods of evolutionary change. Even a mass movement of one million anarchist workers would be a minority in a country of thirty million. Anarchism will only be embraced by workers throughout all of society during a revolutionary period, when vast numbers of previously indifferent people are caught up in a wave of excitement, become open to fundamentally new ways of thinking, and take an active role in reshaping society. This was demonstrated by the fact that, in the eighteenth century, republicanism and the desire to abolish monarchy only became popular in France during the French Revolution itself.[[#170KropotkinRebel7073|170]]
+Ah-Cacaw’s son, Ruler B, succeeded him on 9.15.3.6.8 (December 12, 734). This son most likely built his famous father’s funerary mountain, Temple 1, because we have evidence that the pyramid was erected after the tomb was sealed. Still, the absence of any editorial comment by this young man in the hieroglyphic texts on the masterful lintels of this temple suggests that they were completed under the watchful eye of an aging Ah-Cacaw. The devout son, no doubt, merely installed them.[331]
-The success of anarchism therefore required establishing how evolution develops into revolution. Kropotkin answer was that “it is the ''action'' of the minorities, continuous action endlessly renewed that achieves this transformation” to a “revolutionary situation.”[[#171KropotkinRebel186|171]] He predicted that the actions of radical minorities, as individuals and groups, will spread discontent with the existing social system, hatred of the ruling classes, and “reawaken audacity, the spirit of revolt, through preaching by example.”[[#172KropotkinRebel186|172]] The acts of revolt carried out by courageous minorities will receive sympathy and support from workers not yet engaging in revolutionary action and thereby “find imitators,” such that, as the first radicals are being imprisoned, “others will appear to continue their work” and “the acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, will continue and multiply.”[[#173KropotkinRebel187|173]]
+We are less sure about the end of Smoking-Squirrel’s life at Naranjo. All we know is that his son Smoking-Batab succeeded him on November 22, 755.[332]
-Kropotkin thought this would occur due to three interdependent processes: (a) revolutionary ideas will spread among previously indifferent workers who are now forced to pick a side in the ongoing class conflict; (b) workers will join the ongoing insurgency because its successes demonstrate the real possibility of overthrowing the ruling classes who previously seemed invincible; and (c) a vicious cycle of state repression will anger the working classes and provoke more and more acts of revolt. Over time, these acts of revolt will spread and grow in size and number until a full-blown social revolution breaks out.[[#174KropotkinRebel18790|174]]
+Many parallels can be drawn between the lives of Ah-Cacaw and Smoking-Squirrel. Both kings inherited polities that had suffered humiliating defeats at the hand of the same enemy—the kingdom of Caracol— and both kings spent their lives successfully reestablishing the prestige and central position of their kingdoms in the affairs of the Late Classic Maya world. Their strategies were essentially the same. Ah-Cacaw began his reign with the honorable deposition of desecrated monuments in the older buildings that fronted the North Acropolis, the ritual center of Tikal. Although his father, Shield Skull, had already begun the process of reawakening the state with a preliminary rejuvenation of the North Acropolis, it fell to Ah-Cacaw to complete the program. He erected the huge Temple 33 over the stela recording the history of his kingdom’s greatest conquest—the deeds of his mighty ancestors, Great-Jaguar-Paw, Curl-Snout, and Stormy-Sky. On the thirteenth katun anniversary of the last readable date on the desecrated monument, he went to war and took a captive high enough in rank and prestige to wipe away the dishonor on the spirit and history of his kingdom. With the building of Temple 33, he remade the ceremonial heart of the city into a new configuration on a scale and proportion worthy of the glory he had regained.
-This social revolution will only adopt an anarchist character if anarchist workers play a key role in the early waves of revolt, because “the party which has done most revolutionary agitation, which has manifested most liveliness and audacity, will get the best hearing on the day when action becomes necessary, when someone must march at the head to accomplish the revolution.”[[#175KropotkinRebel189|175]] A social movement that fails to engage in “revolutionary action in the preparatory period” and make its ideas and aspirations popular among the masses “will have a scanty chance of realizing even the smallest part of its programme. It will be overtaken by the activist parties.”[[#176KropotkinRebel18990|176]]
+Smoking-Squirrel used the same tools of reclamation to reestablish his kingdom’s honor. His success in war demonstrated both Naranjo’s regained prowess as a military power and the renewed favor of the gods. His success as a charismatic ruler can be seen in his ability to gather the tremendous numbers of laborers and skilled craftsmen needed to remake the center of his kingdom on an even greater and more glorious scale. Smoking-Squirrel built Groups A15 and C (Fig. 5:12), both designed to reproduce the triadic arrangements of Late Preclassic buildings we have seen at Cerros and Uaxactun. His appeal was not only to size, but more important, to the ancient orthodoxy of Maya kingship. This was a pattern seized upon by Ah-Cacaw as well, for by sealing the interior courts of the old temple complex away from processional access, he turned the North Acropolis into the northern point of a new triadic group. Temple 1 formed the second point and Temple 2 the third. Thus, both kings reestablished the prestige of their defeated kingdoms by publicly and forcefully demonstrating their prow’ess as architects and warriors.
-Kropotkin developed this position from his study of how the French Revolution of 1789 arose. He claimed that, in urban areas, a minority of republican revolutionaries spread the spirit of revolt by popularizing their ideas through pamphlets, leaflets, posters, and songs as well as organizing protests where orators spoke, effigies of the ruling classes were burned, and soldiers were attacked if they attempted to break up the demonstration. Over time, this developed the militancy and daring of the masses until demonstrations transformed into riots and riots into a revolution.[[#177KropotkinRebel19296|177]] A similar pattern unfolded in the countryside. According to Kropotkin, “during the whole year of 1788 there were only half-hearted riots among the peasantry. Like the small and hesitant strikes today, they broke out here and there across France, but gradually they spread, became more broad and bitter, more difficult to suppress.”[[#178KropotkinRebel7374|178]] By 1789, the mass of peasantry had risen up to overthrow the ruling classes. They did so because they “saw that the government no longer had the strength to resist a rebellion” after “a few brave men set fire to the first châteaux, while the mass of people, still full of fear, waited until the flames from the conflagration of the great houses rose over the hills toward the clouds.”[[#179KropotkinRebel74|179]] The actions of these revolutionary minorities were the catalyst for a chain reaction of uprisings until
+What we have tried to show in these histories of the Peten kingdoms is how the interrelationships of the many polities that inhabited this landscape together comprised what we call Maya civilization. In alliance, in war, and in marriage, the great families that ruled these kingdoms wove together a fabric of meaningful existence as intricate as any they wore on state occasions. The patterns of destruction and creation were shared. More important, the destiny of any kingdom hinged upon its successful performance not only within its own borders but also before the watchful eyes of its friends and foes. History was a matter of mutual interpretation and the mutual elaboration of innovative new ideas like Venus-Tlaloc s warfare. In later chapters, as we shift our focus to a close-up of the inner workings of specific kingdoms, we need to bear in mind that the Maya ahauob were always performing for the wider audience of their neighboring peers. Their deeds always required the validation of that larger congregation of true and resplendent people. For the nobility, as for all the people of the community, to be Maya was to be part of the patterns of history formed by the actions of kings within the framework of sacred space and time.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">it became impossible to control the revolution. . . . It had broken out almost simultaneously in a thousand places; in each village, in each town, in each city of the insurgent provinces, the revolutionary minorities, strong in their audacity and in the unspoken support they recognized in the aspirations of the people, marched to the conquest of the castles, of the town halls and finally of the Bastille, terrorizing the aristocracy and the upper middle class, abolishing privileges. The minority started the revolution and carried the people with it.[[#180KropotkinRebel74|180]]</div>
+ Photo Gallery
-Kropotkin thought it would “be just the same with the revolution whose approach we foresee. The idea of anarchist communism, today represented by feeble minorities but increasingly finding popular expression, will make its way among the mass of the people.”[[#181KropotkinRebel75|181]] This would be achieved by groups of anarchist workers spreading throughout the populace in order to help organize acts of resistance and rebellion. Such collective struggles would culminate in revolution spreading widely until capitalism and the state had been overthrown. During this process, “what is now the minority will become the People, the great mass, and that mass rising up against property and the State, will march forward towards anarchist communism.”[[#182KropotkinRebel75|182]]
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-2.jpg 70f][The magic of these waterfalls at Palenque enchanted Linda Scheie on her first visit to the ruins. The ancient Maya who built their city around their lifegiving pools must have seen these streams as meaningful symbols of the processes of destruction and creation, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1972)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#14|1]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''77.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-3.png][Tikal Temple 33 (A.D. 400–700), which was dismantled by archaeologists, was the first major building constructed by Ah-Cacaw. He placed Stela 31 inside the old temple before construction on this final version began. The enormous new temple was dedicated on September 17, A.D. 695, exactly 260 years after the last date on that early stela, (photo by Peter Harrison)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#24|2]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 204. See also, 219.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-4.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Cerros shows Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> (100 B.C.-A.D. 100), the first temple built at that center, to the right peeking out of the forest next to the shore. The eastward-facing Acropolis of a later king sits at the end of the modern dock extending into Chetumal Bay. During the first century B.C., people of Cerros experimented with kingship and then abandoned it a hundred years later to return to their lives as villagers and farmers, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-[[#34|3]]. Quoted in Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 55.
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-5.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph of Tikal shows the North Acropolis at the top, the Great Plaza in the center, and the Central Acropolis to the lower right. Temple 1 is on the right of the Great Plaza and Temple II on the left. Most of the visible architecture in the North Acropolis is Early Classic (A.D. 300–600), while the Great Plaza and most of the Central Acropolis is Late Classic (A.D. 600–800). (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#44|4]]. Quoted in Turcato, ''Making Sense'', 55.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-6.jpg 70f][This aerial photograph features many of 18-Rabbit’s greatest works. The Great Plaza and its forest of tree-stones (at the top) was built during the early eighth century. 18-Rabbit built the Ballcourt (lower right) six months before he was sacrificed by a rival at the nearby site of Quirigua. The stela on the end of the Ballcourt was commissioned by his father, while the tiny altar near it was placed there by the last tragic king of Copan, the Maya kingdom that dominated western Honduras and the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, (photo by William M. Ferguson and John Q. Royce)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#54|5]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-7.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the greatest work of King Chan-Bahlum—the Group of the Cross (A.D. 692) at Palenque, México. The view is from the door of the Temple of the Foliated Cross and includes the Temple of the Sun on the left, the Palace in the center, and the Temple of the Cross on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#64|6]]. Quoted in Ruth Kinna, ''Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 132.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-8.jpg 70f][This wraparound photograph shows the south end of the Palace at Palenque. House E, the building housing Pacal’s accession panel, is on the left with the Group of the Cross visible above its roof, while the Temple of Inscriptions, where Pacal is buried, nestles against the mountain on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#74|7]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 74.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-9.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#84|8]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''449–50.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-10.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#94|9]]. James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''247.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-11.jpg 70f][This brightly painted clay figurine (A.D. 600–800) depicts a Late Classic Maya ruler wearing the god Chac-Xib-Chac in his befeathered headdress. His ornate costume includes a royal belt around his waist, huge pendants on his chest, a decorated apron, and tasseled sandals. He wears a round shield on his left wrist and probably once had a tiny spear in his right hand. His mouth ornament is like one worn by Pacal into his grave. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#104|10]]. For example Charles Tilly, ''European Revolutions'','' 1492–1992'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 5.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-12.jpg 70f][This painted vessel (A.D. 426) was found in Curl-Snout’s tomb (Burial 10) inside Temple 34 of Tikal, Guatemala. The vessel shape is Maya, but the images reflect contact with Teotihuacán, the great city near modern México City, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#114|11]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''180, 176.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-13.jpg 70f][Lintel 41 (A.D. 755) was once mounted over a doorway into Structure 16 at the ruins of Yaxchilán in México. The carved scene depicts Bird-Jaguar standing with a wife from Motul de San José as she helps him prepare for battle. He holds a battle spear in his hand and wears a Tlaloc-war headdress. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#124|12]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''275.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-14.jpg 70f][Lintel 24 (A.D. 700–725) was mounted over the left door of Structure 23 at Yaxchilán, México. The carved scenes depict a bloodletting rite celebrating the birth of a son to the sixty-two-year-old king, Shield-Jaguar. He holds a torch over Lady Xoc, his principal wife, as she pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue to sanctify the birth of a younger wife’s child. This child, Bird-Jaguar, became king after ten years of competition with rivals who may have been Lady Xoc’s offspring, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#133|13]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 53.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-15.jpg 70f][Dedicated in A.D. 715, Temple 22 of Copan, Honduras, was commissioned by 18-Rabbit to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of his accession. This extraordinary sculpted door leads to the inner sanctum where 18-Rabbit and his successors let blood and talked to their ancestors and the gods. The image represents the arch of the sky held away from the skeletal realm of the Underworld by gods called Pauahtun. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#143|14]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 220–21</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-16.jpg 70f][This jade earflare (50 B.C.-A.D. 50) was once mounted on the side flanges of a headdress worn by a Late Preclassic king from Pomona, Belize. The glyphs are arranged to form a quincunx pattern with the central hole. The inscription evokes the Sun God and the Maize God and the rituals that celebrated their power. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#153|15]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 156–57. For other examples see Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''197–99; Errico Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 88–96. It should be kept in mind that, despite the ideas and actions of antipatriarchal anarchists within the movement, many anarchist men were sexists.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-17.jpg 70f][18-Rabbit, one of the greatest kings of Copan, as he was depicted on the east face of Stela C (A.D. 711), the first tree-stone he planted in the Great Plaza. The intense red color is the original paint. (photo by Linda Schele)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#163|16]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 133, 171; Mark Leier, ''Bakunin: The Creative Passion—A Biography'' (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 345n6. It should be kept in mind that on other occasions anarchists used the term “spontaneous” in a different sense to refer to actions that occurred impulsively, suddenly or without planning. For example, in 1924, Malatesta complained about some anarchists who wrongly believed that “human events,” including revolutions, “happen automatically, ''naturally'', without preparation, without organization, without preconceived plans.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 461.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-18.jpg 70f][These great masks (50 B.c.) were modeled from plaster on the eastern terraces of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, Belize. They represent the Sun God (lower mask) and Venus (the upper mask) as they rise from the horizon at dawn. (photo by James F. Garber)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#173|17]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 20'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 14.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-19.jpg 70f][The tumbled colonnade attached to the Temple of the Warriors (A.D. 850–950) at Chichón Itzá in Yucatán, México. (photo Graph © Barbara Kerr 1975)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#183|18]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 83. For other examples of anarchists repeating the words of the preamble, see Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''234; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 537.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-20.jpg 70f][Stela 31 (A.D. 447), the tree-stone of the great king Stormy-Sky, as it was found inside Temple 33 at Tikal. This side represents Stormy-Sky’s father, Curl-Snout, dressed as a Tlaloc warrior, (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1964)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#193|19]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 174.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-21.jpg 70f][These jade jewels (50 B.C.) were deposited in an offering in the summit of Structure 6, the second temple complex built at Cerros. The center head was worn as a pectoral, while the four smaller heads were mounted on a headband that functioned as the crown Of kings. (photo by Linda Schele)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#203|20]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 45. See also Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 241. There were a few anarchists who were pacifists committed to strict nonviolent resistance, but they were in the minority. See Bart de Ligt, ''The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution'' (London: Pluto Press, 1989).</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][Yucatec Maya conducting a primicia ritual at Yaxuná, Yucatán, in 1986. The boughs at the four corners of the table represent the trees at the corners of the world, while the food and drink are located on the central axis once symbolized by the Wacah Chan Tree. The symbolism of the altar and the ritual descend directly from Precolumbian belief and practice, (photo by Debra S. Walker)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#213|21]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 53, 55, 59.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-22.jpg 70f][The west gallery (dedicated in A.D. 654) of the building the people of ancient Palenque called the Zac Nuc Nah, the “White Big House.” The Oval Palace Tablet seen on the right shows Pacal receiving a headdress from his mother during his accession rites. Most of Pacal’s successors were inaugurated into the office of king while seated on a throne that once sat below this tablet, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#223|22]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 156–57.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-23.jpg 70f][This is a photo rollout of a bowl sent by Ruler 1 of Naranjo to a noble woman of Tikal as a gift. Buried with her in Structure 5G-8, the bowl (A.D. 590–630) was decorated with images of the Celestial Bird carrying snakes in its beak as it flies across the sacred world of the Maya, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#233|23]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 157.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-24.jpg 70f][This extraordinary statue of the God of Scribes and Artists (A.D. 725–750) once decorated Structure 9N-82, the house of a noble scribe at Copan, Honduras. The net headdress, paua, combines with the sign on his shoulder, tun, to spell his name, Pauahtun, while his face is that of a howler monkey, who was an artisan in Maya myth. Here, he holds scribal tools—a paintbrush and a shell paintpot—in his hands. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1985)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#243|24]]. Quoted in George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, ''Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 160.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-25.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#253|25]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 305.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-26.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a vase painting (a.D. 600–800) shows warfare as it was practiced in ancient times. Warriors wearing short-sleeved battle jackets, elaborate headdresses, and the shrunken heads of past victims carry stabbing spears, battleaxes, and flexible shields. They seize captives, who are disarmed but still wearing their battle finery, by their hair to bring them under control. One grabs the leg of his captor as he looks back at his companion’s suffering, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#263|26]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 470, 477.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-27.jpg 70f][A modern divination ceremony in progress before an ancient sculpture at La Democracia in Guatemala. Copal incense hovers in front of the head, while a shaman’s pouch with its rock crystals and maize seeds rests on the stone altar. Unseen in the photograph is a chocolate bar the shaman had placed in the mouth of the sculpture to bring it alive for the ritual. The same kinds of objects and rituals were used by the Precolumbian shamans two thousand years ago. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1987)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#273|27]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', 169. See also, 275, 277.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-28.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#283|28]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct ''Struggle, 207. For other examples, see,'' ''145.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-29.jpg 70f]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#293|29]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''104.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-30.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a corpulent lord from Motul de San Jose leaning back against his pillow as he admires himself in a mirror held by a dwarf. Lords surround him as another dwarf, a hunchback, and a flower-bearing lord sit on the floor in front of him. The local band of three musicians plays a conch-shell trumpet and two wooden horns just offstage behind the palace wall. Three enema pots sit on the floor outside the room along with a large round pot that apparently holds the liquid sipped by the dwarf, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#303|30]]. Woodcock and Avakumović, ''From Prince to Rebel'', 365–66.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-31.jpg 70f][This is the northern vista of Palenque as seen from the Temple of the Inscriptions. The Palace, which was the main ceremonial and residential building of the king, sits in the center of the photograph, while the Group of the Cross, the accession group built by King Chan-Bahlum in the late seventh century, is seen on the right, (photo by Macduff Everton)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#313|31]]. For example Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''171; Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 24–25, 36–37, 47; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 86–7; Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 76–77.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-32.jpg 70f][This photo rollout of a cylindrical vessel (A.D. 600–800) shows a scene taking place inside a palace painted with images of jaguar gods and watery quadrifoils holding the skeletal visage of a death god. A lord from Dos Pilas sits on a bench bearing a pillow for his back and a set of bundles and boxes to his left. Four lords of high rank sit on the floor in front of him, while an attendant holds an object out to him. Two of the lords face him in rapt attention, while the other two lean toward each other as they converse, perhaps about the business at hand, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1981)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#323|32]]. Quoted in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 83, 82, 78.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-33.jpg 70f][This rollout of a vase painting (A.D. 600–800) shows a lord of Dos Pilas sitting on a bench in front of a large pillow. Two nobles bring him bouquets of flowers, perhaps to be used with the round-bottomed enema pot sitting on the floor between them. Other pots of various shapes sit on the bench and the floor around the principal lord. The three-glyph phrase behind his head names the artist of this vase, who may have depicted himself in the center of the scene with his paintbrush thrust into his headdress, (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1989)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#333|33]]. Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 56.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-34.jpg 70f][This Early Classic vessel (A.D. 200450) depicts the Sun God paddling his canoe across the watery surface of the Otherworld. The nose-down peccary legs support not only the vessel but the waters of the world depicted on its sides and lid. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1986)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#343|34]]. Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” 56.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-35.jpg 70f][A jade head (A.D. 350–500) representing the god of decapitation sacrifice that was used to record the conquest of Uaxactün on the Tikal Ballcourt Marker. (photo Graph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#353|35]]. Andrew R. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Early Movement'' (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 253–55.</div>
+[[l-s-linda-schele-a-forest-of-kings-36.jpg 70f][This cylindrical vase (A.D. 600–800) was painted with a scene showing a woman from Dos Pilas dressed in a delicate, transparent lace huipil as she kneels before a lord of Motul de San José. While sitting cross-legged on a mat-covered bench inside a curtain-draped palace, he holds a small deity effigy against his chest as he extends a rattle (or perhaps an enema bag) toward her. Behind him rests a large pillow, while two large vessels sit on the floor below him. (rollout photograph © Justin Kerr 1984)]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#363|36]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''201–4.</div>
+. The Children of the First Mother: Family and Dynasty at Paleonque
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#373|37]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 203. See also Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 62–65.</div>
+Like a white, shimmering jewel, Palenque perches above the misty, deep green of the forest shrouding the waterlogged lands that stretch northward from the base of the Chiapas mountains to the swampy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. To the south of the city, rugged, jungle-covered hills gradually rise to climax in cold, volcanic highlands. Temples, palaces, and noble homes, all built with the distinctive sloped roofs characteristic of Palenque’s architectural style, line the clear streams that bubble up from within the heart of these mountains to tumble down rocky slopes and into the rolling plain below. As if to instruct humanity in the ways of destruction and rebirth, these life-sustaining w’aters rise through the limestone strata to break onto the surface of the earth. Laden with calcium, the running water fashions a fantasy world of crystal lacework by encasing the decaying leaves and branches of the forest in what will become the fossilladen strata of floriforous limestone a million years hence. The pearly deposits shroud temple and tree alike, creating a mirror to the Otherworld, like a cave turned inside out. Even today, you know you stand on sacred ground here at the western gate of the sun’s journey across the world of the ancient Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#383|38]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''563–64.</div>
+Palenque’s magic has fascinated the Western mind since the adventurers and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first published accounts of their visits. The drawings and commentaries of intrepid travelers John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood especially captured the imagination of nineteenth-century readers and created a special vision of Palenque as the lost city of an intelligent and civilized indigenous people.[333]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#393|39]]. Quoted in Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 67.</div>
+Yet Palenque has done more than appeal to the romantic side of the Western imagination. This city has played a crucial role in the modern study of ancient Maya history and religion, as well as in the decipherment of their writing system. The kings of Palenque left a substantial record of texts carved on the fine-grained limestone monuments of their city. Many of their most outstanding monuments are preoccupied with one issue: the relationship between the legitimate inheritance of divine status through family descent and the personal charisma of the king. As we have seen in other kingdoms, the Palenque ahauob had practical reasons for their obsession with history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#403|40]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 28. Bakunin made a similar remark in 1842 prior to becoming an anarchist. See Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 58. For examples of this idea being repeated by later anarchists, see Berkman, ''The Blast ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 10; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 222; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''579.</div>
+Two Palenque kings, Pacal, whose name means “shield,” and his oldest son, Chan-Bahlum,[334] “snake-jaguar,” stand out as primary contributors to the history of their city. They are both members of that class of remarkable people who are responsible for creating what we call a civilization’s “golden age.” Not only did they make their kingdom into a power among the many Maya royal houses of the seventh century; they also inspired and nurtured the exceptional beauty of Palenque’s art, the innovative quality of its architecture, and the eloquence of the political and theological visions displayed in its inscriptions and imagery. The royal literature commanded by these men represents the most detailed dynastic history to survive from Classic times. Their vision wove it into the most beautiful and far-reaching expression of the religious and mythological rationale of Maya kingship left to modern contemplation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#413|41]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''183–84. See also Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''145–46.</div>
+Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the essential details of their dynasty on four separate king lists. According to these family accounts, Palenque’s dynastic history began on March 11, A.D. 431, when a thirty-four-year-old ahau named Bahlum-Kuk (“Jaguar-Quetzal”) became the king. The descent of the royal line continued through subsequent generations of divine ahauob—with only a few minor sidesteps—into the glorious reigns of our two protagonists. Finally, the kingship failed in the hands of their progeny sometime after A.D. 799, the last date recorded in the inscriptions of Palenque. These “minor sidesteps” in the succession are the subject of our tale and the reason for the extraordinary detail of the record those ancient kings have left to us.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#423|42]]. Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 67–68.</div>
+Pacal began his task of historical interpretation with the construction of his funerary building—the Temple of Inscriptions (Fig. 6:1). In the corridors of this magnificent temple, he mounted the first of his king lists on three huge stone slabs. These slabs comprise the second-longest[335] inscription left to posterity by the ancient Maya (Fig. 6:Id).[336] In his tomb deep under the temple, Pacal recorded the deaths of the same kings he named above. He also pictured them on the side of his coffin, as part of an ancestral orchard growing out of the cracked earth. His son, Chan-Bahlum, extended this ancestral list back to the founder of the dynasty— and beyond to the divinities who established the order of the cosmos at the beginning of this current manifestation of the universe.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#433|43]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 270–71.</div>
+Combined, these four great king lists overlap in time and recorded history to constitute the most detailed and complete dynastic history known from the Classic period (Fig. 6:2). When a Palenque ruler was recorded in all four lists, we have his dates of birth, accession, and death, as well as good information on his kinship relationships with other members of the dynasty. For those kings recorded only on Chan-Bahlum’s list, we have their births and accessions, and a reasonable estimate of their ages at death. We can surmise the latter since we know a new king usually acceded shortly after his predecessor’s death. For those kings whose I names occur only on the sarcophagus and panels of the Temple of Inscriptions, we have only their dates of accession and death, and thus w e cannot estimate length of life or their ages at various events. Still, these four lists taken together allow us to reconstruct the history of Palenque’s dynasty for the ten generations culminating with Chan-Bahlum.[337]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#443|44]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 400.</div>
+[[][Generation 6 Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ LadyZac-Kuk]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#453|45]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''72. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 322, 535, 553.</div>
+The very existence of these king lists raises questions about their context and the motivations of the men who made them. What so fascinated and troubled these men that they felt compelled to present such a comprehensive treatise on their dynasty on such important monumental spaces? Here, as in any true history, it is not so much a matter of the facts of the history as their interpretation that reveals the intentions of the chronicler. The royal preoccupation with these lists, and the parallel information that comes to us from other sources, hint of troubles in the very dynastic succession the two kings so obsessively recorded.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#463|46]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 28.</div>
+The essential problem, as we surmise it from their public efforts to explain it away, was to extricate dynastic succession from the same principle of lineage that originally fostered and legitimated it. As we shall sec, Pacal inherited the throne of Palenque from his mother in violation of the normal patrilineal inheritance patterns that governed Maya succession. His most pressing concern, then, was to justify this departure from the normal rules. To prove his point, he and his son, who inherited the problem, made elegant and imaginative use of the Maya mythology that was the basis of social order and kingly rule.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#473|47]]. Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters'', 487.</div>
+Pacal’s portrait gallery of his direct ancestors, carved on the sides of his sarcophagus, gives us his version of how each of his ancestors appeared (Fig. 6:3). Each rises with a fruit tree from a crack in the earth to create an orchard of the ancestral dead. Chaacal I in the southeast corner begins the progression through time and lineage that culminates with the mother and father of Pacal, who rise on both the north and south ends of the sarcophagus.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#483|48]]. The following account of social revolution can be seen in Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''177–236; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 99–103; Malatesta, ''Café'', 122–25.</div>
+Within this ancestral orchard, Pacal depicted two women—his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, and his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal— and each is depicted twice. Why would Pacal have chosen to double the portraits of these women when he could just as easily have doubled a male ancestor or added portraits of even earlier ancestors to the portrait gallery? In the case of his mother, we might infer that he doubled her portrait precisely because she was his mother. After all, he did the same for his father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, in spite of the fact that his father never ruled. This line of reasoning, however, cannot explain why his great-grandmother, Lady Kanal-Ikal, held an honored place on the sarcophagus. Some other factor must explain her special status.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#493|49]]. Anarchists typically claimed that only means of production and land that was used by a capitalist or landowner to profit off the labor of others would be expropriated. See Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 214; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 89. For how the expropriation of food, clothing, and housing was envisioned, see ibid., 70–71, 103–4, 121–22, 127.</div>
+From our vantage at least, these two women were certainly deserving of special attention. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were very unusual individuals in that they are the only women we can be sure ruled as true kings. They were neither consorts nor, as in the case of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Naranjo, regents for young heirs. Yet by their very status as rulers, they created serious dilemmas for the government of their kingdom. When the throne of Palenque descended through Kanal-Ikal to her children, it became the prerogative of a different lineage, for the Maya nobility reckoned family membership through their males. Lady Kanal-Ikal and Lady Zac-Kuk were legitimate rulers because they were the children of kings and, as such, members of the current royal lineage. The offspring of their marriages, however, belonged to the father’s lineage. Each time these women inherited the kingship and passed it on to their children, the throne automatically descended through another patriline. This kind of jump broke the link between lineage and dynasty in the succession.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#503|50]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170–71.</div>
+Because the line changed twice through these women rulers, Palenque’s dynasts did not belong to one patriline, but rather to three (Fig. 6:4). The first lineage to declare command of the high kingship descended from the founder Bahlum-Kuk through eight successors to Lady Kanal-Ikal. Even though they were of a different lineage, Pacal and his successors to the throne of Palenque claimed that they derived their right to rule from this man. In this respect, while they followed the traditional practice of other Maya dynasties, which also claimed descent from a founding king, they were declaring the dynastic succession to be a force transcending patrilineality.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#513|51]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 179. For his participation in 1848 and the 1849 insurrection, see E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 149–62, 189–94.</div>
+[[][Fig. 6:4 The Three Descent Lines in Palenque’s Dynasty]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#523|52]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''157.</div>
+Lady Kanal-lkal must have been a charismatic and exceptional woman to have successfully ascended to the throne of a high kingship. What history she herself may have created lies deeply buried under later construction—if indeed she was even permitted the royal prerogative of recording personal history. In all likelihood, she would have based her legitimate claim to the kingship on her status as the child of an acknowledged ruler. Her progeny claimed the throne after her, although they belonged to the lineage of her husband—a man never mentioned by name in the Palenque chronicles. Notables in this second lineage included the king Ac-Kan and his brother Pacal, who died before he could become the high king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#533|53]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''232. See also Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 85; Makhno, ''Struggle'', 57–58, 89; Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 43–46.</div>
+Even though he himself was never a king, this first Pacal appears in the royal grove carved on the side of the sarcophagus. There is a good reason for this. In each generation, the royal line could pass through only one sibling. In this case, the first Pacal was probably the father of Lady Zac-Kuk, the next ruler and last scion of this second royal lineage.[338] The presence of the first Pacal on the side of the great sarcophagus confirms that Pacal the Great was trying to make something more than a list of kings here. He was orchestrating a careful political manipulation of an orthodox belief. By placing his direct ancestors, both kings and nonkings, into a frame of reference that both honored the rules of lineage and transcended them, he worked to establish an unshakable claim to the throne.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#543|54]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 109.</div>
+The third lineage began with Pacal the Great himself. As the son of a ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, he had the same legitimate claim to the throne as Lady Kanal-Ikal’s child, Ac-Kan. Difficulties arose, however, when Pacal’s own children, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul, followed their illustrious father to the throne. These men belonged to the lineage of their father and their paternal grandfather, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’. Hence the problems with their claim to the kingship were different from Pacal’s and analogous to those of the descendant kings of the second lineage, Ac-Kan and Zac-Kuk. They were the offspring of a lineage that had no legitimate claim to produce kings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#553|55]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 110.</div>
+We do not know what happened the first time one of these sidesteps in the royal dynasty occurred because we have no contemporary inscriptions from Lady Kanal-Ikal or her children.[339] The second time it happened, however, in the case of her granddaughter Zac-Kuk, the contradictory imperatives of lineage and dynasty precipitated a crisis. Lady Zac-Kuk’s offspring, Pacal, and his son, Chan-Bahlum, responded to the crisis with the two extraordinarily innovative projects under discussion—the Temple of Inscriptions and the Group of the Cross. These remarkable monuments were designed to interpret the dynastic history of Palenque in such a fashion as to make their legitimate rights to the throne undeniable.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#563|56]]. The complex history of anarchist military participation in the Russian and Spanish civil wars goes beyond the scope of this book. For overviews, see Peter Arshinov, ''History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''6–23; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014).</div>
+In their presentations of the dynastic sequence at Palenque, both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum recorded the descent line as if it were historically unbroken. At the same time, they substantiated their claim of legitimacy by using the current mythology, explaining the historical breaks in the descent sequence as if they were preordained by the cosmos.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#573|57]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 542–4, 551–5; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 191–5; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 101–2, 186–89, 203. Malatesta also pointed out that anarchists would be but one faction within the revolution. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''472.</div>
+Their twofold strategy was brilliant. First they declared Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal’s mother, to be like-in-kind to the first mother of gods and kings at the beginning of the present creation. This goddess was the mother of the three central gods of Maya religion—the deity complex known as the Palenque Triad. Secondly, Pacal and Chan-Bahlum asserted that Pacal was born on a day that exactly replicated the temporal symmetry of that goddess’s birth. In this way they were able to imply that the human king was made of the same divine substance as the goddess. Having thereby demonstrated that the mother and son were the stuff of the gods, they declared that their own inheritance of the throne from Pacal’s mother replicated the actions of the gods at the beginning of creation: the direct transmission of rule through females as well as males. Here was a radical new definition of dynastic succession that denied patrilineality as the sole fount of power. But who could possibly disagree with something that replayed creation?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#583|58]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 218. The fear that a social revolution could be crippled by food shortages was shared by Malatesta. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 428–9.</div>
+Pacal’s overall strategy to hold the throne was more subtle than his son’s, perhaps because he acceded at age twelve while his mother was still alive and after she had been ruling for three years. Lady Zac-Kuk may have left no direct history of her reign; but like her grandmother, Kanal-Ikal, she stands out as a masterful politician, able to manipulate the rival interests of her paternal clansmen away from the succession and toward each other or outside enemies. No doubt her husband, the consort of a princess of the blood, figured prominently in her success through appeal to his own influential noble clan and his own deeds of valor. Just getting her young son on the throne was a triumph. Consolidating that victory required an acceptable historical and theological rationale for this audacious move, one that would calm the discontent of all the noble clans of the kingdom whose own high social status hinged upon lineage descent.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#593|59]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 207, 218–20; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 95–97; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 588.</div>
+Lady Zac-Kuk lived another twenty-five years after Pacal’s accession. While she lived, she and her husband, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, apparently sustained the alliances necessary to support her son’s rule; but she very probably kept the real power in her own hands. Not until after her death in 640 did Pacal commission works that left their mark in the archaeological record of Palenque. It is also likely that during the delicate transitional period, this resplendent lady helped to craft the ingenious political resolution to the succession celebrated by her son in subsequent katuns.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#603|60]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266.</div>
+In 647, seven years after his mother’s death and four years after his father’s, Pacal celebrated his newfound independence by dedicating the Temple Olvidado (Fig. 6:5) in the western zone of the city.[340] On the ridge side above a residential zone spanning one of two permanent water sources that coursed through the city, Pacal’s architects built a new kind of temple that held the seeds of a revolution in architectural technology.[341] With its double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls, multiple doors, and trefoil vaults, this building foreshadowed the technology that would soon produce the largest interior volume and best lighting ever known in Maya architecture.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#613|61]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266. See also Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 37–38.</div>
+At the successful completion of his first construction project, Pacal began an extensive building campaign which included the Temple of the Count, the subterranean galleries of the Palace, House E, House B, and finally House C in the Palace which was dedicated in 659 when he was fifty-six years old.[342] With each new building, Pacal experimented with the new style and pushed the innovative technology further.
-[[#623|62]]. Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread''.
+When Pacal reached his early seventies, he must have begun feeling his mortality, for he began the last great project of his lifetime: the construction of the great mortuary Temple of the Inscriptions. This building, which housed his ultimate statement on dynasty, became one of the most famous monuments in the Mesoamerican world. Built in the stylistic tradition he established with the Temple Olvidado,[343] this spectacular pyramid was a labor of imagination and complex engineering. First, the work crews cleared and leveled a section of ground next to the Palace. This site was located at the foot of the sacred natural mountain which loomed over the great central plaza opening on to the northern horizon. Against the mountain face (Fig. 6:1), a pit was dug into which the laborers set a huge block of limestone that would become Pacal’s coffin when finished.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#633|63]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 228.</div>
+Consulting with the king, Palenque’s greatest artists designed an image (Fig. 6:3) that would represent his fall down the great trunk of the World Tree into the open jaws of the Otherworld. At the same time, they incorporated a sense of resurrection into this death image. As Pacal falls, he is accompanied by the image of a half-skeletal monster head carrying a bowl of sacrifice marked with the glyph of the sun. This particular glyph is a powerful symbol, representing the sun in transition between life and death, poised on the brink of the Otherworld. Like the sun, the king would rise again in the east after his journey through Xibalba. He was, after all, the living manifestation of the Hero Twins who had set the example of how to defeat the Lords of Death.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#643|64]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 34, 43.</div>
+Around the hollowed coffin in which he would lie, the artists drew the images of his direct ancestors. These images were arranged in ascending generations, moving from south to north and from east to west, culminating with the central pivot—the king himself. When they were done with the drawings and Pacal had approved them, workmen moved in to construct a protective wall around their work. They then filled the chamber with sand and the masons and architects began to raise the pyramid. Into its center they built a vaulted stairway that would let the sculptors get to the coffin when it was no longer in danger from the construction. Down this dark stairway they would bring the body of the king when he died, setting it into the hollow at the center of the sarcophagus before they rolled the lid across the opening and sealed him in forever.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#653|65]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 43.</div>
+Pacal’s death was still far off, however, as the great mass of rock and earth rose upward in the nine great terraces upon which the six-doored temple would rest. His masons built the foundation platform of the temple first and then raised the central and rear walls that would hold up the roof. While these walls stood unencumbered by the heavy stone vaulting of the roof, sculptors went to the special quarries where the finest sculptural stone was found. There they cut huge, thick slabs to mount within the bearing walls of the temple—two to fit into the front surfaces of the walls separating the front and back rooms, flanking the doorway into the rear sanctum; and a third to fit into the back wall of the temple in a position where the light from the doorways could still shine upon it. Pacal’s scribes then drew a grid to accommodate a total of 640 glyphs which would record Pacal’s katun history and the important events of his own reign. They reserved the last two columns of the text for his death. Then, as with the sarcophagus, they built a protective wall around the inscriptions until the construction of the vaults and the plastering work was completed.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#663|66]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 71.</div>
+The passages on these temple tablets give us our first glimpse of this family’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. Less than three years before his own accession, Pacal recorded the accession of a woman whom he named in a mysterious and unusual way (Fig. 6:6). This woman took the throne on October 22, 612, 202 days before the end of the ninth katun, when Pacal was nine years old. Her name is recorded with a glyph written in the form of a screaming bird: Its bulging beak lies back against its forehead, and its gaping mouth is filled with feathers. Since this strange bird is a variant of the Palenque Emblem Glyph, we can assume that Pacal meant to connect the woman in question with the sacred name of his kingdom. Even more important, this same glyph was also used to name the First Mother, affectionately dubbed Lady Beastie by scholars, who was born before the present creation. This goddess, as we have mentioned above, was the mother of the gods and the creatrix of Maya myth.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#673|67]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 137. See also Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 111.</div>
+Is Pacal telling us, then, that the person who held the throne before he became the king was the First Mother? In a way that is exactly what he intended to say, for this mysterious woman was indeed a mother, I although a human one. She was his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk,[344] who gave him life and then the crown when he acceded to power (Fig. 6:7). By using the name of the goddess to refer to his mother, Pacal declared her to be analogous to the mother of the gods. By logical extension, Pacal like-in-kind to the lords who were the three gods of the Palenque Triad, the Late Classic version of the gods the Late Preclassic ahauob fashioned on the temples of Cerros.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#683|68]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''153.</div>
+The great Pacal died in his eightieth year and was buried by his sons in rituals that involved the highest and lowest people in his realm. Opened again in 1952 by the great Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz, his tomb contains a record of his funerary rites frozen forever in time. We can visualize the rituals that, in the final hours, sent him on his lall into the realm of Xibalba to face the Lords of Death.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#693|69]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 182–88.</div>
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#703|70]]. Quoted in Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 182.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum tasted the salty sweat that rolled into the corner of his mouth as he lowered himself to the last of the high, slippery steps that descended down through the rock of his father’s sacred mountain.[345] Nearby was the vaulted tomb where his father awaited the rites that would begin his fall into the Otherworld. Dizzy from three days of fasting, the hard climb up the outer stairs, and the descent down the inner ones, Chan-Bahlum reached out to the white plastered wall to steady himself. At last, he stepped down into the dank cloud of smoke that filled the corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Masking the sweet smell of death, the blessed incense hovered around a sphere of torchlight before vanishing upward, like the Vision Serpent, following the dark path upward to the human world.[346]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#713|71]]. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, ed., ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'' (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 4–7, 29–43; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 101–10.</div>
+His brown chest heaving like a frightened deer, Chan-Bahlum paused once more, this time to catch his breath. Sixty-seven high steps led from the world of light above, down to the gate of Xibalba. As the senior son of the dead king, and the king-elect, it had been Chan-Bahlum’s obligation to descend deep into this most holy mountain to send his father on the journey only the few and the prepared survived: the journey to confront the Lords of Death and to trick them into relinquishing life once again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#722|72]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''138–41; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''221–37; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''120–24; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 104–15, 120–43.</div>
+The long days of fasting and grief were taking their toll. Chan-Bahlum felt all his forty-eight years weighing on him like stones upon the backs of his father’s masons. Remembering his duty, he threw off his exhaustion and straightened his heavy jade pendant so that it lay squarely on his chest. His dignity restored, he turned to look into the black eyes of his younger brother. The thirty-eight-year-old Kan-Xul, by their father’s decree, would be king after him. The older man looked upon the more delicate features of his brother and saw in them the image of their father as he had been in his prime. Together they continued into the tomb.
-[[#732|73]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 43.
+Startled from his concentrated effort, a sculptor saw the princes approaching through the swirling smoke and tore himself away from his last-minute work,[347] carving the great king’s death date on the south edge of the massive sarcophagus lid. He quickly gathered his tools and the debris from his work into a net bag and slung them over his naked, sweat-damp shoulder. Pushing past the princes in the narrow confines of the hall, he mumbled apologies and began his climb out of the tomb. Kan-Xul smiled briefly to reassure his nervous brother. Even with the final rush to transform the imagery of the dead and reborn kings on the sarcophagus from painted line to carved relief, the burial rites would go without mishap. Chan-Bahlum knew it fell to him, as patriarch of Pacal’s lineage, to bury his father properly and heal the wound his death had caused in the fabric of the kingdom. He was determined the ritual would go well and dispel the danger of this time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#742|74]]. “International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915),” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 290. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''379–87.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to his brother and turned back toward the heavy stone door and the three steps that led up to the inner chamber. Xoc,[348] his father’s adviser and a respected member of the lineage, awaited them at the door. He, along with a cadre of shamans, would assist the brothers as they sent their father into the terrifying fall to the Otherworld. First, however, they would equip the dead king with the power to rise like the dawning sun. Chan-Bahlum stepped through the triangular opening in the upper part of the tomb vault and entered the stifling hot chamber filled with the shamans who would sing the king’s spirit on its way. They would contain the dangerous energies that would be left by the king’s departure.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#752|75]]. Kinna, ''Kropotkin'','' ''177–83; Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); A. W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.</div>
+Standing on the threshold above the five stairs that led down into the tomb chamber, Chan-Bahlum paused to gaze at his father’s body. Nestled in an arm-deep cavity cut into the huge limestone block that served as the sarcophagus, Pacal lay on his back with his hands at his sides. His legs were extended and his feet relaxed to the sides as if he were sleeping. The dry, wrinkled skin of the eighty-year-old man seemed transparent in the flickering light of the torches held by the shamans. The jade collar that covered his chest and the cuffs on his wrists gleamed against the red walls of the coffin. The green headband with its Jester God lay on his forehead where it would tell the Lords of Xibalba that a great king had come among them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#762|76]]. Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism:'' Élisée'' Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''77, 157–58; Kropotkin, ''Memoirs'', 412; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 95, 97; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 195–96, 342; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 55.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum and his brother advanced down the steps with slow dignity, passing between the plaster portraits of their father modeled on either side of the entrance. Their horny feet rasped on the cold limestone of the steps as they moved to the platform that had been built so that they could stand level with the body, above the floor of the chamber. Together they stepped from the platform and onto the sarcophagus itself. Chan-Bahlum walked to the right side of the hollow that held his father’s body, while his brother went to the left side. Simultaneously they dropped to their knees and gazed for the last time upon their father’s face. Kan-Xul reached down into the coffin to straighten the ornament in Pacal’s left ear and to align the mica rectangle piece that enframed his mouth.
-[[#772|77]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
+The two brothers locked eyes as Chan-Bahlum instructed the shamans to join them on the narrow surfaces surrounding the coffin depression and begin the final rites. Xoc stepped to his side and handed him a delicate mosaic mask of jade, shell, and obsidian formed into a likeness of his father’s face. Carefully balancing his weight, Chan-Bahlum leaned forward, reaching down into the coffin to lay the mask across his father’s features. The obsidian eyes of the dead Pacal stared heavenward from under the shining green brow. The visage of this great king would not be lost as his flesh decayed and left only bone.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#782|78]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 138.</div>
+Satisfied with the positioning of the mask, Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul slowly moved until they were kneeling by the dead man’s waist. A shaman gave Chan-Bahlum a cube of jade which he laid reverently in the open palm of the right hand, already adorned with five rings of deep green jade. Another shaman gave Kan-Xul a sphere of jade to be set in the ring-laden left hand to balance the cube in the right. Leaning forward again, Chan-Bahlum set a small jade statue on the rich embroidered cloth that covered his father’s genitals from whence had come the seed and the blood of the greatest of all beings in the kingdom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#792|79]]. Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
+Together, the brothers moved to their father’s feet, each of them laying a sphere next to the sole of the foot closest to him. Lastly, Chan-Bahlum took a large hunk of jade that had been reverently and skillfully carved into the image of the patron god of the month Pax. It was an image that read te, the word for the tree down which the dead king was falling in the image on his sarcophagus lid and which he had embodied in his person while alive. The high-pitched, droning voices of the shamans echoed off the walls of the vaulted chamber, as they sent prayers to accompany the falling soul of the king. Satisfied that the body was prepared in the honorable manner appropriate to a high king, Chan-Bahlum and his brother stood up and stepped off the sarcophagus and back onto the platform at its south end.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#802|80]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+Chan-Bahlum spoke softly to Xoc who disappeared through the door and called up the stairs. The sounds of the shamans’ prayers counterpointed the shuffling sounds of footsteps descending the high steps from the temple above. Finally, the frightened face of a young boy appeared in the doorway. It was Chac-Zutz’, scion of an important and honored cahal lineage which had served the high king for many generations. Chac-Zutz’ tugged gently on the arm of the four-year-old Chaacal who lagged behind him. The youngest male issue of Pacal’s line, this child might one day be the king if neither Chan-Bahlum nor his brother could produce an heir who lived long enough to inherit the throne.[349]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#812|81]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 251–52. Bakunin used similar imagery in a letter to Nechaev. See Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 183.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum stared at the two boys with dark-eyed intensity and spoke in a commanding voice, instructing them to look upon the great king who had transformed the face of the kingdom and made them all great. Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul stood in patient dignity while all the important men of the clan filed in behind the boys and then quickly ascended after taking this last opportunity to gaze upon the great Pacal before he was sealed forever into the Otherworld of the ancestors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#822|82]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 247. This dam metaphor can also be found in Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolutions'','' ''81.</div>
+When it was done, the king-to-be gestured to the men of the royal lineage who had been chosen to help seal the coffin. After hushed consultation, two of them jumped down to the chamber floor. They handed the heavy stone lid, cut to fit inside the hollow holding the body, up to the four men standing on top of the sarcophagus. These men threaded ropes through holes drilled into each corner of the lid and then lowered it carefully onto the inset ledge around the coffin hollow. Once there, it formed a smooth stone surface across the top of the monolith. With the body now sealed in, they withdrew the ropes and dropped a stone plug into each of the drilled holes. The plug in the southwest corner had a notch cut in it so that the spirit tube, built into the stairway, could connect the chamber where the dead king lay to the world of his descendants above.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#832|83]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 179.</div>
+The time had finally come to pull the enormous carved lid over the top of the sarcophagus. This action would finish the sealing process and set the dead king amid the symbols that would insure success in his confrontation with the Lords of Death. Chan-Bahlum and his party stepped outside the tomb chamber to give the workers room to carry out this last difficult task. Strong young men of the ahau and cahal rank had been chosen to execute this dangerous and precise operation under the direction of the head mason who had overseen the construction of the tomb chamber. The prayers of the shamans were soon overwhelmed by the controlled pandemonium. The men whispered hoarsely to each other as they brought the equipment into the tomb. They set log rollers on top of the massive stone box that now held the king’s body and arranged themselves as best they could along the sides of the carved slab. Throaty grunts underscored the straining of their muscles as they heaved at the impossibly heavy lid. From the steps above, Chan-Bahlum watched as the great lid finally began to slide slowly forward onto the rollers. Struggling and sweating, the men worked in the close space of the chamber, urging the great lid into its place. Once this was accomplished, they labored to extricate the rollers and seat the lid with the help of ropes strung from the great stone beams in the upper vaulting of the tomb.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#842|84]]. This idea has been falsely attributed to Kropotkin. Malatesta, for example, makes this claim in his 1931 article “Peter Kropotkin: Recollections and Criticisms by One of His Old Friends.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 516–20. For a critique of fatalistic readings of Kropotkin, see Matthew S. Adams, ''Kropotkin'','' Read'','' and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism'' (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) 106–11.</div>
+Finally, however, it was done. The young men passed the rollers out of the chamber and up the stairs to the venting tunnels in the side of the sacred mountain. Then, more quickly than Chan-Bahlum had believed possible, they were gone, taking all the equipment and the debris of their effort with them. The urgent pandemonium diminished until suddenly only the steady chants of the shamans reverberated through the tomb. The brothers crossed the threshold and stepped down to the platform to gaze at the image of their father carved upon the lid. There they saw him poised in the first moment of his descent down the World Tree into the jaws of Xibalba—his forehead pierced by the smoking ax that marked him as the incarnation of the last born of the First Mother’s sons.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#852|85]]. Reclus,'' Anarchy'', 139.</div>
+Without speaking, the younger brother lowered himself onto the floor of the tomb chamber to stand at the southwest corner of the great sarcophagus. His eyes were level with the portraits of the ancestors carved on its sides. Chan-Bahlum, who had jumped to the floor at the southeast corner, reached back up to take a plaster head from Xoc, who stood on the platform above. He waited until Xoc had given another head to Kan-Xul, and then the two of them knelt down. As older brother, it was Chan-Bahlum’s perogative to act first. Lying down on his belly, he crawled forward between the stone piers that supported the platform at the south end of his father’s sarcophagus. It was a tight fit but he managed to wriggle between the obstacles until he could reach far under the massive stone sarcophagus, which stood on six low stone blocks.[350] With a silent call to the ancestors of his line, he stretched his arm as far inward as he could reach and gently deposited a life-sized head made of plaster. Torn from another building as an offering to help Pacal’s soul in its journey, it represented his father as he had looked in his prime. Kan-Xul, in his turn, wriggled under the huge sarcophagus and placed his sculpture next to the first. The second sculpture depicted Pacal as he had looked at the age of twelve when he became king.[351]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#862|86]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 105.</div>
+Sweating in the heat, the two of them extricated themselves and stood to take the ritual cup and plate Xoc handed down to them. The brothers then knelt in unison, carefully balancing the containers which were filled to the brim with food and drink to succor the dead king’s soul on his journey. They placed the offerings on the floor under the south side of the platform while the shamans chanted prayers asking that Pacal’s journey be swift and his defeat of the Lords of Death sure. Finished with the ritual, the two brothers accepted a hand from Xoc, who helped them up onto the platform again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#872|87]]. Mella, “Evolution and Revolution,” Biblioteca Anarquista website, https://es.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ricardo-mella-evolucion-y-revolucion. See also Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 87–92, 227.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum looked at the red-lidded sarcophagus once more— examining every detail of the preparations. The flickering torchlight played across the relief images of Pacal molded on the plaster walls of the chamber. In front of him, on the north end of the lid, was the carved image of his father. It almost seemed to him as if the dead king were present, sitting cross-legged on the stone platform that had supported the lid before it had been wrestled atop the sarcophagus. Chan-Bahlum stood still, lost in the memory of his father and in the anticipation of his own transformation into the high king. He was a three-katun lord in his forty-eighth year of life. To the people of his world, he was already an old man, and he wondered if the gods would give him time to leave as great a mark on the flow of history as his father had.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#882|88]]. Malatesta,'' Café'', 105.</div>
+At his feet a plasterer worked, laying the spirit tube from the notch in the south end of the lid, across the platform, and up the five stairs to tie into the hollow pipe that ran up the vaulted stairs to the floor of the temple above. The kings of Palenque were practical men as well as people of faith. To help their ancestors ascend into the world of humankind, they created a physical path for the Vision Serpent to follow when a dead king wished to speak to his descendants.
-[[#892|89]]. James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 40–44, 248–49; George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 127; Chris Ealham, ''Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 72–74.
+With the spirit tube ready, only one ritual remained. Chan-Bahlum turned to his brother, who handed him the great jade belt his father had worn to mark his status as a divine ahau. The flint pendants dangling under the jade ahau heads clanked together as Chan-Bahlum grasped the leather ties and stretched the heavy belt out between his extended hands. With reverence, he stepped up onto the red surface of the sarcophagus lid and knelt upon the image of his falling father. Leaning forward, he laid the belt down on the lid, stretching it out across the god image that marked the World Tree as a holy thing. The king’s belt rested above the center point of his human body, now hidden under the heavy lid. His soul could at last begin its journey, released from the case of worldly flesh, prepared for the fall to the Otherworld with food, images of his human form, and the belt that would signal his divinity and rank as he met the Lords of Death.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#902|90]]. Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 80, 120n3; Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 46.</div>
+The shamans’ song changed as Chan-Bahlum and his brother voiced their farewell, asking their father to help them when he emerged from Xibalba. Heavy with grief, they climbed the five short stairs leading out of the chamber and prepared themselves for the next stage of the ritual. Stepping down into the outer corridor, they watched as the shamans pushed the huge triangular door closed. Masons rushed down from the venting passages with baskets of wet plaster, which they threw onto the edges of the door with loud slapping noises. Using wooden spatulas and their hands, they smoothed the plaster until all evidence of the door was gone. One of them shouted an order and other men rushed down the long stairs with more plaster and stones. With the same efficient haste, they constructed a stone box at the end of the corridor setting one side of it against the now hidden door. Finishing in a rush, they cleaned up the debris, gathered their tools, and left in a silent hurry for they knew what was coming. A great king had died and it was time to sanctify his journey with a sacrifice so that he could be reborn.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#912|91]]. Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 16–19, 43–50, 146–47.</div>
+In the sudden silence that fell after the workers had departed, Chan-Bahlum could hear the scuffling descent of more people, this time from the temple above. He turned and saw five captives being dragged down the stairs by the honored kinsmen of the dead king. A woman and four men would go to Xibalba this day to accompany Pacal on his journey. Some of them moaned in terror, but one young man trod forward to meet his fate with insolent pride. He was an ahau taken in battle and chosen to go with Pacal because of his arrogant courage and reckless bravado.
-[[#922|92]]. Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 1–2; Paul Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background ''(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 47.
+Chan-Bahlum grabbed the young ahau’s hair and wrenched his head up so that he could see the captive’s eyes. He closed his hand on the hilt of the flint knife he had brought with him for this act of sacrifice. In silence he plunged it into the captive’s chest and struck up into the heart. This was the signal. His kinsmen screamed in a cacophony which echoed in the waiting ears above and fell upon the victims, slaughtering them with furious slashes of their bloodstained knives. The limp bodies of the dead were tossed in tangled abandon into the box.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#932|93]]. Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 147–48.</div>
+With the sacrifice completed, Chan-Bahlum left the blood-splattered corridor and began to mount the stairs in slow dignity, conserving his strength for the final rite he must perform in the temple above. The muscles in his legs burned with exhaustion as he turned at the midway platform and began the climb up the second flight of stairs. His beblooded kinsmen followed him in a reverent silence broken only by their heavy breathing as they struggled with the hard climb and the residual emotions from the sacrificial ritual.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#942|94]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 31.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum emerged through the floor of the temple, where the spirit tube from his father’s coffin ended in the head of the Vision Serpent. When he had made his careful way around the ledge beside the stairway entrance, shamans took him by the arms and stripped away his loincloth. One of them handed him a fresh blade of obsidian just struck from a core. He reached down and grasped his penis, holding it tightly as he pierced it three times with the point of the bright black razor. Handing back the blade, he pulled long strands of bark paper through the wounds and watched them turn red with the sacred blood of sacrifice. It was his first sacrificial act as patriarch of the royal clan, an act of symbolic birth in the midst of death.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#952|95]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 46.</div>
+His brother performed his own act of sacrifice, as did the men who had helped them dispatch the captives. Stained crimson with the flow from his own body and the blood of the captives below, Chan-Bahlum stepped out of the back chamber. He passed through the great katun history his father had commissioned to appear between the central piers of the outer wall. A great roar of grief rose from the gathered multitude in the plaza below as they saw him emerge, the blood on his white loincloth clearly visible in the oblique light of the setting sun. The people of the kingdom in their thousands had come to witness the beginning of the great king’s journey. When Chan-Bahlum’s bloodstained body appeared and cast its shadows on the whitened walls of the temple piers, they knew it was done. Like the setting sun that lit the scene, the great king was falling toward Xibalba. Hundreds began their song of grief and cut their own flesh in pious prayers for the king. Drums beat a mind-numbing rhythm accompanied by the piercing notes of clay whistles blown by people exhausted by days of dancing and fasting in preparation for this moment.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#962|96]]. Kropotkin, ''Memoirs'', 390–91.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum stood above, swaying slightly, looking down on the seething mass of his people. The paper hanging down against his legs was now saturated with his blood, which dripped to stain the white plaster floor below his feet. His younger brother stood off behind his right shoulder, reddened by his own act of sacrifice. The corridor behind them was filled with the most important people of the royal clan. On the terrace just below the temple summit stood ahauob of other lineages and the cahalob who had governed the towns of the kingdoms for the king. They too had drawn blood that now stained the cloth bands tied to their wrists and hanging from their ears and loins.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#972|97]]. For examples of anarchist counterculture see Avrich, ''Haymarket'','' ''131–49; Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'', 169–83; Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''34–51, 168–82; Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the ''Cronca Sovversiva'' and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 76–125; Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'','' ''124–31; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 155–62, 259–62; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''24–26, 35–37, 62–66.</div>
+Shamans stood beside hip-high braziers modeled in the image of the great Ancestral Twins, and watched Chan-Bahlum closely. He began to dance slowly in place, preparing to enter the trance of communication with the dead. When the shamans saw the trance state descend upon him, they threw handfuls of copal resin and rubber (the “blood of trees”) into the fire burning in the conical bowls sitting atop the clay cylinders. Others brought shallow plates filled with blood-saturated paper from the king-to-be and his brother. As great billows of black smoke rose from the braziers, cries of wonder rose with them from the plaza below. The last light of the sinking sun lit the rising columns of smoke to tell the thousands of watchers that the ancestors had arrived. The moaning wail of conch trumpets echoed off the mountain walls and spread over the great plain below. The dead king’s ancestors knew that he was coming to join them. They would go to help him in his conflict with the Lords of Death.
-[[#982|98]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 84–88; Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''50–55; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 45–47; Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#992|99]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''303.</div>
+The forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum waited 132 days after his father died to conduct his own rituals of accession. The responsibility of finishing his father’s funerary temple fell to him, and this task provided the first step in his own campaign to prove the legitimacy of his ascent to the throne. To do so, he asserted that he had received his power by direct transfer of authority from his dead father in an act replicating events that occurred at the time of creation. In this way, he redefined dynastic succession as a supernatural rite of ecstatic communion between the heir and the dead king, who was in the Otherworld.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1002|100]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''46.</div>
+The first project of Chan-Bahlum’s reign demonstrates his preoccupation with this new definition of dynasty: the direct ritual transmission of power in place of the traditional system of lineage succession. While finishing his father’s funerary monument, he usurped the outer piers of the temple at the summit. On these he depicted the rituals in which his father chose him as the legitimate heir and transformed him from a human child into a living god[352] (Fig. 6:8). In this scene, modeled in brightly painted stucco, Pacal and three other adults present the six-year-old Chan-Bah-lum from the edge of a pyramid. The height of this structure enabled the audience below, which consisted of the nobility and probably a large number of the commoners as well, to see and acknowledge that this child, of all Pacal’s offspring, was the one who would become the next ruler.[353] Chan-Bahlum, however, mixed the portrayal of the actual ritual with images conveying the supernatural sanction of the new status this ritual bestowed upon him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1012|101]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''401–2.</div>
+The child who is cradled in the arms of his predecessors has both divine and purely human features. His status as a divinity is emphasized by merging other parts of his anatomy with the signs of the god G1I, the third-born child of the First Mother (Fig. 6:8a). One of Chan-Bahlum’s legs, for example, transforms into a open-mouthed serpent in the fashion characteristic of the god. Moreover, penetrating the baby’s forehead is the smoking-ax blade that is so often depicted stuck through the forehead mirror of the god. The identical symbol impales the forehead of Pacal, his father, on the sarcophagus lid in the tomb deep below to bear witness to his divine status as he falls into the Otherworld. Yet to insure that the baby on the Temple of Inscriptions piers was not taken simply to be an image of the god, he was depicted with six toes on each foot (Fig. 6:9a), a physical deformity shown repeatedly in Chan-Bahlum’s adult portraits (Fig. 6:9b-d). The inclusion of this characteristic deformity affirmed the humanity of the baby figure and its personal identity as the six-toed heir Chan-Bahlum. Combining these contrasting features asserted the essential divinity of the human heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1022|102]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 404.</div>
+This ritual display of the child heir, then, constituted the public affirmation of Chan-Bahlum’s new identity as a “divine human.” This new identity was sanctified by the sacrifice of captives taken in battle by Pacal. Another proud father, King Chaan-Muan, depicted exactly this sequence of events explicitly and graphically in the murals of Bonampak, a contemporary Late Classic kingdom on the Usumacinta river.[354] Chan-Bahlum, like the Bonampak king, turned this ephemeral ritual of heir display into a permanent public declaration of his legitimate status by placing it on the facade of a temple which dominated the central public plaza of his city. The fact that the temple housed his father’s grave made the assertion all the more powerful.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1032|103]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 306–7.</div>
+During the time when he was finishing his father’s temple, Chan-Bahlum also began work on the Group of the Cross, the buildings that would house his own version of Palenque’s dynastic history—the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and the Temple of the Sun. In pictures and texts of unsurpassed eloquence, the new king completed the presentation of his new doctrine of dynasty as an institution transcending lineage. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary for him to reach back to the fundamental and orthodox concepts of royal authority. Chan-Bahlum approached the nebulous and paradoxical nature of political power with the vision of a great theologian and statesman. He divided his pictorial and textual treatise into three temples, thus recalling the triadic arrangement of primordial Late Preclassic royal architecture.[355] In this way, his statement evoked “origins” to the Maya—just as we “borrow” from the architecture of the Parthenon and Pantheon in our own state and religious monuments to declare the Greek and Roman origins of our cultural heritage.
-[[#1042|104]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 179.
+The three temples of the Group of the Cross rise from the summits of pyramidal platforms. The tallest temple is in the north, the middle one in the east, and the lowest in the west (Fig. 6:10). The south side of the group is open, both to preserve the triadic form of the group and to accommodate a large audience for ritual performances. This arrangement was all part of Chan-Bahlum’s plan to assert the ancient and pristine quality of his legitimacy. Although this design violates the landscape of Palenque, which would logically dictate that the principal building face toward the broad plain below, not away from it, it does conform with the primarily southward orientation of the first royal temples built at Cerros and other Late Preclassic kingdoms.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1052|105]]. Quoted in A. W. Zurbrugg, “Introduction” in Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 14.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum pursued the triadic theme further in the design of the buildings themselves. In each temple, three doors pierce the front wall of an interior which is divided into an antechamber and three rear sanctums (Fig. 6:11). In the central chamber of each temple his masons built the holy portals which opened into the Otherworld. These powerful foci of supernatural energy were set inside miniature houses—called by the Maya pib nau[356] or “underground buildings”—built within the back chamber of each temple. While these little houses were only symbolically underground, they replicated in principle the real underground buildings of Palenque: the tombs of Pacal and other kings in pyramids which dotted the sacred landscape of the city.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1062|106]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 420, 426. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 46–47.</div>
+Artists decorated the outer facades of the temples with huge plaster reliefs modeled on the roof combs, the entablatures, and on the piers between the doors (Fig. 6:11). Unfortunately, only the sculptures of the Temple of the Cross entablature remain legible. These depicted frontal views of great Witz Monsters gazing out from all four sides of the roof. The Maya thought of this temple as a living mountain. Thus, its inner sanctuary was “underground” because it was in the mountain’s heart.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1072|107]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Revolution and Dictatorship: On One Anarchist Who Has Forgotten his Principles,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/8932r8. See also Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''136; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''3, 143.</div>
+Into these “underground houses in the hearts of the mountains” the king would tread, alone and stripped of earthly trappings, to meet his father and his ancestors in Xibalba. He would hazard the perils of hell, as the Hero Twins had before him, to bring back life and prosperity for his people. The plaster sculptures that adorned the outer entablatures of the pib na declared their supernatural purpose. Great slabs of stone brought from special quarries bore the words and images that would open these portals to the Otherworld. These stone panels were set into the rear walls of the interior, and into the outer, front walls on either side of the entry doorways. Another set of inscribed doorjamb panels lined the inside of that door (Fig. 6:11).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1082|108]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147, 148.</div>
+The images used to represent the visions special to each pib na were all arranged in the same basic pattern. The resonances and contrasts designed into the three compositions provided a means of enriching the information they conveyed and emphasizing the unity of their spiritual source. The pictures in each temple were carved on the central axes of the main tablets set against the back wall of the pib na (Fig. 6:12). Each composition represented one of the three paths to Xibalba, as well as the three forms that supernatural power would take during the king’s ecstatic trances. In each temple, the central image was flanked on the one side by a short figure encased in a heavy cloth costume, and on the other by Chan-Bahlum wearing simple dress. From there the action moved to the two exterior panels, following the path of the king from the Otherworld to the natural one. On the outer panels the king is shown returning in triumph from his transformational journey: He has changed from heir to the reigning monarch of Palenque.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1092|109]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147.</div>
+The texts embedded in these narrative scenes tell us exactly which historical events were critical to this transformational process. The text describing the heir-designation of Chan-Bahlum was extremely important. This information appears often, always near the small figure muffled in heavy clothing. This text tells us that the rituals surrounding the presentation of the boy from atop the pyramid took place on June 17, 641, and ended five days later on the summer solstice when he became the living manifestation of the sun.[357] Other significant texts relate that on January 10, 684, the forty-eight-year-old Chan-Bahlum became king 132 days after his father’s death. The glyphs recording this celebration are next to his portrait. They appear on the inner panels of the Temples of the Cross and the Foliated Cross, and over the shield in the center of the Tablet of the Sun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1102|110]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147.</div>
+[[][Fig. 6:12]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1112|111]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''200.</div>
+When the scene moves to the outer panels, other important events are emphasized. In the Temple of the Foliated Cross and the Temple of the Sun,[358] we see two different scenes from Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites. In both these temples, the left panel shows him on the first day of these rites, and the right panel shows him at their conclusion, ten days later, when Venus was at its greatest elongation as Eveningstar. In the Temple of the Cross, only the culminating event of the succession rites is shown. In this version, we see Chan-Bahlum facing God L, one of the most important gods of Xibalba, who has evidently guided him out of the Otherworld and back into the light of life. Finally, the text behind Chan-Bahlum on the Tablet of the Cross puts a period to the historical proceedings by recording the three-day-long dedication rites for the completion of this monumental group on July 23, 690.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1122|112]]. For the first uses of these terms, see Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” ''Radical America'' 11 (1977): 99–122; Wini Breines, “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law,’” ''Social Problems'' 27, no. 4 (1980): 419–29. For a broad overview of this topic, see Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).</div>
+If we have accurately identified these events—the designation of Chan-Bahlum as heir, his accession as king, and his dedication of the temples—who then is the mysterious personage shown in these final narrative scenes? The answer is simple: The small muffled figure is none other than the dead Pacal, the father of the king-to-be,[359] who stands facing his child in the ritual that will make him king. Chan-Bahlum designed the inner scenes of the temples to represent places in Xibalba where he would meet his father and receive the power of the kingship from him directly. Pacal is shown transferring the kingship to his son through a ritual of transformation paralleling the one he enacted for a frightened six-year-old boy forty-two years earlier. On each of the inner panels, the son is dressed simply in the Maya equivalent of underwear, his long hair wrapped in readiness to don the heavy headdress of kingship. His father stands nearby, his chest muffled in heavy cloth wrapping bands. His neck too is bound in a thick twisted cloth which hangs down his back. This apparel most likely represents the burial clothing he wore in his own final portal deep beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions. At any rate, the costume clearly portrays him in his role as denizen of Xibalba.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1132|113]]. Some anarchists rejected this idea. Nettlau argued that anarchist organizations built in the present should not be viewed as the embryo of the future society because we should not “permit the present to mortgage or lay its hands upon the future” and we “have no real knowledge of the nature of ''the society of the future, which, like life itself, will have to remain ‘without adjectives.’''” See Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''196, 208, 282.</div>
+On the inner panels, the dead Pacal still holds the insignia of royal power. Transformation and the passing on of authority occurred only during the ten days of the accession rites. At the end of these days and nights of fasting, sacrifice, and communion in the place of death, we finally see Chan-Bahlum coming forth from the<em>pib na</em> wielding those very power objects and wearing the age-old garb of kings. The royal belt, with Chac-Xib-Chac dangling behind his knees, girds his loins. The heavy elaborate feathered headdress adorns his brow with the responsibility of authority. On his back rests the burden of divinity symbolized by the backrack with its image of a god. This was the dress of kings when Tikal conquered Uaxactun. By donning this most ancient and powerful garb, Chan-Bahlum became the ahau of the ahauob—“the lord of lords.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1142|114]]. Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 32–41,'' ''69.</div>
+The central icon at the portal of each of the three temples in the Group of the Cross specifies the nature of the cosmic power and community responsibility that defined kingship for that temple. At the portal of the Temple of the Cross, we see a variant of the World Tree (see the Glossary of Gods). This cross-shaped Tree, with the Serpent Bar of kingship entwined in its branches and the Celestial Bird standing on its crown, was the central axis of the cosmos (Fig. 6:12a).[360] Along this axis rose and descended the souls of the dead and the gods called from the Otherworld by the vision rite to talk to human beings. It was the path the Cosmic Monster took as the sun and Venus moved through its body on their daily journeys.[361] The king himself was the worldly manifestation of this axis, and this emphasized his role as the source of magical power. He was not only the primary practitioner of the rituals that contacted the Otherworld: He was the pathway itself (see Chapter 2, Fig. 2:11). In this portal the dead Pacal gives his son a scepter in the form of the monster that rests at the base of the World Tree—the same sun-marked monster that bore Pacal to Xibalba. Chan-Bahlum wields a disembodied head as an instrument of power, as had the Early Classic kings of Tikal and other kings before him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1152|115]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869.</div>
+The portal of the Temple of the Foliated Cross (Fig. 6:12b) bears a foliated variant of the World Tree formed by a maize plant rising from a band of water and Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, one of the symbols of the watery world of raised fields and swamps (see the Glossary of Gods). In the crown of this foliated tree sits a huge water bird wearing the mask of the Celestial Bird. The branches of the tree are ears of maize manifested as human heads, for, in the Maya vision, the flesh of human beings was made from maize dough. This Foliated Cross represented the cultivated world of the community through the symbol of a maize plant rising from the waters of the earth as the source of life. Maize was not only the substance of human flesh, but it was the major cultigen of the Maya farmer. As the sustainer of life, and as a plant that could not seed itself without the intervention of humans, maize was an ultimate symbol of Maya social existence in communion with nature. In this portal Pacal is shown giving his son the Personified Bloodletter. This was the instrument of the bloodletting rite and the vision quest. It drew the blood of the king and brought on the trance that opened the portal and brought forth the gods from the Otherworld.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1162|116]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future.” For an overview of his life and ideas, see William Whitham, “César De Paepe and the Ideas of the First International,” ''Modern Intellectual History ''16, no. 3 (2019):'' ''897–925.</div>
+Images of war and death sacrifice adorn the panel in the pib na of the Temple of the Sun. A Sun Jaguar shield and crossed spears dominate the central icon (Fig. 6:13). These images are sustained aloft by a throne with bleeding jaguar heads emerging from one axis, and bleeding dragons from the other. As at Cerros, these bleeding heads represent decapitation sacrifice. The throne and its burden of war rest on the shoulders of God L and another aged god from the Otherworld. Both are bent over like captives under the feet of victorious warrior kings.[362] This scene recalls the defeat of the Lords of Death at the beginning of time by the Hero Twins. Captive sacrifice was the source of life through the reenactment of the magical rebirth of these heroic ancestors of the Maya people. God L, who received the greetings of the new king in the Temple of the Cross, now holds up the burden of war and sacrifice. In both cases, ritual performance by the king involved Otherworld denizens in the human community.[363]
-[[#1172|117]]. Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 109; Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''9.
+Here in the Temple of the Sun, the power object is not actually passed from the inside scene to the outside, as in the other temples; but the intent of the composition is still the same. On the inner panel, Pacal holds a full-bodied eccentric flint and a shield made of a flayed human face: symbols of war among the nobility of Palenque and other Maya kingdoms. If we move to the outer panels, on one we see Chan-Bahlum holding a bleeding jaguar on a small throne as the symbol of sacrificial death. On the opposite panel, he wears cotton battle armor with a rolled flexible shield hanging down his back. The tall staff he wields is probably a battle spear typical of the kind carried by warrior kings at other sites. The parallelism here is nicely rendered. On the one side, he is emerging from the pib na as a warrior prepared to capture the enemies of his kingdom; on the other, he comes forth as the giver of sacrifice, the result of victory.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1182|118]]. For the context of the “Sonvilier Circular,” see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 167–75; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 85–120.</div>
+Once he had memorialized the scenes of his transformation within his living mountains, Chan-Bahlum framed the imagery with the finest examples of royal literature left to the modern world by the ancient Maya. We know that, on the one hand, his actions were politically motivated and designed to gain personal glory. That knowledge, however, cannot obscure our awareness that these texts constitute a magnificent poetic vision of the universe, a remarkable expression of the high level of philosophical and spiritual development within the civilization of the Maya. These texts comprise the only full statement of creation mythology and its relationship to the institution of ahau that we have from the Maya Classic period. They define the sacred origin and charismatic obligations of kingly power.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1192|119]]. The Jura Federation, “The Sonvilier Circular,” in ''Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1, 97–98. For Marx and Engels’s response, in which they reject this position, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 64–70.</div>
+In these texts, Chan-Bahlum resolved the relationship between lineage and dynasty by evoking the origin myths of the Maya, declaring that his own claim of descent from his grandmother replicated the practices of the gods at the time of the genesis. He pursued and elaborated the same divine symmetries his father had asserted before him, symmetries between the First Mother, First Father, and their children, and the historical realities of Palenque’s dynastic succession. The First Mother was Lady Beastie, who we mentioned above as the mother of the gods and the Creatrix in the Maya vision of the cosmos. As we shall see the Palencanos saw her operate in their lives through her spirit counterpart, the moon. Her husband and the father of her children is called GT (G-one-prime) by modern scholars. He established the order of time and space just after the fourth version of the cosmos was created on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. Both the Creatrix and her husband were born during the previous manifestation of creation, but their children were born 754 years into this one.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1202|120]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''180–81. See also Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.</div>
+The three children are known as the Palenque Triad because Heinrich Berlin[364] first recognized them as a unit of related gods in Paienque’s inscriptions. He dubbed them GI, GII, and GUI for God I, God II, and God III. We now know that the firstborn child, GI, had the same name as his father, GI’, in exactly the same pattern as the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh where Hun-Hunahpu is the father of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. GI is a fish-barbled anthropomorphic god who wears a shell-earflare. He is associated with Venus and with decapitation sacrifice. GII, also known as God K, Bolon Tz’acab, and Kauil, is a serpent-footed god who wears a smoking-ax through his obsidian-mirrored forehead. He is the god of lineages and blood sacrifice. GUI is the cruller-eyed Jaguar God, who is also known as Ahau-Kin, “Lord Sun.” See the Glossary of Gods for full descriptions and pictures.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1212|121]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993),'' ''41.</div>
+As the most ancient and sacred of all Maya dieties, these three gods played a crucial role in the earliest symbolism of kingship we saw at Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactun. Chan-Bahlum makes them the crucial pivot of his own claim to legitimacy. On the right half of each text, he recounted their actions in the Maya story of the beginning of the current world. On the left he recorded the connections between those sacred events and Paienque’s history. Here is a chronology of the mythological events in the order they are presented. (See Fig. 6:14,15,16 for the full decipherment and drawings of these texts.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1222|122]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 20.</div>
+<verse>
+On December 7, 3121 B.C.,
+when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled,
+five days after the moon was born
+and the 2<sup>nd</sup> moon had ended,
+X was the moon’s name and it had 29 days.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1232|123]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 397.</div>
+It was 20 days after God K had set the south sky place
+on November 16, 3121 B.C.
-[[#1242|124]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''91.
+that Lady Beastie was born. [Al-Cl]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1252|125]]. Isaac Puente, Libertarian Communism, (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 10.</div>
+. years, 5 months,
+and no days after he was born and then the past epoch ended.
+On August 13, 3114 B.C.,
+. baktuns were completed.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1261|126]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 153; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''358–60; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''129–30; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 152–55. For examples of anarchist cooperatives and intentional communities, see Andrew Cornell, ''Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century ''(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016),'' ''96–100, 129–33; John Quail, ''The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists'' (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978),'' ''224–31.</div>
+year, 9 months, and 2 days after the new epoch began,
+GF entered the sky.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1271|127]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 50–51, 261–64; Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013),'' ''90–91; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism'' (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 120–29;'' ''Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 102–20; Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 151–62.</div>
+On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ dedicated it.
+“Wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” was its name.
+It was his house of the north. [DI —C13]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1281|128]]. Ardouin et al., “Liberty Through Education: The Libertarian School,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/liberty-through-education-1898.</div>
+years and 12 months after GF had set the wac chan
+and then the matawil person was born.
+On October 21, 2360 B.C., the matawil,
+the blood of Lady Beastie, touched the earth.
+[D13-F4]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1291|129]]. Francisco Ferrer, ''Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader'','' ''ed. Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth'' ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 86. See also, 50–51.</div>
+years, 11 months, and 2 days
+after she had been born,
+and then she crowned herself
+on August 13, 2305 B.C. [E5-F8]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1301|130]]. Ferrer,'' Anarchist Education'', 85–93. Anarchists disagreed on whether or not schools run by anarchists should teach anarchist ideas. See ibid., 188–206; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''185–201.</div>
+,330 years, 12 months, 2 days after
+August 13<sup>th</sup> came to pass
+and then U-Kix-Chan, the Divine Palenque Lord,
+was born.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1311|131]]. Avrich, ''Modern School'','' ''29–31.</div>
+years, 7 months, 13 days after
+U-Kix-Chan had been born ... [E10-F17]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1321|132]]. Cornell, ''Unruly Equality'','' ''159–60, 163, 208–9.</div>
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
-[[#1331|133]]. Wilson,'' Anarchist Essays'', 43.
+<verse>
+On October 21,2360 B.C.,
+GI, the matawil, touched the earth.
+,094 years, 11 months, 10 days later
+On January 10, 692 ...
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1341|134]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''140. See also Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 188.</div>
+ The Temple of the Cross
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1351|135]]. Quoted in Jennifer Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City'','' 1880–1945 ''(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 165.</div>
+<verse>
+On December 7, 3121 B.C., Lady Beastie, the First Mother, was born.
+On June 16, 3122 B.C., GI’, the First Father, was born.
+On August 13, 3114 B.C., the 13<sup>th</sup> baktun ended and the new creation began.
+On February 5, 3112 B.C., GI’ entered into the sky and he dedicated the house named ‘wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (the “World Tree house of the north”).[365]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1361|136]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''46–52, 171–2; Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''155–58, 195–99; J. Mintz, ''Casas Viejas'', 91–99; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''44–46; Guglielmo,'' Living the Revolution'','' ''154, 156,'' ''171–72; Ginger Frost, “Love is Always Free: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England,” ''Anarchist Studies'' 17, no. 1 (2009): 73–94.</div>
+<verse>
+... and then U-Kix-Chan crowned himself
+on March 28, 967 B.C.
+He was a Divine Palenque Lord. [P1-Q3]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1371|137]]. Quoted in Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 115.</div>
+On March 31,397 Kuk was born.
+It was 22 years, 5 months, 14 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself on March 11,431.
+He was Divine ????? Lord. [P4—Q9]
+On August 9, 422, “Casper” was born.
+years, 3 months, 9 days after “Casper” had been born and then it was August 10, 435,
+days after “Casper” crowned himself and then December 11,435, came to pass, on that day 3,600 years (9 baktuns) ended. <verbatim>|Pl0—S2]</verbatim>
+years, 1 month, 18 days after “Manik” had been born and then he crowned himself on July 29,487. [R3-S7]
+years, 7 months, 17 days after he had been born
+on July 6,465,
+and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself
+on June 5, 501. [R8-R13]
+years, 6 months, 16 days after Kan-Xul had been born and then he crowned himself on February 25, 529.
+[S13-S18]
+years, 4 months, 17 days after he had been born and then Chaacal-Ah-Nab crowned himself
+on May 4,565. [T1-T6]
+year, 1 month, 1 day after Chaacal-Ah-Nab had been
+born on September 5, 523
+and then Chan-Bahlum was born. [U6-T11]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1381|138]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''77, 87–88, 103, 115–20, 123.</div>
+years, 4 months, 7 days after Chan-Bahlum had
+been born on September 20, 524
+and 18(?) years, 8 months, 2 days. [U11-U18]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1391|139]]. Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution'', 156, 159–60, 162–63.</div>
+<verse>
+it was housed the wacah-chan (six-sky)
+it was the sanctuary of
+it was the holy thing of
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal
+and the child of Lady Ahpo-Hel.
+It happened at the Waterlily Place.
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1401|140]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''21, 115, 120–37.</div>
+On October 21, 2360 B.c., GI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1411|141]]. Quoted in Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''148.</div>
+On August 13, 2305 B.C., at age 815, Lady Beastie became the first being in this creation to be crowned as king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1421|142]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 151–54.</div>
+On March 1 1, 993 B.c., U-Kix-Chan was born.
-[[#1431|143]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+On March 28, 967 B.C., at age thirty-six, U-Kix-Chan, Divine Lord of Palenque, was crowned king of Palenque.
-[[#1441|144]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+On November 8, 2360 B.C.
+when the eighth Lord of the Night ruled,
+it was ten days after the moon was born,
+moons had ended,
+X was its name and it had 30 days.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1451|145]]. For example Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 203.</div>
+It was 14 months and 19 days
+after God K set the west quadrant.{1}
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1461|146]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 58. See also, 53, 84; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 105; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 298.</div>
+It was the third birth and GII was born. [A1-D2]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1471|147]]. Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13–15, 23–24.</div>
+years, 14 months after GII, the matawil, had been born
+and then 2 baktuns (800 years) ended
+on February 16, 2325 B.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1481|148]]. Émile Pouget, ''Direct Action ''(London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 1.</div>
+On that day Lady Beastie, Divine Lord of Matawil,
+manifested a divinity through bloodletting. [C3-D11]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1491|149]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 3.</div>
+It had come to pass
+on Yax -Ha! Witznal
+in the shell place
+at the Na-Te-Kan{2}
+on November 8, 2360 B.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1501|150]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 76–77. A few years later in her 1913 pamphlet ''Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice'', Goldman used the term “direct action” in its original narrow syndicalist sense. See ibid., 94.</div>
+,947 years, 3 months, 16 days later{3} ... [C12-D17]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1511|151]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''202.</div>
+{1} The scribe made an error here by adding rather than subtracting the Distance Number. The correct station is 1.18.4.7.11 Imix 19 Pax with red and east.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1521|152]]. Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''48.</div>
+{2} These three locations refer to the Mountain Monster under Chan-Bahlum’s feet, the shell under Pacal’s feet, and the Foliated Cross in the center of the panel (See Figure 6:12).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1531|153]]. de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 52–55.</div>
+{3} The Distance Number should be 7.14.13.1.16.
-[[#1541|154]]. John Merriman, ''The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror ''(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 55.
+<verse>
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
+On November 8, 2360 B.C..
+GII, the matawil, touched the earth. 3,050 years, 63 days later
+on January 10, 692 ...
+<verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1551|155]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 127–32; Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''246–49, 257–8, 275–77.</div>
+ The Temple of the Foliated Cross
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1561|156]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907) ''(Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 164.</div>
+<verse>
+November 8, 2360 B.C., GII was born.
+Thirty-four years later, on February 17, 2325 B.C., Lady Beastie let her blood when two baktuns ended.
+... on July 23, 690, (III and Gill were in conjunction [L1-M4]
+On the next day,
+the Mah-Kina-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated in the house of Lord Chan-Bahlum,
+Divine Palenque Lord. <verbatim>|L6-L9]</verbatim>
+On the third day Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord, he let blood with an obsidian blade;
+he took the bundle
+after it had come to pass at the Waterlily Place.
+Wac-Chan-Chac Ox-Waxac-Chac acted there. [L10-L17]
+years, 6 months, 4 days after he had been born and then he crowned himself,
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord on January 10, 692. [M17-P5]
+years, 11 months, 6 days after he had been seated as ahau and then GI, GII, Gill and their companion gods came into conjunction.
+Lord Chan-Bahlum enacted a ritual.
+In 1 year, 12 months, 4 days it will happen, the end of the 13<sup>th</sup> katun on March 17, 692.
+And then it came to pass July 23, 690 and then they were in conjunction the gods, who are the chcrcished-ones of, Lord Chan-Bahlum, Divine Palenque Lord.
+it was housed, the Na-Te-Kan (Foliated Cross)
+it was the pib nail of
+it was the divine-thing of
+Lord Chan-Bahlum, the child of Lord Pacal the child of Lady Ahpo-Hcl.
+It happened at the Waterlily Place.
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#157|157]]. Cornell, ''Unruly Equality'', 71–74.</div>
+<verse>
+On October 25, 2360 B.C.
+the third Lord of the Night ruled,
+it was 26 days after the moon was born,
+four moons had ended,
+X was its name and it had 30 days ....
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#158|158]]. Abel Paz, ''Durruti in the Spanish Revolution'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 49–54.</div>
+It was 1 year, 46 days after
+God K set the north quadrant
+on July 24, 2587 B.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#159|159]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 77–78; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 98–99, 106–11.</div>
+On that day he was born,
+Mah Kina Tah-Waybil-Ahau,
+Kin-tan “decapitated jaguar.”
+Ti Nah, Zac-Bac-Na-Chan, Atin Butz’, TITI,
+Mah Kina Ahau-Kin.. [A1-D6]
-[[#160|160]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''92.
+years, 3 months, 6 days after the wac-chan
+had been set,
+and then the matawil, the child of Lady Beastie,
+Divine Palenquc Lord, was born. [C7—D13]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#161|161]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 5. See also Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 170–71.</div>
+,858 years, 5 months, 16 days ... [Cl—D16]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#162|162]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 189.</div>
+Alfardas flanking the main stairs
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#163|163]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 7.</div>
+On October 25, 2360 B C.,
+GIII, the matawil, touched the earth.
+[3,894 years, 11 months, 6 days later
+on January 10, 692 ...]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#164|164]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 20.</div>
+ The Temple of the Sun
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#165|165]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 32.</div>
+On October 25, 2360 B.c., 754 years after the era began, GUI, the child of Lady Beastie, was born.
-[[#166|166]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''83.
+<verse>
+... after the present epoch began on August 13, 3114 B. C.,
+and then July 23,690, came to pass.
+GUI came into conjunction. 1016–06]
-[[#167|167]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''90.
+One day later on July 24, 690,
+the Kinich-Bahlum-Kuk Building was dedicated,
+in the house of the Bacel-Way
+Lord Chan-Bahlum. [N7-O12]
-[[#168|168]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''91.
+Three days later he materialized the divinity
+through bloodletting.
+He did it at the Waterlily Place,
+the Old God of Kuk-Te-Witz.{4} (N13-N16]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#169|169]]. This phrase continued to be used by Kropotkin over several decades. See Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''140, 200, 348, 374; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 18–19; Kropotkin,'' Modern Science'','' ''190, 194.</div>
+years, 12 months, 3 days after November 20,496,
+when Kan-Xul took office as the heir-designate.
+It had come to pass at the Toc-tan Place.
+and then June 17, 641, came to pass.
+He (Lord Chan-Bahlum) became the heir.
+And on the fifth day after (on June 22,641)
+Lord Chan-Bahlum became the sun
+in the company of GI. [O16-Q10]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#170|170]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 70–73.</div>
+years, 2 months. 17 days after he had been born
+on May 23, 635,
+and then he was designated heir. [P11-Q13]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#171|171]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 186.</div>
+It was 1 year, 167 days until December 6, 642,
+when 10 years ended (9.10.10.0.0),
+he warred{5} as heir. [P14-Q16]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#172|172]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 186.</div>
+{4} Kuk-te-witz is the ancient name for the mountain behind the Temple of the Foliated Cross, known today as El Mirador.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#173|173]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 187.</div>
+{5} This is the same war event Smoking-Squirrel of Naranjo enacted against Ucanal (Stela 22) and Ah-Cacaw of Tikal enacted against Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#174|174]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 187–90</div>
+<verse>
+It was an action in the Mah Kina ???? Cab,
+it was the pib nail of
+he completed 13 katuns on March 18, 692,
+Lord [Chan-Bahlum ...]
+</verse>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#175|175]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 189.</div>
+This pattern of events reveals Chan-Bahlum’s strategy of dynastic legitimization. In the Temple of the Cross, the first event recorded is the birth of Lady Beastie, the First Mother. In the next passage, we are told that the First Father, GT, was born on an even earlier date.[366] Both these gods were born during the previous creation, indicating that the nature of their power comes from a time before the existence of our world. On 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the cosmos re-formed into the new pattern of creation which manifested the present world. As the text continues, it describes how GT, the First Father, established the order of the new world on 1.9.2, 542 days after the present creation began.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#176|176]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 189–90.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum provided a lot of information about these primordial times, beyond their naked existence as dates and events. His real theological and political intentions, however, are revealed by the manner of his presentation. In the text of his accession monument, the Temple of the Cross, he recounted the birth of the First Mother as if it were the first, and not the second, chronological event in the historical sequence. Initially, when recording the birth of the First Father, he didn’t even identify him. The reader had to wait until a subsequent passage to discover that this mysterious person, born eight years before creation—and 540 days earlier than the goddess—was in fact the First Father, GT. Chan-Bahlum manipulated the focus of the text at the expense of the First Father specifically because the First Mother was the pivot of his strategy of legitimization.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#177|177]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 192–96.</div>
+In his accession monument, therefore, Chan-Bahlum placed the focus entirely on Lady Beastie and her relationship to the three gods of the Palenque Triad. Pacal had already set the precedent for this association by linking Lady Beastie’s name to that of his own mother, Lady Zac-Kuk, implying by this reference that his mother was the human analog of the mother goddess of all Maya. Chan-Bahlum went further by contriving to make the birth date of the goddess like-in-kind to the birth date of his own father, Pacal.[367] With a little calendric manipulation, this was easily done. To the Maya, days that fell at the same point in a calender cycle shared the same characteristics in sacred time. Days that fell on the same point in many different cycles were very sacred indeed. By extension, events, such as births, which fell on days that were related cosmically, were also “like-in-kind.” Because of the symmetry of their birth dates, Chan-Bahlum could declare that his father, Pacal, and the mother of the gods, were beings made of the same sacred substance.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#178|178]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 73–74.</div>
+The symmetry of sacredness between the First Mother and Pacal was vital for another reason. The mother of the gods was born in the world of the past creation; therefore, she carried into the new world the cumulative power of the previous existence.[368] The date 4 Ahau 8 Cumku represented a membrane, comprised of the horrific chaos of creation, separating the symmetry and order of the former world from that of the present one. The contrived relationship between Pacal’s birth and the goddess’s asserted that his birth held the same sacred destiny as hers and that this symmetry came from the time before the creation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#179|179]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 74.</div>
+The parallel Chan-Bahlum wished his people to see is both elegant and effective. He focused their attention on the old and new creation, then demonstrated that Lady Zac-Kuk and her royal clan represented the old ruling lineage at Palenque, while her son Pacal represented the new order of another patrilineal clan—a “new creation,” so to speak. When his mother passed the sacred essence of the kingship on to Pacal, she successfully passed through the chaotic violation of kinship principles of succession to arrive at this new order. Chan-Bahlum’s legitimate claim to the throne rested on this principle: direct transmission of the sacred essence of royal power between kings, irrespective of their gender or family.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#180|180]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 74.</div>
+Chan-Bahlum extended the similarity between the kings of Palenque and the gods even further by recording the births of the three gods of the Palenque Triad on the left sides of the tablets inside the pib na. There he emphasized their relationship to the First Mother by labeling GI (the namesake of the First Father) and GUI, who were the first and second born of her children, with the glyphic phrase “he is the child of Lady Beastie.” These gods were her children, exactly as Pacal was the child of Lady Zac-Kuk. GII, the god most closely related to Maya kings, was also her child, but Chan-Bahlum chose to relate him to the First Father by setting up contrived numerology between their births, exactly as he contrived to make Pacal’s birth “like-in-kind” to Lady Beastie’s.[369] The equation is, of course, his own claim to legitimacy: As GII was descended from the substance of First Father so was he the descendant of the divine Pacal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#181|181]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 75.</div>
+This declaration of parallelism might have been enough, but Chan- Bahlum, intent on proving his right to the throne beyond the shadow of any doubt, was not content to stop there. On the Tablet of the Cross he declared that after she brought the firstborn of the Palenque Triad into the world, Lady Beastie, at age 815, became the first living being to be crowned ruler in the new creation. The crown she wore is called glyph- ically zac uinic (“pure or resplendent person”) and it is visually represented as the Jester God headband we saw first at Cerros. This glyph is the key title taken by all the subsequent kings of Palenque who were recorded on the historical side of this panel. Once again, Chan-Bahlum did not say that the First Father became the king: It was the goddess that he chose to emphasize. The text itself reads: “2 days, 11 uinals, 7 tuns, 1 katuns, and 2 baktuns after she had been born and then she crowned herself the zac uinic, Beastie, on 9 Ik seating of Zac” (Fig. 6:17).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#182|182]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 75.</div>
+At this point, Chan-Bahlum could certainly have rested from his labors. He had already created a simple and effective equation between the First Mother and the children of the gods on the one hand, and Lady Zac-Kuk and her descendants on the other. But instead he decided to bridge the temporal gap from the accession of the First Mother to the accession of the founder of his dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. He accomplished this by evoking the name of a legendary king, U-Kix-Chan. We know that this man was a figure of legend because Chan-Bahlum tells us he was born on March 11, 993 B.C., and crowned himself on March 28, 967 B.C. These dates fall during the florescence of the Olmec, the first great Mesoameri- can civilization. The Olmec were remembered by the Classic peoples as the great ancestral civilization in much the same way that the Romans evoked Troy from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as their source of their legitimacy. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec, like the Greeks of the Old XV orld, forged the template of state art and religion for their world by developing many of the symbols, the rituals, and the styles of artistic presentation that would be used by their successors for millennium.
-== {{anchor|Chapter5AnarchismandStateS}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook8}} {{anchor|Chapter5AnarchismandStateS1}} Chapter 5: Anarchism and State Socialism ==
+U-Kix-Chan may not have been a real person, but Chan-Bahlum deliberately set his birth date in Olmec times. In this way he could claim that the authority of Palenque’s dynasty had its roots in the beginnings of human civilization as well as in the time of the divine. The passages recording U-Kix-Chan’s name began on the mythological side of the Tablet of the Cross, with his birth, and bridged to the historical side with his accession. He was immediately recognizable as human, no matter how legendary his time, because of the scale of his life. He was twenty-six years old when he became the king of Palenque; the First Mother was 815 when she took the same throne. Since their ages were read with their accessions, their status as divine versus human would have been immediately and emphatically self-evident.
-Anarchism as a social movement emerged in parallel with, and opposition to, various forms of state socialism. This included not only Marxism but also those influenced by such figures as Louis Auguste Blanqui, Ferdinand Lassalle, César De Paepe, Paul Brousse, and Jean Allemane. During the late nineteenth century, a number of socialist political parties adopted Marxist programs or at least programs influenced by Marxism, such as the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria in 1888 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1891. These social democratic parties contained numerous factions, including people who were not Marxists, and coexisted with political parties committed to other kinds of state socialism, such as the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France, who were known as Possibilists. From 1889 onward, the various state socialist parties of the time were linked together through a loosely organized coalition known as the Second International. This coalition disintegrated from 1914 onward, when the majority of socialist parties in Europe supported their respective nation-states in World War I and voted for war credits. This was followed by the Russian revolution of 1917, during which the Marxist Bolshevik party seized state power and established a one-party dictatorship. These two events led to a split in state socialism and the formation of various national Communist parties, which affiliated with the centralized, Bolshevik-led Third International (Comintern) that had been founded in March 1919. These Communist parties, in contrast to a significant chunk of social democracy, were explicit Marxist parties and became the main rivals of anarchism within international socialism.[[#1GaryPSteensonAfterMarx|1]]
+From the legendary “Olmec,” U-Kix-Chan, Chan-Bahlum moved to the birth and accession of the founder of his own dynasty, Bahlum-Kuk. The text then proceeded through each succeeding king, finally culminating with Chan-Bahlum I, the ancestor from whom Chanappears as the verb when the Vision Serpen-Bahlum, the author of this text, took his name. The Palenque dynasty envisioned by him descended from the original accession of the mother of the gods.
-The anarchist critique of state socialist strategies was largely articulated in response to the programs, newspapers, congress resolutions, and actions of the various socialist, and later communist, political parties that confronted them. Anarchist authors, in other words, generally focused their energy on refuting the theory and practice of really existing social movements, rather than producing an exhaustive examination of Marx and Engels’s various writings on the topic (much of which was not publicly available or easy to obtain at the time). This is not to say that anarchists never argued against Marx and Engels. Anarchist critiques of state socialism frequently mentioned Marx and Engels by name or responded to an idea that Marx and Engels had advocated in their best-known works, such as the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' or ''Anti-Dühring''.[[#2Forillustrativeexamplesse|2]]'' ''Yet, even when critiquing the strategy of Marx and Engels, anarchists tended to interpret their ideas through the lens provided to them by socialist political parties at the time, rather than understanding Marx and Engels on their own terms.[[#3ForanoverviewofMarxandE|3]]
+Lady Beastie was depicted not only as the first ruler of Palenque. Chan-Bahlum also portrayed her as the first to shed her blood for the people of the community in the cathartic act which opened the path to Xibalba and allowed prosperity to flow into the human world. On the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, Chan-Bahlum recorded that thirty-four years after the birth of GH (her third-born child), Lady Beastie celebrated the end of the second baktun with a “fish-in-hand”[370] glyph (Fig. 6:18) that appears as the verb when the Vision Serpent is materialized through bloodletting. Chan-Bahlum’s decision to record this vision-bringing ritual in the Temple of the Foliated Cross was not accidental. If you remember, the Personified Perforator was the instrument that Pacal, on the inner tablet, passed to Chan-Bahlum, on the outer. When Chan-Bahlum spilled his own blood in the rituals that took place within this pib na, he was activating his own portal and generating the energies these images represented: agricultural abundance for the human community. In Chan-Bah- lum’s version of the genesis story, therefore, the First Mother was not only the first being to become a ruler in this creation; she also taught the people how to offer their blood to nourish life, to maintain the social order, and to converse with their ancestors in the Otherworld. The model for human and kingly behavior was again manifested through the actions of the First Mother rather than the First Father.
-According to anarchists in this period, state socialists generally argued that, in order to achieve a stateless, classless society (essentially an anarchist society), the working classes must first conquer state power and use it to overthrow the capitalist class, reconstruct the economy along socialist lines, and defend the revolution from counterattack. The conquest of state power would be achieved by forming political parties that either won state power through parliamentary elections or seized state power via force. The government of the bourgeoisie would be transformed into, or replaced with, a democratic workers’ republic that, at least in theory, was based on the genuine self-rule of the working classes. The reconstruction of the economy would take the form of private property being abolished in favor of state ownership of the means of production and land. Production, distribution, and exchange would then be organized through the state. Once the revolution had been successful and a classless society achieved, the state would wither away. Anarchists and state socialists agreed on the ends of a stateless, classless society but proposed different means to achieve it.[[#4PeterKropotkinWordsofaR|4]]
+[[][Fig. 6:18 The First Mother and the First Vision Rite in This Creation]]
-Anarchists rejected the strategy of attempting to abolish capitalism via the conquest of state power. This rejection did not stem from abstract arguments about morality, or ignore the harsh facts of real politics. They instead did so for fundamentally strategic reasons that were grounded in the theory of practice. Anarchists argued that, given the unity of means and ends (which was explained in the previous chapter), the conquest of state power was a path that would never lead to a stateless, classless society. This argument applied to both engaging in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state and attempting to overthrow the bourgeois state and transform it into, or replace it with, a workers’ state. In making this argument, anarchists were not, as is commonly claimed by Marxists, rejecting or ignoring political struggle. Given my focus on explaining what anarchists themselves thought, I shall not examine the complex question of whether or not the anarchist critique of state socialism actually applied to their various opponents, such as Marx and Engels.
+Chan-Bahlum did not entirely ignore the father of the gods, however. In the Temple of the Cross, he related the story in which the First Father, GT, as a boy of ten, established cosmic order a year and a half after the creation of the present world. The text calls this action “entering or becoming the sky (och chan).” We can see a beautiful rendering of these actions in a scene from an ornamental pot: GI’ has set up the World Tree which lifted the sky up from the primordial sea of creation. Now he crouches below it, ready to shoot his blowgun at the Celestial Bird sitting atop the Tree, imitating the glory of the sun. It was these actions, separating out the elements of the natural world and assigning them their proper roles, that brought chaotic nature into order[371] (Fig. 6:19).
-'''Parliamentarism'''
+In the expression of this great cosmic event at Palenque, we learn that this “entering the sky” also resulted in the dedication of a house called “wacah chan xaman waxac na GI” (see Note 33). Phis is the name of the structure created by GI’ when he set up the World Tree. It is the dome of heaven and the movement of the constellations as they pivot around the great northern axis of the sky—the pole star. But Wacah-Chan was also the proper name of the pib na in the Temple of the Cross, which, in turn, was named for the central icon on the main tablet—the World free itself. When Chan-Bahlum dedicated his own temples in the Group of the Cross, he replicated the establishment of celestial order brought about by the First Father.
-During the late nineteenth century, various socialist parties were formed in Europe and the United States. These parties generally argued that the abolition of capitalism and establishment of socialism could be achieved, or at least built toward, through the strategy of winning local and national elections and participating in bourgeois parliaments as representatives of the working class. Through this political struggle, socialist parties would simultaneously build up their size and organizational strength, win various reforms via the passing of new legislation, and spread socialist ideas to a large audience. In so doing, they would transform parliament from a mere tool of bourgeois rule into a lever of working-class emancipation. This parliamentary struggle would occur alongside, and as a complement to, various forms of extraparliamentary activity, including demonstrations, the organization of trade unions and strikes, the construction of cooperatives, the spreading of ideas via the socialist press, and the establishment of a working-class counterculture within singing societies, bicycle clubs, reading groups, and the like. Socialist parties generally, but not always, viewed the parliamentary struggle as primary and thought that extraparliamentary activity played a secondary and supportive role. Over time, these various forms of struggle would lead to the development of a mass socialist party that was capable of, and driven to, win state power in response to the economic crises of capitalism.[[#5Foranoverviewofthesemove|5]]
+Chan-Bahlum made records of the rituals in which he dedicated the Group of the Cross in all three temples, but he featured them especially in the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun. In both instances he created bridges between the mythological events in the left column of the tablets and the dedication rituals in the right. In this way he declared that the essential causality of these rites derived from the actions of the First Mother and Father (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for the paraphrases and arrangements of these texts).[372]
-State socialists disagreed with one another about how to achieve this. Moderate state socialists proposed that if a socialist party won a majority in parliament then they would be able to gradually establish socialism through the passing of new legislation and the achievement of various reforms. Radical state socialists rejected this position and argued that the conquest of state power could not be won by legal and peaceful means. State power could only be forcibly seized by such means as an armed insurrection, coup, or general strike. The majority of radical state socialists did not, however, reject parliamentarism and thought that it could still be used as an effective means to win immediate improvements within capitalism, spread socialist ideas to a large audience, and build up the size and organizational strength of the socialist party.[[#6EdwardBernsteinEvolutionar|6]]
+The rituals themselves fell on three distinct days during a four-day span. On the first day (9.12.18.5.16 2 Cib 14 Mol, July 23, 690), Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and the moon appeared in a spectacular conjunction with all four planets less than 5° apart in the constellation of Scorpio.[373] Chan- Bahlum and his people apparently envisioned this conjunction as the First Mother (the moon) rejoined by her three children (manifested as the three planets). Seen this way, this extraordinary alignment in the sky was an omen of enormous portent. On the next day (3 Caban 15 Mol), Chan- Bahlum dedicated his temples with exactly the same ritual that the First Father had enacted to establish the Wacah-Chan at the center of the cosmos. Chan-Bahlum’s own house was named Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Na, “Lord Bahlum-Kuk House” (Fig. 6:20), therefore making it the house of the founder of his dynasty.[374] By proclaiming that his new portals to the Otherworld were also those of his founding ancestor, Chan-Bahlum joined the three patrilineages of Palenque’s kingship into a coherent totality. At their completion, the three temples of the Group of the Cross housed the divine sanction for the dynasty as a whole and gave the rationale for its descent through females’as well as males.
-Anarchists had four main objections to parliamentarism. First, even if socialist parties managed to win majorities in parliament, the economic ruling classes would never allow their power and property to be voted away and abolished via peaceful and legal means. Capitalists and landowners would, if necessary, overthrow any socialist party that attempted to do so. The abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism cannot be achieved via the ballot. It can only be achieved by working-class social movements breaking the law and launching a social revolution to forcibly overthrow their oppressors. Anarchists were aware that radical state socialists agreed with them about this.[[#7BerkmanAnarchism9193Kr|7]]
+Two days after the house dedication on 5 Cauac 17 Mol,[375] Chan- Bahlum consummated the ritual sequence with a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. The timing of this last bloodletting linked the dedication rites back to Pacal, occurring just three days short of the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of his accession (July 29, 615 to July 26, 690). Chan-Bahlum’s final sacrifice put the finishing touch to the extraordinary document he had created. Having begun these rituals when the First Mother reassembled in the sky with her children, he ended with her action of bloodletting, completing the symmetry he had forged between the creator gods and himself.
-Second, anarchists rejected the claim that parliamentarism was a necessary or sufficient condition for winning immediate improvements within capitalism. They argued that workers could achieve immediate improvements through direct action alone. This could be seen not only in the numerous strikes that had successfully won higher wages or reductions to the working day, but also in the fact that direct action had played an important role in the achievement of the right to vote itself, as with the 1893 general strike in Belgium. It was clear that a key factor in the achievement of new legislation was the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action. If this is the case, then reforms could be won by imposing pressure on liberal, republican, or conservative politicians. It did not specifically require the election of socialist politicians. Such immediate improvements would also most likely be won faster if time, energy, and money devoted to electoral campaigns was instead exclusively used on direct action and the self-organization of the working classes.[[#8KropotkinDirectStruggle3|8]]
+The last event Chan-Bahlum recorded in the Group of the Cross was the activation of the pib na themselves on 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab, the eighth tropical year anniversary of his own accession (January 10, 684 to January 10, 692). He recorded this ritual on the jambs around the sanctuary doors, on the outer piers of the temples, and on the balustrade panels mounted on either side of the stairs rising up the pyramidal base of each temple. The most public parts of the dynastic festival were the dedication of the stairway panels and the piers. These events could be easily viewed by an audience standing in the court space in the middle of the temple group.
-In the absence of the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action, socialist politicians routinely found themselves unable to pass new laws in parliament. Bourgeois politicians from a variety of different parties would put aside their differences in order to vote against motions proposed by socialists.[[#9MalatestaPatientWork303|9]] Even if socialist politicians did manage to pass laws in parliament that protected or expanded workers’ rights, it did not follow from this that the law would be enforced. As de Cleyre wrote in 1912, “nearly all the laws which were originally framed with the intention of benefiting the workers, have either turned into weapons in their enemies’ hands, or become dead letters unless the workers through their organizations have directly enforced their observance. So that in the end, it is direct action that has to be relied on anyway.”[[#10VoltairinedeCleyreTheVo|10]]
+On each set of balustrades (see Figs. 6:15 and 16 for paraphrases), Chan-Bahlum began his text with the birth of the patron god of each temple: GI for the Temple of the Cross, GII for the Temple of the Foliated Cross, and GUI for the Temple of the Sun. On the left side of the stairs, he recorded the time elapsed between the birth of the god and the dedication of the temple. On the right he listed the actors in the dedication rituals and their actions. In this manner, he connected the birth of the god in mythological time to the dedication of the pib na in contemporary time.
-A state socialist might reply that, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness, working-class social movements should engage in parliamentary politics and direct action simultaneously. In 1897, Malatesta answered this by pointing out that “the two methods of struggle do not go together and whoever embraces them both inevitably winds up sacrificing any other considerations to the electoral prospect.”[[#11MalatestaLongandPatient|11]] Ultimately, “the electoral and parliamentary contest amounts to schooling in parliamentarism and winds up making parliamentarists of all its practitioners.”[[#12MalatestaLongandPatient|12]]
+Chan-Bahlum also used the four outer piers of each temple to record the dedication ceremonies. Here, once again, he depicted himself engaged in ritual. These more public displays of his political strategy were rendered in plaster relief, like the sculptures he had placed on the piers on the Temple of the Inscriptions. The inscription recording the date of the dedication festival and its events occupied the two outer piers, while the two inner ones illustrated the action. Unfortunately, only the two piers of the Temple of the Sun have survived into the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, given the temple’s focus on warfare, Chan-Bahlum was portrayed in the costume of a warrior. The particular regalia he chose is that which we have already seen at Tikal, Naranjo, and Dos Pilas. The king is shown holding a square, flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it,[376] declaring that he engaged in Tlaloc warfare. No doubt the object of his battles included those captives whose blood would sanctify the pib na as the gods came to reside in them.[377]
-The third anarchist objection to parliamentarism was that it is a form of practice that fails to develop in workers the radical traits necessary for a social revolution. Instead of taking direct action within prefigurative organizations, workers would engage in such activities as voting in elections, campaigning for politicians, and listening to them make various promises. Such forms of activity would produce workers who look to politicians to achieve their own emancipation and who respond to injustices by putting their hopes in the next election, rather than taking direct action themselves.[[#13MalatestaLongandPatient|13]] In 1912, De Cleyre claimed that the “main evil” of parliamentary politics was “that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves, what they alone can do for themselves.”[[#14DeCleyreReader59|14]] Decades later, Rocker was convinced that this is what had occurred. He wrote in 1938 that “participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labor movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed . . . the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”[[#15RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|15]]
+Like the balustrades, the doorjambs inside the sanctuaries are all glyphic,[378] but they record no information aside from the pib na dedications. All three sets of inscriptions describe the action in the same manner.
-Anarchists thought that this would be especially harmful during a revolutionary situation. Parliamentarism not only leads to workers becoming accustomed to elevating party leaders into positions of power. It also makes them believe in the possibility of good government and the false notion that emancipation can be achieved by simply changing who is in power. In a revolution, workers would thus most likely establish a new government based on minority rule by a political ruling class. This government would then, for reasons that will be discussed later, turn on and repress working-class social movements. A new system of domination and exploitation would arise, rather than a stateless, classless society based on self-management and free association. Given this, a key reason why anarchists rejected participating in electoral politics was because, to quote Malatesta, “we consider any methods that lead the people to believe that progress consists in a change of governing individuals, and revolution in a change of government form, to be dangerous, and directly counter to our purposes.”[[#16MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|16]]
+[[][The Mah Kina ???? Cab<br><sub>from the Tablet of the Sun</sub>]]
-Fourth, anarchists argued that state socialists were wrong to think that they could enter the existing capitalist state, transform it from within, and use it as a tool to build toward socialism. The capitalist state, which is a hierarchical institution that perpetuates the power of the economic and political ruling classes, would transform them. In 1869, before most socialist parties were formed, Bakunin predicted that working-class politicians would be “transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into a political atmosphere of wholly bourgeois political ideas, will cease to be actual workers and will become statesmen, they will become bourgeois, and perhaps more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.”[[#17MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|17]] Later anarchists thought that this prediction had come true. Reclus claimed in 1898 that “socialist leaders who, finding themselves caught up in the electoral machine, end up being gradually transformed into nothing more than bourgeois with liberal ideas. They have placed themselves in determinate conditions that in turn determine them.”[[#18EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|18]] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1913 that “as the socialists become a party of government and share power with the bourgeoisie, their socialism will necessarily fade: this is what has already happened.”[[#19KropotkinModernScience1|19]]
+The verb <verbatim>‘to</verbatim> house” is followed by the proper name of each sanctuary, followed by the glyph u pib nail, “his underground house.” Each pib na was named for the central image on its inner tablet[379] (Fig. 6:21): Wacah Chan for the World Tree on the Tablet of the Cross, Na Te Kan for the maize tree on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross, and Mah Kina ????-Cab for the shield stack on the Tablet of the Sun.
-Anarchists thought this would consistently occur to any socialist party that engaged in parliamentarism due to a set of interlocking processes. Most obviously, socialist politicians would be corrupted by the exercise of state power, the intrigues of parliament, and the financial offers of wealthy patrons. Reclus argued that the state is “a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level.”[[#20ReclusAnarchy122|20]] As a result of this, socialist politicians with “the best of intentions” may initially “fervently desire” the abolition of capitalism and the state “but new relationships and conditions change them little by little. Their morality changes along with their self-interest, and, thinking themselves eternally loyal to the cause and to their constituents, they inevitably become disloyal.”[[#21ReclusAnarchy122|21]]
+Chan-Bahlum’s final message to his people was that the performers of the “house” events were none other the gods of the Palenque Triad themselves. On the doorjambs he referred to these deities as “the cher- ished-ones[380] of Chan-Bahlum,” while on the balustrades he called them the “divinities of Chan-Bahlum.” For this event, Chan-Bahlum depicted himself in the guise of a Tlaloc warrior; but in this instance the costume symbolized more than just warfare. Dressed thus, Chan-Bahlum also became the “nurturer” of the gods[381] through his role as the provider of their sustenance—the blood of sacrifice. He offered them both the blood of captives taken in battle and his own blood.
-Socialist parties that attain power within parliament would, in order to exercise that power, have to become effective managers of the bourgeois state and the national economy. Doing so requires, given the nature of capitalism and the state as social structures, the ongoing reproduction of the domination and exploitation of the working classes. As a result, state socialists in power would inevitably develop interests opposed to the wider working classes and side with capital against labor in order to maintain their own position of rulership and influence. This would especially occur in response to workers engaging in direct action and thereby disrupting the smooth functioning of the economy. In Max Baginski’s words: “The politics of parliaments are tailored to serve the needs of the bourgeois, the capitalist world. They administer this world and provide the violent means necessary to guarantee its continued existence: soldiers, police, and courts of law. Whosoever, as a representative of the workers, enters parliament or the government is faced with two choices; either he is superfluous or else he is an active accomplice in the administration and safeguarding of a political order founded on the exploitation of labor.”[[#22MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|22]]
+If he himself was the principal actor, however, why did Chan-Bahlum tell us that the actors were the gods? Perhaps we are meant to understand that they acted in the divine person of the king. Although we do not have the precise phonetic reading of the verb, we suggest that each of the Triad gods came into his pib na on this day and brought the temples of the Group of the Cross alive with the power of the Otherworld. They were witnesses, like the nobility on the plaza below, to the awesome might of the Palenque king.
-The leadership of socialist parties would, in addition to this, come to view the interests of their nation-state and the interests of the party as increasingly intertwined because the party exercises power within a specific nation and owes its power to the votes of a national electorate. Thus, socialist parties are, to quote Rocker, “compelled by the iron logic of conditions to sacrifice their Socialist convictions bit by bit to the national policies of the state.”[[#23RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|23]] This would result in the labor movement being “gradually incorporated in the equipment of the national state” until it had become a social force that maintained the stability and “equilibrium” of capitalism.[[#24RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|24]]
+In his attempt to disengage his dynastic kingship from the prerogatives of the patrilineal clans, Chan-Bahlum brought to bear every major principle in the religion that bound the Maya states into a coherent cultural totality. As the Jaguar Sun and the Tlaloc warrior, he protected the realm from enemies. In war he captured foreign kings and nobles to offer as sacrificial instruments for the glory of Palenque. He recalled the First Father, GT, who raised the sky and established the ancestral home of creation within which his people could dwell at peace on their verdant mountainside. He also recalled the namesake of the First Father, GI, who like his father was an avatar of Venus. Just as the First Mother had shed her blood, causing maize—the raw material of humanity—to sprout from the waters of the Otherworld, so also did Chan-Bahlum shed his blood to nurture and “give birth to” the gods. The metaphor of kingship in both its human and divine dimension stretched from the contemplation of genesis to the mundane lives of farmers who plucked dried ears of maize from the bent stalks of their milpas to grind the kernels into the stuff of life.
-Socialist parties would be transformed not only by the corrupting effects of wielding state power but also by the compromises that parliamentary politics forced them to make. During this period, socialist parties typically had a maximum program and a minimum program. The maximum program were its long-term goals, such as universal human emancipation and the abolition of private property. The minimum program consisted of immediate improvements to be won within capitalism through legislation. These typically included such demands as universal suffrage, banning child labor, the eight-hour day, compulsory secular state education, free health care, and freedom of speech, the press, and assembly.[[#25Fortheprogramsofsocialis|25]] Anarchists thought that socialist parties would begin as revolutionary organizations that focused on the attainment of the minimum program but, gradually over time, become reformist organizations that had abandoned the maximum program and mistakenly viewed the minimum program as the essence of socialism.
+The three gods of the Triad were known and exalted by all lowland Maya ahauob, but Chan-Bahlum and Pacal evoked them in very special ways. They gave them birth in temples which celebrated both the creation of the cosmos and the founding of the dynasty by their anchoring ancestor, Bahlum-K.uk. Called forth into this world through the unique courage and charisma of the reigning king, these three gods, like the three historical lineages leading up to Chan-Bahlum, were manifested for all to witness. All the events of the past, both human and mythological, encircled Chan-Bahlum: The dynasty existed in the person of the king.
-This would consistently occur because, in order to win elections at both a local and national level, socialist parties must secure as many votes as possible by appealing to as many people as possible, including nonsocialists who would otherwise vote for republican, liberal, or conservative political parties. This would, especially in countries without universal suffrage, include people with class interests that were opposed to those of the working classes, such as small merchants and shopkeepers. Socialist parties, in addition to this, have to ensure that they maintain a legal existence and do not engage in activity that could preclude them from standing in elections or sitting in parliament. The need to appeal to as many voters as possible, alongside the need to operate within the confines of the law, would force socialist parties to: (a) reduce their political program to very minor reforms to capitalist society; and (b) oppose workers within the party, or affiliated trade unions, engaging in militant direct action that might scare voters away.[[#26BerkmanAnarchism92939|26]] This process only accelerates over time as the socialist party grows in size and attracts, to quote Rocker, “bourgeois minds and career-hungry politicians into the Socialist camp.”[[#27RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|27]]
+Even the universe conspired to affirm Chan-Bahlum’s assertions of divine involvement. On the day he began the rites to sanctify the buildings housing his version of history. Lady Beastie and her offspring reassembled as a group in the sky on the open south side of the Group of the Cross.
-In order to achieve these minor social reforms, socialist parties, given the nature of the parliamentary system, would be compelled to form alliances with bourgeois political parties in order to form coalition governments or successfully pass laws in parliament.[[#28MichaelBakuninStatismand|28]] For Bakunin, one of the most notable examples of the dangers of forming alliances with bourgeois political parties occurred when the Geneva section of the First International supported the 1872 electoral campaign of the lawyer Jean-Antoine Amberny, a member of both the First International and the bourgeois Radical Party. During his campaign, he publicly promised fellow members of the bourgeoisie that the First International in Geneva would not engage in strikes that year and, in so doing, acted against the interests of local construction workers, who were at the time, considering taking strike action in response to reduced wages. The leadership of the Geneva section chose to intervene on the side of Amberny and thereby sacrifice the direct struggle of workers themselves in order to protect the electability of a bourgeois candidate. This included unsuccessfully attempting to persuade construction workers to issue a declaration that they were not planning to go on strike.[[#29ReneBerthierSocialDemocr|29]] In response to these events, Bakunin concluded that “whenever workers’ associations ally themselves with the politics of the bourgeoisie, they can only become, willingly or unwillingly, their instrument.”[[#30BakuninSelectedTexts181|30]]
+A year and a half later, on the day he celebrated his eighth solar year in office, the three gods of the Triad housed themselves. By this action they brought the sanctuaries inside the three temples, the pib na, alive with their power. So powerful and eloquent was Chan-Bahlum’s statement of the origins of his dynasty and the preordained nature of its descent pattern, that no subsequent king ever had to restate any proofs. When later kings had problems with descent, they simply evoked Chan-Bahlum’s explanation of the workings of divinity to justify their own right to the throne.[382]
-Anarchists predicted that the combined effect of these various processes, which are inherent in parliamentarianism as a social structure, would result in socialist parties abandoning their revolutionary ideas and becoming socialist in name only. State socialists at the time proclaimed that the parliamentary struggle was merely a means to the end of constructing the mass revolutionary socialist movements that would abolish class society. Anarchists replied that, given the forms of practice that constituted parliamentarism, what was once a means to an end would become an end in and of itself. Socialist parties would become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state.[[#31GalleaniEndofAnarchism|31]]
+Pacal’s and Chan-Bahlum’s vision of the Maya world has crossed the centuries to speak to us once again in the twentieth century. Their accomplishments were truly extraordinary. Pacal’s tomb with its access stairway and innovative structural engineering is so far a unique achievement in the New World. The imagery of his sarcophagus lid is famous around the globe, and the life-sized plaster portrait of this king found under the sarcophagus has become an emblem of modern Mexico (Fig. 6:22a).
-A state socialist might reply that although anarchists are correct about the dangers of parliamentarism, socialist parties could participate in elections and parliament solely as a means to spread their ideas and critique the ruling classes. Anarchists thought such a strategy was mistaken because it ignored the manner in which participation in elections and parliament transforms people and organizations independently of their intentions. In 1928, Berkman noted that state socialists had initially claimed that they only meant to engage in parliamentarism “for the purpose of propaganda,” but this “proved the undoing of Socialism” because they had failed to realize that “the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object.”[[#32BerkmanAnarchism92|32]] He explained,
+Chan-Bahlum (Fig. 6:22b), in his own way, exceeded even the accomplishment of his father by creating the most detailed exposition of Maya kingship to survive into modern times. His tablets have captured the Western imagination since they were first popularized in 1841 by Stephens and Catherwood in their Incidents of Travels in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. Chan-Bahlum’s masterful performance is the clearest and most eloquent voice to speak to us of both the ancient history of kings and the religion that supported their power.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Little by little they changed their attitude. Instead of electioneering being merely an educational method, it gradually became their only aim to secure political office, to get elected to legislative bodies and other government positions. The change naturally led the Socialists to tone down their revolutionary ardor; it compelled them to soften their criticism of capitalism and government in order to avoid persecution and secure more votes. Today the main stress of Socialist propaganda is not laid any more on the educational value of politics but on the actual election of Socialists to office.[[#33BerkmanAnarchism9293|33]]</div>
+Both Pacal and Chan-Bahlum had personal agendas as they worked out the political and religious resolution to their problems of dynasty. Their success, however, was meaningful within a larger context than just their personal pride and glory. During the century of their combined lives (A.D. 603 to 702), Palenque became a major power in the west, extending its boundaries as far as Tortuguero in the west and Miraflores in the east. Under their inspired leadership, Palenque took its place in the overall political geography of the Maya world. In the end, however, Palenque’s definition of dynasty as a principle transcending lineage did not provide salvation from the catastrophe of the collapse of Maya civilization. The descendants of Pacal, “he of the pyramid,” followed their brethren into that final chaos when the old institution of kingship failed and the lowland Maya returned to the farming lives of their ancestors.
-Anarchists thought that their critique of parliamentarism was confirmed by the history of state socialism. To focus on France, the socialist Alexandre Millerand joined the bourgeois cabinet of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899 and became Minister of Commerce and Industry. His colleagues included the Minister of War, Gaston de Galliffet, who had ordered the murder of a large number of workers during the suppression of the Paris Commune. Once in power, Millerand attempted to establish compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes and thereby harm the ability of trade unions to engage in direct action. Pouget responded to this by labeling Millerand a “prisoner of Capital” who “could not break the mold; he is only a cog in the machine of oppression and whether he wishes it or not he must, as minister, participate in the job of crushing the proletariat.”[[#34QuotedinJeremyJenningsS|34]] Several years later, in 1906, socialist René Viviani became Minister of Labor and, under his watch, nineteen workers were killed and an estimated seven hundred were injured due to state repression during strike actions. This state repression included forty thousand soldiers being sent to police a miner’s strike in 1906, launched in response to a mining accident that took the lives of 1,100 miners. In 1910, Aristide Briand, who had once been a socialist and an advocate of the general strike, joined Viviani in government as Minister of the Interior. He proceeded to defeat a French railway strike by arresting the strike committee, declaring a military emergency, and conscripting the railway workers into the army. In so doing, he subjected any worker who refused to work to martial law and the potential punishment of execution for disobeying orders.[[#35JenningsSyndicalisminFra|35]]
+. Bird-Jaguar and the Cahalob
-In 1914, World War I broke out and the majority of socialist political parties in Europe responded by siding with their respective governments. A minority of state socialists, which grew in size as the war progressed, remained committed to working-class internationalism, opposed all sides in the war, and organized the antimilitarist Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. The majority of the anarchist movement, in comparison, refused to side with any state in the conflict and suffered a significant amount of state repression due to this.[[#36SFKissinWarandtheMa|36]] Anarchists did not think that socialist political parties abandoned antimilitarism simply due to the treachery or negative personality traits of politicians. Rather, they focused on the manner in which socialist parties had been transformed through the social structures they participated in and the forms of practice that constituted them. Berkman argued in 1928 that “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are. The Socialists’ long political activity and cooperation with bourgeois politics gradually turned their thoughts and mental habits from Socialist ways of thinking.”[[#37BerkmanAnarchism99|37]] This gradual process culminated in socialist parties abandoning their principles and becoming “the handmaiden of the militarists and jingo nationalists” who “sent the toilers to murder each other.”[[#38BerkmanAnarchism9998|38]]
+In the distant past, a gleaming white city[383] once graced the precipitous hills lining the western shore of a huge horseshoe bend of the great river known today as the Usumacinta (Fig. 7:1). One of the early visitors to the ruins of that once magnificent city, Teobert Maier,[384] named it Yaxchilan. Since Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s pioneering study of its inscriptions, this kingdom has been central to the recovery of historic information about the Maya.[385]
-From these and other events, anarchists concluded that their predictions had come true. State socialists who entered parliament in order to work toward the conquest of political power and the abolition of classes had not conquered the state. The state had conquered them, and genuine socialist parties had, gradually over time, become fundamentally bourgeois and opposed to the self-emancipation of the working classes.
+In Yaxchilan’s heyday, visitors arriving by canoe saw buildings clustered along the narrow curving shore which contained and defined the natural riverside entrance into this rich and powerful community. The city ascended in rows of broad, massive terraces built against the face of the forest-shrouded hills that stood as an impassive natural citadel alongside the mighty river. From the temples (Fig. 7:2a) built upon the summits of the tallest bluffs, the lords of Yaxchilan commanded the sweeping panorama of the rich green, low-lying forest which extended, on the far side of the river, all the way to the hazy horizon in the northeast. The light of sunrise on the summer solstice[386] would spill over that horizon to shine through the dark thresholds of the royal sanctuaries whose presence declared the authority of the Yaxchilan ahau over all those who lived below.
-'''Workers’ State'''
+Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,”[387] or more delicately put, “Progenitor-Jaguar,” on August 2, A.D. 320, founded the dynasty that ruled this kingdom throughout its recorded history. From that day on, until Yaxchi- lan was abandoned five-hundred years later, the descent of the line was unbroken.[388] Of Yat-Balam’s many descendants, the most famous were Bi Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar, a father and son who collectively ruled the kingdom for over ninety years, from A.D. 681 until around A.D. 771. These two rulers stamped their vision of history upon the city with such power and eloquence that they were the first of the ancient Maya kings to have their names spoken again in our time.[389] Yet in spite of the glory of their reigns and their long-lasting effect upon history, they faced problems of descent from the father to the son. Bird-Jaguar’s claim to the throne was vigorously disputed by powerful noble clans who were allied with other members of the royal family. Even after Bird-Jaguar overcame his adversaries and became king, many of the public buildings he commissioned were erected to retrospectively defend his own actions and prepare a secure ascent to the throne for his heir. In this chapter, we will focus on his problems and the political strategies and alliances that finally enabled him to fulfill his ambition to rule that ancient kingdom.
-Anarchists did not limit themselves to critiquing parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state. They went further and rejected the strategy of overthrowing the bourgeois state and transforming it into, or replacing it with, a workers’ state. They viewed the conquest of state power as a means that would never achieve the ends of a stateless, classless society. To understand why, one must first understand the anarchist theory of the state.
+The history of Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors in the Early Classic period does not survive in great detail. Most of the monuments from those times were either buried or destroyed as each new king shaped the city to his own purposes. However, thanks to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of reusing ancestral texts in his own buildings (Temples 12 and 22), we do have records of the first through the tenth successors of Yaxchilan. One of these venerable texts, a badly eroded hieroglyphic stairway, provides the dates of several early accessions, as well as accounts of the visits of lords from other kingdoms. These brief and sketchy early inscriptions outline the first three hundred years of Yaxchilan’s history. It was a time in which its dynasty prospered and held an important place in the overall political landscape of the Maya.[390]
-Anarchists argued that, given their in-depth analysis of the state as a social structure both historically and when they were writing, the state is necessarily a centralized and hierarchical institution wielded by a political ruling class. This class possesses the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force. Kropotkin was convinced that this was “the essence of every State” and that, if an organization ceased to be structured in this manner, then “it ceases to be the State.”[[#39KropotkinModernScience3|39]] Since the state is a centralized and hierarchical institution that rules over an extended territory, it follows that the political power of the so-called workers’ state could not in reality be wielded by the working classes as a whole. State power would at best be exercised by a minority of elected representatives acting in the name of the working classes. Bakunin predicted “it is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of men elected to represent and govern them.”[[#40MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|40]]
+The foreign visitors mentioned above were ahauob sent by their high kings from as far away as Bonampak, Piedras Negras, and Tikal to participate in Yaxchilan festivals. Reciprocal visits were made as well. Knot-eye-Jaguar, the ninth king of Yaxchilan, paid a state visit to Piedras Negras in the year 519. The relationship between these two kingdoms was apparently a long-lasting one, for another Yaxchilan ahau, presumably Bird- Jaguar, participated in the celebration of the first katun anniversary of the reign of Piedras Negras Ruler 4 in 749, 230 years later. These state visits affirm the ancient and enduring value that the kings of Yaxchilan placed upon the participation of high nobility in the rituals and festivals of their city. Public performances under the aegis of the high king, by both foreign and local lords, affirmed the power of the king and demonstrated public support for his decisions. We shall see shortly how the manipulation of such dramatis personae on monuments was the vital key to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.
-Anarchists thought that there was an inherent connection between the organizational form and function of any social structure. And the organizational form of the state did not develop by accident. The state is structured in a hierarchical and centralized manner because of the function that it performs and was created to perform: establishing and maintaining the domination and exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. This applied not only to monarchies and individual dictatorships but also to republics governed by parliaments of elected representatives. A social structure characterized by a specific organizational form cannot be used to perform just any possible function. Centralization and hierarchy enable and result in the rule of a minority over a majority. Therefore, the state cannot be transformed into an instrument of liberation simply by writing a new constitution or electing good people with the right ideas into positions of authority. The minority of governors who actually exercise state power would, even if they were genuine socialists elected by universal suffrage, become tyrants who dominate and exploit the majority of the population.[[#41RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|41]]
+Our story opens around the year 647[391] with the birth of a child to the Lady Pacal, favored wife of the king, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar,[392] and scion of a powerful family allied to the king through marriage. The child, whom the proud parents named Shield-Jaguar, was to have a glorious career at Yaxchilan, living for at least ninety-two years and ruling as high king for over six decades. His mark on the city was long-lasting and profound, for later kings left many of his buildings untouched. Among his greatest works were the vast number of tree-stones he set among the plazas and in front of his temples on the summits of his sacred mountains. Shield- Jaguar inherited a city already built by his predecessors, but the accomplishments of his long lifetime exceeded their work by such a factor that, while much of his work is still preserved, most of theirs is forgotten, buried under his own construction and that of his son, Bird-Jaguar.
-This would occur due to a specific set of processes. Since the state is a social structure like any other, it follows that it is constituted by social relation and forms of practice that produce and reproduce people with particular capacities, drives, and consciousness. According to Malatesta, “the government is the aggregate of the governors . . . those who have the power to make laws, to regulate relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws.”[[#42MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|42]] This force is exercised via various institutionalized mechanisms of coercion, such as the police, army, courts, and prisons. The exercise of state power is therefore necessarily constituted by social relations of command and obedience, of domination and subordination. The minority of socialists who wield this power will use it to implement their own ideas and further their interests. In so doing, they will inevitably come into conflict with different groups of workers who have ideas and interests of their own. This will especially occur with workers who are other kinds of socialist. Given the vast differences in power, the workers will be compelled to follow the commands of their superiors. If they do not do so and choose to ignore, resist, or rebel against the will of the governors they will be met with violent state repression, including censorship, beatings, arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. The result is always the same: workers would not self-determine their lives or the society in which they lived. They would instead be subject to the will of a governing minority. As Malatesta explained, “a government . . . already constitutes a class privileged and separated from the rest of the community. Such a class, like every elected body, will seek instinctively to enlarge its powers; to place itself above the control of the people; to impose its tendencies, and to make its own interests predominate. Placed in a privileged position, the government always finds itself in antagonism to the masses, of whose forces it disposes.”[[#43MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|43]]
+Most of Shield-Jaguar’s early life is lost to us. What little biographical data we do have tells us that when he was around eleven, one of his siblings participated in a war led by Pacal, the king of Palenque we met in the last chapter.[393] This event must have lent prestige to the royal family of Yaxchilan, but their public monuments say nothing about it. We only know of this event because it was preserved on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C at Palenque. The fact that Pacal described his Yaxchilan cohort as the “sibling” of the eleven-year-old Shield-Jaguar tells us that, even at that early date, Shield-Jaguar had probably been named as heir. Otherwise, Pacal would have chosen to emphasize the captive’s status merely as the son of a male of the royal family.[394]
-One might object by arguing that these socialist representatives are workers themselves and so do not form a class distinct from the workers who elected them. Bakunin responded to this argument in 1873. He insisted that the governing minority are “''former'' workers, who, as soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people.”[[#44BakuninStatismandAnarchy|44]] In other words, they have transitioned from being members of the working classes to being members of the political ruling class in control of the state. State socialists fail to realize that class is not only about a person’s relationship to the means of production. It is also determined by a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat would therefore not be based on the self-rule of the proletariat. It would, to quote Malatesta in 1897, “be the dictatorship of ‘Party’ over people, and of a handful of men over ‘Party.’”[[#45MalatestaPatientWork27|45]]
+Later in his life, the demonstration of the young heir’s prowess as a military leader took on a special political importance—enough so that the lords of Yaxchilan required that Shield-Jaguar take a high-ranked captive before he could become king. As prelude to his accession, Shield-Jaguar went into battle and captured Ah-Ahaual, an important noble from a B kingdom whose ruins we have not yet found, but which was highly important in the Maya world of that time.[395] A little over a year later, on October 23, 681, at the approximate age of thirty-four, Shield-Jaguar became high king of Yaxchilan.
-Anarchists argued that a fundamentally new function—the self-management of social life by producers themselves—requires the construction of fundamentally new social structures. These new organs need an organizational form that actually enables and leads to the realization of the desired function. For this to occur, the organs of self-management have to be developed by working-class social movements themselves engaging in a process of experimentation during the course of the class struggle. According to anarchists, these new organs are, as we have seen, workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias linked together through formal federations and/or informal social networks.[[#46KropotkinModernScience1|46]]
+Strangely enough, the only picture of Shield-Jaguar’s accession rite to have survived shows not the new king but his principal wife, Lady Xoc, in rapt communion with Yat-Balam, the founding ancestor of the Yaxchi-lan dynasty. Lady Xoc achieved a central place in the drama of Yaxchilan’s history in this and in two other bloodletting rituals she enacted with, or for, her sovereign liege.[396] Her kinship ties with two powerful lineages of the kingdom made her political support so important to Shield-Jaguar that he authorized her to commission and dedicate the magnificent Temple 23. On the lintels of that building were recorded the three rituals that comprised the apical actions of her life.
-If state socialists advocated the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a new workers’ state that was genuinely nothing but the self-rule of the working classes, then the disagreement with anarchists would largely be a semantic disagreement about how to define a state. In 1897, Malatesta considered the possibility of a social democrat who sincerely wanted to abolish the state:
+Thus, with the approval and probably at the instigation of her husband, Lady Xoc was one of the few women in Maya history to wield the prerogatives usually reserved for the high king. Unlike Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque, however, Lady Xoc never ruled the kingdom in her own right. The hidden hand of her husband, Shield-Jaguar, underlies the political intentions of the extraordinary Temple 23. His influence can be seen in both the substance of its narrative scenes and in the texts[397] carved on the lintels that spanned the outer doorways. Constructed in the center of the city’s first great terrace, and in a position to dominate the plazas that extended along the riverfront, this temple is one of the greatest artistic monuments ever created by the Maya.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">If they meant that, even as they capture it, they want to abolish the State . . . disband any armed governmental force, do away with all legislative powers . . . and promote the organization of society from the bottom up through the free federation of producer and consumer groups, then the entire issue would boil down to this: that they express by certain words the same ideas that we express by other words. Saying ''we want to storm the fortress and destroy it'', and saying ''we want to seize that fortress to demolish it ''means one and the same thing.[[#47MalatestaPatientWork120|47]]</div>
+The carved lintels above the doorways of Temple 23 combine to present a carefully orchestrated political message critical to Shield-Jaguar’s ambition and to the future he hoped to create. Made of wide slabs mounted atop the doorjambs, these lintels displayed two carved surfaces. The first, facing outward toward the public, was composed of pure text. The second was a series of narrative scenes hidden away on the undersides of the lintels, facing downward toward the floor (Fig. 7:2b). A general viewer approaching the building could read only the text above the doorways, which recorded the dedication rituals for various parts of the temple. This text stated that the house sculpture (probably the stucco sculpture on the entablature and roof comb) had been dedicated on August 5, 723, and the temple itself on June 26, 726.[398] The all-important narrative scenes could be seen only by those privileged to stand in the low doorways and look up at the undersides of the lintels.
-He knew, however, that the vast majority of state socialists did not advocate federations of workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias—the true organs of worker self-rule—and then simply choose to call these systems of organization a state.[[#48Councilcommunistsareanex|48]] In June 1919, Malatesta wrote that the Bolsheviks did not mean by “the dictatorship of the proletariat” merely “the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society” by expropriating the ruling classes and creating social structures in which “there would be no place for a class that exploited and oppressed the producers.”[[#49MalatestaMethodofFreedom|49]] If this is what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” meant then “our dissent would have to do only with words.”[[#50MalatestaMethodofFreedom|50]] In reality, and judging by their actions, the Bolsheviks meant “a dictatorship of a party, or rather of the heads of a party; and it is a true dictatorship, with its decrees, its penal laws, its executive agents and above all with its armed force that serves today also to defend the revolution against its external enemies, but that will serve tomorrow to impose upon the workers the will of the dictators, to arrest the revolution, consolidate the new interests and finally defend a new privileged class against the masses.”[[#51MalatestaMethodofFreedom|51]]
+It is here, on the undersides of the lintels, that we see Lady Xoc enacting the three bloodletting rituals that are today the basis of her fame (Fig. 7:3). The sculptors who created these great lintels combined the sequence of events into a brilliant narrative device. If we look at the lintels from one perspective, we see that each portrays a different linear point in the ritual of bloodletting. Over the left doorway we see Lady Xoc perforating her tongue; over the center portal we see the materialization of the Vision Serpent; over the right we see her dressing her liege lord for battle. If we shift our perspective, however, we see that Shield-Jaguar intended these scenes to be interpreted on many different levels. He used the texts and the detail of the clothing the protagonists wore to tell us that this same bloodletting ritual took place on at least three different occasions:[399] during his accession to the kingship, at the birth of his son when he was sixty-one, and at the dedication of the temple itself.
-According to state-socialist theory, a workers’ state would only exist during the transition from capitalism to a stateless, classless society. The state is the coercive instrument by which one economic class rules over and represses another economic class. A workers’ state would be the social structure through which the proletariat ruled over and repressed the bourgeoisie. Exercising this political power, the proletariat would reorganize the economy and establish state ownership and control of the means of production and land. In so doing, they would abolish class. Once class had been abolished, the economic basis for the state would cease to exist, since there would no longer be a division between a class who ruled and a class who was ruled over.[[#52KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|52]] The workers’ state would, to quote Engels, wither away such that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ ''It dies out''.”[[#53MarxandEngelsCollectedW|53]] Once this had occurred, society would be organized via “a free and equal association of the producers.”[[#54KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|54]]
+Over the central door, Lady Xoc is depicted with a Vision Serpent rearing over her head as she calls forth the founder of the lineage, Yat-Balam, to witness the accession of his descendent Shield-Jaguar in 681[400] (Fig. 7:3a). This critical event in the lives of both the principal players was appropriately located on the center lintel, at the heart of the drama. Shield-Jaguar himself is not portrayed here, although his name does appear in the text after the “fish-in-hand” verbal phrase. The sole protagonist is the woman, who by her action as bloodletter materializes the founder of the dynasty to sanction the transformation of his descendant into the king. Since we know of no other pictorial representation of Shield-Jaguar’s accession,[401] we may speculate that he considered his wife’s bloodletting the most important single action in this political transformation.
-Anarchists living in the nineteenth century were not convinced by this argument. Decades before the Russian revolution and the emergence of the USSR, anarchists predicted that a workers’ state would not die out after the abolition of capitalism. It would instead continuously reproduce itself as a social structure. This is because the forms of practice involved in either exercising or being subject to state power produce people with traits that reproduce the state as a dominant structure, rather than people who will want to and be able to abolish the state. In exercising state power, socialist governors would not only change the world but also change themselves. They would acquire distinct class interests as members of the political ruling class and come to focus on maintaining and expanding their own power over the working classes, rather than allowing it to be abolished in favor of a stateless, classless society.
+Over the left door, Lady Xoc kneels before Shield-Jaguar and pulls a thorn-laden rope through her mutilated tongue in the action that will materialize the Vision Serpent. Shield-Jaguar stands before her holding a torch, perhaps because the ritual takes place inside a temple or at night. Although this lintel depicts the first stage in the type of bloodletting ritual shown over the central door, this particular event took place almost twenty-eight years later.[402]
-In 1881, Cafiero declared that any socialist who says “they wish to take over the State in order to destroy it once the struggle is over” is “either seeking to mislead us or are deceiving themselves. . . . No power, no authority in the world has ever destroyed itself. No tyrant has ever dismantled a fortress once he has entered it. On the contrary, every authoritarian organism, every tyranny tends always to spread, to establish itself even more, by its very nature. Power inebriates and even the best can become the worst once they are vested with authority.”[[#55CarloCafieroRevolutionE|55]] In short, to quote Bakunin, the “habit of commanding . . . [and] the exercise of power never fail to produce this demoralization: ''contempt for the masses, and, for the man in power, an exaggerated sense of his own worth''.”[[#56MichaelBakuninBakuninon|56]]
+The occasion for this particular act of sacrifice was an alignment between Jupiter and Saturn. On this day those planets were frozen at their stationary points less than 2° apart, very near the constellation of Gemini. This was the same type of planetary alignment we saw celebrated at Palenque when Chan-Bahlum dedicated the Group of the Cross, even though the conjunction at Yaxchilan was perhaps less spectacular, since it involved two planets rather than four. Significantly, this hierophany (“sacred event”) took place only sixty-two days after a son was born to Shield-Jaguar. The birth of this child on August 24, 709, and the bloodletting event that followed it on October 28, were special events in Shield- Jaguar’s reign. This bloodletting would later become the pivot of his son’s claim to Yaxchilan’s throne.
-Anarchists thought this would occur irrespective of people’s good intentions due to the manner in which they are shaped by the social structures they constitute and participate in. Malatesta wrote, “it is not a question here of the good faith or good will of this man or of that, but of the necessity of situations and the general tendencies that men exhibit when they find themselves in certain circumstances.”[[#57MalatestaPatientWork124|57]] Bakunin similarly claimed that those who exercised state power would be transformed by “the iron logic of their position, the force of circumstances inherent in certain hierarchical and profitable political relationships.” This would occur regardless of their “sentiments, intentions, or good impulses.”[[#58BakuninStatismandAnarchy|58]]
+Over the right door (Fig. 7:3b), the sculptors mounted the final scene. Lady Xoc, her mouth seeping blood from the ritual she has just performed, helps her husband dress for battle. He already wears his cotton armor and grasps his flint knife in his right hand, but she still holds his flexible shield and the jaguar helmet he will don. Here Shield-Jaguar is preparing to go after captives to be used in the dedication rites that took place either on February 12, 724, or on June 26, 726.
-The existence of a state ruled by a minority political ruling class would simultaneously have a dire effect on the working classes in general. Instead of directly self-managing their lives themselves, the working classes would be subject to the rule of a governing minority and so engage in forms of practice that lead them to become accustomed to oppressive social relationships after their supposed liberation. They would learn to obey and defer to their superiors rather than to think and act for themselves. Rather than learning how to associate with others as equals, they would learn to put those in power on a pedestal and venerate them in just the same way that people under capitalism learn to hero worship so-called “captains of industry” or political figureheads like royal families and charismatic presidents. Workers would come to support the ongoing existence of the state and view it as a natural and necessary aspect of human existence that cannot be changed.[[#59MalatestaMethodofFreedom|59]] Authority, to quote Berkman, “debases its victims” and “makes those subject to it acquiesce in wrong, subservient, and servile.”[[#60BerkmanAnarchism43See|60]]
+The depiction of a woman as the principal actor in ritual is unprecedented at Yaxchilan and almost unknown in Maya monumental art[403] at any site. Lady Xoc’s importance is further emphasized by the manner in which Bird-Jaguar centers his own strategy of legitimacy around this building. The three events portrayed—the accession of the king, the bloodletting on the Jupiter-Saturn hierophany, and the dedication of the building itself, were all important events; but the bloodletting on the hierophany was the locus of the political message Shield-Jaguar intended to communicate. Perhaps the planetary conjunction alone would have been enough reason for such a bloodletting to take place. We suspect, however, that more complex motivations were involved. Later, when Bird-Jaguar commissioned monument after monument to explain who he was and, more importantly, who his mother was, he focused on this event as the key to his kingdom.
-Anarchists predicted that the minority political ruling class in control of the so-called workers’ state would, in order to defend and maintain their position of authority, create a new economic ruling class that owed them allegiance and so would protect their class interests. This new economic ruling class would initially appear within the state bureaucracy itself given that the so-called workers’ state would own and manage the whole or majority of the economy. Over time, the new economic ruling class would grow in power due to the extreme importance of production and distribution in social life and gradually transform the state into an institution that primarily serves their distinct economic interests. This would culminate in the reintroduction of private property and market capitalism.[[#61MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|61]] The state was, to quote Fabbri, “more than an outcome of class divisions; it is, at one and the same time, the creator of privilege, thereby bringing about new class divisions.”[[#62LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|62]] According to Malatesta, “anyone in power means to stay there, and no matter what the costs he intends to impose his will—and since wealth is a very effective instrument of power, the ruler, even if he personally does not abuse or steal, he promotes the rise of a class around him that owes to him its privileges and has a vested interest in his remaining in power. . . . Abolish private property without abolishing government, and the former will be resurrected by those who govern.”[[#63MalatestaPatientWork123|63]]
+There are points of interest to make about this bloodletting ritual and the birth that preceded it. Lady Xoc, patroness of this building and the giver of blood, was at least middle-aged at the time of this birth.[404] She had been shown as an adult at Shield-Jaguar’s accession, twenty-eight years earlier, and she may well have been beyond her childbearing years at the time of the later bloodletting. Certainly, other inscriptions make it clear that the child in question was born to Lady Eveningstar, another of Shield-Jaguar’s wives. Why, then, is Lady Xoc celebrating a celestial event E linked to the royal heir born to another woman?
-Supporters of workers’ states in this period generally believed that state socialism was a necessary transitional phase between capitalism and communism. Anarchists replied that state socialism would ultimately be the transitional phase between capitalism and capitalism. Given the self-reproducing nature of the state, and its tendency to establish new class divisions, it could not be used to achieve a stateless, classless society. Although, as Bakunin noted, state socialists claimed that “this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people; anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship the means,” they failed to realize that “no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.”[[#64BakuninStatismandAnarchy1|64]] The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.[[#65FabbriAnarchyandScient|65]]
+Some startling information about Lady Xoc’s role in Shield-Jaguar’s political machinations is revealed on a lintel mounted over the door in the east end of Structure 23. On its underside, this all-glyphic lintel (Lintel 23) records Shield-Jaguar’s twenty-fifth year anniversary as ruler and also Lady Xoc’s dedication of this extraordinary temple. On the edge of this obscure lintel, facing outward toward the viewer, we find some critical and unexpected information about Lady Xoc. The text tells us that this particular passageway[405] into the temple was dedicated by Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s sister—his aunt, in other words. The title sequence in this aunt’s name is relevatory, for it delineates an up-to-now unknown genealogical relationship between Lady Xoc and the king (Fig. 7:4).[406] We learn here that Lady Xoc was the daughter of Shield-Jaguar’s mother’s father’s sister. In plain English, she was the maternal first cousin of his mother, and his own maternal first cousin once removed.
-'''State Capitalism'''
+What this information tells us is that Lady Xoc was distantly related to the patriline of Shield-Jaguar’s mother, but he married her not because of her mother’s relatives but because her father was a member of a powerful noble lineage. How do we know that her father’s line was important, when it is not even mentioned in the inscriptions? We can deduce its importance from the fact that it was worthy to take a wife from the same family that provided the woman who was wife to the king 6-Tun-Bird- Jaguar and mother to the heir, Shield-Jaguar. In other words, anyone powerful enough to marry a woman from the same family that provided the queen-mother to the royal house must also be of extraordinarily high-rank. The importance of the line of Lady Xoc’s father is further confirmed by the fact that it was eligible to provide a wife to the royal house in the next generation. Thus, it was a lineage important enough to take a wife from the highest levels in the kingdom and in its own right to be in a wife-giving alliance with the royal house. In fact, it is precisely this marriage alliance with Lady Xoc’s father that led Shield-Jaguar to take her as his wife in the first place.
-From an economic perspective, anarchists also rejected the idea that a state socialist society would be socialist at all. They thought it was more appropriate to label such a society ''state capitalism''. The term was used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a different sense to refer to the Soviet Republic’s New Economic Policy of 1921, in which capitalist markets and small private businesses existed alongside state ownership and management of large-scale industry but were subject to control by a self-proclaimed workers’ state. The earlier and broader anarchist usage of the term should not be confused with this.[[#66VladimirLeninSelectedWor|66]] It should also be kept in mind that the anarchist claim that state socialist societies would be instances of state capitalism was distinct from their prediction that state socialism would result in the resurrection of private property and market capitalism. From this perspective, it would begin as one form of capitalism and then later transform into another kind of capitalism.
+What we find amazing here is that Lady Xoc’s patriline is utterly absent from the public record. On Lintel 23, Lady Xoc’s relationship to that patriline is suppressed in favor of her kinship to her mother’s people. As we have shown above, her mother’s clan was already allied to the royal house of Yaxchilan, for Shield-Jaguar’s mother was a member of that patriline. In the best of worlds, Shield-Jaguar could have safely ignored such a well-attested and secure alliance in the public record. What, then, led Shield-Jaguar to commission the extraordinary Temple 23 with its homage to Lady Xoc and her mother’s clan? Why did he deliberately eliminate her father’s clan from public history by redefining her importance in terms of people who were already his allies?
-State socialists aim to establish state ownership of the means of production and land, organize production and distribution through centralized state planning, and have workers become employees of the state. Were this to happen then, a single entity—the state—would own and control the whole or the majority of the economy. Under this system, the economy would, due to the state’s centralized and hierarchical nature, be owned and controlled by the minority of people who in fact wielded state power, rather than the working classes they claimed to represent. These workers would, instead of directly owning and controlling the economy themselves through organs of self-management, labor within state-owned workplaces hierarchically managed by state bureaucrats. These bureaucrats would implement the policies decided by the minority ruling class who, even if elected via universal suffrage, actually exercise decision-making power on a day-to-day basis. Under such a system, workers become wage laborers employed by the state and subject to its domination within the workplace in the same manner that they had previously been employed and dominated by individual capitalists and landowners.
+We suspect that the answer to this question lies in a new marriage that Shield-Jaguar contracted late in his life. His new wife, Lady Eveningstar, who bore him a son when he was sixty-one, was apparently a foreigner of high rank. On Stela 10, her son, Bird-Jaguar, recorded her name in his own parentage statement, remarking that she was a “Lady Ahau of Calakmul” (Fig. 7:4).[407] Yet Shield-Jaguar’s treatment of his new wife and the powerful alliance she represented was not what we might expect. Despite the great power and prestige of Calakmul, Shield-Jaguar never once mentioned Lady Eveningstar on his own monuments. Instead, the principal concern of his late monuments was to secure support for Bird- Jaguar, the child she gave him.
-This perspective can be seen throughout anarchist texts. Bakunin predicted in ''Statism and Anarchy'' that the leaders of socialist parties would, if they seized state power, concentrate “in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.”[[#67BakuninStatismandAnarchy1|67]] In ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', Kropotkin claimed that anarchists rejected “the new form of wage-labor which would arise if the State took possession of the means of production and exchange, as it has already taken possession of the railways, the post office, education, national security [''l’assurance mutuelle''], and defense of the territory. New powers, industrial powers . . . would create a new, formidable instrument of tyranny.”[[#68KropotkinModernScience1|68]] Kropotkin referred to such a society as “state capitalism” on numerous occasions.[[#69KropotkinDirectStruggle|69]]
+To this end, he commissioned Temple 23 when his son was thirteen years old.[408] He honored Lady Xoc, who represented local alliances with two important lineages, as the major actor of the critical events in his reign. And, in the same series of lintels, he emphasized her relationship to her mother’s patriline.[409] But what of her father’s people, not to mention the royal house of Calakmul?
-State socialism would therefore lead to a reconfiguration of class society rather than the abolition of classes and the self-management of production and distribution by producers and consumers themselves. The existing economic and political ruling classes—capitalists, landowners, bankers, politicians, judges, generals etc.—would be replaced by or subordinated to a new economic and political ruling class—the socialist party leadership—which exercised power through a single institution: the state. This new economic and political ruling class would, in turn, be aided by a vast array of state bureaucrats who would serve as a managerial class that was subject to the authority of the socialist party leadership but at the same time exercised power over the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, “whoever has dominion over things, has dominion over men; whoever governs production governs the producers; whoever controls consumption lords it over the consumer. The question is this: either things are administered in accordance with agreements freely reached by those concerned, in which case we have anarchy, or they are administered in accordance with law made by the administrators, and we have Government, the State, which inevitably turns tyrannical.”[[#70MalatestaPatientWork123|70]]
+To elect a child of Lady Xoc to succeed him would have brought Shield-Jaguar strategic alliance with her father’s people, a local lineage of extraordinary importance. Alternatively, to designate Lady Eveningstar’s child as the heir would have sealed a blood bond with one of the largest and most aggressive kingdoms of the Peten, but it was also an alliance with a foreign power.[410] The decision for Shield-Jaguar was a difficult one: increased prospects for peace and stability within his kingdom versus an elevated position in the grand configuration of alliance and struggle embracing all of the great kingdoms of the Maya.
-Since state socialists sought to seize existing state power, it followed that the managerial class would be largely composed of the same bureaucrats who had previously managed the market-capitalist state. State socialists would transform certain aspects of the state during their seizure of state power, such as writing a new constitution, but the bulk of the state’s bureaucratic machinery would remain intact since the state could not function without it. This would occur even if state socialists genuinely wanted to smash the old state bureaucracy and immediately construct a new one. During a revolutionary period, the leaders of the socialist party would not be in the position to replace or fundamentally reorganize the state bureaucracy, especially in societies where most people were illiterate. They would instead be forced by circumstances to use, and massively expand, the previously existing state bureaucracy in order to implement their plans as rapidly and as effectively as possible, nationalizing industry and organizing the economy through central planning.
+Temple 23 was his effort to forge a grand compromise: to honor Lady Xoc and the principle of internal alliance while building support for the child of the foreign alliance. He chose the greatest artists of his kingdom to carve what are even today recognized as great masterpieces of Maya art. In the elegant reliefs he depicted his senior wife carrying out the most sacred and intimate act of lineage fealty, the calling forth of the royal founding ancestor. When she gave her blood for his new heir, she did so in the most horrific ritual of tongue mutilation known from Maya history. No other representation of this ritual shows the use of a thorn-lined rope in the wound. Her act was one of extraordinary piety and prestige—and an act of audacity by the king, for he simultaneously consigned the mother of the heir, scion of Calakmul, to public obscurity. For Shield-Jaguar, this was a masterful three-point balancing act. By honoring Lady Xoc, he was also honoring that patriline. He used texts upon the lintels of the temple to publicly emphasize her relationship to his mother’s family and thus secure that alliance. Lastly, he satisfied his foreign alliance by choosing the child of that marriage as the heir.
-For Kropotkin, this was no different from when republicans overthrew monarchies. The form of the state was altered, but the state bureaucracy continued to operate largely as before. He wrote that, in France, “the Third Republic, in spite of its republican form of government, remained monarchist in its essence.” This was because,
+This strategy of compromise worked, at least while he was still alive. Perhaps Shield-Jaguar’s extraordinary age was one of the contributing factors in this drama. For him to have lived long enough to marry again and to sire a child in that marriage may have surprised the lineages allied to him by previous marriages. Furthermore, any children born in his youth would have been in their middle years by the time of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. By the time of Shield-Jaguar’s death in his mid-nineties, many of his children may well have been dead or in advanced age themselves. Because of this factor, Bird-Jaguar’s rivals would have had as legitimate a claim on the throne as he; it is likely that he faced the sons and grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar. We cannot, of course, prove that these rivals existed, for they did not secure the privilege of erecting monuments to tel! their own stories. This is one of those situations in which we have only the winner’s version of history. Nevertheless, we know that some set of circumstances kept the throne empty for ten long years, when a legitimate heir of sufficient age and proven competence was available. We surmise that Bird-Jaguar needed those ten years to defeat his would-be rivals. During this long interregnum no other accessions appear in the record. There was no official king, although there may have been a de facto ruler.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Those holding power have changed the name; but all this immense ministerial scaffolding, all this centralized organization of bureaucrats, all this imitation of the Rome of the Caesars which has been developed in France, all this formidable organization to ensure and extend the exploitation of the masses in favor of a few privileged groups that is the essence of the State-institution—all that remained. And these cogs [of the bureaucratic machine] continue, as in the past, to exchange their fifty documents when the wind has blown down a tree onto a national highway, and to pour the millions deducted from the nation into the coffers of the privileged. The [official] stamp on the documents has changed; but the State, its spirit, its organs, its territorial centralization, its centralization of functions, its favoritism, its role as creator of monopolies, have remained. Like an octopus, they expand [their grip] on the country day-by-day.[[#71KropotkinModernScience2|71]]</div>
+There could, of course, be many reasons for such a long delay between reigns. Bird-Jaguar’s own program of sculpture after he became king, however, clearly indicates what he felt were his greatest problems. The first was public recognition of his mother’s status and her equality with Lady Xoc.[411] The second was his need to forge alliances among the noble cahal families of Yaxchilan to support his claim to the throne and force the accession ritual. He built temple after temple with lintel upon lintel both to exalt the status of his mother and to depict his public performance with those powerful cahalob. Like his father, he married a woman in the lineage of his most important allies and traded a piece of history for their loyalty.
-State socialism would therefore not only be a reconfiguration of class society. It would also be an expansion of existing class society in so far as the bulk of the state machinery would continue to operate largely as before and this state machinery would move from organizing only certain aspects of the economy—the post office, trains etc.—to organizing the whole or most of the economy.
+The fathering of an heir at the age of sixty-one was not the final accomplishment of Shield-Jaguar’s life. He remained a vigorous leader, both politically and in the realm of war, for many more years. Work on Temple 23 began around 723, when he was seventy-two years old. In his eighties, he still led his warriors into battle and celebrated a series of B victories in Temple 44, high atop one of the mountains of Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:1). Even at eighty-four, Shield-Jaguar went to battle and took a captive, but by then he must have been feeling his mortality. He began a series of rituals soon after his last battle to demonstrate forcefully his support of Bird-Jaguar as his heir-apparent—at least according to the story Bird- Jaguar gives us. In light of the political statement that Shield-Jaguar built into Lady Xoc’s Temple 23 at the height of his power, there is reason to believe that at least the essence of Bird-Jaguar’s account of events leading up to his reign is true.
-Within such a society, the state would, for all intents and purposes, act as a single massive capitalist, since it now performed the various functions that were previously performed under market capitalism by multiple individual capitalists owning and directing different aspects of the economy. As a result, anarchists saw in state socialism not the abolition of classes, but the replacement of individual capitalists competing in a market with a single state capitalist that alone owned, directed, and planned the economy.[[#72FabbriAnarchyandScient|72]] Bakunin, for example, claimed that under state socialism the state would “''become the sole proprietor'' . . . the single capitalist, banker, financier, organizer, the director of all national work and the distributor of every product.”[[#73BakuninSelectedTexts88|73]] According to Kropotkin, state socialists aim to “seize the existing power structures and to retain and strengthen their control over them; in place of all of today’s ruling classes (landlords, industrialists, merchants, bankers, etc.) they strive to create one single proprietor—the State—to rule over all land, all works and factories, all accumulated wealth, and to be run by a Parliament.”[[#74KropotkinDirectStruggle|74]] Anarchists rejected this vision and could not “see in the coming revolution a mere . . . replacement of the current capitalists by the State [as sole] capitalist.”[[#75KropotkinModernScience1|75]]
+The series of events preceding Shield-Jaguar’s death and Bird-Jaguar’s ascent to the throne began on June 27, 736. On that day Shield- Jaguar, at the age of eighty-eight, conducted a flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:5a and b), a celebration usually occurring shortly after a summer solstice. We do not know the exact nature of this ritual, but pictures of it show rulers and nobles holding a human-high, wooden staff with a four-to-six-inchwide cloth tied down its length. This narrow cloth was decorated with elaborately woven designs and flapped openings, usually cut in the shape of a T. Shield-Jaguar recorded his first display of this staff on Stela 16, which he erected at the highest point of the city in front of Temple 41. Bird-Jaguar commissioned his own retrospective version of his father’s action on Lintel 50 (Fig. 7:5b).
-Anarchists were also afraid that state socialists would create something much worse than state capitalism ruled by an elected parliament. In centralizing so much economic and political power into the hands of the state, they were creating an institution that could, in turn, be seized by a dictator and used to establish an even more tyrannical society. Kropotkin wrote in 1913 that “as long as the statist socialists do not abandon their dream of socializing the instruments of labor in the hands of a centralized State, the inevitable result of their attempts at State Capitalism and the Socialist state will be the failure of their dreams and military dictatorship.” The state they created during a period of revolutionary turmoil “would be the stepping-stone for a dictator, representing the reaction.” This would merely be a repeat of what had already happened after the French revolutions of 1793 and 1848. In the “centralized State . . . created by the Jacobins, Napoleon I found the ground already prepared for the Empire. Similarly, fifty years later, Napoleon III found in the dreams of a centralized democratic republic which developed in France after [the revolution of] 1848 the ready-made elements for the Second Empire.”[[#76KropotkinModernScience1|76]]
+The next time we see this flapstaff ritual is on Stela 11, a monument erected by Bird-Jaguar soon after his accession. Designed to document events that culminated in his successful ascent to the throne, this stela includes the image of another flapstaff ritual which had occurred on June 26, 741, exactly five years after Shield-Jaguar’s earlier flapstaff ceremony. In this scene (Fig. 7:5c), the shorter Shield-Jaguar,[412] who was then ninety- three years old, faces his son under a double-headed dragon representing the sky, above which sit Bird-Jaguar’s ancestors.[413] Both men now hold the same flapstaff that Shield-Jaguar displayed on Stela 16. Bird-Jaguar took pains to emphasize the importance of this mutual display. He did so by depicting this scene both atop and between texts that recorded his accession to the throne, thus asserting that his father had shared this ritual with him to legitimize his status as heir. Furthermore, Bird-Jaguar set this dual depiction in front of Temple 40 (Fig. 7:5c and e), which was situated on the same hill summit as Temple 41 where Shield-Jaguar had placed his earlier depiction of the flapstaff ritual. This close juxtaposition emphasized the linkage between the two rituals and supported Bird-Jaguar’s political aspirations.
-It was for these reasons that Kropotkin warned revolutionaries that the state is, “an octopus with a thousand heads and a thousand suckers, like the sea monsters of the old tales, it makes it possible to envelop all society and to channel all individual efforts so as to make them result in the enrichment and governmental monopoly of the privileged classes.”[[#77KropotkinModernScience3|77]] As a result, “if the revolution does not crush the octopus, if it does not destroy its head and cut off its arms and suckers, it will be strangled by the beast. The revolution itself will be placed at the service of monopoly, as was the [French] revolution of 1793.”[[#78KropotkinModernScience3|78]]
+This father-son flapstaff event took place only four days before the end of the tenth tun in the fifteenth katun on 9.15.10.0.0. Five days later, on 9.15.10.0.1 (July 1, 741), another ritual took place that was so important and involved so many critical people that Bird-Jaguar recorded it glyphically and pictorially three times (Fig. 7:6), in three different locations. These locations all pivoted thematically around Temple 23, the building that became the touchstone of his legitimacy.
-For anarchists, these predictions were soon proven true by the one-party Bolshevik state that was established during the 1917 Russian revolution and the subsequent seizure of this state by Stalin and his supporters after Lenin’s death in January 1924.[[#79Forabriefoverviewofthis|79]] As early as June 1919, Malatesta wrote that although “Lenin, Trotsky and their companions are certainly sincere revolutionaries . . . they prepare the governmental cadres that will serve those that will come, who will profit from the revolution and kill it. They will be the first victims of their method, and with them, I fear, will fall the revolution.”[[#80MalatestaMethodofFreedom|80]]
+The most distant of these depictions, Lintel 14 of Temple 20, shows two persons. One is a woman named Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and the other is a man with the same family name, Lord Great-Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:6a). This woman would become the mother of Bird-Jaguar’s son and heir, and the man, who is named as her brother, was most likely the patriarch of her lineage.[414] Great-Skull-Zero belonged to a cahal lineage that was apparently an important source of political support, for Bird- Jaguar continued to depict him on public monuments, even after his own accession. In this earlier ritual, both Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother hold a Vision Serpent the two of them have materialized through bloodletting.[415] She also holds an offering bowl containing an obsidian B blade and bloodstained paper, while he holds the head of the serpent aloft as a female ancestor materializes in its mouth. The name of this ancestor, “Lady Ahau of Yaxchilan, Lady Yaxhal,” appears in the small text above the apparition’s head.
-Anarchists who had witnessed the revolution first hand subsequently wrote a number of critiques of the Bolsheviks. This included Goldman, who was deported from the United States to Russia in 1920. She wrote in December 1922 that the Bolsheviks had succeeded only in creating an “all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression,” which was based on “the masking of autocracy by proletarian slogans.”[[#81GoldmanRedEmma388394|81]] The Bolsheviks violently repressed all rival forms of socialism, including anarchists, left socialist-revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, in order to keep power within the Communist Party. Members of the Party “who were suspected of an independent attitude” and challenged the party leadership were expelled.[[#82GoldmanRedEmma387|82]] In parallel to this, the organs of self-management that had been created by workers themselves during the revolution—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, and cooperatives—were “either subordinated to the needs of the new State or destroyed altogether.”[[#83GoldmanRedEmma389|83]] The consequence of this was that “the triumph of the State meant the defeat of the Revolution.”[[#84GoldmanRedEmma391|84]] This occurred because the “revolutionary methods” of the Bolsheviks were not “in tune with revolutionary aims.”[[#85GoldmanRedEmma404For|85]]
+It is possible that this bloodletting rite was part of the rituals of marriage between Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero, but none of the glyphs recorded on this lintel refer to marriage. Whatever the occasion, we can presume that this lady and her kinsmen were vitally important to Bird-Jaguar’s successful campaign to replace his father as high king. Going against precedent, he gives them an unusually prominent place in history, depicting them as participants in this critical bloodletting ritual.
-The tragedy of the Russian Revolution demonstrated, according to anarchists, that they had been right and state socialists had been wrong. The liberation of the working classes could only be achieved through them crushing state power and building their own organs of self-management and class power. These arguments have, from an anarchist perspective, only proven stronger with time, given that subsequent state socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, and Vietnam have, like their predecessor in Russia, failed to produce a substantially free and equal society in which the working classes themselves own the means of production and self-manage their lives within both the workplace and wider society, let alone a state in the process of withering away. Despite numerous achievements within certain domains, such as increasing literacy rates or improving healthcare, these societies have not laid the foundations from which a stateless, classless, moneyless society based on distribution according to need could possibly emerge.
+The second time we see this bloodletting is on a retrospective stela (Fig. 7:6b) found next door in Temple 21, a building in which Bird-Jaguar deliberately replayed the iconographic program of Lady Xoc’s temple in celebration of the birth of his own heir.[416] This newly discovered stela[417] shows Bird-Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, engaged in the same bloodletting as his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her brother. This stela emulates the style and iconographic detail of Lintel 25 on Temple 23, which depicts Lady Xoc materializing the founder of the dynasty at Shield-Jaguar’s accession. Bird-Jaguar declares—by means of this not-so- subtle artistic manipulation—that his mother’s actions were every bit as important as those of his father’s principal wife.
-'''Anarchism and Political Struggle'''
+On the front of the stela and facing the entry door, Lady Eveningstar is depicted holding a bloodletting plate in one hand and a skull-serpent device in the other, while a huge skeletal Vision Serpent rears behind her. As on Lintel 25, this Vision Serpent is double-headed and emits Tlaloc faces. The text records the date, 4 Imix 4 Mol, and states that a “fish-inhand” vision event took place u cab chan kina “in the land of the sky lords.” A coupleted repetition attests that “Lady Eveningstar let blood.” On the rear, she is shown drawing the rope through her tongue and here the text specifies that she was “the mother of the three-katun lord, Bird- Jaguar, Holy Lord of Yaxchilan, Bacab.” Bird-Jaguar very likely installed this monument to emphasize his mother’s legitimate status, as well as her ritual centrality during his father’s lifetime. At any rate, this stela was part of his program to assert the legitimacy of his own son and heir, whose birth was celebrated on the central lintel of this temple.[418]
-The anarchist rejection of seizing state power has led some Marxists to assert that anarchists opposed, and so ignored the need for, political struggle.[[#86ForexampleHalDraperKarl|86]] This argument dates back to Marx and Engels themselves. Marx wrote in an 1870 letter to Paul Lafargue that Bakunin thought that the industrial working class “must not occupy itself with ''politics''” and instead “only organize themselves by trades-unions,” and thus making what Marx saw as the fatal error of allowing “the governments, these great trade-unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like.” Bakunin had, according to Marx, failed to see “that every class movement as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a ''political'' movement.”[[#87KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|87]] After the First International’s Hague Congress of 1872, Marx gave a speech in which he said that “a group has been formed in our midst which advocates that the workers should abstain from political activity” and thereby ignored that “the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organization of labor.”[[#88KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|88]] Engels likewise claimed in an 1872 letter to Louis Pio that anarchists in the First International advocated the “''complete abstention from all political activity, and especially from all elections''.”[[#89KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|89]]
+Bird-Jaguar set the third depiction (Fig. 7:6c) of this critical bloodletting ritual over the central door of Structure 16, a building located at the eastern edge of the river shelf. Carved on the outer edge of Lintel 39, the scene shows Bird-Jaguar sprawled on the ground as he supports a Serpent Bar, skeletal in detail and emitting GII as the materialized vision. The date is again 4 Imix 4 Mol[419] and the action a “fish-in-hand” vision rite. Now, however, the actor is the future king himself.
-Anarchists in Marx’s time and beyond did not, however, reject political struggle in and of itself. They rejected one form of political struggle—attempting to conquer state power via elections or armed insurrection—in favor of a different form of political struggle—engaging in direct action outside of and against the state with the long-term aim of abolishing it. This position was grounded in the idea that working-class social movements should only engage in forms of political struggle that built toward a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state, rather than leading workers away from it. As Malatesta wrote, anarchists embraced “political struggle” in the sense of “struggle against the government and not co-operation with the government,” because “if you truly want to overthrow the system, then you must clearly place yourself outside and against the system itself.”[[#90MalatestaAttheCafeConv|90]] For many anarchists, this political struggle included engaging in direct action to gain or enforce political liberties that expanded the ability of workers to self-organize, such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.[[#91RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|91]]
+Based on these three representations of this critical bloodletting, as well as depictions of similar events at other sites,[420] we can visualize this great ritual in the following vignette.
-The anarchist view on political struggle can be seen in Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois reformist politics and the revolutionary proletarian politics of the anarchist movement. According to Bakunin, “it would be the death of the proletariat, if it were preoccupied exclusively and solely with economic matters” and ignored “political questions.”[[#92BakuninSelectedTexts238|92]] This is because any significant attempt by the working classes to emancipate themselves economically will be met by state violence. In Bakunin’s words, “''the political question is inseparable from the economic question'' . . . politics—the institution and mutual relations of States—has no other object except that of ensuring that the ruling classes can legally exploit the proletariat. So in consequence, the moment the proletariat wishes to free itself, it is forced to consider politics—to fight it and overcome it.”[[#93BakuninSelectedTexts226|93]] The First International would for this same reason, “be compelled to intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie.”[[#94BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|94]] Its task as an organization “is not just some economic or a simply material creative activity, it is at the same time and to the same degree an eminently political process.”[[#95QuotedinBerthierSocialD|95]]
+The starlit darkness broke before the first flush of light as the sun rose from Xibalba over the dark waters of the river. Venus, who had preceded his brother out of the Underworld by almost two hours, now hovered brightly near the seven lights of the Pleiades and the bright star Aldeba- ran.[421] Nine times had the Lords of the Night changed since the sun had taken its longest journey through the sky on the day of the summer solstice. Birds waking in the trees across the river and along the hills above the city raised a crescendo of song, counterpointing the barking of the village dogs and the squawks of brilliant red macaws flying along the edge of the water. Far in the distance, a howler monkey roared his own salutation to the new day. The celestial stage was set for an important festival and the community of people who lived along the river waited anxiously for the rituals that would soon begin.
-The question for Bakunin was not whether we should engage in politics but what form our political interventions should take. He was careful to distinguish between bourgeois politics, which did not aim to achieve the immediate emancipation of workers, and the politics of labor or social revolution, which aimed to abolish the state in order to establish socialism.[[#96BakuninSelectedTexts22|96]] Given this, “It is not true . . . to say that we completely ignore politics. We do not ignore it, for we definitely want to destroy it. And here we have the essential point separating us from political parties and bourgeois radical Socialists. Their politics consists in making use of, reforming, and transforming the politics of the State, whereas our politics, the only kind we admit, is the total ''abolition'' of the State, and of the politics which is its necessary manifestation.”[[#97MichaelBakuninThePolitic|97]]
+A crowd of ahauob, cahalob, and people of lesser rank milled restlessly within the cool plaza beside the great river. The iridescent feathers of their headdresses bobbed above their animated conversations like a fantastic flock of birds. The brilliantly embroidered and dyed cloth of their garments swirled in a riot of color against the hard whiteness of the plaster floor and the distant green backdrop of the mist-shrouded forest. As dawn broke through the darkness of night, more people drifted toward the plaza from the distant hillslopes. Still more arrived in canoes, having fought the high floodwaters to cross the river so that they too could witness the great ritual announced by the king.
-Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois politics and revolutionary proletarian politics was shared by other anarchists. During the First International’s 1872 Hague Congress, which was attended by Marx and Engels, Guillaume claimed that the anarchist idea of politics “was not political indifferentism, but a special kind of politics negating bourgeois politics and which we should call the politics of labor,” which sought “''the destruction of political power''.”[[#98QuotedinWolfgangEckhardt|98]] Andrea Costa wrote, with Bakunin’s assistance, a program for the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International sometime in late 1872. The program distinguished between the “negative politics” of abolishing ruling-class institutions and the “positive politics” of constructing a new society through the “revolutionary power” of the working classes.[[#99QuotedinTRRavindranatha|99]] Over two decades later, in 1897, Malatesta remarked that “who has outdone us in arguing that the battle against capitalism has to be harnessed to the fight against the State, meaning the political struggle? There is a school of thought these days in which political struggle means achieving public office through elections: but . . . logic forces other methods of struggle upon those seeking to do away with government, rather than capture it.”[[#100MalatestaPatientWork20|100]]
+The king’s family, arrayed in front of the gleaming white walls of the Tz’ikinah-Nal, the house Lady Xoc had dedicated many years ago, and the Chan-Ah-Tz’i,[422] the house of the seventh successor of Yat-Balam, watched the sun rise over the huge stone pier that had been built over the river on its southern side. No one could see the pier now, of course, for the great Xocol Ha[423] was in flood from the thunderstorms of the rainy season. The roar of the tumbling waters played a ground behind the rhythms of drums and whistles echoing through the great open spaces along the canoe-strewn shore. Merchants, visitors, pilgrims, and farmers from near and far had laid their wares along the river for the people of Yaxchilan to peruse. They too joined their voices to the cacophony of sound swelling throughout the gleaming white plazas of the city.
-For Malatesta, like Bakunin before him, economic struggles would be transformed into political struggles. He argued that “from the economic struggle one must pass to the political struggle, that is to the struggle against government” because “workers who want to free themselves, or even only to effectively improve their conditions, will be faced with the need to defend themselves from the government” that violently protects private property rights and the interests of the economic ruling classes.[[#101MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|101]] Workers will be forced to “oppose the rifles and guns which defend property with the more effective means that the people will be able to find to defeat force by force.”[[#102MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|102]] The manner in which capitalism and the state support and cocreate one another led Malatesta to conclude that the economic struggle against capitalism and the political struggle against the state are so interconnected that they should be viewed as two aspects of a single struggle against the ruling classes, rather than as two separate struggles.[[#103MalatestaPatientWork16|103]]
+The royal clan stood in two groups, the hard and dangerous tension between them radiating down into the crowd below. The cahalob and ahauob of the court arranged themselves in clusters, clearly indicating their support for one or the other branch of the family. The aging but indomitable Lady Xoc[424] took up position with her kinsmen in front of the Tz’ikinah-Nal. In this, the place of her glory, she contemplated the irony of her fate. Here, in the most magnificent imagery to grace the city, she had commemorated her devotion to Shield-Jaguar. The finest artisans of the realm had carved the lintels in the house behind her, declaring publicly and permanently that she had materialized the founder when her lord acceded as king. And the reward for that sacrifice? She had been forced to deny her own father’s kinsmen and to let her blood to sanctify the final issue of her aged husband’s loins: Bird-Jaguar—son of a foreigner.
-A significant number of anarchists held that politics would be abolished via the social revolution. One Spanish anarchist poem, for example, declared that “politics” would “disappear from the world” via “the establishment of anarchy.”[[#104QuotedinJeromeRMintz|104]] Other anarchists, in comparison, thought that politics was not inherently state-centric and would continue to exist, albeit in a very different form, after the abolition of the state. Kropotkin argued that “new forms of economical life will require also new forms of political life, and these new forms cannot be a reinforcement of the power of the State by giving up in its hands the production and distribution of wealth, and its exchange.”[[#105KropotkinDirectStruggle|105]] These new forms of political life must instead be “created by the workers themselves, in ''their'' unions, ''their'' federations, completely outside the State.”[[#106KropotkinModernScience|106]] Given this, “The free Commune . . . is the ''political ''form that the ''social ''revolution must take.”[[#107KropotkinModernScience|107]]
+Even now the men of her father’s lineage were as reluctant as she to give up their privileges as kinsmen of the king’s principal wife. The gods had favored Shield-Jaguar by giving him a life span beyond that granted to other humankind. He had lived so long that most of the sons of her womb were dead, as were many of their sons.[425] The sharp pain of remembered grief cut through her reverie. The matriarch, soon to enter her fifth katun of life, glanced at her remaining offspring, her thwarted and angry kinsmen, and the powerful cahalob allied to her father’s clan. All stood quietly, grimly, allowing the old woman her moment of bitter reflection.
-'''Different Kinds of Anarchism'''
+Most of the witnessing emissaries from towns along the river gathered before the other royal group in anticipation of the celebration to come. Bird-Jaguar, renowned warrior, defender of the realm and future king, quietly conversed with his mother, Lady Eveningstar, and his new wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero. They were framed by the splendor of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. At thirty-one, the heir radiated a physical strength to match his valor and ambition. The bride’s lineage patriarch, Great-Skull- Zero, stood beside her, accompanied by the other cahalob who, by their presence here, declared themselves allies of the king’s son. Chief among them, Kan-Toc proudly and dispassionately surveyed potential friends and foes below, ready to place his prowess as warrior at the disposal of the future king.
-Anarchists in this historical period generally shared the basic strategic commitments that have been explained in Chapters 4 and 5. They nonetheless also disagreed with one another about a wide variety of more specific topics. This included such questions as what kind of organizations they should build, what tactics they should engage in, and how anarchists should act to help bring about the social revolution. Broadly speaking the anarchist movement can be divided into two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchism advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that attempted to trigger, or at least build toward, a social revolution by engaging in an escalating series of individual and collective violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions. Mass anarchism, in comparison, advocated the formation of large-scale formal organizations that struggled for immediate reforms in the present via direct action. They viewed such struggles as the most effective means to construct a mass movement capable of launching a social revolution via an armed insurrection.[[#108LucienvanderWaltAnarc|108]]
+The nobles flanking the principal players in this drama stood in small groups on the steps of the temples. Their arms folded across their chests, they spoke of the day’s events, the condition of the new crop, and hundreds of other topics of concern. Some were bare-chested, but the most important lords wore blinding white capes closed at the throat with three huge red spondylus shells. This cotton garb was reserved for those privileged to serve as attendants to the king, or those who held the status of pilgrims to the royal festivals.[426] Farther away, warriors of renown in their finest battle gear stood with other notables who carried the emblazoned staff-fans of Maya war and ceremony. Other nobles sat in informal groups, engaging in lively conversation among the riot of color in the long-shadowed light of the brilliant morning. Excitement and anticipation were becoming a palpable force pulsing through the crowd of people that now included a growing number of farmers and villagers who had come in from the surrounding countryside to share in the festivities.
-The terms insurrectionist anarchist and mass anarchist were not used by anarchists historically and are anachronistic. In Spain during the 1880s, the debate occurred between anarchist communists (insurrectionist anarchists) and anarchist collectivists (mass anarchists). In Italy during the 1890s and 1900s, it occurred between anarchist communists who were either organizationalists (mass anarchists) or antiorganizationalists (insurrectionist anarchists). Given the wide variety of different terms that were used historically, I decided to make things clearer by using the same terminology consistently. This terminology, which was coined by the historian Lucian van der Walt, is potentially misleading and two points of clarification must be made.
+Shield-Jaguar, the ninety-three-year-old king, sat frail but erect upon the long bench inside the central room of the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. The morning light coursing through the door warmed his bony chest, bared above his white hipcloth, as he mused over the many shivering hours he had spent in such rooms in the dark time before dawn. Now with his aged cronies, the last of his most trusted lords, he sat in this venerable house that had been dedicated 286 years earlier by the seventh successor of Yat-Balam.
-First, mass anarchists advocated and engaged in armed insurrections, while insurrectionist anarchists ultimately aimed to create a mass working-class social movement. Second, although one can distinguish between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism these are ideal types and individuals cannot always be neatly categorized into one or the other due to their combining elements of both or only subscribing to certain aspects of the theory in question. The anarchist movement contained a great deal of intellectual diversity and, although some anarchists were dogmatic, there were no rigid barriers between different kinds of anarchism that might, in principle, prevent one kind of anarchist learning from and being influenced by another kind of anarchist. Most Italian anarchists who lived in North Beach, San Francisco, for example, subscribed to multiple publications espousing different kinds of anarchism and interacted socially with anarchists from other tendencies.[[#109KenyonZimmerImmigrantsA|109]] The distinction between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism should be viewed as a simplification that is helpful for thinking about the major strategic disagreements within the anarchist movement, rather than being a perfect description of the ideological complexity of the anarchist movement. In the next several chapters, I will examine the various forms that anarchism took during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+Shield-Jaguar’s years weighed heavily upon him. This would surely be the final festival of his life—his last opportunity to seal his blessings upon Bird-Jaguar before the gods, the ancestors, and the people of his kingdom. Four days earlier, he had stood before the people with his son and heir and displayed the ceremonial cloth-lined flapstaif. It was important that all his people, noble and common folk alike, witness and accept his gift of power to Bird-Jaguar. The issue of the inheritance still tormented his spirit so powerfully he feared he was not adequately prepared for his trial with the Lords of Death. It was common scandal among all the great houses on the river that the men of Lady Xoc’s lineage continued to press their claims on the king, despite all that he had done for them and for her. The kinsmen of his principal wife had become his most formidable enemies. They would surely maneuver to place one of her own offspring on the throne after his bones lay in the vaulted grave that awaited his fall into Xibalba. Bird-Jaguar would have to be a subtle and powerful leader to take and hold his rightful place as the successor of his father.
-[[#15|1]]. Gary P. Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Keven McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, ''The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin ''(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 1–27.
+A shout from the crowd outside brought Shield-Jaguar back to the present and his immediate duty to the dynasty of Yat-Balam. The Ancestral Sun had climbed above the mouth of the eastern horizon until he hovered free of the earth. Despite the fierce glare the sun brought to the world, Venus retained his strength on this special day so that the brothers could be seen together in the morning sky, momentary companions like the aged king and his energetic son. It was one day after the halfway point of Katun 15. The bloodletting rituals about to begin would consecrate that benchmark in time and demonstrate the king’s support for his youngest son.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#25|2]]. For illustrative examples, see Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''89–136; Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 101–8, 383–420; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 371–82, 432; Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 24–27, 120–24; Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 11–12, 48–49; Rudolf Rocker, “Marx and Anarchism,” Anarchist Library website, April 26, 2009. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-marx-and-anarchism.</div>
+The old man’s eyes sparkled as he watched Lady Eveningstar, mother of the heir, move gracefully into the frame of light before his doorway. She would be the first to offer her blood and open the portal to the Other- world.[427] Dressed in a brilliant white gauze huipil, high-backed sandals, and a flower headdress, she stepped forward to stand before her son. Shield-Jaguar was too frail to make the precise ceremonial cut in his wife’s body and that role now fell to Bird-Jaguar. Holding a shallow plate within the circle of her folded arms, Lady Eveningstar knelt before Bird-Jaguar. The bowl was filled with strips of beaten-bark paper, a rope the thickness of her first finger, and a huge stingray spine. Her eyes glazed as she shifted her mind into the deep trance that would prepare her for what was to come. Closing her eyes, she extended her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could. Bird-Jaguar took the stingray spine and, with a practiced twist of the wrist, drove it down through the center of his mother’s tongue. She did not flinch, nor did a sound pass her lips as he took the rope and threaded it through the wound.[428] She stood near the edge of the platform so that all the assembled witnesses could see her pull the rope through her tongue. Her blood saturated the paper in the bowl at her chest and dribbled redly down her chin in brilliant contrast to the deep green jade of her shoulder cape.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#35|3]]. For an overview of Marx and Engels’s strategy, see Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 3,'' The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Richard N. Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 1,'' Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974); Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 2,'' Classical Marxism, 1850–1895 ''(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).</div>
+Bird-Jaguar removed some of the saturated paper from the plate and dropped it into the knee-high censer that stood on the floor beside his mother’s left leg. After placing fresh paper in her bowl, he removed her head covering and replaced it with the skull-mounted headdress that signaled Venus war and gave honor to the brother of the Sun.[429]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#45|4]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 91–92; Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''211, 220–21, 233.</div>
+Lady Eveningstar pulled the last of the rope through her tongue, B dropped it into the bowl, and stood swaying as the trance state took possession of her consciousness. In that moment Bird-Jaguar saw what he had been seeking in her eyes—the great Serpent Path to the Otherworld was opening within his mother. He set the ancestral skull into her hand and stood back. That was the signal. The deep moaning voice of a conch trumpet echoed throughout the city, announcing the arrival of the Vision Serpent. Black smoke billowed and roiled upward from the god-faced censer behind Lady Eveningstar and formed a great writhing column in which Bird-Jaguar and his people saw the Double-headed Serpent and the god of Venus war she had materialized with the shedding of her blood. A song of welcome and awe rose from the crowd below as they drew blood from their own bodies and offered it to the god now born into their presence.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#55|5]]. For an overview of these movements and their ideas, see Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin''. For important primary sources, see Karl Kautsky, ''The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) ''(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910); Mike Taber, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889–1912 ''(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).</div>
+The crowd writhed and sway ed as a tide of ecstasy coursed throughout the city. Trumpeters and drummers, caught in the tumult of their music, accelerated their rhythms to a frenzied tempo. Dancing lords whirled across the terrace below the king and his family, their glowing green feathers and hip panels suspended at right angles to their whirling bodies. People throughout the crowd drew their own blood and splattered it onto cloth bands tied to their wrists and arms. The plaza was soon brightly speckled with devotion. Smoke columns rose from censers which stood upright throughout the plaza as the ahauob and the cahalob called their own ancestors forth through the portal opened by the Lady Eveningstar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#65|6]]. Edward Bernstein, ''Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation ''(New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1909), x–xvi, 145–46, 163, 196–99, 216–19; Rosa Luxemburg, ''Rosa Luxemburg Speaks'','' ''ed. Mary-Alice Waters'' ''(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 48–59, 76–83.</div>
+Feeling the awesome strength of his mother’s vision, Bird-Jaguar knew he had chosen the penultimate moment to publicly affirm the alliance he had forged by his marriage to Lady Great-Skull-Zero. 1 he numbers of fierce and powerful cahalob who had allied themselves with his cause would give his rivals pause and strengthen his own claim as the rightful successor of the great Shield-Jaguar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#75|7]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 91–93; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 193; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 30–31.</div>
+Motioning through the haze of smoke that drifted along the terrace from his mother’s sacrifice, he signaled Lady Great-Skull-Zero and her brother to bring their own vision through the portal. His wife wore a brilliantly patterned huipil, a heavy jade-colored cape, and a bar pectoral. On her head sat the image of the Sun God at dawn to complement the symbols of Venus worn by his mother. Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of his wife’s lineage, was richly dressed in a skull headdress, a cape, a bar pectoral, knee bands made of jade, a richly bordered hipcloth, a heavy belt, an ornate loincloth, and anklet cuffs. Both were barefoot and grasped the deified lancets of the bloodletting ritual in their hands.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#85|8]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 378–81; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 64–71; Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''178–82.</div>
+Holding in readiness a shallow plate filled with paper strips, Lady Great-Skull-Zero gestured toward her brother. Like her mother-in-law, she extended her tongue far out of her mouth and permitted Great-Skull- Zero to make the cut of sacrifice. Grasping the obsidian, he pierced her tongue in one deft motion, then handed the bloody blade to Bird-Jaguar. Gazing into the eyes of his new kinsman and future king, Great-Skull- Zero remained motionless while Bird-Jaguar slashed down into his extended tongue. Bleeding heavily and deep in the vision trance, Lady Great-Skull-Zero and Great-Skull-Zero danced together, bringing forth the Serpent known as Chanal-Chac-Bay-Chan.[430] As the great Serpent writhed through their arms, they saw the ancestor Na-Yaxhal materialize between them. A roar rose from the plaza, coming most loudly from the throats of those lords allied with Bird-Jaguar and his wife’s clan.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#95|9]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''30–31.</div>
+Finally it was time for the king’s son to sanctify the day with the gift of his own blood. Bird-Jaguar was more simply dressed than Great-Skull-Zero. His hair, worn long to tantalize his enemies in battle, was tied above his head with a panache of feathers which hung down his back. Around his neck he wore a single strand of beads, and a bar pectoral suspended on a leather strap lay against his brown chest. His wrists, ankles, and knees were bejeweled with deep blue-green strands of jade and in the septum of his nose he wore a feather-tipped ornament. His loincloth was simply decorated and brilliantly white so that his people could see the blood of sacrifice he would draw from the most sacred part of his body.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#105|10]]. Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''59.</div>
+His wife, still weak from her own sacrifice, came to his side to help him with his rite,[431] but his main assistant would be an ahau who was skilled in communication with the gods. The white cape shrouding this ahau’s shoulders contrasted vividly with Bird-Jaguar’s sun-darkened skin. Lady Eveningstar grasped a shallow basket filled with fresh, unmarked paper in one hand, and held the stingray spine her son would use in the other. Still dazed, Great-Skull-Zero stepped in front of Bird-Jaguar, took the basket from his kinswoman’s hand and placed it on the plaza floor between Bird-Jaguar’s feet. Face impassive, Bird-Jaguar squatted on his heels, spreading his muscular thighs above the basket. He pulled his loincloth aside, took the huge stingray spine, and pushed it through the loose skin along the top of his penis. He pierced himself three times before reaching down into the bowl for the thin bark paper strips it contained. Threading a paper strip through each of his wounds, he slowly pulled it through until the three strips hung from his member. His blood gradually soaked into the light tan paper, turning it to deepest red. From the saturated paper, his blood dripped into the bowl between his legs. When he was done, his wife reached down for the bowl and placed the bloodstained paper of his sacrifice in the nearby censer along with offerings of maize kernels, rubber, and the tree resin called pom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#115|11]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 4.</div>
+The rising columns of smoke revived the attention of the milling, tired crowd below. Many of the people who had drifted away to the adjacent courts and riverbank to examine the goods brought in by traders and visitors from other cities and kingdoms hurried back to the main plaza. They wanted to witness Bird-Jaguar’s materialization of the god. Times were dangerous along the Xocol Ha, and they hoped for a young, vigorous ruler, skilled in battle and wily in statecraft, to lead the kingdom through the growing peril of the times.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#125|12]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 9.</div>
+High above the crowd, Bird-Jaguar’s legs gave way beneath him as the trance state overpowered him. Sitting back onto his right hip, he stretched his legs out through the billowing smoke. In his arms, he held the Double-headed Serpent that manifested the path of communication special to kings. God K—the god called Kauil who was the last born of BI the three great gods of the cosmos—emerged from the mouths of the serpents. The great conch-shell trumpets sounded for the third time, warning that a god had been materialized from the Otherworld, this time by the king’s son, Bird-Jaguar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#134|13]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 180–81.</div>
+It was midmorning when the royal family’s bloodletting obligations were fulfilled. Walking with a painfully careful gait, Bird-Jaguar led his mother, his wife, and Great-Skull-Zero to the bench in the Chan-Ah-Tz’i where Shield-Jaguar had been sitting throughout the ritual. The white- caped attendants moved aside as Bird-Jaguar sat down on the right-hand side of his father.[432] His own wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, sat to his right. Lady Eveningstar moved to take the position on Shield-Jaguar’s left, but before she could mount the bench, Lady Xoc entered and usurped that position for herself. In silent menace, the old woman forced the younger woman to take the outside position, jarring everyone present into realizing that neither she nor her kinsmen would ever yield their power without a fight. In a state of uneasy truce, the royal family watched the remainder of the rituals unfold as the ecstasy of the morning’s activities ebbed into the exhaustion of afternoon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#144|14]]. De Cleyre,'' Reader'', 59.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar understood all that his father had done for him. First there had been the flapstaff ritual of four days ago and now this great blood ritual so close to the period ending celebration. His father’s public acknowledgment of his favor could not be denied nor would it be forgotten. In the years ahead, this ceremonial recognition would be the most important single component of his claim to the throne. His fight would be a hard one, but now he knew that not only his father but all the ancestors of the royal clan had selected him as the inheritor of the glory of Yaxchilan. After this moment together in eternity, it was simply a matter of time and patience.
-[[#154|15]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''54.
+<center>
+<verbatim>  </verbatim>
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#164|16]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 178. See also, 77; ''Patient Work'', 10, 44.</div>
+Shield-Jaguar was in his mid-nineties and not far from death when this multiple bloodletting took place. We surmise that his advanced age precluded his direct participation in this critically important rite; but, as we have seen, just about everyone else who was important to Bird-Jaguar’s claim participated: his wife and her brother, who was the patriarch of her lineage, Bird-Jaguar himself, and his mother. The four-day-long sequence that began with the flapstaff event and ended in this multiple bloodletting was well-timed. Less than a year later, on June 19, 742, the old man died, and at age thirty-two Bird-Jaguar began his campaign to follow his father into office.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#174|17]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''54.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar’s first action of public importance after his father’s death was a ballgame (Fig. 7:7) he played on October 21, 744. On the front step of Structure 33, his great accession monument, his artists depicted a captive, bound into a ball, bouncing down hieroglyphic stairs toward a kneeling player.[433] The text carved on this step associated this bailgame with events in the distant mythological past, placing Bird-Jaguar’s actions firmly within the sacred context of the game as it related to the larger cosmos.[434] Bird-Jaguar framed this event with the scenes he felt would most powerfully serve his political ends. Successive panels flank the central scene on the upper step[435] of the stairway leading to the temple platform. To the immediate left of his own bailgame scene, Bird-Jaguar portrayed his own father kneeling to receive a ball bouncing down a hieroglyphic stairway. On his right, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, also kneels to receive a ball. Other panels show important cahalob engaged in the game, as well as Bird-Jaguar’s wives holding Vision Serpents in rites that apparently preceded active play.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#184|18]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147.</div>
+Two years later, on June 4, 746 (9.15.15.0.0), Bird-Jaguar celebrated his first big period ending. He recorded this rite in an unusual way, embedding it into the Stela 11 scene depicting him and his father engaged in the flapstaff ritual (Fig. 7:8). The text for the period ending tells us that on that day, Shield-Jaguar erected a tree-stone and that he held a staff in his hand.[436] This claim is a bit strange, since Shield-Jaguar had been in his grave for over four years (he died on June 19, 742). In reality, we know that Shield-Jaguar could not have erected a tree-stone, held a staff, nor done anything else on that date. What the reader is meant to understand is that Bird-Jaguar acted in his place.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#194|19]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 193.</div>
+Even more curious, the final phrase in this text states that these actions took place u cab, “in the land of” Bird-Jaguar. How had the BI kingdom become “the land of” Bird-Jaguar when he hadn’t yet acceded to office and would not qualify for that event for another six years? The embedding of this period-ending notation into the scene of the father-son flapstaff ritual had a special intention. By this juxtaposition Bird-Jaguar implied that he and his father (even after death) acted together on both occasions, and that the kingdom had become Bird-Jaguar’s by this time, if only in de facto status.[437]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#204|20]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 122.</div>
+The next time we see Bird-Jaguar on a monument, he is once again displaying the flapstaff (Fig. 7:5d). The date is now June 25, 747, eleven years after Shield-Jaguar’s first performance of this ritual, and some six years after the father-son event. By repeating this flapstaff rite yet again, Bird-Jaguar was commemorating his growing command of Yaxchilan’s ritual life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#214|21]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 122.</div>
+Two years later on April 3, 749, Lady Xoc, Shield-Jaguar’s principal wife, died and went to join her husband in Xibalba. She had survived him by seven years. A little over a year later—exactly four years after the 9.15.15.0.0 period ending discussed above—Bird-Jaguar conducted a ritual in which he acted as warrior and giver of sacrifices. On June 4, 750, wearing the mask of the god Chac-Xib-Chac, he presented three unnamed victims for sacrifice. He carved this scene on the temple side of Stela 11 (Fig. 7:8), opposite the depiction of the father-son flapstaff event and the unusual period ending text discussed above.[438] These three events—the flapstaff, the period ending, and the GI sacrifice—were of such central importance to his campaign for the throne that Bird-Jaguar surrounded them with texts recording his accession. One text recording that event as hok’ah ti ahauel, “he came out as king,” was carved on the narrow sides of the tree-stone. A second text recording the event as chumwan ti ahauel, “he sat in reign,” was carved under the scene of the flapstaff event. As a finishing touch to the program of Stela 11, Bird-Jaguar placed miniature figures of his dead mother and father in the register above the sacrificial scene. They view his performance with approval from the world of the ancestors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#224|22]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 13.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar’s campaign of legitimization was now close to completion, but some barriers still remained. He had yet to prove his prowess as a warrior by taking a captive of sufficient prestige to sacrifice in the accession ceremonies, and to demonstrate his potency by fathering a male child and heir. These last events were never witnessed by his mother, for she died in the following year. On March 13, 751, Lady Eveningstar went to join her rival, Lady Xoc, in the Otherworld.
-[[#234|23]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+With the principal female players in this historical drama dead, Bird-Jaguar embarked on the last phase of his crusade. On February 10, 752, 357 days after the end of the sixteenth katun, Bird-Jaguar went to war and took a captive named Yax-Cib-Tok, a cahal of an as-yet-unidentified king.[439] Eight days later, on February 18, Lady Great-Skull-Zero bore him a son, Chel-Te-Chan-Mah-Kina. This son would later take Shield- Jaguar’s name when he himself became the king. With these events Bird- Jaguar’s long struggle for the throne came to an end. Seventy-five days later he was crowned king of Yaxchilan.
-[[#244|24]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+Like the multiple bloodlettings that preceded Shield-Jaguar’s death, this capture and the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir loomed large in his program of propaganda. He inscribed the capture on a glyphic step (Fig. 7:9a) located in front of a door leading into Temple 41, the structure built by his father on the highest point of the city. This was the location where Shield-Jaguar himself had erected the depiction of his first flapstaff ritual and the stelae recording the most famous captures of his career. By inscribing the record of his own battle triumph on this building, Bird- Jaguar associated himself with his father’s triumphs as a warrior.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#254|25]]. For the programs of socialist parties in Austria, Germany, and Italy, see the appendix to Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin'', 285–307.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar also mounted a pictorial representation of this capture (Lintel 16, Fig. 7:9b) inside Temple 21. Temple 21, if you remember, was BI the structure designed to parallel the glory of Lady Xoc’s magnificent Temple 23. In the scene on this lintel, Bird-Jaguar, dressed in battle armor, stands before his seated captive who bites on his thumb in a gesture of submission or fear.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#264|26]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92–93, 99–102; Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''145–7; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 338, 372–74; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 115.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar also depicted the rituals celebrating the birth of his son in two separate locations, maximizing the political implications of the event in the public record. He placed the bloodletting ritual that celebrated the birth over the right-hand doorway of Temple 21, next to the central capture scene described above. If we look at this scene (Fig. 7:9c), we see Bird-Jaguar preparing to draw blood from his own genitals, while one of his wives, Lady Balam, Lady Ahau of lx Witz,[440] pulls a rope through her tongue while holding a plate filled with blood-splattered paper.
-[[#274|27]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+This depiction corresponds to Lintel 24 in the program of Temple 23, the bloodletting celebration at the birth of Bird-Jaguar himself. Obviously, Bird-Jaguar wished the audience to draw some parallels. In the earlier bloodletting on Temple 23, Lady Xoc was shown acknowledging the birth of a son to a co-wife, Lady Eveningstar. Here Lady Balam acknowledges the birth of her husband’s heir, also the child of another wife. The only logistical difference is that Lady Great-Skull-Zero is not a foreign wife, as Lady Eveningstar had been, but a woman from a prominent cahal lineage of Yaxchilan. In addition, Temple 21 houses the stela (Fig. 7:6b) that depicts Bird-Jaguar’s mother in the critical 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, which we described in such detail in the vignette. The presence of this stela linked yet another critical bloodletting ritual to the birth of the heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#284|28]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 180; Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 30.</div>
+In an adjacent temple (Temple 20), Bird-Jaguar mounted another representation of the birth rituals. In this second depiction, Lady Great- Skull-Zero, the mother of the newborn child, holds a Personified Bloodletter in one hand and a bloodletting bowl in the other (Fig. 7:10b). Against her ribs she grasps the tail of a Vision Serpent which winds its way across empty space to rest in the hand of the infant’s father, Bird-Jaguar. The text recording the birth sits immediately in front of the human head emerging from the Vision Serpent’s mouth. This head most likely represents either an ancestor recalled to witness the arrival of the infant heir or the infant himself, Chel-Te-Chan, being metaphorically born through the mouth of the Vision Serpent. This birth scene is mounted in the same building as Lintel 14, which shows Lady Great-Skull-Zero holding the Vision Serpent with Great-Skull-Zero in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting rite (Fig. 7:6a and 7:10c). Thus, in both Temples 20 and 21, Bird-Jaguar connected the birth of his heir and the taking of his captive to the multiple bloodletting event that was so fundamental to his political claim.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#294|29]]. René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 48–9; Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 259–60.</div>
+With these last two acts—the taking of a captive and the production of an heir, Bird-Jaguar became the king. It is curious that after all his long struggles for the throne, he was never particularly interested in picturing this hard-won accession rite. He did, however, inscribe textual records of this event on Stela 11, the steps of Stela 41, and on the lintels of Structure 10, which he built directly across the plaza from Lady Xoc’s building.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#304|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 181.</div>
+The only actual surviving picture of his accession appears in Temple 33, one of the largest and most important constructions he commissioned during the first half of his reign. Built on a slope above and behind the string of buildings documenting his right of accession (Temples 13, 20, 21, 22, and 23), this building has a lintel over each of its three doors and a wide step portraying the bailgame events discussed earlier (Fig. 7:7) on its basal platform. The accession portrait is over the left door (Lintel 1, Fig. 7:11a). There, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself holding the manifestation of GIF[441] outward toward an audience we cannot see. Behind him stands the mother of his new son, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a bundle to her chest.[442] The verb in the text over her head records that she will soon let blood,[443] just as Lady Xoc did for Shield-Jaguar on the day of his accession (Lintel 25, Fig. 7:3b). Presumably, as the bloodletter for the king, she, like her predecessor Lady Xoc, would be responsible for materializing the founder of the dynasty. Her name is also written in a form that identifies her as the mother of the heir—the child who would become the second Shield-Jaguar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#314|31]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29–30.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar’s accession rites culminated nine days later with the dedication of a new building, Temple 22, located on the river terrace immediately adjacent to Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s memorial (Fig. 7:12). Into this new building, he reset four very early lintels. These lintels were presumably removed from the important ancestral building now encased within the new construction. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of lintels and inscriptions from the buildings of his ancestors was a very important part of Bird-Jaguar’s political strategy.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#324|32]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92.</div>
+On the brand-new lintel he placed over the central doorway of Temple 22, he commemorated the dedication of the earlier temple, which had been named Chan-Ah- Fz’i by King Moon-Skull, the seventh successor in the dynasty. This ancient dedication had taken place on October 16, 454. The inclusion of the earlier texts was meant to link Bird-Jaguar’s dedication of the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i temple to the actions of the ancestral king. The official dedication of Temple 22 took place on May 12, 752, nine days after Bird-Jaguar had become the new king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#334|33]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92–93.</div>
+Obviously. Bird-Jaguar had to have begun construction of Temple 22 at a much earlier date for its dedication rituals to have played a part in his actual accession rites. This is but one more example of the extent of the power he wielded before he officially wore the crown. His choice of this building as his first construction project, and the one most closely associated with his accession rites, was deliberate. Not only was Temple 22 a new and impressive version of his illustrious ancestor’s Chan-Ah-Tz’i, it stood right next door to Lady Xoc’s pivotal building. Through this construction project, Bird-Jaguar asserted both his mastery of Lady Xoc’s imagery and his connection to a famous and successful ancestor. The purpose of this building (and Temple 12, in which he reset another group of early lintels), was to encase and preserve earlier important monuments and to declare his status as the legitimate descendant of those earlier kings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#344|34]]. Quoted in Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''36. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 111–17. In response to Millerand’s actions, the 2nd International passed resolutions at its 1900 and 1904 congresses that opposed the entry of socialist politicians into a bourgeois government’s cabinet. See Taber, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner'','' ''77–78, 83–84.</div>
+This construction project was just the opening shot in a grand strategy that would completely change the face of Yaxchilân over the next ten years (Fig. 7:12). Bird-Jaguar dedicated the new Chan-Ah-Tz’i just nine days after his accession. To the left of the adjacent Temple 23 and attached to it, he built Temple 24 (dedicated on September 2, 755). Its lintels recorded the deaths of his immediate ancestors: his grandmother’s on September 12, 705; Shield-Jaguar’s on June 19, 742; Lady Xoc’s on April 3, 749; and his own mother’s on March 13, 751.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#354|35]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 36; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),'' ''58–61; Robert G. Neville, “The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906,” ''Journal of Contemporary History'' 13, no. 1 (1978): 33–52.</div>
+While still working on the huge terrace that supported the group of buildings surrounding Temple 23, Bird-Jaguar began construction on yet another temple, Temple 21. This structure also replicated the magnificent lintels of Lady Xoc’s building. Bird-Jaguar designed the program on this temple around the following scenes: his capture of Yax-Cib-Tok; his own bloodletting in celebration of his son’s birth; and a bloodletting rite that took place on March 28, 755, probably as part of the dedication rites for the temple itself (Fig. 7:9d). The giver of blood in the final event was Lady 6-Tun, a woman from Motul de San José, another of Bird-Jaguar’s wives. These images, of course, deliberately echoed the lintels of Temple 23. Bird-Jaguar intensified the association of this new building with Lady Xoc’s monument by planting inside it the stela recording his mother’s B pivotal bloodletting rite on 9.15.10.0.1. Carved in a style emulating the Lintel 25 masterpiece from Lady Xoc’s temple, this stela depicts Lady Eveningstar (Fig. 7:6b) wearing the same costume as her rival while materializing the same double-Tlaloc-headed Vision Serpent. This, and other imagery, shows us how obsessed Bird-Jaguar was with equating his mother with Lady Xoc.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#364|36]]. S. F. Kissin, ''War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars'','' ''vol. 1,'' 1848–1918 ''(London: Routledge, 2019). For anarchist responses to the war, see Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)''<nowiki>; </nowiki>''A. W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.'' ''</div>
+Next to this building, he constructed Temple 20, which had three lintels showing many of the same events. One depicts his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, and her patriarch participating in the great 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting. A second shows his wife letting blood along with Bird-Jaguar in celebration of the birth of their son. The third lintel depicts the ritual display of four captives by Bird-Jaguar and an unnamed noble. This lintel has been tentatively dated to November 13, 757.[444]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#374|37]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99.</div>
+Across the plaza trom temple 23, Bird-Jaguar constructed three more buildings: Temples 10, 12, and 13. In Temple 12, he reset another series of Early Classic lintels. These recorded the first through the tenth successors of the dynasty, and the accession of the tenth king, Ta-Skull, on February 13, 526. This building, along with Temple 22, honored the members of the long dynasty of Yaxchilan from which Bird-Jaguar descended, and preserved important public records which would have otherwise been lost when he covered over earlier structures during the course of his building program.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#384|38]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99, 98.</div>
+To the west of Structure 12, Bird-Jaguar commissioned a great L-shaped platform surmounted by two buildings housing two sets of lintels. The first set, Lintels 29, 30, and 31, are all glyphic and record his birth, accession, and the dedication of the building itself (Temple 10) on March 1, 764. The other building (Structure 13) housed pictorial lintels of extraordinary interest (Fig. 7:13). The first, Lintel 50, shows Shield- Jaguar’s original flapstaff ritual, the event that began Bird-Jaguar’s race for the throne.[445] Balancing Shield-Jaguar’s flapstaff rite is Lintel 33. This lintel, found over the right-hand door of the temple (Fig. 7:13c), shows Bird-Jaguar conducting his own flapstaff event eleven years later on June 25, the summer solstice of the year 747.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#394|39]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 310, 199, 227.</div>
+Lintel 32 (Fig. 7:13b), found over the middle door, shows Bird- Jaguar’s mother, Lady Eveningstar, in a bundle rite. According to his inscription, this rite took place the day after his father persuaded Lady Xoc to let her blood in acknowledgment of Bird-Jaguar’s birth. The masterly representation of Lady Xoc’s extraordinarily painful suffering is just across the plaza, so we may assume that Bird-Jaguar used Lintel 32 to show that his own mother was also directly involved in the rituals surrounding his birth. In fact, she holds a bundle that very probably contained the bowl, rope, and lancet used in the bloodletting rite. By this means, he asserted that her role on that occasion was every bit as important as Lady Xoc’s. As a finishing touch, he framed his mother’s participation in the bundle ritual with the flapstaff events he considered to be a key part of his legitimization. The program of this building thus links those crucial events together into a single web of causality. It is retrospective history at its best. Bird-Jaguar masterfully orchestrated events, with their many shades of meaning and connections, to fit the conclusions he wished his people to accept as fact.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#404|40]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 255. The same point is made in Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 388.</div>
+With the completion of this last building, Bird-Jaguar had accomplished his campaign of political legitimization. His major problem now was to maintain the loyalty of his nobility and secure their support for his own son. His own problems with the succession appear to have marked B1 him deeply; so much so that the efforts of his remaining years were spent in a concentrated effort to insure that his own heir did not suffer the same fate.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#414|41]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 14–15; Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''130; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 273–75, 352.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar began this new campaign with a set of buildings constructed on the slopes above the river shelf. Pivotal to the program was the huge Temple 33, which he flanked with Temple 1 to the west, and Temple 42 to the east (Fig. 7:14). The ten lintels on these three buildings record a sequence of events beginning with Bird-Jaguar’s accession and culminating with its fifth anniversary. He repeated the same narrative strategy he had used in the building sequence which centered around Temple 23: the repetition of key scenes in more than one location. In this way he was able to feature several different people, thereby allowing many of his nobles and allies the prestige of appearing with the king in the permanent public record of history (Fig. 7:14).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#424|42]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''113.</div>
+Forty days after his accession, Bird-Jaguar staged the first of these ceremonial events, a bundle ritual, on June 12, 752, ten days before the summer solstice (Fig. 7:15a). One pictorial representation of this event shows us Bird-Jaguar (on Lintel 5 of Temple 1) holding a tree-scepter in each hand, while Lady 6-Sky-Ahau, another foreign wife, this time from Motul de San José,[446] holds a bundle. In the second depiction of this ritual (Lintel 42 of Temple 42), Bird-Jaguar appears not with his wife but with Kan-Toc, one of his most important cahalob.[447] The king holds out a GII Manikin Scepter, an important symbol of the kingship, toward this cahal, who is shown gripping a battle ax and shield.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#434|43]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 130. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 253, 265–66.</div>
+We do not know the occasion for this ritual event, but Bird-Jaguar found it politically advantageous to represent it on these two lintels—one displaying a foreign wife who probably brought a powerful alliance with her, and the other featuring one of his most important nobles. In the Maya tradition, subordinate nobles were rarely depicted on the same monuments as the high king. Here Bird-Jaguar is obviously flattering his cahal, perhaps cementing his allegiance by publicly acknowledging his importance. The same reasoning would apply to the monument depicting his foreign wife. She must have brought her own set of alliances with her when she came to marry the king of Yaxchilân.
-[[#444|44]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 178.
+Later in the same year, on October 16, 752, Bird-Jaguar staged another series of rituals, once again depicting each of them in double imagery. During the first ceremony, he displayed a strange-looking staff mounting a basket with a GII miniature sitting atop it (Fig. 7:15b). In one version of this ritual (Lintel 6, Temple 1), Kan-Toc, the same cahal we saw above, stands before the king. He is holding bloodletting paper in one hand and a jaguar-paw club in the other. In the contrasting depiction (Lintel 43 of Temple 42), another wife, Lady Balam of lx Witz, stands with Bird-Jaguar. She holds a bloodletting bowl with a bloodstained rope hanging over one side. She is the same wife we saw letting blood on Lintel 17 to celebrate the birth of Bird-Jaguar’s heir. Here Bird-Jaguar watches her let blood again in an event occurring either just before or just after his scene with the cahal. Note that the paper held by Kan-Toc in the alternate depiction now rests in Bird-Jaguar’s hand. The fact that the paper is depicted in both scenes lets us know we are seeing different moments in the same ritual.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#454|45]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 27.</div>
+This particular ritual apparently lasted for several days, for two days later Bird-Jaguar reappears on Lintel 7 (Fig. 7:15c), this time holding the GII Manikin Scepter. Another of his wives appears with him, hugging a large bundle to her chest. While we cannot positively identify the woman depicted here (her name is badly eroded), we are reasonably certain she is another foreign wife, this time a second wife from Motul de San José.[448]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#464|46]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 164, 352.</div>
+The final episode in this series of lintels records the most famous and important capture of Bird-Jaguar’s lifetime—the taking of Jeweled-Skull (Fig. 7:15d). Once again, he commissioned two versions of the event. As before, one shows him acting with a cahal and the other with a wife. On Lintel 41, Lady 6-Sky-Ahau of Motul de San José stands before the king, who is dressed in full battle regalia including cotton armor and lance. She has been helping him dress for war in the same type of ritual we saw Lady Xoc perform for Shield-Jaguar thirty-one years earlier. In this scene, however, the action is a little farther along than that shown on the earlier Lintel 26 (Fig. 7:3c). Here Bird-Jaguar is already fully dressed in the Tlaloc war costume and ready to enter the battle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#474|47]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 120–21.</div>
+The capture itself appears on Lintel 8 of Temple 1. Bird-Jaguar, dressed in the battle gear his wife had helped him don, holds the unfortunate Jeweled-Skull by the wrist. Kan-Toc, the cahal he had shown twice before, yanks on the bound hair of his own captive. The manner of Bird-Jaguar’s presentation is highly important. Not only does he share his moment of victory with a subordinate, he represents the two captures[449] as equally important.[450] If it were not for the more elaborate detail of Bird- Jaguar’s costume and the larger size of the text describing his actions, a E casual onlooker might be hard-pressed to identify who was the king and who the lord. Both protagonists are about the same size and occupy the same compositional space.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#484|48]]. Council communists are an example of Marxists who advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat that was similar to, but not identical with, what anarchists advocated. For a discussion of the similarities between council communism and anarchism, see Saku Pinta, “Towards a Libertarian Communism: a Conceptual History of the Intersections Between Anarchisms and Marxisms” (PhD Diss., Loughborough University, 2013).</div>
+Why would Bird-Jaguar share the stage of history with his wives and cahalob? In the age-old political traditions of the Maya, the high king’s performance of public ritual affirmed the legitimacy of his power and gained public support for his decisions. Few rulers before Bird-Jaguar had felt compelled to document these mutual performances in monumental narrative art. By allowing his subordinates onto the stage of public history, Bird-Jaguar was actually sharing with them some of his prerogatives as king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#494|49]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+Shield-Jaguar had used this same strategy to deal with his wife Lady Xoc and the lineage she represented. Bird-Jaguar was merely extending this strategy further to include the cahal lineages whose alliances he needed to secure his own position and to insure that his son inherited the throne without dispute. Notice, however, that Bird-Jaguar produced his heir with a woman of this internal cahal lineage, opting for a different solution than his father had with his marriage to a foreigner. We suspect he did not want his own son, Chel-Te, to face the opposition from the internal lineages that had very probably kept him off the throne for ten B years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#504|50]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+Setting his son and heir into the midst of this web of alliance became the preoccupation of the second half of Bird-Jaguar’s reign, and the strategy and emphasis of his political art reflect his new goal (Fig. 7:16). The centrally placed Temple 33 was the first sculptural program designed to focus on the problem. In it Bird-Jaguar employed a uniquely Yaxchilan strategy. At Palenque, in the Group of the Cross, and in the murals at Bonampak, other Maya kings recorded specific rituals which were designed to publicly affirm a child’s status as the chosen heir. Bird-Jaguar never recorded a similar heir-designation rite for his own son, Chel-Te. Instead, he repeatedly depicted himself and the most important of his cahalob in public performance with his heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#514|51]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392. There appears to be a typo in this edition, where Malatesta says that it will “defend the revolution for its external enemies.” I choose to replace “for” with “against” based on the translation available in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''392.</div>
+This new strategy was begun with the celebration of the five-tun period ending on 9.16.5.0.0 (April 12, 756). Once again, Bird-Jaguar created multiple representations of the event. He mounted the first of these depictions over the right-hand door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11c). In this scene, Bird-Jaguar holds a GII Manikin Scepter out toward the smaller figure of a cahal. This noble, named Ah Mac, is someone we have not seen before. The cahal holds his own Manikin Scepter and wears the same type of clothing as the king, although his headdress is different.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#524|52]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 24'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 320–21; ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 26, 269–72</div>
+The second depiction of this period-ending rite is located several hundred meters up the river in Temple ST[451] (Fig. 7:16), one of the first of a series of buildings to be erected in that new area of the city. On the central lintel (Fig. 7:17b), Bird-Jaguar is depicted with his wife, Lady Great-Skull-Zero, celebrating the period ending with a bundle rite. The bundle holds the bloodletting instruments he will use to draw his holy blood. The composition of this scene echoes both his accession portrait on Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11a) and the bundle rite celebrated by his own father and mother to commemorate his birth (on Lintel 32, Fig. 7:13b). The replication of these earlier ritual actions was designed to deliberately link all these actions together in one great string of causality. Just as Shield- Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar had performed the bundle ritual before them, so would Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull-Zero reenact it for both his accession and this period ending. The parallel Bird-Jaguar wished to draw is obvious: The first pair of actors were his own parents; the second were the parents of his heir, Chel-Te.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#534|53]]. Marx and Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 24, 321.</div>
+The bundle ritual conducted by Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great-Skull- Zero is linked to Chel-Te by the events depicted in the lintels over the flanking doorways. Over the right portal, Chel-Te stands before Great- Skull-Zero (Fig. 7:17c), the patriarch of his mother’s lineage. Great-Skull- Zero is depicted here precisely because he is Chel-Te’s mother’s brother. Exactly this relationship (yichan[452] in Mayan) stands between his name and the heir’s below.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#544|54]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 272. For Marx’s vision of a stateless classless society, see Paul Raekstad, ''Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism'' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 155–72.</div>
+Over the left door (Fig. 7:17a), Chel-Te stands before his mother who sits on a bench and gestures to him with her right hand. Since the flanking scenes have no date, we presume that all three lintels depict different actions that took place on the same day. First, Bird-Jaguar and his wife enacted a bundle rite; next, Chel-Te presented himself to his mother; finally, he appeared before his maternal uncle, who was the head of his mother’s clan. The goal of these juxtapositions was not to glorify Bird-Jaguar, but to show his wife’s lineage giving public support to his son as the heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#554|55]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 45.</div>
+One year later, Bird-Jaguar depicted himself and his son over the central door of Temple 33 (Fig. 7:11b). The date is 9.16.6.0.0 (April 7, 757), and the event, the celebration of his fifth year in office as king. Both father and son display the same bird scepters Bird-Jaguar held out to Lady 6-Sky-Ahau forty days after his accession on June 12, 752 (Lintel 5, Fig. 7:15a). Bird-Jaguar chose this location carefully. Temple 33, if you remember, is the building that housed the only picture of Bird-Jaguar’s accession. It was also prominently located on the slope immediately above the temple program of legitimization. By depicting his son’s participation in this important ritual at this key site, Bird-Jaguar hoped to document in public and permanent form Chel-Te’s status as the heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#564|56]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 145.</div>
+Nine years later, Bird-Jaguar erected another series of lintels for his son, elaborating upon strategies he had used in earlier buildings. Going upriver again, he built a new temple next to the one that showed his son and wife celebrating the five-tun period ending. This time the event he chose to focus on was the fifteen-tun ending date, 9.16.15.0.0 (February 19, 766). Over the center door (Fig. 7:18), he depicted both himself and his son displaying GII Manikin Scepters in these period-ending rites.[453]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#574|57]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 124.</div>
+Bird-Jaguar took a different strategy, however, in the two flanking lintels. Over the right door, he showed a woman, presumably his wife Lady Great-Skull-Zero, holding a Vision Serpent in her arms as she materializes a vision. Over the left door (Fig. 7:18c), he repeated for the second time the scene of his mother Lady Eveningstar acting with Shield- Jaguar on the occasion of his own birth during the Jupiter-Saturn hiero- phany. This juxtaposition is critical. The center lintel proves that Bird-Jaguar acted with his son, and the left lintel relegitimizes his own claim to the throne by declaring once again that his mother acted with his father in the same ritual sequence his father memorialized with Lady Xoc. This is but another example of Bird-Jaguar’s oft-repeated declaration that his mother was as good and as exalted as his father’s principal wife. Clearly the man “doth protest too much.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#584|58]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 52. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 63.</div>
+Any problems Bird-Jaguar encountered, either because of his mother’s status or because of rivals with better claims to the throne, would very likely be inherited by his son. Aware of the difficulties his heir might still face, Bird-Jaguar was not yet willing to rest on his laurels. He apparently used the same period-ending date, 9.16.15.0.0, to seal the allegiance B of yet another cahal for his son. This fellow, Tilot, ruled the territory on the other side of the river from a subordinate town called La Pasadita. Three lintels mounted on a building at that site show Bird-Jaguar acting in public with Tilot. On the center lintel (Fig. 7:19b), Bird-Jaguar scatters blood on the period ending while Tilot stands by as his principal attendant. Flanking this critical scene is a picture of Tilot and Bird-Jaguar standing on either side of an unfortunate captive taken in battle on June 14, 759 (Fig. 7:19a). On the other side (Fig. 7:19c), Tilot stands before Chel-Te, who sits on a bench as either king or heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#594|59]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''147.</div>
+These lintels lent prestige to Tilot by depicting him in public performance with the high king. The third scene, however, was the payoff, for it shows this powerful cahal in public performance with Bird-Jaguar’s son, Chel-Te. The price Bird-Jaguar paid for this allegiance was the personal elevation of Tilot into a co-performer with the king; but by sharing his prerogatives and his place in history, Bird-Jaguar reinforced the submission of this cahal to his own authority and secured Tilot’s loyalty to the heir.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#604|60]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 43. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 136.</div>
+[[][]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#614|61]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 115–16, 130–31, 289–90; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 11–13.</div>
+The last monument Bird-Jaguar erected during his life continued his effort to secure the succession. It also brought his story full circle. Set on Lintel 9 (Fig. 7:20), the single lintel within Temple 2, a building situated on a terrace just below Temple I,[454] this scene shows Great-Skull-Zero, the patriarch of the queen’s lineage, conducting a flapstaff ritual with Bird- Jaguar. As we mentioned above, this was the ritual first enacted by Shield- Jaguar on June 27, 736 (Fig. 7:5a and b). It was also the ritual Bird-Jaguar enacted with his father on June 26, 741, just before Shield-Jaguar died (Fig. 7:5c). It was the ritual depicted on Lintel 33 as well (Fig. 7:5d), on June 26, 747, with Bird-Jaguar as the sole actor. This final ritual took place on June 20, 768, nearly thirty-two years after its first enactment.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#624|62]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 20.</div>
+The flapstaff rituals had always been critical to Bird-Jaguar’s strategy to prove himself the legitimate heir to Shield-Jaguar. To show himself enacting the same event with his brother-in-law was an extraordinary elevation of that cahal’s prestige. But his reason for allowing such honor to fall to Great-Skull-Zero is also patently clear from the text on Lintel 9. There Great-Skull-Zero is named yichan ahau, “the brother of the mother of the ahau (read ‘heir’).” Bird-Jaguar participated in this double b display to insure that Great-Skull-Zero would support Chel-Te’s assumption of the throne after Bird-Jaguar’s death. The strategy apparently worked, for Chel-Te took the throne successfully and was known thereafter as the namesake of his famous grandfather, Shield-Jaguar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#634|63]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 123.</div>
+Ironically, even though Bird-Jaguar had had problems demonstrating his right to the throne on his home ground, his regional prestige had been secure even before he was formally installed as king. The king of Piedras Negras had felt his presence prestigious enough to invite him to participate in the designation of the Piedras Negras heir; and this event took place three years before Bird-Jaguar was even crowned. Bird-Jag- uar’s royal visit is recorded in an extraordinary wall panel (Fig. 7:21) commissioned retrospectively by Ruler 7 of Piedras Negras. The panel depicts a palace scene where a celebration is taking place. The occasion is the heir-designation of Ruler 5, Ruler 7’s predecessor. The events recorded on the wall panel are these: On July 31, 749 (9.15.18.3.13), Ruler 4 of Piedras Negras celebrated the end of his first twenty tuns as king, in a ritual witnessed by Jaguar ofYaxchilan,[455] who had come down the river by canoe to participate in it. The date of this anniversary falls during the period when Yaxchilan was without a king. We cannot identify the Yaxchilan visitor with absolute certainty, but it was most likely Bird-Jaguar, who would have come as the de facto king of Yaxchilan.
-[[#644|64]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 179.
+When next Bird-Jaguar appears in a Piedras Negras text, his name and actions are clear. The cahalob portrayed in the scene on this particular wall panel are divided into four groups. The king of Piedras Negras sits on a bench and talks to the seven cahalob seated on the step below him. An ornamental pot divides them into two groups—one of three and another of four people. On the king’s immediate right stands an adult and at least three smaller figures, one of which is the heir to the Piedras Negras throne.[456] At the king’s far right stands a group of three lords talking among themselves. The texts around and in front of this latter group identify these people as Yaxchilan lords; and, according to the text next to the Piedras Negras king, one of them is the great Bird-Jaguar himself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#654|65]]. Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 20.</div>
+This scene took place on October 20, 757 (9.16.6.9.16), during the fifth year of Bird-Jaguar’s reign. He had come down the river to conduct a bundle rite for the designation of the Piedras Negras heir. This ritual was apparently celebrated just in the nick of time, for forty-one days later, on November 30, Ruler 4 died. Ruler 5, the heir whose inheritance Bird- Jaguar publicly affirmed, took the throne on March 30, 758 (9.16.6.17.17).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#664|66]]. Vladimir Lenin, ''Selected Works ''(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 635, 682–83, 685–86.</div>
+Interestingly enough, Bird-Jaguar’s visit to Piedras Negras was never recorded in the public forum at Yaxchilan. It would seem that the Piedras Negras heir and his descendants are the ones who gained prestige from this visit and wished to record it for their posterity. What then did Bird- Jaguar gain? Presumably, if he went to Piedras Negras at the behest of Ruler 4 to give his public support to the Piedras Negras heir, he secured reciprocal support for his own son’s claim.
-[[#674|67]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 181.
+Bird-Jaguar’s political problems and his use of monumental art to work out solutions were by no means novel either to his reign or to the political experience at Yaxchilan. Other Maya rulers, such as Pacal and Chan-Bahlum of Palenque, had their own problems with succession. Within the history of the Classic Maya, however, Bird-Jaguar’s solution— sharing the public forum with powerful political allies—was new. The fact that this strategy worked so well would gradually lead to its adaptation by other kings, up and down the Usumacinta River, in the years to come.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#684|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 170.</div>
+Before Bird-Jaguar, Maya kings did not depict themselves on public monuments with cahalob, regardless of how noble or powerful these nobles might have been or how important to the king’s political machinations they were. In indoor mural paintings, of course, the practice was different. Even in the very early murals of Uaxactun, the court, not just the king, was represented. On stelae and architectural lintels, however, kings normally depicted only themselves and occasionally family members—especially mothers and fathers from whom they claimed legitimate inheritance. Cahalob could and did commission monuments to celebrate important events in their lives, but they erected them in their own house compounds or in the subordinate communities they ruled for the high kings. Bird-Jaguar was the first to elevate his cahalob to stand beside him in the public eye. He did so to secure their support for his claim to the throne. That alliance must have been a fragile one, however, for he was forced to share the stage of history with them again and again in order to maintain the alliance, both for himself and his son.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#694|69]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 165, 210, 288, 385–86,</div>
+Bird-Jaguar was not the first Maya king to find himself in a struggle to command the succession. Primogeniture can go wrong as often as right, especially when ambitious offspring from multiple marriages are competing for the throne. We can be sure that Bird-Jaguar was not the first son of a foreign wife to compete for a Maya throne. Others before him manipulated the system and strove to use the nobility to support their claim. Bird-Jaguar, however, was the first to exalt those cahalob by depicting them standing beside him in the public record, and we know he did not do so out of a sense of largess. Those cahalob he portrayed with him sold their loyalty for a piece of Yaxchilan’s public history. The price they—and B the people of the city—paid was more than sworn fealty to the king. The precedents established by Bird-Jaguar were dangerous and eventually debilitating. A king with Bird-Jaguar’s personal charisma and ferocity in battle could afford to share the power of the high kingship; but the legacy of conciliar power he left to the cahal families he honored was not so well commanded by his descendants.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#704|70]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 123–24.</div>
+. Copán: The Death of First Dawn[457]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#714|71]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 274.</div>
+The mountain spine of the Americas wends its way through Maya country, creating a cool high region of mists and towering volcanoes. From the base of these mountains, the peninsula of Yucatán stretches far to the north through the territory of the kings. Located on the southeastern margin of the Maya world, the Copan River drains the valley system it has carved from the rugged, forest-shrouded mountains of western Honduras. This waterway eventually joins the mighty Motagua River on its way to the Gulf of Honduras and the Caribbean Sea. The broadest valley in this system shares its name, Copan, with that river.[458]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#723|72]]. Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 29–30.</div>
+This river is responsible for the richness of the land in the Copan Valley. Each year during the rains of summer and fall, floodw’aters deposit the alluvial soils from the mud-laden river waters onto the valley floor. The resulting fertile bottomlands follow the ambling path of the river through low foothills and the higher ridge lands of the rugged mountains (Fig. 8:1). On their upper reaches, these mountains are covered by pine forests, while deeper in the valley, they are covered with tropical growth—including the mighty ceiba, the sacred tree of all Mesoamericans.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#733|73]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 88–89.</div>
+From the dawn of time, the Copan Valley was an inviting place to live. Between 1100 B.C. and 900 B.C. the first settlers, who were just learning to rely on agriculture to feed themselves, drifted into the valley from the Guatemalan highlands or perhaps the adjacent mountains of El Salvador. These earliest immigrants lived in temporary camps, enjoying a good life in the tall gallery forest along the water’s edge. They hunted deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary[459] among the trees and ate the maize and beans they harvested from clearings they had cut with stone axes. By 900 B.C., their farmer descendants had built permanent homes and spread out to occupy the entire valley. There, throughout the bottomlands and foothills, they left the debris of their pottery cooking vessels and the bowls, plates, and cups of their daily meals. Eventually these people established at least three villages—one in the Sepulturas Group, another in the area called the Bosque, and the last under the Great Plaza later built by Copan’s kings (Fig. 8:9).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#743|74]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 130–31.</div>
+These prosperous pioneering farmers buried their loved ones under their patio floors within earshot of the children and descendants working and playing above them. In proximity to their homes and families, ancestral spirits could dwell happily in the Otherworld. When the family patriarch stood on the patio and conducted a bloodletting, he knew the ancestors were below his feet—close at hand should he want to call them forth. The departed were buried with an array of gifts and personal belongings, including quantities of highly prized jade, as well as incised and painted pottery with sacred images the Maya had borrowed from the I Olmec—the creators of the first great interregional system of thought and art in Mesoamerica.[460]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#753|75]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 198.</div>
+These rites for the beloved dead show us that the people of the valley had already begun the process that led to the creation of social stratification, for the privileged were more able than others to take rich offerings with them into Xibalba. The differences in social standing among families in the villages, engendered by bountiful harvests or success in varying commercial enterprises, would become both the foundation of kingship and its burden in the centuries to come. During the Middle Preclassic period, however, the people in the Copán Valley were blessed with an unfailing abundance of all the requirements of life. Their prosperity may well have outstripped even their contemporaries in the lowlands of the Petén, for the quantity of jade found in their tombs exceeds all other burials known from that time.[461]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#763|76]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 191, 193.</div>
+By contrast, we know little of the Copanccs who lived in the valley during the Late Preclassic period (300 B.C.-A.D.150). This was the time when their Maya brethren in the lowlands, at places like Cerros, Tikal, and Uaxactún, were acknowledging their first kings. In contrast, Copán saw a major reduction of population and building activity during this 450-year span. Archaeologists have found traces of human activity from the first three centuries of this period in only two locations—one south and the other southwest of the Acropolis. And even this weak trace disappears from the record during the last 150 years of this period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#773|77]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306.</div>
+Scholars working on the history of the Copán Valley have no explanation for this curious lapse. This inexplicable disappearance of population from a thriving area becomes even more enigmatic when compared with Maya activities in both the Pacific areas to the south and the lowlands to the north. In all other parts of the Maya world, the Late Preclassic was a time of exuberant innovation and social experimentation. It was a time when the institutions of government achieved their Classic forms with the invention of kingship. To all appearances, however, the valley of Copán was seriously depopulated, and those who lived among the remnants of a more glorious past did not participate in the events sweeping the Maya society of that time. Kingship, for the Copanecs, would come to the valley only in later years when the mythology and symbolism of governance had already been developed.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#783|78]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306.</div>
+By A.D. 200, however, the valley of Copán had recovered and her people had joined the mainstream of Classic Maya life. The construction of the first levels of the Acropolis stimulated a series of building projects, including floors and platforms that would serve, in future centuries, as the foundations lor the Great Plaza, the Ballcourt, and the Acropolis of Copán’s cultural apogee (Fig. 8:1). During this early time, farmers and craftspeople settled the rich agricultural bottomlands north of the river, building their homes as close as possible to the valley’s growing center of power.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#793|79]]. For a brief overview of this very complex history from an anti-Leninist perspective, see: Maurice Brinton, “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution,” in ''For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton'', ed. David Goodway (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 293–378; Iain McKay, “The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice,” in ''Bloodstained'', 61–117.</div>
+This pattern of settlement created no difficulties in the beginning when there was plenty of farmland and only a moderate number of people to support. But slowly the surrounding green sea of maize and forest gave way to a city of white and red plazas—with fine structures of stone, wood, and thatch all jostling for position. Soon, social standing and proximity to the dynamic pulse of the city became more important to these exuberant people than their own food production. Meter by meter, over the centuries, they usurped the richest cropland, constructing their lineage compounds on acreage that used to be fields, gradually forcing the farmers up into the margins of the valley.[462] These new urban elite established particularly dense neighborhoods around the Acropolis, in the area now under the modern village of Copan, and on the ridge above it at a spot called El Cerro de las Mesas. Aristocrats and commoners alike vied with each other for the privilege of residing in the reflected brilliance of the Acropolis and the concentration of power it represented.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#803|80]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+[[][Fig. 8:2 The Founding of Copan as a Kingdom<br><sub>b-c: drawing by B.W. Fash</sub>]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#813|81]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 388, 394. For details about Goldman and Berkman’s deportation, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''269–72, 291–302.</div>
+The Classic dynastic chronicles of Copan refer to this dawning era of the kingdom in ways that closely match the archaeological evidence. Later Copan kings remembered the date A.D. 160 as the year their kingdom was established as a political entity. At least three kings recorded 8.6.0.0.0 (December 18, A.D. 159) as a critical early date of the city, and Stela 1 (Fig. 8:2) records the date July 13, A.D. 160, in connection with the glyph that signifies Copan both as a physical location and a political entity. Unfortunately, the area of the text that once recorded the precise event is now destroyed, but we believe that later Copanecs honored this date as the founding of their kingdom.[463]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#823|82]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 387.</div>
+By A.D. 426, Copan’s ruling dynasty was founded and the principle of kingship was accepted by the elites reemcrging in the valley society after the dormancy of the Late Preclassic period. No doubt here as elsewhere in the Maya world, the advent of this institution consolidated the kingdom, creating a politically coherent court in which the ahauob could air their differences and rivalries while at the same time presenting a unified front to their followers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#833|83]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 389.</div>
+Yax-Kuk-Mo’ (“Blue-Quetzal-Macaw”), who founded the ruling dynasty, appears in the historical and archaeological record[464] about 260 years after the recovery from the Late Preclassic slump. We know that he founded the dynasty of kings who led the kingdom of Copan throughout the Classic period. All the subsequent kings of Copan counted their numerical position in the succession from him, naming themselves, for example, “the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[465] In all, sixteen descendants followed Yax-Kuk-Mo’ onto Copan’s throne, and these kings ruled the valley for the next four hundred years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#843|84]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 391.</div>
+| <verbatim>#</verbatim> | <strong>Name</strong> | <strong>Accession</strong> | <strong>Death</strong> | <strong>Other dates</strong> |
+| <strong>1</strong> | <strong>Yax-Kuk-Mo’</strong> | | | <strong>426–435?</strong> |
+| 2 | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>3</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>4</strong> | <strong>Cu-Ix</strong> | | | <strong>465 ± 15 yrs</strong> |
+| <strong>5</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>6</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>7</strong> | <strong>Waterlily-Jaguar</strong> | | | <strong>504–544 +</strong> |
+| <strong>8</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | | |
+| <strong>9</strong> | <strong>unknown</strong> | | <strong>551, Dec. 30</strong> | <strong>????</strong> |
+| <strong>10</strong> | <strong>Moon-Jaguar</strong> | <strong>553, May 26</strong> | <strong>578, Oct. 26</strong> | |
+| <strong>11</strong> | <strong>Butz’-Chan</strong> | <strong>578, Nov. 19</strong> | <strong>626, Jan. 23</strong> | |
+| <strong>12</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Imix-God K</strong> | <strong>628, Feb. 8</strong> | <strong>695, Jun. 18</strong> | |
+| <strong>13</strong> | <strong>18-Rabbit-God K</strong> | <strong>695, Jul. 9</strong> | <strong>738, May 3</strong> | |
+| <strong>14</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Monkey</strong> | <strong>738, Jun. 11</strong> | <strong>749, Feb. 4</strong> | |
+| <strong>15</strong> | <strong>Smoke-Shell</strong> | <strong>749, Feb. 18</strong> | <strong>????</strong> | |
+| <strong>16</strong> | <strong>Yax-Pac</strong> | <strong>763, Jul. 2</strong> | <strong>820, May 6 -(</strong> | <strong>mos.</strong> |
+| <strong>17</strong> | <strong>U-Cit-Tok</strong> | <strong>????</strong> | <strong>822, Feb. 10</strong> | |
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#853|85]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 404. For other anarchist critiques of the Bolsheviks, see Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 103–36; Peter Arshinov, ''History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Voline, ''The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921 ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019).</div>
+In actuality, Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the first king of Copan. It is probable, however, that he earned the designation of founder because he exemplified the charismatic qualities of the divine ahau better than any of his predecessors. It is important to remember that here, as at Palenque and the other kingdoms that acknowledged such great statesmen, the definition of a founding ancestor served a deeper social purpose. Aristocrats who descended from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ constituted a distinct cluster of noble families, the clan of the kings, by birth superior to all the other elite in the valley. In principle, these people owed the reigning monarch a special measure of loyalty and support.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#863|86]]. For example Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 4,'' Critique of Other Socialisms'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 154; Paul Thomas, ''Karl Marx and the Anarchists'' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 12, 16, 343–48; Vladimir Lenin, ''Collected Works'', vol. 10,'' ''ed. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 71–73; George Plechanoff, ''Anarchism and Socialism ''(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 94–100.</div>
+The earliest date associated with Yax-Kuk-Mo’, 8.19.0.0.0, (February 1, 426), appears as retrospective history on Stela 15, a monument of the seventh successor, Waterlily-Jaguar. At the other end of the historical record, Yax-Pac, the sixteenth successor and the last great king of the dynasty, also recorded events in the life of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He did so on his Altar Q (Fig. 8:3), which he called the “Altar of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” Yax-Pac used the sides of the altar to unfold the sixteen successors of his line, beginning with the founder and ending with himself. On the top, he inscribed two important deeds of Yax-Kuk’-Mo’.[466] There we can read that on 8.19.10.10.17 (September 6, 426), Yax-Kuk-Mo’ displayed the God K scepter of royal authority. Three days later on 8.19.10.11.0 (September 9) I Yax-Kuk-Mo’ “came” or “arrived” as the founder of the lineage[467] (Fig. 8:4a and b). Yax-Pac recorded these two events as if they were the fundamental actions that spawned the dynasty and the kingdom. His commemoration of these events was critical to his campaign for political support from the many ahauob who reckoned their aristocratic pedigree from this founder. Later in the chapter we shall see why Yax-Pac was so anxious to associate himself publicly with the charismatic founder of his dynasty.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#873|87]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 43'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 490–91.</div>
+The thirteenth successor, a particularly powerful man named 18- Rabbit, also evoked these early rituals of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the basis of authority over his own ahauob. On Stela J, 18-Rabbit inscribed his own accession and that of his immediate predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K, in an intricate text rendered in the form of a mat, the symbol of the kingly throne. On the first strand of the mat, he linked 9.13.10.0.0, the day this extraordinary monument was dedicated, to 9.0.0.0.0 (December 11, 435), a day when Yax-Kuk-Mo’ performed another “God K-in-hand” event (Fig. 8:4c).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#883|88]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 254–55.</div>
+Recent excavations under the Acropolis have turned up a building erected either during or shortly after the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Discovered under the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (10L-26), this newly excavated temple once held in its back chamber a stela dated at 9.0.0.0.0,[468] Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is recorded as the king in power when the baktun turned, while his son, the second king of the dynasty, was the owner of this tree-stone. Most important for our understanding of Copan’s history, the text associates the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ with the same date that would be evoked by his descendant, 18-Rabbit. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not an invention of later kings who were fabricating a glorified past for political reasons. Yax-Kuk-Mo’ did rule Copan, and in doing so he left a sacred legacy of tree-stones and temples to his descendants that is now coming to light in the excavations of the Acropolis.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#893|89]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 331.</div>
+This early temple, which is called Papagayo by the archaeologists,[469] was built only a few meters away from the first Ballcourt, which had been built during an earlier predynastic time. These two buildings became two of Copan’s central metaphors of power throughout its recorded history— the temple of kings and the ballcourt portal to the Otherworld. As the centuries progressed, the successors of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ commissioned temple after temple, building layer upon layer until that first temple and its companions grew into a range of sacred mountains overlooking a forest of tree-stones in the Great Plaza below.[470]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#903|90]]. Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 155. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 171.</div>
+Papagayo temple held not only the 9.0.0.0.0 tree-stone, but also a step placed inside it during a remodeling project by the fourth successor, a ruler named Cu-Ix. Its text and accumulating evidence from ongoing excavations show that Papagayo was embedded in predynastic architecture and that it remained a focus of dynastic activity for centuries after the founder died.[471] This marvelous little temple emerged from obscurity when a tunnel was excavated into the southwest corner of the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs.[472] Both the step and the above-mentioned stela are part of the growing body of inscriptions from the Early Classic period that have been emerging in recent excavations. Among the early kings who have been identified from this collection of inscriptions are the first ruler, Yax-Kuk-Mo’; his son, the second ruler; the fourth, Cu-Ix; the seventh, Waterlily-Jaguar, who left us two tree-stones (Stelae 15 and E) in the Great Plaza; the tenth, Moon-Jaguar, who left at least one tree-stone in the area under the modern village; and the eleventh, Butz’-Chan, who erected a tree-stone both in the village area and in the growing Acropolis. (See Fig. 8:3b for a summary of chronology that has been recovered to date.)[473]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#913|91]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 28; ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''73–78; Peter Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 39–43.</div>
+Late Classic Copanec kings considered that their authority sprang from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and his charismatic performance as king. From his reign onward, Copan’s dynastic history unfolded steadily until the system itself collapsed four hundred years later when the civilization of the Classic Maya as a whole failed. Many of the works of Copan’s earliest kings still lie buried under the Acropolis and inside other structures, and are just beginning to come to light. Unfortunately, even when we uncover a buried building or find a fragmentary stela, we rarely find names associated with it. The reason for this is clear. Inscriptions are often unreadable, either because they were already old and worn when they were buried or because they were ritually “terminated” when they were placed in their final resting places. Earlier monuments were torn down to make room for the newer ones, and older buildings were either buried or broken up to be recycled as building materials. There is reason to suspect, however, that the destruction and reuse in construction of inscriptional materials was not a casual matter. The Copanecs, like other Maya, probably defused the power of places and objects they wished to cover or dispose of through special termination rituals involving defacement and careful breakage. These rituals are a source of much of the damage to early inscriptions at Copan.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#923|92]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 238.</div>
+Our access to recorded history really begins in earnest with the twelfth successor, Smoke-Imix-God K. This ruler stands out as a man of extraordinary accomplishment in a world that produced many great kings. One of the longest-lived kings in Copan’s history, he reigned for sixty-seven years, from A.D. 628 to 695. He presided over the Late Classic explosion of Copan into a major power in the Maya world, expanding the dominion of its dynasty to the widest extent it would ever know. The period ending on 9.11.0.0.0 (A.D. 652) represented one of the pinnacles of his reign. On that date, he erected a series of stelae throughout the valley, making it his personal sacred space in the same manner that other kings marked out the more modest spaces of pyramid summits and plazas for their ecstatic communion.[474] At the eastern entrance to the valley, he set Stelae 23, 13, 12, and at the western entrance, Stelae 10 and 19, all pivoting off Stelae 2 and 3 set up in the huge main plaza north of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:5a). Thus Smoke-Imix-God K activated the entire city of Copan and its valley as his Otherworld portal. Even recalcitrant lords of the noble lineages might hesitate to plot intrigue within the supernatural perimeter of a king so favored by the Ancestors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#933|93]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 226.</div>
+Smoke-Imix-God K’s conversion of the entire community of the Copan Valley into a magical instrument bent to his will was more than a boastful gesture. Under his aegis, the Copan nobility enjoyed prestige and wealth at the expense of their rivals in neighboring cities. They were the dominant elite of Maya civilization’s southeastern region.[475] On the same 9.11.0.0.0 period ending, Smoke-Imix-God K celebrated his preeminence over his nearest neighbor, Quirigua, by erecting Altar L there[476] (Fig. 8:5b). In years to come this nearby kingdom, which straddled the rich trade routes of the Motagua River, would throw off the yoke of Copan in a spectacular battle. As Smoke-Imix-God K pursued his dream of empire, however, that day was far in the future. While the king grasped lands to the north and west on the Motagua, Maya lords, most likely from his own city, established themselves in the Valley of La Venta on the Chamelecon River between Copan and their non-Maya neighbors to the east.[477] In the hands of the powerful and ambitious Smoke-Imix-God K, Copan may have been one of the largest Maya royal territories of its time.
-[[#943|94]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 313.
+In A.D. 695, 18-Rabbit succeeded Smoke-Imix-God K and began his own transformation of his ancestors’ work. Where his predecessor had defined the boundaries of the sacred valley, 18-Rabbit chose the pivotal center of Copan as the stage for his own contribution to the glorious I history of the dynasty. Exhorting the truly exceptional sculptors, architects, scribes, and artisans of his time to extend their arts well beyond the limits of precedence, 18-Rabbit brought about the creation of many beautiful dramas in stone. In the course of a lifetime, he transformed the center of Copan into a unique and beautiful expression of Maya royal power that has endured to the present, unfailingly touching the most dispassionate of modern visitors.
-[[#953|95]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 59.
+One of his many projects was the remodeling of the Ballcourt. 18- Rabbit capped the older markers created by his predecessors with new images emphasizing his personal role as the incarnation of the Ancestral Hero Twins in their triumph over the Lords of Death. Next to the Ballcourt and within the adjacent space of the Great Plaza, 18-Rabbit also created a symbolic forest of te-tunob (Fig. 8:6). Within this magnificent grove each tree-stone bore his portrait in the guise of a god he had manifested through ecstatic ritual. All the tree-stones found in the Great Plaza were placed there between 9.14.0.0.0 and 9.15.5.0.0 (a.1). 711 — 736).[478]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#963|96]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 22, 53, 225.</div>
+One of 18-Rabbit’s final projects focused on the Acropolis directly south of his Ballcourt. There he rebuilt one of the ancient living mountains of his forebears, a monument referred to today as Temple 22.[479] 18-Rabbit commissioned his best artists to decorate this amazing building inside and out with deeply carved stone sculpture. Outside the temple, great Witz Monsters reared at the four corners of the cosmos, while the doorway of the inner sanctum, the king’s portal to the Otherworld, was framed by an arching Celestial Monster—the sky of the apotheosized Ancestors—laced with the blood scrolls of royal sacrifice (Pl. <verbatim>#).</verbatim> This sky of the king was held aloft by Pauahtunob, the age-old burden-bearers who stand at the four points of the compass and lift the heavens above the earth. Here they allowed the king to enter the darkness where only divine ahauob could go and return alive.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#973|97]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''313.</div>
+The magnificence of 18-Rabbit’s work lay not in the themes, which were traditional for Copan and all Maya ahauob, but rather in their execution. Unlike Pacal and Chan-Bahlum at Palenque, 18-Rabbit revealed no special political agenda in his efforts. Instead he focused solely upon the centrality of the king in the life of the state. From Smoke-Imix- God K he had inherited a court of nobles already accustomed to governing neighboring cities. To control these noble subordinates, 18-Rabbit needed to energetically and eloquently assert the prerogatives of his kingship over them. As we can see from the examples of his monumental art shown above, he accomplished his purpose with theological sophistication and poetic passion. Few kings in Maya history have ever wielded the canon of royal power with results as truly breathtaking as those of 18-Rabbit. But this balance of power was not to hold for long. From the clear vantage afforded us by hindsight, we can understand the root of the disaster that ended his reign. His beautiful expressions of the pivotal role of the divine king were aimed at a noble audience who would become increasingly convinced of their own ability to manage the affairs of the kingdom without the king.
-[[#983|98]]. Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''341.
+The beginning of the end can be seen in the monumental art created by these very nobles. As the prosperity of the kingdom overflowed from the king to the valley elite, this elite began putting up monuments which, although erected in private and not public space, emulated royal practices. During 18-Rabbit’s reign, for example, a lineage of scribes occupying Compound 9N-8 built an extraordinary family temple (Structure 9N-82- Sub; Pl. <verbatim>#)</verbatim> dedicated to God N, the patron god of writing, and hence, of history itself. The texts of the temple mention the high king and probably also his predecessor, Smoke-Imix-God K.[480] Not only were the nobility of 18-Rabbit’s reign privileged to commission such elaborately decorated buildings, they were able to take full advantage of the extraordinary artistic talent flourishing in the community of this time. In the case of Structure 9N-82, the <verbatim>scribes</verbatim> lineage was able to hire one of the finest masters in the valley to execute their sculpture.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#993|99]]. Quoted in T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 183.</div>
+During 18-Rabbit’s forty-two-year reign, Copan not only flourished as an artistic center of the first rank, but also became an multi-ethnic society, drawing in non-Maya people from the central region of Honduras around Lake Yojoa and Comayagua.[481] The recruitment of these people into the city created a truly cosmopolitan state, but one in which a slight mythological adjustment had to be made. Traditionally, the high king had always been the living manifestation of the special covenant which existed between the Maya people and their supernatural ancestors. By bringing in people from a non-Maya ethnic group, however, 18-Rabbit had to expand upon this tradition. There is not the slightest hint of unorthodox ritual in his monuments. Still, his lavish amplification of the cult of the king as god and supernatural hero may register his public appeal to barbarians less knowledgeable in Maya theology, and more impressed by pageantry, than local aristocrats. He may have persuaded such new converts to Maya culture that he was indeed their advocate to the Other- world, just as he was the advocate for his own people. Whether or not he enacted such a strategy, he did succeed in enhancing the power base of his kingdom and increasing the population of the valley.[482]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1003|100]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 20–21.</div>
+As had happened in other ambitious Late Classic kingdoms, the path of war and expansion taken by Copan finally turned back upon itself. The unfortunate 18-Rabbit reaped the whirlwind caused by his predecessor’s actions. In mid-career and at the height of his glory, he had installed a new ruler named Cauac-Sky (Fig. 8:7) at Quirigua, the kingdom brought under the hegemony of Copan by his father, Smoke- Imix-God K. The installation ritual, a “God K-in-hand” event, had taken place on January 2, A.D. 725, in “the land of (u cab}” 18-Rabbit of Copan.[483] Thirteen years after this accession, Cauac-Sky turned on his liege lord and attacked, taking 18-Rabbit captive in battle and sacrificing him at Quirigua on May 3, 738.[484]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1013|101]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''53, 52.</div>
+The subsequent fate of Copan was profoundly different from that of Tikal or Naranjo after their defeat by Caracol. In their excavations, archaeologists have found no evidence that Quirigua dominated Copan at all. The population of Copan continued to burgeon, its lords pursued their architectural plans, and its merchants plied their trade with the rest of Honduras. In other words, everything was business as usual. A person looking at the record of the city’s economic and social life would never l> guess that anything had changed.[485]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1023|102]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''53. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 310–11.</div>
+Although it is possible that Cauac-Sky just wasn’t able to dominate so vast a neighbor from his more modest city, a more convincing explanation to this puzzle emerges. The absence of effect in the archaeological record may register a fundamental reaction of the Copan people themselves. The death of the king precipitated no faltering in the orderly world of the nobility and common tolk, perhaps because they were coming to believe that they could get along without a king. Apparently, the ruling dynasty was in no position to challenge that belief for quite some time. According to the inscriptional record, it took the dynasty almost twenty years to recover the prestige it lost when 18-Rabbit succumbed to his rival. Ultimately, this failure fooled the patriarchs of the subordinate lineages into believing that their civilized world could survive quite well without a king at the center.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1033|103]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 167–68.</div>
+There was still a king at Copan, however, even if he was an unremarkable one. Thirty-nine days after the defeat of 18-Rabbit, on a day close to the maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar,[486] a new king named Smoke-Monkey acceded to the throne. We have not been able to associate this king with any stelae or structures at Copan. In fact, the only historical episode of his reign that we know of was recorded by one of his descendants. This event, a first appearance of Eveningstar, was recorded in Temple 11 by the sixteenth successor of the dynasty, Yax-Pac.[487] After ruling for ten silent years, Smoke-Monkey died, and Smoke-Shell, his son,[488] became the king on February 18, 749.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1043|104]]. Quoted in Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 13.</div>
+Although Smoke-Shell reigned only fourteen years, he succeeded in reestablishing the tradition of glorious public performance, if not the glory, of his dynasty. In contrast to the long decades of humiliation that were the price of defeat paid by the ahauob of Tikal and Naranjo, Smoke- Shell brought his kingdom back from the ignominy of defeat within a katun. The strategy he used featured two main components: an ambitious building program and a judicious political marriage.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1053|105]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 535.</div>
+Shortly after taking the throne, Smoke-Shell began reconstruction work[489] on one of the oldest and most sacred points in the city center—the locus that had grown over that very early temple that contained the 9.0.0.0.0 temple and its adjacent Ballcourt. The magnificent result of his effort, the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs (Structure 10L-26), is one of the premier monuments of the New World and a unique expression of the supernatural path of kings.[490] Inscribed upon this stairway of carved risers is the longest Precolumbian text known in the New World, comprising over twenty-two hundred glyphs.[491] This elegant text records the accessions and deaths of each of the high kings of the Yax-Kuk-Mo’ dynasty. This record of Copan’s divine history rises out of the mouth of an inverted Vision Serpent, pouring like a prophetic revelation of the cosmos, compelling the ancestors of Smoke-Shell to return through the sacred portal he 1 had activated for them. Flowing upward in the midst of this chronicle sit the last five successors of the dynasty, Smoke-Monkey, 18-Rabbit, Smoke- F Imix-God K, Butz’-Chan, and Moon-Jaguar, carved in life-sized portraits <verbatim><</verbatim> (Fig. 8:8). These ancestors are girded in the battle gear of Tlaloc-Venus 1 conquest war we have seen in full bloom at Tikal, Caracol, and Dos Pilas. In his version of history, Smoke-Shell proclaimed the prowess of his predecessors as warlords despite the personal defeat of 18-Rabbit by a vassal ahau.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1063|106]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 164. See also Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''144.</div>
+As the building on his portal progressed, Smoke-Shell sent to a faraway, exotic place to bring a new wife to Copan. From the opposite side of the Maya world, a royal woman from the famous kingdom of Palenque crossed the dangerous lands to marry her new husband and bear him a son who would become the next king.[492] His strategy echoes the marriage alliance between Naranjo and Dos Pilas that revived the Naranjo dynasty after its defeat by Lord Kan of Caracol. This marriage likely occurred late in Smoke-Shell’s life, for his heir came to the throne when he was less than twenty years old.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1073|107]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 159.</div>
+Smoke-Shell’s efforts to revive the dynasty and to persuade his nobility to follow him apparently succeeded only in the short term. He bequeathed his child, Yax-Pac, a variety of problems touching every stratum of society, from the highest to the most humble. In every long-lived dynasty, the pyramid of royal descendants increases every generation until an enormous body of people exists, all sharing the prerogatives of royal kinship. Not only are these people a drain on the society that must support them, but they create political problems by intriguing against one another. The general nobility was also growing in wealth and power at this time. Needless to say, Yax-Pac would have to be a very strong king to control and satisfy all these political factions. In addition to this, the valley of Copan was plagued by a variety of economic and ecological problems. The rulers of Copan, by and large, had done their job too well. The valley resources had been overdeveloped and strained to their very limits. Now it seemed that the trend toward progress was reversing itself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1083|108]]. Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun'' ''(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 515. This distinction was first proposed in Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 123–24. It should be noted that, since its publication, Schmidt was revealed to be a racist.</div>
+Overpopulation was one of the primary problems Yax-Pac would have to deal with during his reign. The kingdom had continued to grow at a steady rate during the two reigns following 18-Rabbit’s capture. Throughout the eighth century, more and more residential complexes[493] sprang up on the rich bottomlands around the Acropolis (Fig. 8:9). The region within a one-kilometer radius of the Ballcourt contained over fifteen hundred structures, with an estimated density of three thousand people per square kilometer. At least twenty thousand people were trying to eke out a living from the badly strained resources. This population simply could not be supported by local agriculture alone, especially since T the best land was buried under the expanding residential complexes around the Acropolis.[494]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1093|109]]. Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 99.Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism</div>
+When Yax-Pac came to the throne, he inherited a disaster in the C making. Over the generations, expanding residential zones had covered J the best agricultural lands, forcing farmers into the foothills and then onto the mountain slopes. There they were forced to clear more and more forest to produce maize fields. Clearing, in turn, caused erosion. Shorter fallow periods were depleting the usable soils at an even faster rate, just when the kingdom was required to feed the largest population in its history.[495]
-== {{anchor|Chapter6InsurrectionistAnarc1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook9}} {{anchor|Chapter6InsurrectionistAnarc}} Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism ==
+Deforestation caused other problems as well. People needed wood for their cooking fires, for the making of lime in the construction of temples,[496] for building houses, and for dozens of other domestic and ritual uses. As more and more people settled in the valley, the forest gradually retreated, exposing more and more of the poor soils on the mountain slopes and causing more erosion. The cutting down of the forest also affected climate and rainfall, making it yet more difficult for people to sustain themselves. With an insufficient food supply came malnutrition and its resultant chronic diseases, rampant conditions that affected the nobility as well as the common people.[497] The quality of life, which was never very good in the preindustrial cities of the ancient world, fast deteriorated toward the unbearable in Copan under the pained gaze of its last great king.
-Insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that met to learn and discuss ideas, plan direct action, organize talks and countercultural activities—such as dances and picnics—produce or distribute anarchist literature, and engage in violent acts of revolt against the ruling classes and their institutions.[[#1Priortothecreationofthe|1]] The ultimate aim of these different methods of action was the same: to inspire or evoke a revolutionary upsurge by the working classes. In theory, anarchists advocating, praising, and engaging in violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions would provoke or inspire significant segments of the working classes to rise up, which would in turn motivate others to join them in insurrection. This would lead to a chain reaction of uprisings spawning an ever-increasing number of revolts until the working classes had formed a mass movement, forcefully expropriated the ruling classes and abolished capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#2MichaelSchmidtandvanderW|2]]
+As his father had before him, Yax-Pac continued to place the focus of his royal performance upon dynastic history, holding up the values of his predecessors as the canon by which he would guide Copan through the dangers and crises of the present. After becoming king on July 2, 763, Yax-Pac’s first action on Copan’s beautiful stage[498] was the setting of a small carved altar representing the Vision Serpent into the Great Plaza amid the tree-stones of his rehabilitated predecessor, 18-Rabbit (Fig. 8:20). This small altar celebrated 9.16.15.0.0, the first important period ending after his accession.
-This strategy was advocated by Galleani. He held that “the way to revolution, whose initial phase must be the individual act of rebellion, inseparable from propaganda, from the mental preparation which understands it, integrates it, leading to larger and more frequent repetitions through which collective insurrections flow into the social revolution.”[[#3LuigiGalleaniTheEndofAn|3]] Although insurrectionist anarchists favored individual acts of rebellion, they also believed that the social revolution would be brought about by the working classes acting as a mass movement engaging in collective insurrections. Galleani endorsed “the direct and independent action of individuals and masses,” including “rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.”[[#4GalleaniEndofAnarchism3|4]] Cafiero thought that a social revolution would require “the violence of the insurgent masses.”[[#5CarloCafieroRevolutionEd|5]]
+Shortly thereafter, the young ahau turned his attention to an ancient temple standing on the northern edge of the Acropolis, overlooking the forest of tree-stones. This old temple had been built by the seventh successor of the dynasty and named on its dedication step “Holy Copan Temple, the House of Mah Kina Yax-Kuk-Mo’.”[499] At the base of the temple stairs, Yax-Pac’s father, Smoke-Shell, had erected Stela N, his final contribution to Copan’s public history. Yax-Pac chose the locale of that old temple as the site of his greatest work. There he planned to raise Temple 11, one of the most ambitious structures ever built in the history of the city. In the tradition of his forebears, he encased the old temple in the new, shaping the imagery of the new temple into a unique and spectacular expression both of cosmic order and of the sanctions that bound the fate of the community to that of the king. Through this building and the Otherworld portal it housed at the junction of its dark corridors, Yax-Pac began his lifelong effort to ward off the impending disaster that hung over the valley.
-The three main ideas that constituted insurrectionist anarchist strategy in this historical period were an opposition to formal organizations, a rejection of struggling for immediate reforms, and a commitment to propaganda of the deed. This chapter will establish what insurrectionists thought and how they used the theory of practice to justify or reject particular strategies. In particular, it will provide an overview of how the meaning of propaganda of the deed changed over time.
+We are not sure of the exact starting date for the construction of this temple, but work on it must have begun in the first few years of Yax-Pac’s reign. Six years later, on March 27, 769, following the celebration of the equinox, Yax-Pac dedicated the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the temple. This Reviewing Stand faced the inner court and temples of his forebears which studded the West Court of the Acropolis. Built against the first terrace of the pyramid that would eventually support Temple 11, the Reviewing Stand was a metaphorical Xibalban Ballcourt, complete with three rectangular markers set into the plaza floor below in the pattern of a playing alley (Fig. 8:10). Jutting outward into the West Court, this stairway was a place of sacrifice where victims were rolled down the stairs as if they were the ball.[500] The stair itself carried an inscribed history of its dedication rituals, naming the structure as a ballcourt. Huge stone conch shells marked the terrace as the surface of the Xibalban waters through which the ax-wielding executioner god Chac-Xib-Chac (an aspect of Venus, the firstborn of the Twins) rose when he was brought forth by the king’s ecstasy.
-'''Opposition to Formal Organizations'''
+Yax-Pac further indicated that the entire West Court was under the murky waters of the Underworld by placing two floating caimans[501] atop the platform opposite the Reviewing Stand. The southern side of this pyramid was thus a representation of Xibalba. It was the “place of fright,” the Otherworld where sacrificial victims were sent into the land of the Lords of Death to play ball and to deliver messages from the divine ahau.[502] With the construction of such an elaborate, theatrical ballcourt, Yax-Pac was making an important statement about his strategies for the kingship: He would require himself to excel in battle against noble enemies and bring these enemies here to die.
-Insurrectionist anarchists argued that anarchism as a movement should not be organized through large, formal organizations characterized by such things as having a constitution, elected delegates, yearly national congresses that passed congress resolutions, and an official membership. Insurrectionist anarchists were initially in favor of federations because anarchism as a movement developed within the federations of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals. Paul Brousse, for example, was one of the main theorists of propaganda of the deed but also participated in a French anarchist federation that was affiliated with the Saint-Imier International.[[#6DavidStaffordFromAnarchis|6]] Similarly, during the 1880s, Most advocated propaganda of the deed, rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and played a key role in the founding of the American national federation of the International Working People’s Association.[[#7TomGoyensBeerandRevoluti|7]]
+As the king set about preparing his new temple and the supernatural landscape surrounding it, he reached back to 18-Rabbit, the source of both his dynasty’s success and its profoundest failure. In August of the same year in which he dedicated the Reviewing Stand, Yax-Pac built within the Acropolis what would be the first of many bridges to his paradoxical ancestor. The king set Altar Z on the platform between Temple 22—the magnificent temple created by 18-Rabbit on his first katun anniversary— and Temple 11, the structure that would become his own cosmic building (Fig. 8:11). Yax-Pac may also have set another important precedent with this small monument, for we think it makes mention of a younger brother of the king.[503] This inscription is significant because it indicates the beginning of a trend in Yax-Pac’s strategies in regard to the public record. In the course of his lifetime, Yax-Pac peopled Copan’s stage of history with an ever-increasing troupe of ahauob. This is a strategy we have seen before at Yaxchilan—sharing power is always better than losing it.
-From the late 1870s onward, a significant segment of insurrectionist anarchists, such as Cafiero, came to reject formal organizations for strategic reasons, while still advocating federations as a key component of the future anarchist society. Eventually what had been a matter of strategy was transformed into a matter of principle and insurrectionist anarchists came to hold that all formal organizations were fundamentally incompatible with anarchist values and goals. It is difficult to establish how many insurrectionist anarchists there were because, unlike trade unions, they did not keep records of their size.[[#8CafieroRevolution4142P|8]]
+[[][Fig. 8:12 Temple 11: Architectural Detail]]
-Despite the fact that some insurrectionist anarchists claimed to reject all organization, they were not against organization in the sense of people coming together to act collectively as a group. Insurrectionist anarchists themselves usually distinguished between ''free association'', which they supported, and ''organization'', by which they meant formal organization, which they opposed. The Italian anarchist Giuseppe Ciancabilla wrote in 1899 that “organization (not free agreement, nor free association, we mean) is absolutely anti-anarchist.”[[#9QuotedinKenyonZimmerImmi|9]] In 1925, Galleani advocated a society based on cooperation, mutual agreement between groups, and “''the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association''.”[[#10GalleaniEndofAnarchism|10]] Yet he also thought that “organizationalists cannot find a form of organization compatible with their anarchist principles.”[[#11GalleaniEndofAnarchism|11]] For this reason he opposed “the political organization of the anarchist party,” by which he meant a specific anarchist organization, and “the organization of the craft and trade unions.”[[#12GalleaniEndofAnarchism|12]]
+The first katun ending of Yax-Pac’s life was a significant one. Not only was it the first major festival of his young career, but by coincidence it tell on the day of a partial eclipse, followed sixteen days later by the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar.[504] To celebrate the katun ending,[505] Yax-Pac sandwiched a tiny building, Temple 21a, between 18-Rabbit’s great cosmic building, Temple 22, and the now-destroyed Temple 21.[506] The small scale of Temple 21a and its position between the two huge buildings suggests Yax-Pac had assigned most of the available labor to the ongoing construction of Temple 11. Yet regardless of the scale, Yax-Pac was clearly intent upon associating himself with the earlier king. Perhaps Smoke-Shell had successfully restored 18-Rabbit’s reputation and he was, by that time, remembered more for the accomplishments of his reign than the ignominy of his death. Nevertheless, the repeated efforts by Yax-Pac to embrace the memory of this ancestor suggest that there was a pressing need to continue the process of rehabilitation not only of 18-Rabbit but also of his dynasty in the face of a disenchanted nobility.
-Critics of insurrectionist anarchism were likewise aware that they did not literally reject all organization. The Spanish anarchist Juan Serrano y Oteiza, who advocated formal organization and revolutionary trade unionism, wrote in 1885 that his opponents within the movement, “do not accept any organization except that of a group, and therefore they do not have organized trade sections, nor do they have local federations, district federations or federations of trade or trade unions. . . . Their only and exclusive form of organization are the groups or circles of social studies among which there has not been established any pact or constituted any commission which can serve as a center of relations between the respective collective bodies that pursue the same ends.”[[#13QuotedinGeorgeRichardEse|13]] Several years later in 1890, Malatesta noted that antiorganizationalist anarchists “rack their brains to come up with names to take the place of organization, but in actual fact they quite sheepishly engage in organization or attempts at organization.”[[#14MalatestaTheMethodofFre|14]]
+On 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773), two years after the katun ending, Yax-Pac dedicated Temple 11. The magnificent cosmic statement he made in this monument would become the basis of his fame. Before the passage of time had sullied its original splendor, this building was truly one of the most unusual and intriguing temples ever built in the F Precolumbian Maya world. Facing the northern horizon, this two-story-high temple with wide interior vaults towered over the Ballcourt and 1 Great Plaza. Its principal north door opened through the mouth of a huge Witz Monster,[507] which glared down at the gathered populace below. At each of the two northern corners of this microcosmic world stood a giant Pauahtun (Fig. 8:12a), its huge hands holding up images of the Cosmic Monster, arching across the roof entablatures in symbolic replication of remnant of the full-figured inscription that was over the door the arch of heaven and the planetary beings who moved through that path on their supernatural journeys.[508] It was as if he took the magnificent sculpture at the heart of Temple 22, 18-Rabbit’s greatest building, and turned it inside out so that it became the outer facade rather than an arch over the door to the inner sanctum. Today, fragments of the scaled body of this Cosmic Monster litter the ground around the fallen temple.
-Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organizations for two main reasons. First, they held that it made it too easy for the state to infiltrate, persecute, and surveil the anarchist movement. In 1874, a group of influential Italian anarchists argued that the wave of state repression that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International had experienced was a product of how they had primarily organized within a formal public federation. This had enabled “bourgeois troublemakers and spies” to infiltrate the movement and provide the government with information such that they could track the activities of anarchists and repress them at “the opportune moment.”[[#15QuotedinNunzioPerniconea|15]]
+Yax-Pac designed the ground floor of this temple with a wide eastwest gallery crossed by a smaller north-south corridor. In this way he engineered an entrance to the building from each of the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west. Just inside each of these four doors, panels facing one another record historical events important to Yax-Pac’s political strategy and the dedication of the temple itself.[509] What is curious about each pair of texts is that one is in normal reading order, while the other facing text reads in reverse order as if you are seeing a mirror image. It is as if you were standing between the glass entry doors of a bank—the writing on the door in front of you would read normally while the writing behind you would be reversed. If you were standing outside, however, the texts on both door would read in the proper order. In Temple 11, of course, the walls are not transparent, but this made no difference, since the audience addressed by these texts consisted of the ancestors and the gods. Apparently, they could read through solid walls. Furthermore, each pair of texts is designed to be read from a different direction starting with the north door: To read them in proper order (that is, “outside the bank doors”) the reader would have to circulate through all four of the directions. This attention to the “point of view” of the gods is not unusual in Maya art.
-From late 1878 onward, the amount of state repression that Italian anarchists faced massively expanded. This occurred due to the Italian ruling classes using an unsuccessful republican assassination attempt against King Umberto I of Italy as an opportunity to destroy the International once and for all.[[#16PerniconeandOttanelliAss|16]] In 1879, Cafiero responded to these events by arguing that anarchists should establish “''secret and firm bonds'' between all of us” because formal organizations “display all our forces to the public, i.e., to the police” and so reveal “how and where to strike us.”[[#17QuotedinNunzioPernicone|17]]
+Just to the south of the place where the two corridors cross, Yax-Pac built a small raised platform set within the skeletal, gaping jaws of the Maw of the Otherworld. The carved image of this great Maw was set at both the southern (Fig. 8:12b) and northern (Fig. 8:13) entries onto the platform. He made the northern side special by replacing the lower jaw of the Maw with a bench depicting twenty ancestral figures, ten each on either side of an inscription recording his accession as king (Fig. 8:14). These were the dynasts who had preceded him onto the throne of Copan.[510] Yax-Pac had brought them forth from the land of the ancestors to participate in his accession rite. Their sanction of this rite was forever frozen in this stone depiction, serving as a testament to those privileged elite who would enter the temple to see and affirm.
-One year later, the Italian state issued the killing blow to the International in Italy when the high court ruled that any internationalist organization composed of five or more people was an association of malefactors. This enabled the Italian state to arrest and imprison anarchists simply for being anarchists, even if they had not planned or engaged in any illegal actions. At the same time, numerous anarchists were subject to searches of their home, suppression of newspapers, dissolution of groups, extreme limitations on their freedom of association and movement, and deportation to, and forcible confinement on, desolate islands near Sicily and southern Italy.[[#18PerniconeandOttanelliAss|18]] It was within this context of state repression that the Italian anarchist paper ''La Gazetta Operaia'' wrote in July 1887 that “experience teaches that a vast association of a revolutionary character easily offers its flank to the police, therefore to persecution. . . . United and fighting all together under the impetus of a vast association we run the risk of being crushed with a single blow by adversaries stronger than us.”[[#19QuotedinPerniconeItalian|19]]
+Temple 11 was the greatest work of Yax-Pac’s life. To be sure, he built other buildings during his reign, but none so grand in size, ambition, and conception as this one.[511] Temple 11 was an umbilicus linking the kingdom of Yax-Pac to the nurturing, demanding cosmos: the final great expression at Copan of the Maya vision. Its lower level, especially to the south, manifested the underwater world of Xibalba.[512] The great rising Acropolis that supported it was the sacred mountain which housed other portals into the Otherworld. The temple roof was the sky held away from the mountain by the Pauahtunob at the corners of the world. The front door was the huge mouth of the mountain, the cave through which the king entered sacred space. At the heart of the temple was the raised platform defined as the portal to the Otherworld. This building sealed the covenant between Yax-Pac, his people, and their collective destiny. Its enormous size and grand scope were designed to proclaim the power of the king to rally his people in the face of their difficulties. It may not have been the finest Maya temple ever built—the sculptures weren’t anywhere near the artistry of 18-Rabbit’s. Nor was it the most architecturally sound—the vaults were so wide they had to be reinforced because the walls started to fall down as soon as the builders began to raise the second story. Nevertheless, this temple was the statement of authority the young king hoped would help keep disaster at bay.
-The second reason why insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization was that, from their perspective, formal organizations made people unfree and inhibited their membership’s ability to act and take initiative.[[#20DavideTurcatoMakingSense|20]] This entailed that formal organizations were incompatible with the unity of means and ends, since they failed to produce the self-determining individuals needed for a successful social revolution and the production and reproduction of an anarchist society. This hostile attitude toward formal organization partly stemmed from the negative experiences anarchists had within the First International due to the actions of the General Council.[[#21DavidBerryAHistoryofth|21]]
+[[][Fig. 8:14 Temple 11 bench]]
-Formal organizations were above all thought to mirror the organizational form of the state. In February 1887, the Italian anarchist paper ''Humanitas'' labeled formal organizations “a state in miniature” and argued that they destroyed “the spirit of initiative in individuals, who expect everything from this organization.”[[#22QuotedinPerniconeItalian|22]] In 1925, Galleani similarly claimed that any formal organization “has its programme; i.e., its constitutional charter: in assemblies of group representatives it has its parliament: in its management, its boards and executive committees, it has its government. In short, it is a graduated superstructure of bodies a true hierarchy, no matter how disguised.”[[#23GalleaniEndofAnarchism|23]]
+Yax-Pac continued to refine his fundamental statement of charismatic power during the next three years in construction projects that altered the west side of the Acropolis. At the five-year point of Katun 17, three years after he had dedicated Temple 11, he set Altar Q (Fig. 8:3) in front of the newly completed Temple 16, a massive pyramid he built at the heart of the Acropolis. Replete with images of Tlaloc warfare and the skulls of slain victims, Temple 16 replicated the imagery of his father’s great project—Temple 26—as Temple 11 had reproduced Temple 22 of 18-Rabbit’s reign.[513]
-According to Galleani, constitutions forced the formal organization to follow a particular set of procedures, rather than what was appropriate or necessary given ongoing events and the nature of the present struggle. Formal avenues for decision-making and action, such as congresses, filtered out original ideas and reaffirmed the orthodoxy of the organization. When workers wanted to take action themselves and implement their own ideas, they were instead instructed to go through the appropriate committee or were informed that a committee had already been set up to handle this task and would take care of matters. Even federations based on delegates were critiqued for leading to a situation in which representatives and those higher up in the organization made decisions that the wider membership accepted out of discipline, regardless of their own opinions and interests. In each case, the organization would take on a life of its own and control its membership.[[#24GalleaniEndofAnarchism|24]]
+Altar Q, a low, flat-sided monument, was more suited to the functions of a throne than those of an altar. It depicted each of the sixteen ancestors seated upon his own name glyph. The whole dynasty unfolded in a clockwise direction, starting with Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and culminating with Yax-Pax himself. His ancestors sit in front of a monument celebrating war while they ride just below the surface of the symbolic sea he created in the West Court. The program of imagery is an elegant and powerful statement of power. Ironically, the charisma of the divine lord as exemplified in battle and conquest belied the reality of Yax-Pac’s circumstances, for this was to be the last great exhortation of kingship to be built in the valley of Copan.
-Galleani rejected the idea that delegates could represent others, even if they had been elected and mandated. This was because “every delegate . . . could represent only his own ideas and feelings, not those of his constituents, which are infinitely variable on any subject.”[[#25GalleaniEndofAnarchism|25]] He thought it was impossible to “anarchically delegate to another person one’s own thought, one’s own energy, one’s own will.”[[#26QuotedinSentaGalleani1|26]] Galleani also rejected congress resolutions on the grounds that they subordinated the minority to the majority and thereby made people unfree. For Galleani, congresses were only useful and consistent with anarchism if they were just meetings that provided an occasion for individual militants to meet, share ideas, and work together.[[#27SentaGalleani126Formal|27]]
+For all of its elegance and centrality, the West Court and Altar Q mark a change in strategy for Yax-Pac. Up to this time, kings had acknowledged the passage of sacred time with buildings, sculptures, and inscriptions erected only in the ceremonial heart of the community. Now, however, Yax-Pac also began to write his history outside the Acropolis by traveling to the residential compounds of his lords to conduct royal rituals within their lineage houses. This was clearly a comedown for an “ahau of the ahauob,” made necessary by the need to hold the allegiance of his lords in the face of civil disaster.[514]
-As an alternative to large formal organizations, insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups. These affinity groups, which were also called circles or clubs, were either more or less permanent cells or were formed for a specific task and dissolved once it was complete. They typically had a membership of between four and twenty members and were given a wide variety of different names, such as Germinal (in honor of Émile Zola’s novel), The Termites Libertarian Circle, The Barricade Group, The Right to be Idle Group, and the Revolutionary Propaganda Circle.[[#28AndrewDouglasHoytAndTh|28]] An 1885 article in ''Le Révolté'' claimed that “we do not believe in long-term associations, federations, etc. For us, a group should come together only for a clearly defined objective or short-term action; once the action is accomplished, the group should reform on a new basis, either with the same elements, or with new ones.”[[#29QuotedinBerryFrenchAnar|29]]
+The next important period-ending date that Yax-Pac celebrated, 9.17.10.0.0, was commemorated not only in the royal precinct of the Acropolis, but also in the household of a noble family of the city. The date and description of the scattering rite that Yax-Pax enacted is inscribed on a bench in the main building of Group 9M-18[515] (Fig. 8:9), a large noble household to the east of the Acropolis. Yax-Pac’s action is recorded as an event still to come in the future at the time the patriarch dedicated his house, the place where he held court over the affairs of his family and followers (Fig. 8:15). Strangely the name of the patriarch was not included on the bench. Instead it records a dedicatory offering given in the name of Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s father.[516] Perhaps the lineage patriarch felt he should not place his name so close to that of his liege lord, so he remained anonymous. Nevertheless, he brought prestige to his own house and weight to the decisions he made astride this bench by focusing on the high kings as the main actors in his family drama.
-Thus, anarchist affinity groups were viewed as superior to formal organizations because the fact that they were loosely structured and composed of a small group of people, who knew and trusted one another, meant that they simultaneously enabled freedom of initiative while also being more effective at avoiding infiltration, persecution, and state surveillance. If an affinity group was infiltrated or repressed by the state then, given its small size, the damage to the anarchist movement was less severe than when the same occurred to a large federation.[[#30CarloCafieroTheOrganisa|30]] In 1890, Jean Grave argued in ''La Révolte'' that affinity groups accustom “individuals to bestir themselves, to act, without being bogged down in routine and immobility, thereby preparing the groupings of the society to come, by forcing individuals to act for themselves, to seek out one another on the basis of their inclinations, their affinities.”[[#31QuotedinAlexandreSkirda|31]] Affinity groups were, in other words, thought to prefigure the social relations of an anarchist society and so were constituted by forms of practice that developed individuals with the right kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for achieving anarchist goals.
+Shortly after the period ending, another lineage benefited from Yax- Pac’s ritual attention, and bragged about it inside the new house of their leader. The scribal lineage living in Group 9N-8 (Fig. 8:9) dismantled the magnificent structure an earlier patriarch had commissioned during the reign of 18-Rabbit and put a new, larger building in its place. The elegance of this building was unmistakable. Its upper zone was sculpted with mosaic images of the lineage’s own patriarch; and on either side of the door that led into the large, central chamber of the building, a Pauahtun, one of the patron gods of their craft, rose dramatically from the Maw of Xibalba.
-This is not to say that insurrectionist anarchists thought that only small groups of people should engage in actions. Massive crowds containing numerous small affinity groups could, for example, riot without belonging to a formal organization. Large groups of people who were participating in an uprising could quickly form mass general assemblies in order to make agreements about what to do next. They could do so without establishing a federation, electing an administrative committee, or passing binding congress resolutions. Nor is it the case that affinity groups were completely isolated entities. Insurrectionist anarchists sought to achieve coordination between different groups via informal social networks, which were usually centered around specific periodicals, rather than through the establishment of a formal federation. This can be seen in the history of the paper ''Cronaca Sovversiva'', which was edited by Galleani and based in the United States. It not only spread anarchist ideas and instilled a sense of anarchist identity in its readership, but also connected anarchist groups by publishing their correspondence and announcements in a single place that they all read. This facilitated both the exchange of information and enabled groups to engage in dialogue with one another and make collective decisions.[[#32HoytAndTheyCalledThem|32]]
+Almost all of the floor space of this chamber was occupied by a bench[517] on which the patriarch sat to conduct the business of the lineage. This bench (Fig. 8:16) records that on 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Ch’en (July 10, 781),[518] this patriarch dedicated his new house while the king participated in those rites with him. As Yax-Pac had done for the lineage head of Compound 9M-18, he honored this patriarch by participating in rituals on his home ground. The king was breaking precedent, going to his subordinate rather than the other way around. At Yaxchilan, Bird-Jaguar had also gone to his subordinate across the river at La Pasadita, but in that instance he had functioned as the principal actor while the cahal was clearly in a position of subservience. In the scribes’ building, Yax-Pac’s name closes the text, but the noble is given equal billing. Furthermore, this text doubles as the body of a Cosmic Monster, imagery directly associated with the royal house of Copan. Four Pauahtunob hold up the bench in the same way that they hold up the sky in Temples 22, 26, and 11. The head of this scribes’ lineage utilized the same symbolic imagery as his king, and he did so apparently with Yax-Pac’s approval.
-Some insurrectionist anarchists were so committed to their rejection of formal organizations that they viewed those who advocated them as betraying the core principles of anarchism. This resulted in a great deal of polemical debate that could sometimes even turn violent. In September 1899, the antiorganizationalist anarchist barber Domenico Pazzaglia shot Malatesta in the leg during a meeting at a saloon in West Hoboken, New Jersey, due to Malatesta’s advocacy of formal organizations. He responded in a truly anarchist fashion by refusing to tell the police who had shot him.[[#33ZimmerImmigrants60Pern|33]]
+Yax-Pac thus gave away some of the hard-earned royal charisma of his ancestors to honor the head of this lineage. Was this the act of a desperate man? In all likelihood the king was fully aware of the potential danger in his capitulation to the nobility, but regarded it as a necessary step in his efforts to save the kingdom from impending economic disaster. He was clearly seeking solutions to immediate political problems threatening the peace and stability of the domain destiny had placed in his hands. Like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan in the west, Yax-Pac tried to secure the continuing loyalty of the patriarchs of his kingdom by sharing his prerogatives with them, particularly the privilege of history.
-'''Rejection of Struggling for Reforms'''
+Once Yax-Pac had embarked on this policy, he pursued it systematically and creatively during the second half of Katun 17. He raised monuments in the community at large and in the main ceremonial center and “lent” his historical actions to the monuments of significant others in the political arena of Copan. In the region now under the modern village of Copan (Fig. 8:5), the king erected two monuments to celebrate the first katun anniversary of his accession. Here, in the village area, he planted Stela 8 (Fig. 8:17), on which he recorded this anniversary and a related bloodletting which took place five days later. As we have seen so often before, the anniversary date fell on an important station of Venus: the maximum elongation of the Morningstar.[519] Yax-Pac also chose to record his parentage on this stela, reminding his people that he was the child of the woman from Palenque. This is the only monument ever to mention Yax-Pac’s relationship to his mother, and it is possible that he did so here in order to lend prestige to his half brother by the same woman.
-Insurrectionist anarchism opposed the strategy of struggling for immediate reforms in the present. As the paper ''L’Insurrezione'' argued in 1881, “anything that facilitates and brings the time of the insurrection nearer, is good; all that keeps it away through maintaining the appearance of progress, is bad. This is the principle that guides us.”[[#34QuotedinDiPaolaKnights|34]] This rejection of struggling for immediate reforms included not only parliamentary politics, which all anarchists rejected, but also participating within trade unions in order to struggle for higher wages, shorter working days, and improved working conditions. Those insurrectionists who did advocate participating within trade unions did so only when they thought it was a good opportunity to undermine the trade union bureaucracy, spread anarchist ideas, develop the spirit of revolt, and persuade workers that their involvement in the trade union was futile and would not achieve their emancipation. This included the organization of wildcat strikes that were not approved or supported by the trade union’s leadership.[[#35GalleaniEndofAnarchism|35]]
+The second monument celebrating Yax-Pac’s first katun anniversary, Altar T, also graced the central plaza of the town. Here, for the first time, we are formally introduced to Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, the king’s half brother by the woman Smoke-Shell had brought from Palenque to rejuvenate the lineage.[520] As we shall see shortly, this sibling would become an important protagonist in the saga of Copan during the twilight of its dynasty.
-Insurrectionist anarchists rejected struggling for immediate reforms for three main reasons. First, they held that reforms did not challenge, but rather rested upon, the ongoing existence of dominant institutions. Social movements that aim to win reforms will therefore end up consenting to and reproducing the existing economic and political system, rather than overthrowing it. They may start out as revolutionary, but the practice of struggling for reforms will, over time, cause radical capacities, drives and, consciousness to decay and be replaced by ones compatible with dominant structures. Reforms that are initially viewed as only a means or stepping stone to revolution will, over time, be transformed into the actual end goals of a movement’s activity. For insurrectionist anarchists, this process of revolutionary movements being weakened by the struggle for reforms could be clearly seen in socialist political parties that became less and less radical over time in order to gain votes and pass reformist laws through political alliances with bourgeois parties.[[#36GalleaniEndofAnarchism|36]]
+Altar T was decorated on three sides with twelve figures, some human and some animalistic. All of these figures faced toward a central inscription referring to the half brother (Fig. 8:18). The figures on Altar T emulate the style of Altar Q, Yax-Pac’s great dynastic monument of twenty years earlier.[521] This design was chosen quite intentionally to honor the king’s half brother. The top surface has a rendering of the image of ‘ a great crocodile sprawling in the waters of the earth. Waterlilies decorate his limbs, and his rear legs and tail drape over the corners and the back of the altar. Like fanciful scales, the king’s name marches down the spine of the crocodile, and the tail of the great beast falls between two humanlike figures personifying the date of Yax-Pac’s accession and its anniversary twenty years later. Sitting among the extended legs of the floating crocodile in the world under its belly are six human figures, presumably ancestors. To be sure, Altar T and its imagery celebrated the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s accession, but the protagonist whose name sits under the nose of the crocodile is the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac himself.
-Second, they thought that the ruling classes only conceded reforms to the working classes in order to calm popular discontent. Although reforms might improve people’s lives in the short term, they also stabilized class society and thereby perpetuated the suffering and oppression of the working classes. This is because the achievement of reforms can alter the consciousness of workers such that they come to mistakenly believe that the ruling classes are benevolent, view the state as a servant of the people, and put their hopes in politicians and the law. Reforms could, in short, have the dangerous effect of causing workers to desire a better and more humane master, rather than no master at all. According to Galleani, “reforms” are “the ballast the bourgeoisie throws overboard to lighten its old boat in the hope of saving the sad cargo of its privileges from sinking in the revolutionary storm.”[[#37GalleaniEndofAnarchism|37]] Given this, reforms should be seen as the byproducts of threats to ruling class power that are granted when “attacks against the existing social institutions become more forceful and violent,” rather than being the main immediate goal of political and economic struggle.[[#38GalleaniEndofAnarchism|38]]
+We know Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac was the half brother of the king because his status as child of the king’s mother was prominently inscribed on Altar U, a monument he himself raised (Fig. 8:19) in the town which once existed under the modern village. The “sun-eyed throne stone,”[522] as the Copanecs called it, depicts a sun-eyed monster flanked by two old gods who sit at the open Maw of the Otherworld. The inscriptions on the rear and top surface retrospectively document Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s participation in rituals on 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793) and the seating on January 29, 780, of yet another player on Copan’s historical stage. Named Yax-Kamlay, this man, who may have been a younger full brother of the king, also played a crucial role in the last half of Yax-Pac’s reign. The name Yax K’amlay means “First Steward”[523] so that this full brother may have functioned in a role like “prime minister,” while the half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, governed the district of the ancient city under the modern village area for the high king. This type of governance, rule by a council of brothers, ultimately failed in Copán, but it succeeded at Chichón Itzá, as we shall see in the next chapter.
-Third, insurrectionists tended to subscribe to the iron law of wages, which had been advocated by the political economist David Ricardo and later popularized among socialists by Ferdinand Lassalle, who was one of the main founders of what would become German social democracy. The concept claimed that real wages under capitalism would always tend toward the amount of money required to secure the subsistence of the worker. For Ricardo and Lassalle, this was related to population growth: an expansion of the supply of labor would lead to a decrease in wages, and living costs would increase due to larger families.[[#39GDHColeAHistoryof|39]] The insurrectionist anarchists, in contrast, focused on the idea that any increase in wages that workers won through struggle would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living as capitalists and landlords charged more for basic necessities such as food and rent. If this were true, then fighting to win higher wages was futile, a waste of time and energy, since any wage increase would not last.[[#40GalleaniEndofAnarchism|40]]
+The altar stone was dedicated on June 24, 792, a day near the summer solstice, but the text also records events later than this date. We surmise that the altar was commissioned as an object in anticipation of its function as a historical forum. The anticipated rituals occurred on the day 9.18.2.5.17 3 Caban 0 Pop (January 25, 793), a day that happily coincided with the thirtieth tun anniversary (30x360) of the king’s accession and the thirteenth haab anniversary (13x365) of Yax-Kamlay’s seating. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, who dedicated the altar, honored both his kingly half brother and the man who was the king’s first minister by celebrating this unusual co-anniversary. It was Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, however, who is clearly the protagonist of the inscription.
-In place of struggles for immediate reforms, insurrectionist anarchists advocated immediate violent confrontation with dominant institutions. Galleani argued that “tactics of corrosion and continuous attack should be preferred . . . immediate attempts at partial expropriation, individual rebellion and insurrection” or strikes that adopt “an openly revolutionary character” and seek, “through the inevitable use of force and violence, the unconditional surrender of the ''ruling'' classes.”[[#41GalleaniEndofAnarchism|41]] Insurrectionist anarchists held that, instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, it would be better to “start the revolution inside oneself and realize it according to the best of our abilities in partial experiments, wherever such an opportunity arises, and whenever a bold group of our comrades have the conviction and courage to try.”[[#42GalleaniEndofAnarchism|42]] These tactics were thought to “exert the most spirited influence over the masses” and would therefore inspire the working classes to rise up.[[#43GalleaniEndofAnarchism|43]]
+Let us stop for a moment and imagine what the king would have seen as he led a procession from the Acropolis to the village on the day these anniversaries were to be celebrated.
-'''Propaganda of the Deed'''
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-If revolutions were, as an article in ''La Révolte'' stated in 1890, “the product of a spontaneous explosion of the masses’ discontent and anger,” then the role of revolutionaries was to ignite this anger.[[#44QuotedinBerryFrenchAnar|44]] Propaganda of the deed was one of the primary means through which insurrectionist anarchists attempted to spread the spirit of revolt and thereby contribute toward the emergence of a social revolution. Historians of terrorism frequently make the mistake of equating the entire idea of propaganda of the deed with the kinds of high-profile assassination or bombings carried out by anarchists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.[[#45ForexampleDavidCRapopo|45]] The idea of propaganda of the deed did not, however, always refer to the advocacy and practice of individuals attempting to murder the ruling classes in the name of revolution. It underwent a process of development over three decades of theory and practice.
+Yax-Pac paused on the causeway near the ancient tree-stone erected by his ancestor, Smoke-Imix-God K, when the valley had known happier times and lived in hope. He could see the visage of his ancestor etched by the shadows cast in the sharp morning light. The great te-tun displayed two faces—a proud human one facing the rising sun, and another masked with the image of the Sun God watching the ending of the days. Smoke- Imix was forever caught in his act of sacrifice, eternally materializing the sacred world for his people with the shedding of his blood.[524]
-What would come to be called “propaganda of the deed” started out as the view that anarchist ideas could and should be spread through actions, rather than only through written or spoken propaganda. Propaganda of the deed proceeded to undergo two main phases of development. During its first phase, between 1870 and 1880, it largely referred to the practice of anarchists collectively attempting to launch armed insurrections in order to spread their ideas and provoke a popular uprising. This went alongside the view that other forms of collective direct action, such as combative demonstrations, were an effective means of popularizing anarchist ideas and gaining support for the anarchist movement. During its second phase, which lasted roughly from the 1880s to the early 1900s, it transformed into the idea that individual acts of violence, such as assassinating heads of state or bombing crowded opera houses frequented by the wealthy, were a legitimate form of working-class vengeance that would weaken the ruling classes and inspire the working classes to rebel.[[#46PaulAvrichAnarchistPortr|46]] Both notions of propaganda of the deed shared the idea that revolutionary action by an anarchist minority could successfully spread anarchist ideas and spark a chain of events that would culminate in a social revolution. Where they differed was the kind of action advocated and performed.[[#47Therearesomeusagesofthe|47]]
+For a moment, Yax-Pac wondered what kind of immortality his forebear had won with the great tree-stone he had erected halfway between the Acropolis and the old community now governed by his younger half brother, the son of the royal woman from Palenque. He was grateful that the ancestors had provided him with such a capable sibling. The vigorous, optimistic Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac strove to give him the labor and tribute necessary to keep the kingdom together in these hard times, and now he was overseeing the celebration of the thirtieth tun of reign. By coincidence, Yax-Pac’s anniversary fell on the same day that ended the thirteenth haab of Yax-Kamlay’s administration. They would commemorate the two anniversaries together.
-''Propaganda of the Deed: First Phase''
+Yax-Pac walked twenty paces ahead and paused again when he saw the smaller tree-stone[525] visible in the small compound to the west of the double portrait of his ancestor. This portrait of Smoke-Imix was less impressive in scale, but equally important, for it preserved the memory of the king as warrior, celebrating the half-period of Katun 12. On that day, Venus had stood still just after he had journeyed across the face of his brother, the Sun, to become Morningstar.[526] 18-Rabbit had made his debut as the heir on the occasion of that period ending. Who among the nobility remembered, or respected, such things nowadays? There was a coughing and shuffling of silent impatience in the halted entourage behind him. He ignored them.
-The 1870s began with a series of unsuccessful insurrections. In September 1870, Bakunin and his associates launched a quickly defeated insurrection in Lyon. On the September 26, they issued a program, adopted by a crowd of six thousand, declaring the abolition of the state and the establishment of revolutionary committees for each commune, which were subject to the direct supervision of the people. When they attempted to implement this program two days later, they succeeded in storming the city hall and issuing a variety of decrees only to be forced to flee by late afternoon when municipal authorities called in the army. This was soon followed by an equally unsuccessful second insurrection in Lyon on April 30, 1871, the rapid rise and bloody fall of the Marseille Commune between March 23 and April 4, and the Paris Commune between March 18 and May 28.[[#48AvrichAnarchistPortraits|48]] During the violent repression of the Paris Commune, at least seventeen thousand people were, according to the official government report, executed for having risen up against the ruling classes. Anarchists, in comparison, believed that between thirty and thirty-six thousand people had been slaughtered.[[#49JohnMerrimanMassacreThe|49]] The Spanish cantonalist rebellion of July 1873, in which anarchists participated, suffered a similarly violent defeat.[[#50EsenweinAnarchistIdeology|50]]
+As the low, long-shadowed light of the morning sun rose above the mountains rimming the far side of his lands and broke through the mist, Yax-Pac sighed and turned back to look across the valley. He gazed with pride on the Kan-Te-Na, Pat-Chan-Otot,[527] the house he had dedicated soon after the solar eclipse at the end of Katun 17. Silhouetted against the beams of brilliant yellow light,[528] it towered above the Acropolis, echoing the huge mountains that rose above the valley floor in the distance. The sacred mountains beyond the sacred portals built by the men of his dynasty were bare now, like bones drying in the sun. It was winter and those mountains should be green with growth from the fall rains, but all he saw was bone-white rock and the red slashes of landslides scarring the faces of the witzob. The stands of forest that had once graced the ridgetops were only memories now in the mind’s eye of the very, very old. Even the occasional patches and scraggly survivors he had found in his childhood wanderings were gone—not a single sapling reared its silhouette against the blue sky.
-It was within this context of armed conflict with the ruling classes that the idea of propaganda of the deed arose and gained prominence. In 1870, Bakunin remarked that revolutionaries “must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas and . . . spread our principles, not with words ''but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda''.”[[#51BakuninBakuninonAnarchis|51]] The aim of these deeds was to inspire the masses through revolutionary acts.''' '''In advocating this strategy, Bakunin does not appear to have been arguing that assassinations were an effective means of changing society. In 1866, he had responded to Dmitry Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the Tsar by writing that “no good can come of regicide in Russia for it would arouse a reaction favorable to the Tsar.”[[#52MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|52]] For Bakunin it was a mistake to think that “the Gordian knot can be cut with one stroke.”[[#53BakuninSelectedWritings|53]]
+Thirty tuns ago today he had followed his father, Smoke-Shell, onto the throne. Then he had been a young man who had not even seen the end of his first katun. He had harbored great hopes of a glorious and prosperous reign, but the gods and the ancestors seemed to be turning their backs on the people of the sacred Macaw Mountain.
-On July 8, 1873, the French anarchist Paul Brousse, who would later become a state socialist, responded to the ongoing cantonalist rebellion by writing an article for the Barcelona paper ''La Solidarité Révolutionnaire''.[[#54StaffordFromAnarchismto|54]] In it, he declared that “revolutionary propaganda is . . . above all made in the open, in the midst of the piled-up paving stones of the barricades, on days when the exasperated people make war on the mercenary forces of reaction.”[[#55QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|55]] This view, as he would later write in the August 1877 edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'', rested on the idea of grabbing “people’s attention, of showing them what they cannot read, of teaching them socialism by means of actions and making them see, feel, touch. . . . Propaganda by the deed is a mighty means of rousing the popular consciousness.”[[#56PaulBroussePropagandaby|56]] An insurrection that established a socialist commune would have to defend itself but even if it was defeated, like the recent insurrections of the early 1870s, this would not matter in the long run since “the idea will have been launched, not on paper, not in a newspaper, not on a chart” but in the real political practices of the working classes; it would thus “march, in flesh and blood, at the head of the people.”[[#57PaulBroussePropagandaby|57]]
+Yax-Pac’s eyes swept across the valley, catching an occasional glimmer of light from the distant waters of the river. Mostly he saw the white houses of his people—hundreds of them—filled with children, many of them sick and hungry. Smoke still rose from the kitchen fires, but Yax-Pac knew the young men had to walk many days now through wider and wider strips of barren land to find firewood. From time without beginning, the earth had yielded up her abundance—wood to cook the bountiful harvests of earlier generations and to make the plaster covering for the buildings and plazas commissioned by the ancestors. What was one to make of a world without trees? The earth itself was dying, and with it all must eventually die.
-Brousse’s insistence on propaganda through insurrection partly developed out of being radicalized by the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune had, Brousse argued, done more to spread revolutionary ideas in two months of fighting than twenty-three years of traditional written propaganda. This was because, while a person must find, buy, and read a book or newspaper in order to be radicalized by it, an armed insurrection rapidly gains the attention of large numbers of people, including those who cannot read, and puts them in a position where they must take a side in the ongoing struggle.[[#58CahmKropotkin7778|58]] This was not mere speculation on Brousse’s part. In Italy, a large number of revolutionaries were driven to socialism by news of the Paris Commune, including future prominent anarchists such as Malatesta, Cafiero, and Costa.[[#59PerniconeItalianAnarchism|59]]
+In the glory days of his grandfathers, his people had believed in the favor of the gods and in the endless cycles of wet and dry that gave rhythm to the passage of days and life to the earth. More and more children had been born, and more and more people had come from distant lands to live in his valley. The more there were, the more they needed fuel and lumber, and the more they cut the forest. The river ran red with the soil of the mountains, naked now, having given up their flesh to the hard storms of summer and the floods of the winter months. Always there was too much rain, or not enough. The hard rains washed away the earth and the rock below could no longer nourish the seeds of the sacred maize. Too much of the good land along the river was under the houses of the noble clans.
-Brousse was not alone in holding that insurrections that establish communes have a powerful transformative effect on popular consciousness. Bakunin had himself made a similar point in his unsent 1872 letter to the editors of ''La Liberté'', which was not published until 1910. He wrote in response to the Paris Commune that,
+The farmers had been driven higher and higher up the stony mountainsides looking for land that could hold their crops. Some of them even had to tie ropes around their waists as they worked the nearly vertical walls of the mountainsides. Anywhere the hard rock cradled a shallow pocket of earth, they planted their seed and hoped the young sprouts of maize would find enough water and nourishment to lift their delicate leaves into the air.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">What makes that revolution important is not really the weak experiments which it had the power and time to make, it is the ideas it has set in motion, the living light it has cast on the true nature and goal of revolution, the hopes it has raised, and the powerful stir it has produced among the popular masses everywhere, and especially in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from that insurrection, whose main feature was the revolt of the Commune and the workers’ associations against the State.[[#60BakuninSelectedWritings|60]]</div>
+Yax-Pac felt a shiver run up his back in the cold morning air. It was only thirty-five days after the winter solstice, but already it was clear that there had not been enough rain during the fall and winter. His people were facing another bad year, with too many mouths to feed with what little the earth yielded to the hard labor of his farmers. He knew in his heart that they must somehow bring back the forest, for it was the source of life. But what was he to do? His people were sick and dying already. They had to cut and burn the scraggly bush that patched his land like scabs to plant their crops or death would win its final battle with the people of the land of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. He saw no way out of this losing battle with the Lords of Death, except more prayer and sacrifices to the gods and the ancestors of the Otherworld. If they would only hear the cry of his people and touch the earth with the gift of gentle rain, perhaps the times of his fathers would return.
-Cafiero shared this evaluation. In an unpublished chapter of his 1881 ''Revolution'','' ''he wrote that ''“''the events of the Commune implanted militant socialism in every civilized land, and the long-awaited distant goal of the propagandist was reached in an instant by the brilliant flash of events.”[[#61CafieroRevolution63The|61]] Two years later, Kropotkin said, during his court speech while on trial in Lyon, that, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, “socialism drew new life from the blood of its followers. Its ideas about property have been given an enormous circulation.”[[#62KropotkinDirectStruggle|62]]
+Yax-Pac’s eyes traveled up again toward the impassive face of Smoke-Imix and he shivered once more. This was the face of his ancestor which turned toward the west and the death of the sun. Straightening his shoulders, Yax-Pac firmly dismissed all thoughts of doom from his mind and resumed his march toward the house of his brother. Today they would meet to celebrate the years of their reigns: Yax-Pac as the king would be together with his younger brothers and councillors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay. Perhaps, in the quiet moments between their public performances in the rituals, he would have time to talk to the two men who shared the burden of rule with him. They all longed for the old days when there was plenty of everything and no end in sight for the glory of Copan. Maybe together they could get the ancestors to pay attention to the plight of the children of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Pondering the past and his grim vision of the future, Yax-Pac resolved to harness the power and will of his people. While he lived in this world, all of his thoughts, the wisdom of his ancestors, the skill of his scribes and artisans, would be bent to the salvation of his people and his kingdom.
-Nor was Brousse alone in holding that anarchists should, given the powerful propaganda effect of the Paris Commune, work toward the social revolution by launching insurrections that establish new communes. In an August 11, 1877, article in ''L’Avant-Garde'', Kropotkin reacted to the recent violently crushed railway strikes in the United States by proposing that the strikes would have gone differently if there had been anarchists present who had sought to transform the strikes into insurrections that established communes and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. Even if these proposed communes had been defeated they would have, like the Paris Commune before them, served as “an immensely resounding act of propaganda for socialism.”[[#63QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|63]] In 1879, Kropotkin argued for this strategy again by insisting that attempts at social revolution must perform “the deed of expropriation” because it is “the most powerful way of propagating the idea” among the general populace and thereby motivating other workers to join the emerging social revolution and expropriate their local economic ruling classes.[[#64KropotkinDirectStruggle|64]]
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-Within the historical context of the rise and subsequent violent defeat of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Spanish cantonalist rebellion of 1873, anarchists thought that they were riding a revolutionary wave and that the social revolution was imminent. In 1883, while on trial in Lyon, Kropotkin declared to the court that “the social revolution is near. It will break out within ten years.”[[#65KropotkinDirectStruggle|65]] This was not a uniquely anarchist perspective. Engels also predicted that a revolution was imminent numerous times during the 1880s and 1890s.[[#66GaryPSteensonAfterMarx|66]] Reflecting on this period in 1904, Kropotkin wrote that “revolutionaries and moderates agreed then in predicting that the bourgeois regime, shaken by the revolution of 1848 and the Commune of Paris, could not long resist the attack of the European proletariat. Before the end of the century the collapse would come.”[[#67KropotkinDirectStruggle|67]]
+This remarkable co-anniversary and the two men who shared it with the king were also celebrated in the Acropolis at almost the same time. On 9.18.5.0.0 when Altar U was about to be completed, Yax-Pac set a small throne stone inside the back chamber of Temple 22a, the council house (Popol Nah) that had been erected next to 18-Rabbit’s Temple 22 by his successor, Smoke-Monkey.[529] On the throne, he celebrated his own katun anniversary (which had been commemorated by Altar T and Stela 8 in the Village area), the co-anniversary he had shared with Yax-Kamlay, and finally the hotun ending. This final date he associated with Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac so that all three of them appear prominently together. In the council house built by his grandfather in the dark years after 18- Rabbit’s defeat, Yax-Pac celebrated his own council of siblings.[530]
-If the revolution was near, then, as Costa wrote in January 1874 (with Bakunin’s approval), “the time for peaceful propaganda has passed, it must be replaced by resounding—solemn propaganda of insurrection and barricades.”[[#68QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|68]] These words were written in the journal of the Italian Committee for Social Revolution (CIRS), a secret association whose membership included key Italian anarchists such as Cafiero, Costa, and Malatesta. The group sought to put theory into practice by launching multiple insurrections simultaneously across Italy, which had recently experienced a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and riots in response to high food prices and unemployment. This strategy was opposed by the majority of delegates of the Saint-Imier International at a meeting on March 18, 1874, on the grounds that socialism was not yet popular enough in Italy for armed insurrections to be launched. Despite lacking international support, the Italian federation nonetheless decided to proceed with its plan. The result was total failure.[[#69PerniconeItalianAnarchism|69]]
+[[][Fig. 8:20 Yax-Pac and the Vision Serpent Altars in the Great Plaza]]
-None of the insurrections attempted on August 7 and 8, 1874, went as the Italian anarchists had hoped. The people did not rise up in response to CIRS’ calls for revolution, which they had announced in a bulletin that had been posted to the walls of various cities. The thousands of revolutionaries that were expected to form armed bands did not turn up. Instead only several hundred assembled, with a mere five turning up to join Malatesta’s insurrection in Puglia on the night of August 11. In response, the anarchist militants either quickly disbanded or were soon arrested. Other anarchists were arrested before they could even assemble due to police spies sharing the anarchists’ plans with the authorities. Bakunin was forced to shave his beard and escape to Switzerland disguised as a priest.[[#70PerniconeItalianAnarchism|70]]
+The altars of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac and Yax-Kamlay signal Yax- Pac’s radical intentions in his efforts to sustain the government, for these brothers must have stood as close to the status of co-regent as the orthodox rules of divine kingship could allow. Furthermore, the two altars Yax-Pac erected in the old village area constituted major historical and theological statements. Not only did the king and his half brother call upon Copan’s best artists and scribes to execute their new vision of authority, but they communicated this vision in a style that was highly innovative, even in the expressive and daring tradition of Copan’s artisans.[531] These large, dramatic, boulderlike altars were the first to combine glyphs and zoomorphic figures, and the first altar monuments to stand on their own without a stela to accompany them.
-The insurrections of August 1874 were viewed by Costa, one of the main organizers, as an attempt at propaganda of the deed. In his 1890 memoir, Costa wrote that “the occasion had come if not to provoke the social revolution in Italy, at least to give a practical example that would demonstrate to the people what we wanted and to propagate our ideas with evidence of deeds.”[[#71QuotedinPerniconeItalian|71]] Despite the failure of 1874, the Italian Federation of the Saint-Imier International officially adopted propaganda of the deed as a strategy during its congress of October 1876. This was done because, as Cafiero and Malatesta explained in a letter published in the December edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'', “the Italian Federation holds that the ''act of insurrection'', designed to assert socialist principles through deeds, is the most effective method of propaganda and the only one that, without deceiving and corrupting the masses, can delve into the deepest strata of society and draw the cream of humanity into the struggle, backed by the International.”[[#72MalatestaMethodofFreedom|72]]
+Yax-Pac shared his royal prerogatives with his brothers in response to the growing stress in the valley as social and economic conditions worsened. He also invited people of lesser status, such as the lords of Compounds 9M-18 and 9N-8 to share royal privilege by erecting monuments memorializing the king’s participation in the dedications of their houses. In this way, he broadened his power base. Perhaps the pressures were different, but Yax-Pac, like Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan, chose to share his power in order to conserve it. For a while, his strategy worked. In the end, however, the precedents of sharing central power with nonroyal patriarchs destroyed the divinity that had sustained the Copan kingship for more than seven hundred years.
-In advocating propaganda through the deed of armed insurrection, Italian anarchists were not advocating something new to Italian politics. The strategy had a prior history in the theory and practice of revolutionary Italian republicanism, which much of the Italian anarchist movement had developed out of.[[#73Theunsuccessfulinsurrectio|73]] Giuseppe Mazzini and his associates had sought to create a unified Italian republic through a strategy of armed bands of revolutionaries engaging in guerrilla warfare and attempting to “rouse the nation into insurrection.”[[#74GiuseppeMazziniACosmopol|74]] This can be seen in Mazzini’s hope that a defeated 1853 insurrection in Milan would have been “the kindling of a universal fire throughout Italy” if it had lasted twenty-four hours.[[#75QuotedinDenisMackSmith|75]] Malatesta later claimed, in 1897, that the early anarchist movement in Italy had believed in, “the youthful illusion (which we inherited from Mazzinianism) of imminent revolution achievable through the efforts of the few without due preparation in the masses.”[[#76MalatestaPatientWork336|76]]
+As Copan declined, bits of her history slowly began to slip from the grasp of her people. Neither Yax-Pac nor his lords left any major monuments that celebrated the turning of the katun on 9.18.0.0.0. For reasons yet unknown, the next hotun, 9.18.5.0.0 (September 15, 795), saw a lot of activity. Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s Altar U, found in the town beneath the modern village, mentioned that period ending and it was celebrated in Temple 22a as we discussed above. Perhaps more important was Yax- Pac’s return to the forest of tree-stones erected by 18-Rabbit in the Great Plaza. On the eastern side of this plaza, between Stelae F and H, he set I another of the Vision Serpent altars (G2) next to the first monument (Altar G3) he had erected there just after he became the high king (Fig. 8:20).
-The attempted insurrections launched by Italian republicans were consistently unsuccessful. They often failed, like the future anarchist insurrections, due to the state knowing of the plots before they were launched.[[#77DMSmithMazzini671|77]] The exception was in 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi, a longtime associate of Mazzini, contributed to the unification of Italy by invading Sicily with roughly one thousand poorly armed men and subsequently, after amassing a much larger army of twenty thousand soldiers, capturing Naples.[[#78ClarkItalianRisorgimento|78]] An inkling of the effect that Garibaldi’s actions had on the developing socialist movement can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence in an 1897 letter to Maria Isidine Goldsmith that between 1859 and 1860 “Garibaldi’s brave campaigns did more to spread the liberal, radical spirit of revolt and socialism right across Europe than anything else.”[[#79KropotkinDirectStruggle|79]]
+Five years later on the half-period, 9.18.10.0.0, the third of these Vision Serpent monuments, Altar Gl, was erected. With this monument in place, the triangular portal set in the middle of 18-Rabbit’s tree-stone forest was completed. This altar, right in the ceremonial center of the city, also affirmed the political duality binding Yax-Pac to his half brother, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This superb sculpture, called the “na-chan altar” by the Copanecs, presented a double-headed image of the Cosmic Monster, skeletal at one end and fleshed at the other (Fig. 8:21). Each side of its body displayed a special text. On the north side, the dedication of the altar “in the land of Yax-Pac” was recorded; on the south, Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac’s name. The placement of this altar was highly significant. It was one thing for the half brother to get star billing in the town under the modern village, but entirely another for him to be featured in the sacred precinct in the center of the kingdom. The Acropolis and the Great Plaza had always been the sanctuary of the divine kings.
-The strategy of forming armed bands that launched insurrections coincided with some republican revolutionaries unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate monarchs. On January 14, 1858, Felice Orsini and two accomplices tried to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III of France with explosives. The three bombs that were thrown killed eight and wounded at least 156 people but barely harmed the Emperor. On December 8, the soldier Agesilao Milano stabbed and wounded King Ferdinand II of Naples with a bayonet. These republican acts of violence, be they collective revolts or individual attacks, had a profound influence on Italian anarchism.[[#80MarcoPinfariExploringth|80]] Malatesta remembered in 1932 that “the idea of violence, even in the sense of the individual ''attentat'', which many today believe characteristic of anarchism, was inherited by us from democracy. . . . Before accepting the teachings of Bakunin, the Italian Anarchists—Fanelli, Friscia, Gambuzzi—had admired and exalted Agesilao Milano, Felice Orsini, and ''coups de main'' typical of Mazzini. When they passed over to the International, they were not taught anything in this camp that they had not already learned from Mazzini and Garibaldi.”[[#81QuotedinPerniconeandOtta|81]]
+Yax-Pac’s next project, Temple 18 (Fig. 8:22a), must have been under construction during the time of this same 9.18.10.0.0 period ending. This temple is the last building Yax-Pac ever built on the Acropolis, and its smaller scale is good evidence of the reduced assets available to the king less than twenty-five years after he dedicated his magnificent Otherworld portal in Temple 11. Set on the southeast corner of the Acropolis, directly across trom Temple 22, this final royal sanctuary contained an elaborate vaulted tomb chamber that was looted in ancient times.[532]
-Italian anarchists were particularly influenced by Carlo Pisacane, whose writings they discovered in the mid-1870s. Pisacane was a socialist influenced by Proudhon and was chief of staff of Mazzini’s republican army of 1849.[[#82PerniconeItalianAnarchism|82]] In 1857, shortly before dying in a failed insurrection at Sapri (which he co-organized with Mazzini), he wrote that “ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around . . . conspiracies, plots and attempted uprisings are the succession of deeds whereby Italy proceeds toward her goal of unity. The flash of Milano’s bayonet was a more effective propaganda than a thousand volumes penned by doctrinarians.”[[#83CarloPisacanePoliticalT|83]]
+Yax-Pac placed this building in one of the most potent points in the city, an area that had been the focus of his attention for thirty years. This temple completed a skewed southward triangle with Temples 21a and 22a, anchored on Temple 22, the sacred building housing the portal of his ancestor 18-R.abbit (Fig. 8:11). The inscription carved into the interior walls of the outer chamber of this temple recorded the date of its dedication as 9.18.10.17.18 4 Etz’nab 1 Zac (August 12, 801), the day of the zenith passage of the sun (Fig. 8:22b). The imagery carved on the jambs of the doors in the outer and the center walls is a radical departure from precedent at Copan and reflects the dark final days of its dynasty. Yax-Pac and a companion (most likely his half brother) wield spears and strut in the regalia of warriors (Fig. 8:23) at the place of the waterlily. They wear cotton armor, shrunken heads, ropes for binding captives, and the bones of past victims. Grasping shields and weapons, they are ready for battle with Copan’s foes.
-Undeterred by their previous failure in 1874, the Italian anarchists soon made a second attempt at insurrection, which would come to be known as the Benevento affair. In theory, an armed band of anarchists would roam the Matese mountain range and its surrounding provinces in southern Italy, spreading revolutionary consciousness. One of the insurrection’s participants, Pietro Ceccarelli (who had previously participated in Garibaldi’s campaigns), explained later in 1881 that they planned “to rove about the countryside for as long as possible, preaching [class] war, inciting social brigandage, occupying small towns and leaving them after having accomplished whatever revolutionary acts we could, and to proceed to that area where our presence would prove more useful.”[[#84QuotedinPerniconeItalian|84]] Believing “that revolution must be provoked, we carried out an act of provocation. . . . We were a band of insurgents destined to provoke an insurrection that cannot and must not count on anything but the echo it may find in the population.”[[#85QuotedinPerniconeItalian|85]]
+The symbolism on these two doors reflects a change in strategy in direct correspondence with the violent death throes of Copan. In this last building, Yax-Pac did not reiterate the cosmic sanction of his reign. Instead, he announced his success and prowess as a warrior. Although all Copan’s kings had been warriors and sacrificial executioners, this choice of portraiture is unusual in Copan’s history.
-Guillaume described the ideas behind this strategy in detail. He wrote,
+The Hieroglyphic Stairs built by Smoke-Shell emphasized the role of the ancestral kings as warriors, and this same Tlaloc-war iconography was prominently displayed on Temple 16 and Temple 21. Nevertheless, these were merely ancestral portraits or stage backdrops for rituals. Such rituals may have required wars to provide victims to send to the Otherworld in the tradition of Maya political life, but the Copanec tradition since the time of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had been to show the ruler standing in the portal of the Otherworld. It was his role as communicator with the ancestral dead and the materializer of the gods that preoccupied Copan royal portraiture.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Our friends in Italy came to the conclusion that, in their country at least, ''oral and written propaganda were not enough'', and that, to be clearly understood by the popular masses, especially the peasants, it was necessary to ''show'' them what could not be made living and real in any theoretical teaching, they had to be taught socialism through ''deeds'' so that they could see, feel and touch it. A plan was formed for teaching the Italian peasants, by means of a ''practical lesson'', what society would be like if it got rid of government and property owners; for this, it would be enough to organize an armed band, large enough to control the countryside for a brief time and go from one commune to another carrying into effect ''Socialism through action'' before the very eyes of the people.[[#86QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|86]]</div>
+In all of the city’s long history, this is the only building on which the king is actually shown in battle, wielding the weapons of war.[533] We can only assume the role of king as active warrior became increasingly important to his public image as the crisis within his kingdom deepened. None of Yax-Pac’s enemies are mentioned by name, but neighboring kingdoms may well have been making forays, or perhaps the non-Maya peoples who had always lived just beyond the borders decided to move against the failing kingdom. Copan may also have been suffering from internal political problems. The nobles who had ruled parts of the kingdom for the high king, especially in its expanded version, may have decided to strike out on their own. War apparently was the only means at Yax-Pac’s disposal to fend off these challenges. Sadly, when authority fails, force is the last arbiter.
-Again, things did not go according to plan.[[#87Thefollowingaccountofthe|87]] The Italian state was aware of the plot by mid-February 1877, due to reports from police spies who had infiltrated the anarchist movement. The following month, a member of the group, Salvatore Farina, disappeared after revealing the full details of their plans to the Italian state. Rather than flee the country, the anarchists decided to launch the insurrection at the beginning of April, a month earlier than planned. Doing so did not allow them to escape police repression. Several were arrested before they could even reach the agreed rendezvous point. Those who managed to arrive successfully were forced to flee the area with a fraction of their equipment after discovering and shooting at the four policemen who had them under surveillance. During their escape, they were joined by ten fellow insurgents who had, by chance, eluded the police because they missed their scheduled train. Together the group of only twenty-six anarchists headed for the mountains.
+In spite of these upheavals, the machinery of the state ground on. Yax-Pac recorded the end of his second katun as king on 9.18.12.5.17 2 Caban 15 Pax (December 4, 802), on a beautifully carved stone incensario. This incensario is the only monument we have identified so far from the second half of that katun.[534] We do have one other record of Yax-Pac’s activities from the end of this katun, albeit an unusual one. Yax-Pac paid a state visit to Copan’s old rival, Quiriguá, in order to perform a scattering rite on 9.19.0.0.0 (June 28, 810) (Fig. 8:24). This visit was unusual on two counts. First of all, kings rarely traveled to neighboring kingdoms; they preferred to send ambassadors.[535] Second, this sort of scattering rite was usually performed at the homesite, not in another king’s city. As far as we know, Yax-Pac did not perform a similar sacrificial ritual at Copán, although we know he was still ruling there, for his death was commemorated there some ten years later.
-The armed band was low on men, ammunition, weapons, and food. Traveling to nearby large towns to gather supplies was not an option since, as the anarchists soon discovered, the government had already occupied the area with twelve thousand troops. Given these circumstances, the anarchists were only able to enter two small towns, Letino and Gallo. In each case, they did what little they could by burning official documents taken from the town hall, distributing what weapons and money they could find to the local peasants, and giving a speech on the necessity and value of the social revolution. In his speech to the peasants of Letino, Cafiero declared “the rifles and the axes we have given you, the knives you have. If you wish, do something, and if not, go f— yourselves.”[[#88QuotedinPerniconeItalian|88]]
+Yax-Pac died shortly before 9.19.10.0.0 (May 6, 820).[536] Although he had struggled valiantly to retain the loyalty and cooperation of the nobles in his valley, his strategy did not ultimately succeed. After seven hundred years, the central authority in the valley of Copan had less than a decade of life left.
-According to Brousse, these events had been a practical demonstration that taught the peasants how much contempt they should have for private property and the state.[[#89BroussePropagandabythe|89]] This lesson appears to have had a limited effect, since the peasants of both Letino and Gallo cheered and applauded the anarchists only to return to their daily lives once the band had left. One of the reasons why the peasants did not join the anarchists in insurrection was that they were legitimately afraid of what would happen if they rose up. Malatesta later recalled that a peasant in Gallo had asked him how they could know that the anarchists were not, in fact, undercover police attempting to entrap them. Even if they could be sure that the anarchists were not police, an insurrection was still deeply impractical. As the peasants explained to Malatesta, “the town is in no condition to defend itself, the revolution has not yet erupted on a vast scale, tomorrow the troops will come and massacre us all.”[[#90QuotedinPerniconeItalian|90]]
+Although we do not know the exact date of Yax-Pac’s death, his survivors chose this half-period date (9.19.10.0.0) to commemorate his entry into the Otherworld. On that day they erected Stela 11 in the southwest corner of the platform supporting Temple 18 (Figs. 8:11 and 8:22), the last building he constructed. The imagery on this stela (Fig. 8:25) depicts Yax-Pac standing in the watery Otherworld holding the bar of office. In this instance, however, the bar is missing the serpent heads that symbolized the path of communication between the supernatural world and the human world.[537] Yax-Pac no longer needed them for he was already among the supernatural beings, a state marked by the smoking torch piercing his forehead. In the Otherworld Yax-Pac was manifested as God K, the deity of kings and their lineages.[538]
-After failing to escape the region due to poor weather conditions, the anarchists took refuge for the night in a farmhouse near Letino. They were soon surrounded by soldiers after being informed on by a local peasant seeking a reward. Fighting was not an option—their weapons and ammunition had been rendered useless by rainfall. Knowing that they would be killed if they resisted the anarchists chose to surrender without a fight. With their arrests the insurrection was over.
+The inscription on this strange rounded stela is enigmatic, but we have hints of its meaning. 1 he verb is a phonetic spelling of hom, the verb we have already seen recording ‘I ikal’s war. Ilere, however, the word does not refer to the destruction of war, but rather to the other meaning of the verb, “to terminate” and “to end”—as, for example, “to end a katun.” Following hom is the glyph that stands for “founder” or perhaps “lineage” or “dynasty” in other texts at Copan Putting all this together, we understand this text to mean that the people of Copan believed the dynasty of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ had ended with the death of Yax-Pac.[539]
-Despite this, the insurrection was not a total failure. News of the insurrection and the subsequent trial, during which the defendants gave speeches on anarchism, garnered the International and its revolutionary socialist politics considerable national attention for several weeks. This was probably a contributing factor in the growth of the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International over the following year and a half.[[#91PerniconeItalianAnarchism|91]] Cafiero, perhaps looking for a positive outcome of the failed insurrection he had participated in, later claimed that the Benevento affair had increased demand for Marx’s ''Capital'' to such an extent that a bookseller in Naples was forced to find more copies after having sold out.[[#92CafieroRevolution6364|92]]
+Yax-Pac was not, however, the last king of Copan Although his reign was a difficult one, he was fortunate in one respect. He lived long enough to gain a place in history, but died soon enough to avoid the final tragedy. The king who oversaw those last days of kingship at Copan was named U-Cit-Tok. His is perhaps the saddest story of all the Maya kings we have met, for he inherited a world that had already fallen apart. There were too many people, too much of the forest gone, too many nobles grabbing honor and power for their own benefit, too little faith in the old answers, too little rain, and too much death.
-Anarchists in Berne, Switzerland, made less ambitious attempts at propaganda of the deed. They attended a demonstration on March 18, 1877, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, and brought red flags with them. The canton had prohibited the public display of the red flag and the previous year’s demonstration by social democrats had ended in failure when it was attacked, dispersed, and the red flag was torn up. The aim of the anarchists was to march through Berne defending the flag from attacks by the police. This action was inspired by a Russian demonstration on December 6, 1876, when students and workers had gathered outside Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral after a revolutionary had been killed in prison. At the Russian demonstration, a student carrying a red flag had declared the demonstration’s solidarity with all who had suffered in the struggle against Tsarism. The subsequent brutal state repression of the demonstration led to a large increase in public sympathy toward the revolutionaries. The anarchists hoped that their demonstration involving a red flag would have a similar effect and lead to increased sympathy with and support for the Jura Federation, whose membership was in serious decline.
+This tragic man became the new king on 9.19.11.14.5 3 Chicchan 3 Ho (February 10, 822),[540] a day that contained some of the old astronomical associations beloved by the Maya, it was the day of disappearance for the Morningstar and a time of conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, which were just visible in the hours before dawn. The accession rituals of that day were commemorated on an altar placed on the mound at the north end of the Ballcourt (Fig. 8:11) near Stela 2, the old monument that commemorated Smokc-Imix-God K and the earlier days of Copan’s glory.
-On the day of the protest in Berne, roughly 250 demonstrators, several of whom were armed with sticks and truncheons, assembled themselves into a procession and marched forward with the Swiss anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel at their head brandishing a red flag. The demonstration, which was attended by several well-known anarchists including Guillaume, Kropotkin, and the Frenchman Jean-Louis Pindy, was then attacked by police armed with sabers and the anarchists defended themselves. During the struggle six policemen and several protesters were seriously wounded. The anarchists were forced to abandon the original flag but did manage to escape with another red flag and take it to the meeting planned for the end of the demonstration.[[#93CahmKropotkin8082100|93]] Kropotkin claimed in letter written to Paul Robin on March 24, that the protest had nonetheless been a success because two thousand people, instead of the expected seventy, had attended the meeting afterward organized by the anarchists. Their act of revolt had gained them “an attentive and in part sympathetic public” since “''there is nothing like courage to win over the people''.”[[#94QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|94]]
+[[][Fig. 8:26 U-Cit-Tok, the Last King of Copan]]
-In August, Brousse argued that the Berne protest was an act of propaganda of the deed that taught the Swiss working class “that they do not, as they thought they did, enjoy freedom.”[[#95BroussePropagandabythe|95]] This lack of freedom was apparent in how the Swiss state responded to the Berne protest. Thirty of the demonstrators were brought to trial and sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from sixty days for the two anarchists who had struck policemen with sticks to forty days for Guillaume, thirty days for Brousse, and ten days for the rest. All the foreign participants were expelled from the Berne Canton for three years and with this the movement in Berne lost its leading militants.[[#96StaffordFromAnarchismto|96]]
+The south side of the altar (Fig. 8:26) depicts the new king seated across from Yax-Pac in direct emulation of Altar Q, and in the tradition pursued by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac on his monument. As on Altar Q, the Calendar Round sits between the two kings, but U-Cit-Tok felt the need to qualify its meaning even further by writing chumwan, “he was seated,” after it.[541] On the left, in the same place occupied by Yax-Kuk-Mo’ on Altar Q, the new ruler sits on his own name glyph, holding out a fanlike object toward his predecessor. On his opposite side, in the same position he occupies on Altar Q, sits Yax-Pac. Perched on his name glyph, Yax- Pac mirrors the position and clothing of his successor, passing on, by analogy, the power and sanction of his divinity. It was not the younger version of the king that U-Cit-Tok wished to evoke, but the divinity of the mature and aged Yax-Pac. The pattern of Yax-Pac’s beard emulates his portrait on Stela 11, the image of his last and irreversible journey into Xibalba.
-''Propaganda of the Deed: Second Phase''
+The final hours of the kings of Copan are frozen in this amazing altar. On the other side is a scene of two figures, seated profile to the viewer while engaged in some sort of ritual (Fig. 8:27). We will never know what the sculptor intended to depict here because the altar was never finished.[542] In the middle of his cutting the imagery into the stone, the central authority of Copan collapsed. The sculptor picked up his tools and went home, never to return to his work on the altar. Copan’s dynastic history ended with the echoing slap of that sculptor’s sandals as he walked away from the king, the Acropolis, and a thousand years of history. The kings were no more, and with them went all that they had won.
-During its second phase, propaganda of the deed developed into advocating or engaging in assassination and bombings.[[#97Ihavedecidednottocollec|97]] The transformation occurred in response to a vast array of factors that included: a vicious cycle of anarchists responding to state violence with violent individual attacks that led, in turn, to more state violence and so on; anarchists being influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by contemporary social movements such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; and the nefarious influence of police spies and agent provocateurs. It is difficult to chart the path from collective uprisings into individual acts of violence, partly because it is rarely clear if a particular attack was carried out by a genuine anarchist attempting to implement insurrectionist theory and engage in propaganda of the deed. Attacks were frequently attributed to anarchists by the police or the press (including, sometimes, the anarchist press) with little to no evidence.[[#98RichardBachJensenTheBat|98]]
+The residential compounds beyond the Acropolis continued to function for another century or so. Some of the lineages even profited enough from the disintegration of central power to continue adding to their households. But without the central authority of the king to hold the community together, they lost it all. The lineages would not cooperate with each other without the king to reduce their competition and forge bonds of unity between them. Toward the end, one of the buildings in Compound 9N-8 collapsed onto an occupant, but his relatives never even bothered to dig him out. It was the final straw—the people simply walked away.[543] Within two centuries of the demise of the last king of Copan, 90 percent of the population in the Copan Valley system was gone.[544] They left a land so ravaged that only in this century have people returned to build the population back to the levels it knew in the time of Yax-Pac. Today, history is tragically replaying itself, as the people of Copan destroy their forests once more, revealing yet again the bones of the sacred witzob—but this time we are all threatened by the devastation.
-The earliest alleged anarchist assassination attempts occurred in 1878 when Max Hödel on May 11 and Dr. Carl Nobiling on June 2 both tried unsuccessfully to kill the Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. This was soon followed by Juan Oliva y Moncasi’s failed attempt to assassinate King Alfonso XII of Spain on October 25. It is not clear from the available evidence whether either Hödel or Nobiling were genuine anarchists. At best they were socialists with some loose connections to a few anarchist groups.[[#99AndrewRCarlsonAnarchism|99]] Although Moncasi was a member of the anarchist-led Spanish section of the Saint-Imier International, it is not clear whether he was an anarchist himself.[[#100EsenweinAnarchistIdeolog|100]]
+. Kingdom and Empire at Chichen Itza
-The first definite anarchist assassination plot occurred in 1880. After guns had failed to kill the Kaiser, the German anarchist August Reinsdorf planned to dig a tunnel under the Reichstag, plant explosives around the building’s supports and ignite them while the Reichstag was in session. Reinsdorf made the mistake of explaining his plan in a letter dated September 1, 1880, to his associate Johann Most, a German socialist who, at the time, lived in London, edited the journal ''Freiheit'', and had yet to become an anarchist. Oskar Neumann, a spy living in London, heard of the plan and subsequently informed the Berlin police. Reinsdorf was arrested on November 14 while carrying a dagger near the home of the Berlin chief of police, Guido von Madai, whom he planned to assassinate.[[#101CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|101]]
+Maya kingdoms were dying as the tenth cycle of the baktun neared its end. The epidemic of political chaos spread a thousand miles across the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, from Palenque to Copan; and in the southern lowland country, few dynasties endured into the ninth century. Yet in the northern part of the peninsula, in the dry forest lands of the northeast, in the rugged hill country of the west, on the northwestern plain, and along the coasts, Maya states not only flourished during the Terminal Classic period, but grew in strength and numbers (Fig. 9:1).[545]
-This escalation in political practice was mirrored by an escalation in theory. In December 1880, Cafiero wrote an article for ''Le Révolté ''in which he repeated the old insurrectionist idea that actions were an effective means of spreading revolutionary ideas. What had changed was the scope of acceptable action. Rather than merely advocating armed bands inspiring a popular insurrection, he now insisted that anarchists should engage in “permanent rebellion, by word, by writing, by dagger, by gun, by dynamite . . . we shall use every weapon which can be used for rebellion. Everything is right for us which is not legal.”[[#102CarloCafieroAction188|102]] He argued that anarchists should immediately engage in violent attacks because “if we go on waiting until we are strong enough before attacking—we shall never attack, and we shall be like the good man who vowed that he wouldn’t go into the sea until he had learned to swim. It is precisely revolutionary action which develops our strength, just as exercise develops the strength of our muscles.”[[#103CarloCafieroAction188|103]] He predicted that if anarchists fought and died for popular movements then the seeds of socialism they contained would grow and flower into a revolution. Cafiero, in short, held that engaging in revolutionary violence would simultaneously develop the capacities of anarchists and instill radical drives and consciousness within the working classes.
+The cultures of these northern lowlands were distinctive from those in the south in several respects. The northerners, for example, developed architectural techniques using concrete wall cores surfaced with veneer block masonry.[546] They used this construction technique to render elaborate programs of political and religious imagery (Fig. 9:2) in complex stone mosaic facades and wall carvings. Further, the northern Maya developed a historical tradition of their own, distinct from the south’s, collected in books called the Chilam Balam. In them, each community compiled and kept its own version of history, which, after the Spanish conquest, was transcribed from its original hieroglyphic form into an alphabetic system using Spanish letters to record Mayan words.[547] The histories kept in these many books describe successive incursions of foreigners from outside Yucatán, some from as far away as central Mexico. Because these Classic period societies of the northern lowlands had a significantly greater interaction with outsiders than the Maya in the south, they assimilated a greater amount of foreign culture. This interaction resulted in their developing a more international outlook in politics and trade.
-A few months later, Cafiero wrote a letter to the paper ''Il Grido del Popolo ''in which he advocated armed struggle in more detail. Anarchist militants were to form a group in their area composed of between six and ten men or women and engage in violent attacks, including with explosives, against capitalism and the state. He optimistically predicted that their actions “will find echoes all over the world. Hardly will the actions of one group have begun, when the whole country will be covered in groups, and action become generalized. Every group will be its own center of action, with a plan all of its own, and a multiplicity of varied and harmonic initiatives. The concept of the whole war will be one only: the destruction of all oppressors and exploiters.”[[#104CafieroTheOrganization|104]]
+[[][Fig. 9:1 The Yucatan Peninsula and the Northern Lowlands Contour intervals: 250, 500 feet]]
-Propaganda of the deed soon came to be enshrined in the resolutions of the International Social Revolutionary Congress, which met in London between July 14 and 20, 1881, and was conceived as an attempt to re-found the International.[[#105Accordingtoapolicerepor|105]] The congress was attended by forty-five delegates claiming to represent sixty federations and fifty-nine individual groups with a total membership of fifty thousand people. One of the most vocal delegates was the French police agent Égide Spilleux, who operated under the pseudonym Serreaux and had successfully infiltrated the movement.[[#106CahmKropotkin15259Pe|106]] After a significant amount of discussion and debate, the delegates agreed to adopt the following resolution,
+In spite of its international tradition, the northern region merges into the southern lowlands without geographic interruption; and from the time of the earliest kingdoms, the Maya living in both regions were linked, linguistically, culturally, economically, and politically.[548] Although the destinies of southern and northern kings in the Terminal Classic period diverged, they ultimately shared a common root. Since the institution of ahau was at the heart of government in both regions, we must look at the distinctive ways the northerners modified its relationship to central leadership in order to understand how the northerners transcended the limitations that led to failure in the south.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the International Workingmen’s Association deems it necessary to add “Propaganda by Deed” to oral and written propaganda. . . . It is absolutely necessary to exert every effort toward propagating, by deeds, the revolutionary idea and to arouse the spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses who still harbor illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods . . . Whereas the agricultural workers are still outside the revolutionary movement, it is absolutely necessary to make every effort to win them to our cause, and to keep in mind that a deed performed against the existing institutions appeals to the masses much more than thousands of leaflets and torrents of words, and that “Propaganda by Deed” is of greater importance in the countryside than in the cities.[[#107QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|107]]</div>
+The social catastrophe of the ninth century was the culmination of the gradual faltering of Maya kingship over a thousand years of history and many ingenious attempts to accommodate change. Yet in the end, this chain reaction of collapsing governments became the catalyst that pushed some of the peoples of the north toward a fundamental revision of the basic institution of ahau.
-Edward Nathan-Ganz, delegate No. 22 and one of the three members of the resolution committee appointed to summarize the proposals that had been put forward during the congress, connected propaganda of the deed to the manufacture of bombs. He wrote within the resolution that “whereas the technical and chemical sciences have rendered services to the revolutionary cause and are bound to render still greater services in the future, the Congress suggests that organizations and individuals affiliated with the International Workingmen’s Association devote themselves to the study of these sciences.”[[#108QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|108]]
+Few of the Maya kingdoms were able to make the crucial transition from one form of government to another. The southern kingdoms of the Terminal Classic period tried, but their leaders failed because they attempted to solve their burgeoning social problems using methods that were fast becoming obsolete: the time-honored politics of the divine dynasties. The aggrandized kingdoms of such men as Great-Jaguar-Paw and Lord Kan II were never able to establish stable empires because they could not transcend the pride and exclusivity of the kingship—pride that compelled conquered dynasties to resist the acknowledgment of permanent subordination; exclusivity that prevented would-be emperors from effectively sharing power. On the other hand, some ahauob in the northern lowlands did succeed in perpetuating central government in this time of turmoil. Like the conqueror kings in the southern lowlands, the Itzá lords sought to break out of the limitations imposed by many small, competing realms. The way they accomplished this was to forge a conquest state and hegemonic empire with its capital, Chichén Itzá, in the center of the north. This city witnessed the birth of a social and political order based upon a new principle of governance, mu! tepal, “joint rule.”
-Reinsdorf soon decided to follow these proposals and undertake a second attempt at blowing up members of Germany’s ruling classes. As he explained in an 1882 letter to an American comrade, only the bomb could “inject the whole bourgeoisie and their slaves with total terror” and achieve “complete and utter revenge” for “all the dirty tricks and atrocities” they committed.[[#109QuotedinUlrichLinseP|109]] This time, Reinsdorf and his associates in the town of Elberfeld planned to use dynamite to kill Wilhelm I, alongside other key members of the German ruling classes, at the inauguration of the Niederwald Monument on September 28, 1883. The assassination failed. Due to a sprained ankle, Reinsdorf was unable to go himself and two of his associates—the saddler Franz Rupsch and the compositor Emil Küchler—went in his place. Küchler made the mistake of ignoring Reinsdorf’s instructions to buy a waterproof fuse. The night before the assassination attempt, it rained heavily and the cheaper fuse failed to ignite at the crucial moment. In 1884, Reinsdorf and his group were arrested and put on trial for the attempted assassination of the Emperor. It turned out that one of Reinsdorf’s associates, the weaver Carl Rudolf Palm—who had donated forty marks toward Rupsch and Küchler’s travel expenses—was in fact a police spy and had been informing on the group from the very beginning. On the morning of February 7, 1885, Reinsdorf and Küchler were executed, with Rupsch having had his death sentence commuted to imprisonment for life.[[#110CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|110]]
+For a few centuries, Chichén Itzá ruled the Maya of the north without rival. The ahauob of Chichén Itzá honored many of the religious and political protocols laid down by generations of kings before them. Yet, at the same time, they were revolutionizing the ancient royal institutions, creating new policies, rituals, and symbols partly inspired by foreign traditions. At the height of their power in the lowlands, they extended the boundaries of their military and economic interests—and their religious and political vision—to the point where all of Mesoamerica knew of Chichén Itzá, as either a valuable ally or a formidable enemy.
-In parallel to these events, Most, who had known Reinsdorf, moved from London to New York in December 1882 and became an anarchist.[[#111GoyensBeerandRevolution|111]] During the mid-1880s, Most wrote numerous articles for ''Freiheit ''which declared that workers should arm themselves with guns, dynamite, poison, and knives in order to violently attack the ruling classes and achieve revenge. For example, in August 1884 he wrote that “Every prince will find his Brutus. Poison on the table of the gourmet will cancel out his debt. Dynamite will explode in the splendid, rubber tyred, coaches of the aristocracy and bourgeois as they pull up to the opera. Death will await them, both by day and by night, on all roads and footpaths and even in their homes, lurking in a thousand different forms.”[[#112QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|112]] In 1885, Most even published an assassination manual for his readers based on what he had learned working in an explosives factory. It was titled ''The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc''.[[#113CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|113]]
+Our last royal history will recount the transformation of Chichén Itzá, its rise and triumph through foreign invasion and alliance—through war on an unprecedented scale, diplomacy, and brilliant political innovation. It is also the story of the Itzá’s opponents in this struggle: the orthodox Maya ahauob of Cobá and the innovative and international ahauob of the Puuc hills region. In their conflicts with Chichón Itzá, these powers endured and lost the closest thing to a world war the northern Maya would experience before the coming of the European conquerors.[549]
-This shift to the meaning of propaganda of the deed within anarchist circles did not occur in isolation. Anarchists were influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by other social movements between the 1850s and 1880s, including Italian republicans, Irish nationalists, and Russian nihilists.[[#114OnItalianrepublicanssee|114]] One of the most impactful events was Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) assassinating Tsar Alexander II of Russia with explosives on March 1, 1881. In the aftermath of this attack, an increasing number of anarchists came to argue that anarchists should follow Narodnaya Volya’s example and organize their own assassination campaign against the ruling classes. It is not a coincidence that the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London passed a resolution advocating propaganda of the deed and the study of chemical sciences to build explosives a few months after the assassination of the Tsar with explosives.[[#115SethRussianTerrorists9|115]]
+At the northern apex of the ancient city of the Itzá, the Castillo rises into the clear air above the dry forest that stretches away into the distance across the flat plain (Fig. 9:3) of central Yucatán. This structure is a mute but eloquent testimony to the engineering elegance and revolutionary vision of a city that, in its heyday, stretched for at least twenty-five square kilometers[550] beyond its wide central plazas (Fig. 9:4). Here at the heart of the community, the vision is a silent one. Unlike the kings of the south, the last divine lords of Chichón Itzá chose not to use hieroglyphic texts on their stelae and buildings to proclaim their histories and triumphs. Instead, these rulers pursued a magnificent architectural program of bas- reliefs carved on piers, walls, pillars, and lintels. The decision to tell their story in pictures unencumbered by the written word was a deliberate one, for these cosmopolitan Maya had changed the institution of ahau and the kingship derived from it.
-The impact of the Tsar’s assassination was clear to anarchists at the time. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that “when the Russian revolutionaries had killed the Czar . . . the European anarchists imagined that, from then on, a handful of fervent revolutionaries, armed with a few bombs, would be enough to bring about the social revolution.”[[#116QuotedinJensenAnarchist|116]] This perspective was echoed by Nettlau. He wrote in 1932 that, during this period, anarchists were inspired by “the example of fortitude and sacrifice set by Russian nihilists” and thought that, due to the assassination of the Tsar, alongside other examples of revolt, insurrection, and state repression, there was a “growing accumulation of acts of violence,” which in turn indicated that “a general revolutionary upheaval of a socially destructive type was imminent.”[[#117NettlauShortHistory148|117]]
+Archaeology and the carved-stone inscriptions found in other parts of the city also give testimony to this transformation. These two sets of E evidence, however, tell two quite different, though ultimately related, versions of Chichén Itzá’s history.[551] During the Late Classic period, while the southern lowland kingdoms flourished, new cities came to prominence in the range of low hills called the Puuc in the northwestern part of the peninsula.[552] While divine ahauob ruled these cities,[553] the culture of their people shows strong ties to the Gulf Coast region and highland Mexico. These ties can be seen in features of architectural decoration and ceramic styles. One group of foreigners, called by archaeologists the “Putun” or “Chontai” Maya,[554] traded with the Puuc communities during the Late Classic period, and heavily influenced their culture. Indeed, the elite of the Puuc region may well have regarded themselves not only as ethnically Putun, but also as the political inheritors of the great traditions of the southern Classic period kingdoms. Described as crude barbarians by the Yucatecan Maya in some of their later books, these Chontai speakers were probably no more barbarian than the Germanic generals who, by diplomacy and force, took over Roman provinces in the waning years of that civilization.
-Although the vast majority of anarchist assassinations and bombings were carried out by genuine anarchists acting independently, there are several examples of the police normalizing or encouraging the use of these violent tactics. Louis Andrieux, the prefect of the Paris Police, financed the creation of the anarchist paper ''La Révolution Sociale'' in September 1880, through his agent Serreaux. The paper, which Serreaux helped to edit, published articles advocating violent attacks and provided the reader with instructions on how to manufacture dynamite. In June 1881, a police agent working for Andrieux played a key role in instigating a small group of anarchists to bomb the statue of the former president Adolphe Thiers, who had ordered the massacre of the Paris Commune a decade earlier. The bomb failed to damage the statue, and left only a black stain. As mentioned earlier, Serreaux attended the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London as a delegate and formed around him a group of supporters that Kropotkin referred to as “''la bande Serreaux''.” During the congress, this group advocated propaganda of the deed, a rejection of morality, the study of bomb making, and a repeat of actions like the bombing of the statue of Thiers.[[#118JensenAnarchistTerrorism|118]]
+% hile the Puuc hills in the west nurtured a prosperous and cosmopolitan constellation of new cities, the eastern region witnessed the establishment of a huge Late Classic state with its capital at Cobâ. With more than seventy square kilometers of homes, temples, house-lot walls, and stone causeways, Cobâ was undoubtedly the largest city in the northern region of Maya country.[555] Beyond its teeming multitudes and towering pyramids, Cobâ reached out for the agricultural produce and human labor of the surrounding towns. These communities were physically linked to the great city by stone roads that helped to reinforce the alliances and obligations between the noble families of vassals and the ahauob in the center.[556] In contrast to the Maya of the Puuc cities, the people of Cobâ and their kings sustained strong cultural ties to the southern kingdoms. The style of their great pyramids reflected Petén traditions and their divine lords raised tree-stones with extensive, and unfortunately badly eroded, hieroglyphic texts. Like the ahauob of Palenque and Copân, the nobility of Cobâ apparently regarded themselves as frontier stalwarts of a great Maya tradition with its heart in the southern lowlands.
-It was not until the 1890s that the new understanding of propaganda of the deed was implemented by anarchists on a grand scale. The manner in which this occurred varied between countries. In Italy, explosives were largely used to damage government buildings, rather than people, and generally did little more than break windows.[[#119PerniconeandOttanelliAs|119]] In Spain and France, by contrast, there were a series of bombings that wounded and killed random civilians who just happened to be in the area. In 1892, François Koenigstein, known more commonly as Ravachol, decided to seek vengeance for the wrongful arrest, torture, and imprisonment of anarchist protesters by the French state. To this end, he bombed the apartment buildings where the judge and prosecutor attorney of the court case lived on March 11 and 27. The bombs injured eight innocent people and failed to wound, let alone kill, their targets.[[#120JohnMerrimanTheDynamite|120]]
+Archaeological research documents that, soon after the consolidation of these distinctive western and eastern kingdoms in the northern lowlands by the end of the eighth century, a series of strategic coastal strongholds was established by canoe seafaring peoples. These people were called the Itzâ by archaeologists, after references to them in Books of Chilam Balam.[557] These coastal Itzâ used pottery styles which would become characteristic of Chichén Itzâ, and they brought with them foreign goods, such as Mexican obsidian, both black and green.[558] Eventually, these merchant warriors founded a permanent port facility on an island off the northern coast, at the mouth of the Rio Lagartos, where they could command a rich trade in the sea salt prized in Mexico and elsewhere. Called Isla Cerritos,[559] this small island was literally transformed by artificial construction into a single round and massive platform with masonry docking along its entire periphery for the large dugout canoes used by these peoples.
-Several months later, on November 8, Émile Henry left a bomb outside the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company, which had recently crushed a miners’ strike. The bomb exploded after being moved to a nearby police station, killing five people. On December 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed anarchist who was unable to feed his wife and daughter, threw a small nail bomb into France’s chamber of deputies in order to call attention to the suffering of the poor. Due to its design, the bomb only slightly wounded several deputies and a few spectators. Despite not having killed anyone, Vaillant was sentenced to death. Seven days after Vaillant was executed, Henry sought revenge and threw a bomb into Paris’s Café Terminus on February 12, 1894. His aim was not to target any person in particular but to kill any random member of the bourgeoisie. The explosion killed one and wounded twenty.[[#121MerrimanDynamite99105|121]]
+At some juncture in their expansion along the coastal areas, the Itzâ moved inland to establish a new state in the north. Although the Chilam Balam books claim the Itzâ incursions came from the direction of Cozumel Island and the east coast of the peninsula, the archaeological evidence suggests they came directly inland from their outposts along the coast. It is hardly accidental that their final major capital at Chichén Itzâ was established in the center of the northern plain, directly south of their port at Isla Cerritos. That central zone, however, was already a frontier between the state of Cobâ to the east and the Puuc cities to the west and south. The Itzâ marched provocatively into a region that was already occupied by formidable kingdoms. It is clear that they intended to stay. The first step in their plan was the conquest of Izamal, a kingdom that boasted one of the largest and most famous pyramids in the north.[560] Once they had overcome Izamal, the Itzâ armies kept right on going. They aimed for a border city between Coba and the Pune, an ancient center known as Yaxuna (or Cetelac, as some call it).
-Similar events occurred in Spain. On September 24, 1893, Paulino Pallás threw a bomb at Arsenio Martínez de Campos, the Captain General of Catalonia, during a military parade in Barcelona. The bomb, which was thrown in response to the execution of four anarchist militants, killed two people and wounded Campos and twelve soldiers and spectators. Pallás was subsequently executed. Santiago Salvador, who had been converted to anarchism by Pallás, sought revenge for his friend’s execution by throwing two bombs down onto the wealthy audience of the Liceu Opera theater in Barcelona during its November 7 performance of ''William Tell''. Only one bomb exploded, killing fifteen people and seriously injuring fifty others.[[#122EsenweinAnarchistIdeolog|122]]
+The massive pyramids of Yaxuna had been raised by kings in the Preclassic and Classic periods and were the largest such structures in the central northern lowlands. Following a decline in the Late Classic period, Yaxuna experienced a resurgence of both population and prestige in the Terminal Classic. At the time of the Itza incursions, Yaxuna was probably a sizable town, marking the boundary between Coba’s sphere of influence and the Puuc cities to the west. In this flat land without rivers, there were only two clear geographic markers: the deep natural wells, called cenotes, and the sacred mountains raised by ancestral peoples. Both were used by the northern Maya to stake out political centers and frontiers. Yaxuna had large ancient pyramids and the aura of power and legitimacy such places contain. It also had a great natural well. Both of these landmarks made it the logical choice for a border city.
-Other anarchists used blades and guns to engage in targeted assassinations. In 1894, Santo Caserio stabbed to death the President of France Sadi Carnot. This was followed by Michele Angiolillo assassinating the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1897 and Luigi Lucheni killing the Empress of Austria Elisabeth Eugenie in 1898. Two years later in 1900, Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto I of Italy with a revolver. In 1901, Leon Czolgosz, who had only recently come into contact with anarchist ideas, shot and fatally wounded the American president William McKinley. On other occasions, anarchist assassins were unsuccessful, such as Berkman’s 1892 attempt to kill the capitalist Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for the violent repression of a strike at the Homestead steel works.[[#123JensenAnarchistTerrorism|123]]
+The Itza could not take Yaxuna immediately because the king of Coba and the rulers of the Puuc cities claimed it as their own. By dint of diplomacy or force of arms, these two kingdoms initially repelled the invaders’ advance, thus forcing the Itza to chose another nearby sacred spot for their new capital. The Itza established their new city at a another cenote that would come to be known as Chichen Jtzd, “the Well of the Itza.” This site was located twenty kilometers to the north of Yaxuna.
-Anarchist assassinations and bombings did not end suddenly at the dawn of the new century and continued for several years after. For example, anarchist bomb throwers failed to murder the King of Spain Alfonso XIII during his 1905 visit to Paris and 1906 wedding in Madrid. The explosions from these two assassination attempts injured 124 bystanders and killed twenty-three people. Over a decade later, the anarchist Émile Cottin unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate the French Prime Minister Clemenceau in 1919.[[#124OnAlfonsoseePaulAvrich|124]]
+This first confrontation was but the opening round in a grim war for control of the northern part of the peninsula. Responding to the new intruders, the king of Coba commissioned the construction of the most ambitious political monument ever raised by the Maya: a stone road one hundred kilometers long, linking the center of Coba to the ancient center of Yaxuna. Townsmen and villagers living along the route of this sacred causeway quarried three quarters of a million cubic meters of rock from the earth for its construction. They filled the masonry walls and packed down tons of white marl on the road’s surface, using huge stone rolling pins. This road declared Coba to be master of a territorial domain covering at least four thousand square kilometers, nearly twice the size of the southern lowland kingdom of Tikal at its height.[561]
-The majority of these attacks were carried out in response to the much greater violence of the ruling classes. A clear example of this is Bresci’s assassination of King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. A few years previously, in 1897 and 1898, a wave of protests, demonstrations, strikes, and riots had spread across Italy in response to the spiraling cost of bread, which was the primary source of food for the working classes. This direct struggle included women leading raids on granaries and bakeries in order to expropriate food. Bread prices had risen due to an extremely poor grain harvest in Italy and the Italian state’s decision to not lower import duties on foreign grain in order to protect the financial interests of Italian capitalists and landowners. This included the prime minister and finance minister, who both owned vast amounts of land. The Italian state responded to the working classes struggle for adequate food with mass arrests, the mobilization of the army, and the imposition of martial law. On several occasions, protesters armed with little more than sticks and stones were wounded or killed by gunfire from soldiers. In the port of Livorno, two warships even threatened to shell working-class neighborhoods.
+At Yaxuna, the arrival of the masonry road triggered a frenzy of building activity on the foundations of the ancient ruins (Fig. 9:5). Early Classic buildings were quarried to provide building blocks for the new temples and palaces that rose at the edges of the broad plaza area where the Coba road ended. Masons removed the rubble and stone from the sides of the Preclassic Acropolis and piled it up again into a pyramid twenty-five ] meters high, facing eastward toward Coba. To this conglomerate of old and new, the Yaxuna people added a ballcourt and its associated temples and platforms. We know that the Puuc cities also had their part in the rebuilding of Yaxuna because the style of the new buildings emulated the Puuc tradition, rather than that of Coba.
-Such threats were not empty. In May 1898, soldiers in Milan not only responded to thrown rocks with volleys of gunfire. They also fired artillery at striking workers, who had attempted to defend themselves by erecting barricades out of little more than furniture, metal grilles, and trolley cars. Groups of women who attempted to block the street were met with cavalry charges and trampled under horses’ hooves. A crowd of two thousand students, some of whom were armed with revolvers, were shot at with cannons. The names of 264 people were listed as dead victims in local newspapers, though other estimates ranged from four hundred to eight hundred deaths. King Umberto celebrated this violence by rewarding Italy’s highest decoration to the commander of the soldiers in Milan, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris.[[#125PerniconeandOttanelliAs|125]] Bresci later claimed that “when in Paterson I read of the events in Milan, where they even used cannons, I wept with rage and prepared myself for vengeance. I thought of the king who awarded a prize to those who carried out the massacres, and I became convinced that he deserved death.”[[#126QuotedinZimmerImmigrant|126]]
+Surrounding this new seat of authority, the inhabitants founded a perimeter of smaller communities, one almost exactly midway between Yaxuná and Chichón Itzá (Fig. 9:6). To decorate their small palaces, artisans of these towns carved stone bas-reliefs displaying the warriors of the polity taking captives (Figs. 9:7 and 9:8). They also displayed bas- reliefs of the accession of their lords, including one who acceded to the rank of cah, a variant of the cahal status of nobles in the southern lowland kingdoms (Fig. 9:9).
-Such individual acts of violence usually provided an anarchist with the opportunity to engage in propaganda of the word during their court speech and thereby spread anarchist ideas to a large audience via the reporting of mainstream newspapers. These speeches varied in quality and the extent to which they successfully transmitted anarchist ideas. To give one example, Berkman refused to be represented by a lawyer and prepared a lengthy court speech on anarchism. During the trial Berkman’s speech was unexpectedly badly translated from German to English by a court interpreter. After an hour, the judge abruptly ended the speech and Berkman was unable to complete it. This occurred despite him offering to cut the part on labor and capital and move onto his discussion of the church and the state.[[#127AvrichandAvrichSashaan|127]] Caserio’s passionate court speech suffered a similar fate when it was translated into French and quickly read aloud by a court clerk in a monotone voice. His speech nonetheless provides an illustrative example of the manner in which anarchist assassins or bombers justified their violent acts. He declared to the court that anarchists had to respond to the “guns, chains, and prisons” of the ruling classes with “dynamite, bombs, and daggers” in order to “defend our lives” and “destroy the bourgeoisie and the governments.”[[#128QuotedinPerniconeandOtt|128]]
+Ultimately, however, the efforts of the Puuc cities and Coba to remain in power in the center of the northern lowlands failed. After many years of bitter fighting, Chichón Itzá’s armies won the battle on the fields of Yaxuná. The rebuilding of that city ended almost as soon as it had begun. Quarried blocks of stone lay strewn at the base of ancient platforms, abandoned in hasty retreat before the masons could use them. The occupants of the perimeter communities likewise fled, leaving their little decorated palaces unattended and their homes to fall into ruin.
-Anarchists responded to the wave of assassinations and bombings that began in the 1890s in a variety of conflicting ways. Prominent anarchist authors routinely claimed that the individuals who carried out such acts of violence were sensitive or desperate people reacting to the much greater violence of capitalism and the state.[[#129ForexampleEmmaGoldmanR|129]] A significant segment of the wider anarchist movement labeled the perpetrators as martyrs who acted heroically in the pursuit of social emancipation. In 1895, the English anarchist Louisa Sarah Bevington wrote that “those who did these acts were the very best, the most human, unselfish, self-sacrificing of our comrades, who threw their lives away, meeting death or imprisonment in the hope that their acts would sow the seeds of revolt, that they might show the way and wake an echo, by their deeds of rebellion, in the victims of the present system.”[[#130LouisaSarahBevingtonAn|130]]
+We cannot say how long this war lasted, but its final outcome is certain. The war reliefs of Yaxuná[562] were cast down from their buildings to be rediscovered a millennium later by archaeologists (Fig. 9:10). The inhabitants of Chichón Itzá, by contrast, went on to expand their city, adding many ambitiously conceived buildings dedicated to their triumph and glory. The cities of the Puuc region and the great capital of the northwestern plain, Dzibilchaltún,[563] likewise collapsed as political capitals. As Chichón Itzá prospered, these rival kingdoms were eventually abandoned. The final occupation of Uxmal also shows the presence of the pottery styles of Chichón Itzá.[564] Cobá may not have been abandoned in the wake of this catastrophe, but it experienced a slow, steady decline in public construction.[565]
-These sorts of statements were part of a broader trend in which the memory of anarchist assassins and bombers were incorporated into anarchist counterculture and took their place alongside other key events of remembrance, such as the anniversary of the Paris Commune. An Italian anarchist group in the United States, for example, named themselves “The Twenty-Ninth of July,” after the day Bresci assassinated Umberto.[[#131AvrichSaccoandVanzetti|131]] This trend was not universal or always long-lasting. In Spain, several anarchist papers initially praised anarchist assassins and bombers as martyrs, but from 1898 onward, their names rarely appeared in print media.[[#132JamesYeomanPrintCulture|132]]
+The archaeology of Chichón Itzá itself yields an enigmatic and controversial picture of these events.[566] Traditionally, archaeologists regarded the city as having had two major occupations: an earlier “Maya” community with Puuc-style temples and palaces, including dedicatory lintels with hieroglyphic texts; and a later “Toltec” or foreign community established by Mexican conquerors and their Maya allies. In reality, Chichen Itza shows evidence of having always been a single city occupied by a remarkable. increasingly cosmopolitan nobility. This nobility manipulated diverse political expressions in their public art—some Maya, some Mexican—but all aimed at reinforcing and consolidating their authority.
-Anarchists, regardless of what they thought about the individuals who carried out assassinations and bombings, disagreed with one another about whether or not such acts were an effective means of contributing toward positive social change. Galleani wrote articles defending Pallás and Vaillant in December 1893, and publicly recommended a bomb-making manual in 1906 that featured an image of Ravachol on the front cover.[[#133SentaGalleani6566139|133]] Several years later, in 1925, Galleani argued that a wave of individual acts of violence was “''a necessarily intermediary phenomenon between the sheer ideal or theoretical affirmation and the insurrectionary movement which follows it and kindles the torch of the victorious revolution''.”[[#134GalleaniEndofAnarchism|134]] Just as Brousse had previously thought that anarchist-led insurrections transmitted lessons to the people, so too did Galleani think that assassinating monarchs was a powerful means of communication. It taught the oppressed classes that a monarch, who is believed to be picked by God and wields a vast amount of power, can be killed and so is just like any other person. Above all, such individual acts of violence taught workers that they could, if they wanted, free themselves and overthrow their oppressors. For Galleani, no act of rebellion was useless or harmful to the cause.[[#135GalleaniEndofAnarchism|135]]
+This revised vision of Chichen Itza as a single, unified culture is based upon a realization that the pottery style of the “Toltec” city was at least partly contemporary with the pottery style of the Puuc and “Maya” Chichen. It is also based upon recognition that the settlement organization of the city is unitary: A network of stone roads links principal groups into a whole. Finally, although the artistic style of the “Toltec” part of the city is distinctive, this style also utilizes Maya hieroglyphic texts.[567] The royal patrons of this “Toltec” complex in the northern section of Chichen Itza may have favored murals and sculpture over texts, but they were not illiterate foreigners. They were true Maya citizens.
-Other anarchists disagreed and argued that such actions were tactically misguided and immoral when they targeted innocent people. Malatesta opposed Henry’s bombing of the Café Terminus as “unjust, vicious, and senseless,”[[#136MalatestaPatientWork58|136]] and described Salvador’s bombing of the Liceu Opera theater as an act which killed and wounded “needless victims” while achieving “no possible benefit to the cause.”[[#137MalatestaPatientWork12|137]] In the case of Michele Angiolillo’s assassination of the Spanish Prime minister, an act that did not harm any innocent people, Malatesta thought that although the act was morally justifiable, “it is doubtful that his deed served the freedom of Spaniards . . . it is for reasons of usefulness that, generally speaking, we are not in favor of individual attacks, which have been very common throughout history but almost always have not helped, and have very often harmed, the cause they were intended to serve.”[[#138MalatestaPatientWork26|138]]
+What the archaeology of Chichen Itza does suggest is that several generations of rulers built public architecture and sculpture to commemorate their increasing success in war and trade. As the ahauob of Chichen Itza w’orked to forge a conquest state that incorporated the territories of their enemies, the political statements they commissioned departed more and more from the prototypes they had inherited from the southern kings. These kings abandoned narrative portraits with inscribed texts in favor of assemblies of portraits carved on pillars in the great colonnades or engraved on the interior walls of their temples, throughout this book we have shown how changes in the strategies of public art reflect improvisations in the institution of ahau. In the case of the Itzá, these changes were designed to legitimize not only conquest but also consolidation. We have seen such improvisation before in the case of Early Classic Tikal, but here the strategy is more comprehensive, reaching into the very essence of the institution of ahau itself—namely its focus upon the lineal connection between males of descending generations.
-According to the historian Richard Bach Jensen, during the 1890s real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings in Europe, the United States, and Australia killed at least sixty people and wounded more than two hundred. Between 1878 and 1914, real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings globally (excluding Russia) killed more than 220 people and wounded over 750. Despite such great human costs, which included the needless murder and injury of innocent civilians, the tactic of propaganda of the deed had failed to generate a mass revolutionary movement or inspire large insurrections, let alone ignite the social revolution. It had instead made the social revolution a more remote possibility because it both convinced the political ruling classes, including heads of police, that they were threatened by an international coordinated anarchist conspiracy that had to be destroyed, and it provided them with a political opportunity for directing huge amounts of state repression toward the anarchist movement in particular, and the socialist movement in general. This state repression included the banning of anarchist papers, mass arrests, and laws that criminalized anarchism specifically.[[#139JensenAnarchistTerrorism|139]] Kropotkin neatly summarized the consequences of this state repression in 1907, when he remarked that it had the “effect of thinning our ranks.”[[#140KropotkinDirectStruggle|140]]
+The political organization of Chichón Itzá, as conveyed in its hieroglyphic texts, was revolutionary even before the initiation of the non- glyphic public art programs. This innovativeness is particularly evident in the treatment of family relationships between ahauob,[568] as we shall see shortly. The nobles of this city shared extraordinary privileges with their rulers. The texts of Chichón Itzá are scattered throughout the city in places traditionally reserved for the use of kings: on the stone lintels spanning the doorways of public buildings; on the jambs of these doorways; on freestanding piers in doorways, an architectural fashion of the Terminal Classic period; and on friezes decorating the interiors of these buildings.
-Ultimately, it is fair to say that insurrectionist anarchism was unsuccessful, in so far as the main forms of propaganda of the deed they advocated and engaged in failed to inspire the working classes to rise up, and in so doing, form a mass movement capable of overthrowing class society. The strategy of propaganda of the deed can appear to be doomed to failure from a twenty-first<sup>-</sup>century vantage point, equipped with the benefit of hindsight and the lessons of over 150 years of attempts to build socialism. As a result, it is essential to understand insurrectionist anarchists on their own terms, and contextualize their ideas within the time they lived in. The strategy of insurrectionist anarchism did not develop out of nowhere. It was instead a product of anarchists being affected by and responding to their contemporary situation. This included the belief that a social revolution was imminent due to a recent wave of insurrections in multiple countries; being deeply influenced by the actions and ideas of contemporary social movements, such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; responding to the much greater violence of the political and economic ruling classes toward the working classes in general and anarchism in particular; and the nefarious influences of police spies and agent provocateurs. Insurrectionist anarchism was nonetheless not the only strategy anarchists developed in response to their context.
+The written history of Chichón Itzá covers a remarkably short span for a city of such importance. The dates associated with these texts are all clustered within the second katun of the tenth baktun. The earliest clear date at the site, July 2, A.D. 867, is inscribed on a monument that was found lying on the ground. This monument, know n as the Watering Trough Lintel, has a deep corn-grinding-metate surface cut into it. Recently, the intriguing question has arisen that an inscription on a temple called the High Priest’s Grave,[569] traditionally regarded as the latest date at the site (10.8.10.11.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, or May 13, A.D. 998) might actually have been carved much earlier. We suggest instead that this date fell on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, 842) and is thus the earliest date in the city. This alternative makes better sense in light of the tight clustering of the other inscribed dates found within the city. The date inscribed on the High Priest’s Grave is only one of several texts, including several undeciphered historical ones, on the temple. Hence it clearly falls into the phase of public literacy in the city.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#16|1]]. Prior to the creation of the anarchist movement in the 1870s, the strategy of insurrectionist anarchism was advocated by Déjacque in the 1850s. Since I do not know if his ideas on strategy had any influence on the movement in general or the key insurrectionist theorists, such as Cafiero, Most, or Galleani, I have decided to not discuss his ideas. See Joseph Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861'' (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 40–42.</div>
+At the same time, the High Priest’s Temple is architecturally a prototype of the four-sided Castillo with the famous serpent sculptures on its stairways.[570] The Castillo is the focal point of the later northern center only a few meters to the north and east of it. The imagery within the High Priest’s Temple, including a bound noble on a column and a serpent- entwined individual over the inner dais, clearly anticipates the iconography of buildings in the great northern center such as the Temple of the Chae Mool and the Temple of the Warriors. This earlier placement of the High Priest’s Grave would tie the “Toltec” northern center to the “Maya” southern center architecturally and spatially. If confirmed, it would also make the original implementations of the “Toltec” iconographic and architectural styles which lack inscriptions completely contemporary with the “’Maya” styles found with the dedicatory monuments throughout the southern districts of the city.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#26|2]]. Michael Schmidt and van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 123, 128–131.</div>
+The restricted distribution of dates at Chichón Itza is commensurate with the intent of the texts, for they do not delineate a dynastic history like those we encountered in the southern kingdoms. The inscriptions of the southern cities focused on the commemoration of major events in the lives of kings and their significant others, often tying these events to major conjunctions in the cycles of time. The focus of attention in the Chichén Itzá texts is upon rituals of dedication carried out by groups of lords. The historical information given consists not of personal history but of dates, names, and the relationships among the actors who participated in these rituals.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#36|3]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 99.</div>
+The Temple of the Four Lintels is one of three Puuc-style buildings containing inscribed monuments in a group that terminates the main north-south sacbe, or roadway, of the city (Fig. 9:11). The assemblage of lintels from this building illustrates the general rhetoric of these inscriptions. The name of the principal protagonist is listed, along with the date of the inscription and the action being commemorated. This information is followed by a statement of his relationship to a second person. This second person may then be qualified as the agent of yet another ritual in the overall process of dedication. Finally, in a couplet structure, there is a reiteration of the dedication by the principal individual, followed by a listing of two more individuals who are said to be related to one another. The date of this particular dedication, July 13, A.D. 881, is thrice recorded on the lintels of this temple.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#46|4]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 32.</div>
+This focus upon dedicatory rituals and their participants leaves us with only a brief and enigmatic history of the important people of Chichén Itzá. We are not told when these people were born or when they acceded, warred, or died as we were in the southern kingdoms. We do, however, have some glimmering of the kinds of rituals being carried out. In the Four Lintels texts, there are references to the drilling action which creates new fire[571] and several of the individuals named carry a “fire” title. Furthermore, two of these lintels carry images on them which, when found in other scenes at Chichén Itzá, pertain to sacrifice. The most prominent images are the bird which claws open the chests of victims to extract the heart and the serpent which rises above the sacrifice.[572]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#56|5]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 47.</div>
+The Casa Colorada is a sizable temple south of the main city center and next to the sacbe leading to the southern group containing the Temple of the Four Lintels. Here, a hieroglyphic frieze records a series of events that took place on two different dates, 10.2.0.1.9 6 Muluc 12 Mac (September 15, 8 69),[573] and 10.2.0.15.3 7 Akbal 1 Ch’en (June 16, 8 70). Again, we see the names of several different lords listed along with the ritual actions they performed on these days. We find recorded, among others, a “fish- in-hand” bloodletting ritual and the ceremonial drilling activity associated with the creation of fire (Fig. 9:12). Here, as in the case of the Four Lintels texts, the emphasis is again upon a series of individuals who are named as agents of different actions.
-[[#66|6]]. David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''104–5, 108–9.
+The bridge between the textual programs and the purely artistic programs in the city can be found on the carved doorway column in Structure 6E1[574] (Fig. 9:13). In this one instance, the artist wrote out the names of the individuals glyphically, but rendered their actions in portraits. On the doorway column of this building, we see four striding figures. One of them carries a handful of throwing-stick darts and a severed human head. The others carry axes of the kind used in decapitation sacrifice[575] and knives used in heart-extraction rituals at Chichen Itza.[576] Here then we have a group of titled individuals[577] who are participants in, or witnesses of, a death sacrifice. Another glyphic inscription is found in the nearby Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs (Structure 6E3). This temple is associated with a particular kind of elite residence called a Patio Quad structure,[578] which finds its most spectacular expression in the Mercado, a colonnaded palace in the main northern center. In the past this Patio Quad type of house has been attributed to the “Toltec-Chichen Itza,” illiterate foreigners living within the city. The presence of these traditional Maya-style glyphs on a building which is clearly the household shrine of this group, however, is but one more example that the “Maya” and “Toltec” styles existed simultaneously in time, as part of one unified culture.[579]
-[[#76|7]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''74, 102–9.
+Any overview of the monumental art of Chichén Itzá raises nearly as many questions as it answers. Who were these mysterious lords who did not care to celebrate their births, accessions, and triumphs as Maya rulers had done before them? This is a matter which is not easily resolved. First of all, the actual number of historical individuals recorded in the texts is still a point of controversy. Those people we can identify with relative certainty are listed in Figure 9:14. Second, sorting out the kin relationships at Chichén is a perplexing task. The relationships we are sure of are given in Figure 9:15. The connections here are between women of ascending generation and their progeny, as expressed in the glyphic expressions “mother of” and “child of mother.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#86|8]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''41–42; Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 61–62; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 57, 91–93. For an example of an insurrectionist group, see Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 150–56.</div>
+At the most, these glyphs tell us that there were two, perhaps three, generations of women who were mother, grandmother, and possibly greatgrandmother to the major group of men named as “siblings” in these texts. The kinship ties among these five men can be determined in the following ways: (1) Two of them, Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi, are the children of the same mother, and (2) four of them are named in the kind of yitah, or “sibling,” relationship we have seen recorded at Caracol and Tikal. Kin- Cimi, Ah-Muluc-Tok, Wacaw, and Double-Jawbone are all named in this “sibling” group. Since Kakupacal and Kin-Cimi share the same mother, Kakupacal can also be added to this group of brothers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#96|9]]. Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 59.</div>
+We have seen siblings before in the royal histories of the Maya, but not in sets of five. Moreover, although there are many more discoveries to be made in these texts, as of now there is no clear evidence that any one of these individuals was superior in rank to any of the others. All carry such noble titles as ahau and yahau kak, “lord of fire,” but there is no single individual whom we can identify with certainty as king. This situation is exacerbated by the presence of at least one, and perhaps two, more such sibling sets in these texts, as shown in Figure 9:14. While there may eventually be evidence to suggest generational relationships among the groups, for the present there are no clear father-son relationships in any surviving record from Chichen Itza. The dates of the texts in question cover a span of time which is relatively brief by Maya standards, and the texts imply contemporaneous actions by these people. The native chronicles of the Itza declare that Chichen Itza was ruled by brothers in its heyday[580]—and a brotherhood of princes is exactly what we see emerging from the ancient texts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#106|10]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 61, See also, 58, 105.</div>
+There are precedents for the sharing of power between a Maya king and his key relatives. Smoking-Frog and Curl-Snout of Tikal ruled their expanded domain together. Yax-Pac of Copan had co-regents of a sort in his brothers. Bird-Jaguar of Yaxchilan elevated his cahalob, his noble kin, and his supporters to stand beside him on the royal monuments of the realm. Of course, the king had always been an ahau, like many of the nobles around him. The dissolution of the kingship into a council of nobles, however, was still a fundamentally new and revolutionary definition of power and government for a people who had acknowledged sacred kings for a thousand years.
-[[#116|11]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 73.
+At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya had a word for this kind of government: multepal, joint or confederate government.[581] It was a multepal that ruled Mayapan, the last regional capital of the northern Maya, which was established after the fall of Chichen Itza, during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200–1450) and just before the Spanish conquest.[582] Within the Mayapan government, there was a particularly powerful family, the Cocom, whose patriarch was generally regarded as the “first among equals.” There was also a rival political faction, the Xiu, whose family patriarch was high priest of the cult of Kukulcan and carried the title of Ah Kin Mai, Priest of the Cycle. Neither of these leaders, however, could successfully claim to rule their constituents in the manner that the Classic period southern kings did. We are convinced that the present textual evidence at Chichen Itza points to an earlier and precedent-setting multepal as the institution of government in that city.
-[[#126|12]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 75.
+The Cocom family of the Conquest period claimed to be the descendants of the ancient rulers of Chichen Itza. According to legend, the Cocom returned to the territory of the city of the sacred well after the fall of Mayapan in A.D. 1450.[583] Chichen Itza texts from the end of the Classic period provide some support for their claim to be the former rulers of that city. In the text of the Casa Colorada frieze discussed above, Yax-Uk-Kauil, Kakupacal, and other notables are associated with Hun-Pik-Tok, who is called “Divine Cocom, the ahau (vassal) of Jawbone-Fan” (Fig. 9:12).[584] The name Hun-Pik-Tok also appears on the lintel from the Akab Tzib, where he is again named the vassal of the “Divine Cocom” overlord, Jawbone-Fan. The ancient pedigree of the Cocoms is thus confirmed by their appearance in the inscriptions of Kakupacal and his siblings in the early history of Chichón Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#135|13]]. Quoted in George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.</div>
+Since neither Hun-Pik-Tok nor Jawbone-Fan is tied to any of the sibling sets, we have no way of knowing what kin relationship they may have had with Kakupacal and his siblings. Hun-Pik-Tok, moreover, does not get the amount of historical attention we have seen on the monuments of other Maya kings. Instead, he is, at most, an antecedent presence to the sibling sets, either providing them with some form of legitimacy or acting as their ally. Nevertheless, we can assume from all of this evidence that the multepal form of government probably did not originate at Mayapán, as some have believed, but in Chichón Itzá itself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#145|14]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''102. See also'' ''Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''62; Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 95–97.</div>
+We also know that Chichón Itzá, like the more orthodox Maya kingdoms, also used an Emblem Glyph, which can be loosely translated as “divine Chichén Itzá lord.”[585] The main phrase of the Chichén Itzá Emblem Glyph is comprised of male genitalia and a le sign. Male genitalia are one of the most ancient and venerable of titles taken by kings, and probably connote the concept of “progenitor.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#155|15]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order:'' ''Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe ''(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 34.</div>
+The Emblem Glyph was widely used in the names of Chichén’s leaders: Several members of the sibling sets used the Emblem Glyph as a title. This “male-genitalia” glyph even occurs as part of the name of the oldest female appearing on the monuments. In the name of this woman, the grandmother of the five brothers, the glyph probably simply connoted the simple idea of an ancestress. In the southern kingdoms, contemporaries of the ruler could also refer to themselves with the Emblem Glyph title. In those cases, however, there was never any ambiguity as to which of these lords was the high king and which were in positions of subordination. The ambiguous nature of the hierarchical labels at Chichón is just one more piece of evidence supporting the concept of confederate rule.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#165|16]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''25–29.</div>
+The texts we have surveyed so far give us only a glimpse of Chichón Itzá’s rich and complex-history. To examine the culture and political structure further, we must turn to the richer and more extensive political statements found in the imagery on its public art. Here we find a marked thematic contrast to the art of the southern lowland Maya kingdoms, particularly those of the Late Classic period. Chichén Itzá’s many carved panels, pillars, piers, lintels, sculptures, and murals do not celebrate the king, but rather groups of people, particularly in processional arrangements.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#175|17]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''169.</div>
+One of the most spectacular of these stone assemblies is the gallery of notables carved on the squared columns of the Northwest Colonnade and the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9.16). The Northwest Colonnade is a spacious, beam-and-mortar roofed building found at the base of the raised pyramid crowned by the Temple of the Warriors. The gallery of notables is, literally, a frozen procession representing 221-plus striding men. These stone figures frame the processional route which leads to the temple stairway (Fig. 9:17).[586]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#185|18]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''30–33.</div>
+For the most part, the individuals portrayed are warriors, as the name of the building complex implies. The majority are armed with spearthrowers, although some carry bunched spears and others clubs studded with ax blades. There is also a depiction of another defensive weapon, a curved stick evidently used to parry spears hurled by enemies.[587] These weapons are associated with the Tlaloc-warfare complex which we saw operating among southern lowland kingdoms. In the art of Chichen Itza, however, there are abundant and explicit depictions of the actual waging of war with such weapons. Some of the warriors in the procession are clearly veterans, proudly displaying their amputated limbs. Each is an individual portrait, differing in details from the others (Fig. 9:18). In addition to the warriors, there are other important people. Some have been identified as sorcerers or priests by the regalia they wear and the fact that they are not armed (Fig. 9:18d). There is also one intimidating old matriarch striding among all of these men.[588] She is probably either the matriarch of the principal sodality or a representative of the Moon Goddess Ix-Chel, also known as Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. This figure echoes images from elsewhere in the city and we find her as well in the Temple of the Jaguars across the great platform from the Temple of the Warriors.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#195|19]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 216.</div>
+In the center of the procession, on the columns in front of the stairway leading upward to the sacrificial stone, the Chae Mool, there is an assembly of prisoners. This group of bound captives confirms the essential intent of the overall composition—to celebrate victory in war. Despite the brilliant and innovative architectural framework, the political message here is the same as the one we have seen throughout our earlier histories— capture and sacrifice of rival lords by the powerful. There is one significant difference, however. In the monumental art of the southern kingdoms, we have seen prisoners stripped, humiliated, and often mutilated. Here, the captives are dressed in rich regalia, in most respects the same kind of attire worn by the highest ranking of the victorious warriors surrounding them (Fig. 9:18c). Obviously, the Itzá preferred to absorb their enemies rather than destroy them.
-[[#205|20]]. Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102.
+Although the elite of Chichón Itzá clearly had ties to the non-Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the winners celebrating here are as clearly “Maya” in their appearance as their victims. Let us pause now to imagine what a procession like this would have been like in the days when Chichón was entering into the era of its glory.
-[[#215|21]]. David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''19; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 191.
+A bewhiskered, grizzled face swam before the eyes of the adolescent boy as the old steward shook him awake in the cold dampness of the colonnaded hall. It was still dark in the plaza in front of his family compound. Inside, the red-painted walls and heavy wooden rafters glinted in the flickering torchlight, festooned with stone-edged weapons and sparkling gear. Already the boy’s elder kinsmen were dressed in their sleeveless jackets of embroidered cotton armor. Their golden-feathered, greenstone- studded helmets shone in the dim light. As the men engaged in animated conversation, the small blue birds, which hung like diadems from the front of their helmets, bobbed with the movements of their heads. They reminded the boy of the pretty little birds that swooped among the swarms of insects at half-light, devouring them by the thousands, like the Itzá overwhelming their enemies on the field. The men’s green-feathered back- shields were emblazoned with the fearful insignia of their family and their city. Schoolboys from the villages vied with one another to supply the long strips of cotton[589] with which the men strapped each other’s arms and legs for war.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#225|22]]. Quoted in Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'','' ''216.</div>
+Laughter and casual conversation filled the boy’s ears, and his belly growled as the scent of hot corn gruel laced with chocolate and chili filled his nostrils. He moved quickly to join the others. No battle today. Instead, they would march in victory to the great council hall of the lords.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#235|23]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74.</div>
+Accompanied by the ancient shamans, his father emerged from the family shrine which sat on a steep platform across the plaza. The blood of last evening’s sacrifices stained their long robes and matted their flowing hair. The boy’s heart swelled with pride as he remembered the lords the men of his family had taken captive in the campaign of the hill towns. His older brother had told him how the shouts of victory had mingled with the screams of terror as the women of the vanquished had fled their burning homes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#245|24]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74–75.</div>
+If the sacrifices were finished, the boy knew it was getting late. As he dressed hastily, he could hear the defeated nobles in their finery being assembled by his siblings on the plaza before the great hall. The drums of his clan began sounding the march. Still straightening his helmet, the boy rushed down the stairs to join the procession as it moved off led by his father, their great captain.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#255|25]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74.</div>
+Drumsong and the smoke of morning temple fires rose from the arcade of tall shade trees and fruit orchards lining the road. Dawn was just turning the sky pale-blue as the boy’s clan reached the main thoroughfare, joining the other groups of warriors who were pouring in greater and greater numbers from the paths among the trees. Together, they headed northward on the great white limestone road. The jogging rhythm of the warriors surrounding him propelled the boy forward, even as he strained to catch a glimpse of the prisoner-kings of the enemy whom the high lords of the council paraded among them. The company marched the battle dance of the Itza, a frightening, sinuous rush of warriors that carried death to all who opposed it. The massive red walls of the first house of the siblings loomed to the boy’s right as the swelling ranks of the army emerged onto the plaza of the old center. Their arrival was punctuated by a roar of approval from the crowds lining every side.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#265|26]]. Quoted in Senta, ''Galleani'', 126.</div>
+The great captains danced forward, reenacting the capture of their enemies. Uttering his distinctive hawklike war cry, the boy’s father grabbed a valorous ahau by the hair and pushed him off balance, stabbing his spear into the air. Up ahead, the procession slowed as the vast stream of men expanded out onto the broad avenue, flanked on one side by the Observatory and on the other by the Red House. Elbowing past the intent ranks of his clan and their provincial allies, the young boy maneuvered himself to the edge of the battle group. It was his responsibility, he reminded himself as the older men gave way, to stand at the exposed edge of his family’s ranks, moving them at the signals from his father and his elder siblings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#275|27]]. Senta, ''Galleani'', 126. Formal congresses were also rejected by Jean Grave. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''65.</div>
+Moving forward with the impetus of the men-at-arms, the boy passed the old Castillo, its sacred cave now sealed by the graves of seven great lords.[590] It loomed high above the far side of the parade. The new Castillo, still under construction, rose proudly before them, surrounded by a sea of city folk. As the crowd fell back cheering, the army writhed onto the blinding white plaza and danced across to the Great Ballcourt. Also unfinished, this structure was vast beyond all imagining, encompassing an awesome vision of victory and sacrifice at the heart of the mighty city. The sweet stench of death filled the boy’s nostrils as he passed the huge skull rack before the Ballcourt. The hollow-eyed heads of defeated enemies glared back at him, sending a shiver down his spine as he contemplated their earthly remains mounted in row upon row on the tall wooden rack. The older trophies shone in the morning light with the creamy-white brillance of naked bone, while others taken more recently still bore the flesh and hair of their unfortunate owners. All hung as grim reminders of what the wargame would bring for some of the prisoners today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#285|28]]. Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the ''Cronca Sovversiva'' and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 49–53; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 34–35; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014),'' ''29.</div>
+At full strength now, the army swirled around the Castillo, gyrating to the reverberation of hundreds of great wooden drums and the wail of the conch trumpets. Thousands upon thousands of warriors arranged in long sinuous lines moved with the discipline of years of combat, pushing back the crowds to the edges of the plaza and up onto the flanks of the buildings. The prisoners moved in their midst, each one the ward of a great veteran. The boy’s father signaled his son to shift his battle group into tormation along the eastern side of the great northern plaza, joining the others of his province. In a moment the wargames would begin in earnest.
-[[#295|29]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''19.
+Vibrating with tension, the men faced a wide sea of their compatriots across the plaza. When the signal whistles and cries rose from their captains, they rushed forward to engage each other as they had engaged the enemy in the battle of the hills. The crowd roared encouragement. More warriors rushed forward in the melee to dampen the danger of accident. Circles opened in the crowd as brave enemies were freed from their bonds and given weapons with which to pantomime deadly combat with the Itzá’s best heroes. Dart duels cut alleyways throughout the ranks as men moved out of the line of fire.[591] The dance of death progressed, parry and thrust, the groans of surprise at a sudden wound. Some Itzá would join their ancestors today if they were not alert.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#305|30]]. Carlo Cafiero, “The Organisation of Armed Struggle,” trans. Paul Sharkey, ''The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review'' 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 101.</div>
+In the midst of this melee, the boy saw his father squaring off against his highest-ranked prisoner, both armed with stabbing spears. The two men closed vigorously, wrestled, and then closed again. The lord fought well, but the boy’s father was in better condition and soon had his prisoner down on the plaza with a spear under his chin. There was a pause. Suddenly the father raised up his enemy and gave him back his spear. He gazed into his face and then turned his back to him as he would to a sibling and trusted battle companion. The decision he offered his enemy was to die taking his captor with him. Such a death, however, would be a humiliating act of cowardice. Better by far to live as a younger sibling, a prince of the hated Itzá and their city of the new creation. The captive grasped his spear tightly and, for a moment, the boy thought his father’s time had come. But then the captive’s fingers slowly relaxed, his eyes dropped, and he fell into line behind his captor as the group came back together again and moved off toward the council house.[592] The boy felt a flush of pride. Not all of the lords would have taken such a chance, but he knew his father held his position in the high council by means of his courage as well as his wisdom.
-[[#315|31]]. Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 50.
+The boy’s battle party moved forward to the steps of the Temple of the Warriors, the council house of the Itzá nation. The ambassadors from distant allied cities in the western mountains were arrayed along the front of the halls with their piles of sumptuous gifts. Dressed in long skirts, the dreadful shamans of the city moved among them, waving their crooked staffs and billowing censers and muttering incantations against treachery. The lords of the council gathered on the steps with their highest-born prisoners, announcing the names of those who had joined the nation and those who had chosen to go to the Otherworld today. Those who chose death were honored with ritual celebration before being led through the lower hall and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice. There, as the sun stood high in the sky at midday, one after the other they received the gentle death, so called because no one ever made a sound when his heart was cut out. The great Vision Serpent rose in the clouds of incense surrounding their lifeless bodies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#325|32]]. Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 8–9, 24–27, 33–35, 294–96.</div>
+The sacrifices continued through the afternoon, and the warriors, engaged in their games on the plaza, clustered like angry bees around a hive until the sun sank in bloody splendor. The boy amused himself with the games and wondered if he would ever get to sacrifice in the Great Ballcourt when it was finished by the master builders and masons of the defeated hill cities. Mostly, however, his thoughts were with his father, sitting in the council house plotting the future of the city. Now that there was peace in the land, the Itza could look outward to the world beyond and the challenges it would bring.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#335|33]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 60; Pernicone, “Introductory Essay” in Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''xxiii.</div>
+<center>
+•
+</center>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#345|34]]. Quoted in Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'','' ''52–53.</div>
+The eternal stone rendering of this procession in the Temple of the Warriors depicts figures wearing three of the basic motifs of Tlaloc warfare we have seen in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:18a): the Tlaloc mask, the year-sign headdress, and the clawed-bird warrior. In the temple above this procession, a second gathering of portraits was carved on twenty more columns. Here there are no prisoners, but only warriors and dignitaries. These figures, ranged along the back wall of the hall before the throne dais, embody some particularly fine expressions of this particular artistic program. Although these familiar images of warriors and important dignitaries frame the ritual space which the leader occupied, as we have come to expect in the lineage houses of the earliest Maya kingdoms, they are also different. This great procession of VIPs stands in place of the traditional Classic symbol of the domain—the carved portrait of the victorious king. The throne is still upheld by the customary small warrior figures, but at Chichen Itza, the Maya did not attempt to record the personal identity of the man who sat there.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#355|35]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 76–80; Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''134–48; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 28–29; Paul Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background ''(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 53, 61. Galleani did not adopt a rigid antisyndicalist perspective until around 1910 or 1911 and prior to this appears to have had a more positive view of trade unions. See Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 243–44; Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''106–7, 158–59, 172–73, 191–92.</div>
+The same principle holds true for the Temple of the Chae Mool, an earlier council house buried beneath the Temple of the Warriors. Above the benches that line the walls of this building’s inner sanctum, brightly painted murals portray seated lords, wearing masks of the gods who ruled their cosmos. Seated upon jaguar-skin pillows, some of these lords extend offerings in flat bowls, while others sport shields and carry ax scepters with the bottom portion carved to represent the body of a snake. These scepters resemble the Manikin Scepters of royal office displayed in the southern lowlands (Fig. 9:19, south bench). Still other lords (Fig. 9:19, north bench) carry spearthrowers and throwing spears while they sit on thrones carved to represent full-bodied jaguars. This kind of jaguar throne, even more than the jaguar-skin pillow, was the furniture of rulers among the southern lowland peoples. Yet here we have not a single preeminent personage but whole assemblies of nobles seated upon this type of throne.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#365|36]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''29–30.</div>
+The message of this mural is clear. Once again, the throne is empty. What is being depicted with that empty throne is the historical idea of a central public persona in the city’s government, not a real individual. Each of the surrounding figures is depicted in a distinctive manner. They are clearly meant to represent real people. The government of Chichen Itza, in both its earlier manifestation in the Temple of the Chae Mool, and in its later and more splendid expression in the Temple of the Warriors, is pictured as an assembly, a multepal. What are we to make of the historical legends that claim Kukulcan ruled this city, or of the heroic captains such as Kakupacal and Hun-Pik-Tok of the Cocom, who are likewise mentioned? The answer to that question will have to wait on further archaeological evidence, for these figures certainly do not seem to be centrally focused upon in the public art.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#375|37]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 30.</div>
+The Great Ballcourt, directly across from the Temple of the Warriors complex, expands and complicates the political program. Here, in addition to an assembly of lords, we see other images of central importance. These figures are known as Captain Sun Disk and Captain Serpent (Fig. 9:20).[593] Captain Sun Disk carries a spearthrower and throwing spears and sits inside a nimbus identified by its triangular protrusions as the sun. Captain Serpent also carries the weapons of war, but he sits entwined within the coils of a great feathered snake.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#385|38]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 31.</div>
+[[][Fig. 9:21 Lower Temple of the Jaguars: The Upper Registers after Maudslay]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#395|39]]. G. D. H. Cole, ''A History of Socialist Thought'','' ''vol. 2,'' Marxism and Anarchism'','' 1850–1890'' (London: Macmillan & Co, 1974), 80–1; Jeremy Wolf, “Iron Law of Wages,” in ''The Encyclopedia of Political Thought'', ed. Michael Gibbons (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0541/abstract.</div>
+The importance of the individuals bearing these insignia is clear in the assembly compositions, such as the one found in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:21), where Captain Sun Disk looks down upon the upward-gazing Captain Serpent from his place on the central axis of the overall picture. But there are problems in attempting to identify these insignia as the regalia of real people. First of all, in the imagery of the Classic Maya, the nimbus means simply that the individual so portrayed is a revered ancestor.[594] Captain Sun Disk’s position in the compositions of the Great Ballcourt is variable. In two of the main pictures, however— the one found in the North Temple at the apex of the playing court, and the one in the Lower Temple of the Jaguars across from the Temple of the Warriors—Sun Disk is at the top of the overall picture, the favored locality in Classic Maya art for dead predecessors. Second, the Serpent insignia is not confined to one individual, even on the Great Ballcourt scenes. In the Lower Temple of the Jaguars, for example, there are two Serpent Captains, one feathered and the other decorated with cloud scrolls.[595]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#405|40]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''28, 79.</div>
+Two serpent captains within a composition could be interpreted as indications of the presence of particularly important individuals; but if we go back to the Temple of the Warriors, there are entire processions of serpent captains (Fig. 9:22). Therefore, we can only conclude that the insignia pertains not to an individual but to some important status. Even more significant is the fact that a serpent captain is also found among the prisoners arranged before the stairway of the Temple of the Warriors (Fig. 9:18). This status then is not even peculiar to Chichen’s own elite.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#415|41]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29.</div>
+It is a difficult task to discover individuals who stand out as unequivocal leaders in a program devoted to assembly. The sun-disk status is a real one, and perhaps it pertains to an individual ancestor, but the iconography of this image never shows Captain Sun Disk actively engaged in any of the scenes as a leader. The Serpent insignia is also important, but it too pertains to many people among the nobility at Chichón Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#425|42]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 96–97.</div>
+What can be derived with certainty from these public monuments is that the government of Chichón Itzá carried out successful campaigns of war against its enemies. The murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars (Fig. 9:23) are explicit illustrations of the kind of warfare actually fought with the spearthrower and throwing spear displayed in Tlaloc warfare throughout the Classic period in the southern lowlands. This battle scene, and others in the Temple, show that these wars were fought within the communities of the vanquished. Women are shown fleeing their homes as the battle rages around them. It was the kind of war that resulted in “the tearing down of vaults and buildings,” or hom as it was written in the texts of Tikal and Caracol.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#435|43]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29.</div>
+As always, the penalty of defeat was capture and sacrifice. Victims had their hearts torn out by warriors dressed in the guise of birds, while the great feathered serpent floated above them.[596] Others were shot with arrows or had their heads chopped off. Decapitation sacrifice was particularly associated with the ballgame, as displayed in the reliefs of the Great Ballcourt (Fig. 9:24), but it was also associated with fire ritual, as seen in mural paintings along the basal wall of the Temple of the Warriors. Like their cultural predecessors, however, the people of Chichén Itzá adhered to the ancient Maya notion of the ballgame as a metaphor for battle, and of the ballcourt (or its architectural surrogates in stairways and plazas)[597] E as the primary setting for decapitation sacrifice. Indeed, the Great Ballcourt at Chichén Itzá was evidently constructed as a monument to the successful completion of the Itzá’s wars of conquest.[598]
-[[#445|44]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 21.
+The volume of sacrifice at Chichén Itzá is grimly commemorated in the skull-rack platform[599] next to the Great Ballcourt. We have reason to suspect, however, that not all of the kings and nobles captured by Chichén Itzá ended up on the skull rack. The well-dressed prisoners paraded in the Northwest Colonnade below the Temple of the Warriors could easily blend in with the victors if freed from their bonds. There are also processing dignitaries in the Lower Temple of the Jaguar that bear a remarkable resemblance to lords of the Yaxuná area (Fig. 9:25). The message here is the clear. In a government organized around the principle of confederation and assembly, the major political consequence of war need not be the defeat and humiliation of a rival dynasty. Instead, this dynasty might be incorporated into the expanding cosmopolitan state. In a city already housing numerous ahauob, there may well have been room for the vanquished.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#455|45]]. For example, David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in ''Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy'', ed. Audrey Cronin and James Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 50–52; Mary S. Barton, “The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904,” ''Diplomatic History'' 39, no. 2 (2015): 306–8.</div>
+At its height, Chichón Itzá ruled supreme in the Maya lowlands. We do not know how far its elite extended their claims to dominion, but surely they prevailed over most of the northern lowlands. After the founding of their kingdom, the Puuc cities fell and Coba slowly dwindled to insignificance. There were some hold-out polities in the southern lowlands, but these intrepid survivors of disaster provided no challenge to a city the size of Chichón Itzá and most likely attempted to negotiate an advantageous relationship with its government. How far beyond the lowlands Chichón Itzá’s lords may have extended their domain is still an open question. During this period many fortified capitals of highland México—Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and Tula, to name but a few—show significant connections to the Maya world. We suspect that in future investigations, more of Chichén Itzá’s Maya legacy will be found in the other cultures of Mexico that so astounded the Spaniards.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#465|46]]. Paul Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.</div>
+One idea that the Maya of Chichén Itzá did not pass on to their Mesoamerican neighbors was divine kingship and its concomitant hieroglyphic literature. This docs not, however, imply a paradox in our vision of the last great burst of Maya social innovation. In order to perpetuate the principle of kingship in this period of crisis, to expand it beyond the limitations that caused its demise in the south, the Maya lords of Chichén Itzá terminated the office of king and the principle of dynasty that had generated it. We do not believe, as some have said, that the people of Chichén Itzá were vigorous Mexican foreigners. Their leaders were Maya ahauob as well as participants in the culture of Mesoamerica. Their enemies, at least among the Puuc cities, were similarly cosmopolitan. If earlier Classic iconographic allusions are any guide, the Itzá were certainly not utilizing novel tactics in warfare. They were adhering to the same four-hundred-year-old precepts of Classic Maya Tlaloc-Venus warfare we have already seen in the south.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#475|47]]. There are some usages of the term “propaganda by the deed” by anarchist authors that cannot be neatly fit into these two main versions. Malatesta wrote an article in 1889 called “Propaganda by Deeds,” in which he proposed that anarchists should, either as individuals or affinity groups, beat up tax collectors, push landowners down the stairs when they show up to collect rent, seize and distribute the harvest among peasants rather than allowing it to be taken to the landowner, kill the animals of landowners and distribute the meat to starving peasants, and provide landowners who evict people unable to pay rent “with a terrifying example of the vengeance of the oppressed.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 79–83.</div>
+The key to success for the Chichén Itzá lords lay in their redefinition of the political consequences of defeat in war. They turned away from the dynastic blood feuds of the past and moved toward effective alliance and i consolidation. This consolidation would become the guiding principle of empire among the next great Mesoamerican civilization, the Culhua- E Mexica. At the core of this principle of alliance is the notion of itah, “sibling” or “kinsman of the same generation.” Two siblings perpetuated the first Maya conquest state, that of Tikal and Uaxactún. It was this very principle of brotherhood that Bird-Jaguar invoked in his manipulation of his noble supporters. Even as the lords of the Puuc region desperately fought to withstand Chichén Itzá, they began to declare itah relationships among themselves.[600]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#485|48]]. Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'', 229–39; Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 255–73; E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 394–96, 400–7; Guillaume, “Michael Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch,” in Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 40–42. Bakunin later claimed that the Lyon and Marseille insurrections failed because of a lack of effective organization. See Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 65.</div>
+[[][Fig. 9:25 Warriors from Chichen Itza and the Yaxuna Region]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#495|49]]. John Merriman, ''Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 250–1. For anarchist estimates of the death count, see Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 305; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 354, 406; Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 22.</div>
+With Chichen Itza, the first and last Mesoamerican capital among the Maya, we come full circle in the history of their kingship. The divine lords who emerged in the Late Preclassic period to dance upon their sculptured pyramids were first and foremost ahauob, members of a category of being that made them all essentially the same substance. They were siblings in a brotherhood that began with the Ancestral Twins and prevailed throughout all subsequent history. The reassertion of the idea of brotherhood marked the dismantling of that first principle undergirding kingship: dynasty. When the Ancestral Heroes, through the magic of sacrifice, killed one another and brought each other back to life in the Place of Bailgame Sacrifice in Xibalba, they became father and son to each other. So divine kings brought life out of death and were brought to life by the sacrifices of their fathers before them. The lords of Chichen Itza did not celebrate dynasty, nor did they contemplate sacrifice as kings. They were brothers and ahauob together, as their ancestors were at the beginning of time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#505|50]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 45–50; Temma Kaplan, ''Anarchists of Andalusia'','' 1868–1903'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 101–10.</div>
+. The End of Literate World and its Legacy to the Future
-[[#515|51]]. Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'','' ''195–96.
+Naum-Pat, Halach Uinic (“true human”), felt the gentle waves of the dark, glittering sea lap against his feet as he watched the strange canoes bob against the stars. They were vast floating palaces really. Lit from within with lamps and torches, their tall masts and rigging graced the cool moonlight of Lady Ix-Chel.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#525|52]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 61.</div>
+“Mother of all,” he whispered to himself, “where did these foul-smelling barbarians come from?”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#535|53]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 62. See also Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 123.</div>
+He sighed in astonishment and worry. He had been a seaman all his life. Like his people a thousand years before him, he had plied the deep blue waters and treacherous shallows in great canoes, laden with honey, salt, slaves, chocolate—treasure of all kinds. He had fought enemies upon its rolling surface; he had ridden out the great storms that tormented its waters; he knew every port and people that graced its shores. The sea was his, world of his ancestors, great and dangerous and rich in precious, holy things. Now it had vomited up this monstrosity—a canoe that was a house. The light-skinned barbarians wielded great power, no doubt about it. A shiver ran up his spine. They would be worse and more dangerous than the Aztec pochteca—those dangerous merchants from the west who were extending the Mexica empire toward the ancient lands of the true people.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#545|54]]. Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''35–40. For a short overview of Brousse’s life, see Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'', 240–46.</div>
+On the temple mountain yesterday, that old fool of a priest had addressed these new strangers as if they were gods. He had blown incense on them only a moment before they had pushed him aside and entered the sanctuary. After defiling and smashing the sacred images of the gods, they had opened the bundles and handled the holy objects of the ancestors, taking those made of sun-excrement—the yellow metal the foreigners coveted. Metal-lovers, these strange creatures wore helmets, armor, and great knives of the bright and hard substance. Wonderful stuff, he thought as he contemplated the price such objects would bring in the Mexica ports. He cursed the hairy strangers, calling upon the powers of the Otherworld to open the sea and consume them ... and soon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#555|55]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 76–77.</div>
+Worse than looting the temple—other pirates had done that—these men had raised up the World Tree in the form of a wooden cross. They had opened a book—small, black, and poorly painted, but still a book— and read from it in their unutterable tongue. The chilan, his city’s prophet and interpreter for the gods, had watched from the crowd at the base of the temple, shaking his head in fear and wonder.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#565|56]]. Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 150.</div>
+Naum-Pat shuddered with the horror of the memory of what the strangers had done. As he did so, the words of the famous prophecy of the Chilam Balam went through his mind.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#575|57]]. Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+“Let us exalt his sign on high, let us exalt it that we may gaze upon it today with the raised standard,” the great prophet had exhorted them so many years ago. “Great is the discord that arises today. The First Tree of the World is restored; it is displayed to the world. This is the sign of Hunab-Ku on high. Worship it, Itza. You shall worship today his sign on high. You shall worship it furthermore with true goodwill, and you shall worship the true god today, lord. You shall be converted to the word of Hunab-Ku, lord; it came from heaven.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#585|58]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 77–78.</div>
+Naum-Pat had watched in stunned disbelief as the strangers threw down the kulche’, the images of the gods, in the Holy House, and put the wooden Tree in its place. A groan had escaped his throat as he saw the prophecy materialize before his eyes. They had put up the Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First Tree of the World. For the people it had been a very powerful sign. The local chilan had been disturbed enough to send word by courier canoe to the chilanob on the mainland.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#595|59]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 35–36, 44, 64–70.</div>
+Like the chilan, Naum-Pat had seen the raising of the Tree as a powerful portent, but somehow the strangers’ black book had frightened him more. In all the world, only real human beings, only Maya, had books. Others, like the Mexica, had pictures of course, but not the written words of ancestors and heroes, not the prophecies of the star companions. Books were records of the past, they were the truth, the guide to the cycles. The strangers’ metal knives were powerful weapons, but many weapons of the Maya could kill just as efficiently. It was the books that Naum-Pat feared, for with books came true knowledge, knowledge that could vanquish his people’s present and capture and transform their future.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#605|60]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 261. See also, 184–85.</div>
+Naum-Pat could not imagine the strangers attacking his people on the neutral ground of Cozumel, Lady Ix-Chel’s sacred isle. They had come ashore with smiles and gifts of clear stones that were like strangely-colored obsidian. He had planned a feast for them tomorrow in the council hall and would treat them distantly, yet with dignity. But what of the future? W as this the beginning of the time of discord and change the great chi- lanob had predicted ‘ The fear in his belly whispered that it was so. As Naum-Pat turned his back to the quiet beach and headed home, his thoughts turned to his children.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#615|61]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 63. The piece was never published in full during his lifetime because, in September 1881, the newspaper ''La Révolution Sociale'' suspended publication when its editor, the undercover police agent Égide Spilleux, fled with its funds and Cafiero was arrested. See ibid., xi.</div>
+In the Maya world, its’at, “one who is clever, ingenious, artistic, scientific, and knowledgeable,” was used with the same respect and in the same contexts we use the word “scientist” today. That its’at also meant “artist” and “scribe” was no accident. For the Maya, as for ourselves, the written word held the key to their future survival. Writing was the power of knowledge made material and artifactual. It was the armature of wealth, prosperity, and the organized labor of the state. It was the wellspring from which flowed knowledge and lore, orally repeated and memorized by the common folk in their songs and prayers.[601] The arrival of the Spanish changed all that and subverted Maya literacy to the ambitions of the Europeans.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#625|62]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 111. Kropotkin had himself been radicalized by news of the Paris Commune. See Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 73–75.</div>
+But the beginning of the end of literacy occurred centuries before the Conquest, with the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms in the ninth century A.D. As much time separates us from Columbus as separated Naum-Pat from the Classic kings. He and his proud people were still Maya, still civilized, and their elite were still able to read and write, but they lived in a dark age of petty lords and small temple mountains.[602] His age, like our own medieval period, was dimly lit by the flickering lamp of literacy and the collective memory of a great past; but his people’s hope for future greatness was snuffed out by the Spanish conquerors. What brought down the awesome power crafted by the kings of our histories and made them, by the time the Spanish appeared, only a dim memory to their descendants?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#635|63]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 102.</div>
+The end of the Classic period witnessed a major transformation of the Maya world, one that would leave the southern lowlands a backwater for the rest of Mesoamerican history. Sometimes, as at Copán, the public record stopped dramatically, virtually in mid-sentence. Other kingdoms died in one last disastrous defeat as at Dos Pilas. For many, however, the end came when people turned their backs on the kings, as they had done at Cerros eight hundred years earlier, and returned to a less complicated way of living. Regardless of the manner in which the southern kingdoms met their doom, it is the staggering scope and range of their collapse that stymies us. This is the real mystery of the Maya and it is one that has long fascinated Mayanists and the public.[603]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#645|64]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 500. Kropotkin thought his idea of the spirit of revolt was distinct from Brousse’s theory of propaganda by the deed. This disagreement appears to be largely semantic given that Kropotkin held, like Brousse, that ideas should be spread through actions and that these actions included insurrections which established communes. See Miller, ''Kropotkin'', 260; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 92, 102–105.</div>
+We have no final answer to what happened, but as with all good mysteries, we have plenty of clues. At Copán, the last decades of the central government were those of the densest population. The voiceless remains of the dead, both commoner and noble alike, bear witness to malnutrition, sickness, infection, and a hard life indeed. In the central Petén, where raised fields played an important role in people’s sustenance, the agricultural system was productive only as long as the fields were maintained. Neglect of the fields during conditions of social strife, such as the growing military competition between Late Classic ruling lineages, likely led to their rapid erosion and decay.[604] Rebuilding these complex agricultural systems in the swamps was beyond the capabilities of individual farmers without the coordination provided by central governments, so they moved out as refugees into areas where they could farm—even if that meant jostling the people already there.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#655|65]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 111. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution was near several times during this period. For other examples, see Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 32, 34–35, 205–6; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 119, 291, 542.</div>
+The collapse also came from a crisis of faith. The king held his power as the patriarch of the royal lineage and as the avatar of the gods and ancestors. Ecological and political disaster could be placed directly at his feet as proof of his failure to sustain his privileged communication with the gods. Moreover, because of the way the kings defined themselves and their power, the Maya never established enduring empires, an arrangement that would have created new possibilities of economic organization and resolved the strife that grew in ferocity and frequency during the eighth century. Kings could become conquerors, but they could never transcend the status of usurper, for they could never speak persuasively to the ancestors of the kings they had captured and slain. Each king wielded the written word and history to glorify his own ancestors and his own living people.
-[[#665|66]]. Gary P. Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 29–31.
+As time went on, the high kings were driven to unending, devastating wars of conquest and tribute extraction. In part they were urged on by the nobility. During the Early Classic period, this class comprised a relatively small proportion of the population, but even by the time of Burial 167 in the first century B.c. in Tikal, they were growing rapidly in both numbers and privilege. Averaging about ten centimeters taller than the rest of the population, they enjoyed the best food, the greatest portion of the wealth, and the best chance of having children who survived to adulthood. Since everyone born to a noble family could exercise elite prerogatives, it did not take too many centuries of prosperity for there to be an aristocracy of sufficient size to make itself a nuisance to governments and a burden to farmers. Increasing rivalry between nonroyal nobles and the central lords within the kingdoms appears to have contributed to the downfall of both.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#675|67]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 545.</div>
+The situation forced the gaze of the nobility outward toward neighboring kingdoms and the tribute they could win by military victory. In the short term, the strategy worked, but in the long term that kind of endemic warfare caused more problems than it solved and eventually the rivalry of the nobility helped rupture the central authority of the king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#685|68]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 78.</div>
+Foreign relations were also troublesome at the end of the Classic Period. In the wake of the collapse of Teotihuacán in the late seventh century, other regional civilizations like El Tajin, Xochicalco, and Cacaxtla made a bid for power. Barbarians and marginally civilized peoples in the borderlands between the ancient great powers, like the Chontai Maya-speaking people living in the Tabasco coastlands, also asserted control of trade routes and established new states in both the highlands and lowlands. These merchant warriors, called the Putún, meddled in the affairs of Maya kingdoms and eventually established new hybrid dynasties that prospered at the expense of the traditional Maya governments.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#695|69]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 82, 85–86; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 190, 194–95.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:1 The Last Inscriptional Dates Before the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#705|70]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 90–95; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''203–209. For Malatesta’s account of his role in the insurrection see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''12–13.</div>
+The failure of the Maya way of life did not descend upon them with the dramatic suddenness of a volcanic explosion, a shattering earthquake, or a sweeping plague. The Maya had time to contemplate their disaster during the century it took for their way of life to disintegrate into a shadow’ of its former self. By A.D. 910, the Maya of the southern lowlands built no more temple-mountains to house their portals into the Otherworld and I they erected no more tree-stones to commemorate the glory of their kings and cahalob. Throughout the lowlands, they abandoned literacy as part of the public performance of their kings (Fig. 10:1) and retreated from the society they had built under their leadership.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#715|71]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 85.</div>
+We have observed the sad end of the kings of Copan, but U-Cit-Tok was not alone in his suffering, nor was he the first to watch central government fall amid growing crisis. On the other side of the Maya world, at Palenque, the last words written in the historical record occur in a pitiful little inscription carved on a blackware vase. This vase was not even found in a royal context but in a slab-covered tomb under the floor of a modest residential compound below the escarpment where the great ceremonial precinct of the old glory days was located. The man who recorded his accession in the text tried to enhance his renown by calling himself 6-Cimi-Ah-Nab-Pacal[605] after the great king who had brought Palenque to glory one hundred and fifty years earlier. The vase, however, was made in some obscure town on the swampy plain north of Palenque, and was probably a barbarian Putun Maya gift to an otherwise silent king.[606] Within fifty years of this date, Palenque had been abandoned and reoccupied by wandering tribesmen who lived atop the debris in the disintegrating buildings, leaving broken fragments of bailgame yokes and hachas lying forlornly about. As at Copan, one of these wanderers was killed when the north building of the Palace collapsed[607] and no one dug his body out to give it honorable burial.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#724|72]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 11. Similar ideas had been expressed by Malatesta at the recent October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. See Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''346.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:2 Piedras Negras Stela 12]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#734|73]]. The unsuccessful insurrections of 1874 were in part launched in order to out-compete Italian republican revolutionaries. See Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 84–85.</div>
+At Piedras Negras, a venerable and powerful kingdom on the Usuma- cinta River southeast of Palenque, the last king closed the history of his domain on a glorious high note of artistic achievement. Stela 12 (Fig. 10:2) is a masterpiece showing the ritual display of captives taken in a war with the small kingdom of Pomona[608] downriver on the Usumacinta, perhaps in a ploy to stop people from the flourishing Putún homeland farther downriver from coming up into the territory of the ancient kingdoms. If this was the intention of the Piedras Negras lords, it did not work. The victory over those unfortunate Pomona lords apparently did not contribute to the survival of Piedras Negras. Pomona’s last recorded date fell in the year A.D. 790, while the victor lasted only another twenty years. The last inscription at Piedras Negras celebrated the end of the nineteenth katun in A.D. 810.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#744|74]]. Giuseppe Mazzini, ''A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy'','' Nation Building'','' and International Relations'', ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 111.</div>
+This same twenty-year period saw the demise of Yaxchilán farther upriver on the Usumacinta. Like Palenque, Yaxchilán went out with a whimper rather than a bang, but as with Piedras Negras, the last inscription speaks of war. Bird-Jaguar’s son Chel-Te had indeed lived to rule, testimony to his father’s political success. Chel-Te, in his turn, sired a son whom he named after an illustrious ancestor—Ta-Skull, the tenth successor, who had made the alliance with Cu-Ix of Calakmul[609] in the sixth century. The last Ta-Skull, however, did not live up to the memory of his ancestor. He commissioned only a single lintel, mounted in a tiny little temple that he built next to the lineage house where Bird-Jaguar, his paternal grandfather, had given the flapstaff to Great-Skull-Zero, his grandmother’s brother (Fig. 7:20). The all-glyphic lintel Ta-Skull set above the solitary door of this new temple celebrated his victory in war, but the victory must have been hollow one. Not only does the paltry scale of the building signal Yaxchilán’s drastic decline, but its inscription was the work of a inept artisan. The glyphs started out large on the left and got smaller and smaller as the scribe ran out of room to the right. Like his liege, the writer had failed to plan ahead. He was not alone, for the kings of Bonampak and other smaller centers in the region fell silent at the same time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#754|75]]. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith, ''Mazzini'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 100.</div>
+Onward upstream at Dos Pilas in the Petexbatún region, the story was the same. During a final battle at the capital of the famous Flint-Sky- God K and his conqueror progeny, a desperate nobility threw up a huge log stockade[610] around the sacred center of their city, trying to shield themselves against the vengeance wreaked on them by their former victims. The kings who oversaw the last public history of that dying kingdom were forced to erect their tree-stones at other places than their capital. One Dos Pilas king recorded an image of himself in A.D. 790 on a stela at Aguateca at the southern end of his dynasty’s conquered territories. On the northern frontier, the last-known Dos Pilas king struggled to retain I control of the Pasión River. He raised two stelae at the little community of La Amelia, at the northeastern edge of his greater realm, on the Pasión River near its confluence with the Usumacinta. He also raised several tree-stones at the strategic site of Scibal. These last-known (Fig. 10:3a) images of a Dos Pilas king, elegant, dynamic, and confidently carved, show him valiantly playing ball. The recorded date is A.D. 807. Such play usually celebrated victory and sacrifice, in remembrance of what the Heroic Ancestors had won and sacrificed in the beginning. But we know in hindsight that the Lords of Death won this time. This man’s kingdom probably ended in a violent cataclysm soon thereafter. Within a few years of the Dos Pilas ballplayer stelae, barbarian kings, probably from downriver, had taken Seibal, its prize vassal, and had effectively cut its trade routes to the Usumacinta River and the Peten.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#764|76]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''336.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:3]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#774|77]]. D. M. Smith, ''Mazzini'', 6–7, 10, 41, 47, 64–73, 98–101, 118–19; Martin Clark, ''The Italian'' ''Risorgimento'','' ''2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 41.</div>
+The end of Katun 19 in A.D. 810 saw the last gasp of many kingdoms throughout the lowlands; 9.19.0.0.0 also marked the end of the royal history declared by two great dynasties in the central Peten heartland, the old rival kingdoms of Naranjo and Calakmul. Calakmul was the strongest of these realms, for its king was able to raise three stelae (15, 16, and 64) on that date. All three present him in front view, standing atop a captive and holding a shield and a God K scepter. Evidently this special show of power exhausted his fund of local support for public historical celebrations, for we don’t hear from him again. For an indefinite time thereafter, kings without history (or at least, without texts discovered by archaeologists) must have ruled at Calakmul, for one holy lord of this capital did evidently witness a katun rite at Seibal thirty-nine years later. Indirectly then, we know that Calakmul still continued to exist, even after the end of its own known texts.
-[[#784|78]]. Clark, ''Italian'' ''Risorgimento'', 80–84.
+Naranjo’s final historical ruler erected only one monument—Stela 32—but it was an extraordinary one. Unusually large, this tree-stone celebrates both the ruler’s accession and the katun ending. Shown seated on a great cosmic throne, the king holds a Double-headed Serpent Bar drawn in an exaggerated style that seems to turn everything into flying scrolls.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#794|79]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 140. One of the individuals inspired by Mazzini and Garibaldi was Bakunin who, prior to becoming an anarchist, met and attempted to work with them between 1862–64 in order to achieve Slav liberation as part of a wider democratic political revolution. Bakunin would go onto become a major critic of Mazzini and Garibaldi. See Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'', 13–20, 57–60, 84–85, 122–26, 131–33, 147–48, 255n19; Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''214–31.</div>
+Turning to the far southwest of the Maya world, we find what is perhaps the most interesting of these 9.19 stelae, a tree-stone erected at Chinkultic (Fig. 10:3b) in highland Chiapas. This carving bears stylistic affinities to the emerging art of the Puuc region in the northern lowlands and ultimately to Itza monuments at Chichen Itza.[611] Since dated monuments were not known in this part of Chiapas in earlier times, Chinkultic’s appearance on the stage of history may reflect the beginning of a diaspora, a movement of literate Maya nobility from the lowlands into the highlands.[612] They might have been looking to a new political order as well as to a new land, their eyes turned to the Chontal-speaking Putun and the revolutionary state of Chichen Itza.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#804|80]]. Marco Pinfari, “Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat,” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 21, no. 4 (2009): 582–83; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 7–19.</div>
+Since the greatest part of Maya history took place during the four hundred years of the tenth baktun (9.0.0.0.0–10.0.0.0.0), one would think that the end of the cycle, with its promise of new beginnings, would have been celebrated with hope and enthusiasm by the Maya kings who survived to witness its completion. Ironically, the reverse is true. It was as if they all thought of it as a time of ill omen. Only the king of the resurgent Uaxactun dynasty and the ahau of Oxpemul, a little center north of Calakmul, celebrated the end of this great cycle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#814|81]]. Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 7–8.</div>
+Twelve years into the eleventh baktun, a captive event recorded on the High Priest’s Grave establishes Itza presence at Chichen Itza on 10.0.12.8.0 (June 20, A.D. 842). The High Priest’s Grave is a massive, four-sided pyramid with Feathered Vision Serpent balustrades. Like the Pyramid of the Sun at the great city of Teotihuacan, it was built over a cave to mark it as a place of “origin.” The raising of the Temple of the High Priest’s Grave with its captive iconography marked (Fig. 10:4a) the triumph of a new social and political order in the northern lowlands and a new era of barbarian, hybrid Maya states throughout the Maya world. Through the sy mbolism of the cave, it also declared the new state to derive frorfFthe same origin as the great states of earlier times.]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#824|82]]. Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'','' ''11–13, 118–19, 169. The influence Pisacane had on Italian anarchism can be seen in the fact that Cafiero quotes him at length. See Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 4–5, 10–11, 14, 23, 45, 47, 62, 66–67. Despite being a republican martyr, the political theory of Pisacane does not appear to have been widely known among Italian republicans in the 1860s. See Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''70–73.</div>
+Yet not all the new rulers chose revolution. Some attempted to build on the foundation of ancient Maya kingship. The earliest Chichen Itza date is remarkably close to the last date (10.0.10.17.15; A.D. 841) at Machaquila, a kingdom just west of the then-defunct Dos Pilas hegemony. That last Machaquila king, One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint (Fig. 10:4b), depicted himself without the deformed forehead and step-cut hair that had been the T ethnic markers of the Classic Maya elite. Either his people had abandoned the old style by then, or they were intruders who knew how to use Maya l symbolism in the old orthodox ways. In light of contemporary events at neighboring Seibal, we think this lord was a Putun trying vainly to rekindle the ancient royal charisma at an old hearth of power. At Machaquila, 1 the ruler sided with the orthodox Peten ritualists, while at Seibal, as we shall see, the lords worked to create a new vision out of the tattered 1 remains of the old kingship.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#834|83]]. Carlo Pisacane, “Political Testament,” Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, September, 22, 2011, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/carlo-pisacane-propaganda-by-the-deed-1857. According to Nettlau, the earliest reprint of this text he was aware of occurred in June 1878 in the Italian anarchist journal L’Avvenire. See Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 92.</div>
+With the end of the first katun in the new cycle (10.1.0.0.0) came the last surge of historical kingship in the southern lowlands. On that date a lord raised a monument at Ucanal, the old border town between Naranjo and Caracol, and another lord celebrated at Xunantunich, a hilltop citadel in Belize above the river trail leading eastward to the Caribbean coast. Ueanal’s monument is particularly noteworthy because it is carved in a style that had grown to prominence in the region around Tikal late in Baktun 9. It shows the Ucanal ruler (Fig. 10:5) standing with one of his lords on top of a struggling, belly-down captive, scattering his blood in celebration of the katun ending. Above him, floating in a S-shaped scroll of blood, lies a Tlaloc warrior of the type who haunted Ucanal a hundred and fifty years earlier during the Naranjo wars. Together, the king and his colleague, who ruled other cities on the headwaters of the rivers emptying into the Caribbean, defined a new eastern frontier of the old royal territory. Beyond them to the east, in the rich river valleys of Belize, some communities survived and even flourished, but these Maya eschewed royal history.[613] To the south and west, other Putún, wise in the ways of the literate kings, raised stelae in chorus at Altar de Sacrificios on the Usuma- cinta and at Seibal on the Río Pasión.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#844|84]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 121.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:4]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#854|85]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 119.</div>
+The simultaneous expression of literate kingship at several surviving capitals reveals the different kinds of strategies their royalty chose in order to cope with changing times. While the Pasión was now the domain of Putún kings trying to forge new and more effective ritual formulae, the territory to the north of this river, the old heartland of Petén, belonged to conservative kings determined to stick to the old ways. These men were caught between the astute merchant warriors working their way along the rivers in the south, the rising Itza hegemony in the north, and other barbarians who carried their commerce along the Caribbean coast and up the rivers of Belize. The world of the holy lords shrank back upon its Petén birthplace, its ancient capitals shattering into petty fiefdoms.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#864|86]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 78.</div>
+At Seibal, to celebrate the end of the first katun in the new baktun, a new king commissioned one of the greatest displays of creative artistry of the Late Classic period—the extraordinary Temple A3. That Seibal king, like One-Fish-in-Hand-Flint of Machaquilá, appears to have been a foreigner,[614] for he too wore his hair long and had the undeformed forehead of barbarian outsiders. Nevertheless, he knew the Classic Maya way and used it to create one of the most innovative statements of kingship in Maya history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#874|87]]. The following account of the Benevento Affair is a summary of Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 121–26; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''225–29.</div>
+The new ruler, Ah-Bolon-Tun-Ta-Hun-Kin-Butz’ (Ah-Bolon-Tun, for short), came to Seibal after the disappearance of its last Dos Pilas overlord. He took charge and revitalized Seibal enough to make it a major player in the politics of the time. To celebrate the end of the first katun of the new baktun, Ah-Bolon-Tun commissioned a temple with four stairways, each facing one of the cardinal directions. In this respect, he designed this temple to parallel the High Priest’s Grave at Chichén Itzá.[615]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#884|88]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 125</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:5 Ucanal Stela 3 drawing by Ian Graham]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#894|89]]. Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+In contrast to the one at Chichen, however, this building clearly declared the personal power of the king. Ah-Bolon-Tun decorated his temple with an elaborate polychrome and modeled stucco frieze displaying four larger- than-life portraits of himself over the doorways, each holding offerings and standing at his portals to the Otherworld. He also portrayed other people, perhaps the witnesses to his celebration, as well as monkeys, birds, and other animals—all in a great profusion of corn plants. The effect was no doubt quite spectacular, a world-renewal ceremony that all could admire and understand.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#904|90]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''126.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:6]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#914|91]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 126–27, 140–45.</div>
+He placed one tree-stone inside the building and one at the bottom of each stairway to form the quincunx pattern so important to ancient Maya imagery. On the eastern tree-stone, he holds a staff and stretches his right hand out in the scattering gesture. On the northern tree-stone (Fig. 10:6a), he holds the Cosmic Monster as a ceremonial bar and records that three Ch’ul-Ahauob, one from Tikal, one from Calakmul, and one from Motul de San Jose witnessed the period-ending rites at Seibal.[616] This passage affirms that those three ancient capitals, or some local pretenders to their titles, were still active at this time and that the political landscape was stable enough to make royal visits worthwhile. The record of this gathering of holy Maya lords in the southern kingdoms shows that the conservative holdouts in Peten may have attempted to insulate themselves from change, but that they were prepared to deal with and acknowledge the barbarian kings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#924|92]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 63–64.</div>
+The western te-tun shows Ah-Bolon-Tun holding the Vision Serpent, named Hun-Uinic-Na-Chan, as if it were a ceremonial bar. On the south te-tun, the king wears the jaguar-costume of Gill and holds up God K’s head in his right hand. The central tree-stone shows him holding a round shield in his left hand and lifting up the Manikin Scepter in the other. These five images depict Ah-Bolon- Tun in some of the most important costumes of Classic Maya kings, but never had these costumes been assembled into one composition in this way, nor had the Cosmic Monster and Vision Serpent been merged with the ceremonial bar in quite this manner. In addition to his innovative treatment of these themes within the Maya canon, he also introduced new symbols—ones shared by the Itza at Chichen Itza.[617]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#934|93]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 80–82, 100–102; Miller, ''Kropotkin'', 136–37; Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''80–83.</div>
+Many modern scholars have taken Ah-Bolon-Tun to be a Chontal- speaking intruder from the lower reaches of the Usumacinta.[618] While he may have been from an intruding group, it hardly matters. As we have seen, Ah-Bolon-Tun was a practiced and skillful manipulator of the Classic Maya imagery of kingship and therefore an acceptable Maya ruler. Moreover, his contemporaries in the old dynasties of other kingdoms dealt with him as a legitimate ahau. Unfortunately, whatever synthesis of the ancient kingship with barbarian beliefs he tried to put together soon began to unravel.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#944|94]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 101.</div>
+His successors gamely attempted to sustain the effort, but evidently lacked his command of the old orthodoxy. They erected tree-stones to celebrate the next two katun endings and by doing so they give us clear and poignant documentation of a people who were losing their roots in this ancient culture. Each image became more confused than the last, diminishing not only in the skill with which the drawings were executed but also in the very syntax of symbols that gave Classic Maya art its meaning (Fig. 10:6b). The last Seibal imagery w’ould have seemed gibberish to the literate Maya of earlier generations.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#954|95]]. Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+The central Peten kingdoms managed to stave off most intruders, although some barbarians probably established an outpost on the east end of Lake Peten-Itza at Ixlu. While the newcomers built architecture like their cousins at Seibal,[619] the images their king raised on tree-stones were perfectly standard and deliberately echoed the canon of period-ending presentations particular to Tikal. They were trying to buy into the old orthodoxy. On 10.1.10.0.0 and again on 10.2.0.0.0 (A.D. 879), this king erected tree-stones showing him materializing the Paddler Gods through bloodletting (Fig. 10:7a). The Tlaloc-marked, spearthrower-wielding warrior we saw at Ucanal floats in blood scrolls along with the Paddler Gods. More revealing, however, is a round altar that accompanied Stela 2. In his own name, this Ixlu lord claims status as a Ch’ul-Ahau of Tikal, while his reference to the gods repeats exactly the prose of an earlier stela at Dos Pilas.[620]
-[[#964|96]]. Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''113.
+[[][Fig. 10:7]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#974|97]]. I have decided not to collectively label these acts “terrorism.” This is because although some of them were acts of terror against civilians, others were targeted attacks against specific individuals that occurred as part of an ongoing armed conflict between anarchists and the ruling classes. They were thus more akin to special operations carried out during a war. This is, in turn, consistent with how anarchists viewed themselves as militants fighting a class war.</div>
+The kings of Tikal had lost more than the area at the east end of Lake Peten-Itza. The last king of Tikal erected his only tree-stone in the middle of the forest of kings in front of the North Acropolis. The image is fairly well wrought, with the figure presented in front view holding the ribbondecorated staff that had become prominent with the staff-kings four hundred years earlier (see Fig. 5:1a and b). In order to display the detail of the backrack in the manner of the traditional style, the artist wrapped it out to the king’s side in a completely unrealistic pose. A bound captive lies belly down behind the king’s ankles, echoing both the old style of composition and the kingdom’s former glory. As in the case of Ixlú and Ucanal, small figures float above in the blood scrolls of the king’s vision. All in all, the image is conservative and deeply concerned with remaining faithful to the old way of doing things. In contrast to the innovative king of Seibal, this Tikal ahau was a fundamentalist.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#984|98]]. Richard Bach Jensen, ''The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History'','' 1878–1934'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7, 23–24.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:8]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#994|99]]. Andrew R. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Early Movement'' (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 115–16, 139–41. For the argument that they were anarchists, see ibid., 117–24, 143–48. For a critique of this view, see Cahm,'' Kropotkin'', 89–90. Kropotkin denied that there was any connection between these assassination attempts and the Jura Federation. See Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 388–89.</div>
+Perhaps he had reason, for his domain was a shadow of its former self. The final years of Tikal saw the kingdom fragmented into a series of petty, competing domains. All claimed legitimacy as the seat of the Ch’ul- Ahau of Tikal. While the dynasty of its old nemesis, Caracol, erected its last tree-stone in 10.1.10.0.0 (A.D. 859), Tikal’s old subordinate, Uaxac- tún, which had reestablished its independence, erected its own tree-stones until 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). In this final irony, Uaxactún’s monumental art lasted twenty years longer than its former master’s.
-[[#1004|100]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 65–66; Benedict Anderson, ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination'' (London: Verso, 2013), 115n90.
+Furthermore, on the border halfway between Uaxactún and Tikal, yet another lord had established himself as an independent king at the little site of Jimbal (Fig. 10:8a). This ahau erected a tree-stone on the same date as his Tikal rival—10.2.0.0.0, and like his Ixlú contemporary, he used the Tikal Emblem Glyph in his name. Here again the Paddler Gods float in blood scrolls above the king. This king outlasted the Tikal king by twenty years and erected another all-glyphic tree-stone on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889) on the same date as the lord of Uaxactún.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1014|101]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 284–85.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:9 Toniná Monument 101<br>drawing by Peter Mathews]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1024|102]]. Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” in ''Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1, 152.</div>
+To the north of Tikal near Calakmul, a king of the site now called La Muñeca erected a tree-stone on the katun-ending in A.D. 889. Xultún, a little-studied kingdom northeast of Uaxactún, had sustained a tradition of stela erection since Cycle 8 times, but it too ended on 10.3.0.0.0 (A.D. 889). Like Tikal, the last performances of Xultún’s artists (Stelae 3 and 10) evoked the old tradition, but at Xultún, the artistic convention called for the king to be portrayed displaying small effigy gods of the Baby Jaguar and Chae (Fig. 10:8b). We don’t yet know the reason why this date marked the ending of monumental art at so many different sites.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1034|103]]. Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” 152. See also Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 186–88.</div>
+The diaspora up the headwaters of the Usumacinta into the highlands can be seen in two more stelae in Chiapas—one at Comitán dated to A.D. 874 and one at a place called Quen Santo in A.D. 879. The last historical declaration of the Classic Maya kings was raised not too far away, also in the Chiapas highlands, at the unlikely kingdom of Toniná. A bellicose realm during most of its Late Classic existence, Toniná’s most glorious moment came when its king captured Kan-Hok-Xul, the aged second son of Palenque’s most famous king, Pacal. For a brief time, the same Toniná king also had a Bonampak lord as his subordinate.[621] Perhaps the military skill of Toniná’s warriors preserved them longer than other Classic-period kingdoms, or perhaps it was their isolated position at the western edge of Maya territory in a valley off the major trade routes. Whatever it was, Toniná’s people retained their Classic heritage longer than any other Maya kingdom. Their last king erected a tree-stone (Fig. 10:9) to celebrate the ka- tun 10.4.0.0.0, which fell on January 20, A.D. 909. This was the last kingly portrait and inscription ever mounted publicly by the Maya of the southern lowlands, and it conformed exactly to the generations-old artistic tenets of that kingdom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1044|104]]. Cafiero, “The Organization of Armed Struggle.”</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:10]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1054|105]]. According to a police report, almost identical resolutions had been passed a year earlier on September 12, 1880, at a meeting of thirty-two anarchist militants in Vevey, Switzerland, which included Kropotkin and Reclus. See Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''172.</div>
+However, the collapse of the southern lowlands was not the end of Maya civilization. In the northern lowlands where rainfall rather than raised-field agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, kingdoms prospered as never before in the ninth and tenth centuries. It is in the north, rather than in the south, that the Maya finally established empires over the dominions of kings. As we have seen, the greatest of these empires had its capital at Chichén Itzá, a city with allies at Tula in highland Mexico but with no equal in Mesoamerica during the eleventh century a.D. First cousins of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s people at Seibal, the Itzá constructed a world without kings—a world that was instead ruled by councils of lords.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1064|106]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 152–59; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 193–94.</div>
+The Classic Maya view of a world without kings was of a world beyond the pale, a barbarian place without true order. The Chilam Balam chronicles of the northern lowland Maya suggest that the ahauob of Chichón Itzá were sufficiently barbarian to devise such a state. These confederate lords were also Maya enough to regard their solution as a perpetuation of a time-honored practice. They transformed kingship into an abstraction, vested in objects, images, and places, rather than in the individual identity and written words of a person. Their principal image of kingship was not the living king, but a dead king sitting on his sun disk, an icon that had developed from the Classic period ancestor cartouche. Captain Sun Disk may or may not have been an actual person, but his identity as an individual was not the critical message. The function of this imagery was to symbolize the idea of an ancestral king presiding as a spirit over the realm of Chichón Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1074|107]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''252–53.</div>
+For the Itzá the image of such an ancestral king was an anonymous human sitting inside the sun disk wielding the spearthrower and darts of Tlaloc war (Fig. 10:10a). His image could be replaced by a mirror, another ancient symbol of kingship from the Classic period. These two critical symbols of kingship at Chichón, the mirror and the ancestral king, were found together in a cache inside one of the earliest and most important temples at Chichón Itzá—the Temple of Chae Mool, the structure that was later buried inside the Temple of the Warriors. Under the throne seat inside this earlier temple, the ruling council placed a hollowed-out stone column. Inside was a sun disk (Fig. 10:11) carefully wrapped in a sacred bundle, along with stones of divination, the bodies of a finch, representing the warriors of Chichen, and of a pygmy owl, symbolizing Tlaloc war.[622]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1084|108]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 253. Nathan-Ganz had, a few months prior, published an article on “Revolutionary War Science,” meaning the use of explosives, in his paper the ''An-Archist: Socialistic Revolutionary Review''. See Avrich, ''Haymarket'','' ''57–58; Timothy Messer-Kruse, ''The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 81, 206n28.</div>
+[[][Fig. 10:11 Turquoise Mosaic with a Pyrite Mirror. Offering in the Bench from the Temple of Chac Mool]]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1094|109]]. Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in ''Social Protest'','' Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'','' ''ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 210.</div>
+In the center of the disk was a golden mosaic mirror of iron pyrite. Surrounding it was a gleaming turquoise mosaic version of the sun disk divided into eight compartments. A profile serpent with a crest of feathers arcing around its head occupied every other compartment, forming a pattern like the four-serpent design that decorated the Classic period ancestor frame (Fig. 10:10b). These crested serpents are the late versions of the Vision Serpent we saw rising in the scene of Shield-Jaguar’s accession, spitting out the image of the founder dressed in the garb of Tlaloc war.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1103|110]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 288–300.</div>
+At Chichen Itza, this mosaic mirror was not passed through the generations from king to king. Instead, it was set into the throne to endow it with power and authority. The person who sat on that throne was rendered the temporary steward of ancestral power, a “two-day occupant of the mat,” as the enemies of the Itza scornfully called them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1113|111]]. Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'', 59–60, 93–95.</div>
+Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent—Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans and the Vision Serpent of the southern Maya—became the second great abstract symbol of kingship. While images of serpents—feathered, scroll- covered, and plain—abound in the art of Chichen, nowhere in the existing texts is this being given a person’s name. The role of the Feathered Serpent as it writhed between the victims of sacrifice and the hovering ancestor above was clearly derived from the Vision Serpent of Maya kingship. But for these Itza Maya, the Vision Serpent ceased to be the instrument the king used to communicate with the ancestors and became a symbol of the divinity of the state.[623] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the cult of Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, was still the cult of the Maya nobility in Yucatán.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1123|112]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 254.</div>
+The revolutionaries at Chichón Itzá and the final orthodox kings of the Peten seem to have converged on a central and shared ritual theme in their pursuit of political survival: the Vision Serpent and the calling forth of the Gods and Ancestors through it. In a set of gold plates called the Battle Disks, dredged from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichón Itzá, acts of war (Fig. 10:12a) and sacrifice are depicted. Above many of these scenes writhe Feathered Serpents, Vision Serpents, and blood scrolls embracing Tlaloc warriors, bird warriors, and even GUI, the ancient Sun deity. The similarities to southern lowland images of the same period are striking and underscored by other correspondences in the iconography and epigraphy of these disks and the Cycle 10 monuments of the south.[624] But while the southerners tried to call forth the ancestors to reinforce the ancient definitions of kingship, the lords of Chichón called them forth to proclaim a new order of power. The economic and military success of Chichón Itzá in this contest was undeniable and may have served to seal the doom of the holdouts in Petén.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1133|113]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 254–55.</div>
+However, while the Maya of the northern lowlands did succeed in transforming the structure of their government to establish an empire, Chichón at its height was a capital without a public history, without the written declarations of kings embedded into its stone walls. It was a capital that turned its back on a thousand years of Maya royal practice and relegated literacy to the books of chilanob, men who were sorcerers and prophets, but not kings. Joining the ranks of the nonliterate peoples of Mesoamerica, this kingdom looked to the larger world of the Mexican and the Gulf Coast peoples for its prosperity and future. The result of the success of Chichen lords was the Mayanization of Mesoamerica.[625]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1143|114]]. On Italian republicans, see Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 12–14, 26–29. On Irish nationalists, see K. R. M. Short, ''The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain ''(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd, 1979); Lindsay Clutterbuck, “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?,” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 16, no. 1 (2004), 154–81. On Russian nihilists, see Claudia Verhoeven, ''The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism'' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ronald Seth, ''The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki'' (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966).</div>
+Chichen Itza was a great state indeed, but once literate history had been disengaged from the central authority, Maya lords would never again harness the beliefs and aspirations of their own people as once they had. How long that state endured is still a matter of debate among scholars, but it evidently became the template for a cyclic form of government in which power became centralized at one regional capital, then dissolved to re-form elsewhere. After the fall of Chichen Itza, another regional capital arose in the northern lowlands at Mayapan—founded by Cocom lords who claimed descent from the lords of Chichen Itza.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1153|115]]. Seth, ''Russian Terrorists'', 96–100; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 35, 37–39.</div>
+The lords of Mayapan also erected their own tree-stones, but they had become something very different from those of the Classic lords. Their imagery shows gods (Fig. 10:12b) like those in the Dresden and Madrid codices, books that prescribed the timing and nature of ritual. One badly damaged image appears to show a Yax-Cheel-Cab, the First World Tree, mentioned in the prophecy of Chilam Balam. A bird flutters in the sky above the tree in an image that recalls the World Trees at Palenque. Mayapan flourished for a time and then disintegrated as the factions comprising its government struggled among themselves for power. Although the Spanish cut short the bickering among the several small states ruled by these factions, the pattern of cyclical centralization was a precedent the Maya would have likely continued.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1163|116]]. Quoted in Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 18.</div>
+The last king of the Maya to reign independently was a man named Can-Ek, king of the Itza who fled after the kingdom of Mayapan failed to the region that had once been ruled by the Ch’ul-Ahauob of Tikal. The last Can-Ek (a name probably meaning Serpent-Star[626]) was at least the third ruler of that name to appear in Spanish chronicles. The first greeted Cortes and his expedition as they made their way across the Peten to Honduras in 1525.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1173|117]]. Nettlau, ''Short History'', 148, 146.</div>
+Another Can-Ek met a second Spanish entrada, or “expedition,” to the Itza made in 1618 by the Padres Fuensalida and Orbita. Their goal was to convert the Itza to Christianity. Can-Ek’s reaction to their message bears witness to the power accorded the written word among the Maya. Can-Ek told the padres that, according to the prophecies of the katuns— which projected history to predict the future—their spiritual message was not correct. The padres described his reaction in these words:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1183|118]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 45–46; Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 43–45; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 154–59, 320–21, notes 11 and 12. For other examples see Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 44–52.</div>
+<quote>
+“The time had not yet arrived in which their ancient priests had prophesied to them they were to relinquish the worship of the Gods; because the period in which they then were was Oxahau, which means Third Period ... and so they asked the padres to make no further attempts in that direction, but to return to the village of Tipu and then, on another occasion, to come again to see them.”[627]
+</quote>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1193|119]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''51–56.</div>
+Finding the Itza unwilling to listen, the priests left, and several other attempts to convert the Itza during the next seventy years were met by the same intransigence and sometimes even with violence. It was not until 1695 that the resistance of the Maya to Christianity eased. At that time another padre, Andres de Avendaño y Layóla, accompanied by two other Franciscans and a group of Maya from the town of Tipú in northern Belize, journeyed to the shores of Lake Petén-Itzá to a town named Chacan.[628] After a long night filled with tear and overactive imaginations fueled by memories of past massacres, the three Franciscans emerged from their hut in the morning to see a wedge of flower-adorned canoes emerging out of the glare of the rising sun. The canoes were filled with resplendent warriors playing drums and flutes. Sitting in the largest of the canoes at the apex of the wedge rode King Can-Ek, whom the Spanish chronicler described as a tall man, handsome of visage and far lighter in complexion than other Maya.[629]
-[[#1203|120]]. John Merriman, ''The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror ''(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 71–73, 78–81.
+Dressed with all the elegance of his station, King Can-Ek wore a large crown of gold surmounted by a crest of the same metal. His ears were covered with large gold disks decorated with long dangles that fell to his shoulders and shook when he moved his head. Gold rings adorned his fingers and gold bands his arms. His shirt was made of pure white cloth elaborately embroidered with blue designs, and he wore a wide black sash around his waist to mark his status as priest of the Itzá. His sandals were finely wrought of blue tread with golden jingles interwoven. Over everything else, he wore a cape made of blue-flecked white cloth edged with an blue-embroidered border. It bore his name spelled in glyphs.[630]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1213|121]]. Merriman, ''Dynamite'','' ''99–105, 137–38, 145,'' ''149–59, 180–81. For other bombings, see ibid., 172–78.</div>
+After Can-Ek stepped ashore onto a mat, his men followed him off the canoes while keeping the music going without a break. Silence fell across the plaza when he raised the feather-mounted stone baton he held in his hand. The black-dressed priests of the Chacans came forward to do the king reverence and argue for the sacrifice of the foreigners who had invaded their lands.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1223|122]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 184–88.</div>
+Protecting his guests from the Chacan priests, Can-Ek returned to his canoe, taking the Spanish and their party with him for the two-hour canoe trip to his home island. There he hosted Avendaño and his fellow padres in his own house, where they were fed and tended by two of his unmarried sons and two of his unmarried daughters, all of very attractive appearance, according to the Spanish commentator. With the help of two interpreters, Gerónimo Zinak and Ah-Balan-Chel, Avendaño tried to convince Can-Ek that the time prophesied by the Chilam Balam and the katun histories was soon to come.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1233|123]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 31–36. For details see Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order''.</div>
+Can-Ek listened politely to what Avendaño had to say and told him to return another time. That time came later in the same year when Avendaño, in yet another entrada, journeyed south from Merida through the land of the Cehaches, past the huge ruins of Tikal,[631] and to the shore of Lake Petén-Itzá. Once again Avendaño and his party waited for Can- Ek in Chacan. When the Itzá arrived, “they came in some eighty canoes,” Avendaño wrote, “full of Indians, painted and dressed for war, with very large quivers of arrows, though all were left in the canoes—all the canoes escorting and accompanying the petty King, who with about five hundred Indians came forward to receive us.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1243|124]]. On Alfonso, see Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 26; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 163. On Clemenceau, see Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''167. For other examples, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''228–36; Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti'','' ''97–104, 137–59, 205–7; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 200, 221–22, 229.</div>
+The time Avendano had spent learning to speak Mayan and to know Maya prophecies as thoroughly as the Maya’s own chilanob was about to bear fruit. He was to use Maya memory of history to turn their future to his own ends.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1253|125]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''123–33; Turcato, ''Making Sense'', 170–73. In response to this struggle from below the prime minister suspended import duties on grain and flour until June 30.</div>
+Can-Ek must have known it was a special moment too, for in the trip back to Tayasal he tested the courage of his Spanish guest. While they were in the canoe surrounded by painted and befeathered Maya warriors of fierce demeanor, Can-Ek reached down to place his hand over Avendano’s heart. “Are you frightened?” he asked. Hoping to elicit signs of fear, Can-Ek found instead a man prepared to die for what he believed. Avendano looked up at the fearsome ahau and told him he had come in fulfillment of the very Maya prophecies that earlier Can-Ek had used against Padres Fuensalida and Orbita.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1262|126]]. Quoted in Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 60.</div>
+“Why should my heart be disturbed?” he retorted. “Rather it is very contented, seeing that 1 am the fortunate man, who is fulfilling your own prophecies, by which you are to become Christians; and this benefit will come to you by means of some bearded men from the East; who by signs of their prophets, were we ourselves, because we came many leagues from the direction of the east, ploughing the seas, with no other purpose than borne by our love of their souls, to bring them, (at the cost of much work) to bring them to that favor which the true god brings them.”[632]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1272|127]]. Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'', 91–96.</div>
+Avendano had turned the tables on Can-Ek. In an act of bravado and perhaps of remarkable insight, he reached up and mimicked Can-Ek’s challenge by putting his own hand on the king’s chest and asking, “Are you now the one who is disturbed by the words of your own prophets?” Can-Ek replied, “No,” but he was putting a good face on the matter, for his own action would soon show he had accepted that the time foretold by the prophecy had come.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1282|128]]. Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 75. For more primary sources, see Mitchell Abidor, ed., ''Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed'' (Oakland CA, PM Press, 2015).</div>
+When Avendano landed at Tayasal, the capital of the Itza, he and his men were led, for the second time that year, through the streets to Can- Ek’s palace. In the center of the house sat a round stone pedestal and column which the Itza called Yax-Cheel-Cab, “First Tree of the World.” On the western side of the pedestal base, the ill-made (according to Avendano) mask of a deity called Ah-Cocah-Mut rested. Since mut is the word for both “bird” and “prophecy,” we take the image to be the remnant of the Celestial Bird that stood on the crown of the Wacah Chan Tree in Classic-period imagery. Here was the sad echo of the image on Pacal’s sarcophagus, of the great tree-stones of the Classic period, of the tree carved on the stela of Mayapan, and of the tree Naum-Pat saw the Spaniards raise in the temple on Cozumel.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1292|129]]. For example Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 256–79; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''84–90;'' ''Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''173–76; Ruth Kinna, ''Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 58–60; Clark, “Introduction,” in Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 57–59; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 124–27.</div>
+In a temple behind the Yax-Cheel-Cab, Avendano saw a box holding a large bone. He realized later he had seen the remains of the horse Cortes had left with the first Can-Ek 172 years earlier.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1302|130]]. Louisa Sarah Bevington, ''An Anarchist Manifesto'', (London: Metropolitan Printing Works, 1895), 11.</div>
+Avendano and his companions spent several days in Tayasal, surrounded wherever they went by curious and suspicious Itza. He complained that neither the admonitions of the king nor the protest of the Spaniards forestalled the curious Maya, who touched them everywhere including “the most hidden parts of a man.”[633] All the time Avendano used the old prophecies to work on Can-Ek’s mind. When he finally convinced the Itza king to be baptized, Can-Ek remained suspicious, demanding to know what the bearded priest intended to do, “since they thought that there was some shedding of blood or circumcision or cutting of some part of their body.” The king, like the suspicious Xibalbans of the Popol Vuh, volunteered a child to try it first. Satisfied that he would sustain no physical injury, he suffered himself to be baptized, and soon thereafter three hundred of his people followed his example.
-[[#1312|131]]. Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti'','' ''52.
+In the midst of these conversion efforts, “governors, captains, and head men of the four other Petens or islands,”[634] arrived at Tayasal splendid in the riotous color of their full war regalia. Avendano calmed them down by inviting them to share food and drink. In his own words, he “treated them kindly, speaking to them more frequently and pleasantly, discoursing with them in their ancient idiom, as if the time had already come (just as their prophets had foretold) for our eating together from one plate and drinking from one cup, we, the Spaniards, making ourselves one with them.”[635]
-[[#1322|132]]. James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 90–98.
+To argue with these new lords, who would soon prove to be formidable enemies, Avendano spoke to them in Yucatec, read their own books to them, and used their katun prophecies to convince them it was time to accept conversion. He described these books in detail.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1332|133]]. Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''65–66, 139–41.</div>
+It is all recorded in certain books, made of the bark of trees, folded from one side to the other like screens, each leaf of the thickness of a Mexican Real of eight. These are painted on both sides with a variety of figures and characters (of the same kind as the Mexican Indians also used in their own times), which show not only the count of the said days, months and years, but also the ages and prophecies which their idols and images announced to them, or, to speak more accurately, the devil by means of the worship which they pay to him in the form of some stones. These ages are thirteen in number; each age has its separate idol and its priest, with a separate prophecy of its events.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1342|134]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 84.</div>
+(Means 1917:141)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1352|135]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 93–95.</div>
+The hostile chiefs, especially one named Covoh, did not like his words and soon drove Avendano and his companions out of Tayasal in a dangerous, near-fatal retreat through the forest. But a year later, another expedition came back, this one armed and prepared to take on the stubborn Itza by force, if necessary. After a few hours of token resistance, the Itza gave up and fled their island home, leaving the houses of their gods and the site of their Yax-Cheel-Cab to be ravaged by the Spaniards. After 178 years of resistance, the Itza gave up with barely a whimper on March 13, 1697, the day 12.3.19.11.14 1 lx 17 Kankin in the Maya calendar.[636]
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1362|136]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 58.</div>
+The Long Count position of the fall of Tayasal is not that important because the Maya had long since given up the Long Count as a way of keeping time, but they had retained the count of the katuns. The ends of the katuns were the ages Avendano described. Named for the ahau day on which each twenty-tun cycle ended, the katun cycled through the full thirteen numbers used in the tzolkin count. Because the 7,200 days that make up a katun are divisible by 13 with a remainder of -2, the ahau number of each successive katun drops by two. 13 Ahau is followed by 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, 7 Ahau, 5 Ahau, 3 Ahau, 1 Ahau, 12 Ahau, and so on until the count runs through all the numbers. This unit of thirteen katuns formed the basis of the katun prophecies that Avendano used against Can-Ek; each katun ending within the thirteen had its prophecy. The date of Avendano’s visit fell in the katun that ended on 12.4.0.0.0 10 Ahau 18 Uo (July 27, A.D. 1697).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1372|137]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 127.</div>
+The Chilam Balam of Chumayel records the following prophecy for Katun 10 Ahau:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1382|138]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 264–65. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''187–91; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 53–58.</div>
+<quote>
+Katun 10 Ahau, the katun is established at Chable. The ladder is set up over the rulers of the land. The hoof shall burn; the sand by the seashore shall burn. The rock shall crack [with the heat]; drought is the change of the katun. It is the word of our Lord God the Father and of the Mistress of Heaven, the portent of the katun. No one shall arrest the word of our Lord God, God the Son, the Lord of Heaven and his power, come to pass all over the world. Holy Christianity shall come bringing with it the time when the stupid ones who speak our language badly shall turn from their evil ways. No one shall prevent it; this then is the drought. Sufficient is the word for the Maya priests, the word of God.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1392|139]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 36–38. For an overview of state repression in response to propaganda of the deed see Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013),'' ''132; Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 21–22, 32n22; Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads'', 34–35, 39; Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 127–29, 154–58, 293–94; Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'','' ''14–17; Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 167, 188–199; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'', 213–14; Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''191; Merriman, ''Dynamite'', 207–10; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 77–89.</div>
+<right>
+(Roys 1967:159–160)
+</right>
+</quote>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1402|140]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''397.Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism</div>
+Ahau, the katun that followed 10 Ahau, was even more ominous than the prophecy above, for throughout Maya history as it was recorded in the katun prophecies, 8 Ahau was a katun of political strife and religious change. These prophecies were the basis of Avendano’s success and Can-Ek’s resigned acceptance of baptism and eventually his defeat.[637] The fatalism that was at the heart of Can-Ek’s thinking came from the katun prophecies. This fatalism was part of the legacy of the Classic-period attitude toward history and its relationship to cyclic time and supernatural causality. Classic-period scribes emphasized the connectedness among the actions of their living kings, the actions of ancestors in the historical and legendary past, and the actions of gods in the mythological past. We do not think men like Jaguar-Paw, Smoking-Frog, Chan-Bahlum, Bird-Jaguar, and Yax-Pac believed that the past dictated the present, but that these events unfolded within the symmetries of sacred time and space. They looked for symmetries and parallelisms as part of their political strategies, and when they could not find them, they very probably manufactured them. The result of this type of thinking, transformed by the exigencies of the Collapse and then the Conquest, became predictive history and produced the fatalism of Can-Ek.
-== {{anchor|Chapter7MassAnarchismMas1}} {{anchor|Chapter7MassAnarchismMas}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook10}} Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism ==
+The Spaniards who met Naum-Pat on the island of Cozumel, and 178 years later convinced Can-Ek that his world had come to an end, brought with them a different vision of history and the importance of human events. In their view, w hich we of the Western world have inherited, the history of the New World began with the arrival of Columbus. The eyewitness accounts of these times registered the cataclysmic clash of worlds and realities that was the Conquest and its aftermath; but, as with the story of Can-Ek, we see these events only through the eyes of the Conquerors, not of the peoples they found and changed forever.
-Mass anarchists advocated forming, or participating in, large-scale, formal organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society and engaged in collective struggles for immediate reforms in the present. It was held that these collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop a revolutionary mass movement that was both capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. The struggle for immediate reforms was, in other words, viewed as the best means to develop the social force that was necessary for launching a successful armed insurrection. Mass anarchists thought this would occur due to workers being transformed by the practice of participating within prefigurative organizations, taking direct action against the ruling classes, and being influenced by anarchists acting as a militant minority within social movements.[[#1MichaelSchmidtandLucienva|1]]
+Yet as we have shown, the peoples of Mesoamerica had a long and rich historical tradition preserved in many different forms, including myth, oral literature, ritual performance, the arts, painting, and writing. The Maya had kept their written history pristine and untainted by foreign interests for sixteen hundred years before those first Spaniards stepped ashore and surprised Naum-Pat. The conquerors knew the importance of written history to the identity of the people they subdued and used this knowledge to their own ends. They worked to destroy glyphic literacy among the Maya by burning their books and educating Maya children, when they allowed education at all, in Spanish and Latin only.[638] Their logic was clear and compelling: Native literacy perpetuated resistance to the Conquerors and their religion. Denied public history, the stubborn Maya continued to write their own books in secret, eventually in the Roman alphabet as they learned the ways of the Europeans. There are h-men among the Yucatecs today who still read and keep a book of prophecy in the tradition of the Books of Chilam Balam, and the Maya of highland Guatemala still observe and record the ancient count of days and use it to make sense of their lives.
-'''Support of Formal Organizations'''
+Driven underground, glyphic literacy and the history that went with it was lost until the process of decipherment began to remove the veil. Because we can once again read their words, the ancient Maya are no longer a mute receptacle of our vision of what they must have been. We of the modern world no longer see the historical Maya as our immediate intellectual forebears envisioned them—as serene astronomer priests telling their charges when to plant the crops. Neither were the ancient Maya the “rational economic” people of some current theoretical schemes of social science, nor mindless automatons “behaving” without will or self- awareness as they lived their lives and left witness of their existence in the archaeological record. They were, as occasion warranted, warlike, politically acute, devout, philosophical, shortsighted, inspired, self-serving human beings. Their rulers were fully engaged in managing governments and ruling large populations through the myths and symbolisms they shared with their people. The language and images they used are ones their distant descendants can still understand today.
-Mass anarchists advocated building, and participating within, large-scale formal federations that prefigured the kinds of organization that would exist in a future anarchist society. These tended to be federations of trade unions or community groups, whose membership included both anarchists and nonanarchists, and federations of anarchist militants, which I shall refer to as ''specific anarchist organizations''. The size of organization mass anarchists hoped to create can be seen in Kropotkin’s argument that the victory of the working classes required “monster unions embracing millions of proletarians” and the establishment of “an ''International Federation of all the Trade Unions all over the World''.”[[#2PeterKropotkinDirectStrug|2]]
+Recently, Linda Schele had a unique opportunity to observe firsthand the shift of the ancient Maya into the active voice and the potential this transformation holds for the Maya of the modern world. In 1987 while working on the archaeological project in Copán, Honduras, Linda was the guide to a group of American linguists and Maya Indians from the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, México, who came to visit those ancient ruins. During that afternoon and the following day, she shared what she knew of the ancient kings of the city. Some of the visitors were bored and others distracted or doubtful, but for the most part, the Maya and Americans alike were enchanted with what those working at the site had learned. Most of all, they came to the realization that the ancient inscriptions could actually be read. A few grasped that there was powerful history locked up in those silent stones.
-Large-scale federations were advocated by mass anarchists for two main practical reasons. First, they held that they were necessary to achieve coordination between, and effective action by, large groups of people in different areas. In 1870, Bakunin argued that the self-emancipation of the working classes was impeded by their “lack of organization, the difficulty of coming to agreements and of acting in concert.”[[#3QuotedinReneBerthierSoci|3]] He wrote,
+They finished the final tour and ate a late lunch together before piling back into their buses to begin the long trip home. While they ate, the leader of the Maya, a Cakchiquel named Martin Chacach Cutzal.[639] asked Linda if she would come to Antigua, Guatemala, that summer and give a workshop on the ancient writing system to a group of modern Maya. She thought about it (for about five minutes) and realized that a lifetime’s dream was about to come true. The modern Maya had asked to learn about the writing and the history of their forebears. Linda[640] traveled to Antigua and, amid the earthquake-shattered ruins of a Spanish church, went on a marvelous four-day journey of discovery into the ancient past with forty Maya men and women.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Certainly, there is sufficient spontaneous strength among the people, indubitably the strength of the latter is much greater than that of the government and that of ruling classes within it; but lacking organization, spontaneous force is no real force. It is not in a [fit] state to sustain a protracted struggle against forces that are much weaker but much better organized. It is on this undeniable superiority of organized force over elemental popular force that all the power of the state resides. . . . Thus, the [real] question is not one of knowing if the people are capable of an uprising, but rather whether they are ready to form an organization which will assure the success of a revolt, a victory which is not ephemeral, but durable and definitive.[[#4QuotedinBerthierSocialDe|4]]</div>
+During the last day, they all worked on reading the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque, one of the most beautiful inscriptions ever carved by the ancient Maya. Everyone cut up a drawing of the inscription and, following Linda’s lead, taped the disassembled text down onto a large sheet so that they could write a translation below each glyph. The resulting grid displayed the structure of the text, showing how its time statements, verbs, and actors worked.
-Given this, Bakunin argued in 1871 that “to make the people’s might strong enough to be able to eradicate the State’s military and civil might, it is necessary to organize the proletariat. . . . That is precisely what the International Working Men’s Association does” by organizing workers into federations of trade unions.[[#5MichaelBakuninTheBasicBa|5]]
+The final session had to end with the text only half translated so that everyone could prepare for the traditional closing ceremony required for such events. Excited with the results, even though they were only half done, almost everyone came forward to express their feelings about the magic that had happened during those four days. Exuberant that it had worked so well, Linda was nevertheless disappointed and a little hurt when one of the most enthusiastic participants, a Kekchi named Eduardo Pacay, known as Guayo to his friends, disappeared without saying a word.
-This argument was applied not only to the organization of the working classes in general, but also the organization of workers who were anarchist militants. In 1889, Malatesta complained that some anarchists had “attacked the principle of organization itself. They wanted to prevent betrayals and deception, permit free rein to individual initiative, ensure against spies and attacks from the government—and they brought isolation and impotence to the fore.”[[#6QuotedinNunzioPerniconeI|6]] Amédée Dunois similarly claimed at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam that the anarchist movement in France was disorganized and fragmented into unconnected small groups and isolated individuals. He lamented that,
+Two hours later, everyone reassembled for the closing ceremony, which was held at the headquarters of the “Francisco Marroquin” project. A polyglot of conversation in at least ten languages floated over the sounds of a marimba as everyone drank rum and cokes or soft drinks and nibbled on snacks of beef, chicken, beans, and tortillas. Finally done eating, everyone stood or sat around the courtyard of the old house as the formal ceremony began in which gifts were given to the teachers and everyone got a diploma declaring that they had participated. Toward the end, Guayo and the two other Kekchi who had been in his team appeared carrying the meter-high chart they had made during the workshop. They opened the tightly rolled paper, and while two of them held it stretched out, Guayo read their translation—in Kekchi. Before forty awestruck witnesses, a Maya read aloud one of the ancient inscriptions in his own language for the first time in four hundred and fifty years.[641] That day, 12.18.14.3.5 1 Men 3 Xul in the ancient calendar,[642] was 291 years after Can-Ek’s conversion and 1,078 years after the last dated monument of the Classic period.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Everyone acts in his own way, whenever he wants; in this way individual efforts are dispersed and often exhausted, simply wasted. Anarchists can be found in more or less every sphere of action: in the workers’ unions, in the anti-militarist movement, among anti-clericalist free thinkers, in the popular universities, and so on, and so forth. What we are missing is a specifically anarchist movement, which can gather to it, on the economic and workers’ ground that is ours, all those forces that have been fighting in isolation up to now. This specifically anarchist movement will voluntarily arise from our groups and from the federation of these groups. The might of joint action, of concerted action, will undoubtedly create it. . . . It would be sufficient for the anarchist organization to group together, around a programme of concrete practical action, all the comrades who accept our principles and who want to work with us, according to our methods.[[#7MaurizioAntonioliedTheI|7]]</div>
+The magic of that moment was special to Guayo and his friends, but it was equally important to the rest of us. In the “world history” courses that punctuate our childhood education, we learn to place a special value on written history and the civilizations that possess it. In antiquity, history was a very special and rare kind of consciousness and it is a momentous event in our own time when we rediscover a lost reality encapsulated in written words. The Maya inscriptions that have been unlocked by the decipherment offer us the first great history of the Americas.
-The second reason why mass anarchists advocated large-scale federations was that they were necessary for developing the kinds of people and social relations that were needed to abolish capitalism and the state and create an anarchist society. In 1892, Malatesta argued that since “agreement, association, and organization represent one of the laws governing life and the key to strength—today as well as after the revolution,” it follows that the working classes must be organized prior to the social revolution.[[#8MalatestaTheMethodofFree|8]] This is because “tomorrow can only grow out of today—and if one seeks success tomorrow, the factors of success need to be prepared today.”[[#9MalatestaMethodofFreedom|9]] This was especially important given that, as Malatesta explained in 1897, workers cannot be “expected to provide for pressing needs” during the social revolution “unless they were already used to coming together to deal jointly with their common interests.”[[#10ErricoMalatestaALongand|10]] For example, supplying bread to everyone in a city would have to be organized, and this required that bakers were “already associated and ready to manage without masters.”[[#11MalatestaPatientWork158|11]]
+Maya history as we have presented it is, of course, a construction of our times, sensibilities, and intellectual agendas. The ancient Maya who lived that history would have seen it differently, as will their descendants. Even our own contemporaries who work with different patterns of data and different agendas w ill eventually change some of the details and ways of interpreting this information; but that is only the natural result of time and new discoveries. Yet for all the limitations that lie within the proposition that history cannot be separated from the historian, these very limitations are part of the nature of all history—ours as well as theirs. Each generation of humanity debates history, thus turning it into a dynamic thing that incorporates the present as well as the past. This process has been happening with American history both before and after Columbus; it is happening to the history of the last fifty years even as we watch events unfold with mind-boggling rapidity on the evening news. It will happen to the Maya history we have constructed here. But you see, that is the miracle. There is a now Maya history that can be debated and altered into a dynamic synergy with the present and the future. And with that synergy our perception of the history of humanity is changed.
-Large-scale, formal organizations were, in short, deemed necessary for both engaging in successful revolts and producing and distributing goods and services during and after the social revolution. Insurrectionist anarchists were not convinced by such arguments because they regarded formal organizations as incompatible with the freedom of the individual, and so with anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends. Mass anarchists replied that formal organizations were both compatible with freedom and a prerequisite for it. They thought that large-scale coordination and collective action based on voluntary agreement expanded a person’s real possibility to act and develop themselves far beyond what an individual could attain by themselves or in a small group. A worker may have the internal ability to help organize a large strike across multiple industries but they lack the capacity to do so when isolated. The external conditions necessary for the development and exercise of such a capacity only emerge when an organization like a national trade union is formed that unites workers together, and thereby enables new forms of action.[[#12MalatestaPatientWork148|12]]
+ Epilogue: Back to the Beginning
-Mass anarchists also argued that a lack of organizational structures often results in informal hierarchies emerging. Charismatic individuals can, for example, create a newspaper and use it to steer the anarchist movement in a direction of their own choosing, and transform themselves into a prominent leader. In so doing, they acquire a large amount of influence, and use this to further their own positions and interests in manners that are unaccountable to the wider movement and sometimes even harmful. Formal organizational structures can counter this tendency by creating systems of accountability, such as the editors of newspapers being delegates who are elected and mandated by the members of a trade union.[[#13MalatestaPatientWork153|13]]
+On a warm night in May of 1986, Linda and I, Mary Miller, and many friends celebrated the opening of the Blood of Kings exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by letting a little blood from our fingers onto paper and copal incense and burning the offering. I carefully wrapped the ashes, along with the obsidian blades we had used, in a paper bundle. The following summer, I buried the bundle in the cement benchmark at the center of Yaxuna, a place where I hope to work for ten more years. So we take our thoughts and our feelings for the ancient Maya from this book and from our distant homes back to the Maya field with us, Linda to Copan, me to Yaxuna. Maybe we are a little superstitious, but I’d rather think we’re empathetic, for the Otherworld still shimmers over the Maya landscape even as we of the West pass through it in oblivious innocence.
-Mass anarchists were, nevertheless, still anarchists and so opposed to any system of top-down organization based on minority rule and centralization.[[#14RicardoMellaAnarchistSoc|14]] The conclusions of the 1906 Russian anarchist-communist conference, which were written by Kropotkin, opposed “every form of hierarchical organization that is characteristic of the parties of the State socialists” in which members are “obedient to a central power” and subject to “party discipline and compulsion.”[[#15KropotkinDirectStruggle|15]] This perspective was shared by Baginski who, three years later, rejected “constraining laws that need a centralistic apparatus for their execution,” while advocating “a federative association that does not demand subjection from its members, but will rather place understanding, initiative, and solidarity in the place of commands and compulsory, soldierly behavior.”[[#16MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|16]]
+Don Emetario, captain of the Maya workmen at Yaxuna, and my friend, took me aside at the end of the summer’s work in 1988 to tell me this story. A few years ago he was walking home to the village from his fields along the modern dirt road that cuts through the ruins of Yaxuna. It was dusk, and in the reddening light he saw a tiny boy standing before him, naked and bald. Thinking it might be his son, Emetario cried out to him, but the child ran off the road and disappeared into a hole in the rocky surface of the ancient community. Emetario ran home for a flashlight and peered down into the hole, but all he could see was something furry like a night animal. Was this the “lord of money (the Earthlord)”? Emetario asked me. 1 replied that there are always strange things to be found in ruins, but that I did not know what it was he saw.
-One hierarchical organization that mass anarchists opposed was the bureaucratic trade union. In 1938, Rocker argued that trade unions, in which decisions flow from a small minority of bureaucrats at the top to workers beneath them, should be rejected on the grounds that they are “always attended by barren official routine; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification, and permits no independent action.”[[#17RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi1|17]] Such top-down systems of decision-making systems were especially harmful because the minority who actually made decisions lacked immediate access to the local information needed to do so. To illustrate this point, Rocker referred to trade unions allied with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in which strikes had to first be approved by the central committee, which was usually very far away and “not in a position to pass a correct judgement on the local conditions.” This meant that workers in a particular area were unable to engage in sudden direct action, and so effectively respond to their immediate circumstances and concerns on the ground.[[#18RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|18]] For a state, “centralism is the appropriate form of organization, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium [under capitalism]. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favorable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could but be a curse.”[[#19RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|19]]
+I rather suspect that Emctario’s cousin, Don Pablo, knows more than I do about such things. Don Pablo is a H-men, a “known,” or shaman, of the village, who also works for the Yaxuna project. On the last day of our work in the summer of 1988. Don Pablo was working with our photographer in the southern end of the community, clearing the grass from stone foundations for pictures. In the
+course of the conversation, tie regarded the principal acropolis of the south, a fine raised platform with three buildings upon it, erected in the Preclassic period, at the dawn of Maya history.
-The form of organization that would, in the opinion of mass anarchists, simultaneously enable effective coordination between large groups of people and the free initiative of its members was the federation. What such federations were supposed to look like can be understood by examining in detail Malatesta’s various descriptions of anarchist organizational structures, especially those he made during a series of debates with antiorganizationalist anarchists in the 1890s.[[#20Thefollowingaccountislar|20]] These organizational principles were later implemented by the specific anarchist organization Malatesta was a member of during the early 1920s, the Italian Anarchist Union.[[#21MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|21]] It should nonetheless be kept in mind that these are Malatesta’s proposals, and, despite being influential, do not reflect what all mass anarchists thought or how all mass anarchist organizations actually operated.
+“Here was a great temple,” he said, “but the portal is now closed.”
-Malatesta advocated the formation of an organization that united individuals under a common program, which specified the goals of the group and the means they proposed to achieve them. The purpose of such an organization was to enable individuals to pursue their shared goals by educating one another, engaging in joint activity, and coordinating action over a large-scale. In so doing, an organization would develop a collective strength to change society that was not only impossible for an individual to develop in isolation, but was also greater than the sum of the individual strengths that composed it.
+We cannot open the Maya portals to the Otherworld with excavation alone, no matter how careful and how extensive. For the portals are places in the mind and in the heart. We, as pilgrims from another time and reality, must approach the ruined entrances to the past with humility and attention to what the Maya, ancient and modern, can teach us through their words as well as their deeds. So our book is a beginning for us on that path—I look forward to hearing what Don Pablo has to say about our progress.
-Such a formal organization must, given the unity of means and ends, be structured in a manner that prefigures an anarchist society. Whereas authoritarian organizations rest on a division between some who command and others who obey, anarchist organizations are free associations of equals that are formed in order to achieve a common goal. There should be no substantial difference between how anarchists organize before and after the social revolution. They need, “today for the purposes of propaganda and struggle, tomorrow in order to meet all of the needs of social life, organizations built upon the will and in the interest of all their members.”[[#22MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|22]] Anarchist formal organizations, therefore, have to be founded on “the principle of autonomy of individuals within groups, and of groups within federations” such that “nobody has the right to impose their will on anyone else, and nobody is forced to follow decisions that they have not accepted.”[[#23MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|23]] Within such a federalist organization, each group and individual member would be free to federate with whomever they desired, and to leave any federation whenever they wanted. This freedom of association included the freedom of the federation, or groups within the federation, to choose to disassociate from individuals who violated its common program, such as by campaigning for a politician or supporting an imperialist war.[[#24MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|24]]
+<right>
+David Freidel
+<br>Dallas, Texas
+<br>September 1988
+</right>
-Decisions within the local groups that compose the federation would be made by a general assembly, in which each member had a vote and an equal say in collective decisions. Although Malatesta held that anarchists should aim for a situation in which everybody agreed on a decision, he understood that this would often not happen, and there would be a division between a majority of people in favor of one position and a minority opposed to it. In such situations, where it was impractical or impossible to pass multiple resolutions reflecting each faction’s distinct viewpoint, it was expected that the minority would voluntarily defer to the majority, so that a decision was made and the organization would continue to function. If the minority disagreed strongly with the majority, and felt that this was an issue of supreme importance, then they were free to voluntarily dissociate and leave the organization.
+ Update 1991
-Large-scale coordination would be achieved through the organization of congresses, which were attended by delegates that each section’s general assembly had elected. According to Malatesta,
+Since A Forest of Kings went to press, new information relevant to our stories has been discovered. In the 1990 season, excavators in the Caracol Project under the direction of Arlen and Diane Chase discovered several new stelae. According to project epigrapher Nikolai Grube, one of these records an attack on Tikal during the war in which Lord Kan II conquered Naranjo in A.D. 637. Simultaneously, in the Dos Pilas project under the direction of Arthur Demarest, excavators cleared a hieroglyphic stairway, which Stephen Houston and David Stuart, the project epigraphers, analyzed as recording the capture of Shield-Skull, the father of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal on the date 9.12.6.16.17 11 Caban 10 Zotz’ or May 3, A.D. 679. Because we knew only of Caracol’s conquest of Tikal in A.D. 562 when we wrote our story of this period, we could not explain why it had taken so long for Tikal to recover from this single defeat nor why the broken stelae had been allowed to lie unattended in the Great Plaza for over a hundred years. Now it seems likely that Tikal was defeated and devastated at least two more times after the first Caracol victory and that Flint-Sky-God K and his allies disfigured the monuments in the Great Plaza only three years before Ah-Cacaw’s accession in A.D. 682.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">congresses of an anarchist organization . . . do not lay down the law; they do not impose their own resolutions on others. They serve to maintain and increase personal relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action, to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current among the anarchists and draw up some kind of statistics from them—and their decisions are not obligatory rules but suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved, and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept them, and for as long as they accept them.[[#25MalatestaMethodofFreedom|25]] </div>
+The third great discovery came from Nikolai Grube, who deciphered the glyph for “dance” (ak’ot) in May 1990. This new discovery is particularly important to the Bird-Jaguar story in Chapter 7 because the Flapstaff, Basket-staff, and Bird-staff rituals as well as the display of the God K scepter and the bundle can now be identified as public dances. Dance, it turns out, has been one of the focal acts of Maya ritual and political life even until today.
-In order to ensure that the delegates within the federation did not develop into a ruling minority who imposed decisions on the wider membership, Malatesta proposed a number of limits to their power. First, the delegate would be mandated to complete specific tasks by the group who elected them, such as being a treasurer or voting as instructed at a congress, rather than being granted decision-making power, which would remain in the hands of the general assembly who had elected the delegate. Second, the delegate would serve for fixed terms and the position would be rotated regularly, so that as many people as possible could learn to perform these tasks and take initiative. Third, the delegate could be instantly recalled and replaced by those who had elected them, if they did not approve of what the delegate had done.[[#26MalatestaMethodofFreedom|26]]
+<right>
+Linda Schele
+<br>Austin, Texas
+<br>February 1991
+</right>
-A more concrete understanding of what federations built on anarchist principles actually looked like can be seen by examining the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union the CNT, which was founded in 1910, and had a membership of over 700,000 workers by 1919. Despite suffering multiple waves of state repression and being illegal for several years of its existence, the CNT was able to survive and maintain itself over time. By May 1936, the CNT was composed of 982 union sections with a total membership of 550,595 workers.[[#27JosePeiratsTheCNTinthe|27]] Its organizational structure is shown below in ''figure 1''. The CNT was initially composed of craft unions that belonged both to a federation of every union in their specific or similar crafts, and a federation composed of all the other unions, irrespective of craft, in their local area. This formally changed at a national level in 1919, when delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form “single unions” that united all workers in a specific industry, regardless of their profession, within the same union. These single unions were, in turn, broken down into individual trade sections that would deal with any issues specific to their craft.[[#28MurrayBookchinTheSpanish|28]]
+ Glossary of Gods and Icons
-Decisions in the single unions were made by a general assembly composed of the entire membership. This general assembly elected a shop steward, who was granted the power to call for work stoppages when the membership instructed them to do so, and an administrative committee. The administrative committee of the single union was, according to the activist manual issued by the CNT during the Spanish revolution of 1936, composed of a general secretary, treasurer, accountant, first secretary, second secretary, third secretary, librarian, propaganda delegate, and federal delegate(s). All the different trade sections within the single union had to be represented within the administrative committee. Who performed what role was decided upon by the elected members of the administrative committee themselves. The exceptions to this were the general secretary, treasurer, and federal delegate who were specifically chosen by the general assembly of the single union.[[#29DannyEvansprivatecommuni|29]]
+The Baby Jaguar appears frequently in paired opposition with Chac-Xib-Chac in scenes of dance and sacrifice. He most often appears with the body of a infantile human, although he may also be represented as an adult, fully zoomorphic jaguar. In both aspects, he wears a scarf and is associated with the sun. His human aspect sometimes wears a cruller, associating him with GUI of the Palenque Triad. The Baby Jaguar is particularly important at Tikal in the early inscriptions where it appears as if it were the name of the kingdom. At minimum, it was considered to be a god particularly associated with Tikal, perhaps as its patron. The Baby Jaguar also appears in early inscriptions at Caracol. See Chac-Xib-Chac.
-The single unions in a particular area combined to form a local federation. The local federations then combined to form a regional federation and the regional federations together formed the national federation.[[#30In1931themajorityofdel|30]] The local, regional, and national federations were all self-managed by their own respective administrative committees. In order to prevent the rise of a bureaucracy within the CNT, the only paid delegates within the trade union were the general secretary of the national federation and the secretaries of the regional federations. Every other delegate was expected to earn a living working in a trade.[[#31In1934AngelPestanaclaim|31]] The administrative committees of the local, regional, and national federations lacked the ability to impose decisions on shop stewards, who were only subject to the instructions of their single union. The local, regional, and national administrative committees were, on paper, supposed to focus their activities exclusively on coordinating actions between various single unions, correspondence, collecting statistics, and prisoner support. During periods of state repression, they ended up taking on greater responsibilities because the close links between the single unions and the CNT’s main delegates were broken down.[[#32Thehighercommitteesofthe|32]]
+Bicephalic Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-The committees of the regional federations were elected each year at the regional congresses, that were attended by mandated delegates from the local federations. In certain unusual situations, the members of the regional committees were expected to consult local trade unions and federations by means of either a referendum or correspondence. A regional committee could be replaced if the majority of local federations within the regional federation called for an extraordinary congress to take place, at which new delegates would be elected. The committee of the national federation was, in contrast, a role that was delegated to one of the regional committees on a temporary basis by the national federation’s congress, which was attended by mandated delegates from every single union in the country. Between national congresses, decisions in the CNT that involved multiple single unions were made at plenums. A local federation’s plenum was composed of the federal delegates from each single union’s administrative committee, who were mandated on how to vote at the plenum by those who had elected them. These local federal delegates then elected and mandated a delegate to represent the area at a regional plenum of local committees that, in turn, sent mandated delegates to a national plenum of regional committees.[[#33ThisaccountofhowtheCNT|33]]
+Blood is represented by a bifurcated scroll, sometimes with plain contours and sometimes with beaded outlines representing the blood itself. To mark the scroll as blood rather than smoke or mist, the Maya attached a number of signs representing precious materials: kan, “yellow,” yax, “bluegreen,” chac, “red,” shells, jade jewelry like beads and earfiares, obsidian, mirrors of various materials, “zero” signs, and bone. This imagery merges with that of God C, which imparts the meaning “holy” or “divine.” Blood is the holy substance of human beings. See God C.
-A more detailed description of how the CNT was organized is made by the brickmaker José Peirats, who was a member of the CNT from 1922 onward, and was elected as the organization’s general secretary in 1947. In the CNT,
+The Bloodletting Bowl is a flat, shallow plate with angled sides, called a lac in Mayan. It held offerings of all sorts and was often used in caches in a lip-to-lip configuration in which a second bowl was used as the lid. In bloodletting scenes, the bowl usually holds bloodied paper, lancets of various sorts, and rope to pull through perforations.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The unions constitute autonomous units, linked to the ensemble of the Confederation only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses, whether regular or extraordinary. Apart from this commitment, the unions, right up to their technical sections, are free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organization as a whole. . . it is the unions which decide and directly regulate the guidelines of the Confederation. At all times, the basis for any local, regional, or national decision is the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals. Resolutions are adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation. Extraordinary congresses are held on the suggestion of the assembled unions. Even the agenda is devised by the assemblies where the items on the agenda are debated and delegates appointed as the executors of their collective will. This federalist procedure, operating from the bottom up, constitutes a precaution against any possible authoritarian degeneration in the representative committees.[[#34PeiratsTheCNTintheSpan|34]]</div>
+Cab or Caban, see Earth.
-<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+Cauac Signs consist of a triangular arrangement of disks in groups of three, five, or more, combined with a semicircular line paralleled by a row of dots. These signs derive from the day sign Cauac, but in the iconography they mark both things made of stone and the Witz Mountain Monster. When they appear in zoomorphic form or with a wavy contour, cauac signs mark the Eccentric Flint. Combined with the God C-type head, the cauac signs refer to sacred stones, like altars. When the zoomorphic form has eyelids and a stepped forehead, it is the Witz Monster or Living Mountain. See Witz Monster.
-[[Image:Zoe_Figure_1.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-The CNT’s system of majority voting was explained in more detail within the organization’s constitution, which was printed on the trade union’s membership card. It declared that “Anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism recognize the validity of majority decisions. The militant has a right to his own point of view and to defend it, but he is obliged to comply with majority decisions, even when they are against his own feelings. . . We recognize the sovereignty of the individual, but we accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision. Without this there is no organization.”[[#35QuotedinPeiratsWhatist|35]]
+The Celestial Bird, also known as the Serpent Bird and the Principal Bird Deity, has a long tail, personified wings, and the head of a zoomorphic monster. Often it appears with a round object and woven ribbon held in its mouth, with a trefoil pectoral around its neck, and a cut-shell ornament attached to a jade headband. In its most common representation it sits atop the World Tree or astride the body of the Cosmic Monster. In its earliest manifestations, it appeared prominently in the Late Preclassic art of the southern highlands. There it represented the idea of nature out of control but brought into order by the Hero Twins and their avatar on earth, the king.[643] This concept of the king as the guardian of ordered nature first came into the iconography of the lowland Maya with the image of this bird, especially in the context of the World Tree.
-Members of the CNT did, nonetheless, disagree about whether or not this system of majority voting, in which decisions were binding on all members, should be applied to much smaller specific anarchist organizations. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was a specific anarchist organization composed of small affinity groups. The FAI initially made most of their decisions via unanimous agreement and rarely used voting. In 1934, the Z and Nervio affinity groups pushed for the FAI to adopt binding agreements established through majority vote. The Afinidad affinity group, which included Peirats, agreed with the necessity of such a system within the CNT, but opposed it being implemented within small specific anarchist organizations or affinity groups. After a confrontational FAI meeting Afinidad left the organization in protest.[[#36EalhamLivingAnarchism77|36]]
+The Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster.
-The extent to which anarchists within the CNT valued its federalist system of organization can be seen in the actions of the twelve to fifteen thousand former members of the Durruti Column, who had fled to France after the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1939, and were imprisoned in the Vernet d’Ariège concentration camp. Despite the abysmal conditions of the camp—lack of adequate housing, food shortages, disease, and very cold weather—the anarchists established a mirror image of the CNT. Every anarchist belonged to a general assembly within their hut, which elected a hut committee to represent them. These hut committees then federated together and elected sector committees, which in turn voted for a camp committee. The camp committee then sent demands from the general assemblies to the French authorities running the concentration camp. In so doing, they practiced what little anarchism they could within the direst of circumstances.[[#37EalhamLivingAnarchism12|37]]
+The Ceremonial Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-Mass anarchists advocated and built large-scale federations, but these were not the only kind of organizations they valued. They understood that different forms of organization were appropriate for different tasks and, to this end, also advocated the formation of affinity groups that were either permanent or formed for specific actions, and dissolved once the action was complete.[[#38MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|38]] The CNT itself contained numerous affinity groups that performed a wide variety of tasks, ranging from publishing texts, organizing debates and lectures, engaging in prisoner support, protecting prominent anarchist militants, robbing banks, and assassinating class enemies.[[#39ChrisEalhamAnarchismand|39]]
+Chac-Xib-Chac is frequently paired with the Baby Jaguar in early inscriptions, while in Late Classic pottery painting they occur together in scenes of dance and sacrifice. Chac-Xib-Chac can appear in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form, but he is distinguished by a shell diadem, a fish fin on the face of his human version, a shell earflare, and his frequent wielding of an ax. All but the shell diadem and the ax are features shared by G1 of the Palenque Triad, and in fact the two may be aspects of the same entity. Chac-Xib-Chac was the prototype of the great god Chae of the Maya of Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Kings frequently portray themselves in the guise of Chac-Xib-Chac or wear him behind their legs suspended on a chain. On the Cosmic Plate (Fig. 2:4), he is identified by date and actions as Venus as Eveningstar.[644] See Baby Jaguar.
-'''Reform not Reformism'''
+The Cosmic Monster, also known as the Celestial Monster and the Bice- phalic Monster, is a dragon-type monster with a crocodilian head marked by deer ears. The body has legs, usually terminating in deer hooves with water scrolls at the joints. Its body sometimes resembles a crocodile marked with cauac signs, but it can also appear as a sky band or as the lazy-S scrolls of blood. At Yaxchilán, the Monster appears with two crocodile heads, but usually the rear head is the Quadripartite God, which Y hangs upside down in relation to the front head to mark it as a burden of the Cosmic Monster. The front head is usually marked as Venus while the Quadripartite Monster is the sun. Together they represent the movement of Venus, the sun, and by extension, the planets across the star fields at night and the arc of heaven during the day. The Cosmic Monster marks the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds as it exists on the perimeter of the cosmos. See World Tree and Quadripartite Monster.
-Mass anarchists and insurrectionist anarchists agreed that fundamental social change can only be achieved by mass movements. What separated the two is that mass anarchists believed that, given their immediate social and historical context, the most realistic and effective means to develop mass movements was through the long and patient work of struggling for immediate reforms in the present, rather than isolated individuals or small anarchist groups engaging in propaganda of the deed in order to inspire a series of popular uprisings. Mass anarchists used a variety of different terms to refer to modifications to existing dominant structures and social relations, such as “gains,” “improvements,” or “reforms.”
+The Death God (God A) appears as an animated skeleton, sometimes with the gas-distended belly characteristic of parasitical disease or the decay of a corpse. There appear to have been many versions of this god, differentiated by slight variations in the anatomy, the objects carried, and the actions done in the scene. These variations may represent different aspects of the same god, or just as likely, different Lords of Death named for various diseases or actions.
-This position was originally advocated by anarchists in the First International. In 1869 Bakunin argued that a significant number of workers could develop revolutionary socialist consciousness “through [the] the collective action and practice” of “''the organization and the federation of resistance funds'' [strike funds]” and the “real struggle to reduce hours of work and increase pay.”[[#40MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|40]] An anarchist pamphlet published in 1872 claimed that the International “must gradually change the economic situation of the working class . . . improve working conditions, curtail, diminish and eliminate the privileges of capital, make these every day more dependent and precarious, until capital surrenders and disappears. . . . This can be achieved by ''resistance'', with the legal and open weapon of the ''strike''.”[[#41QuotedinWaltherLBerneck|41]]
+The Directional Gods, see Four-Part Gods.
-This view was repeated four decades later by the CNT’s paper ''Solidaridad Obrera'', which claimed in January 1917 that radical trade union movements, such as the CNT, were simultaneously committed to achieving the “reformism” of “the reduction of the working day, the increase in wages, etc.” and the “revolutionism” of “the emancipation of the proletariat through the abolition of capital and of the wage earner.”[[#42QuotedinRalphDarlington|42]] Fourteen years later, the CNT declared in its 1931 Madrid Congress resolutions that, although they were “openly at war with the state,” and aimed “to educate the people to understand the need to unite with us to secure our complete emancipation by means of the social revolution,” they also had “the ineluctable duty of indicating to the people a schedule of minimum demands that they should press by building up their own revolutionary strength.”[[#43QuotedinPeiratsTheCNTi|43]]
+The Double-headed Serpent Bar, see Serpent Bar.
-In order to understand why mass anarchists advocated this strategy, it is important to first outline their critique of insurrectionist anarchism. According to Malatesta, insurrectionists mistakenly viewed “present society as an indivisible block susceptible to no alteration beyond a radical transformation, and thus regarded as useless any attempt at improvements and concerned themselves solely with ''making revolution'' . . . which was then not made and remained a distant promise.”[[#44MalatestaPatientWork281|44]] Propaganda of the deed had been conceived as the means by which anarchists would spark a revolutionary upsurge, but the two main versions of it—small armed bands launching insurrections and individual acts of violence (assassinations or bombings)—had consistently failed to pave the way for mass uprisings, let alone achieve the social revolution. This was despite the fact that insurrectionist anarchists had engaged in numerous revolts, assassinations, and bombings between the 1870s and 1890s.
+Earth is represented by bands marked with cab signs from the glyph meaning “earth.” These bands may be split to represent a cleft from which a tree grows or ancestors emerge. In some representations, earth bands may also represent the concept of territory or domain.
-It was argued that these tactics actively encouraged anarchists to isolate themselves from the majority of the working classes in order to avoid state repression, surveillance, and infiltration. Anarchists, thus, were unable to influence or inspire the working classes in the way that they had intended and hoped for. In 1889, twelve years after the Benevento affair, Malatesta wrote that small armed groups of anarchists failed to inspire revolts because inadequate preparation among and contact with the populace led to the group being “scattered and defeated before the people even get to learn what it is that the band wanted!”[[#45MalatestaMethodofFreedom|45]] Under these circumstances, the local populace were unable to join the band, and could merely look on impassively.
+Eccentric Flint and Flayed-Face Shield combine a flint lance blade or an eccentric flint with a shield made from a flayed human face. It is an object transferred from ancestor to king in the accession rites at Palenque. At other sites, like Tortuguero, Yaxchilan, and Tikal, this symbol combination is directly associated with war and capture.
-Malatesta expanded upon this argument in 1894, when he concluded that a “great spontaneous insurrection” would most likely not launch the social revolution, because “plots and conspiracies can only embrace a very limited number of individuals and are usually impotent to start a movement among the people of sufficient importance to give a chance of victory. Isolated movements, more or less spontaneous, are almost always stifled in blood before they have had time to acquire importance and become general.”[[#46MalatestaMethodofFreedom|46]] A few years later in 1897, Malatesta insisted that uprisings “''cannot be improvised''” and that “a revolution without resources, without an agreed-upon plan, without weapons, without men” would be doomed to failure.[[#47MalatestaPatientWork182|47]] Anarchists attempting to launch insurrections while they were such a small minority had only resulted in a cycle of “six months of quiet activity, followed by a few microscopic uprisings—or more often, mere threats of uprisings—then arrests, flights abroad, interruption of propaganda, disintegration of the organization. . . . Just to start the whole thing all over again two or three years further down the line.”[[#48MalatestaPatientWork374|48]] Given this, Malatesta concluded in 1899 that, in order for insurrections to be successful, anarchists must, “rather than face periodical and pointless slaughter . . . lay preparations appropriate for the force we are going to have to confront” and federate in order to accumulate “the strength required to steer the next popular uprising to victory.”[[#49MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|49]]
+The Foliated Cross is a maize tree, representing the central axis of the world in the symbolism of cultivated nature. At its base is the Kan-cross Waterlily Monster representing the canals and swamps of raised-field agriculture. Its trunk, like that of the Wacah Chan tree, is marked with <verbatim><</verbatim> the God C image meaning “holy” or “sacred.” Its branches are ears of maize with a living human head substituting for the grains of maize as a A reference to the myth of creation in which human flesh was shaped from maize dough. Perched on its summit is the great bird of the center, in this context represented as the Waterbird associated with the canals around raised fields. The Waterbird wears a mask of the Celestial Bird. See World Tree.
-The tactics of assassination and bombings, in contrast, contributed toward the anarchist movement suffering an extreme amount of state repression, without achieving any substantial social change worth that price. Such tactics had been conceived of as acts of propaganda, but were instead a key factor in why a significant number of workers became less likely to listen to anarchists and adopt their ideas. They instead came to stereotype anarchists negatively as dangerous individuals, mindlessly spreading chaos and destruction.[[#50HaiaShpayerMakovAnarchi|50]] The French anarchist Fernand Pelloutier remarked in 1895 that “I know many workers who are disenchanted with parliamentary socialism but who hesitate to support libertarian socialism because, in their view, anarchism simply implies the individualistic use of the bomb.”[[#51QuotedinUlrichLinsePr|51]] After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky wrote, “the benefits that such an attempt can bring to the propaganda of our ideas are very questionable, the damage however is certain and sure.”[[#52QuotedinKenyonZimmerImm|52]]
+The Four-Part Gods: Many gods in the Maya system occur in repetitions of four associated with the directions and colors of the four-part division of the world. In the Dresden Codex, Chae (God B) is the principal god shown in a four-part set, but in the Classic period the Pauahtunob[645] or Bacabob are the most frequent deities shown in four repetitions. In the 819-day count of the Classic inscriptions, GII (God K) appears in fourfold division associated with colors, directions, and the appropriate quadrants of the sky. See Pauahtun, GII, and Chac-Xib-Chac.
-Even Most, who had been a fervent advocate of anarchist assassinations and bomb plots during the 1880s, ended up changing his mind.[[#53PaulAvrichandKarenAvrich|53]] He wrote in 1892 that “there is no greater error than to believe that we as anarchists need only to commit any deed, no matter when, where, and against whom. To have a propagandist effect, every deed needs to be popular. . . . If that is not the case, or if it actually meets with disapproval from the very part of the population it is intended to inspire, anarchism makes itself unpopular and hated. Instead of winning new adherents, many will withdraw.”[[#54QuotedinAvrichandAvrich|54]] Shortly afterward, Most responded to Berkman’s unexpected assassination attempt against the American capitalist Frick by publicly opposing the act. He argued that “in a country where we are so weakly represented and so little understood . . . we cannot afford the luxury of assassinations. . . . In countries like America, where we still need solid ground to stand on, we must limit ourselves to literary and verbal agitation.”[[#55QuotedinGoyensJohannMo|55]]
+GI, GII, GUI, see the Palenque Triad.
-Insurrectionist anarchists had above all been wrong to assume that the revolution was imminent, and that the working classes would rise up in reaction to the violent actions of a few. As early as 1885, the Spanish anarchist Serrano had insisted that “individual actions—even if they employ thousands upon thousands of kilos of dynamite—will not succeed in any region, nor will they succeed in destroying the bourgeoisie or in bringing about the Social Revolution.”[[#56QuotedinGeorgeRichardEse|56]] Over a decade later, in an 1897 interview, Malatesta said that “in the early days of the anarchist movement . . . there was the illusion that the revolution was just around the corner; and, as a result, any organizational work that required a long and patient endeavor was neglected.”[[#57MalatestaPatientWork319|57]] He recalled in 1928 that “we put our hopes in general discontent, and because the misery that afflicted the masses was so insufferable, we believed it was enough to give an example, launching with arms in hand the cry of ‘down with the masters,’ in order for the working masses to fling themselves against the bourgeoisie and take possession of the land, the factories, and all that they produced with their toil and that had been stolen from them.”[[#58QuotedinPerniconeItalian|58]]
+God B, see Chac-Xib-Chac.
-In a 1902 letter to Max Nettlau, Kropotkin noted that the wave of propaganda of the deed was motivated by the belief “that all it took to trigger the revolution was a few heroic feats” and, when this failed to happen, several younger anarchists came to realize that “a revolution cannot be ''provoked'' by ten or a hundred” and that it was a delusion to imagine “that a sharp push by a few might successfully spark revolution.”[[#59KropotkinDirectStruggle|59]] A revolution, he said, could only be produced by “the slow work of organization and preparatory propaganda among the working masses.”[[#60KropotkinDirectStruggle|60]] This was, of course, not a new insight for mass anarchists, including Kropotkin. In his 1899 autobiography, he claimed that, in the late 1870s, he and other members of the Jura Federation understood that to abolish class society a period of “tedious propaganda and a long succession of struggles, of individual and collective revolts against the now prevailing forms of property, of individual self-sacrifice, of partial attempts at reconstruction and partial revolutions would have to be lived through.”[[#61PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|61]]
+God C is a monkey-faced image that will often have representations of blood drops and other precious materials attached to it. The phonetic reading of the glyphic version as k’ul, the Maya word for “divinity,” “holy,” or “sacred,” identifies the icon as a marker for the same quality. When the image is associated with the depiction of a living being, such as a king or deity, it marks that being as a “divinity.” When it is merged with the image of a thing, such as a tree, stream of blood, or a house, it marks the image as a “holy” thing. See Blood and World Tree.
-The strategy of engaging in individual acts of violence above all rested on a false view of social change. Social change is not just a matter of attacking the existing order until it collapses. The transformation of society requires the transformation of the working classes’ capacities, drives, and consciousness in an anarchist direction such that they learn to self-organize horizontally and undertake a revolution. Killing a monarch or blowing up a building might temporarily scare the ruling classes or inspire a small number of workers, but it will not lead to fundamental social change. A new monarch will be crowned and the building will be repaired. Society will carry on as normal, because the general population will have merely observed the actions of an isolated individual and not have themselves engaged in forms of practice that transform them as people. In the aftermath of any anarchist attack, a typical worker could continue to behave as before, and thereby reproduce the dominant structures of class society.
+God D is the most difficult of the old gods to identify iconographically. He has large square eyes, an overhanging nose, a toothless mouth, and wears a headband embossed with a hanging flower. His glyphic name in the codices and the Classic inscriptions is Itzamna. In glyphic expressions at Naranjo and Caracol, which are structurally similar to those naming the Palenque Triad, he appears paired with Gill or the Baby Jaguar.
-“An edifice built upon centuries of history,” Kropotkin remarked in 1891, “cannot be destroyed by a few kilos of explosives.”[[#62QuotedinAlexandreSkirda|62]] Malatesta made the same point in 1894: “one thing is certain, namely, that with a number of bombs and a number of blows of the knife, a society like bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being based, as it is, on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices, and sustained, more than it is by the force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”[[#63MalatestaMethodofFreedom|63]]
+God K, see Palenque Triad (GII).
-The mass anarchist alternative to propaganda of the deed, as understood by insurrectionists, was not inaction and relying solely on print media and speaking tours to spread anarchism until the day of revolution. Malatesta’s program of 1899 rejected this explicitly, because anarchists “would soon exhaust our field of action; that is, we would have converted all those who in the existing environment are susceptible to understand and accept our ideas.”[[#64MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|64]] Mass anarchists, in other words, held that, since what people think or are open to thinking is a product of their social environment, it follows that focusing on spreading ideas alone will not lead to fundamental social change. Under present conditions, which reproduce class society, only a small number of people will ever learn about and become anarchists through the written or spoken word.[[#65BakuninSelectedTexts186|65]]
+<strong>God L</strong> is one of the aged gods who appear principally in scenes of Xibalba. He is frail and bent with age, wrinkled in feature, and has a huge nose overlapping a toothless mouth. He is a smoker, preferring huge cigars or smaller cigarettes. His most important costume element is a headdress in the form of the mythological bird named Oxlahun Chan (13 Sky). He has a house in the Otherworld, where he is attended by the beautiful young goddesses who personify the number two. His rule of Xibalba is chronieled by a rabbit scribe.[646] He is also the god who presided over the assemblage of gods when the cosmos was ordered on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.
-Anarchists therefore had to cause a “gradual transformation of the environment. Progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between man and their environment” until an increasingly large number of workers were in a position to learn about and adopt anarchism.[[#66MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|66]] This view was repeated by Malatesta in 1922. He argued that, since “the will of humanity . . . is mostly determined by the social environment,” it follows that anarchists must “work to change social conditions in such a way as to produce a change of will in the desired direction” and thereby cause “a reciprocal interaction between the will and the surrounding conditions,” such that changed people acted and changed social structures that, in turn, changed more people, and so on.[[#67MalatestaAttheCafeConv|67]]
+God N, see Pauahtun.
-Mass anarchists held that the most effective means for causing this gradual transformation in social structures, and the people who produced and reproduced them, was by organizing and participating in working-class social movements that struggled for immediate reforms in the present. In 1892, Kropotkin said that anarchists should “permeate the great labor movement which is so rapidly growing in Europe and America” in order to “bring our ideas into that movement, to spread them . . . among those masses which hold in their hands the future issue of the revolution.”[[#68KropotkinDirectStruggle|68]] In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists should win the working classes “over to our ideas by actively taking part in their struggles” and participating in “working-men’s associations, strikes, collective revolt.”[[#69MalatestaMethodofFreedom|69]] Three years later, he insisted that the success of anarchism required “long-term, constant, day-to-day work . . . done in conjunction with resistance societies, cooperatives, and educational circles, of gradually marshaling, organizing, and educating all the fighting forces of the proletariat.”[[#70MalatestaPatientWork101|70]]
+The Headband Twins, who are characterized by ornate headbands displaying the Jester God of kings, occur most frequently in pottery scenes where they are named as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam. In their fully human aspect, they are the Classic period prototypes of the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hun-Ahau Twin carries large dots on his cheek, arms, and legs and functions in the writing system as the anthropomorphic variant of the glyph for lord, ahau. In the Dresden Codex, this Twin appears as the god Venus in his manifestation as Morningstar. His Twin is marked by patches of jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs, and by a cut shell, read ds yax, attached to his forehead. This god functions also as the personification of the number nine and the glyph yax, meaning “blue-green” or “first.” See Palenque Triad.
-Malatesta, in addition to this, referred to specific reforms that were worth struggling for. In 1899, he argued that,
+The Hero Twins, see Palenque Triad and Headband Twins.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">we must always push them [workers] to demand greater things; but meanwhile we must encourage and assist them in the battles they want to fight, providing that they are in the right direction, which is to say, that they tend to facilitate future gains and are fought in such a way that workers become used to thinking of their masters and governments as enemies, and to desiring to achieve what they want by themselves. Many workers wish to not work over 8 hours. . . . The reform is among those that tend to actually improve the status of workers and facilitate future gains; and we, when we cannot convince them to demand more, we must support them in such a modest claim.[[#71MalatestaTowardsAnarchy1|71]] </div>
+The Jester God began as the personified version of the tri-lobed symbol that marked headband crowns of Late Preclassic kings. By the Classic period, this personified version had become the zoomorphic version of the glyph for ahau. Putting a headband with the Jester God, the ahau sign, or a mirror on any animal or human head glyph converted its meaning to ahau. Named for the resemblance of its pointed head to a medieval jester’s cap, this god can appear in miniature form held by the king; but it is most commonly attached to the headband of the king or worn on his chest as a pectoral. The Jester God will sometimes have fishfins on its face.
-Organizing to win reforms through direct action was considered valuable for three main reasons. First, and most obviously, achieving reforms improved the lives of workers and put them in a position where they had more time, energy, and motivation to emancipate themselves fully. Malatesta wrote in 1897 that anarchists are “interested in people’s circumstances being improved to the greatest possible extent, starting today,” both because of the “immediate impact of reduced suffering” and “because when one is better nourished, has greater freedom, and is better educated, one has a greater determination and more strength to fully emancipate oneself.”[[#72MalatestaPatientWork25|72]]
+The Kan-cross Waterlily Monster is a special version of the waterlily distinguished by the presence of a Kan-cross on its forehead. Often the root formations, blossoms, and pads of the waterlily emerge from its head.
-This line of reasoning persuaded Goldman to support the struggle for the eight-hour day and abandon her previous view, which she had learned from Most, that it was a pointless reform that distracted workers from launching a social revolution. She changed her mind after a worker at one of her talks against the eight-hour day explained that it would improve the lives of workers, many of whom would not live long enough to see a revolution, and would give them more time to read and enjoy life.[[#73GoldmanLivingMyLifevol|73]] Rocker, in comparison, came to reject the idea that reforms should be opposed after he visited extremely poor areas of London. During these visits, he realized that “those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt. . . . It is contrary to all the experience of history and of psychology; people who are not prepared to fight for the betterment of their living conditions are not likely to fight for social emancipation.”[[#74RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|74]]
+It is especially associated with the water environment of agricultural canals. See Waterlily Monster.
-Second, participating in daily struggles for immediate reforms, such as strikes, provided the means to organize and make contact with not only committed socialists, who seek each other out, but also the large number of workers who are yet to become revolutionaries. This was especially important because, regardless of what anarchists did, state socialists would participate in working-class social movements and funnel them toward parliamentary politics. If this happened, given the arguments previously explained in chapter 5, social movements would be transformed from potential threats to ruling class power into maintainers of the status quo. As a result, it was essential that anarchists join struggles for immediate reforms in order to promote direct action and ensure that social movements remained, or became, forces outside of and against the state.[[#75KropotkinDirectStruggle|75]]
+The Maize God was represented by a beautiful young man with maize foliation growing from his head. He is identified with the older set of Twins who were the father and uncle of the Hero Twins[647] and his most common representation is as the Holmul Dancer.
-Third, collectively struggling for reforms by means of direct action within prefigurative organizations is a form of practice that can positively transform workers. Whether or not a social movement wins great victories, the process of engaging in class struggle is valuable in and of itself. It enables workers to develop new skills, hopes, desires, and ways of thinking, such as learning how to organize a strike, or realizing that the police exist to violently defend the interests of the rich and powerful. As Guillaume wrote in 1914, “you think that the starting point is the revolutionary ideal and that the workers’ struggle against the bosses only comes afterwards, as a consequence of the adoption of the ‘ideal’; I think on the contrary . . . that the starting point is the struggle and the ideal comes after, that it takes form in the workers’ minds as the incidents of the class war give birth to it and cause it to develop.”[[#76QuotedinDavidBerryAHis|76]]
+The Maw of Xibalba is depicted as the great gaping head of a skeletal zoomorph. This creature has much in common with the mouth of the Witz Monster, but it is always represented with skeletal features and split-representation of two profiles merged at the lower jaw, whereas the mouth of the Witz Monster is shown either in profile or front view as the natural mouth of a fleshed creature. The Maw symbolizes death or the point of transition between the natural world and the Otherworld of Xibalba. In Temple 11 at Copan, the mouth of the Witz Monster was the outer door of the temple itself, while the central platform inside the building was the Maw to Xibalba. In that context, one reached the Maw by entering the mountain. A possible interpretation of the contrast in these images is that the Maw is the portal on the side of the Xibalbans, while the mouth of the Witz Monster is the portal in the world of humans.
-This theory was advocated for many decades by mass anarchists involved in the trade union movement. Baginski argued in 1909 that “the proletariat learns from its daily battles that it is always thrown back on itself, on its own strength and solidarity. Whenever it accomplishes small improvements of its situation, it does so as a consequence of direct intervention and struggle. Its condition is a function of the strength of its unity, its revolutionary insights, initiative, and solidarity; for exploiters concede only what is wrested from them through ''the development of proletarian power''.”[[#77BaginskiWhatDoesSyndical|77]] The practice of struggling for reforms through direct action was valued because it transformed workers—who are typically treated as objects acted upon or represented by others—into self-acting agents who fight for their own emancipation, and develop their collective power to transform society.[[#78BaginskiWhatDoesSyndical|78]] Given this, “no one disputes the utility and necessity of wrestling as much as possible for higher pay and shorter hours; but that should be considered in the light of merely preparatory exercises, as training for the final event, the Social Revolution and the overthrow of wage-slavery.”[[#79MaxBaginskiAimandTacti|79]]
+The Mexican Year Sign is a trapezoidal configuration that is associated with the Tlaloc sacrifice complex. Its name comes from the function of a similar sign which marks year dates in the Aztec codices. See Tlaloc.
-These same ideas were expressed by Rocker through the language of pedagogy in 1938. He claimed that “the strike is for the workers not only a means for the defense of immediate economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every last right has to be won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.”[[#80RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|80]] As a result, “the economic alliance of the producers” is both “a weapon for the enforcement of better living conditions” and “a practical school, a university of experience, from which they draw instruction and enlightenment in richest measure.”[[#81RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|81]] The experience of class struggle transformed how workers thought about themselves and the world in which they lived. By reflecting on these life experiences, workers “developed . . . new needs and the urge for different fields of intellectual life.”[[#82RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|82]] The practice of engaging in class struggle was transformative not only at the individual level; it also altered the social relations between workers. Through their experience of cooperating with one another, such as going on strike in support of other striking workers, they developed a sense of solidarity among themselves, which Rocker defined as a “feeling of mutual helpfulness.”[[#83RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|83]] Developing this sense of solidarity was essential because, without it, they would never learn to act as a united class and thereby transform society in their shared class interests.
+The Moon Goddess in her Classic period form often sits in a moon sign holding a rabbit. Her head functions both as the numeral “one” and as phonetic na. Since na was also the word for “noble woman,” the head of the Moon Goddess precedes female names, distinguishing them from the names of male nobles. In the codices and the Yucatec Colonial sources, the Moon Goddess was called Ix-Chel and she may appear as an aged woman with a toothless mouth.
-Although mass anarchists advocated struggling for immediate reforms, they were not reformists in the sense of people who view reforms as a political endpoint, or who hold that capitalism and the state could eventually be abolished through gradual reform. In September 1897, Malatesta wrote that “the reforms, both economic and political, that can be obtained under certain institutions, are limited by the very nature of those institutions, and sooner or later, depending on the degree of popular consciousness and the more or less blind resistance from the ruling classes, a point of irreconcilability is reached and the very existence of these institutions needs to be called into question.”[[#84MalatestaPatientWork287|84]]
+The Paddler Gods are named from their appearance on four bones from the burial chamber of Ah-Cacaw of Tikal. In the scenes incised on these offerings, they paddle the canoe of life carrying the king’s soul through the membrane between the worlds and into death. The Paddlers appear with special frequency in references to period-ending rites, where they are born of the king’s blood offering. Both gods have aged features. The Old Stingray God is distinguished by squint-eyes and a stingray spine piercing the septum of his Roman nose. He sometimes wears the helmet of a mythological fish called a xoc. His twin is also aged, but he is distinguished by a jaguar pelt on his chin, a jaguar ear, and sometimes a jaguar helmet. From glyphic substitutions, we know this pair represents the fundamental opposition of day and night. The Old Stingray God is the day and the Old Jaguar God the night.[648]
-A month later, in an interview with a state socialist, Malatesta explained that anarchists were not “a reformist party” because “in our view, reforms, if and where they can be won, should be only a first step on the way to revolution; this is why we want the people to win them for themselves and feel that reforms are a result of their vigor, so that their determination to demand ever more may develop.”[[#85MalatestaPatientWork320|85]] This was a restatement of a claim Malatesta had previously made in his 1890 article, “Matters Revolutionary”:
+The Palenque Triad is composed of three gods most fully described in the inscriptions and imagery of Palenque where they are asserted to be the direct ancestors of that kingdom’s dynasty. Sired by the mother and father of the gods who had survived from the previous creation, they were born only eighteen days apart. Although their kinship to human kings is detailed only in the inscriptions of Palenque, we surmise they were considered to be ancestral to all Maya kings and thus central images in Maya iconography.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">We must immerse ourselves in the life of the people as fully as we can, encourage and egg on all stirrings that carry a seed of material or moral revolt and get the people used to handling their affairs for themselves and relying on only their own resources; but without ever losing sight of the fact that revolution, by means of the expropriation and taking of property into common ownership, plus the demolition of authority, represents the only salvation for the proletariat and for Mankind, in which case a thing is good or bad depending on whether it brings forward or postpones, eases or creates difficulties for that revolution.</div>
+GI, the first born of the Triad, is human in aspect and distinguished from his brothers by a shell earflare, a square-eye, and a fish fin on his cheek. He is particularly associated with the imagery of the incense burner in the Early Classic period and as a mask worn by kings during rituals. GI often wears the Quadripartite Monster as his headdress and is associated with the Waterbird.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">As we see it, it is a matter of avoiding two reefs: on the one hand, the indifference toward everyday life and struggles that distance us from the people, making us unfathomable outsiders to them—and, on the other, letting ourselves be consumed by those struggles, affording them greater importance than they possess and eventually forgetting about the revolution.[[#86MalatestaMethodofFreedom|86]]</div>
+GII, the last born of the Triad, is always zoomorphic in aspect. His most important feature is a smoking object—such as a cigar, torch holder, or ax head—which penetrates a mirror in his forehead. He may appear as a reclining child, as a scepter held by a ruler, or as an independent full-figured being. His face always has the zoomorphic snout traditionally called a long-nose, but his body is often shown as human with a leg transformed into a serpent. He is thus the serpent-footed god. He is also called God K,[649] the Manikin Scepter, and the Flare God and has been identified with the Maya names Tahil, Bolon Tzacab, and Kauil.[650] GII is particularly associated with the ritual of bloodletting, the institution of kingship, and the summoning of the ancestors. He is the god most frequently shown on the Double-headed Serpent Bar.
-Mass anarchists, in other words, saw the struggle for reforms as the means to bring increasingly large numbers of workers together under a common aim, due to their shared interest in improving their lives in the here and now. In struggling for these reforms, workers would not only change social relations, such as reducing the length of the working day, but also change themselves due to the experience of participating in prefigurative organizations and engaging in direct action against the ruling classes. The consequence of this would be that a significant number of workers would, over varying lengths of time, go from only aiming at small improvements within existing society to being revolutionaries, who were organized and united as a class within federations and who had developed the initiative to act for themselves. This process would repeat, until the conflict between the working classes and the ruling classes escalated to the point of an armed insurrection being launched by the social movements that had been developed during previous struggles for reforms. To quote Malatesta’s 1899 anarchist program, “one always comes back to insurrection, for if the government does not give way, the people will end by rebelling; and if the government does give way, then people gain confidence in themselves and make ever-increasing demands, until such time as the incompatibility between freedom and authority becomes clear and the violent struggle is engaged.”[[#87MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|87]]
+GUI, the second born, is also human in aspect, but he is marked by a jaguar ear and a twisted line called a cruller underneath his eyes. Gill is also called the Jaguar God of the Underworld and the Jaguar Night Sun. His most frequent appearance is as an isolated head worn on a belt, carried in the arm, or surmounted on shields carried by kings and nobles. Both GI and GUI have Roman-nosed, square-eyed faces, long hair looped over their foreheads, and human bodies. GI and GUI will often appear as twins.
-Mass anarchists understood, alongside anarchists in general, that evolutionary change does not necessarily lead to progress or an anarchist revolution. They were careful about which reforms they supported, who they worked with, and the means they proposed to achieve these reforms. In 1897, Kropotkin insisted that anarchists “have to cling to our principles while working with others” and therefore must “never allow ourselves to be chosen as or turn into exploiters, bosses, leaders,” “never have any truck with the building of some pyramidal organization, be it economic, governmental or educational-religious (even be it a revolutionary one),” and “never have any hand in conjuring up man’s governance of his fellow man in the realm of production and distribution, political organization, leadership, revolutionary organization, etc.”[[#88KropotkinDirectStruggle|88]]
+The Pauahtuns (also known as God N) are aged in feature with snaggleteeth, small human eyes, and a wrinkled visage. They often wear net headbands in combination with cauac or ‘‘stone” markings on their bodies as spellings of their name, paua (“net”) plus tun (“stone”). Characteristically, they wear a cut-shell pectoral or their bodies emerge from a conch shell or turtle carapace. The version that wears waterlilies in addition to the net headband might have the body of a young man.
-For mass anarchists, it was essential, in the words of Malatesta, to fight ''as'' anarchists, to “remain anarchists and act like anarchists before, during and after the revolution.”[[#89MalatestaMethodofFreedom|89]] To participate within working-class social movements as committed anarchists was primarily for them to persuade other workers to act in an anarchistic manner, such as taking direct action against the ruling classes, making decisions within general assemblies, or coordinating action over a large area via federations. According to Malatesta, anarchists have to “take advantage of all the means, all the possibilities and the opportunities that the present environment allows us to act on our fellow men” and thereby incite the working class “to make demands, and impose itself and take for itself all the improvements and freedoms that it desires as and when it reaches the state of wanting them, and the power to demand them.”[[#90MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|90]]
+The Classic Maya represented the Pauahtuns as beings who held up the four corners of the world. Sometimes they were the sky and sometimes the earth. The image of the Pauahtuns as world bearers is seen, for example, on Temples 11 and 22 of Copán. Pauahtuns are also depicted with scribes and artisans on painted pottery and on sculpture, as in the case of the Scribe’s Palace at Copán. The number five is personified as Pauahtun.
-Malatesta explained in his 1897 interview that “as a rule, we always support reforms that, more than the others, highlight the conflict between property-owners and proletarians, rulers and ruled, and therefore are apt to foster a conscious feeling of rebellion that will explode into the definitive, final revolution.”[[#91MalatestaPatientWork320|91]] He rejected “false reforms” that “tend to distract the masses from the struggle against authority and capitalism” and instead “serve to paralyze their actions and make them hope that something can be attained through the kindness of the exploiters and governments.”[[#92MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|92]] One reform that mass anarchists consistently opposed was universal suffrage within existing capitalist states. In 1873, Bakunin argued against struggling to achieve the vote, because it would legitimize the state by giving it the “false appearance of popular government” and thereby provide the economic ruling classes “with a stronger and more reliable guarantee of their peaceful and intensive exploitation of the people’s labor.”[[#93MichaelBakuninStatismand|93]] This opposition to struggling for universal suffrage included women’s suffrage, which Goldman argued against in 1910, on the grounds that it would not further the emancipation of women.[[#94EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|94]]
+The Personified Perforator is a blade of flint or obsidian, or sometimes a thorn or a stingray spine attached to the ubiquitous long-nosed head that Y personifies inanimate objects in the Maya symbol system. Its other critical feature is a stack of three knots, a symbol that evokes bloodletting with S the perforator.
-Mass anarchists also rejected methods of winning reforms that consolidated the dominant structures of class society, rather than building the revolutionary strength of the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, anarchists “should never recognize the [existing] institutions. We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forward by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path.”[[#95MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|95]] This led mass anarchists to argue that reforms should be won by imposing external pressure onto the ruling classes through direct action, rather than by campaigning for new legislation. For example, in 1875, Schwitzguébel wrote that “instead of begging the State for a law compelling employers to make them work only so many hours, the trade associations [''sociétés de métiers''] ''directly impose'' this reform on the employers [''patrons'']; in this way, instead of a legal text which remains a dead letter, a real economic change is effected ''by the direct initiative of the workers''.”[[#96QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|96]] Or, as Malatesta told a court while on trial in April 1898, “there cannot be reforms on the part of a government, unless the people demand and impose them.”[[#97MalatestaPatientWork443|97]]
+[[][Principal Bird Deity, see Celestial Bird.]]
-The extent to which some mass anarchists were in favor of winning reforms through extremely radical means can be seen in the history of the CNT. In 1931, brick workers used a diversity of tactics to successfully end a system in which they worked for capitalists via exploitative contractors. They not only went on strike but also formed armed groups that would both hunt down scabs escorted by the police, and commit arson attacks against several brickworks. Bakery workers went further and, without even going on strike, forced capitalists to give in to their demands for the abolition of night work and changing the start of the working day to 5 a.m. This was achieved by bombing a number of bakeries. Those capitalists who refused to recognize the deal and punished organizers were subject to an escalation of resistance. This began with boycotts that, after they proved unsuccessful, were followed up with more militant activity, such as more bombings. On one occasion, Peirats and a comrade visited a capitalist armed with pistols in order to make him change his mind.[[#98EalhamLivingAnarchism57|98]]
+The Quadripartite Monster appears in three major versions: as the rear head of the Cosmic Monster, as an independent image at the base of the World Tree, and as a scepter or headdress. It never has a body and its head is usually fleshed above the muzzle and skeletal beneath it. A flat bloodletting bowl marked with the sign for the sun, kin, forms its forehead and a stingray spine, a shell, and crossbands rest in the bowl. The stingray spine represents the blood of the Middleworld; the shell symbolizes the water of the Underworld; and the crossbands are the path of the sun crossing the Milky Way, a sign of the heavens which can be represented by a bird’s wing in Early Classic examples. GI of the Palenque Triad often wears this image as its headdress. The Quadripartite Monster represents the sun as it travels on its daily journey through the cosmos. See Cosmic Monster, World Tree, and GI.
-It is clear that mass anarchists within the CNT did not reject the use of guns and bombs to achieve reform. They also used them in self-defense against the violence of the ruling classes. From 1914 onward, gunmen hired by capitalists and the state attempted to assassinate a significant number of anarchist trade unionists. In Catalonia, between 1920 and 1923, 104 anarchists were killed—including the former general secretary of the Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí—and thirty-three were wounded. The militant wing of the CNT responded to these violent attacks by organizing armed affinity groups to identify, locate, and kill those responsible.[[#99ChristieWetheAnarchists|99]] This included the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato on March 8, 1921, by members of an action group in the metal industry.[[#100ASmithAnarchismRevolu|100]] These kinds of assassinations had previously been viewed by insurrectionist anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s as one of the means that anarchists could use to develop a mass movement. Mass anarchists who supported assassinations, in contrast, appear to have viewed them as a means to defend already existing mass movements that had been developed through the struggle for immediate reforms.
+The Royal Belt consists of a heavy waistband to which jade heads were attached at the front and sides. Typically, these heads, which read ahau, surmount a mat sign (or an equivalent sign of rule) and three celts made of polished jade or flint. A chain hung from the sides of the belt to drape across the back of the wearer’s legs where a god hung from the chain. Many examples of the dangling god are identified iconographically as Chac-Xib-Chac. This dangling version of Chac-Xib-Chac also occurs as the head variant of an important title reading chan yat or in some versions chan ton. The first paraphrases as “celestial is his penis” and the second as “celestial is his genitals.”
-Armed self-defense by anarchist militants continued over the following years. In July 1931, the CNT’s builders’ union responded to a police raid on their offices with gunfire. This led to a four-hour siege, during which the building was surrounded by hundreds of policemen, assault guards, and soldiers. Six workers were killed and dozens were wounded on both sides.[[#101EalhamAnarchismandtheC|101]] Violence was also used by some mass anarchists to acquire funds for the revolution. From 1933 to 1935, militants within the CNT responded to the trade union’s dire financial problems by launching armed robberies against banks, which on several occasions involved shoot-outs with the police and fleeing the scene of the crime in stolen cars. Despite the financial gains these armed expropriations bought to the union, a significant section of the CNT opposed them, including Peirats.[[#102EalhamAnarchismandtheC|102]]
+The Serpent Bar, also known as the Bicephalic Bar, the Double-headed Serpent Bar, and the Ceremonial Bar, is a scepter carried in the arms of rulers, usually held against their chests. To hold the Bar, Maya rulers put their hands in a formal gesture with their wrists back to back and their thumbs turned outward. Its original function in the Late Preclassic period was to symbolize “sky” based on the homophony in Mayan languages between chan-“sky” and chan-“snake.” In Early Classic times, kings began to hold the double-headed snake as a scepter. Since it had originally marked the environment through which the gods move, its structural position in Maya symbolism overlaps partly with the Vision Serpent. In its fully developed form, it signals both sky and the vision path, as well as the act of birthing the gods through the vision rite.[651] See Vision Serpent.
-Another disagreement among mass anarchists concerned when social movements should shift from focusing on immediate reforms to attempting to spark the social revolution via armed insurrection. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a long-lasting dispute within the CNT between moderate and radical syndicalist anarchists. The moderates sought to build up the trade union’s strength gradually through workplace organizing, while the radicals, who belonged to CNT’s defense committees and to armed affinity groups like Nosotros, thought that the social revolution was near and that the time for reform had passed. This led the radical faction to engage in what they termed “revolutionary gymnastics,” which referred to the strategy of dedicated anarchist militants launching insurrections that would be repressed and thereby inspire an increasing number of workers to rise up. In practice, the series of armed uprisings they organized in January 1932, January 1933, and December 1933 were all unsuccessful and defeated quickly, due to a combination of lack of popular support, insufficient weaponry, and the state being prepared to repress them.[[#103JasonGarnerGoalsandMea|103]]
+Serpent Bird, see Celestial Bird.
-'''Militant Minority'''
+The Skyband consists of a narrow band divided into segments by vertical bars. Inside each segment is a glyph for a planet, the sun, the moon, or other celestial objects.
-Mass anarchists believed that it was necessary to participate in social movements as a militant minority in order to ensure that struggles for reforms did not collapse into reformism and, instead, developed a revolutionary mass movement that could launch a large-scale armed insurrection. This meant spreading anarchist ideas, acting as key and effective organizers, encouraging or inspiring workers to take direct action, and ensuring that formal organizations or informal groups were horizontally structured and made decisions in a manner that prefigured an anarchist society. In 1931, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy can only come about gradually, as the masses become able to conceive it and desire it; but will never come to pass unless driven forward by a more or less consciously anarchist minority operating in such a way as to create the appropriate climate.”[[#104MalatestaMethodofFreedo|104]]
+The Sun God is related to Gill of the Palenque Triad. This particular version features a Roman-nosed human head with square eyes and squintlike pupils in the corner. The four-petaled flower kin marks the head as the image of the sun.
-The notion of a militant minority within working-class social movements was expressed by mass anarchists in a number of different ways. An 1892 article published in ''La Révolte'' claimed that, although the revolution would “be made by the pressure of the masses . . . these masses themselves are looking for people to take the initiative, they are looking for men and women who can better formulate their thoughts, who will be able to win over the hesitant and carry with them the timid.”[[#105QuotedinDavidBerryAHi|105]] This required “active minorities,” who were “avant-gardist” and embodied “individual initiative, put at the service of the collectivity.”[[#106QuotedinBerryFrenchAna|106]] Malatesta referred to anarchists as a “conscious minority” and “vanguard.”[[#107MalatestaCafe107149|107]] Berkman thought that anarchists were “the most advanced and revolutionary element.”[[#108AlexanderBerkmanWhatis|108]] In Spain, the anarchist militants of the CNT were known among other workers as “the ones with ideas.”[[#109EalhamAnarchismandtheC|109]]
+Tlaloc is a symbol of war and bloodletting consisting of a jawless head with blood scrolls emerging from its mouth and large circles around its eyes. It is associated with spearthrowers, darts used as weapons, and a certain type of flexible, rectangular shield. Warriors dressed in the costume of this complex usually wear a full-body suit made from a jaguar pelt. Often, a horned owl will also occur with this imagery. This symbolic complex and its sacrificial meaning is shared by many contemporary Mesoamerican societies, including Teotihuacan, which may have lent this ritual complex to the Maya during the Early Classic period.
-Such language did not mean that anarchists viewed themselves as separate from the working classes or the workers’ movement. Anarchism was a social movement whose members were overwhelmingly drawn from the working classes. As Fabbri noted, it “is ''de facto'' a teaching whose followers are almost exclusively proletarians: bourgeois, petit bourgeois, so-called intellectuals or professional people, etc. are very few and far between and wield no predominate influence.”[[#110LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|110]] In referring to themselves as a militant minority, anarchists were only expressing the view that they had the most advanced revolutionary ideas within the working classes and, by virtue of this, had a key role to play in the collective struggle for human emancipation.
+Twins and Oppositions: The principle of twinning and opposition is at the heart of Maya cosmological thought. Paired gods, like the Paddlers who represent day and night, are common in Maya religious imagery. Some twins represent oppositions and others are actual twins, born of the same parents. Any god could, however, if need be, appear alone outside its normal pairing. New oppositions could also be generated by new pairings. The most famous examples of twins are the Ancestral Heroes of the Popol Vuh, who are related mythically and historically to several of the frequently shown twins of the Classic period. Another context in which oppositions appear with regularity is in the glyphs that introduce Distance Numbers. In this context, the oppositions function as metaphors for the concept of change, the replacement of one thing by another. Some of the oppositions expressed in this context are male-female, life-death, windwater, Venus-moon, blood-water. The principle of paired oppositions remains today a fundamental characteristic of Mayan languages and metaphor. See Headband Twins, Paddlers, Palenque Triad, Chac-Xib- Chac, and Baby Jaguar.
-The main task of anarchists as a militant segment of the working classes was to bring about a transformation in the consciousness of other workers such that they came to adopt anarchist ideas, overthrow capitalism and the state, and build an anarchist society. For Dunois, “our task as anarchists, the most advanced, the boldest and the most uninhibited sector of the militant proletariat, is to stay constantly by its side, to fight the same battles amongst its ranks . . . to provide this enormous moving mass that is the modern proletariat . . . with a goal and the means of action” and so act as the “educators, stimulators and guides of the working masses.”[[#111AntonioliedInternationa|111]] This point was repeatedly made by Malatesta. In 1897, he wrote that anarchists should “cultivate in the proletariat a consciousness of the class antagonism and the need for collective struggle, and a yearning to . . . [establish] equality, justice, and freedom for everyone.”[[#112MalatestaPatientWork32|112]] During his trial in April 1898, Malatesta told the court that anarchists “want the complete transformation of society, which must spring from the will of the masses, once they become conscious. It is precisely toward the formation of that consciousness that we are working, through the press, the talks and organization.”[[#113MalatestaPatientWork44|113]]
+The Vision Serpent is usually depicted as a rearing snake, sometimes with feathers lining its body and sometimes with its body partially flayed. Personified (or ‘’Holy”) Blood is usually attached to its tail as a symbol of the substance which materializes it. It symbolizes the path out of Xibalba through which the ancestral dead and the gods enter the world when they are called in a bloodletting rite. Normally, Vision Serpents are depicted with a single head, but two-headed versions are known. The Maya apparently softened the distinctions between Vision Serpents and Double-headed Serpent Bars because they considered them to be related in meaning.[652] See Serpent Bar.
-How anarchists acted as a militant minority varied according to the context. In 1891, it took the form of anarchists in Rome launching a preplanned riot by attacking the police at a May Day demonstration. This attack was triggered by the anarchist Galileo Palla giving his comrades a signal to begin when he ended his speech by declaring, “Long live the revolution!” and then jumped off the speaker’s platform into the crowd. This riot, which the anarchist militant minority initiated, lasted for several hours after it spread quickly to the rest of the crowd and other districts of Rome. So sudden was the riot that both contemporary observers and modern historians have mistaken it for a purely spontaneous affair and failed to realize that it was the outcome of conscious anarchist activity. Six years later in 1897, Italian anarchists in Ancona, including Malatesta, acted as a militant minority in a different manner by actively supporting the unionization of dock workers, bakers, barbers, and shoemakers.[[#114TurcatoMakingSense163|114]]
+Wacah Chan, see World Tree.
-The Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky acted as a militant minority during the early 1890s in London when he opposed a trade unionist called Lewis Lyons, who sought to organize master tailors, who were employers, alongside wage laborers. Yanovsky combated this attempt to unite groups with opposed class interests by denouncing Lyons’s plans in articles he wrote for the ''Arbeter Fraint'' and by speaking at every public meeting that was held on the question, regardless of which side in the dispute organized it. In this way, Yanovsky was able to defeat Lyons and force him to leave the Jewish labor movement.[[#115RockerLondonYears6263|115]] Yanovsky was not unique in this respect. Jewish anarchists living in London, alongside Rocker, played a key role in organizing trade unions and strikes. According to Rocker, “all the Jewish trade unions in the East End, without exception, were started by the initiative of the Jewish anarchists.”[[#116RockerLondonYears90|116]]
+Water is the substance in which the world floats. It is shown welling up out of the portal to the Otherworld. In at least some images, water is the atmosphere of Xibalba and actions which occur there take place as if they were underwater. Water is depicted in two ways: as Water Bands composed of alternating rows of dots, scrolls, and stacks of rectangles representing the surface of water, especially shallow water as in swamps or agricultural canals; and as bands filled with the images of waterlilies. Because nab, the word for “waterlily,” was homophonous with words for “lake,” “swamp,” and “river,” Waterlily Bands represented these bodies of water. Waterlily Bands often merge with the symbolism of Blood Bands. A Water Hole is a glyphic and symbolic version of water contained under the earth, in cenotes, and perhaps in rivers. It is related to the glyphic and iconic version of the Maw of the Underworld.
-In 1912, this activity culminated in Jewish tailors launching a general strike to abolish sweatshops in the East End. The strike, which mobilized 13,000 workers in two days, was launched in solidarity with striking tailors in the West End, whose strike had initially been undermined by strike-breaking work within the East End sweatshops. Rocker acted as a militant minority by attending all the meetings of the strike committee, acting as Chairman of the Finance Committee, editing the daily ''Arbeter Fraint'', and addressing three or four strike meetings a day. After three weeks on strike, the workers employed in men’s tailoring emerged victorious having won shorter hours; an end to piecework; better sanitary conditions; and the employment of union labor only. The strike continued within the women’s garment industry, where Jewish workers were overwhelmingly employed, until the capitalists gave in. In so doing they had, according to Rocker, ended the sweatshop system.[[#117RockerLondonYears1263|117]]
+The Waterbird represents a generic class of bird the Maya associated with water, especially the waters of rivers, swamps, and the canals of raised- field agriculture. This bird usually has a long neck, but as in the case of the Palenque Emblem Glyph bird, it can also have a short neck. The head has the crest of the heron and the upturned, bulging beak of the cormorant. See the Celestial Bird.
-The majority of anarchist militants who played key roles as organizers were not famous authors like Malatesta or Kropotkin, but self-taught workers whose names rarely appear in surviving primary sources. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, a trade union was formed by workers in 1914. One of the main organizers of the local union was a poor charcoal burner named José Olmo García, who provided other workers with anarchist literature, gave fiery speeches on anarchist ideas, and made persuasive points at group meetings.[[#118JMintzCasasViejas14|118]] Anarchist attempts to organize or participate in mass movements as a militant minority were of course not always successful. To focus on England, Italian anarchists living in London failed on several occasions to organize restaurant workers into a long-lasting trade union due, in part, to the temporary and seasonal nature of the work.[[#119DiPaolaKnightsErrant3|119]] In September 1908, English anarchists in Leeds participated in a movement of unemployed people that began positively, from an anarchist perspective, by engaging in direct action but ended up being taken over by politicians, despite anarchist attempts to push it in a radical direction.[[#120JohnQuailTheSlowBurnin|120]]
+The Waterlily Monster is the personification of lakes, swamps, and other bodies of still water. It is characterized by the pads and blossoms of the waterlily and in some cases it will appear with an Imix glyph (distinguished from other imix glyphs by cross-hatching in its center) in its forehead. This particular version is closely associated with the tun and uinal glyphs that are used in Long Count notations. A particularly important title of Classic nobility was based on the uinal substitution as a reference to the nobility as “people of the waterlily” or, perhaps, “people of the swamps and lakes.”
-Although mass anarchists viewed themselves as a militant minority who sought to influence the consciousness of other workers, they explicitly rejected authoritarian forms of vanguardism due to their commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. This rejection took four main forms. First, mass anarchists sought only to influence other members of the working classes through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. For Malatesta, while “authoritarians see the mass of the people as raw material to be manipulated into whatever mold they please through the wielding of power by decree, the gun and the handcuff,” anarchists “need the consent of the people and must therefore persuade by propaganda and by example.”[[#121MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|121]] The Russian anarchist Voline similarly wrote that, since revolutionary success can only be achieved by “''the broad popular masses''. . . . Our role in this realization will be limited to that of a ferment, an element providing assistance, advice, and an example.”[[#122VolineSynthesisanarchi|122]] Such influence was entirely consistent with the goal of anarchism since, according to Malatesta, an anarchist society is one in which nobody is “in a position to oblige others to submit to their will or to exercise their influence other than through the power of reason and by example.”[[#123MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|123]]
+The Witz Monster is the symbol of the living mountain. It is depicted as a four-legged zoomorphic creature marked with the distinctive signs of the Cauac and “stone.” To differentiate the Witz Monster from the zoomorph representing “stone,” the Maya portrayed the mountain with eyelids and a stepped cleft in the center of its forehead. On pottery, the mouth of the Witz Monster is often depicted agape. The Witz Monster was placed on temples to transform them into sacred, living mountains. Its open mouth then became the entry into the mountain, symbolizing both the doorway of the temple and the mouth of a cave. To specify which mountain they were picturing the Maya would attach icons to the Witz or write its name within its eyes. See Cauac Signs.
-Second, mass anarchists encouraged other workers to act for themselves and self-organize. In 1894, Malatesta claimed that “it is necessary that the people be conscious of their rights and their strength; it is necessary that they be ready to fight and ready to take the conduct of their affairs into their own hands. It must be the constant preoccupation of the revolutionists, the point toward which all their activity must aim, to bring about this state of mind among the masses.”[[#124MalatestaMethodofFreedo|124]] In a 1929 letter to Makhno, he wrote, “what matters most is that the people, men and women lose the sheeplike instincts and habits that thousands of years of slavery have instilled in them, and learn to think and act freely. And it is to this great work of moral liberation that the anarchists must specially dedicate themselves.”[[#125MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|125]]
+The World Tree is the central axis of the world. Called the Wacah Chan (“six sky” or “raised up sky”) in the glyphs, it appears in the form of a cross marked with God C to denote it is a divine or holy thing. The bejeweled, squared-snouted serpents which usually terminate its branches represent flows of liquid offering—human blood and its analogs, rubber, copal, and the red sap of the ceiba tree. Draped in the branches of the tree is the Double-headed Serpent Bar of kings and perched on its summit is the Celestial Bird Deity, who is the bird of the center in the directional model of the world. The World Tree often emerges from behind the rear head of the Cosmic Monster. The front head of the same creature can be depicted as its roots. The Tree is the path of communication between the natural and supernatural worlds as it is defined at the center of the cosmos. The Cosmic Monster is the same path of communication configured for the periphery of the cosmos. The king personifies this World Tree in his flesh. See Foliated Cross.
-Third, influential mass anarchist authors, rejected the view that they were superior to others and instead sought to treat nonanarchist workers as their equals. In 1890, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists who label others as unintelligent if they do not immediately embrace anarchism “forget that they were not anarchists from birth,” and that it took an extended period of transformation for them to unlearn the prejudices they had been socialized into by class society.[[#126KropotkinDirectStruggle|126]] Five years later, in 1895, he argued that, although anarchist militants had “an obligation to do everything possible to spread the anarchist idea among the working masses,” they should not view themselves as “better than the ‘ignorant masses’ just because we are anarchists and they are not yet.”[[#127KropotkinDirectStruggle|127]] As Malatesta argued in 1894, anarchists should not “refuse to associate with working men who are not already perfect Anarchists” since “it is absolutely necessary to associate with them in order to make them becomes Anarchists.”[[#128MalatestaMethodofFreedo|128]] Anarchists had to, in short, “take the people as they are and . . . move forward with them.”[[#129MalatestaMethodofFreedo|129]] This coincided with the view that anarchists had to not only teach anarchist ideas to other workers, but also themselves learn from the various collective struggles that were organized by workers independently of anarchists.[[#130MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|130]]
+; Notes
-Fourth, mass anarchists opposed the seizure of state power in the name of the working classes because, as was explained in chapter 5, it would lead to the death of the revolution, and the establishment of a new system of minority rule in which the majority of workers were oppressed and exploited. The social revolution could only be achieved if workers decided to reorganize society themselves through their own organs of self-management. All mass anarchists could do to facilitate this process was to act as a militant minority in the same manner that they had done prior to the revolution: spreading anarchist ideas and engaging in actions that implemented the anarchist program and thereby served as an example to others. For Kropotkin, anarchists should not “let themselves be hoisted into power” during a revolution, but should instead “remain on the streets, in their own districts, with the people—as propagandists and organizers . . . joining in with the people as they looked to their food and their livelihoods and the city’s defenses; living alongside the poor, getting impassioned about ''their'' everyday issues, their interests, and rebuilding, in the sections, the life of society with them.”[[#131KropotkinDirectStruggle1|131]]
+; Prologue
-Mass anarchists continued to advocate this position in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. In 1922, Goldman opposed “the political power of the Party, organized and centralized in the state,” in favor of “the industrial power of the masses, expressed through their libertarian associations.”[[#132GoldmanRedEmma39091|132]] Given this aim, the role of anarchists was “to guide the released energies of the people toward the reorganization of life on a libertarian foundation.”[[#133GoldmanRedEmma393|133]] Two years later, Malatesta explained that “we cannot make the revolution exclusively ‘ours’ because we are a small minority. . . . [W]e must therefore content ourselves with a revolution that is as much ‘ours’ as possible, favoring and taking part, both morally and materially, in every movement directed toward justice and liberty and, when the insurrection has triumphed, ensure that the pace of the revolution is maintained, advancing toward ever greater freedom and justice.”[[#134MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|134]] If anarchists were successful in this, their position as a militant minority would fade away during the course of, or in the aftermath of, the social revolution itself, as more and more workers came to adopt and implement anarchist ideas themselves.[[#135KropotkinRebel75Kropo|135]]
+[1] This conference, organized by Merle Greene Robertson at Palenque, was a pivotal meeting, bringing together thirty-five of the most active people in Maya studies. The acceleration of the glyphic decipherment and iconographic studies can be traced to this meeting and the timely publication of its results a year later.
-According to Kropotkin and Malatesta, one of the main ways that anarchists should act as a militant minority during a revolution was by establishing autonomous regions, which refused to recognize the authority of any revolutionary government that was formed. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that, during a revolution, anarchists would not “be able to avert . . . attempts at revolutionary government,” but could instead only “conjure up from within the people itself a force that is mighty in its actions and in the constructive revolutionary tasks that it is to carry out, ignoring the authorities, no matter what name they may go under, growing exponentially by virtue of its revolutionary enterprise, its revolutionary vigor and its achievements in terms of tearing down and reorganizing.”[[#136KropotkinDirectStruggle|136]] This self-organized, federated force would undermine any attempts at revolutionary government because
+[2] Our work with the dynastic history of Palenque was built on Berlin’s (1968) identification of the rulers we called Pacal, Kan-Xul, Chaacal, and Kuk, and Kubler’s (1969) discussion of persons he called Sun-Shield and Snake-Jaguar. Kelley (1968) demonstrated the phonetic reading of one king’s name as Pacal or “shield.” Our work identified two new kings and an accession phrase that allowed us to fill in the gaps in Berlin’s and Kubler’s earlier work.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">a people that will itself have organized the consumption of wealth and the reproduction of such assets in the interest of society as a whole will no longer be governable. A people that will itself be the armed strength of the country and which will have afforded armed citizens the requisite cohesion and concerted action, will no longer be susceptible to being ordered around. A people that will itself have organized railways, its navy, its schools is not going to be susceptible to being administered anymore. And finally, a people that will have shown itself capable of organizing arbitration to settle minor disputes will be one where every single individual will deem it his duty to stop the bully misusing the weakling, without waiting for providential intervention by the town sergeant, and will have no use for warders, judges or jailors.[[#137KropotkinDirectStruggle|137]]</div>
+[3] David Kelley was the first to read Pacal’s name as it was originally pronounced; George Kubler identified the builder of the Group of the Cross as Snake-Jaguar (a name w’e later translated into Choi as Chan-Bahlum); and David Stuart read the inscription that dated Temple 22 and thus identified its builder as 18-Rabbit.
-In the 1920 edition of Malatesta’s anarchist program, which was based on the previous 1899 version and adopted by the Italian Anarchist Union, he recommended that anarchists “push the people” to expropriate the ruling classes, establish workplace and community assemblies that collectively own and control the means of production, and refuse “to nominate or recognize any government.”[[#138ErricoMalatestaLifeand|138]] If the wider working classes choose not to do so, then anarchists “must—in the name of the right we have to be free even if others wish to remain slaves and because of the force of example—put into effect as many of our ideas as we can, refuse to recognize the new government and keep alive resistance and seek that those localities where our ideas are received with sympathy should constitute themselves into anarchist communities, rejecting all governmental interference and establishing free agreements with other communities which want to live their own lives.”[[#139MalatestaLifeandIdeas|139]]
+[4] The Harvard-Arizona Cozumel Project was directed by Jeremy A. Sabloff and William L. Rathje and was principally funded by the National Geographic Society. See Freidel and Sabloff (1984) for a description of the ruins on the island.
-In 1925, Malatesta clarified that this included, if necessary, engaging in armed self-defense against the violence of the new state:
+; Foreword
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">If, despite our efforts, new forms of power were to arise that seek to obstruct the people’s initiative and impose their own will, we must have no part in them, never give them any recognition. We must endeavor to ensure that the people refuse them the means of governing—refuse them, that is, the soldiers and the revenue; see to it that those powers remain weak… until the day comes when we can crush them once and for all. Anyway, we must lay claim to and demand, with force if needs be, our full autonomy, and the right and the means to organize ourselves as we see fit and to put our own methods into practice.[[#140MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|140]]</div>
+[5] Ahau is glossed in the Motul dictionary, one of the earliest colonial sources on Yucatec Maya, as “rey o emperador, monarca, principe or gran señor” (“king or emperor, monarch, prince or great noble”). In the inscriptions of the Classic period, the high king was an ahau, but so were many of the high nobles in his court. The inscriptions record that the king took the office of ahau when he became king and that he was a k’ul ahau, “holy (or divine) lord” of his kingdom. We shall use the ahau title to refer to Maya of this highest rank, and following the custom of using pluralizing suffixes from other languages as legitimate forms in English, we will pluralize ahau in the Maya fashion as ahauoh.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#17|1]]. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 124, 133–41.</div>
+; 1. Time Travel in the Jungle
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#27|2]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 318, 360.</div>
+[6] Huastec is recognized by modern linguists as a Mayan language. Archaeologically and linguistically, the separation between Huastec and other Mayan languages occurred very early—probably by 2,000 B.c.
-[[#37|3]]. Quoted in René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 31.
+[7] The term Mesoamerica was invented by Paul Kirchhoff (1943) as both a cultural and geographic term to identify a region limited by aboriginal farming, which did not extend into the deserts of northern Mexico, to an eastward limit defined by Mayan- speakers and their cultural and economical influence.
-[[#47|4]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 31.
+[8] There is still much controversy over the relationship between the hunter-gatherer populations who have left scattered stone-tool evidence ofcampsites in the Maya highlands of Guatemala and in the lowlands of Belize and the farming populations which emerge in the Middle Preclassic period (1000–400 B.C.) Some scholars believe that substantial new populations of farmers moved into the lowlands at the beginning of this period, bringing with them settled village life, the use of ceramic vessels, and the use of domesticated plants. They suggest that these are the true ancestors of the civilized Maya. However, Fred Valdez (personal communication, 1989), reports the presence of preceramic archaic occupation directly underlying the Middle Preclassic village at the site of Colha in northern Belize. With further research, the relationship between an indigenous hunter-gatherer population and the ensuing village farming populations will become clearer. Migration of peoples between the Maya highlands and the adjacent lowlands certainly did occur in antiquity, as it is continuing to occur today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#57|5]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.</div>
+[9] To say that the shaman conserves culture is only partly accurate, for his constant improvisation of interpretations must be anchored in the changes his people constantly experience from the world around them. His actions are indeed homeostatic in all senses of that word: They work to heal the contradictions in village priorities which inevitably come with the imposition of change from without. These actions conserve things of value by constantly reshaping the changes the Maya perceive in their world to fit fundamental cherished ideas which can be traced thousands of years into the past.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#67|6]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''178.</div>
+[10] We called Stephen Houston and David Stuart asking them if they would send a letter to us documenting the new reading so that we could refer to it. Houston’s and Grube’s letters arrived within twenty-four hours of each other. This is typical of the growing dynamism in the field of decipherment. As more and more decipherments are made, they in turn generate new readings, so that when a critical mass is reached, many people at once come to the same conclusions. Houston and Stuart (1989) have since published their evidence for this reading.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#77|7]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 89–90. See also 83. In the original, Dunois uses the word “spontaneously.” I altered the translation to “voluntarily,” given how the French word “spontanément” was used by anarchists at the time.</div>
+[11] Humboldt included five pages from the Dresden Codex in his 1810 narrative of his scientific travels in Mexico with botanist Aimé Bonpland. Del Rio’s travels were published by Henry Berthoud of London in 1822 in a book called Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City, which included seventeen plates depicting stone carving from Palenque.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#87|8]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''163.</div>
+[12] Our recounting of these interesting events is all based on George Stuart’s (n.d.) detailed study of the history of publication and research in the field.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#97|9]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''163.</div>
+[13] Ian Graham, director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, follows in their footsteps by publishing fine drawings and photographs of Maya inscriptions. Merle Greene Robertson is another of the great archivists. She has spent the last thirty years making rubbings, photographs, and drawings of Maya inscriptions and carvings.
-[[#107|10]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 158.
+[14] This description was included in his A Study of Maya Art (1913). Completed originally in 1909 as his doctoral dissertation, Spinden’s work represents the first systematic study of Classic period iconography. Many of its observations and connections still hold good today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#117|11]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 158.</div>
+[15] Morley (1915:26) proposed this methodology and actually applied it to become the first to suggest a war event at Quiriguâ. Shortly after this time, however, he began a lifelong campaign to photograph and analyze all the Classic period inscriptions he could lind. 1 he two resulting works, The Inscriptions of Copan and The Inscriptions of the Petén. are still critically important resources, but in both, Morley paid almost exclusive attention to calendric material. He was never again interested in the “textual residue,” which ironically he systematically excluded from his drawings.
-[[#127|12]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''148–54; Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''98–100.
+[16] The critical papers outlining these discoveries were all published between 1958 and 1964, including Berlin (1958 and 1959), Proskouriakoff (I960, 1961a, 1961b 1963- 1964), and Kelley (1962).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#136|13]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''153;'' ''Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''64, 73.</div>
+[17] This statement was published in the preface to the 1971 edition to his (Thompson 1971:v) Maya Hieroglyphs: An Introduction, but it was but one of several devastating criticisms he published against phoneticism as proposed not only by Knorozov but also by Whorf (Thompson 1950:311–312). His voice was powerful enough to shut down debate until the mid-seventies. Although there are still holdouts against phoneticism today, many of them strident in their opposition, the accumulated evidence, and especially the productivity of the phonetic approach, has convinced most of the working epigraphers that Knorozov was right. We are still engaged in energetic debate about details and individual readings, but there is wide consensus as to how the system works.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#146|14]]. Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 58–59.</div>
+[18] Elizabeth Benson, director of the Pre-Columbian Library and Collections of Dumbarton Oaks until 1979, called a series of mini-conference between 1974 and 1978. The participants, David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, Merle Robertson, and Linda Scheie, worked out detailed paraphrases of the inscriptions of Palenque. This work resulted not only in many new decipherments but in the important methodology of paraphrasing based on syntactical analysis of the texts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#156|15]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''474–75.</div>
+[19] Three of the four known Maya books are named for the cities where they are now found: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Paris Codex. The fourth, the Grolier Codex, resides now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of México. Made of beaten-bark paper folded in an accordion form, each codex combines pictures and written text drawn in bright colors on plaster sizing. The Maya read their books by folding the leaves from left to right until reaching the end of one side; they then turned the codex over and began reading the other side.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#166|16]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 18.</div>
+[20] Codices from the Mixtec recorded lineage histories as the land documents of their communities. Aztec sources record tribute lists, histories of various sorts, and calendric almanacs and were used to carry news from one part of the empire to another.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#176|17]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 60.</div>
+[21] Yucatecan is the ancestor of modern Yucatec, Itzá, and Mopán, while Cholan diversified into Choi, Chontai, Chorti, and the extinct language, Cholti. Most linguists consider that the diversification into these daughter languages occurred after the Classic period ended (A.D. 900).
-[[#186|18]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 61.
+[22] The descendant languages of these two proto-languages were found in approximately this distribution at the Conquest, but with the now extinct Cholti language spoken in the area between Choi and Chorti. Examples of glyphic spelling specific to one or the other language occur in roughly similar distributions, suggesting that they were in approximately the same distributions during the Classic period. Yucatec and Choi also evidence profound interaction in their vocabularies and grammars beginning during the Late Preclassic period, although they diverged from each other many centuries earlier.
-[[#196|19]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 61.
+[23] This particular homophony has long been known to epigraphers and iconogra- phers, although Houston (1984) was the first to fully document its use in the writing system.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#206|20]]. The following account is largely based on Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 63–65, 101–4; ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''61–66, 73–74, 92–95, 130–35, 208–10. For the historical context of this debate, see Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 59–91; Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 188–95.</div>
+[24] We use the word logograph rather than pictograph because most word signs were not pictures of the things they represented. All pictographs are logographs, but most logographs are not pictographs.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#216|21]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''439–40.</div>
+[25] The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov (1952) first identified the way the phonetic spellings work, but it was many decades before his work became generally accepted by Western scholars.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#226|22]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''63.</div>
+[26] Kathryn Josserand has explored the discourse structure of hieroglyphic texts and found a fruitful comparison of the ancient patterns to the modern. She has found that many of the features that the ancient Maya repeatedly used, such as couplets (Lounsbury 1980), oppositions, building a text toward a peak event, and disturbance in syntax around the peak, are still used today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#236|23]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''64,'' ''73.</div>
+[27] Continuities in their toolmaking techniques suggest these people gradually developed village societies between 1500 and 1000 B.C., at least in the eastern Caribbean coastlands of Belize, where there is a gradual shift toward settled village life along the shores of the rivers. R. S. MacNeish (1982) carried out a survey in Belize and discovered the sites and stone artifacts dating from the archaic, prefarming period.
+<br>
+<br>Up until 1988. radiocarbon samples from the remarkable village site of Cuello in northern Belize dated the earliest Maya farmers at roughly 2000 B.C. This period of occupation fell in the Early Preclassic period of Mesoamerica. The weight of evidence (as announced by Norman Hammond, the excavator of Cuello, at the Austin Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in 1988) now favors redating the Cuello village occupation about a millennium later, in what archaeologists call the Middle Preclassic period.
-[[#246|24]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''134; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90.
+[28] By 900 B.C., hierarchical society was established in the Copán Valley, resulting in a burial tradition with wide-ranging access to exotic goods, especially jade. These burials, especially Burial XVIII-27, are among the richest so far known from the early period in the Maya region (W. Fash n.d. and Scheie and M. Miller 1986. 75, Pl 17).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#256|25]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90.</div>
+[29] 1 he groups in the Pacific lowlands have long been accepted to have been May an- speaking. Linguists, especially Terrence Kaufman, Lyle Campbell, Nicholas Hopkins, Kathryn Josserand, and others, now propose that those peoples were speakers of the Mije-Zoqucan language family with the Zoqueans living in the western region closer to the Isthmus and with Mije groups in the east toward El Salvador (Kaufman, personal communication, 1989). If this distribution is correct, then much of the early symbolism of kingship from that region derives from the Mije-Zoqucan cultural tradition, rather than the Mayan.
-[[#266|26]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''63, 437–39; ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''133–4; ''Patient Work'','' ''42, 153.
+[30] This kind of social organization is called segmentary because it consists of politically autonomous groups who, for purposes of trade, ritual communion, marriage, and the management of hostilities, regard themselves as descendants of common ancestors and hence as segments of a large family. The lowland Maya developed other forms of social organization as their society became more complex—patron-client relationships, for example, between noble families and families devoted to crafts and skilled labor. Nevertheless, the segmentary lineage organization remained a fundamental building block of Maya society and politics throughout the span of the civilization. The period of civilization has been called segmentary state organization and this is a reasonable label in light of the enduring role of kinship in the hierarchical structure of royal governments.
+<br>
+<br>The archaeological investigation of the origins of Maya complex society in the lowlands is proceeding at a very rapid pace in the interior of the peninsula. Richard Hansen and Donald Forsyth (personal communication, 1989) have recently discovered that the community of Nakbc near El Mirador contains pyramidal mounds of 18 to 28 meters elevation dating to the Middle Preclassic period, perhaps between 600 and 300 B.c. This discovery indicates that before the advent of the Late Preclassic period, some lowland Maya communities were already experiencing the centralization of ritual activity and the concentration of labor power characteristic of the ensuing era of kings. The people of Copan already enjoyed extensive trade contacts and access to precious materials such as carved greenstone during this Middle Preclassic period. Recently, the elaborately decorated Swazy ceramics of northern Belize were redated from the Early Preclassic period into this Middle Preclassic period. Several sites in northern Belize, including Cuello and Colha, were sizable villages with centralized ceremonial activity and extensive trade contacts during this period. The famous Olmec heartland site of La Venta in the Gulf Coast lowlands flourished during the same era and was clearly importing vast quantities of exotic materials from highland sources. Some of the La Venta sources may well be situated in the Motagua drainage in the southeastern periphery of the Maya lowlands.
+<br>
+<br>Viewing this shifting landscape, we now suspect that during the Middle Preclassic period, a long-distance trade network, a “jade trail,” crossed the interior of the peninsula from the Caribbean coast of Belize, through the vicinity of El Mirador, and thence across to the Gulf Coast lowlands. We suspect a pattern similar to the situation after the collapse of the southern kingdoms in the ninth century. Then, a few complex societies endured in the interior to form a demographic archipelago across the sparsely inhabited forest. These societies facilitated trade in exotic commodities and also provided local products for export. This pattern may also exist at the outset of the demographic buildup leading to the emergence of civilization in Preclassic times. Eventually, further discoveries in the interior may push the origins of the institution of ahau back into the Middle Preclassic period. Even were this to be the case, however, ethnographic analogy with other areas of the tropical world, such as Central Africa, shows that small complex societies can coexist with large tribal societies for centuries without the tribal societies developing into states. The empirical record of the Late Preclassic still suggests that the institution of kingship coalesced and dominated Maya lowland society in a rapid transformation during the last two centuries B.c.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#276|27]]. José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 7–10, 93.</div>
+[31] We discuss the structural transformations of kinship ideology which accompanied the invention of Maya kingship in Freidel and Scheie (1988b).
-[[#286|28]]. Murray Bookchin, ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998),'' ''154–55,'' ''164–65; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 195,'' ''237–49.
+[32] See John Fox’s (1987) study of this kind of organization among the Postclassic Quiche of the Guatemala highlands.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#296|29]]. Danny Evans, private communication, June 27, 2020.</div>
+[33] Lee Parsons (personal communication, August 1987) excavated a Late Preclassic offering in a major center of the Pacific slopes area which contained a set of three carved greenstone head pendants suitable for wearing as a crown. One of these head pendants is the Jester God, the diagnostic diadem of ahau kingship status from the Late Preclassic period until the Early Postclassic period (Freidel and Scheie 1988a). On Stela 5 at the site of Izapa, a major center of the Late Preclassic period in the southern highlands, the Jester God diadem is also depicted worn by an individual in authority (Fields n.d.). Under the circumstances, there is reason to believe that the institution of kingship predicated on the status of ahau was present in the southern regions of the Maya world as well as in the lowlands to the north during the Late Preclassic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#306|30]]. In 1931, the majority of delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form national industrial federations, which would unite all the single unions in a given industry together. These were to exist in parallel to the other geographical federations that united workers from different industries together, based on their location. This decision was never implemented and was actively opposed by several anarchist delegates on the grounds that it would decrease the importance and autonomy of the local single unions. See Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''218–19; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''90–92; Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''33–37.</div>
+[34] There is a massive four-sided pyramid at the northern lowland site of Acanceh in Yucatán which Joesink-Mandeville and Meluzin (1976) correctly identified as Preclassic on the basis of a partially preserved monumental stucco mask illustrated by Seler (Seler 1911). The iconography of this monumental mask is commensurate with the royal iconography of Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros (Freidel and Scheie 1988b). The famous noi thern-lowland bas-relief in Loltún Cave depicts a Maya king. Although not firmly dated by epigraphy or archaeological context, the style of the royal regalia is Late Preclassic (Freidel and Andrews n.d.).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#316|31]]. In 1934, Ángel Pestaña claimed that some local federations and local unions paid for two or three full-time delegates “off the record” and “under the table.” I have been unable to verify this claim or discover how other members responded to these allegations. Quoted in Frank Mintz, ''Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 54–55.</div>
+[35] The city of El Mirador raised stelae in the Late Preclassic period (Matheny 1986), and Richard Hansen (1988) has discovered Late Preclassic-style stone stelae at the site of Nakbe, near that great city. We have yet to find any with hieroglyphic writing.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#326|32]]. The higher committees of the CNT amassed far more power during the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39. See Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 39–40, 45–49.</div>
+[36] This early date is recorded on the Hauberg Stela (Scheie 1985c and Scheie and M. Miller 1986:191). The names of the phases of Maya history—Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic—are misleading in that civilized life and with it public works of enormous size began earlier than the Classic period. Although an important temple of the Late Preclassic period was excavated at Uaxactun early on (Ricketson and Ricketson 1937), it was not until the last fifteen years that archaeologists finally began to uncover the truly amazing accomplishments of the lowland Maya during the Late Preclassic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#336|33]]. This account of how the CNT was organized is based on Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''144–46; Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 11, 13, 73; Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 353n16; Evans, ''Revolution and the State'', 12. For examples of CNT plenums see Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', 52–53, 69–70, 255–56, 259–60.</div>
+[37] The latest dated monument from the Classic period is found at the site of Tonina. It has the date 10.4.0.0.0 or the year 909.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#346|34]]. Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''5. For the biographical details about Peirats, see Chris Ealham, ''Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 29–30, 141–42.</div>
+[38] Pat Culbert (1988 and personal communication, 1986) gives an overall population distribution of 200 people per square kilometer for the entire Maya region. He estimates a population of 500.000 at Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#356|35]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''What is the C.N.T?'' (London: Simian, 1974), 19.</div>
+[39] We will describe the Maya state with several words, including kingdom, domain, dominion, and polity—a word that technically connotes territoriality and political dominion without additional qualifications as to the nature of the organization or whether it can be considered a nation or a state.
-[[#366|36]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''77; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014),'' ''28–29.
+[40] Berlin (1958) noticed this special type of glyph in the inscriptions of many different sites. He showed that it is composed of two constants—the “water-group” affix, which we now know to read ch’ul (“holy”), and the “ben-ich” affix, which reads ahau—and a variable, which corresponded to the city in which the Emblem Glyph was found. Since he could not decide whether this new type of glyph referred to the city as a place or to its ruling lineage, he decided to call it by a neutral term—Emblem Glyph.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (1985a, 1985b, 1986) has done the most recent work on Emblem Glyphs. Following Berlin’s and Marcus’s (1973 and 1976) work, he observed that the rulers of some neighboring communities, such as Palenque or Tortuguero, are both named as ahau of Palenque, suggesting that the territorial entity named by the Palenque Emblem Glyph is larger than the capital city. He also noted that in star-shell war events the main signs from Emblem Glyphs appeared as if they were locations. Combining these data, he proposed that Emblem Glyph are titles, naming the person who has it as a ch’ul ahau (“holy lord”) of a polity. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have additionally recognized glyphs representing geographical features and separate population centers within an area described by a single Emblem Glyph. Finally, we have evidence from Copán that noble lineages tracing their descent to different founders, and presiding over distinct communities within the realm, nevertheless used the same Emblem Glyph. The Copan Emblem Glyph appears on Altar 1 of Rio Amarillo in the name of a governor who ruled that subordinate site, and at the same time traced his descent from a founder other than the founder of Copán’s royal line (Scheie 1987d). Emblem Glyphs thus denote a kingdom or polity as a territorial and political entity with a hierarchy of social positions and different geographical and urban locations within it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#376|37]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''122–23.</div>
+[41] Joe Ball (1989) reports that in the Buena Vista region of northern Belize the larger palace complexes are distributed at five-kilometer intervals throughout the region he surveyed. In between the larger compounds, residential clusters and single-family holdings are found distributed at regular intervals. He has found pottery at the smaller compounds that was probably made at the large Buena Vista center. More important, in debris at Buena Vista, he also has found very well-made pottery with the name of the king of Naranjo (Smoke-Squirrel, whom we shall meet in one of our histories) painted on the rim. Seiichi Nakamura (1987) and the Japanese team working in the La Venta Valley near Copán in Honduras have found the same pattern. One of the largest sites in their survey area, Los Higos, has a stela in the style of Copán, while at least one second-level site had an ahau important enough to have received an incised alabaster vase as a gift from Yax-Pac, the high king of Copán. This gifting down of elite goods was apparently one of the ways Maya kings retained the loyalty of their subordinate lords.
-[[#386|38]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''83; ''Patient Work'','' ''155.
+[42] Research to date by Mathews and Justeson (1984:212–213) and Stuart (1984b and 1986c) has documented the use of this cahal title only in sites of these regions. However, other Maya polities certainly had parallel constructions of political ranking and may also have used this title. Stuart and Houston (personal communication, 1987) have now expressed doubts as to the phonetic value of this title glyph, although they do not question its basic meaning. We will continue to employ it as a useful technical term for this rank that is already known in the literature.
-[[#396|39]]. Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 49–50; Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution'','' ''28–30.
+[43] Cahalob appear as attendants to kings at Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but they also ruled sites like Lacanjá and El Cayo under the authority of the high kings of larger cities. At least one, Chac-Zutz’, was formerly identified as a king of Palenque, but it is now clear he was in fact a cahal probably serving as a war captain to the high king (Scheie n.d.b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#406|40]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 49. See also, 138–41.</div>
+[44] The inscriptions from kingdoms up and down the Usumacinta record royal visits by people who are named theyahau, “the ahau of,” the high kings of allied kingdoms (Scheie and Mathews n.d.). These royal visits appear to have been one of the important methods of establishing and maintaining alliances between kingdoms and within them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#416|41]]. Quoted in Walther L. Bernecker, “The Strategies of ‘Direct Action’ and Violence in Spanish Anarchism,” in ''Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'', ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 90.</div>
+[45] Lateral descents of this kind are recorded several times in the inscriptions of Palenque, Tikal, Caracol, and Calakmul, among others (Scheie n.d.e). Enough examples are now documented to presume that brother-brother inheritance was an accepted pattern, which may still survive in the highlands of Guatemala. In many of the Maya groups living there, the youngest son inherits the house of his parents and is responsible for caring for them in their old age. Often the son will become owner of the house and the responsible male of the household while his parents are still alive.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#426|42]]. Quoted in Ralph Darlington, ''Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism ''(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 29.</div>
+[46] Mathews (1986) generally requires the presence of an Emblem Glyph to define a polity, but since Emblem Glyphs usually do not occur in the northern inscriptions, he used other less certain data to suggest polity boundaries in this northern region. His resulting map of Late Classic polities shows a network of small states covering all of the lowlands, and if anything, his numbers may be overly conservative.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#436|43]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 39. Some trade unions within the CNT opposed the idea of a minimum program. See Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''218.</div>
+[47] Kan-Xul of Palenque and 18-Rabbit of Copán were both captured late in their lives after long and successful reigns. They were apparently sacrificed by their captors—the rulers of the smaller towns of Toniná and Quiriguá, respectively.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#446|44]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''281.</div>
+[48] When we went to Palenque the first time in 1970, the Chois and Tzeltals living south of Palenque had to rely on canoes to carry cargo from their homes in the Tulijá Valley to Salto de Agua and Villahermosa. At that time there were many men who knew how to make dugout canoes, but when the new road was built from Palenque to San Cristóbal de las Casas, this region opened up to truck and bus travel. The younger generation uses modern transportation and the art of canoe making is being lost. See Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzman (1985) for a description of canoe making and its role in Choi society.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#456|45]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 82.</div>
+[49] This carrying system places the cargo in a band passed across the bearer’s forehead and down his back. The weight is thus distributed into the muscles of the neck and onto the back, allowing amazingly heavy loads to be carried substantial distances. This method is still used throughout Central America, where one often sees small children walking down the highway bent under the huge load of firewood they carry back to their houses each day. Their parents will carry 100-pound sacks of grain using the same method.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#466|46]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 181.</div>
+[50] We have all seen recent photographs of the pall of smoke from the burning forest hanging over the Amazon Basin. In the dry season, this is a fact of life across the Maya landscape as well. We might suppose that it would not have been nearly as bad during the Classic period, but archaeology and settlement-pattern studies suggest that the population of the Classic period at least equaled current levels and may well have exceeded them. At the height of the Classic period, soot from dry-season fires would have hung as oppressively over the landscape as it does today.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#476|47]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 182.</div>
+; 2. Sacred Space, Holy Time, AND THE MAYA WORLD
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#486|48]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''374.</div>
+[51] The scene on the Acasaguastlan pot (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:181, 193–194) suggests that in Classic Maya thought these two planes of existence were more than just reciprocally dependent. The scene shows the Sun God in the midst of a vision represented by mirrored Vision Serpents—one manifesting day and the other night. Interspersed among the folds of these Vision Serpents are the beasts of the field and forest, elements representing the human community, the waters of both worlds, and sacrificial ritual which communicates between the two. The “waking dream” of the god is the world in which human beings live. On the other side of the equation, David Stuart (1984a, 1988c) has shown that the Maya believed that this vision rite, when performed by kings and other human beings, “gave birth” to the gods. Through this process, the beings of Xibalba, both supernaturals and ancestors, were materialized in the world of humans. If this reciprocity of the vision rite in both worlds was widely believed (and there is evidence to suggest it was), then the w’orld of human experience came into existence as a vision of the gods, while humanity gave the gods material presence in the Middleworld of people through performance of the same rite. In a very real sense, each plane of existence is materialized through the vision rituals performed by inhabitants of the other.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#496|49]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 19, 23.</div>
+[52] This is more than mere speculation. One of the results of the revolution in Maya hieroglyphic translation is confirmation of the hypothesis that what Maya villagers think of the world today, what their ancestors thought of it at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and what the Classic Maya kings thought of it are all transformations of one and the same model (Vogt 1964). These connections are possible only if, in fact, the villagers of the Classic period, the direct ancestors of the post-Conquest villagers, also shared this model of reality.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#506|50]]. Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914,” ''Victorian Studies'' 31, no. 4 (1988): 487–516; Luigi Fabbri, ''Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism'' (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001).</div>
+[53] These layers are represented in the three elements surmounting the sun-marked bowl of sacrifice in the forehead of the Quadripartite Monster. This symbol, which rests at the base of the World Tree or rides on the tail of the Celestial Monster, represents the sun as it moves through these domains. In turn, the three domains are symbolized by the signs resting in the sacrificial plate, with the crossed bands representing the heavens, the stingray-spine bloodletter representing the blood of sacrifice composing the Middleworld of earth, and the shell representing the watery world of Xibalba.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#516|51]]. Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in ''Social Protest'','' Violence and Terror'', 215.</div>
+[54] Xibalba is the Quiche Maya term used in the Popol Vuh for the Underworld. Recinos notes the following about the derivations of this word: “Chi-Xibalba. In ancient times, says Father Coto, this name Xibalbay meant the devil, or the dead, or visions which appeared to the Indians. It has the same meaning in Yucatán. Xibalba was the devil, and xibil to disappear like a vision or a phantom, according to the Diccionario de Motul. The Maya performed a dance which they called Xibalba ocot, or ‘dance of the demon.’ The Quiche believed that Xibalba was the underground region inhabited by the enemies of man.”
+<br>
+<br>While Xibalba is traditionally regarded as the name of the Underworld, and certainly this is the principal spatial location of Xibalba in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1985), we suggest that the Classic Maya regarded the Otherworld as an invisible, pervasive, ambient presence. Even in the Popol Vuh, there are celestial aspects to Xibalba as interpreted by Dennis Tedlock: “They [the Ancestral Hero Twins] choose the Black Road, which means, at the terrestrial level, that their journey through the underworld will take them from east to west. At the celestial level, it means that they were last seen in the black cleft of the Milky Way when they descended below the eastern horizon; to this day the cleft is called the Road to Xibalba.” (Tedlock 1985:38; brackets ours). Tozzer’s (1941:132) annotated discussion of Landa’s understanding of Maya hell and heaven likewise reveals the fact that in Yucatán at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Maya supernatural abode of gods and ancestors traversed the Underworld, Middleworld, and heavens.
+<br>
+<br>Our analyses of the texts and images pertaining to the Otherworld of the Classic Maya suggest that this is a parallel world revealed in trance. The ritual public spaces of the kings, where people congregated to witness sacrifice, were explicitly designed to convey the idea that they were in the Otherworld (see the acropolis plazas of king Yax-Pac at Copán in Chapter 8). We believe that in the thrall of great public ceremonies, the combination of exhaustion, bloodletting, intoxication, and expectations of trance yielded communal experiences of the Otherworld denizens conjured forth by royalty. Such experiences confirmed the legitimate power of the kings who bore primary responsibility for the interpretation of the visions.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#526|52]]. Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 34.</div>
+[55] The Popol Vuh stories give the best and most humorous view of Xibalba. We recommend the translation by Dennis Tedlock (1985). Michael Coe has done more than any other scholar to associate the Popol Vuh vision with imagery from the Classic period. See Michael Coe (1973, 1978, and 1982) and Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more detailed discussion of Xibalba and Maya concepts of the afterlife.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#536|53]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''87–90.</div>
+[56] Thompson (1950:10–11) was the primary proponent for the crocodile identification. Puleston’s (1976) work on the iconography associated with raised fields supported Thompson’s ideas. Recently, Taube (1988) has presented convincing evidence that the turtle was also used as a symbol for the land surface of the world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#546|54]]. Quoted in Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'', 89.</div>
+[57] The expressions for the directions vary greatly from language to language, and depend to some degree on whether the speaker faces east or west when naming them. East has different names in different Mayan languages: In Yucatec, it is lakin or “next sun”; in Cholti, it is tzatzib kin or “strong sun”; in Chorti, it is wa an kin, “risen sun ; and in Choi, it is pasib kin or “arrived sun.” North is xaman (there is no etymology for this word) in Yucatec; in Choi chiik iklel and in 1 zeltal kini ha al refer to the north as the direction of winter rains. In Chorti north is tz’ik, “left (side of the sun),” and in Izotzil it is xokon winahel, the “side of heaven.” West is chikin, “eaten sun,” in A ucatec and yaram kin, “below the sun,” in Lacandon. In Choi bdhlib kin, “set sun,” or mahlib kin, “gone away sun’—as well as male! kakal, “gone away sun ’ in Tzotzil—refer to the west as the leaving or setting position of the sun. South, known as nohol in Yucatec and nool in Cholti, is the great side of the sun, because this direction is on the right-hand side as one faces the rising sun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#556|55]]. Quoted in Goyens, “Johann Most and the German Anarchists,” in ''Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street'', ed. Tom Goyens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 21–22. In response, Goldman attacked Most with a whip during one of his lectures. See Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''105–6.</div>
+[58] The glyph wac ah chan is recorded in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque as the name of the sanctuary inside the Temple and by extension the name must refer to the central image of the interior panel. That central image is the World Tree. (See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the Temple of the Cross.) Nicholas Hopkins in the 1978 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing was the first person to suggest a decipherment for the glyph naming this axis as “stood-up or raised up sky,” and David Stuart’s (personal communication, 1986–87) work with the proper names of buildings and stelae contributed greatly to the recognition of this wac ah chan as a proper name.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#566|56]]. Quoted in George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.</div>
+[59] David Stuart (1988c) has made an argument that the Double-headed Serpent Bar is another manifestation of the path of communication between the Otherworld and our world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#576|57]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 319.</div>
+[60] As we shall see, other important people in addition to kings could participate in opening the portal to the Otherworld through elicitation of the Vision Serpent. As long as the Maya had kings, they remained the pivotal characters in such royal dramas.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#586|58]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 84. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''526–29.</div>
+[61] This plate was painted by the same artist who executed the famous Altar de Sacrificios vase. See Schele and M. Miller (1986:304—307, 310–312) for a detailed analysis of this plate.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#596|59]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 150, 154.</div>
+[62] Symbols representing the power of objects began as a profile polymorphic image directly attached to objects such as earflares and bloodletters during the Late Preclassic period, personifying such objects as alive with power (Schele and M. Miller 1986:43–44 and Freidel and Schele 1988b). Objects and people continued to be decorated with these little power polymorphs in public art throughout the Classic period. The metaphysics of this way of regarding the material world is cogently summarized by the great Mayanist ethnographer E. Z. Vogt speaking of the modern highland Maya of Chiapas: “The phenomenon of the inner soul is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to the Zinacantecos also possesses an inner soul: domesticated plants, such as maize, beans, and squash; salt; houses and the fires at the hearths; the crosses; the saints in the churches; the musical instruments played in ceremonies; and the Ancestral Gods in the mountains, as well as the Earth Lord below the surface of the earth. The ethnographer in Zinacantan soon learns that the most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons, nor between persons and objects, as we think of these relationships, but rather between inner souls inside these persons and material objects, such as crosses.” (Vogt n.d.:10-l 1). Crosses, we should add, are further described by Vogt: “In Chiapas they symbolize ‘doorways’ to the realm of the Ancestral Gods who live inside the hills and mountains and/or represent Ancestors themselves, as the Classic Maya stelae depict rulers or royal ancestors” (Vogt n.d.:25). David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has associated these same concepts with the God C “water group” set of signs. This set reads ch’ul, “holy” or “sacred,” in the writing system.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#606|60]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 150.</div>
+[63] The Spanish describe the Maya drawing blood from all parts of their bodies as their principal act of piety. In Classic representations and post-Conquest descriptions, the most important rites required blood from the penis or tongue, although it could also be drawn from any part of the body (Joralemon 1974 and Thompson 1961). The ritual served two primary purposes in the understanding of the ancient Maya: as the nourishment and sustenance of the gods and as the way of achieving the visions they interpreted as communication with the other world (Furst 1976). The Maya believed this bloodletting-vision rite gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a, 1988c), and thus materialized them in the human world. Every important dynastic and calendric ritual in Maya life required sanctification through bloodletting (Scheie and M. Miller 1986). It brought the central axis into existence and allowed communication with the ancestral dead and the gods.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#616|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 373.</div>
+[64] Mayan languages have two words for “house”: otot is a “house,” but the word incorporated the idea that someone possesses it (analogous perhaps to “home” in English). Na, on the other hand, is a building that does not include ownership in the concept of the word. The word otot cannot be uttered without implying that the house is owned—it is always someone’s house. Na was used in the proper names of temples, but otot is the glyph used to name the category of object to which “temple” belonged. Temples were sacred houses owned by the gods and the spirits of the ancestral dead who resided in them. Thus we know that the ancient Maya thought of the temple as an inhabited place.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#626|62]]. Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 55. Kropotkin opposed the tactics of assassination and bombings within the Russian anarchist movement. See Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 206–07; Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 59–60. For an overview of Russian anarchist’s engaging in this kind of violence, see ibid., 44–55, 63–70.</div>
+[65] The term “monster” has been in Maya scholarly literature since Spinden’s (1913) first study of Maya iconography, but it is a loaded term to English speakers recalling the Frankensteinian tradition in literature and films. Nevertheless, “monsters” in our own tradition usually exhibit features combining animal and human or distorting the normal features of either to the level of the grotesque. The Maya generated their images of supernatural creatures in the same way, combining animal with human or exaggerating the features of both to produce an image that could never be mistaken for a being from the natural world. It is in this sense that wc use the term “monster,” without intending to associate it with any of the negative connotations that have become attached to the word. We use it in its original sense of “something marvelous, a divine portent or warning, something extraordinary or unnatural” and “an imaginary animal (such as a centaur, sphinx, minotaur, or heraldic griffin, wyvern, etc.) having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animal forms” (OED:1842- 1843).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#636|63]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 176.</div>
+[66] David Stuart (personal communication 1987) first recognized the glyph for witz in its many permutations at Copan and interpreted it as “mountain.” Most important, he found a passage on the Hieroglyphic Stairs where witz is written with the zoomorphic image formerly identified as the Cauac Monster. Distinguished from the cauac zoomorph meaning “stone” by the presence of eyelids and a stepped indention in the forehead, this “mountain” image is the long-nosed god, so prevalent in Maya art and on buildings, which has in the past been called Chae. Rather than referring to the raingod, however, the image identifies the temple as a “mountain” as well as a sacred house. The doorways of temples at Copan and especially in the northern regions are often built in the form of this monster to identify them as the ti’ otot “mouth of the house.” The mouth of the mountain is, of course, the cave, and Maya mythology identifies the road to Xibalba as going through a cave. The Maya not only used natural caves as the locations of bloodletting and vision ritual (MacLeod and Puleston 1979), but the inside of their temple was understood to be the cave pathway to the Otherworld. The ritual of bloodletting materialized the World Tree as the path to the supernatural world. See “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: 301–316) for a detailed examination of the imagery associated with this pathway.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#646|64]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+[67] These are elementary and pervasive metaphors of shamanistic ecstasy (sec Mircea Eliade 1970:Chapter 8). It is our basic working hypothesis that Maya royal charisma was essentially shamanistic as this concept is defined by Eliade (see Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
-[[#656|65]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', 14; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''160; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''470–71.
+[68] Ritual activities of the modern Maya generally involve the creation of altars, arbors, and corrals which, in their essential features, realize the structure of the world given in this model: four trees at the corners, or six poles holding up the altar. And the associations given by modern “knowers” of these rituals are the same as those to be found in the ancient royal performances: the fourfold arrangement of the cosmos; the use of sacrifice (now chickens, turkeys, deer, or pigs), and most significant, the principle that the created “place” is a conduit to the supernatural. The fact that the modern village Maya, and their direct village ancestors as described by the conquering Spanish, performed ritual that is resonant with that of Precolumbian Maya, albeit of elite and royal status, clearly implies that the knowledge and the performance were the province of the commoner ancients as well.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#666|66]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+[69] The pervasive quality of access to the supernatural in shamanistic cosmology is well articulated by Mircea Eliade: “Although the shamanic experience proper could be evaluated as a mystical experience by virtue of the cosmological concept of the three communicating zones [heaven, earth, underworld], this cosmological concept does not belong exclusively to the ideology of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism, nor, in fact, of any other shamanism. It is a universally disseminated idea connected with the belief in the possibility of direct communication with the sky. On the macrocosmic plane this communication is figured by the Axis (Tree, Mountain, Pillar, etc.); on the microcosmic plane it is signified by the central pillar of the house or the upper opening of the tent— which means that every human habitation is projected to the ‘Center of the World, or that every altar, tent, or house makes possible a break-through in plane and hence ascent to the sky.” (Eliade 1970:264–265; brackets ours, italics original.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#676|67]]. Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 82–83.</div>
+[70] Vogt (n.d.) describes the staffs of high office among the modern peasant Maya of the highland region in terms strictly commensurate with this hypothesized attitude of the ancient Maya toward sacred objects and facilities. For example, he states, “The batons are washed and censed in communities such as Chamula in order not only to rid them of accumulations of sweat and dirt, but also to rid them symbolically of any mistakes made by a predecessor serving in the same position. Note that the first washing in Chamula rids the batons of sweat and dirt, and administrative errors, while the water and liquor used in the second and third cleanings are served to the officials who in drinking these liquids renew the sacred power that has come down to them from the Ancestral Gods via these batons. Note also that the silver-headed batons are believed to be infallible; if administrative errors have been made, they are the mistakes of human officials who hold these batons while serving in high offices” (Vogt n.d.:39^4O). Similar repeated ritual results in accumulative power endowed in the silver coin necklaces of the saints housed in Zinacantan center (Vogt 1976:127–128).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#686|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''344. See also 315–33.</div>
+[71] New excavations of Temple 26 at Copan have demonstrated that the iconography of the Ballcourt at Copan remained the same in all of its manifestations from Early Classic through Late Classic times. Other buildings, such as Temple 22, retained the same sculptural program through different construction phases, suggesting that those particular foci were symbolically defined early in the city’s history and remained unchanged through subsequent centuries. When new buildings were to be constructed, the Maya performed elaborate rituals both to terminate the old structure and contain its accumulated energy (Freidel and Scheie n.d. and Scheie 1988b). The new structure was then built atop the old and, when it was ready for use, they conducted elaborate dedication rituals to bring it alive. These dedication and termination rituals permeate the archaeological record and they represent a major component of the history recorded in the inscriptions at many sites.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#696|69]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''179.</div>
+[72] The containment rituals were elaborate and their effects widespread in the archaeological record. The portrait images of both humans and deities were effaced, often by destroying the left eye and nose. Color was removed or whitewashed and sculpture slashed, broken, burned, or sometimes carefully sealed in. Holes were drilled in pottery vessels and other objects were broken or effaced to contain their power. In an earlier building under the summit of Temple 26 at Copan, a circle of charcoal and broken stingray spines, remaining from a ritual conducted to terminate an earlier version of the temple, was recently discovered (W. Fash 1986). At Cerros, this ritual involved the careful burial of the old facade and rituals in which hundreds of pottery vessels were broken over the building. The huge percussion holes that mar the Olmec colossal heads are also remnants of termination rituals (Grove 198 1), reflecting the long-term presence of this ritual and its underlying definition of sacred energy in Mesoamerican thought.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#706|70]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 101.</div>
+[73] The Old Testament Bible is a complex compilation of history, law, poetry, and prophecy (Drane 1983:22–23) written down over an extended period of time by several authors (Spuhler 1985:113) during the emergence of the Hebrew nation as a state. Behind the Bible is a long history of literacy and of literature both in Greater Mesopotamia and in Egypt. In these respects, the Quiche Popol Vuh is quite comparable. It too is a complex compilation of law, poetry, and history pertaining to a nation. It is also subsequent to a long history of literacy in bordering territory and related society, namely among the lowland Maya. The parallels between the histories of the Old Testament and earlier sacred literature from Mesopotamia are often striking, particularly with respect to Genesis (Spuhler 1985:114–115). In the same fashion, the parallels between the Creation story in the Popol Vuh and the allusions to Creation in the sacred literature of the Classic lowland Maya are beginning to become clear. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the Popol Vuh does not register direct transmission of the Classic Maya cosmology or theology any more than the Old Testament registers directly the beliefs of Sumerians. In both instances, we are dealing with long and complicated literary and theological traditions. Ultimately, our interpretations of the Classic Maya reality must be anchored in the contemporary Classic period texts, images, and archaeological record.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#716|71]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''67.</div>
+[74] The surviving version of the Popol Vuh combines stories of the great protagonists of Maya myth, the Hero Twins called Hunahpu and Xbalanquc, with creation stories and the dynastic history of the Quiche. Found in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango by the Spanish priest Ximénez in the seventeenth century, the book records the history of Quiche kings to the year 1550. Ximénez hand-copied the original and transcribed it into Spanish. The original is now lost, but we have the copy made by Ximénez. Of the three English versions by Recinos (1950), Edmonson (1971), and Tedlock (1985), we recommend the Tedlock version as the easiest reading for those interested in knowing these stories. The Popol Vuh is one of the finest examples of Native American literature known to the modern world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#725|72]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''25.</div>
+[75] See Freidel and Scheie (1988b) and Cortez (1986).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#735|73]]. Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''47–48, 52–53.</div>
+[76] Karl Taube (1985) associated the older set of twins with the maize god and the image from pottery painting known as the Holmul Dancer.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#745|74]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 25–26.</div>
+[77] Many of the underworld creatures pictured on Classic Maya pottery have Emblem Glyphs in their names. Houston and Stuart (1989) have shown these beings are the way or “coessences” of the ahau of those kingdoms.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#755|75]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''309; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''156,'' ''189.</div>
+[78] Sec Michael Coe’s (1973, 1978, 1982) works on Maya pottery painting for a corpus of images showing Xibalba and its denizens.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#765|76]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''26.</div>
+[79] There are as many modern myths about the Precolumbian ballgame as there are ancient ones. The most persistent is that the winner was sacrificed, because the loser was considered unworthy. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that curious idea and the stories of the Popol Vuh, our most detailed information on the game, clearly demonstrates that the loser not the winner was the victim of sacrifice. The father and uncle of the Hero Twins were decapitated after they lost to the treacherous Lords of Death. The most interesting recent work on the Precolumbian ballgame is Ted Leyenaar’s (1978) documentation of a game still played in the state of Sinaloa. His photographs of the equipment and the play resemble Classic Maya imagery to a remarkable degree.
-[[#775|77]]. Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want'', 11.
+[80] All Maya calendar counts are in whole days. Since fractions were not available, the Maya used only whole-day adjustments to account for remainders in cycles of fractional lengths. For instance, a lunation is approximately 29.53 days long. To account for the accumulating error in a whole-day count, the Maya alternated a 29-day and 30-day moon to give a 29.5-day average. However, even this approximation soon accumulated discernible error between where the count said the moon should be in its cycle and what one observed in actuality. To adjust for that error, the Maya would place two 30-day months back to back, with different sites using different formulas of 29- and 30-day sequences. None of these approximations produced a particularly satisfactory result. With the true tropical year of 365.2422 days, they did not even try. Instead they kept a simple whole-day count that proceeded day by day without attempting to adjust for the .2422 day that accumulated each year. They were aware of the length of the true solar year and reckoned by it when necessary so that rituals would fall on the same point within it—for example, on a solstice. In their calendar, however, they let the count of days drift, with their New Year’s day, 1 Pop, falling one day later in the solar year every fourth repetition. See Floyd Lounsbury (1978) for a detailed discussion of the Maya calendar and number system.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#785|78]]. Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want'', 10–12, 15–16.</div>
+[81] The use of letters of the alphabet to name these gods comes from Schellhas (1904), the first modern scholar to systematically study their images and glyphic names in the codices. God K, the deity of the 819-day count, appears in four versions which are distinguished by the color glyph and direction of the four quadrants through which the count moves. The first 819-day-count station began 6.15.0 before the creation day and is associated with the birth of the mother of the gods in the text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque (Lounsbury 1976 and 1980; Scheie 1981 and 1984b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#795|79]]. Max Baginski, “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union Movement,” in ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', ed. Peter Glassgold, (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 305.</div>
+[82] No apparent relationship to astronomical or seasonal periodicities has been discovered, so that we presume the cycle is based on numerology.
-[[#805|80]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+[83] Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1987) has proposed that uayeb is an agentive noun derived from the Choi word waye!, “to sleep.” Uayeb (the five-day month at the end of a year) is, thus, the “resting or sleeping” part of the year.
-[[#815|81]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+[84] The Maya, like other Mesoamerican people, believed the world had been created more than once and then destroyed. Each creation used one form of matter that was destroyed by its opposite, for example, a world of fire destroyed by water. Aztec myth makes the current creation the fifth to exist. The writers of the Popol Vuh described these successive creations as the attempts of the gods to create sentient beings who would recognize their greatness. The gods tried different solutions; animals, people of mud, and then wood. Finally in the fourth attempt, they succeed in creating humanity of maize dough. If this seventeenth-century version corresponds to the ancient myth, the current existence is the fourth version in the cosmos to have been created.
-[[#825|82]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+[85] Justeson and Mathews (1983) have proposed that the name of this 360-day year is Yucatec and derived from the practice of setting stones to mark the end of years in this count.
-[[#835|83]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+[86] The ancient Maya called these twenty-day months uinic or “human being” because people have twenty fingers and toes just as a month had twenty days. Modern scholars most often use the term uinal because that is the term found in the Colonial sources from Yucatán. Both terms were apparently extant in the Classic period, for both spellings occur in the inscriptions; however, there is a preference for uinic over uinal. The Maya apparently thought of the month as a “person,” while they thought of the year as a “stone-setting.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#845|84]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''287.</div>
+[87] Except for katun, these terms are coined by modern scholars from Yucatec dictionaries of the Colonial period. Each term is a Yucatec number, bak, pic, calab, combined with tun, the word for year or stone.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#855|85]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''320.</div>
+[88] We transcribe the Maya vertical arrangement into a left to right format using arabic numbers with periods separating the various cycles. The highest cycle, the baktun (“400-stone”), is written 13.0.0.0.0: 13 baktuns, no katuns, no tuns, no uinals, no days.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#865|86]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''106.</div>
+[89] The thirteenth 400-year period of the Maya Calendar is soon to end. 13.0.0.0.0 will occur again on December 23, 2012, but this date falls on 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, rather than on the creation day, 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. From the ancient inscriptions, we know that the Maya did not consider it to be the beginning of a new creation as has been suggested. At Coba, the ancient Maya recorded the creation date with twenty units above the katun as in Date 1 below.
+<br>
+<br>| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 0. 0. 0. | 0 | 4 | Ahau |
+<br>| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13. 9.15.13. 6. | 9 | 3 | Muluc |
+<br>| 1. 0. 0. 0. 0. | 8 | 5 | Lamat |
+<br>
+<br>These thirteens are the starting points of a huge odometer of time: each unit clicks over from thirteen to one when twenty of the next unit accumulate. The baktun clicked from thirteen to one four hundred years after the creation date. The Olmec lived during the fifth 400-year cycle; the earliest written dates in Mesoamerica fall into the seventh cycle; and Classic history took place in the last quarter of the eighth and all of the ninth 400-year cycle. The latest Long Count date known is 10.4.0.0.0 at Tonina. Since dates rarely required that numbers higher than the baktun be written, the Maya regularly excluded them from their dates.
+<br>
+<br>We have one exception to this practice at Yaxchilan, where a scribe wrote a date on the stairs of Temple 33 with eight of the larger cycles above the baktun recorded (Date 2 above). The Yaxchilan scribe intended to set this important historical date in its larger cosmic scale, and by doing so told us that all of the higher cycles of the calendar were still set at thirteen during Maya history. Another inscription, this one from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, projects into the future to the eightieth Calendar Round of the great king Pacal’s accession. They give us a count of the precise number of days it will take to come to this date which happens to be only eight days after the end of the first 8,000-year cycle in this creation (Date 3 above). The pictun will end on October 15, 4772, in our calendar and the anniversary will occur eight days later on October 23, 4772.
+<br>
+<br>Combining the information from all these dates, we have reconstructed the nature of Maya time in this creation. On the day of creation, all the cycles above the katun were set on 13, although this number should be treated arithmetically in calendric calculations as zero. Each cycle within the calendar is composed of twenty of the next lowest units, moving in the order 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000, 3,200,000, 64,000,000, and so on toward infinity. With this information, we can project how long it will take to convert the highest thirteen in the Coba date to one—41,341,050,000.000,000,000,000,000,000 tropical years.
+<br>
+<br>These huge numbers are meant, of course, to represent the infinite scale of the cosmos, but ihey give us other kinds of information. Although the Long Count appears to record a linear concept of time, it, like the other components of Maya calendrical science, was cyclic. Different eras came and went, and each era was itself composed of ever larger cycles, one within the other and all returning to a starting point. The metaphor used by modern scholars is that of a wheel rolling back on its starting point. It is the huge scale of the higher cycles that allowed the Maya to unite linear and cyclic time. From a human point of view, the larger cycles can be perceived only as a tangent, which has the appearance of a straight line. We use this type of scale in the same way to build a cyclic concept into our essentially linear definition of time—our cosmologists place the “Big Bang” 15,000,000,000 years ago and they contemplate the possibility that it was but one of many “Big Bangs.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#875|87]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''55.</div>
+[90] Lounsbury (1976) has discussed “contrived numbers,” as deliberately constructed time distances which link days before the creation date to days in the historical present. The function of these contrived relationships is to demonstrate that some historical date was “like-in-kind” (on the same point in many of the important cycles of Maya time) to the pre-creation date. The worlds that exist on either side of that creation date (13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku) have their special symmetries and patterns of sacredness. To demonstrate that a historical date is “like-in-kind” to a pre-creation date is to say it has the same characteristics and brings with it the symmetry and sacredness of the previous pattern of existence.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#885|88]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''145–46.</div>
+[91] These four books, named for the cities in which they are found or for their first publishers, are the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex. Made of beaten-bark paper coated with a fine plaster surface and folded like accordions, the books record in pictures and writing which gods and what acts were associated with days in the calendar. Tables for anticipating the cycle of Venus and eclipses of the sun are also included as books of learning and prognostication for calendric priests specializing in the use of the calendar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#895|89]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 427.</div>
+[92] In trying to understand how the ancient Maya thought about time and space, modern people can think of the fabric of time and space as a matrix of energy fields. These fields affect the actions of human beings and gods, just as the actions of these beings affect the patterns within the matrix. For the Maya, it was a relationship of profound and inextricable interaction.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#905|90]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+[93] At Palenque, Tikal, and Copan, historical texts recall events that occurred during Olmec history, 1100–600 B.C., or in Late Preclassic times, 200 B.c. to A.D. 200. The texts at Palenque and Tikal imply that each of those dynasties had ruled during those early times, although archaeology has shown that neither kingdom existed during Olmec times. The symbolic relationship they meant to imply was similar in nature to the Aztecs’ proclamation of themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Toltec or our own invocation of Rome or Athens as the source of our political ideology.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#915|91]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''320.</div>
+[94] When we started writing this book, we presumed that primogeniture was the primary system of inheritance and that the examples of brother-brother successions were historical rarities. Our research, however, has shown that lateral succession was far more frequent than we had believed (Scheie n.d.e.). We still believe that primogeniture was the preferred pattern, but that lateral succession from older brother to younger brother was also acceptable.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#925|92]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''168. See also Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 80; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''293–94.</div>
+[95] William Haviland (1968) provides a lucid and remarkably prescient discussion of Classic Maya kinship organization from the vantage of ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnological information. The epigraphic data generally support the patrician organization he describes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#935|93]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 114, 25. For another example, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''98–103.</div>
+[96] Although clan structure is a common social institution in the prcindustrial world, in the case at hand there is a specific glyph that designates the founding ancestral king of a royal Maya clan (Scheie 1986b). This characterization of Maya elite organization is documented in Classic Maya history and is not an extrapolation backward from the period of the Spanish Conquest. The function of designating a founding ancestor is to define a group of descendants as relatives and to internally rank these people.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#945|94]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 190–203.</div>
+[97] Several reconstructions of the Classic period kinship system have been posited based on evidence from the inscriptions and languages, but we find the evidence for a patrilineal and patrilocal system to be by far the strongest. The major proponents of this system have been Haviland (1977) and Hopkins (n.d.).
-[[#955|95]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''81.
+[98] This lineage compound was excavated during the second phase of the Proyeto Arqueologia de Copan. Dr. William Fash first proposed the identification of this compound as the residence of a scribal lineage, an interpretation we accept (W. Fash 1986 and 1989).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#965|96]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''226.</div>
+[99] The glyph for this rank was first identified by Mathews and Justeson (1984) as a title for a subordinate rank. David Stuart (1984b) greatly expanded their discussion by analyzing the distribution and iconographic context for the title. Although the proposed decipherment of the title as cahal is disputed by some epigraphers, we shall use it as a convenient way of identifying this office, accepting that the reading may change in the future.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#975|97]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''443. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''67–69.</div>
+[100] The type-rank system used in the Copan Valley survey developed during Phase 1 of the Proyeto Arqueología de Copan (Willey and Leventhal 1979). Phase 11 of the PAC excavated one example of each of the four types under the direction of Dr. William Sanders. These four excavated examples have been consolidated and are now open to the public. The excavations will be published by the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia in a series of volumes entitled Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán. The information related here comes from personal conversations with Dr. William Fash, who participated in the excavations (see also W. Fash 1983b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#985|98]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''57–59.</div>
+[101] Peter Mathews (1975) first identified the “numbered successor” titles as a way of recording lineage successions, an idea that was elaborated by Berthold Riese (1984). We subsequently found these counts are reckoned from a named ancestor who occurs with the notation “first successor” (Scheie 1986b and Grube 1988). In the Group of the Cross at Palenque and on Altar 1 at Naranjo, a complementary succession is reckoned from mythological ancestors who lived beyond the bounds of human history—that is, before this manifestation of creation materialized on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#995|99]]. Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'','' ''18–22; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'', 48–51; Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution'','' ''31–32; Peirats, ''CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''11–6; For an in-depth overview of this topic, see A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''210–11, 250–53, 300–301, 312, 316–17, 323–37, 343–49, 351.</div>
+[102] Recorded on Altar 1, the Rio Amarillo ruler names himself as an ahau of the Copán polity, but lists his lineage as descended from its own founder (Scheie 1987d).
-[[#1005|100]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''337.
+[103] Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) began five days before the summer solstice of 641 and ended on December 6 of the following year. Muan-Chan of Bonampak began the rites for his heir on December 14, 790, and ended them on August 6, 792, with a battle in which he took captives for sacrifice. He memorialized this series of rites in the amazing murals of Temple 1 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986b).
-[[#1015|101]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''98.
+[104] See the chapters “Kingship and the Rites of Accession,” “Bloodletting and the Vision Quest,” and “Kingship and the Maya Cosmos” in The Blood of Kings: Ritual and Dynasty in Maya Art (Scheie and M. Miller 1986) and Stuart (1984a, 1988c) for a full discussion of these rituals and their representations in Maya art.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1025|102]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''144–48, 163; ''Living Anarchism'','' ''66–67. It should be noted that some of the robberies were carried out by self-described individualist anarchist affinity groups.</div>
+[105] Peter Furst (1976) first discussed this bloodletting ritual as a quest for a vision which the Maya interpreted as communication with the supernatural world. Furst associates this bloodletting ritual with similar beliefs in many other societies, and he has been a longtime advocate of the role of shamanism in the institution of rulership from Olmec times on. David Stuart (1984a and 1988c) has added rich detail to our understanding of the complex of imagery and texts associated with bloodletting. Bloodletting has been discussed in the context of both rituals and objects manufactured for use in ritual by Scheie and M. Miller (1986).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1035|103]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 139–45; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''87–89, 100–1, 130–40, 161–64; ''Living Anarchism'','' ''60–70; Evans, ''Revolution and the State'', 7–10, 15–23; Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–225. It has been argued by Christie that the moderate syndicalist anarchists were not in fact anarchists or only paid lip service to anarchism. I have not been convinced by this claim. See Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', vii, 15, 26–28, 59–65, 68–73, 84–87, 93–94, 100–121.</div>
+[106] David Joralemon (1974) provides a clear iconographic discussion of the prismatic- blade bloodletter. Scheie (1984a and n.d.d) describes the epigraphic and iconographic evidence for obsidian as a material from which prismatic-blade bloodletters were made. Freidel (1986a) reviews some of the larger economic implications of the control by governments of obsidian as a prized ritual commodity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1045|104]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''529.</div>
+[107] All Maya communities would have celebrated the great regularities of the Maya calendars: the hotun (five-year) endings within a katun, the katun (twenty-year) endings, New Year’s, the 819-day count, the coming of the rains, important points in the solar year, such as solstices and the zenith passages, and stations in the planetary cycles. But each great city also had its own histories that generated a series of local festivals celebrating the founding of the city, the date associated with its special patron gods, the anniversaries of its great kings and their births, triumphs, and deaths. Thus the system of festivals combined those occasions celebrated by all Maya with a complementary series derived from the individual histories of each dynasty. Both kinds of celebrations appear in the glyphic record.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1055|105]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''23.</div>
+[108] David Stuart has been instrumental in identifying a set of verbs recording rituals of dedication for temples as well as for their plaster and stone sculptures. His date for the dedication of lemple 11 at Copán (September 26, 773) is four years after the dedication of the Reviewing Stand on the south side of the building on March 27, 769. At Palenque, we have about the same time span in the Temple of Inscriptions. The last date in the ongoing history of the interior panels is October 20, 675, some eight years before the death of Pacal on August 31, 683. The 675 date appears to be the last historical date recorded before the tablets were sealed inside a containing wall to protect them during the rest of the construction. Given that the center and back walls must have been standing so the huge panels could be set in them, we deduce that the construction and decoration of the temple took about nine years.
-[[#1065|106]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''23.
+[109] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya rulers in the northern lowlands were explicitly concerned with the well-being of their farming populations precisely because ill treatment encouraged migration, which they could not easily impede (Roys <verbatim>[1962];</verbatim> N. 1 arris <verbatim>[1984]</verbatim> on demographic fluidity). During the Precolumbian era, the periodic abandonment and reoccupation of some centers and the clear evidence of demographic fluctuation at others indicates similar principles in operation. See Freidel (1983).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1075|107]]. Malatesta, ''Café'','' ''107, 149, 155; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''344, 529.</div>
+[110] Analysis of skeletal materials at Tikal by Haviland (1967) suggests that Classic elite populations enjoyed taller stature and generally somewhat greater physical robusticity than the commoners.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1085|108]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''114.</div>
+[111] The public fair is, and was in antiquity, a temporary marketplace established in town squares near the important civic and religious buildings during religious festivals. Such fairs occurred in cycles and were also no doubt occasioned by great historical events in the lives of rulers. (See Freidel [1981c] for a discussion of this economic institution among the Maya.)
-[[#1095|109]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''41.
+[112] See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of visits between elites.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1104|110]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 16. For an overview of the class composition of anarchist and syndicalist movements around the world, see Schmidt and van der Walt, ''Black Flame'','' ''271–91.</div>
+[113] R. L. Roys (1957) summarized descriptions of marketplaces on the north coast of the peninsula.
-[[#1114|111]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''87–88.
+[114] Since the place-notation system of the Maya used only three marks—one, five, and zero—addition and subtraction were simple geometric operations that could be conducted with any handy material laid out on a grid drawn in the dust. To add, the two numbers were laid side by side and then collapsed into a sum. The twenties only needed to be carried up to obtain the answer. Subtraction reversed the process and was, thus, a simple geometric operation, which like addition required no memorization of tables. Multiplication was more difficult, but still possible without tables or much training. The system allowed the illiterate to do simple arithmetic needed for trade and exchange without formal education.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1124|112]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''325.</div>
+[115] Colonial period sources describe verbal contracts, but there is no reason to suppose that contracts, tribute lists, and some form of accounting were not kept in written form, especially since we have just these sorts of documents from the Aztec of Central Mexico. Unfortunately, the writing surface that would have been used for such purposes, bark paper sized with plaster, did not survive in the tropical forest that was home to the Classic Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1134|113]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''443.</div>
+[116] See Landa’s descriptions of life in Yucatán shortly after the conquest (Tozzer 1941) and Roys’s (1943) discussion of Indian life during the Colonial period of Yucatán.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1144|114]]. Turcato, ''Making Sense'','' ''163–68; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''261–67.</div>
+[117] See Freidel (1986a) for a recent discussion of Mesoamerican currencies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1154|115]]. Rocker, ''London Years'','' ''62–63.</div>
+[118] For a discussion of Maya merchant activities and such speculation see Freidel and Scarborough (1982).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1164|116]]. Rocker, ''London Years'', 90.</div>
+[119] “...they traded in everything which there was in that country. They gave credit, lent and paid courteously and without usury. And the greatest number were cultivators and men who apply themselves to harvesting the maize and other grains, which they keep in fine underground places and granaries so as to be able to sell (their crops) at the proper time.” (Tozzer [1941:96], parens original)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1174|117]]. Rocker, ''London Years'', 126–31.</div>
+[120] Such visits by high-ranked nobles who represented high kings are documented at Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras (Scheie and Mathews n.d.) and at least one vessel from Burial 116 of Tikal depicts such a visit by lords from the Usumacinta region who display- gifts before Tikal lords (see W. R. Coe [1967:102] for a drawing of this scene). In fact, the offering of gifts, especially cloth and plates full of various substances, is one of the most commonly represented scenes on Maya pottery.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1184|118]]. J. Mintz, ''Casas Viejas'','' ''14–16, 29–31, 79–80, 83–85.</div>
+[121] Dennis Puleston (1976 and 1977) accepted the central importance of raised-field agriculture to ancient Maya civilization and proceeded with experimental reclamations of ancient canals to see how the system worked. The experiment not only yielded information on the productivity of the system, but demonstrated how the Maya used the animals and landscape associated with it—water lilies, water birds, fish, and caiman—as important components of their cosmic model and their royal symbolism.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1194|119]]. Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'', 34–35,'' ''95–96,'' ''111–13, 205.</div>
+; 3. Cerros: The Coming of Kings
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1204|120]]. John Quail, ''The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists'' (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978),'' ''250–51. Anarchists were able to more effectively organize unemployed people in the United States. See Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'','' ''217–23.</div>
+[122] Some modern visitors are aw ed by the architectural scale and design of Maya ruins. Yet the architectural techniques they used—corbeling and the post-and-lintel system— were primitive even by the standards of the ancient world. The most spectacular exploitations of the corbel systems are found at Palenque and in the use of concrete core construction in some northern lowland kingdoms. The most wonderful technology of the Maya, from our vantage, was their agricultural system. Despite evidence in some instances that the Maya over exploited and allowed the degeneration of their land, generally their success in producing food and commercial crops was nothing short of spectacular, in an age when modern nations are allowing the rapid destruction of the tropical forest belt of the globe, we have much to learn technologically from the Maya who maintained a civilization of millions for over a thousand years in such an environment.
-[[#1214|121]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''81.
+[123] The Maya knew of metals from at least the Early Classic period onward, because their tribal and chiefly neighbors in lower Central America used them. 1 he lowland Maya chose not to use metals, for reasons yet unknown, until very late in their history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1224|122]]. Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 202–3.</div>
+[124] There were no eligible beasts of burden in Mesoamerica at the time of the emergence of farming village life. The largest animals—the tapir, the peccary, the deer, and the large felines—were categorically unsuited either to domestication or service as burden carriers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1234|123]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''56.</div>
+[125] The regional timing of the establishment of large-scale public centers in the Maya lowlands is a matter of continuing debate. Matheny (1986) and Hansen (1984) place the initial construction of the Tigre complex at El Mirador in the second century B.C., while W. R. Coe (1965a) identities major public construction at Tikal somewhat later, in the middle of the first century B.c. The Tikal dating is commensurate with the dating at Cerros in Belize (Freidel and Scarborough 1982). Our position is that while the point dates of radiocarbon samples range over roughly a century, 25 B.c. to 125 B.c. for the earliest decorated buildings in the lowlands (perforce the earliest evidence of the kingship they celebrate), the statistical range of possibility for the radiocarbon assay representing an actual absolute date shows an overlap of all the reported contexts. For example, a date from Structure 34 at El Mirador of 125 B.c. + 90 years and a date from Structure 2A-Sub 4 at Cerros of 50 B.c. + 50 years, have a statistically high probability of being contemporary.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1244|124]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''176.</div>
+[126] We have outlined the technical arguments from iconographic and archaeological evidence for this interpretation of Maya history in a series of papers, principally Freidel and Scheie (1988b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1254|125]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''110–11.</div>
+[127] Cerros (“hills”) is the modern name of this place; its original name was lost long ago.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1263|126]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''332.</div>
+[128] The evidence for sea travel by the people of Cerros is principally in the form of faunal remains of reef and deep-water fish (Carr 1986b). Dugout canoes made from great tree trunks are traditional to the Maya of Belize and are made even today in some parts of the country.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1273|127]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''348. See also Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 62–64.</div>
+[129] The evidence for long-distance trade between Cerros and people to the north along the coast of Yucatán, down into the mountainous regions of the southern highlands, and into the interior of the southern lowlands is derived from analyses of exotic materials which do not normally occur in down-the-line trade between neighbors. The Cerros people had available, for example, distinctive marine shells from the northern coast of the Peninsula (Hamilton n.d.) and their craftspeople were familiar with a wide range of foreign styles, which they used freely in the pottery manufactured at the site (R. Robertson n.d). Additionally, there are numerous examples of exotic materials at the site which must have been traded in from other parts of Belize or from the southern highland region (Garber 1986).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1283|128]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''179.</div>
+[130] A simple public platform of this description is Structure 2A-Sub 4–1<sup>st</sup>, which, like the first true royal temple at Cerros (Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>) was built as part of the final phase of the nucleated village underlying the later ceremonial center (Cliff 1986). Similar platforms preceded the construction of royal temples in the North Acropolis at Tikal in Guatemala during the same time period (W. Coe 1965a).
-[[#1293|129]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''87.
+[131] Clay drums with cutout and applique faces were found as smashed fragments in the deposits of the nucleated village at Cerros. Elements of the iconography include the “cruller” of GUI (a Sun God and the younger of the Ancestral Heroes Twins) and shark teeth, a signal of GI, who characteristically wears a fish barbel and is associated with Xoc, the shark (see the Glossary of Gods). These drums initiate a long tradition of effigy vessels and vessel supports among the lowland Maya (Freidel, Masucci, Jaeger, and Robertson n.d.).
-[[#1303|130]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 41–42; ''Patient Work'','' ''190.
+[132] The reconstruction of vegetal environment and foodstuffs is based on research carried out by Cathy Crane (1986). The fish and game animals have been identified by Carr (1986a and 1986b).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1313|131]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''554.</div>
+[133] The vessels, affectionately termed “beer mugs” by the Cerros crew, are very effectively designed to hold beverages: graspable, narrow at the straight rim, and weighted on the flat base to discourage tipping. They are identified by Robertson as appropriate for liquids and their context is associated with burials and high ritual (R. Robertson 1983).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1323|132]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''390–91, 395.</div>
+[134] Cathy Crane has positively identified cotton at Cerros; the presence of cacao is a more tenuous identification, but there are some macrobotanical remains that look promising.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1333|133]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''393.</div>
+[135] These are, in fact, the jewels of an ahau that were found deposited in a dedicatory cache at the summit of Structure 6B at Cerros (Freidel 1979; Garber 1983; Freidel and Scheie 1988a). Structure 6 was the second royal temple to be built at Cerros, and it was erected while the first, Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>. was still open and in use. The location and design of Structure 6 shows that it was constructed by the successor of the patron of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>. It is hence likely that the jewels found buried in the summit of Structure 6B belonged to the first king of Cerros, patron of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1343|134]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 88–89.</div>
+[136] See Freidel (1979; 1983) and Freidel and Scheie (1988b) for technical discussions of the origins and distribution of the lowland Maya sculptured pyramid.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1353|135]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''75; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 553–55.</div>
+[137] We do not know how the building crafts of the ancient Maya world were divided, but we suspect they did not have architects in the sense of the modern world—that is, specialists who design buildings and are responsible for iconographic programs as well as engineering. More likely, the Maya had specialists, perhaps entire lineages, who were trained in the art of building. Their training, however, would have been less as artists responsible for what the building said, and more as master craftsmen responsible for how the message was executed. We have chosen to use the term “Master Builder” for this specialty, rather than architect, in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, I. M. Pei, or Mies van der Rohe.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1363|136]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''578.</div>
+[138] These activities have the prosaic title of “termination rituals” in our present scholarly reports (Robertson and Freidel 1986), but the practice clearly encompassed both beginnings and endings of major ritual work such as building temples, rebuilding temples, and finally abandoning them. We believe that the vessels broken on such occasions first held the foods of offering and ritual meals, as found among contemporary Maya. The identification of the fruit-tree flowers is based upon palynological analysis in progress by Cathy Crane. A complete anther of a guava flower is a likely prospect in light of the clustering of four preserved grains of this tree in the deposit.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1373|137]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''578.</div>
+[139] Although we did not find the outline under this particular building, this is a known Maya practice in the preparation of superstructures (Smith 1950) and a logical deduction in light of the fact that the building and stairway were built in a single construction effort. We know, therefore, that their finished proportions were determined by the initial work.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1383|138]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 186.</div>
+[140] These sockets for massive posts are more than 3.5 meters deep and 1.2 meters in diameter. If the size of the posts used in modern postholes throughout the Maya area (Wauchope 1938) can be taken as a guide, these temple posts rose 6 to 9 meters above the floor level of the summit temple or superstructure. The walls of the summit temple rose about 2 meters, hence these temple posts rose far above the roof of the temple.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1393|139]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''187. To compare these sections to the previous 1899 version, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''55–56.</div>
+[141] The raising of the great posts constitutes one of the episodes in the Quiche Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985). These posts are called acante, “raised up or stood up tree,” in the rituals of the Yucatec-speaking Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest (Tozzer 1941; Roys 1965). The raising of these posts defined the sacred space within which the shaman communed with the supernatural forces. We have given the technical discussion of this interpretation of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup>’s posts in Freidel and Scheie (1988a).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1403|140]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 472.</div>
+[142] The plan of this temple, while unusual, is not unique. Across the bay from Cerros, there is an Early Classic temple at the community called Santa Rita (D. Chase and A. Chase 1986). The plan of this Early Classic building, constructed a few centuries after Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, is more complex but comparable in principle to the one described here. Maya temples generally featured an inner sanctum where the most intimate features of ritual action took place, as described further in Chapter 7 in the context of Chan-Bahlum’s accession monuments. The distinctive character of the Cerros example is that the path of entry into the inner sanctum corresponds to the path of the sun.
-== {{anchor|Chapter8TheHistoryofSyndic1}} {{anchor|Chapter8TheHistoryofSyndic}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook11}} Chapter 8: The History of Syndicalist Anarchism ==
+[143] These assemblages consist of a fairly constant set of elements. The center ornament was usually made of jade which had been shaped into a thin-walled cylinder with one end flaring out into a flat surface, often carved to resemble a flower. This part, which is called an earflare because of its shape, was carved by drilling, sawing, and abrasion with reeds, string, sand, and water. During the Early Classic period, this main earflare often had a quincunx design with bosses arranged around the central hole at the four corners. The Maya depicted a curling leaf of maize sitting above the earflare and a large counterweight, often made of shell or pearl, hanging below it. Another popular arrangement had a finger-sized cylinder, which was drilled through its long axis, hanging diagonally from the center of the earflare. To hold it out from the face, a thin string, possibly made from deer or cat gut, was threaded through the center drill-hole, through a bead on the end of the cylinder, back through the drill-hole, and finally through the pierced carlobe to a pearl or shell counterweight.
-Syndicalist anarchism advocated the formation of federally structured trade unions that united the working classes into a collective force, were independent of political parties, and engaged in direct action against the ruling classes. This was to be achieved either by forming whole new revolutionary trade unions, or by participating within existing reformist trade unions and transforming them from within. Historically, anarchist authors used a variety of different terms to refer to trade unions, such as ''societies of resistance against capital'', ''resistance societies'', ''workers’ associations'', or simply the ''labor movement''.[[#1GeorgeRichardEsenweinAnar|1]] The term ''syndicalism'' is itself derived from the French word for trade union—''syndicat''—and the phrase ''syndicalisme révolutionnaire'', meaning trade unionism that is revolutionary.[[#2WayneThorpeUneasyFamily|2]] For the sake of simplicity, I shall be using the English term trade union, rather than such historical terms.
+[144] As described by Schele and M. Miller (1986) for Classic period examples, and by Landa (Tozzer 1941) with respect to the carving of sacred wooden images at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Maya artists may well have performed major public work of this kind in altered states of consciousness achieved by fasting, bloodletting, and the use of intoxicants. Once executed, the error in the proportions of the building may have been left in the design as a divine expression to be accepted and accommodated rather than corrected.
-Syndicalist anarchism was a form of mass anarchism, and so argued that anarchists should struggle for immediate reforms via direct action, especially strikes, sabotage, and boycotts. These collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop an organized mass trade union movement with the necessary radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for abolishing capitalism and the state, in favor of an anarchist society. The social revolution would unfold through an insurrectionary general strike, during which the working classes would stop work, occupy their workplaces, expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes, and smash the state. In the course of the social revolution, the federally structured trade unions would evolve, from organizations engaged in economic resistance against the ruling classes into organizations that self-managed the economy, either in part or whole.[[#3MarcelvanderLindenandWay|3]]
+[145] The earliest archaeologically documented inscribed object in the lowlands is a bone bloodletter found in a Late Preclassic period burial at the site of Kichpanhá, a few miles south of Cerros in northern Belize (Gibson, Shaw, and Tinamore 1986).
-Although all syndicalist anarchists generally agreed on the above strategy, they disagreed with one another on two main questions. These were:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Should trade unions be politically neutral, or should they be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means?</div>
+[146] On this building there are also special raised and modeled glyph panels attached to earflare assemblages. Such panels are also found on other Late Preclassic buildings at Cerros, Structures 6B and 29B. Similar panels are further reported or illustrated on Structure N9-56 at Lamanai (Pendergast 1981), Structure 34 at El Mirador (Hansen 1984), and on Structure H-Sub 8 at Uaxactún (Valdes 1988). The principle of glyphically “tagging” earflare assemblages, the central power objects of the entities represented as head masks on such panels, is thus a widespread convention in the Late Preclassic period. So far, only the glyphs “tagging” the earflares on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> have been read, as discussed further on in this chapter.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Are trade unions sufficient in and of themselves to achieve an anarchist society, or do they need to be assisted by a specific anarchist organization?</div>
+[147] This four-petaled flower regularly appears on the cheek of the Sun God in its young human, old human, and cruller-eyed GUI aspects during the entire Classic period.
+[148] In the great creation myth of the highland Quiche Maya, given in their Book of Council, the Popol Vuh (Edmonson 1971; Tedlock 1985), the ancestral Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, apotheosize as the sun and the moon rather than the sun and Venus. Actually, the younger twin could be associated in the Classic period with the moon as well as the sun (Schele and M. Miller 1986:308–309), while the elder twin was the Sun in the first opposition and Venus in the second. It is important to grasp that such multiple natures as jaguar/sun/moon or Venus/Celestial Monster/sun are not exclusive and unchanging, but rather inclusive and dynamic. The Waterlily Jaguar, for example, the quintessential predator in royal warfare, can be associated with both the sun as it manifests the Sun God and with Venus in the Venus-timed war rituals discussed in Chapter 4. These “aspects” constitute statements of momentary affinity and resonance. The fact that some of these connections are remarkably enduring and pervasive in Maya thought does not belie the perpetual necessity of reiteration in ritual to re-create and sustain them. Ultimately, the charismatic supernature of the king is dependent upon a logic which mandates his inclusion in such cosmic categories.
-Three main forms of syndicalist anarchism emerged in response to these two questions: revolutionary syndicalism, syndicalism-plus, and anarcho-syndicalism.[[#4Thelanguageofsyndicalism|4]] In this chapter, I will establish what these positions meant, and why anarchists came to advocate them. This will be achieved through a detailed overview of the history of syndicalist anarchism, from its prehistory in the First International, to the formation of anarcho-syndicalism as an international movement in the early twentieth century. With this context in place, I will explain the main strategies that were generally advocated by syndicalist anarchists in chapter 9.
+[149] One of the creatures especially associated with Venus, as described in the Glossary, is the Celestial Monster. Derived from a crocodilian model, this beastie was long- snouted, like the Cerros creature.
-'''The Prehistory of Syndicalism'''
+[150] Schele (1974:49–50) dubbed this figure the Jester God because of the resemblance of its tri-pointed head to a medieval court jester.
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism, which would come to be known as syndicalism, was first advocated during debates within the First International and Saint-Imier International. At the September 1868 Brussels Congress of the First International, the Belgian delegate and typesetter César De Paepe advocated the formation of ''resistance societies'' that organized strikes to win immediate improvements and revolt against the ruling classes. In order to do so, they had to be “federated with one another—not only at the level of a trade or country, but across different countries and trades.”[[#5CesarDePaepeStrikesUni|5]] In the long term they would aim to achieve “the abolition of the wages system” through “the absorption of capital by labor.”[[#6DePaepeStrikesUnionsa|6]] The Brussels section of the International supported resistance societies “not only from regard to the necessities of the present, but also the future social order . . . we see in these trade unions the embryos of the great workers’ companies which will one day replace the capitalist companies” and “embrace whole industries.”[[#7RaymondWPostgateedDeb|7]] In February 1869, De Paepe expanded upon this point by arguing that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and that its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order. . . the society of resistance is destined to organize labor in the future. . . . Nothing will be more easy, when the moment comes, than to transform the societies of resistance into cooperative workshops, when the workers have agreed to demand the liquidation of the present society.”[[#8CesarDePaepeThePresent|8]]
+[151] The Maya writing system uses special signs called semantic determinatives to specify particular meanings when a value could be in doubt. One of these determinatives is the cloth headband worn by kings. In various manifestations, the headband can have the regular ahau glyph attached, as well as a mirror and, most importantly for our purpose, a Jester God. Whenever this ahau-Jester God headband is present, the glyph, whether it is a human head, a vulture, a rodent, or whatever, reads ahau. To wear this headband in the Classic period is to be an ahau.
-Several months later, the Swiss Courtelary District section of the First International held a general assembly on August 29, 1869, in which a report on strike funds was approved. The report had been written by the engraver Adhémar Schwitzguébel, who would go on to become the corresponding secretary of the anarchist Jura Federation’s Federal Committee.[[#9EckhardtFirstSocialistSch|9]] The report advocated the formation of an international federation of trade unions, with a shared strike fund, on the grounds that they were an effective means to collectively resist the domination of capitalists and win higher wages. At the same time, they were viewed as having “the great advantage of preparing the general organization of the proletariat, of accustoming workers to identify their interests, to practice solidarity and to act in common for the interests of all. In short, they are the basis for the coming organization of society, since workers’ associations will have to do no more than take over the running of industrial and agricultural enterprises.”[[#10AdhemarSchwitzguebelOnR|10]]
+[152] The Headband Twins are the particular manifestation under discussion. Named glyphically as Hun-Ahau and Yax-Balam, this set of twins has one member marked by large body spots and the Jester God headband, while the other sports a cut-shell yax sign on his forehead and jaguar pelt on his chin, arms, and legs.
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism continued to be articulated within the First International at its Basel Congress, held between September 5 and 12, 1869, and attended by, among others, Bakunin and Guillaume. During the morning session of September 11, the delegate Jean-Louis Pindy, who would go onto participate in the Paris Commune and become an anarchist, presented a report that was subsequently passed as a resolution of the congress.[[#11JulianPWArcherTheFir|11]] Pindy, a cabinetmaker and the delegate of the Paris Construction Workers’ Trade Union, proposed that all workers should establish strike funds, organize local trade unions, and then link these local trade unions together at national and international levels. In so doing, workers would create an organizational structure that enabled the exchange of information and coordinated strike action both within a country and between countries. The goal of these trade unions would be to engage in strikes until capitalism had been abolished and replaced by the federation of free producers. As capitalism was abolished, the trade unions would take over the organization of production, and be converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. The federation of workers at the level of the town would form “the commune of the future” just as the federation of workers at the national and international level would form “the workers’ representation of the future” under which “politics” would be replaced by “the associated councils of the various trades and a committee of their respective delegates” administrating and regulating “work relations.”[[#12JeanLouisPindyResolutio|12]] The formation of national and international federations of trade unions was, therefore, not only necessary in order to engage in effective class struggle. It was also an essential component of establishing the social structures through which workers could organize a global socialist economy that “no longer recognizing frontiers, establishes a vast allocation of labor from one end of the world to the other.”[[#13JeanLouisPindyResolutio|13]]
+[153] There are additional details in the iconographic program of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> which confirm this interpretation. The glyph panels “tagging” the earflare assemblages on the eastern side of the building contain the word jwc, meaning “green” and “first.” Here they denote that the sun and Venus of the eastern side are “first,” as they should be at dawn. On the western side of the building, the Venus image on the upper panel is being disgorged from the split representation of the framing sky/snake (in Cholan languages, the words for “sky” and “snake” are homophonous [chan/chan]), signaling that the movement is down as it should be in the setting of the sun with the Eveningstar above it.
-The same idea was advocated by the French bookbinder, collectivist, and trade union organizer Eugène Varlin, who later played a key role in the Paris Commune and was murdered by the French state in May 1871. He argued that working-class social movements “must actively work to prepare the organizational elements of the future society in order to make the work of social transformation that is imposed on the Revolution easier and more certain.”[[#14EugeneVarlinWorkersSoci|14]] He was convinced that trade unions were one of the main forms of working-class self-organization that could do so: “trade societies (resistance, solidarity, union) deserve our encouragement and sympathy, for they are the natural elements of the social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become producer associations; it is they who will be able to operate social tools and organize production.”[[#15EugeneVarlinWorkersSoci|15]]
+[154] The Maya shaman establishes a four-part perimeter of sacred space. Inside of this space he can pass over the threshold to the Otherworld. We detail the manner in which Late Preclassic kings harnessed shamanistic ecstasy to their emerging definitions of royal charisma in a recent professional article (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
-One of the main proponents of revolutionary trade unionism in the First International was Bakunin. In August 1869, he argued that, prior to the social revolution, the main task of the First International should be to “give an essentially ''economic character'' to workers’ agitation in every land; setting as its goal the reduction of working hours and higher wages” through “''the organization of the mass of workers'' and ''the creation of resistance'' [strike] funds.”[[#16MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|16]] In so doing, the First International would, Bakunin predicted, grow into a mass movement that unified and organized millions of workers across Europe, if not the entire world, into trade unions with “the capacity to replace the political world of the state, and the departing bourgeois.”[[#17BakuninSelectedTexts56|17]] In a revolutionary situation, the First International would, due to its extensive experience of collective struggle, be “capable of taking things in hand and capable of giving them a sense of direction that will be really salutary for the people.”[[#18BakuninSelectedTexts56|18]] This included trade unions being converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. In 1871 Bakunin declared that “the organization of the sections of skilled workers, their federations within the International Association, and their representation through the chambers of labor . . . sow the living seed of a new social order which shall replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but also the very facts of the future.”[[#19QuotedinMaxNettlauASho|19]]
+[155] There are Late Preclassic masks wearing the Jester God headdress in Group H at Uaxactiin, a remarkably preserved and recently excavated temple complex in the interior of the lowlands (Valdes 1988).
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism was also embraced by the sections of the First International that would go onto form the anarchist movement. On April 4, 1870, what would become the Jura Federation passed a resolution at the La Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. It recommended to all sections of the First International that they “direct all their activity toward the federative constitution of labor organizations, the sole means of assuring the success of the social revolution. This federation is the true representation of labor, which absolutely must take place outside of the political governments.”[[#20QuotedinWolfgangEckhardt|20]] An almost identical resolution was passed by the Spanish section of the First International at its founding congress in 1870, attended by ninety delegates representing 40,000 members.[[#21EckhardtFirstSocialistSc|21]]
+[156] There are other potential interpretations of these images which we are exploring, including the prospect that the “first” Venus and sun, on the eastern side, represent the ancestors, while the western Venus and sun represent the human king and his heir (Freidel n.d.).
-The first congress of the Saint-Imier International in 1872 declared that trade unions “increase the sense of fraternity and community of interests” among the proletariat, and “give some experience in collective living and prepare for the supreme struggle.”[[#22ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|22]] Given this, “our broad intent is to build solidarity and organization. We regard strikes as a precious means of struggle, but we have no illusions about their economic result. We accept them as a consequence of the antagonism between labor and capital; they have as a necessary consequence that workers should become more and more alive to the abyss that exists between the proletariat and bourgeoisie and that workers’ organizations should be strengthened, and, through ordinary economic struggles, the proletariat should be prepared for the great and final revolutionary struggle.”[[#23ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|23]]
+[157] Reading “between the lines” in this fashion is the key to understanding the people and politics behind the masks and ritual portraits of Maya art. Although such interpretations are subject to dispute and discussion as to their content, there is no doubt that the Maya intended their art and public texts as political propaganda as well as offerings of devotion. The documentation of this strategy is to be found in the texts of royal temples of the Classic period, as described in subsequent chapters.
-The resolutions of the 1877 Verviers Congress expanded upon this point: “Congress, while it recognizes the importance of trades’ organizations and recommends their formation on an international basis, declares that trades’ organizations that have as their goal only the improvement of workers’ situations, either through the reduction of working hours, or by the organization of wage levels, will never accomplish the emancipation of the proletariat, and that trade’s organizations should adopt as their principal goal the abolition of the proletariat” through the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes.[[#24ResolutionsoftheCongress|24]]
+[158] The earliest public architecture at Cerros, Structure 2A-Sub 4—lst, the small and undecorated pyramid next to the dock, has a radiocarbon date of 58 B.C.+ 50 years from a single large piece of carbonized wood from a sealed plaster floor. The abandonment ritual of the latest public building, Structure 29B, provided us with a piece of burnt wood which registered 25 B.c. + 50 years. What must be understood here is that any radiocarbon date is only the best statistical approximation of the age of an object: the + years give a range into which the date may fall. The wider the + range, the higher the probability that the date falls within that range. The beginning and ending dates of public architecture at Cerros fall within the + range of each other, indicating a range of as little as fifty and as much as one hundred years for all of the public architecture of Cerros to have been built. Other archaeological evidence from the site supports this dating. For example, no change in the style or technology of ceramics occurs between the earliest and the latest building (R. Robertson n.d.). And only eight distinct construction episodes, a very low number for most Maya sites, have been detected in the stratigraphic sequence of architecture (Freidel 1986c). Together, this evidence supports the view that Cerros underwent a veritable explosion of public construction in the first century B.c.
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International, this strategy continued to be endorsed by a number of prominent anarchists. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “organizing the laboring masses into trades associations based on the principle of resistance and of attacking the bosses.”[[#25MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|25]] Three years earlier, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists should organize workers to wage war against capitalist exploitation “relentlessly, day by day, by the strike, by agitation, ''by every revolutionary means''” in order to build “a formidable MACHINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL,” that united workers from every city, village, and trade into one union.[[#26PeterKropotkinDirectStru|26]] This process of class struggle would, at the same time, lead to an increasingly large number of workers becoming aware of their distinct class interests, developing a hatred of their oppressors, and acquiring the belief that capitalism must be overthrown.
+[159] Group H at Uaxactun (see Chapter 4) has this same internal court entered through a portal building atop an acropolis.
-For Kropotkin, the primary contemporary example of this strategy in action were Spanish anarchists who “remain within the working class, they struggle with it, for it” and “bring the contribution of their energy to the workers’ organization and work to build up a force that will crush capital, come the day of the revolution: the revolutionary trades associations.”[[#27KropotkinDirectStruggle|27]] In so doing, they were not only furthering the cause of working-class self-emancipation, but were also being “faithful to the anarchist traditions of the International.”[[#28KropotkinDirectStruggle1|28]] The Spanish anarchists to which Kropotkin was referring had founded the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region, on September 24, 1881. The organization, which grew out of the Spanish section of the First International (FRE), was a federation of trade unions that by the end of 1882 was composed of 218 federations, 663 sections, and 57,934 members. Its main paper, ''La Revista Social'', had 20,000 subscribers.[[#29EsenweinAnarchistIdeology|29]]
+[160] Vernon Scarborough has written detailed discussions of the impact of construction activity on the surrounding landscape at Cerros (Scarborough 1983; 1986).
-Spanish anarchists were not the only anarchists to actively participate within the trade union movement during the 1880s. Anarchists in Chicago, including the future Haymarket martyrs Albert Parsons and August Spies, attempted to build revolutionary trade unions and joined the struggle for the eight-hour day as a means to spread anarchist ideas.[[#30PaulAvrichTheHaymarketT|30]] In Turin and Piedmont, Italian anarchists played a key role within trade unions as organizers, delegates or editors of newspapers. This included Galleani, who had yet to adopt his later rejection of trade unions and formal organizations but was already beginning to move in this direction by 1889.[[#31CarlLevyGramsciandtheA|31]] The extent to which anarchists participated in trade union movements during the late nineteenth century only becomes fully apparent when one looks beyond the United States and Europe. Between 1870 and 1900 anarchists were instrumental in the creation of trade unions and the organization of strikes in, at least, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.[[#32AngelJCappellettiAnarch|32]]
+[161] The excavations in temples and pyramids at Cerros were limited in scope compared to those carried out in some Maya centers because the archaeological project had many other research objectives to address as well. Future excavation at the site will no doubt expose more examples of the elaborate stucco work of Late Preclassic royal architecture. Despite the limitations of the record at Cerros, this remains the largest analyzed and reported sample of such decoration from a Maya site. Uaxactun, El Mirador, and Lamanai promise to provide substantive new samples as excavations at those sites are reported and extended.
-'''The Emergence of Revolutionary Syndicalism'''
+[162] These are the jewels in our little story of the traders’ landing at Cerros.
-Within Europe, the strategy of revolutionary trade unionism came to be endorsed by an increasingly large number of anarchists in response to the London dockland strike of 1889, during which a strike by casual laborers grew over two weeks into a mass mobilization of 130,000 workers that shut down the entire dock and disrupted supply chains such that factories in multiple industries were forced to close. The strike, which ended with workers winning a wage increase, was reported on by Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Pouget in several anarchist papers.[[#33ConstanceBantmanFromTra|33]] In response to these events, Malatesta critiqued anarchists who had opposed participating in the trade union movement, and thereby enabled it to be taken over by moderates and parliamentary socialists. He argued that anarchists should instead “get back among the people . . . let us organize as many strikes as we can; let us see to it that the strike becomes a contagion and that, once one erupts, it spreads to ten or a hundred different trades in ten or a hundred towns.”[[#34MalatestaMethodofFreedom|34]]
+[163] The grasping of a mirror is one way of signifying accession to the rulership in the texts of the Classic period (Scheie and J. Miller 1983).
-In parallel to these developments, revolutionary syndicalism as a self-organized working-class movement began to emerge in France, with the creation of the first ''bourse du travail'' in 1887, three years after trade unions had been legalized in the country. The bourses du travail were initially labor exchanges where workers could find employment, but over the next decade morphed into working-class cultural, educational, and mutual aid centers, and then eventually trade unions that collected strike funds and organized strikes. In 1892, the delegates of ten bourses, including Fernand Pelloutier, met at Saint-Etienne and formed a national federation. A few years later, in 1895, Pelloutier, who had since become an anarchist after moving to Paris in 1893, was appointed general secretary of the Federation of Bourses du Travail.[[#35VadimDamierAnarchoSyndic|35]]
+[164] The ancient Maya believed the sacred liquids could be transmuted into other forms, resulting in a group of substances that were transformations of one another. This group included blood, fire, smoke, water (Freidel 1985), but other liquids, gases, and vapors were also related (Scheie and M. Miller 1986).
-It was within this context that a significant number of French speaking anarchists came to publicly advocate anarchist participation within the trade union movement. This included Kropotkin, who wrote several articles for ''La Révolte ''between 1890 and 1891, that advocated revolutionary trade unionism.[[#36KropotkinDirectStruggle3|36]] A few years later, in October 1894, Pouget argued in ''Le Père Peinard'' that trade unions provided anarchists with an excellent space in which to act and make contact with the wider working class that existed beyond anarchist affinity groups and subcultures.[[#37JenningsSyndicalisminFra|37]] A year later in 1895, Pelloutier wrote an article called “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union” for ''Les Temps Nouveaux''. In it, he called on fellow anarchists to join the trade union movement en masse, and thereby spread their ideas among the working classes and instill in them the idea that they should self-manage their own affairs. Previous and ongoing anarchist participation within the trade union movement had, according to Pelloutier, already been successful in teaching workers “the true meaning of anarchism” and expanding their notion of what a trade union could be and become.[[#38PelloutierAnarchismandt|38]]
+[165] Offerings of precious and powerful objects are common in the record of Maya royal temples. These are typically called dedicatory offerings with the connotation that the objects were given to the gods by the devout to sanctify buildings and carved stone monuments, like stelae. William Coe’s detailed monograph on the offerings from one Maya center, Piedras Negras (W. Coe 1959), documents the complex symbolism of these objects. The cache from Stela 7 at Copan and newly found caches from Temple 26 incorporate ancestral heirlooms made of jade. Such objects were principally used in shamanistic rituals performed by kings to materialize sacred beings in this world (Freidel and Scheie 1988a).
+<br>
+<br>The burial of such objects in buildings or carved monuments enhanced their power to function as the pathways of this type of communication and as portals to the Otherworld. Just as the caching of whole objects focused sacred power, the reciprocal act was to smash and burn objects to release sacred power prior to scattering or sprinkling. In an earlier phase of Temple 26, for example, large numbers of valuable greenstone jewelry were shattered in pit fires set on the four sides of a temple to be buried by new construction. This last kind of termination ritual (R. Robertson n.d.) was often carried out in the same general cycle as dedicatory rituals (Walker n.d.).
-Pouget and Pelloutier’s call for anarchist participation within the trade union movement was even echoed by some anarchist groups who had previously been opposed to revolutionary trade unionism, due to their commitment to the iron law of wages. By 1899, ''Le Libertaire'' had begun to change its attitude and published an article by Luis Grandidier that claimed anarchists should “leave this ivory tower in which we are suffocating” and “enter the trade unions.”[[#39QuotedinDavidBerryAHis|39]] The ideas of French syndicalism also influenced anarchists from other countries. In 1900, Goldman visited France as a delegate for the international anarchist congress in Paris, which ended up being banned by the police and occurring in secret. During her visit, she became an advocate of syndicalism after seeing it in action as a social movement, and hearing so many positive things about Pelloutier. In 1913, she claimed that “on my return to America I immediately began to propagate Syndicalist ideas, especially Direct Action and the General Strike.”[[#40EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|40]]
+[166] The technique of using internal buttressing of this kind is common in Maya architectural construction. It was especially valuable when large-scale buildings were being raised rapidly. The Maya masons employed loose angular rubble when they could in such projects, and provided vertical stability by capping off the rubble with small rocks, gravel, and dirt which could then support another layer of large loose boulders. The internal walls provided lateral stability.
-By the time of Pelloutier’s premature death in 1901 at the age of thirty-three, the National Federation of Bourses du Travail was composed of sixty-five bourses to which 782 dues-paying local unions were affiliated. A year later in 1902, the federation merged with the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) to form a new CGT. This resulted in the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a mass movement.[[#41WayneThorpeTheWorkersT|41]] The CGT had, according to its own congress reports, a membership of 100,000 workers at its refounding in 1902. Over the next decade, it rapidly grew to 300,000 members by 1906, and 600,000 by 1912. Of these 600,000 members, an estimated 400,000 paid their dues. The scale of the CGT can only be understood relative to its historical context. In 1912, an estimated 1,027,000 workers belonged to a trade union in France. The CGT therefore contained, if you limit the figure to dues-paying members, almost half of the unionized workers in France.[[#42RidleyRevolutionarySyndic|42]]
+[167] Although the resulting arrangement resulted in ridiculously narrow alleyways between the flanking stairways and the central platform, the plan was intended to emulate a conventional arrangement now known on the thirty-three-meter-high pyramid at Lama- nai, which also dates to the Late Preclassic (Pendergast 1981). This arrangement can also be seen on a pyramid at El Mirador (Matheny 1987). The three-temple arrangement of small temples or temple-platforms is one of the more important architectural traditions of Late Preclassic architecture.
-The CGT was not itself a majority anarchist organization and contained several different factions. This included, but was not limited to, reformist syndicalists; anarchists who also identified as revolutionary syndicalists; anarchists who did not identify as revolutionary syndicalists; and revolutionary syndicalists who did not view themselves as anarchists. Nevertheless, anarchists did exert a significant influence on the organization in the early years of its existence.[[#43DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|43]] In 1901, the anarchists Georges Yvetot and Paul Delesalle were elected as the general secretary and vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail. That same year Pouget, who had been the editor of the CGT’s paper ''La Voix du peuple'' since its creation in 1900, was elected as the vice secretary of the CGT. Pouget would remain in this position until late 1908, when he was briefly imprisoned for his involvement in the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and subsequently, after his release on October 31, ceased to be active within the organization. Delesalle, likewise, resigned from his position as vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail at the CGT’s 1908 congress of Marseilles, and instead focused his energies on running a second-hand bookshop and publishing radical literature. By 1914, despite anarchist influence within the CGT waning, roughly 100,000 members of the CGT supported anarchist positions at congresses through their elected delegates.[[#44JenningsSyndicalisminFra|44]]
+[168] This pattern is best illustrated in the tri-figure panels of Palenque (Scheie 1979), but it is also found at other sites. The famous Stela 31 at Tikal (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982) depicts king Stormy-Sky flanked by portraits of his father, Curl-Snout.
-The ideas of revolutionary syndicalism were formally crystalized by the CGT at its October 1906 congress, where it adopted the Charter of Amiens with 830 votes in favor and only eight opposed. The Charter, which was drafted in a restaurant by Victor Griffuelhes, Louis Niel, André Morizet, Pouget, and Delesalle, emerged out of a compromise between the revolutionary and reformist factions within the CGT.[[#45ThorpeWorkersThemselves|45]] It declared that the CGT sought to unite “all workers conscious of the struggle to be conducted for the disappearance of the system of wage-earning and management” regardless of “their political schooling” in order to win immediate improvements, and eventually overthrow capitalism via expropriation and the general strike.[[#46QuotedinAWZurbruggAna|46]] It affirmed
+[169] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:241–264) and M. Miller and Houston (1987) for further discussion of the Classic Maya ballgame.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the complete liberty of members to participate, outside the union, in whatsoever forms of struggle conform to their political or philosophical views, and limits itself to requesting, in reciprocity, that they should not introduce into the unions opinions held outside it. As for the organization, Congress resolves, that since economic action must be conducted directly against employers for syndicalism to achieve its maximum effect, the organization of the confederation, insofar as they are unions should not concern themselves with parties and sects, which, outside and alongside, may pursue social transformation in complete freedom.[[#47QuotedinZurbruggAnarchis|47]]</div>
+; 4. A War of Conquest:<br> Tikal Against Uaxactun
-The charter’s advocacy of political neutrality was worded in such a manner that revolutionaries and reformists could interpret the text in contradictory ways. For revolutionaries, the charter only committed the CGT to independence from political parties and so parliamentarism. Reformists, in comparison, interpreted the charter as entailing a much stricter commitment to independence from all forms of politics, including anarchism. This had the effect that, when the CGT engaged in propaganda campaigns against militarism and patriotism, reformists viewed this as contradicting its commitment to political neutrality.[[#48JenningsSyndicalisminFra|48]] This disagreement over the meaning of political neutrality went alongside multiple attempts by some reformist factions within the CGT to establish a formal alliance or tie between the trade union and socialist parties.[[#49NicholasPapayanisAlphonse|49]]
+[170] Some of the largest buildings ever constructed in the Precolumbian world were built at El Mirador at least two centuries before the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan. See Ray Matheny’s description of El Mirador and its amazing architecture in the National Geographic Magazine (September 1987).
-Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists advocated political neutrality because they believed that the function of a trade union was to unite workers on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than on the basis of the specific school of political thought they subscribed to. The trade union, to quote Pouget, “groups together those who work against those who live by human exploitation: it brings together interests and not opinions.”[[#50QuotedinJenningsSyndical|50]] He held that the CGT should be open to all workers, whatever their political or religious beliefs, including those amenable to the state. In theory, workers would join the trade union “imbued with the teachings of some (philosophical, political, religious, etc.) school of thought or another” and, through their experiences of engaging in direct action, “have their rough edges knocked off until they are left only with the principles to which they all subscribe: the yearning for improvement and comprehensive emancipation.”[[#51PougetThePartyofLabour|51]]
+[171] The political collapse of El Mirador remains one piece in the puzzle of the Protoclassic period as discussed in Chapter 1. The city was not completely abandoned after its heyday, but the modestly prosperous Classic period inhabitants never again laid claim to dominion in a landscape populated by an increasing number of rival kings.
-This perspective on trade unions was articulated by the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte on August 28 at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. According to Monatte,
+[172] We call this complex Tlaloc-Venus war because of the imagery worn by its practitioners and the regular association of its conduct with important stations of Venus, Jupiter, and conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn (Kelley 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Closs 1979; Lounsbury 1982, Scheie 1984a, n.d.c). The “star-war” nickname comes from the way the Maya recorded the event by using a Venus sign (Kelley argued that it was simply “star”) over the glyph for “earth” or the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom attacked. See Note 45 for further discussion.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">instead of opinion-based syndicalism, which gave rise to anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia and to Christian and social-democratic trade unions in Belgium and Germany, anarchists must provide the option of French-style syndicalism, a neutral—or more precisely, independent—form of syndicalism. Just as there is only one [working] class, so there should be only one single workers’ organization, one single syndicate, for each trade and in each town. Only on this condition can the class struggle—no longer facing the obstacle of arguments between the various schools of schools of thought and rival sects on every point—develop to its fullest extent and have the greatest possible effect.[[#52MaurizioAntonioliedThe|52]]</div>
+[173] A pit with a constricted neck dug into the bedrock by the ancient Maya.
-From this, it followed that revolutionary syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. By this, he meant that revolutionary syndicalist trade unions could, by themselves, abolish class society. They could: (a) unite workers as a class; (b) organize direct action that enabled workers to develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness; (c) launch the social revolution through a general strike; and (d) provide the organizational framework through which workers would take over and self-manage the economy. For Monatte to say that “syndicalism is sufficient unto itself” was merely to say “that the now-mature working class finally intends to be sufficient unto itself and not to entrust its emancipation to anyone other than itself.”[[#53AntonioliedInternational|53]] This position was shared by Pouget who argued in 1908 that “the trade union is . . . sufficient for all purposes” including “the expropriation of capital and the reorganization of society.”[[#54EmilePougetTheBasisof|54]]
+[174] W. R. Coe (1965a and 1965b) has published detailed descriptions of these very early occupations as well as the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods of Tikal.
-Anarchists who advocated revolutionary syndicalism held that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself because trade unions could independently develop a large organized working-class social movement with the necessary radical traits to launch a social revolution and establish an anarchist society. They thought that, in order to achieve this, trade unions had to be politically neutral toward different left-wing factions, including political parties, and therefore not have an explicitly anarchist program. This was because they believed that the goal of a trade union was to unite as many workers as possible on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than because of their shared ideological commitment to, for example, anarchism or Marxism. Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists did write critiques of political parties and parliamentarism, but they did not think that such positions should be the official position of the trade union. The trade union only had to be independent of political parties, rather than being explicitly opposed to them.
+[175] William Coe (1965b: 1406) himself makes this suggestion.
-The CGT was the first self-described revolutionary syndicalist trade union, but it was not the only one. After the CGT’s merger with the National Federation of Bourses du Travail in 1902, numerous trade unions around the world either came to adopt syndicalist programs, or were founded as syndicalist organizations. This occurred due to the combined activity of anarchist syndicalists and syndicalists who did not identify as anarchists, acting as a militant minority during a global wave of working-class revolt against the ruling classes. In Europe and the United States, at least seven syndicalist trade unions emerged between 1905 and 1912: the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS), American IWW, Central Organization of Swedish Workers (SAC), Spanish National Confederation of Labor (CNT), Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), and Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG), which would develop into the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). In England the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) was founded in order to spread syndicalism within existing reformist trade unions.[[#55Forabroadoverviewofthes|55]]
+[176] The empty Late Prcclassic period tomb at the summit of Structure 4 at Cerros also testifies to the practice of burying exalted dead in the early temple complexes, but in actuality the notion of the corpse as a worthy inclusion in the power structure of places does not appear pervasively until the Classic period. Tikal may prove precocious in this ritual activity.
-Anarchists in Latin America were actively involved in the formation of various syndicalist trade unions, including the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA) in 1904, Uruguayan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORU) in 1905, and Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. This was followed by the creation of the Peruvian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORP) and Bolivian International Workers’ Federation in 1912. Anarchists in Cuba organized trade unions and strikes throughout the early 1900s, and this culminated in the founding of the Workers Federation of Havana in 1922, and then the Cuban National Confederation of Labor in 1925. Branches of the IWW were established around the world, including Canada, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A series of trade unions were also founded by anarchists in Asia, including China’s first modern trade unions in 1917 and the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions (Zenkoku Rôdô Kumiai Jiyû Rengôkai) in 1926.[[#56DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|56]]
+[177] W. R. Coe (1965b:15) identifies the main burial (two skeletons were found in the chamber) as a female.
-The fact that multiple trade unions in Europe, North America, and Latin America embraced syndicalism shortly after the appearance of the CGT can make it appear that they were established simply due to revolutionaries hearing of and deciding to copy the French example. This narrative ignores the fact that they were created after an extended period of anarchists, and other socialists, actively participating within trade union movements. In the United States, for example, Italian anarchists helped organize strikes and founded local trade unions during the 1890s and early 1900s. After the founding of the IWW in 1905, which anarchists participated in, these anarchist-led trade unions decided to affiliate with the IWW and form sections, such as the IWW Silk Workers’ Union Local 152. Italian anarchists within the IWW then continued to act as a militant minority and push the class struggle forward. This included Local 152, which was the main organizing force behind the IWW’s 1913 strike among silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey. This is not to say that the Italian anarchists were not influenced by French syndicalism at all. Italian anarchist papers, including ''La Questione Sociale'', published translations of French syndicalist texts prior to the founding of the IWW. The actions of Italian anarchists cannot, however, be entirely reduced to this influence.[[#57KenyonZimmerImmigrantsAg|57]]
+[178] See W. R. Coe (1965a:15–17 and 1965b: 1410–1412) for full descriptions of this tombs and its contents. Coggins (1976:54–68) discusses the stylistic affinities of the tomb.
-This point only becomes more apparent when examining the history of syndicalism in Latin America. In Argentina, anarchists organized trade unions and strikes from 1887 onward. This included Spanish and Italian immigrants who had previous experiences of participating in anarchist-led trade unions, such as Errico Malatesta, Pietro Gori, Antonio Pellicer Paraire, Gregorio Inglán Lafarga, and José Prat. The participation of anarchists and state socialists in the labor movement led to the founding of the Argentine Workers’ Federation (FOA) in 1901. After a series of conflicts between anarchist and state socialist workers within the trade union, the anarchist wing emerged as the majority, and the state socialists left the organization in June 1902. That year, the FOA organized a series of strikes that, in November, escalated into the first general strike in Argentina’s history. In 1904, the FOA was renamed the FORA. The FORA then explicitly committed itself to anarchist communism in 1905. In Latin America it was the FORA, rather than just the French CGT, which served as a key source of inspiration for how to organize a revolutionary trade union.[[#58CappellettiAnarchisminLa|58]]
+[179] The archaeological record is rapidly changing with respect to the early public depictions of Maya kings. Richard Hansen (1989) reports the presence of carved stone stelae at Nakbe, a satellite of El Mirador, which carry the same kind of elaborate scroll work found here. Because these early representations often depict the individual as masked, their identification as historical people is somewhat problematic.
-In addition, French syndicalist theory repeated ideas that had previously been articulated and implemented by anarchists in multiple countries over several decades. In Spain, where anarchists had organized within trade unions since the 1870s, the anarchist journal ''Natura'' responded to the translation of a pamphlet on syndicalism by Pouget in 1904 by claiming it covered topics “well known here” and showed that “the spirit of free syndicalism, common in Spain, is making strides in France.”[[#59QuotedinAngelSmithAnarc|59]] Anselmo Lorenzo, who translated pamphlets by Pouget and Yvetot, held that the French syndicalists had “returned to us, amplified, corrected and perfectly systematized, ideas with which the Spanish anarchists inspired the French.”[[#60QuotedinASmithAnarchis|60]]
+[180] See XV. R. Coe (1965b:21) and Coggins (1976:79–83) for detailed descriptions of this tomb and its contents.
-The Spanish anarchists were not unique in this respect. During this period, many anarchists looked upon the theory and practice of revolutionary syndicalism as a direct continuation of collectivism within the First International. Pouget himself wrote that the CGT emanated from and was the “historical continuation” of “the International Working Men’s Association” and “the federalists or autonomists” within it who opposed the conquest of state power.[[#61PougetThePartyofLabour|61]] In 1907, Malatesta remarked, during his speech at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, that what some syndicalists considered to be a new path had already been “established and followed within the international” by “the first anarchists.”[[#62AntonioliedInternationa|62]] That same year, Kropotkin wrote in the preface to a pamphlet on syndicalism by the Georgian anarchist Georgi Gogeliia that “the current opinions of the French syndicalists are organically linked with the early ideas formed by the left wing of the International.”[[#63QuotedinNettlauShortHis|63]] The connection between revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism was, in addition to this, understood by at least some Marxists at the time. In 1909, Karl Kautsky, who was one of the most influential Marxists within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, wrote that “syndicalism” was “the latest variety of anarchism” and that “the syndicalism of the Romance countries” was committed to “anti-parliamentarism” due to its “anarchistic origin.”[[#64KarlKautskyRoadtoPower|64]]
+[181] The mask is about the same size relative to a human body as other pectorals known archaeologically (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:81, Pl. 19) and in Maya depictions of rulers. Most telling are the five holes drilled in the lower edge to suspend the cylinder and bead arrays normally depicted with such pectorals.
-Despite the connection between the politics of revolutionary syndicalism and the collectivists of the First International, a growing number of syndicalist anarchists came to believe that the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT was not sufficient to achieve a social revolution that would abolish class society and build an anarchist society. These critics came to embrace either syndicalism-plus or anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchists who advocated syndicalism-plus agreed with revolutionary syndicalists that trade unions should be politically neutral but explicitly rejected the idea that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. They held that anarchists had to both actively participate within the trade union movement and at the same time maintain an independent existence by organizing outside trade unions within specific anarchist organizations. For proponents of syndicalism-plus, these specific anarchist organizations were essential for spreading anarchist values, theory, and practices among the working classes both in and outside of trade unions. They argued, in short, that revolutionaries should create a syndicalist trade union plus a specific anarchist organization. The details of this position will be discussed in chapter 10 as part of my overview of organizational dualism.
+[182] This three-pointed symbol of ahau, initially a geometric element, was worn as the central diadem of a characteristic headband with three jewels (viewed from the front). The three-jewel crown is seen on the foreheads of the upper masks of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros with the geometric forms as described in Chapter 3. On the stucco masks of gods in Group H at Uaxactún (Valdes 1987), the three-jewel crown appears with snarling humanoid faces in the personified form that would become the Jester God of Classic period imagery.
-Anarcho-syndicalists, unlike proponents of revolutionary syndicalism and syndicalism-plus, believed that trade unions should not be politically neutral, and had to instead be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. This typically took the form of trade unions advocating an anarchist society as their end goal, and opposing state socialist strategies and political parties within the union’s constitution, declaration of principles, or congress resolutions. Some anarcho-syndicalists argued that specific anarchist organizations should be formed in parallel with anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, while others opposed it.
+[183] William Haviland (1967:322–323) notes that around A.D. 1, a difference in average height could be seen between those people buried in lavish tombs and the rest of the population at Tikal. This difference continued to grow during the Early Classic period marking what Haviland sees as the development of a ruling elite who had consistent access to better nutrition.
-'''Anarcho-Syndicalism'''
+[184] Christopher Jones (n.d.) has associated the construction phases detected in the North Acropolis, Great Plaza, and East Plaza with the dynastic history of Tikal as recovered from the inscriptions.
-The phrase “anarcho-syndicalist,” like many left-wing terms, began life as an insult. The earliest known usage of the term occurred in 1907, when some French state socialists used it as a pejorative against revolutionary syndicalists who advocated the independence of trade unions from political parties.[[#65WayneThorpeUneasyFamily|65]] During this same period, anarchists in Argentina and Russia, who do not appear to have been aware of one another’s ideas, came to argue that trade unions should be committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This position was not initially referred to as “anarcho-syndicalism.” On August 26, 1905, the FORA explicitly committed itself to an anarchist program at its fifth congress, which was attended by delegates representing ninety-eight trade unions. It was agreed that “the Fifth Congress of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Argentina consistent with the philosophical principles that have provided the ''raison d’être'' of the organization of workers’ federations declares: We advise and recommend to all our followers the broadest possible study and propaganda with the aim of instilling in workers the economic and philosophical principles of anarchist-communism. This education, not content with achieving the eight-hour day, will bring total emancipation and, consequently, the social evolution we pursue.”[[#66QuotedinCappellettiAnarc|66]]
+[185] Chris Jones (n.d.) also speculates that the eastern and western causeways were built at this time as “formalizations of the old entrance trails into the site center.”
-Independently, anarchists in Russia also came to advocate the same approach. A notable example is the South Russian Group of Syndicalist Anarchists, whose membership included factory workers, sailors, dockworkers, bakers, and tailors. Yakob Isaevich Kirillovsky, who was the group’s main theorist and wrote under the pen name Daniil Novomirsky, advocated what would later be called anarcho-syndicalism in his 1907 book ''The Programme of Syndicalist Anarchism''.[[#67AlexandreSkirdaFacingthe|67]] He argued that anarchists should participate in the revolutionary trade union movement in order to “make that movement anarchist,” advocating the formation of “anarchist revolutionary syndicates which are bent on bringing syndicalist anarchism to pass.”[[#68QuotedinSkirdaFacingthe|68]] It is not a coincidence that, in August 1907, the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist Monatte contrasted the politically “neutral” trade unions he advocated with “anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia.”[[#69AntonioliedInternationa|69]]
+[186] Chris Jones (n.d.) suggested an association between these massive building projects and the ruler in this burial.
-Anarcho-syndicalism continued to be advocated by anarchists a decade later in the Russian revolution. On June 4, 1917, the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda adopted a founding declaration of principles that proclaimed that the social revolution had to be “anti-statist in its method of struggle, Syndicalist in its economic content and federalist in its political tasks,” with “the Anarcho-Communist ideal” as its goal.[[#70GolosTrudaDeclarationof|70]] The meaning of Russian “anarcho-syndicalism” can also be seen in ''The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists'' (1926), which was written by Russian and Ukrainian anarchists who had fled to Germany and then France in order to escape being killed or imprisoned by the Bolshevik government. The'' Platform'' carefully distinguishes between “revolutionary syndicalism,” which exists “solely as a trades movement of the toilers possessed of no specific social and political theory,” and “Anarcho-syndicalism,” which advocates “the creation of anarchist-type unions.”[[#71TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|71]]
+[187] One of the basic historical problems facing Mayanists is the relatively great size of Peten centers and communities of the Late Preclassic period compared to other parts of the lowlands. One explanation would hold that El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún among other centers had early special relationships with those kingdoms of the southern mountains and Pacific slopes regions that show precocious complexity and which supplied the lowlands with strategic commodities (Sharer 1988). We agree that such special relationships are a possibility and that commerce would have attracted more farmers to the region from elsewhere in the lowlands. At the same time, the real potential of the swampy interior for ordinary farmers lies less in its proximity to the highlands than in the development of intensive agriculture based upon effective water management. The great Late Preclassic public works of El Mirador, Tikal, and Uaxactún suggest to us that these governments attracted and commanded labor for many other overtly practical projects, particularly raised-field agricultural plots. Intensive agriculture, of course, would not only guarantee the prosperity of commoners. It would also generate the surplus of commodities necessary to sustain a flourishing trade with the highlands. This “agricultural attraction” hypothesis, however, points to the great antecedent civilization in Mesoamerica’s swampy lowlands: the Olmec of the Gulf Coast. We anticipate the future discovery of more direct relationships between the lowland Olmec of such centers as La Venta and the Middle Preclassic pioneers who first farmed the swamps of Petén.
-The term “anarcho-syndicalist” did not immediately catch on and spread outside the Russian anarchist movement. Alexander Schapiro, who had been active within the anarcho-syndicalist movement during the Russian revolution, claimed years later that “when the Russian anarchists nearly a half a century ago pioneered the hoisting of the anarcho-syndicalist colors, the word was rather coldly received by the anarchist movement.”[[#72AlexanderSchapiroIntrodu|72]] Anarchists instead continued to refer to their ideas as revolutionary syndicalism, while advocating what Russian anarchists called anarcho-syndicalism.
+[188] This famous building was reported by Oliver and Edith Ricketson (1937) as part of their work for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
-This can be seen in the resolutions of the 1913 International Syndicalist Congress in London, which was organized in order to establish a revolutionary alternative to the state socialist Second International and the reformist International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centers (ISNTUC). It was attended by delegates representing the major syndicalist trade unions in Europe, including the FVdG, USI, NAS, SAC, ISEL, and the Catalonian Regional Confederation of the CNT. Only a few French trade union sections affiliated with the CGT attended. This was because the CGT supported participating in the much larger ISNTUC in order to radicalize it from within. The congress was not a strictly European affair, and was also attended by delegates representing the COB, the explicitly anarchist FORA, the politically neutral Regional Workers’ Confederation of Argentina, and the Havana Union of Café Employees. According to Schapiro, the thirty-three delegates of the London Congress represented in total roughly sixty local, regional, and national trade unions that had a collective membership of 250,000 members.[[#73ThorpeWorkersThemselves|73]]
+[189] In 1985, Juan Antonio Valdes (1988) began excavations of Group H as part of the Programa de Patrón de Asentamiento. Trenches excavated that year into the platform yielded only Mamón and Chicane! ceramics, dating all interior construction phases to the Preclassic period. In total, he found seven construction phases including the most extraordinary and complete example of Late Preclassic masked architecture now known.
-Despite the congress featuring a great deal of personal animosity and conflict between certain delegates, it nonetheless succeeded in passing a declaration of principles and establishing an International Syndicalist Information Bureau based in Amsterdam. The declaration of principles broke with the CGT’s Charter of Amiens and its commitment to political neutrality by endorsing a number of anarchist positions, including the abolition of the state and an opposition to state socialist strategies. It claimed that
+[190] Freidel has discussed the comparative iconography of Structures 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and E-VII-Sub, suggesting that both display the Sun cycle surmounted by Venus (Freidel 1979; 1981a).
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">this Congress, recognizing that the working class of every country suffers from capitalist slavery and State oppression, declares for the class struggle and international solidarity, and for the organization of the workers into autonomous industrial Unions on a basis of free association. Strives for the immediate uplifting of the material and intellectual interests of the working class, and for the overthrow of the capitalist system and the State. . . . Recognizes that, internationally, Trade Unions will only succeed when they cease to be divided by political and religious differences; declares that their fight is an economic fight, meaning thereby that they do not intend to reach their aim by trusting their cause to governing bodies or their members, but by using Direct Action, by workers themselves relying on the strength of their economic organizations. . . . Congress appeals to the workers of all countries to organize into autonomous industrial unions, and to unite themselves on the basis of international solidarity, in order finally to obtain their emancipation from capitalism and the State.[[#74TheLondonDeclaration191|74]]</div>
+[191] The meanings applied to particular buildings were by no means mutually exclusive. Witz is a general term meaning “mountain,” which was applied in glyphic and symbolic form to Maya buildings to define them as the living mountain. In principle, all Maya pyramids were Witz Monsters. On some buildings, such as Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> or Structure E-VII-Sub, the animus of the mountain itself is a relatively minor component of the overall decoration, specifically given in the lowermost frontal masks on those buildings from which the larger and more important sun masks emerge. On other buildings, such as the one discussed here, the Witz aspect is central. Still other buildings, as we shall see at Palenque and Copan, emphasize the World Tree which grows from the heart of the mountain. These are not different messages, but aspects of a single unitary vision. The aesthetics of Maya ritual performance encourage such creative and diverse expression of nuance.
-From 1919 onward, multiple syndicalist trade unions moved in an increasingly anarcho-syndicalist direction. The idea that it was necessary to commit trade unions to an explicitly anarchist program largely gained popularity in reaction to a wider international context. The politically neutral CGT had, in contrast to the majority of the anarchist movement, recently abandoned its commitment to working-class internationalism and collaborated with the French state in World War I. Around the same time, a one-party Bolshevik dictatorship was established during the 1917 Russian revolution, which proceeded to dismantle organs of workers’ control and violently repress other forms of socialism—including anarchism—in order to maintain a system of minority rule. This created a situation in which many anarchists felt compelled to ensure that trade unions were opposed to state socialist strategies, and were not taken over by Bolshevik supporters.[[#75DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|75]]
+[192] Because the specific signal of the Witz monster is his crenelated forehead, as seen on the lower Monster, we have to be cautious in identifying the upper Monster as another Witz, for the top of the mask is destroyed. Nevertheless, the rest of the mask, including the blunt snout surmounted by a human nose, ‘ breath ’ scrolls flanking the gaping mouth, and the eye panels, comprise a virtual replication of the lower, complete mask. When the Late Preclassic architects intend a primary contrast in meaning between masks at different vertical points in a mask stack, as on Structures 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> and E-VH-Sub, they usually distinguished them by using different muzzle forms and other features. Hence it is likely that the upper mask here replicates the primary meaning of the lower mask.
-Although the CNT had been founded in 1910, it was not originally committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This began to change in late 1918, when the National Conference of Anarchist Groups called on anarchists in Spain to actively participate in the CNT and take on positions of responsibility within the trade union, such as delegates within committees.[[#76JuanGomezCasasAnarchists|76]] The CNT passed a resolution at its December 1919 Second Congress, held at the La Comedia Theater in Madrid, that declared that the CNT was “a staunch advocate of the principles of the First International as upheld by Bakunin.”[[#77QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|77]] A number of key delegates, including the organization’s national committee, went further and signed a declaration of principles that was unanimously approved by the congress:
+[193] All the other buildings in the group have a single room that was entered from a door on the court side of the building. Sub-10 has a door on both the inner and outer sides with flanking plaster masks on both sides of the substructural platform. One entered the group by mounting a stairway rising up the platform from the plaza to the west of Structure H-X, which was a mini-acropolis flanked by a north and south building. Once atop Structure H-X, one could walk to either side of Sub-10, but the main processional entrance was up its short western stair, through the building, and down the east stairs. The use of a building as a gateway into an acropolis is also found on Late Preclassic Structure 6 at Cerros.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Bearing in mind that the tendency most strongly manifested in the bosom of workers’ organizations in every country is the one aiming at the complete and absolute moral, economic and political liberation of mankind, and considering that this goal cannot be attained until such time as the land, means of production and exchange have been socialized and the overweening power of the state has vanished, the undersigned delegates suggest that, in accordance with the essential postulates of the First International, it declares the desired end of the CNT to be anarchist communism.[[#78QuotedinPeiratsTheCNTi|78]]</div>
+[194] The Late Preclassic architectural jaguar mask varies from the strikingly naturalistic animal depictions of Structure 29 at Cerros, to the blunt-snouted snarling zoomorphic image of the sun on Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, to the anthropomorphic version found here in which the fangs are reduced to residual incurving elements within the mouth panel. What began as a broad incisor-tooth bar under the square snout on the sun jaguar of Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> is here reduced to the single projecting tooth which will be characteristic of divinity and the Ancestors in the Classic period. This anthropomorphic jaguar, however, still carries the squint eyes and bifurcated eyebrows of the 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> version. On Structure 29 at Cerros, the appearance of this humanoid ahau is enhanced by its physical emergence from a naturalistic jaguar head. At Tikal, Early Classic Temple 5D-23-2<sup>nd</sup> has a comparable humanoid ahau mask emerging from a jaguar head. In this case, the jaguar carries the mat symbol in its mouth (A. Miller 1986: Fig. 9). The particular ahau masks on Temple H-Sub-10 at Uaxactun are framed below by enormous knots, signaling that they are in fact giant replicas of the girdle heads worn on the belt of the king. Scheie and J. Miller (1983) have discussed these ahau pop and balain pop (“king/mat” and “jaguar/mat”) images of kingship.
-That same month, the FVdG transformed itself into the FAUD at its Twelfth Congress, attended by 109 delegates representing over 110,000 members. As part of this transformation, the FAUD asked Rocker, recently released from the British internment camp where he had been imprisoned for opposing World War I, to write a new declaration of principles for the organization. Rocker’s speech on the principles of syndicalism, which was passed by the congress with minor changes, contained what would become the defining features of anarcho-syndicalism.[[#79ThorpeWorkersThemselves|79]] Although Rocker presented himself as just describing what syndicalists believe, he was in fact articulating a specific understanding of syndicalism that was not shared by everybody who used the label.
+[195] The full extent of Late Preclassic construction is not known in either case, and massive constructions at Tikal likely hide very substantial public monuments of this period (Culbert 1977).
-According to Rocker the aim of syndicalism is the creation of “free, i.e. stateless, communism, which finds its expression in the motto ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’”[[#80RockerDeclarationofthe|80]] He not only claimed that syndicalists should aim for an anarchist society, but also that they should use anarchist means to get there. He described syndicalists as advocates of revolutionary trade unionism, direct action, and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This went alongside a rejection of trying to build socialism through parliamentarism, the conquest of state power, and the nationalization of the economy. These anarchist strategies were explicitly grounded by Rocker in the unity of means and ends. He wrote, “syndicalists are firmly grounded in direct action and support all endeavors and struggles of the people that do not conflict with their goals – the abolition of economic monopolies and of the tyranny of the state.”[[#81RockerDeclarationofthe|81]]
+[196] Recent excavations at the site of Calakmul in southern Campeche suggest that it was a kingdom with a substantial Late Preclassic and Early Classic occupation. David Stuart (personal conversations, 1989) reminded us that the pyramids of El Mirador are visible from the summits of Calakmul’s largest buildings. That great kingdom was very probably a significant player in the demise of El Mirador, and as we shall see in the next chapter, a vigorous rival of Tikal and Uaxactun for dominance of the central Maya region.
-The final shift toward the theory of anarcho-syndicalism as an idea, but not yet as a label, occurred with the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), at an illegal congress held in Berlin between December 25, 1922, and January 2, 1923. The congress was attended by over thirty delegates representing an estimated 1.5 to 2 million workers within various trade unions around the world. This included the FAUD, SAC, FORA-V, USI, and NAS as well as the Mexican General Confederation of Workers (CGT-M), Norwegian Syndicalist Federation (NSF), Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS) and Danish Syndicalist Propaganda Association. The delegates representing the CNT were arrested in Paris while traveling to Berlin, and so were unable to attend. The Portuguese General Confederation of Labor (CGT-P) sent a written endorsement. The delegates representing the Chilean Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-C) and FORU arrived too late to participate in the congress.[[#82Foranoverviewofthecongr|82]]
+[197] The name glyph in Early Classic texts (Fig. 4:10) consists of yax (“first” or “blue-green”), a bamboo square lashed at the corners with rope, and the head of a fish. Lounsbury and Coe (1968) suggested a reading of moch for the “cage” portion of the glyph, and Thompson (1944) proposed a reading of xoc for the mythological fish head in this name. In some examples, these two signs are preceded by yax, perhaps giving Yax- Moch-Xoc as the full name. It is interesting that this moch-xoc glyph appears in the name of Great-Jaguar-Paw on Stela 39, although that ruler is listed as the ninth successor, rather than the founder.
-The congress adopted a declaration of ten principles of “revolutionary syndicalism,” which had been agreed upon at a previous conference in June and were written by Rocker. The principles, which Rocker had based on his earlier speech in 1919 at the founding congress of the FAUD, committed the IWMA to an anarcho-syndicalist program in all but name.[[#83GarnerGoalsandMeans126|83]] This occurred as part of syndicalist anarchists formally breaking with the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), which was affiliated with the Bolshevik-led Communist Third International, after the congresses of the RILU and Comintern declared themselves in favor of core state-socialist tenets that syndicalist anarchists could not subscribe to. Those tenets included parliamentarism, the seizure of state power by a Communist Party, joining reformist unions, centralization, and the subordination of trade unions to Communist parties.[[#84ThorpeWorkersThemselves|84]]
+[198] Peter Mathews (1985a:31) first proposed this calculation, which Jones (n.d.) subsequently supported by showing that the 349 tuns between the accessions of the eleventh and twenty-ninth successors divides into an average reign of 19.3 tuns. The kings who ruled between 375 and 455 were the ninth, tenth, and eleventh successors, with the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, acceding in 426. Giving an average reign of one katun each to the ten rulers who preceded him places the founding date of the lineage somewhere between 8.9.0.0.0 (A.D. 219) and 8.10.0.0.0 (A.D. 238). These calculations fit well with the known archaeological history of likal and with the appearance of historical monuments and portable objects inscribed with historical information dated between A.D. 120 and A.D. 200 (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82–83, 199).
-The IWMA’s declaration of principles were, unlike those of the RILU and Comintern, explicitly in favor of the anarchist goal of “free communism” and the establishment of “economic communes and administrative organs run by the workers in the fields and factories, forming a system of free councils without subordination to any authority or political party.”[[#85IWADeclarationofthePri|85]] This goal was to be achieved through anarchist means: the activity of workers themselves, direct action, the general strike, and freely federated, bottom-up organizational structures. The state socialist strategies of parliamentary activity and conquering political power were explicitly rejected because “no form of statism, even the so-called ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ can ever be an instrument for human liberation . . . on the contrary, it will always be the creator of new monopolies and new privileges.”[[#86IWADeclarationofthePri|86]] The “defense of the revolution” would “be the task of the masses themselves and their economic organizations, and not of a particular military body, or any other organization, outside of the economic associations.”[[#87IWADeclarationofthePri|87]]
+[199] Chris Jones (n.d.) speculates that Stela 36 is even earlier than Stela 29. Found in a plaza at the end of the airfield at Tikal about 3.5 kilometers from the North Acropolis (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:76), this stela may depict one of the unknown rulers between the founder and the ninth successor. The location of this very early monument away from Tikal’s center is curious in any case.
-After its founding congress, a total of thirty trade unions affiliated with the IWMA. Of these, fifteen were from Europe, fourteen were from Latin America, and one was from Asia. Within Europe, this included the FAUD, USI, SAC, NSF, CNT, and CGT-P. They were joined by the Dutch Syndicalist Federation (NSV), which split from the NAS in 1923, and the French Revolutionary Syndicalist General Confederation of Labor (CGTSR), which split from the United General Confederation of Labor in 1926. Other European sections included the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalist Minority; Bulgarian Federation of Autonomous Unions; Polish Trade Union Opposition, Romanian anarcho-syndicalist propaganda organization; and anarcho-syndicalist groups in Austria, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland. In Latin America, the FORA-V, CGT-M, IWW-C, and FORU affiliated in 1923–4. This was followed by the affiliation of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Paraguay (FORP), and various workers’ federations in Brazil, including those based in Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo.[[#88Thorpemistakenlyclaimstha|88]] Several propaganda groups or local unions in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Costa Rica, and El Salvador also affiliated. The American IWW did not affiliate with the IWMA, despite multiple requests to do so, and the support of various sections, including the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.[[#89ThorpeWorkersThemselves|89]]
+[200] Mathews (1985a:44) associates this scroll-jaguar image with another scroll-ahau- jaguar, a glyph at C5 on Stela 31 that he suggests is the name of a ruler. Unfortunately the date associated with this character fell in the destroyed section of Stela 31, so that we are not able to identify this personage as the same ahau portrayed on Stela 29 or as a different one because royal names could be reused in the Maya culture, as in the kingdoms of Western Europe.
-The one trade union in Asia that affiliated with the IWMA was the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions. It had, according to Rocker, “entered into formal alliance with the IWMA” and “held connections with the Bureau of the IWMA in Berlin.”[[#90RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|90]] The IWMA also maintained contact with anarchist groups in China and India. The founding December 1922 Berlin congress of the IWMA had itself been attended by a group of Indian revolutionaries, including M.P.T. Acharya. Having been persuaded of the truth of anarchism, they set up a committee to send anarcho-syndicalist literature into India. The British empire responded by banning the importation of IWMA literature into the country.[[#91OleBirkLaursenAnarchis|91]]
+[201] The main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph is a bundle of strands bound together by a horizontal band tied in a knot. The anthropomorphic version of this bundle glyph is a Roman-nosed head with a twisted rope or jaguar tail hanging in front of the ear. The kings on Stela 29 and other later monuments wore headdresses with a twisted rope or jaguar tail in the same position as a way of marking themselves as the living embodiment of the Emblem Glyph and thus of the kingdom. This same head substitutes for an ahau glyph half-covered with a jaguar pelt, which Scheie (1985a) read balan-ahau or “hidden lord” in an earlier study of the substitution patters of these glyphs.
+<br>
+<br>In October, 1989, Stephen Houston and David Stuart informed us they had read the same glyph not as balan-ahau but as way, the word for “sorcerer” and “spirit (or animal) companion.” Nikolai Grube sent a letter to us at almost exactly the same time detailing his own reading of this glyph and its head variant. All three suggested to us that the kings on Stela 29 and 31 are depicted in their their roles as “sorcerers” and one who can transform into their animal companions in the Otherworld. We accept their observations and further suggest that when this way head appears in the position of an Emblem Glyph on the lintels of Temple 4 that it refers to the king as the ch’ul way, “the holy shaman.”
-It was only after the founding of the IWMA that anarchists within Europe began to call themselves anarcho-syndicalists on a significant scale. This shift in language can be seen in the fact that, in 1925, Malatesta felt the need to critique what he called “Anarcho-Syndicalists” within the periodical ''Pensiero e Volontà''.[[#92MalatestaMethodofFreedom|92]] In September 1927, Fabbri distinguished between “a labor organization open to all workers, and thereby having no particular ideological program” and “the anarcho-syndicalists in Germany and Russia” who advocate a “labor organization which has an anarchist program, tactics and ideology.”[[#93LuigiFabbriAboutaProje|93]] A year later, the French anarchist Sébastien Faure wrote a text advocating a synthesis of the different forms of anarchism, and included “anarcho-syndicalism” as one of the three main “anarchist currents.”[[#94SebastienFaureTheAnarch|94]] Valeriano Orobón Fernández, who worked within the secretariat of the IWMA from 1926 to 1931, wrote a letter to Ángel Pestaña on August 9, 1930, claiming:
+[202] The floating figure on Stela 29 is not named, but we can reconstruct its function from other representations. At Tikal there are two kinds of floating figures: gods materialized through bloodletting, as on Stela 4 and Stela 22, and ancestors recalled by the same rite. This latter type of image is specifically named on Stela 31 as the father of the protagonist Stormy-Sky. Since the floating figure on Stela 29 is patently human, we presume he is the ancestor from whom Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar received the throne.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The evolution of politics following the war has spelt the end of the syndical neutrality of the Amiens Charter. In the whole world there is not a syndicalist organization existing today that does not practice politics, either directly or as an appendage of a political party. The CNT brought itself up to date with this international trend, adopting at the congress at La Comedia [Madrid 1919] an ideological platform, and, at the Zaragoza conference, a political platform. The CNT is therefore a complete organization. Whereas pure syndicalism is not “sufficient in itself,” anarcho-syndicalism clearly is.[[#95QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|95]]</div>
+[203] Scheie and M. Miller (1986:121) called the Leiden Palenque ruler Balam-Ahau- Chaan, while Mathews (1985a:44) called this ruler “Moon-Zero-Bird,” based on the occurrence of his name glyph on Stela 31 at D6-C7 and on the Leiden Plaque at A10. Fahsen (1988b) followed Mathews in the name usage and identified a new occurrence of his name on Altar 13 at Tikal.
-It is important to note that this shift in language did not occur everywhere at once. In France, the CGTSR was founded in 1926 after a series of splits within the CGT. Its founding declaration of principles, the Lyon Charter, explicitly committed the trade union to opposition to political parties. Despite this, members of the organization referred to themselves as “revolutionary syndicalists” or “federalist anti-statist revolutionary syndicalists,” rather than “anarcho-syndicalist,” until 1937.[[#96BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|96]] That year, Pierre Besnard, who was the secretary of the CGTSR, publicly used the term “anarcho-syndicalist” for the first time to describe the ideology of the trade union he belonged to.[[#97BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|97]] During his speech, he stated that “Anarcho-Syndicalism is an organizational and organized movement. It draws its doctrine from Anarchism and its organizational format from Revolutionary Syndicalism.”[[#98PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|98]]
+[204] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986:63–73, 110, 120–121, 319) for detailed discussions of the iconography and inscription on the Leiden Plaque.
-The view that anarcho-syndicalism was the synthesis of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist modes of organization was repeated and popularized by Rocker in his 1938 book ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'', but with one major difference. Unlike Besnard, Rocker did not specify that he was describing what it is for an organization or movement to be anarcho-syndicalist. He instead wrote as if he was describing anarcho-syndicalism as a set of ideas such that an anarcho-syndicalist is anyone who advocates both anarchist theory and syndicalist organizational structures, rather than the position that trade unions should have a syndicalist organizational structure and be committed to an anarchist program.[[#99RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|99]] This had the effect that the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism was blurred, because if anarcho-syndicalism is an ideology based on the combination of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist forms of organization, then anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists, such as Pouget, could now be viewed as anarcho-syndicalists. Doing so would be a mistake, due to the important debates and differences between revolutionary syndicalist anarchists, who advocated politically neutral trade unions, and anarcho-syndicalists, who advocated explicitly anarchist trade unions.
+[205] David Webster (1977), among other Mayanists, believes that warfare during the early phase of the lowland civilization was instrumental in the establishment of an elite warrior class. These warlords, in his view, launched wars of conquest against less organized neighbors, which yielded them land and booty for their followers. Rising population and a diminishing ratio of arable land to people spurred this kind of warfare and precipitated elitism among the lowland Maya in Webster’s scenario. Webster argues his case from the instance of an impressive early fortification surrounding the center of Becan (Webster 1976). While we find Webster’s work stimulating, we see no clear empirical support for a general condition of conquest warfare during the Late Preclassic period and the first centuries of the Early Classic. Ancient Maya farming settlements, beginning in the Preclassic, were characteristically open and rather dispersed across the landscape until the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 800–1000; see Ashmore 19 81). Although Maya centers certainly contained acropolis constructions suitable for defense as citadels, walled forts of the kind used by populations experiencing direct attack and capable of withstanding siege are not common among these people. Where internecine warfare is aimed at ordinary settled populations in modern and historical preindustrial societies, it often generates a response of nucleated and defended communities. In this regard, a number of Terminal Classic and Postclassic Maya are indeed fortified in this fashion (Webster 1979). Our own position is based upon substantive information from texts and images. From the Maya vantage, warfare explicitly served to prove the charisma of kings and high nobility. Ethnohistorical documents (Roys 1962) confirm that such charisma was fundamental to the attraction of population into emergent and flourishing polities (see also Demarest 1986; Chapter 7.) In particular, kingdoms of the Peten, in our view, required and utilized massive organized commoner labor—not only to create and refurbish centers, but also to create and maintain the intensive agricultural systems upon which their economies depended. While the impact of warfare on Maya commoners remains to be elucidated archaeologically, there is positive epigraphic and iconographic evidence to identify the advent of conquest warfare among these people at the close of the fourth century A.D. Preliminary results from research projects aimed at investigating the consequences of conquest warfare (Chase n.d.) indicate that victory indeed economically benefited the winners at the expense of the losers, probably through rigorous tribute extraction (see Roys <verbatim>[1957]</verbatim> for a discussion of predatory tribute at the time of the European Conquest).
-Rocker not only blurred the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote that “Anarcho-Syndicalism had maintained its hold upon organized labor [within Spain] from the days of the First International” and in so doing anachronistically imposed anarcho-syndicalism as a category onto the prehistory of syndicalism before the term and idea had been formed.[[#100RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|100]] Rocker’s 1946 essay, “Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism,” which is an abridged and slightly revised version of ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'', only made things more unclear for future generations.'' ''He repeated his previous claim that anarcho-syndicalism is a synthesis of anarchist theory and syndicalist modes of organization, but then goes on to equate the two by writing that “Revolutionary Syndicalism . . . was later called, Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[[#101RockerAnarchismandAnarc|101]]
+[206] The front of the Stela 9 is badly eroded, but the shape, size, and detail of the object in the crook of his right hand correspond to Tikal and Xultún monuments showing rulers holding heads in the guise of deities. The eroded area in front of his legs probably depicted a kneeling captive.
-Rocker’s claim was technically correct in the sense that the organizations he belonged to, the FAUD and the IWMA, did initially call themselves revolutionary syndicalists while advocating anarcho-syndicalism as an idea and then, as language evolved, switched to calling themselves anarcho-syndicalists. This can be seen in the fact that Rocker himself referred to “syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the FAUD in 1919 and “revolutionary syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the IWMA in 1922. By 1938, his language had shifted. He now referred to the trade unions that formed the IWMA, including the FAUD, as the representatives of “MODERN Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[[#102RockerDeclarationofthe|102]] Unfortunately, twenty-first-century readers of Rocker have often been unaware of these historical details and have misunderstood both the origins and nature of anarcho-syndicalism, and how it differed from the revolutionary syndicalism of politically neutral trade unions like the CGT. It should also be noted that sections of the IWMA continued to have members who did not identify as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists.
+[207] An earlier katun ending, 8.4.0.0.0, is recorded on a broken celt in the collections of Dumbarton Oaks (Schele and M. Miller 1986:84–85). Coggins (1979:44–45) suggested that the emphasis on the celebration of the katun cycles was introduced via Uaxactún from Teotihuacán and that the celebration of repetitive cycles in the Long Count versus the commemoration of one-time historical events was an introduction from Teotihuacán. Since Teotihuacán shows no evidence of using or even being aware of the Long Count calendars and since katun celebrations are dependent on having the Long Count, we find it implausible that something so fundamentally and exclusively Maya would have been introduced from Central Mexico and a cultural area that shows no evidence of having ever used the Long Count or the katun as a basis of calculation or celebration.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#18|1]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118; Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 104; Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''170, 172, 338, 463.</div>
+[208] Fahsen (1988b) also identifies Stela 28 as Great-Jaguar-Paw based on the appearance of a prominent jaguar head and paw in the lower left corner of the monument. His identification seems to be a good one, but the style of Stela 28 is a bit problematic, since it would have to mark either 8.16.0.0.0 or 8.17.0.0.0.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#28|2]]. Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe From the Charte d’Amiens to World War One,” in ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational'', ed. David Berry and Constance Bantman (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 25–26.</div>
+[209] Stela 39 was found interred in Structure 5D-86-6 in the Lost World Complex (Laporte and Vega de Zea 1988), a building that sits in the center of a group built on the same plan as the contemporary Group E at Uaxactún. The huge four-staired pyramid, with its talud-tablero terraces, faces on the cast a set of three buildings arranged in the same pattern as Group E at Uaxactún. Group E is known to mark the two solstice points at its outer edges and the equinox in its center. The Lost World complex is much larger in scale and has been identified by Laporte as the work of Great-Jaguar-Paw, whom he believes to be buried in the same building as the stela. The rituals ending the seventeenth katun very probably occurred in the Lost World complex, perhaps atop the great pyramid at its center.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#38|3]]. Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, “The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'','' ''ed Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe'' ''(Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 1–2; Lucien van der Walt, “Syndicalism” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 249–50.</div>
+[210] The date in the surviving text corresponds to a katun ending which most investigators have interpreted as seventeen, giving a reading of 8.17.0.0.0. The name at the top of the surviving text is Jaguar-Paw, which is exactly the name occurring with this date on Stela 31. However, while looking at a cast of this monument at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Ethnologia of Guatemala, Federico Fahsen (personal communication, 1986) suggested that the number is nineteen rather than seventeen. I resisted his suggestion at first, but it has merit. The Jaguar-Paw name is followed by a “child of mother” expression and the name of a female. Furthermore, the very first glyph could well be the yunen “child of parent” glyph identified by David Stuart (1985b:7) on Tikal Stela 31. Jaguar-Paw’s name may, therefore, occur in a parentage statement for the king who ruled Tikal at 8.19.0.0.0, presumably Curl-Snout.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#48|4]]. The language of “syndicalism-plus” was coined by Iain McKay, “Communism and Syndicalism,” Anarchist Writers website, May 25, 2012. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/communism-syndicalism. Thanks to McKay for suggesting this phrase to me.</div>
+[211] This date and the events that occurred on it have been the subject of speculation by Proskouriakoff as quoted by Coggins and by Mathews. Clemency Coggins, following suggestions by Proskouriakoff, has offered several variants of the same essential scenario. Coggins proposed that this date marks the arrival of foreigners in the region, which corresponded either to the death of Great-Jaguar-Paw I or to his loss of power to those foreigners. In the first scenario (Coggins 1976:142; 1979b), she proposed that Curl-Snout, the next ruler to accede at Tikal, was a foreigner from Kaminaljuyu. In the second (Coggins 1979a:42), she suggested that Curl-Snout came from El Mirador via Uaxactún bringing Feotihuacanos with him. These Teotihuaeanos then withdrew’ to Kaminaljuyu around A.D. 450. In yet another interpretation, Coggins (n.d.), following new information from Mathews, proposed that Curl-Snout kidnapped Smoking-Frog, whom she identifies as the daughter of Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal, and took her to Uaxactun on the 8.17.1.2.17 date, where he married her. Curl-Snout then took over Tikal after Great-Jaguar-Paw, his new father-in-law, died.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (1985a:33–46) examined the Tikal-Uaxactun relationship in the larger framework of the Early Classic period. He pointed out that the two sites account for twenty of the thirty-five Cycle 8 monuments and twenty-two of the fifty-two known Cycle 8 dates. The date shared between them is the earliest shared date (not a period ending) now known, and in subsequent history such shared dates “record major battles,” with a few recording important dynastic dates, such as births or accessions. In the records of the shared date at both sites, Mathews identified a person named “Smoking-Frog of Tikal” as the major actor along with Great-Jaguar-Paw, who let blood on this occasion.
+<br>
+<br>Mathews pointed out a pattern of data that is fundamental to interpreting this event. Since Smoking-Frog appears with the Tikal Emblem Glyph at both sites, he was an ahau of Tikal who became the dominant lord at Uaxactun. The conquest of Uaxactun was apparently directed by Smoking-Frog, but Great-Jaguar-Paw, who must have been an old man at the time, also let blood. Smoking-Frog appears as the protagonist of Uaxactun monuments at 8.18.0.0.0. while the ruler Curl-Snout, who succeeded Great-Jaguar-Paw at Tikal about a year after the conquest, acts at Tikal on the same dates. At Tikal, however, Smoking-Frog’s name appears on all of the Curl-Snout monuments and Curl-Snout acceded “in the land of Smoking-Frog,” suggesting that the new ruler ofTikal held his throne under the authority of Smoking-Frog.
+<br>
+<br>Mathews offered the following explanation for this pattern:
+<br>
+<br>“...if 1 am correct then the nature of the Tikal-Uaxactun ties at this time originates from the placement of Smoking-Frog or of one of his close relatives in power at Uaxactun. This could have been achieved through marriage or by conquest. The nature of the 8.17.1.4.12 event—bloodletting—could be used to support either possibility. Bloodletting was an important feature of both warfare (sacrifice of the captives) and of royal marriages (autosacrifice by the wedding couple). If the event was war, then presumably Tikal imposed a member of its own royal family as ruler of Uaxactun. If the event was marriage, then Tikal apparently married into Uaxactun’s ruling dynasty. Either way, I suspect that Tikal played the dominant role in the relationship between the two sites.”
+<br>
+<br>We accept Mathews’s scenario as the most likely, and we favor his suggestion of conquest as the type of interaction, although a royal marriage may also have resulted from the conquest. The iconography associated with representations of the events are consistently associated with war and bloodletting in Maya history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#58|5]]. César De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International” in'' Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 128.</div>
+[212] This censer is composed of a zoomorphic head with a tri-lobe device over its eye. The same head appears on Stela 39 with the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a sky sign on top of it. This combination also occurs at Copan, where the Tikal Emblem Glyph main sign is replaced by the bat of Copan in a context where the tri-lobed head can be identified as the head variant of the sign known as the “impinged bone.” Combined with the sky sign, the “impinged bone” and its tri-lobed head variant identify place names or toponyms (Stuart and Houston n.d.). In these cases, the “sky-impinged bone” identify the main sign of the Emblem Glyphs as a geographic location corresponding to the polity as a place. On Stela 39, the place where the event took place is identified as Tikal. On Stela 5, it is Uaxactun, which used the split-sky sign that also identified Yaxchilan, although there is no reason to suppose that the two kingdoms were related.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#68|6]]. De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International,” 128–29.</div>
+[213] The most elaborate example of this complex in its Maya form is on the monument of a Late Classic conqueror. Dos Pilas Stela 2 (Fig. 4:17b), depicts Ruler 3 (Houston and Mathews 1985:17) hulking over his captive, Yich’ak-Balam (Stuart 1987b:27–28), the king of Seibal. Ruler 3 wears the same balloon headdress as Smoking-Frog, but the costume is now in its complete form with a full-bodied jaguar suit, the trapezoidal sign called the Mexican Year Sign, an owl, the goggle-eyed Tlaloc image, and throwing spears and rectangular flexible shields. Piedras Negras Stela 8 (Fig. 4:17a) depicts Ruler 3 of that kingdom in the same costume as he stands on a pyramidal platform with two captives kneeling at this feet.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#78|7]]. Raymond W. Postgate, ed. “Debates and Resolutions of the First International on The Control of Industry,” in ''Revolution from 1789 to 1906'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 393–94.</div>
+[214] The date of the Dos Pilas event (which was also recorded on Aguateca Stela 2) and a set of related verbs called “Shell-star” events at other sites were first associated with the periodicities of Venus by David Kelley (1977b). Michael Goss (1979) and Floyd Lounsbury (1982) showed this category of event to be associated with the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar and the two elongation points. Lounsbury went on to add Jupiter and Saturn stationary points to the astronomical phenomenon included in this complex.
+<br>
+<br>Berthold Riese (in Baudez and Mathews 1979:39) first suggested that the star-shell events were war related, a hypothesis that Mary Miller (1986b:48—51, 95–130) has brilliantly supported with her analysis of the inscriptions and imagery in Room 2 of the Bonampak murals. These paintings depict one of the most amazing battle scenes known from the history of art, all under a register that shows stars being thrown into the scene from the heavens. The day is an inferior conjunction of Venus with a heliacal rising of Morningstar probable on the next day (M. Miller 1986b:51). The day of the event, August 2, 792, was also a zenith passage and the constellations that appear in the east just before the dawn of that day, Cancer and Gemini, are also represented on the register.
+<br>
+<br>The Uaxactun costume with its spearthrower, balloon headdress, and bird is regularly associated with these shell-star events. The costume also appears in scenes of self-inflicted bloodletting (Scheie 1984a), such as those shown on Lintels 24 and 25 of Yaxchilan, where a drum-turban decorated with tassels occurs with the complex. Other icons in the complex include the trapezoidal design known as the Mexican Year Sign and the goggle-eyed image known as Tlaloc to the later Aztecs. Along with the balloon headdress, spearthrowers, owls, flexible shield, a jaguarian image made of mosaic pattern, and a full-body jaguar suit, this set of imagery forms a special ritual complex that meant war and sacrifice to the Maya (see Scheie and M. Miller [198 6:17 5–240]).
+<br>
+<br>This complex of imagery also appears at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Kaminaljuyu, Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, and numerous other sites throughout Mesoamerica between A.D. 450 and 900. First discovered at Kaminaljuyu (Kidder, Jennings, and Shook 1946), this merging of traditional Maya imagery with Teotihuacân-style imagery has been taken to signal the presence of Teotihuacanos at the Maya sites, especially at Tikal (Coggins 1976, 1979a, 1979b). Teotihuacan certainly had the same complex of iconography and there it was associated with war (Pasztory 1974) and with sacrifice (Oakland 1982 and Parsons 1985). Teotihuacan has been seen by many of these researchers as the innovator of this ritual complex and the donor and dominant partner in all instances where this complex of iconography appears in non-Teotihuacan contexts. We argue that the relationship between the Maya and Teotihuacan during the Classic period is far more complex that these explanations suppose. See René Millon (1988) for his evaluation of the interaction from the viewpoint of Teotihuacan.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#88|8]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869.</div>
+[215] The same iconography appears in later inscriptions with an glyph juxtaposing the sign for Venus with “earth” or the main signs of Emblem Glyphs. This type of war we shall call “star-shell” war or simply “star war.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#98|9]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 193; Musto, ed. ''Workers Unite'','' ''138n28.</div>
+[216] The coincidence of this iconographie complex with Venus and Jupiter/Saturn stations of importance to the Maya (the heliacal risings of morning and evening stars, the eastern and western elongation points of Venus, and the stationary points of Jupiter and Saturn) is overwhelming. This particular kind of war costume and related iconography occurs at the following sites associated with the following astronomical and historical events:
+<br>
+<br>(1) 17.1.4.12—1/16/378: Uaxactun St. 5, conquest by Tikal on a day with no detected astronomical associations
+<br>
+<br>(2) 9.4.3.0.7—10/19/517: Piedras Negras Lintel 12, display of captive with visiting lords 7 days before maximum elongation (-.7) of Morningstar
+<br>
+<br>(3) 9.4.5.6.16—2/5/520: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded event, first appearance of Eveningstar (26 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(4) 9.8.0.0.0—8/24/593: Lacanja St. 1, period ending rite on the first appearance of the Eveningstar (33 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(5) 9.8.13.10.0—1/4/607: Piedras Negras, Lintel 4, unknown event 17 days before maximum elongation (-1.7) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(6) 9.8.14.17.16—6/3/608 and 9.9.12.0.0—3/10/625: Lamanai St. 9, days of no astronomical associations
+<br>
+<br>(7) 9.9.15.0.0—2/23/628: Piedras Negras St. 26, period-ending rites 5 days after maximum elongation (-.14) of Morningstar
+<br>
+<br>(8) 9.10.6.2.1—2/6/639: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, death of Ruler 1, retrograde before inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(9) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, a mosaic helmet with Palenque Triad on first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(10) 9.11.0.0.0—10/14/652: Piedras Negras St. 34, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(11) 9.11.6.1.8—10/11/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 4, war event of Ruler 2; Jupiter is 1.44 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (345.41)
+<br>
+<br>(12) 9.11.6.2.1—10/24/658: Piedras Negras Lintel 2, war event with heir and youths from Bonampak and Yaxchilan; Jupiter is .45 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (344.46)
+<br>
+<br>(13) 9.11.9.8.6—2/10/662: Piedras Negras St. 35, eroded (6 days before shell-star event); Jupiter is .40 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (89.68)
+<br>
+<br>(14) 9.11.15.0.0—7/28/667: Chicago Ballcourt Panel, bailgame sacrifice by Zac- Balam: Jupiter is .06 before its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point
+<br>
+<br>(15) 9.12.0.0.0—7/1/672: Palenque, Temple of Inscriptions middle panel, mosaic helmet verb with Palenque Triad 5 days after maximum elongation (-.73) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(16) 9.12.7.16.17—4/27/680: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), eroded action of Lady of Site Q, 12 days after maximum elongation (-.776) of Morningstar
+<br>
+<br>(17) 9.12.9.8.1—10/23/681: Yaxchilan Lintel 25, accession of Shield-Jaguar and fish-in-hand bloodletting by Lady Xoc; Jupiter is .17 after 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (318.27)
+<br>
+<br>(18) 9.12.10.0.0—5/10/682: Copan St. 6, period-ending rites on the retrograde position after inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(19) 9.12.11.13.0—1/20/684: Palenque, Group of the Cross, end of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rite 11 days before the maximum elongation of Morningstar (-.53)
+<br>
+<br>(20) 9.12.14.10.11—11/16/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, macah of Lady Ahpo-Katun, 4 days before maximum elongation (-.20) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(21) 9.12.14.10.19—11/19/686: Piedras Negras St. 8 and 7, death of Ruler 2, 1 day before maximum elongation (-.10) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(22) 9.12.14.10.17—11/22/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, nawah of Lady Ahpo Katun, 2 days after maximum elongation (-.18) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(23) 9.12.14.11.1—11/26/686: Piedras Negras St. 8, preaccession rite of Ruler 3, 6 days after maximum elongation (-.62) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(24) 9.12.18.5.16—7/23/690: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication rites for the Group of the Cross, complex conjunction with Jupiter .33 after its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (221.43), Saturn at its 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary (225.50), Mars at 219.20, and the moon at 232.91
+<br>
+<br>(25) 9.12.19.14.12—1/10/692: Palenque, Group of the Cross, dedication of the sanctuary buildings, 23 days before maximum elongation (-1.67) of Morningstar and 8<sup>th</sup>-tropical year anniversary of Chan-Bahlum’s accession
+<br>
+<br>(26) 9.13.3.8.11—8/21/695: Tikal, Structure 5D-57, nawah by Ruler A; Jupiter is .42 before the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (45.64); Saturn is at 2<sup>nd</sup> station (282.4)
+<br>
+<br>(27) 9.13.3.9.18—9/17/695: Tikal, Temple 1, Lintel 3, bloodletting and 13<sup>th</sup> katun anniversary of the last date on Stela 31; Jupiter is .36 after the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (45.70): Saturn is at its 2<sup>nd</sup> station
+<br>
+<br>(28) 9.13.17.15.12—10/28/709; Yaxchilan Lintel 24, bloodletting of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar; Jupiter is .58 after the 1<sup>st</sup> stationary point (117.20); Saturn at 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (114.92)
+<br>
+<br>(29) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Naranjo St. 1, action by Smoking-Squirrel on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(30) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Piedras Negras St. 7, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(31) 9.14.0.0.0—12/5/711: Tikal St. 16, period-ending rites on the first appearance of Eveningstar (25 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(32) 9.14.9.7.2—3/9/721: Piedras Negras St. 7, 17<sup>th</sup> tun anniversary of Ruler 3’s accession; Jupiter is .81 after the 2<sup>nd</sup> stationary point (81.05); Saturn at 1<sup>st</sup> (249.77)
+<br>
+<br>(33) 9.15.0.0.0—8/22/731: Calakmul (Site 2) altar (Dallas), period-ending 5 days before maximum elongation (-.125) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(34) 9.15.4.6.9—12/3/735: Aguateca 2 and Dos Pilas 16, star over Seibal war on the first appearance of Eveningstar (31 days after superior conjunction)
+<br>
+<br>(35) 9.15.5.3.13—10/7/736: Piedras Negras St. 9, 7<sup>th</sup> tun anniversary of Ruler 4’s accession, 21 days before maximum elongation (-2.66) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(36) 9.16.4.1.1—5/9/755. Yaxchilan Lintels 8 and 41, capture of Jeweled-Skull by Bird-Jaguar on a day with no detected astronomical associations
+<br>
+<br>(37) 9.17.0.0.0—1/24/771: Tikal St. 22, scattering rite, visible eclipse 15 days after superior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(38) 9.17.5.8.9—6/15/776: Bonampak St. 2, accession of Muan-Chaan 14 days before maximum elongation (-.74) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(39) 9.17.15.3.13—1/18/786: Bonampak St. 3, capture??? by Muan Chaan 13 days before maximum elongation (-.55) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(40) 9.18.0.0.0—10/11/790: Cancuen 1, period-ending rites 14 days before maximum. elongation (-.43) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>(41) 9.18.1.15.15—8/16/792): Bonampak Room 2, battle to take captives on the zenith passage of sun and the inferior conjunction of Venus
+<br>
+<br>(42) 10.1.0.0.0—11/30/849: Ixlú St. 2, scattering rite, 16 days after maximum elongation (-.95) of Eveningstar
+<br>
+<br>To test that these astronomical associations are not the product of the natural periodicity of planetary motions and thus coincidental, we calculated the dates and planetary data for every hotun (five-tun period) in Classic history. The pattern holds. The flaloc-war iconography appears when a period-ending date coincided with a important Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn station, and it does not appear on dates without these associations.
+<br>
+<br>If the Tlaloc complex was borrowed from Teotihuacán, an interpretation that seems likely, it may have come with the astronomical associations already in place. However, we will not be able to test that possibility since no Teotihuacán art or architectural objects have dates recorded on them. The Teotihuacanos apparently did not consider the calendar or the days on which the events of myth and history occurred to be important public information. Thus, the astronomical associations with this ritual complex may well have come into being after the Maya borrowed it and made it their own.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#108|10]]. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, “On Resistance Funds,” in'' Workers Unite!'', 138–39.</div>
+[217] We do not understand the full four-glyph phrase yet, but the first glyph is a hand with a jewel suspended from the extended first finger. This same sign is used as the principal verb for the completion of katuns and other period endings, especially when recording the katuns with a reign. Thrice this verb is written with its phonetic spelling appended to it: once on Tortugucro Monument 6, a second time on Naranjo Altar 1, and finally on Copán Stela A (Fig. 4:18). These spellings have a shell marked by three dots superfixed to a sign identified in Landa as ma or surrounded by a dotted circle, generally accepted as the syllable mo. The shell sign is the main glyph in the verb identified in the Dresden and Madrid codices and in the inscriptions of Chichén Itzá as the “fire drill” glyph. For many years, we presumed this glyph to read hax. the back and forth motion of the hands that drives the drill. Recently, however, Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1987) reinterpreted this glyph to read hoch’, also a term for “to drill or perforate” in Yucatec. The shell in his spelling has the value ho, giving the value ho-m(a) and ho-m(o) for the “completion” hand discussed above. In Choi and Yucatec, horn is “to end or finish (acabarse)” (see Aulie and Aulie 1978:66 and Barrera Vasquez 1980:231). Homophones in Yucatec mean “a boundary between property” and most important, “to knock down or demolish buildings or hills (desplomar lo abovedado, derribar edificios, cerros).” The latter meaning especially seems appropriate to the context of conquest.
+<br>
+<br>[[]]
+<br>
+<br>David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) takes the horn discussed above to spell the future suffix on a root ending in -h. Stephen Houston, following Stuart, has suggested lah, a word meaning “to end or finish in Yucatec. This reading is the other possibility, although we find it less likely because in other contexts, such as the west panel of the Temple of Inscriptions, the ma phonetic complement is retained when other tense/aspects are distinguished by different suffixes. However, if this lah suggestion proves to be the correct reading, it still provides an appropriate meaning to the event—that the battle “finished” or “ended” the defeat of Uaxactún.
+<br>
+<br>Regardless of which reading proves to be the correct one in the long run. the association of the “completion” hand with war events seems to be clear. On Lintel 3 of Tikal Temple 4, for example, the same verb appears with an event that took place one day after a “star-war” event against Yaxhá (see glyph C7a on the lintel).
-[[#118|11]]. Julian P. W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 166–75; Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 117–19.
+[218] Mathews (1985a:44) observed that the first of the glyphs recording this bloodletting action shows the lower half of a body sitting on its heels in the position assumed by a man when drawing blood from his penis (Joralemon 1974). Mathews suggested the glyph is a direct reference to male bloodletting. Federico Fahsen (1987) has documented other occurrences of the same verb at Tikal with the same meaning. The second verb shows a hand with its thumb extended as it grips a lancet of some sort. The same sign appears in the Early Classic version of the west glyph, which is shown on Yaxchilán Lintel 53 as a monster head biting down on the glyph for the sun. In the two examples of this verb on Stela 31, the hand with lancet has a ba or a bi sign attached to it, producing in the Maya way of spelling a term which should end in -ab or -ib. In Yucatec, the word for west in chikin, “bitten or eaten sun”; the word for “to bite” is chi’; and the word for “bitten” and “to prick or puncture” is chi’bal (Barrera Vasquez 1980:92). The verb is apparently chi’bah, “he was punctured.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#128|12]]. Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” in'' Workers Unite!'', 133.</div>
+[219] Prescott Follett (1932) compiled a useful summary of the weapons and armor depicted in Maya art as well as Colonial descriptions of warfare. Mary Miller’s (1986b) analysis of the Bonampak murals gives evidence of a battle in progress while Schele (1984a), Dillon (1982), and Taube (1988b) discuss the aftermath of battle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#137|13]]. Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” 133.</div>
+[220] Marisela Ayala Falcon has called our attention to what is perhaps the most astounding and poignant episode in our entire story. Stela 5, the tree-stone depicting the conqueror Smoking-Frog, was set directly in front of Temple B-VI1I (Fig. 4:5). Excavated by the Carnegie Institution in the thirties, this building was uniquely constructed as a mausoleum. Ledyard Smith (1950:101) describes a tomb built like a chultun directly under the floor of the upper temple and extending down to the bedrock below. He cites the type of loose fill and the construction technique used in the substructure as evidence that the tomb “chamber was constructed at the same time as the substructure” (Smith 1950:52).
+<br>
+<br>Stela 5, the conquest monument, was located in the center of the temple stairs. The stela “lies only a few centimeters from the center of the lowest step of the stairway. The floor was laid at the time of the stairway and turns up to the stela, which was not put through it” (Smith 1950:52). On the other hand, Stela 4, Smoking-Frog’s 8.18.0.0.0 monument, was erected by cutting through this same floor. The stairway and floor then were completed when Stela 5 was set in its place, thus identifying the temple as a victory monument constructed to celebrate the same events as Stela 5.
+<br>
+<br>Of the tomb, Ledyard Smith (1950:52) said this: “It is of interest that it [Temple VIII] was probably built as a burial place; and that the tomb, which contained five skeletons, is one of the few at the site that held more than a single body; and that it is the only example of a group burial found at Uaxactún.” The five people buried in it comprise the most extraordinary detail of all. Smith (1950:101) reported the skeletons included an adult female who was pregnant when she died, a second adult female, a child, and an infant. That the only group grave at Uaxactún should happen to be located in a tomb constructed inside the temple celebrating Tikal’s victory is no accident. The identity of the dead as two women, an unborn child, an infant, and an older child is no coincidence either. These people were surely the wives and children of the defeated king. They were killed and placed inside the victory monument to end forever the line of kings who had ruled Uaxactún.
+<br>
+<br>The defeated king himself was likely taken to Tikal to meet his end. His family stayed at Uaxactún watching the victors construct the new temple at the end of the causeway that connected the huge temple complexes of the city (Group A and B according to archaeological nomenclature). They must have known the tomb was being constructed in the substructure and who would occupy it.
+<br>
+<br>The scene of their deaths can be reconstructed also. A circular shaft dropped to a ledge cut midway down and then fell another couple of meters to the bedrock floor below, dropping five meters in all. The bottom of the shaft widened on its east-west axis to torm the burial chamber. The pregnant woman died and fell on her side with her knees drawn up around her unborn child. Her body lay in the southwest corner. The other woman lay along the north wall with the child lying next to her waist in the center of the tomb. The infant was thrown into the southeast corner. Plates, bowls, and jugs, probably containing food for their journey, were placed around them and then the chamber was sealed with what Smith (1950:101) called an “elaborate stucco adorno painted red. [The] adorno [was] set into the shaft and covered with the floor of the temple.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#147|14]]. Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies,” trans. Iain McKay, Anarchist Writers website, October 6, 2018. https://anarchism.pageabode.com/precursors-of-syndicalism.</div>
+[221] Despite the crucial role of weaponry in any interpretation of combat tactics, the investigation of Maya chipped-stone weapon tips remains in the preliminary stages. The hypothesis presented here, that the Teotihuacanos introduced the spearthrower as a weapon in the Maya lowlands, is not original to us. For example, Irvin Rovner (1976:46), from the vantage of Becan, and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (1976:96), from the vantage of Tikal, both note the linkage between the stemmed projectile form and imported Mexican obsidian in the time of the known Early Classic contacts. Gordon Willey (1972:161–177; 1978:102–105) provides some overview discussion of the development of lowland Maya bifacially chipped point-shaped artifacts. The relatively smaller stemmed varieties of point are characteristic of the Late Classic period. Although the function of such points is a matter for empirical investigation through microscopic inspection of edge damage, these points arc in the appropriate range for projectile weapons, such as the spear flung using a throwing-stick. The relatively larger laurel-leaf-shaped points, suitable for the thrusting spears and explicitly depicted by the Classic Maya in their war art, definitely occur by Early Classic times at such sites as Uaxactun and Altar de Sacrificios and persist throughout the Late Classic. During the Late Preclassic period, the smaller stemmed varieties of bifacial point are absent from such communities as Cerros (Mitchum 1986); the characteristic pointed artifact is the large, stemmed, plano-convex macroblade “tanged dagger.” This artifact is suitable for a shock weapon such as the thrusting spear, but not for a projectile weapon; it is broadly distributed in Late Preclassic times throughout the Maya region (Sheets 1976). Nevertheless, there is some preliminary evidence from even earlier contexts tentatively identified as Archaic hunter-gatherer groups in Belize (MacNeish 1981) for the presence of projectile weapons among the original inhabitants of the lowlands. We surmise that while the Maya probably always knew about the throwing-stick and its spear, it did not figure prominently in their politics until it was declared a weapon of war by Great-Jaguar-Paw. In all, the stone-artifact evidence will provide a useful arena for the further exploration of the hypothesized change in battle tactics after A.D. 400.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#157|15]]. Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies.”</div>
+[222] Mathews (1985a:44—45) proposed much the same interpretation, but there are problems with the calendrics of this passage, which may lead to a different interpretation. The date at the beginning of this passage is clearly 10 Caban 10 Yaxkin with G4 as the Lord of the Night. This particular combination occurred only on 8.6.3.16.17, a date much too early for the chronology of this text and its actors. Christopher Jones, Tatiana Pros- kouriakoff, and others (see C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:70) have pointed out that the accession date on Stela 4 is 5 Caban 10 Yaxkin with the same G4, and thus the date on Stela 31 has been accepted as an error. The problems with this interpretation are twofold:
+<br>
+<br>(1) 8 Men is written just above this Calendar Round on Stela 31 and 8 Men is exactly two days before 10 Caban, reinforcing the likelihood of a 10 Caban reading.
+<br>
+<br>(2) The clause preceding this date records the dedication of a house named Wi-te-na. The reconstruction of the date of this dedication event is problematic because part of the passage was destroyed in the ritual burning that accompanied deposit of Stela 31 in Temple 33. However, if the date recorded immediately before this burned area belongs to the house dedication, it took place 17 tuns, 12 uinals, and 10 kins (or 17.10.12, since the Distance Number could be read either way) after the conquest of Uaxactun. This chronology gives a date of 8.17.18.17.2 11 Ik 15 Zip (June 26, 395) or 8.17.18.15.4 12 Kan 17 Pop (May 19, 395). The relevance of this dedication date is that the 10 (or 5) Caban 10 Yaxkin event, which has been taken to be Curl-Snout’s accession, took place both in “the land of Smoking-Frog” and in the Wi-te-na. Unless the house dedicated seventeen years after the conquest of Uaxactun carried the same name as an earlier house, the Stela 31 event must have taken place after the house was dedicated.
+<br>
+<br>In this second interpretation, the day of the event would be 8.19.7.9.17 10 Caban 10 ‘ axkin (September 2, 423), but the Lord of the Night would be in error, for this day requires G8. Fortunately, the historical argument we propose in this chapter does not depend on the precise date of this event, for the date is not the critical information. Regardless of the timing of the action, the protagonist clearly is Ciirl-Snont, but he acts ‘in the land of Smoking-Frog.” The ahau of higher rank is Smoking-Frog.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#167|16]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''56.</div>
+[223] The deep interaction of Tikal and Uaxactiin during this period is further supported by the Early Classic murals in Uaxactun Temple XIII. The murals show two high-rank males confronting each other across a three-column-wide text. Next to them sits a palace building with three women sitting inside, and beyond the house, two registers with several scenes of ongoing rituals. The style of dress, the ceramics associated with the building, and the style of the glyphs (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1989) date the mural to approximately the time of Uolantun Stela 1 (8.18.0.0.0) and Tikal Stela 31 (9.0.10.0.0). The main text of the mural has the name of a person called Mah Kina Mo’ (Lord Macaw) and perhaps the name of Stormy-Sky of Tikal. Most interesting, Fahsen (1988a) reports an inscription found on a headless statue in Temple 3D-43, a structure located at the juncture of the Maier and Maudslay causeways. The inscription dates to the time around 8.18.10.8.12 (November 5, 406) and it includes a character named K’u-Mo’. We have no way now of knowing if these two references to someone named Macaw refer to the same person, but the time and place are right.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#177|17]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 56.</div>
+[224] David Stuart (in a letter dated February 10, 1988) suggested a reading of yilan (or yitah) for the T565 relationship glyph first identified by Kelley (1962) at Quirigua. In Chorti, this term means “the sibling of.” Ihtan is the root, while y is the possessive pronoun used with vowel-initial words. We (Scheie n.d.e) have tested this reading at Tikal, Caracol, Chichen Itza, and other Maya sites and found it to be productive. It is used, for example, to represent the relationship between two kings of Caracol (Rulers IV and V) who were born less than twelve years apart.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#187|18]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 56.</div>
+[225] At Palenque and Yaxchilan, a horned owl and a shield substitute for each other in the names of the ruler Pacal and G3 of the Lords of the Night. The owl in this context appears with a spearthrowing dart penetrating its body or its head. Exactly this combination occurs in the headdress on Stela 31, which depicts the dart-pierced bird with the shield over its wing. In the title, the spearthrower dart is replaced by the spearthrower itself, so that “spearthrower-owl” and “spearthrower-shield” and combinations of the “spearthrower dart” with the bird and the shield are all variations of the same name.
+<br>
+<br>[[][Spearthrower and owl from the Tikal Ballcourt Marker]]
+<br>
+<br>Virginia Fields (personal communication, 1989) pointed out to me the importance of Stela 32 (Jones and Satterthwaite 1982: Fig. 55a) to the spearthrower-owl identification. This fragment was found in Problematic Deposit 22, a dedication cache intruded into the stair of Structure 5D-26-lst in the North Acropolis. The image depicts a front-view person dressed in regalia identical to the shield carried by C url-Snout on the sides of Stela 31. However, hanging over the chest of the figure is a crested bird very similar if not identical to the bird medallion on Stormy-Sky’s headdress. If Fields’s identification of this bird as the owl in the spearthrower title is correct, then the title is directly associated with the war costume worn by Curl-Snout, just as we propose.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (personal communication, December 1989) presented us with the final piece of the puzzle by pointing out an entry in the Cordemex dictionary of 1 ucatec (Barrera Vasquez 1980:342) and its relationship to the phonetic value of the cauac sign as cu. The entry has ku (cu in our orthography) as “the omen owl, owl, bird of prophesy in the books of Chilam Balam.” This cu word for “owl” also occurs in Choi and in Tzcltal where it is registered as cuh. Since the objects at the corners of the shield are thought to have the phonetic value hi or he in glyphic contexts, the entire configuration may be the full spelling cu-h(e). Mathews’s observations thus identify the cauac-marked shield as a direct phonetic spelling of the owl and, just as important, with an owl specifically associated with prophecy and fortune-telling. Phis particular association apparently had a very ancient history that derived from the owl’s prominent role in this war iconography.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#197|19]]. Quoted in Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''122.</div>
+[226] This final event on Stela 31 took place on June 11, 439, in the Julian calendar when Venus was Morningstar and 44.93+ from the sun. The maximum elongation occurred fifteen days later on June 27 with Venus at 45.62+ from the sun, or .69+ beyond the June 11 position. However, June 11 can be taken as an arrival position for eastern elongation, the point at which Venus is farthest from the ecliptic of the sun as we see them from earth, and on that day Venus was magnitude -4.4, about as bright as it gets. 1 his date then belongs to the same category of astronomical hierophany as the war/Tlaloc events discussed above (See Note 47).
-[[#207|20]]. Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''54.
+[227] The text on Stela 31 concerning Curl-Snout has proven to be extremely resistant to decipherment. The events and actors as we understand now are as follows:
+<br>
+<br>(1) On 8.17.18.17.2 (June 26, 395) a temple named Wi-te-na was dedicated by Curl-Snout.
+<br>
+<br>(2) On 8.17.2.16.17 (September 13, 379) or 8.19.7.9.17 (September 2, 423), Curl- Snout engaged in a dynastic event that involved displaying a scepter “in the land of” Smoking-Frog (see Note 53 for a discussion of this problematic date).
+<br>
+<br>(3) On 8.18.0.0.0 (July 8, 396), Curl-Snout ended Katun 18 in his own land as a one-katun ahau, a title that indicates a person was under twenty years old or else still in his first katun of reign when the event happened. If he was under twenty years old more than seventeen years after his accession, he was indeed young when he acceded, perhaps explaining why Smoking-Frog appears to be the dominant ahau in the kingdom.
+<br>
+<br>(4) On 8.19.5.2.5 (April 13, 421) an unknown event was done by an unknown person.
+<br>
+<br>(5) On 8.18.15.11.0 (November 27, 411) another event occurred, but the record of it is lost in the damaged area of the text. We do not know who the actor was, but the event occurs on one of the most extraordinary astronomical hierophanies we have yet discovered in Maya inscriptions. Since July of 411, Jupiter and Saturn had been within four degrees of each other, hovering around an azimuth reading of 72+ as they crisscrossed each other in a triple conjunction that would finally end in March of the following year. This day occurred shortly after the second of these conjunctions just when Venus had swung out 47.22^ to its maximum elongation as Eveningstar.
+<br>
+<br>Federico Fahsen (1988b) has posited that the lost event associated with this date was the accession of Stormy-Sky. We find his suggestion interesting because its fits so well with the chronology of the text on Stela 1 and the date in Burial 48, which is generally accepted as Stormy-Sky’s tomb. Since Stela 1 records the “completion of the second katun” of Stormy-Sky’s reign, he must have reigned at least forty years. Moreover, if 9.1.1.10.10 (March 20, 457), the date painted on the walls of Burial 48, is taken as Stormy-Sky’s death (Coggins 1976:186), then the accession must have been at least two katuns earlier—or 8.19.1.10.10, at the latest. 8.19.10.0.0, the date most of us have taken as his accession date, not only falls after that limit, but its 2-katun anniversary fell on 9.1.10.0.0, nine years after the death date. In contrast, Fahsen’s earlier date has its 2-katun anniversary on 9.0.15.11.0, six years before the tomb date and just after the latest date on Stela 31, 9.0.14.15.15 (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982:73). This chronology is much more satisfactory.
+<br>
+<br>We also find support for Fahsen’s suggestion in the fragmentary glyph that follows the 8.18.15.11.0 date on Stela 31. It resembles the T168:518 accession glyph that is used at Naranjo and Palenque. If this date is the accession of Stormy-Sky, then the date under 442 above is likely to correspond to the earlier placement.
+<br>
+<br>(6) On 8.19.10.0.0 (February 1, 426), Stormy-Sky, the son of Curl-Snout, became king or else completed the half-period of the nineteenth katun.
-[[#217|21]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 159–60.
+[228] There may have been earlier records of the event, but they have not survived into modern times or archaeologists have not yet found them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#227|22]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September 1872,” in Appendix to René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 182.</div>
+[229] The period of thirteen katuns was very important in Maya thought. The thirteen numbers of the tzolkin (260-day calendar) divided into the 7,200 days of a katun gives a remainder of + 11 or -2. Thus, each time the Long Count advances one katun it reaches the same day name combined with a number two less than the starting point, as in the consecutive katun endings 6 Ahau, 4 Ahau, 2 Ahau, 13 Ahau, 11 Ahau, 9 Ahau, and so forth. It takes thirteen katuns to cycle back to the original combination. The 12 Etz’nab 11 Zip (9.0.3.9.18) of the Stela 31 passage cycled back on the katun wheel thirteen katuns later on 9.13.3.9.18 12 Etz’nab 11 Zac. On the occasion of that anniversary, the Late Classic descendant of Stormy-Sky conducted his own bloodletting and war in an episode we will encounter in the next chapter.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#237|23]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress,” 182–83.</div>
+[230] This Ballcourt Marker was found inside an altar set inside a court on the north end of Group 6C-XVI-Sub (Fialko 1988 and Laporte 1988). The altar platform was built with a single Teotihuacán-style talud-tablero terrace, a short stairway leading to its summit on which the marker was once mounted in an upright position (Fig. 4:23). We believe that this group was a nonroyal compound, probably for a favored noble lineage subordinate to the high king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#247|24]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 190–91.</div>
+[231] A ballcourt marker with depictions very similar to these murals was found on a ranch in La Ventilla near Teotihuacán in 1963 and is now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico. This Teotihuacan example is made in four pieces joined by tenons and, at 2.13 meters, is twice the size of the meter-high Tikal example (Bernal <verbatim>1969:#8).</verbatim> The Denver Art Museum owns a third example, but we know nothing of its provenience.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#257|25]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''56. Malatesta appears to have previously opposed participating in trade unions at the 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. It is unclear when he changed his mind, because most of the articles he wrote in this period are currently untranslated. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''229.</div>
+[232] This is a unique piece of Mesoamcrican history. First, the lowland Maya of the Preclassic period kingship already celebrated royal events in conjunction with the bailgame played with rubber balls, as we have seen at the center of Cerros where ballcourts are linked to the image of the severed head of the Jaguar Sun. The bailgame is the fundamental metaphor of life out of death: The sacrifice of the Ancestors and their apotheosis occurs in the context of ballgames with the lords of Xibalba. The form of sacrifice associated with the ballgame is specifically decapitation; we have seen that the kings of Tikal and Uaxactún focused upon the severed head resulting from such acts. Further, we know that the severed head of the sun and the bailgame are both central to Maya concepts of warfare.
+<br>
+<br>All well and good: But the lowland Maya did not play the bailgame with markers like the one found at Tikal. Their courts could have carved stones laid into the playing surfaces and sometimes rings or tenoned sculptures mounted in the side walls. The Tikal Ballcourt Marker is a Teotihuacán-style artifact that was used in an entirely different game played with a smaller ball, with sticks, and without courts. Eric Taladoire (1981) has summarized the evidence for this distinctive Early Classic bailgame in his comprehensive review of the Mcsoamerican ballgame. At Teotihuacán, this kind of ballcourt marker and game are depicted in the Mural of Tlalocán, and an actual stone marker was discovered in the La Ventilla Complex at this city. Outside of Teotihuacán, examples of this kind of marker are found in the western region of Mesoamerica; one example is reported from Kaminaljuyu, which clearly had significant ties to Tikal and other lowland Maya capitals during this period (Brown 1977). The Tikal example seems to be of local manufacture, since the long inscription on its shaft is clearly Mayan and refers to local events, but its form deliberately emulates the style of the Teotihuacán game.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#267|26]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 294.</div>
+[233] The date of this accession is somewhat problematical. The best solution gives 8.16.17.9.0 11 Ahau 3 Uayeb (May 5, 374) for the date of accession, with the alternative being 8.18.5.1.0 11 Ahau 13 Pop (May 10, 411) (Fialko 1988).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#277|27]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 299.</div>
+[234] Pendergast (1971) found green obsidian in a Late Preclassic cache at Altun Ha, while Hammond reports green obsidian in Late Preclassic contexts at Nohmul (Hammond n.d.). Later materials in Teotihuacan style are known from a cache at Becan (Ball 1974b, 1979, 1983), and Burials 10 and 48 at Tikal (W. R. Coe 1965a). Conversely, Maya-style artifacts have been excavated at Teotihuacan (Linne 1934, 1942 and Ball 1983). The appearance of these objects imported from the opposite region or manufactured in the style of the other culture signals the opening of an extensive interchange network that moved material goods as well as ideas and symbols throughout Mesoamerica.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#287|28]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 299.</div>
+[235] The Tlaloc complex of imagery is particularly associated with the “star-shell” type of war we have been discussing as battle timed by Venus and Jupiter hierophanies (Scheie 1979, n.d.; Lounsbury 1982; M. Miller 1986b; Closs 1979). Many of the territorial conquests in which rulers of known sites were captured are associated with this complex: Caracol’s defeat of Tikal and Naranjo; Tonina’s defeat of Palenque; Dos Pilas’s defeat of Seibal; Piedras Ncgras’s defeat of Pomona; Tikal’s defeat of Yaxha; and more.
+<br>
+<br>Most captives in Maya art are shown as individuals, some named by glyphs incised on their bodies, most unnamed and anonymous. Their captors stand on captives bodies or display them publicly as offerings whose presentation will gain them merit with the gods. Named prisoners are a minority and those named with their kingdoms identified are rarer still. In most contexts, then, the Maya gleaned prestige from the identities of their captives as individuals as much or more than as representatives of their kingdoms. This remains true of the kingly captives, with the exception that their status as ahauob of their home kingdoms is repeatedly emphasized. If there was war that resulted in territorial conquest as well as political dominance, then these star-shell events are the likely candidates. The first and perhaps the most impressive example of this kind of war was Tikal s conquest of Uaxactun. See Note 47 for a discussion of the astronomical association of this war and sacrifice complex.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#297|29]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 80–4. The trade union was forced to suspend its activities in 1884 in response to state repression and was replaced by a new organization in 1888. See ibid., 84–97, 117–22.</div>
+[236] Coggins (1976; 1979a:259–268) has presented detailed arguments for these identifications, although the case for identifying Burial 10 as the burial place of Curl-Snout is the weaker of the two cases. We find her evidence well argued and accept her identifications.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#307|30]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 72–73, 89–92, 181–88.</div>
+[237] Coggins (1976:177–179) remarks that this deposit was found in a dump west of the North Acropolis. She lists seven skeletons, a basalt mano and metate, olivo shells, green obsidian, a mosaic plaque, a couch shell, and thirty-eight vessels, many of them in the style of Teotihuacan. Among these vessels is one depicting the group of Teotihuacanos apparently leaving a Teotihuacan-style pyramid to arrive at a Maya temple, which Coggins speculated was in fact a record of the arrival of Teotihuacanos in the Maya lowlands.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#317|31]]. Carl Levy, ''Gramsci and the Anarchists ''(Oxford: Berg, 1999), 19–20; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 18–19, 24–29.</div>
+[238] It is just about this time that the cylindrical tripod spread throughout Mesoamerica and became one of the principal pottery forms of the Early Classic period through the entire cultural sphere. The shape, which provides particularly useful surfaces for displaying imagery, was adopted by all of the major cultural traditions of the time. In general the Maya style is taller in the vertical axis than the squatter style of Teotihuacan.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#327|32]]. Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 52, 56, 116–18, 120–1, 172–73, 203–5, 273–76; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010),'' ''xl–xliii; Frank Fernández, ''Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement'','' ''trans. Charles Bufe'' ''(Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 19–29, 40–41; John M. Hart, ''Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class 1860–1931 ''(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 46–59, 75–80, 83–84.</div>
+[239] The other possibility is that the cities are Tikal, Kaminaljuyu, and Teotihuacan (Coggins 1979a:263). Kaminaljuyu is a likely candidate for the middle temple depicted on the vase which shares features of both Teotihuacan and Maya architecture. However, if Coggins’s dates of A.D. 386 to 426 for this deposit are correct, the deposit is some seventy-five to a hundred years earlier than the Teotihuacan-style architecture and tombs at Kaminaljuyu. Furthermore, recent excavations in the Lost World group at Tikal by Juan Pedro Laporte (1988) have demonstrated the presence of talud-tablero architecture at Tikal by the third century A.D. A place ruled by Maya which has both styles of architecture is very probably Tikal. The two types of talud-tablero temples represented in the scene are distinguished by their roofcombs and the U-shapes marking the Maya version.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#337|33]]. Constance Bantman, “From Trade Unionism to Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire to Syndicalism: The British Origins of French Syndicalism” in ''New Perspectives on Anarchism'','' Labour and Syndicalism'', 128–132; Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 40–41; Bantman, “The Militant Go-between: Émile Pouget’s Transnational Propaganda (1880–1914),” ''Labour History Review'' 74, no. 3 (2009): 279–80; Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 36–42; Henry Pelling, ''A History of British Trade Unionism'', 5th ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 94–96.</div>
+[240] Marcus (1980) has also commented on these tasseled headdresses, also associating them with Teotihuacan emissaries to Monte Alban.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#347|34]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 76–77.</div>
+[241] Charles Cheek (1977) proposed a model of conquest to explain the appearance of Teotihuacano architectural and ceramic styles at Kaminaljuyu, placing the time of Teotihuacan conquest in the sixth century. Kenneth Brown (1977 and personal communication, 1986) sees Kaminaljuyu as a port of trade serving as a neutral, secure ground for both lowland Maya and highland Teotihuacanos to trade upon.
+<br>
+<br>At Kaminaljuyu, both lowland Maya and Teotihuacanos seem to have been present during the Middle Classic period (A.D. 400–600). Lowland Maya ceramics and jade artifacts are known at Teotihuacan, especially in the Merchants’ Barrio with its curious arrangement of round buildings (Rattray 1986). Teotihuacanos also seem to have been physically present at Tikal. Moholy-Nagy (personal communication, 1986) believes there were a limited number of people of Teotihuacan ethnic origin at Tikal. This identification is based on a burial pattern consisting of cremation and the use of a pit to deposit the human remains and funerary offerings. Two of these pit burials are known: Problematic Deposit 50 found in a dump west of the North Acropolis and Problematic Deposit 22 found in the center of the North Acropolis in front of Structure 5D-26.
+<br>
+<br>Coggins (1979b:42), following Proskouriakoff, suggested that the appearance of the Teotihuacán imagery at Uaxactún and Tikal signaled the arrival of a foreign people. She has suggested that Curl-Snout was in fact a Kaminaljuyu foreigner who usurped the throne of Tikal on the demise of the old dynasty. Archaeological evidence, however, documents Maya interest in green obsidian for use in cached offerings as early as the Late Preclassic period. New excavations at Tikal place the talud-tablero style of architecture at Tikal earlier than the date of the Uaxactún conquest. The lowland Maya and Teotihuacán had long been known to each other and had long traded for exotic goods originating in each others domains. 1 he appearance of Tikal kings in this Teotihuacán costume represents either an intensification of this contact or the adoption of a Teotihuacán ritual complex by the Maya for their own use. It does not signal the conquest of the central Petén or its dominance by foreigners.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#357|35]]. Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),'' ''20–23, 65, 74–75; Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''11; Fernand Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''409.</div>
+[242] Pasztory (1974) divided Tlaloc imagery into two categories, Tlaloc A, which is associated with water and agricultural fertility, and Tlaloc B, which is associated with war and sacrifice. She pointed out that the goggle-eyed imagery of Stela 31 and the Burial 10 vessels is not a Tlaloc image, but rather humans who wear goggle eyes, which she proceeded to associate with war iconography at Teotihuacán (Pasztory 1974:13–14). This war and sacrifice complex appears as the central theme of the Atetelco murals at Teotihuacán. The iconography of that complex is consistent with Teotihuacán imagery as it appears at foreign sites and may well represent a ritual or religious complex that Teotihuacán traders or political emissaries took with them as they spread outward from Teotihuacán in the fifth and sixth centuries.
+<br>
+<br>Karl Taube (n.d.) has recently identified a war complex he associates with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. The symbolism of this imagery includes the Mosaic Monster headdress, which he identifies as a War Serpent. He cites recent excavations at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Sugiyama 1989; Cabrera, Sugiyama, and Cowgill 1988) in which were found mass burials of warriors who were perhaps sacrificed in dedication rituals sometime during the mid-second century A.D. One of these burials contained eighteen mature males of warrior age. They were buried with obsidian points, mirrors that warriors wore on the back of their belts, war trophies in the form of human maxillas and mandibles, and shell imitations of maxillas and teeth. Other artifacts included 4,358 pieces of worked shell, many of which were drilled at one or both ends. Following suggestions by Berio (1976), Taube suggested these pieced shells were from the Mosaic Monster (his War Serpent) headdress. These recent excavations and work on the war complex of Teotihuacán are enriching our understanding of war in Mesoamerican tradition, especially in the Tlaloc- complex we have seen at Uaxactún and Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#367|36]]. Kropotkin ''Direct Struggle'', 317–39.</div>
+[243] Taube (n.d.) follows Rene Millon in suggesting that all of Mesoamerica saw Teotihuacán as the place where the sun and moon were created. We are not yet convinced that the Maya accepted that view, but the imagery at Teotihuacán, especially in the murals of Tetitla called the Tlalocán (Pasztory 1976), represented the city as the earthly replication of the sacred source of creation and genesis. We contend that the Teotihuacanos thought of themselves as citizens of the central sacred spot in the human plane of existence. The Maya on the other hand understood that all temples performed this function and that all kings were the embodiment of the world axis. We do not see Maya kings, their nobles, or the common folk standing in awe of Teotihuacán, no matter its internal definition of itself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#377|37]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 24–26; Turcato, ''Making Sense'','' ''134–35; Bantman, “The British Origins of French Syndicalism,” 132–35.</div>
+[244] See the July 1982 issue of the National Geographic Magazine for Hammond’s descriptions of this sacrificial burial.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#387|38]]. Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” 409–15. See also Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle.</div>
+[245] However, there may be hints that this complex was associated with Venus. Pasztory (1976:245–247) associates the Atetelco warrior iconography with the sun ritual and follows Sejourne in associating the goggle-eyed warriors with half-darkened faces with the later Venus deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. However, the Venus association may also be a Postclassic loan to the people of the Valley of Mexico from the lowland Maya. The sacrificial ritual depicted at Cacaxtla in the eighth century seems to be closer to the Late Classic Maya version of the complex than to Atetelco.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#397|39]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''24.</div>
+[246] Coggins (1979b:41–42) suggests a variant of exactly this scenario.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#407|40]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 90. For Goldman’s in-depth description of her visit to Paris in 1900, see Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''264–80, 401. Her views on syndicalism were also influenced by her later visit to Paris in 1907. See ibid., 406–07.</div>
+; Chapter 5: Star Wars in the Seventh Century
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#417|41]]. Wayne Thorpe, ''“The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour 1913–1923'' (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 25. For details see Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 63–71; Phil H. Goodstein, ''The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland'' (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 53–59; Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
+[247] The kings changed to a costume consisting of a double-stranded necklace with a pectoral; a thick belt mounting a head-celt assemblage on the tront and a backrack on the rear; a hipcloth overlaid by a pointed loincloth; and elaborate cuffs on the ankles and wrists. The headdresses vary with the particular stela and on Stelae 3 and 9 Kan-Boar wears a cape over his shoulders.
-[[#427|42]]. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 77–79.
+[248] These staff monuments include Stelae 13, 9, 3, 7, 15, 27, 8, and 6.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#437|43]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-''Syndicalism, 15; Wayne Thorpe, ''“The Workers Themselves,”'' 26–27. For an in-depth overview of reformist syndicalism, see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 114–40.</div>
+[249] Coggins (1976:184–208) identified Burial 48 as Stormy-Sky’s grave. Chris Jones (n.d.) dates the construction of 5D-33-2<sup>nd</sup> to a time following the sealing of Burial 48. The temporal gap between the sealing of the tomb and the temple construction is unknown, but he assigns the temple construction to the period of the staff portraits. He also dates the spectacular Structure 5D-22—2<sup>nd</sup>, the huge temple on the northern edge of the Acropolis, to this same period. Arthur Miller (1986:40–50) describes the imagery of this temple in detail, although he assigns the dates of the tombs and construction phases differently from either Coggins or Jones. Miller points out that once the temple was built, the imagery was unchanged until the seventh century when it was encased by the thirty-meter-high Structure 5D-33-lst. No matter which of these chronologies proves to be correct, it is clear that the iconography depicted on these buildings was commissioned during the period of the staff kings, and that these buildings remained the principal backdrop for royal ritual in the Great Plaza until the seventh century.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#447|44]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 24, 138, 145–46; Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 32n37. According to Joll, anarchists only seriously influenced the CGT “for ten or fifteen years” and had little influence within the CGT after 1914. James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 216.</div>
+[250] The clearest data for ordering the monuments comes from dates and a series of “numbered successor” titles that record the numerical position of a particular king following the founder of his dynasty (Mathews 1975; Riese 1984; Scheie 1986b; Grube 1988). Recorded both on monuments and on a looted pot (Robiscek and Hales 1981:234), these “numbered successor” titles allow’ us to reconstruct the order in which the kings reigned, and to know which kings are still missing from the record. Epigraphers still debate which monuments should be associated with w’hich ruler. The three main theories that describe these events have been put forward by Clemency Coggins (1976), Chris Jones (C. Jones and Satterthwaite 1982), and Peter Mathews (1985a). None of these reconstructions is likely to be completely accurate: the eroded conditions and incomplete nature of the inscriptional record make study of this period in Tikal’s history difficult. We present our own theory in the main text.
-[[#457|45]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 27; Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 137.
+[251] See Chapter 4, Figures 4:6 through 4:9.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#467|46]]. Quoted in A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 42.</div>
+[252] A. Miller (1986:43–44) identifies the lower masks as “the sun still in the Underworld.” The center masks he associates with the Old God effigy from Burial 10, which has the same trefoil eyelashes as the Cauac Witz Monster; and the upper masks, he sees as Venus. Although our identifications differ, the interpretative concepts are the same: These masks represent manifestations of the Hero Tw’ins and other cosmic imagery as the sacred definition of the temple in Tikal’s ritual life.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#477|47]]. Quoted in Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives'','' ''42.</div>
+[253] If we calculate the span of time between the death of the eleventh successor, Stormy-Sky, and the accession of the twenty-first successor, we end up with seventy-two years. Dividing this number by the number of kings who ruled during this period gives us an average reign of about eight years.
-[[#487|48]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 134, 137–140; Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 88–94, 180.
+[254] C. Jones (n.d.) says that the stairs of the twin pyramids were rebuilt at least once, suggesting that the complex was used for more than one katun celebration. He also notes the existence of two twin-pyramid complexes during this period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#497|49]]. Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 39–41, 44–45.</div>
+[255] The tw’in-pyramid complexes consist of two pyramids with stairways mounting the four sides of each. These platforms, which never had temples at their summits, sit on the east and west sides of a raised plaza. A row of uncarved stelae paired with plain altars are always erected in front of the west facade of the east pyramid. On the north side of the plaza, a carved stela recording the period-ending rite stands with its altar inside a roofless, walled enclosure entered through a vaulted door. On the south side of each complex is a small building which always has nine doors (see C. Jones <verbatim>[1969]</verbatim> for a detailed description of these complexes at Tikal). Dating the beginning of the twin-pyramid complex to the late fifth or early sixth century is important, for the endings of katuns and their quarter points provide one of the great regular patterns of time on which the Classic Maya system of festival and fair revolved. These complexes are unique to Tikal and they play a role of central importance in the ritual life of Tikal in the second half of the Classic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#507|50]]. Quoted in Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 30–31.</div>
+[256] Caracol was first discovered in 1937 by Rosa Mai, a logger. He reported it to A. H. Anderson, the archaeological commissioner of Belize, who visited the site that year. Linton Satterthwaite of the University Museum conducted several field seasons between 1950 and 1958 that resulted in excavations and removal of many of its monuments to safe locations (see A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:3—7 for a history of investigations). Arlen and Diane Chase resumed archaeological investigations in 1985, resulting in the discovery of important new inscriptions and archaeological data of major importance. Chase and Chase confirm earlier reports (Healy et al. 1980) of a very densely packed settlement. The city is situated five hundred meters high on the Vaca Plateau near the Maya Mountains of Southern Belize (A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a: 1–2).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#517|51]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+[257] Proskouriakofl ’s work, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, was published in 1950. In this study she carefully compared the manner in which a fixed set of objects were depicted on monuments with inscribed dates in the Maya calendar. By showing how these depictions changed over time, she was able to produce a series of dated examples against which an undated monument could be compared and given a general style date. Her work still stands today as the principal means by which we formally assign stylistic dates to Maya sculptures.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#527|52]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 115.</div>
+[258] See Proskouriakoff (1950:111–112) for her description of the hiatus.
-[[#537|53]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'', 115.
+[259] Willey’s (1974) brief and brilliant discussion of the hiatus as a “rehearsal” for the ninth-century collapse of southern Classic Maya civilization reviews many of the political and economic problems confronting the Maya in the wake of the collapse of extensive trade with Teotihuacan and the proliferation of competing polities in the lowlands (see also Rathje 1971). Although a “pre-historical” view, Willey prophetically pinpointed those very areas of social stress that emerged as significant in our translations of the Maya’s own histories of their times. What the Maya themselves are silent on is the linkage between political and economic power. We are confident that there are more allusions to wealth and prosperity of an economic sort in the texts than we can presently identify, but the essential challenge of extending Maya history into the economic domain rests squarely in the fieldwork of archaeologists. One key will be to pursue the strategic imperishable commodities, such as obsidian, jade, and shell, from their stated functions and values in the texts into the contexts of the actual objects excavated from the earth (Freidel 1986a). Meanwhile, the hiatus remains an issue of regional dimensions in Maya research.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#547|54]]. Émile Pouget, “The Basis of Trade Unionism,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/basis-trade-unionism-emile-pouget.</div>
+[260] In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff published a study of the distribution of monuments at the site of Piedras Negras and other sites. This study identified for the first time historical events and people in the Classic Maya inscriptions. During the next several years, she published a series of papers that changed the world of Maya studies forever by providing the keys to reconstituting their history through study of the inscriptions. These included identification of women in Maya inscriptions and art (1961b), a description of her discovery of the historical method (1961a), and finally her description of historical data in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan (1963–1964). These articles more than any others are at the heart of the decipherment and the reclamation of Maya history from the darkness of a muted past.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#557|55]]. For a broad overview of these movements see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'' (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990).</div>
+[261] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that almost all pre-9.7.0.0.0 monuments were deliberately effaced, while monuments after that time appear to have been damaged only accidentally. Early monuments were abraded, broken, and moved. Scars from the pecked lines that facilitated their mutilation are still in evidence. Other carvings (the back of Stela 10 and Altar 13) were rubbed smooth. Jones comments, “I would guess that this energetic onslaught was the result of a successful raid on Tikal, probably at the end of the reign of Double-Bird, the man on Stela 17.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#567|56]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century'', 34–37, 57–63; Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 165, 173-74, 284–85; Hirsch and van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial Worl''d; Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', (London: Pluto Press, 2017).</div>
+[262] A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:33) report that Altar 21 was found in a central trench dug along the east-west axis of the ballcourt in Group A. The use of the term altar for this monument is something of a misnomer. Beginning in the Late Preclassic Period, Maya placed commemorative stones both in the center and at the ends of the plastered playing surfaces of ballcourts (Scarborough et al. 1982). These markers presumably pertained to the rules of the game and also to the rituals that kings carried out in the ballcourts. Generally, the monuments of ballcourts, including reliefs along the sides of some courts, allude to war and sacrifice. This linkage strongly suggests that the ballgame bore a metaphorical relationship to war (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986; Chapter 6). Located in the center of the playing field, the altar in question is a round monument with 1 Ahau, the day upon which the katun of its dedication ended (9.10.0.0.0), and the events in the lives of the Caracol kings, Lord Water and Lord Kan II (Rulers III and V, in the dynastic list). Stephen Houston (in A. Chase n.d.), the project epigrapher, immediately recognized the implications of that remarkable inscription. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:60–62) proposed that the hiatus at Tikal was the direct result of its conquest by Caracol, an argument that we accept.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#577|57]]. Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 75–79, 83–87.</div>
+[263] We follow the chronological analysis of Altar 21 first presented by Houston (in A. Chase n.d.; A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:99–100). This day, 9.6.2.1.11 6 Chuen 19 Pop, corresponded to an ax event, a type of action that is associated with shell-star war events at Dos Pilas. Most significantly, this same glyph records what happened to 18- Rabbit, a king of Copan captured by Cauac-Sky, his contemporary at Quiriguá. Although the “ax” verb is used in astronomical contexts in the codices, it is clearly associated with war and decapitation ritual in the Classic inscriptions and on pottery (see, for example, the Altar de Sacrificios vase, National Geographic, December 1975, p.774).
-[[#587|58]]. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 51–65; Juan Suriano, ''Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890–1910'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 14–16.
+[264] Houston (in A. Chase n.d.) noted that the date of this war event, 9.6.8.4.2 7 Ik 0 Zip, corresponds to the stationary point of Venus that forewarns of inferior conjunction. The verb, a star (or Venus) sign, here followed by the main sign of the Tikal Emblem Glyph, occurs throughout the inscriptions of war events timed by Venus apparitions or Jupiter and Saturn stations. The location is indicated by the main signs of the appropriate Emblem Glyph or simply as the “earth.” Here the star war took place at 1 ikal.
-[[#597|59]]. Quoted in Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 142n44.
+[265] Clemency Coggins (1976:258) notes that this period “is characterized by the poverty of its burials.” During this time there is only one burial “rich enough to have had painted ceramics.” Burials in residential areas were equally poor. In an insightful and anticipatory interpretation of stylistic similarities, Coggins (1976:385–386) posited influence from Caracol into the Tikal region exactly during this period and culminating with the first stela known to have been erected after the hiatus, Stela 30 and its altar, depicting the ahau name of its katun in the style of Caracol. A. Chase and D. Chase (1987a:6O-61) attribute many characteristics, especially in Burials 23 and 24, to Caracol funerary practices.
+<br>
+<br>Chase and Chase (1989) report a 325 percent increase in population at Caracol following the Tikal war. There was a corresponding increase in large, single-phase construction projects both of temples and extensive terracing systems. Tomb space became so sought after that chambers were built into substructures and reused for several people before being finally sealed. Whereas Tikal saw an impoverishment of burial furniture, Caracol experienced a remarkable enrichment. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) have suggested that much of the labor for these construction projects and the wealth of Caracol during this period was transferred from the prostrate kingdom of Tikal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#607|60]]. Quoted in A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 129. For details about how syndicalism became the dominant position in Spain during the early 1900s, see James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 198–249.</div>
+[266] Houston (in A. Chase and D. Chase 1987a:91) suggested that Caracol Rulers IV and V (Lord Kan II) were brothers since they were born only twelve years apart (Ruler IV on 9.7.2.0.3 or November 30, 5 75, and Ruler V on 9.7.14.10.8 or April 20, 5 88). A reading suggested by David Stuart (1987b:27, 1988a, and n.d.) supports Houston’s proposed relationship. On Stela 6, the last clause closes with the information that the halfperiod ending 9.8.10.0.0 was witnessed by Ruler V who was the yitan itz’in, “the sibling younger brother of” Ruler IV. We should also observe that the parentage of Rulers IV and V is not clearly stated in the inscriptions. The most likely reconstruction is that the throne descended from father to firstborn son, but there is some evidence of a break in the descent line with these two brothers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#617|61]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+[267] The Emblem Glyph of this kingdom has a snake head as its main sign. It was identified with Calakmul, a site north of the Guatemala-Mexico border, first by Joyce Marcus (1973 and 1976) and later by Jeffrey Miller (1974). Miller identified looted stelae in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum as coming from the “Snake site,” as Calakmul is sometimes known. Although the Calakmul identification was widely accepted at first, several epigraphers began questioning it because of the unusually wide distribution of this Emblem Glyph and the damaged condition of Calakmul’s monuments. Peter Mathews (1979) assembled all the then-known inscriptions, many of them looted, marked with the Snake site or its dynasty and gave the site the noncommittal designation “Site Q.”
+<br>
+<br>Several years ago, however, Ian Graham discovered the sawed-off remains of the looted monuments currently housed at Cleveland and Fort Worth, in a site called El Perú, located to the west of Tikal in the northwest Petén. Finding the remnants of these shattered stelae at El Perú convinced most epigraphers that the Snake site was finally to be identified as El Perú.
+<br>
+<br>Recently, however, Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have once again questioned the Snake site identification based on the following grounds:
+<br>
+<br>(1) Stelae from El Perú have another Emblem Glyph distinct from the Snake Emblem Glyph. This second Emblem Glyph does not appear paired with the Snake Emblem Glyph in the manner of other double Emblem Glyphs, such as those found at Yaxehilán, Palenque, and Bonampak. This distribution suggests that the Snake Emblem Glyph appearing on El Perú Stela 30 is a reference to a foreign power.
+<br>
+<br>(2) A key Snake site king named Jaguar-Paw appears in the inscriptions of several sites. His birth was recorded on Calakmul Stela 9 and also on Site Q Glyphic Panel 6. His accession was inscribed on El Perú Stela 30 and on Dos Pilas Stela 13. Finally, his capture by Tikal’s Ah-Cacaw was declared in conjunction with a war event in Temple I of that city. The Tikal and Dos Pilas references are clearly to foreigners. The El Perú reference may be taken either as foreign or local, while the Site Q and Calakmul references are more likely to be local.
+<br>
+<br>(3) Finally, Stuart and Houston have identified a place name consisting of a waterlily plant (nab) over a chi hand merged with a tun sign, resulting in the phrase nab tunich. This place name appears with names incorporating the Snake Emblem Glyph at Naranjo, where it is in a foreign context. The Dos Pilas inscriptions say that Jaguar-Paw’s accession occurred at nab tunich, and most important, the ruler on Calakmul Stela 51 has nab tunich in his name. They feel the place is most likely to be some part of Calakmul and prefer the identification of the Snake Emblem Glyph as Calakmul.
+<br>
+<br>We became convinced of the Calakmul identification when Scheie noticed that a fragment in the Tamayo Collection from the side of the Fort Worth stela, recorded a “God K-in-hand” action with two persons named in association. The first of these is the protagonist of that stela, Mah Kina Balam, but his name is followed by ichnal and the name of the current ruler of Site Q. David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has shown that the ichnal glyph means “in the company of.” Given this reading, the fragmentary text records that the El Perú lord enacted the ritual “in the company of” the ruler of Calakmul, giving us strong evidence that Jaguar-Paw of Site Q was a visitor at El Perú for the ritual. Based on this interpretation, we follow Marcus, J. Miller, Stuart, and Houston in accepting Calakmul as the Site Q kingdom. However, we also acknowledge that the evidence is still not indisputable and that Site 2 may be a yet undiscovered city.
-[[#627|62]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 122.
+[268] This same glyph names the fourth successor of the Copán dynasty who reigned about eighty years earlier (Grube and Scheie 1988).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#637|63]]. Quoted in Nettlau, ''Short History'', 279. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''392, 403–11; Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 52–3; Maxim Raevsky, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW ''(Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 1–2.</div>
+[269] We have, of course, no direct evidence that Yaxehilán ever participated in the oncoming wars. However, a representative of the Calakmul king attended an important ritual conducted by the tenth king of Yaxehilán. This visit suggests they were at least on friendly terms, if not outright allies. If Cu-ix installed Ruler I on the throne of Naranjo, as Stela 25 implies, then the Naranjo ruler was very likely part of the proposed alliance against Tikal. By the middle of Katun 5, Tikal may have been surrounded by an alliance of hostile states.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#647|64]]. Karl Kautsky, ''Road to Power'' (Chicago: Samuel A. Bloch, 1909), 61, 95.</div>
+[270] This is the stationary point that ends the retrograde movement of Venus as it flashes across the face of the sun at inferior conjunction. The Morningstar would then resume motion in its normal direction, heading toward its maximum distance from the sun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#657|65]]. Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family,” 17n2. It has been alleged by Albert Meltzer that the term was first coined by the Welsh anarchist Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907) in order to distinguish between British syndicalists, who did not think of themselves as anarchists, and syndicalists in continental Europe who self-identified as anarchists. He does not provide a source or a date for when this occurred. I have been unable to verify this claim or determine, if true, what Mainwaring meant by anarcho-syndicalism. Meltzer claimed he was told the information by Emma Goldman. See Albert Meltzer, ''The Anarchists in London, 1935–1955 ''(London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976), 10; Kenneth John, “Anti-Parliamentary Passage: South Wales and the Internationalism of Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907)” (PhD diss., University of Greenwich, 2001), 109–10.</div>
+[271] Captives, especially those of high rank, were sacrificed in a mock ball game played upon hieroglyphic stairs (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:214—263 and M. Miller and Houston 1987).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#667|66]]. Quoted in Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 64. In 1915, there was a split within the FORA between the FORA-V, which remained committed to the anarchist program of the fifth congress, and the FORA-IX, which endorsed a politically neutral program. See ibid., 66–68, 74.</div>
+[272] Mathews (1977) identifies 9.5.12.0.4 as the birth date of Naranjo Ruler I based on an anniversary expression on Stela 3 and a “five-katun-ahau” title included with Ruler I’s name on Stela 27. Based on this last citation, Mathews proposed that Ruler I lived into his fifth katun and ruled until at least 9.10.12.0.4, long after the conquest date. Closs (1985:71), on the other hand, takes the anniversary sequence on Stela 25 as the celebration of the accession of this ruler. Closs’s interpretation has the virtue of placing the birth of this ruler earlier than 9.5.12.0.4 and placing his transition to status as a “five-katun ahau” on a correspondingly earlier date. Since we have neither a clear birth nor accession verb with any of these dates, the final interpretation will have to wait for additional information to appear. The text of Stela 25, however, clearly declares that the event which took place on that date, be it birth or accession, took place “in the land of Cu-Ix of Calakmul.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#677|67]]. Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 76–78; Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 61–62, 77–78; Daniil Novomirsky, ''Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme'', trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3bk4c0. In these translations, the phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” is used. This is an error. In the original Russian only the phrase “syndicalist anarchism” appears. Thanks to Kenyon Zimmer for showing this to me.</div>
+[273] Heinrich Berlin (1973), citing a personal communication from Linton Satterth- waite, first commented on this 9.9.18.16.3 7 Akbal 16 Muan date that is shared between Caracol and Naranjo, although he offered no interpretation of its significance. David Kelley (1977b) suggested that it should have corresponded with the heliacal rising of Venus as Morningstar, tempering his suggestion with the caution that his data was too varied to commit to a particular answer. The most important component of his paper was the identification of the “shell-star” complex associated with this particular category of date. Following up on Kelley’s work, Michael Closs (1979) identified the shell-star category as Venus dates and posited that this Caracol-Naranjo date corresponded to the first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar, an association confirmed by Floyd Lounsbury and extended to include the Bonampak war scene. See Chapter 4, notes 45 and 47, for a detailed discussion of the war and astronomical associations connected with this set of dates.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#687|68]]. Quoted in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 77; Novomirsky, ''Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme''. In Skirda, the Russian for “revolutionary trade union” has been translated as “revolutionary syndicalist movement.” To avoid potential confusion with revolutionary syndicalism in the distinct CGT sense, I have decided to alter the translation. See also N. Rogdaev, “On the Anarchist Movement in Russia,” in ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam'', 191.</div>
+[274] David Stuart (1987b:29) first read this collocation as k’u.xa.ah, pointing out that it also occurs on a captive panel at Tonina. He notes that k’ux is “eat/bite/pain in proto-Cholan. Stuart himself suggests that the event may be captive torture, a practice well documented in narrative scenes of the Classic period, but he also notes that Victoria Bricker suggested to him that it might also be cannibalism, a practice documented archaeo- logically in many parts of Mesoamerica, including the Maya lowlands. Freidel participated in the excavation of a deposit of butchered human bones found in a small platform at the Late Postclassic lowland Maya community of San Gervasio on Cozumel Island in 1973. The feet and hands had been sawed away from the meat-bearing limb bones. No matter the action recorded here, it boded no good for the captive.
-[[#697|69]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 115.
+[275] Mathews (1985a:44) dates Stela 6 at 9.6.0.0.0 and identifies it as the last monument in a 200-year hiatus in monument dedication at Uaxactún.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#707|70]]. Golos Truda, “Declaration of the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda,” in ''The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution'', ed. Paul Avrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 71. For the history of anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian revolution, see Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'','' ''135–51, 185, 190–95; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''98–100,'' ''163–64.</div>
+[276] Berlin (1958) first noted the mutual use of the same Emblem Glyph at both Tikal and the Petexbatún sites, although he posited that the Tikal Emblem Glyph was subtly differentiated from the Petexbatún version. Marcus (1976:63–65) suggested that the Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas actually recorded the history of Tikal lords who conquered Dos Pilas and reigned there in the name of the regional capital. Coggins (1976:445^446) sees an offshoot of the Tikal royal family moving to Dos Pilas after the death of Stormy- Sky, and sending one of its sons back to Tikal to reestablish the old family and reign as Ruler A.
+<br>
+<br>Houston and Mathews (1985:9) and Mathews and Willey (n.d.) also think it likely that Dos Pilas was established from Tikal, perhaps by a minor son or a segment of the royal family that moved out of Tikal during the hiatus. With the new information available to us, we know that this hiatus occurred because of Tikal’s defeat by Caracol. They believe the Dos Pilas dynasty intruded itself into the area, using a strategy of intermarriage and war to consolidate its position. They, however, also see the Dos Pilas dynasty as independent of Tikal, a position we accept. We, furthermore, see a tension and competition between Tikal and Dos Pilas that unfolds as Tikal struggled to reestablish the prestige of its rulers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#717|71]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 204.</div>
+[277] According to Houston and Mathews (1985:11–12), this second son, named Shield- Jaguar, is recorded on the West Hieroglyphic Stairs at Dos Pilas.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#726|72]]. Alexander Schapiro, “Introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism. For an overview of Schapiro’s activity during the Russian revolution, see Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 238–44.</div>
+[278] The El Chorro and El Pato lords name a woman with the Dos Pilas Emblem Glyph as their mother. Mathews and Willey (n.d.) and Houston and Mathews (1985:14) note that the time involved makes their identification as sisters of the king—or at minimum, members of the royal family of Dos Pilas—a likely interpretation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#736|73]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 53–80. The CNT as a national organization could not attend the congress because it had been made illegal in 1911 and was still in the process of reorganizing itself.</div>
+[279] Unfortunately, since the first half of the stair (Hieroglyphic Stair 2, East 3) is destroyed, we have neither the exact date nor the action recorded in this passage. Since other dates on this stair occur between 9.11.9.15.9 and 9.12.10.12.4, we surmise that this action fell within the same period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#746|74]]. “The London Declaration (1913),” in Appendix to Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 320.</div>
+[280] Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified the combination of a waterlily-imix glyph (nab) with a shell-winged dragon as the name of Lake Petexbatún. The action is called a “shell-dragon” ti kan toe, and may have occurred at that lake. The inscription names Jaguar-Paw as ihtah itz’in, the younger brother, of another Calakmul noble, who may also be named at Dos Pilas (HS2, E4).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#756|75]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 43–46, 64–84. For details about the CGT and World War I, including the minority within the CGT who remained internationalists, see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 161–67; Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim'', 85–110.</div>
+[281] Jeffrey Miller (1974) first identified the accession date of Jaguar-Paw on a looted monument in the Cleveland Art Museum. He suggested the stela was from Calakmul and was once paired with another looted monument in the Kimbell Art Museum. His pairing of the stelae was correct, but Ian Graham found the remnants of both stelae at the site of El Perú. The Cleveland stela depicts a female who records her celebration of the katun ending 9.13.0.0.0. The accession of Jaguar-Paw is the dynastic event to which this katun celebration is linked.
-[[#766|76]]. Juan Gómez Casas, ''Anarchists Organization: The History of the F.A.I'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 56; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''7–11.
+[282] David Stuart (1987b:25–27) has read this representation of an eye as the verb i/, “to see,” supporting his reading with the phonetic spellings that can accompany or replace it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#776|77]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 10. For more information on the La Comedia Congress, see Casas, ''The History of the F.A.I'', 57–60; A. Smith, ''Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction'','' ''313–15</div>
+[283] Recall that Stuart and Houston (see Note 21) associate this toponym with Calakmul.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#786|78]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 8–9. The CNT’s commitment to achieving libertarian communism was reaffirmed at the 1924 Granollers Congress where 236 delegates voted in favor and only one against. See Christie, ''We, the Anarchists'','' ''25.</div>
+[284] Houston and Mathews (1985:14—15) first published this scene and recognized its implications.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#796|79]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 120–23; Rudolf Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” trans. Cord-Christian Casper, Academia.edu website, https://www.academia.edu/39134774/Rudolf_Rocker_Syndicalist_Declaration_of_Principles. For an account of his imprisonment, see Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 142–215.</div>
+[285] The second glyph in the text next to the seated figure is ch’ok, a glyph that Grube, Houston, and Stuart (personal communication, 1988) and Ringle (1988:14) associate with young persons who have not yet taken the throne. Our own study of this title confirms that it appears only in the names of people who are not yet kings, but their ages can range from five to forty-eight years. The title apparently refers to members of a lineage who are not in its highest rank.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#806|80]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.</div>
+[286] Proskouriakoff (1961b:94) first identified this woman in the imagery and texts of Naranjo, pointing out that each of her stelae is paired with another representing a male. She remarked on the presence of the Tikal Emblem Glyph in her name, and observed that the male was born several years after the most important date of the woman. She commented, “She is doubtless older than the man, and one may infer that the relationship could be that of a mother and son.” Berlin (1968:18–20) accepted Proskouriakoff’s analysis, further suggesting that Tikal entered into a dynastic marriage at Naranjo, and that this woman’s male offspring in turn married another woman from Tikal. Molloy and Rathje (1974) and Marcus (1976) both follow the suggestions of their predecessors, but Peter Mathews (1979) noted that the name of the father of this foreign woman in her parentage statement on Naranjo-Stela 24 matches Flint-Sky-God K of Dos Pilas. Houston and Mathews (1985:11) posited two royal marriages for that king—one to a woman of Itzán, which produced the next king of Dos Pilas, and the other to a woman who produced a daughter he sent to Naranjo to marry a noble there. From this marriage came a grandson who was the next king of Naranjo. We accept Mathews’s identification and suggest that the royal woman married a male noble of Naranjo, for the next king, if he was her son, carried the Naranjo Emblem Glyph, rather than that of Dos Pilas.
+<br>
+<br>Berlin (1968:18) observed that the date of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival also occurs on Cobá Stela 1. On that monument, the date occurs in the last clause on the front in the form of a Long Count, the second notation of this kind in the text. Although the Long Count form of the date suggests that it was especially important in the inscriptional history recorded on this monument, the verb is too eroded to decipher. It appears to have involved a katun, perhaps as an anniversary, but the actor is clearly not any of the principals in the Naranjo-Dos Pilas affair to the south. The scene shows the Coba ruler dressed as the Holmul dancer standing on top of two bound captives who are flanked by two more captives. Although we suspect the Coba inscription records an event important to local history, the fact that the date is shared between Cobá and Naranjo may point to some important connection between the two zones.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#816|81]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3.</div>
+[287] Interestingly, a variant of this name occurs in a reference to a foreign wife at Yaxchilán on Lintels 5 and 41 and in a reference to the wife of the ruler Yoc-Zac-Balam of Calakmul. We can come up with a number of explanations as to why the Wac-Chanil- Ahau appellative had this wide distribution: It could have been a special title of royal wives, or perhaps queen mothers; it may have designated foreign women in some way; or it might have been a name popular in the Usumacinta and Petexbatún regions.
-[[#826|82]]. For an overview of the congress see Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 113–27; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''244–56, 313n13.
+[288] In the text at Tikal that records this war event, the extended finger has a bauble dangling from its tip. In this version and a related one on Caracol Stela 3, the jewel does not appear with the hand. However, this hand, both with and without the bauble, occurs in Glyph D of the Lunar Series. We had taken this common occurrence in Glyph D as evidence that both forms are equivalent, but Nikolai Grube and Barbara MacLeod (personal communication, 1990) have independently shown that the hand without the bauble and its substitutes in Glyph D read hul, “to arrive.” They have convinced us that the two forms of the hand do not substitute for each other in most contexts. Glyph D counts the age of the moon from its hul, “arrival,” a point defined as the first appearance of a visible crescent. In the context of the Naranjo event, they suggest that the verb is simply “she arrived,” an event that was followed three days later by the dedication ritual for a pyramid named with the main sign of the Naranjo Emblem Glyph. Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s arrival thus reestablished the house of Naranjo’s rulers.
+<br>
+<br>Archaeologically, there is some evidence supporting the association of termination and dedication rituals with the act of reestablishment or founding. Both kinds of rituals are similar in form and content (Freidel 1986b). Termination rituals involving the smashing of artifacts of pottery, jade, and other materials, and the layering of these materials in white earth, are found not only upon the occasion of the permanent abandonment of buildings, but also at their reconstruction. At Cerros, the first place this ritual activity was identified and documented in the Maya region (Robin Robertson n.d.; Garber 1983), it is clear that the same unbroken ritual offerings which terminate a building can be part of the dedication ceremony of the new building (Walker n.d.). Since the hul event was followed three days later by the dedication of a house, we may very well be dealing with a prime example of a house dedication used to establish a broken dynasty.
+<br>
+<br>Date and universal time: 710 June 28 (Gregorian); 24:22 U 1.
+<br>
+<br>JDN and sidereal time: 1980560.515278; Mean G.S.T.: 18h 49.6m
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Object</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>long</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>lat</strong> | <strong>G</strong> <strong>dist</strong> | <strong>R.A.</strong> | <strong>Dec.</strong> |
+<br>| Sun | 95.45 | 0.00 | 1.017 | 6 23.8 | + 23 30 |
+<br>| Moon | 17.46 | 2.58 | 63.016 | 10.3 | + 9 17 |
+<br>| Mercury | 117.11 | -2.45 | 0.671 | 7 54.7 | + 18 29 |
+<br>| Venus | 116.05 | 1.52 | 1.574 | 7 53.5 | + 22 35 |
+<br>| Mars | 115.22 | 1.20 | 2.584 | 7 49.7 | + 22 25 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 121.25 | 0.73 | 6.255 | 8 14.7 | + 20 44 |
+<br>| Saturn | 115.52 | 0.61 | 10.101 | 7 50.6 | + 21 47 |
+<br>
+<br>As observed from 89.0 degrees west longitude, | 17.0 degrees north latitude:
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Object</strong> | <strong>Altitude</strong> | <strong>Azimuth</strong> | <strong>Mag.</strong> | <strong>Diam.</strong> | <strong>Phase(</strong><strong>%)</strong> |
+<br>| Sun | 0.6 | 294.6 | -26.8 | 31 30.9 | |
+<br>| Moon | -64.1 | 356.3 | -9.4 | 29 43.8 | 39.6 |
+<br>| Mercury | 19.4 | 284.1 | 1.5 | 10.0 | 20.7 |
+<br>| Venus | 19.9 | 288.4 | -3.9 | 10.7 | 93.3 |
+<br>| Mars | 19.0 | 288.4 | 1.8 | 3.6 | 98.9 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 24.4 | 285.5 | -1.8 | 31.5 | |
+<br>| Saturn | 19.1 | 287.7 | 0.3 | 16.5 | |
+<br>
+<br>(Outer diameter of Saturn’s rings: 37.2 arc seconds)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#836|83]]. Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 126, 306n52; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 120–23, 224–26, 253.</div>
+[289] Based on the identification of the verb as “accession” at other sites, and on the recurrent anniversary celebrations of this date, Michael Closs (1985) first established that this event was the accession of this child to the throne.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#846|84]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''chapters 3–7. For overviews of the congresses of the Comintern and RILU, see ibid., 100–106, 132–45, 181–94.</div>
+[290] This pairing was first noted by Proskouriakoff (1961b:94). Stela 2, which depicts Smoking-Squirrel on his first katun anniversary, pairs with Stela 3, which represents Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau. The inscription on Stela 3 connects her arrival to his anniversary. Stela 30, depicting Smoking-Squirrel on the same anniversary, couples with Stela 29, which also records her arrival as well as her initial temple dedication. Smoking-Squirrel’s Stela 28 pairs with Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau’s Stela 31. Finally, Stelae 22 and 24 pair together in recording the accession of the young Smoking-Squirrel and its aftermath.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#856|85]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418, 416. This version of the text refers to “libertarian communism.” I have altered the translation because Rocker in fact used the term “free communism” in the 1922 declaration, the 1920 Berlin declaration, and the 1919 speech at the founding of the FAUD it was based on. This is significant because “libertarian” means anarchist, while “free communism” could potentially be supported by people who identified as syndicalists but not anarchists. See Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 321, 322; Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.</div>
+[291] Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2–3:152) notes that Dcanal lies on high ground at the southwestern end of a spur of hills rising above a flat basin on the west bank of the Mopan River. The glyph name for the site is Kan Witz, “Precious Mountain.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#866|86]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 416–17.</div>
+[292] Based on conversations with Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1989), Stephen Houston (1983) first identified this captive and discussed the war between Naranjo and Ucanal. He noted the passages on Stela 2 and 22, and recognized the same name on a pot. He also called attention to this name on Sacul Stela 1, where it appears with the date 9.16.8.16.1 5 Imix 9 Pop (February 12, 760). The text records a scepter ritual enacted by a Sacul lord “in the company of” (yichnal [Stuart, personal communication. 1988]) Shield-Jaguar of Ucanal. Houston pointed out that the time span (sixty-five years) between the Naranjo attack and this event makes it likely that this later Shield-Jaguar was a namesake. He also remarked that Ucanal had reestablished the prestige of its own ruling lineage by that time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#876|87]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 418.</div>
+[293] In commenting on this passage, Berlin (1968:20) suggested that it names the wife of the young king as a woman from Tikal. He also posited that the woman named here is not Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, the daughter of Flint-Sky-God K. We agree with his suggestions, but we believe she was also from Dos Pilas. The glyphs that precede her name include “18 ???” and “Lord of the shell-winged-dragon place.” This shell-winged dragon is especially associated with Dos Pilas as the toponym of Lake Petexbatún. The person named thus appears to be a lord of Dos Pilas. His name is followed by yihtah, “the sibling of,” (Stuart 1988a) and a glyph Berlin proposed as “wife.” Lounsbury (1984:178–179) has read it as yatan, “his wife.” The male from Dos Pilas seems to be named as the “sibling of the wife” of the king. The wife was a woman of Dos Pilas. Smoking-Squirrel apparently married a woman in his grandfather’s family to reinforce the alliance with Dos Pilas.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#886|88]]. Thorpe mistakenly claims that the Regional Workers’ Federation of Brazil affiliated. An organization with this name was founded in 1905 but changed its name to the Workers’ Federation of Rio de Janeiro after the founding of the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. The COB ceased to exist in 1915. Some surviving regional federations of the COB went onto affiliate with the IWMA. Thanks to Maurício Knevitz for explaining this to me.</div>
+[294] Venus as Morning Star was 6.93+ from the sun, while Jupiter hung at 107.82 and Saturn at 108.09, both frozen at their second stationary points. As we will see in the following chapters, this pairing of Saturn and Jupiter was carefully observed by the Maya and used to time particularly important dynastic events.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#896|89]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''256–67; Thorpe, “The IWW and the Dilemmas of Internationalism” in ''Wobblies of the World'', 105–123.</div>
+[295] The data on the day in question, shown on page 460, was generated with “Planet Positions,” a BASIC program written by Roger W. Sinnott, 1980.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#906|90]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 104, 115. See also Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 267.</div>
+[296] In his map of the Naranjo region, Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 5) used Sacnab as an alternative name for Lake Yaxhá. Sacnab is “clear lake,” while Yaxhá is “blue water.” Maier (1908–1910:70) reported that there are two lakes at the location connected by a natural channel. One of these lakes was called Yaxhá and the other Sacnab. Apparently the names he was given at the end of the nineteenth century come from the Precolumbian names of the lakes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#916|91]]. Ole Birk Laursen, “‘Anarchism, Pure and Simple’: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement,” ''Postcolonial Studies'' 23, no. 2 (2020): 1, 7.</div>
+[297] 9.14.0.0.0 is also recorded on Stela 23, but as a future event, which will follow the current events described in the narrative. The coincidence of the first appearance of Eveningstar on this katun ending was recorded at two other kingdoms. On Stela 16 at Tikal, Ah-Cacaw wears the skeletal god of Eveningstar (Lounsbury, personal communication, 1978) as his headdress, and on Stela C at Copán, 9.14.0.0.0 is connected by a Distance Number to a first appearance of the Eveningstar many years before the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#926|92]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 464.</div>
+[298] Ian Graham (1975–1986, vol. 2, p. 3) reported finding this stone “on the centerline of the ballcourt at the northern extremity of the plaza” in 1972. He posited that it was moved there as the result of Postclassic or even post-Conquest activity, but we believe that the sequence of associated events suggests the placement was deliberate. Caracol conquered Naranjo and erected a stairs there to celebrate its victory. Forty years later, a recovered Naranjo conquered Ucanal and placed a piece of that stairs in the ballcourt of the kingdom they had just defeated. Others (Houston 1983:34 and Sosa and Reents 1980) have also made this connection between defeat, revival, and victory.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Mathews (personal communication, 1976) suggested that triumphal stairs were forceably erected at the site of the loser by the victor. Houston also points out that this type of victory stairs has survived in remarkably good condition at sites like Seibal, Naranjo, and Resbalón, but that they were often reset in illegible order. He suggested that the dismantling and resetting in scrambled order may have been the loser’s way of neutralizing the stair after they had revived their prestige. Apparently one could damage the monuments of a defeated enemy, as Caracol apparently did at Tikal, but the monuments of a victor were not to be defiled in the same way. You reset them out of reading order to neutralize them.
+<br>
+<br>Interestingly, Ucanal’s suffering did not end here. D. Chase and A. Chase (1989) report finding a panel at Caracol that depicts two Ucanal captives, bound and seated on legged, stone thrones. Dated at 9.18.10.0.0, the monument documents a Caracol that is once again erecting stelae and returning to its old pattern of aggression. A renewed Caracol apparently struck at the same border community that had felt the earlier wrath of a recovered Naranjo.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#936|93]]. Luigi Fabbri, “About a Project of Anarchist Organization,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/about-a-project-for-anarchist-organization-luigi-fabbri.</div>
+[299] Chris Jones (n.d.) dates several important projects to the last part of Tikal’s hiatus: a repaving of the North Acropolis; the completion of its present eight-temple plan; a rebuilding of the edge of the North and Central Acropolis which cut the Central Acropolis off from the East Plaza; and the remodeling of the East Plaza, which included placing a ballcourt in its center over the old Twin Pyramid Complex. Burials 23 and 24 were cut into the pyramidal substructure of Temple 5D-33—2<sup>nd</sup>, the huge masked building that fronted the North Acropolis. Jones suggests that Burial 23, the richer of the two, might be the tomb of Shield-Skull, the father of Ruler A, whom he suspects was the patron of much of this construction.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#946|94]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828.</div>
+[300] His first name has been read by Chris Jones (1988:107) as Ah-Cacaw, although he also appears in the literature as Double-Comb and Ruler A. Although the reading of one of the glyphs as ca has been questioned, we will use Ah-Cacaw as the name of this ruler.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#956|95]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 151. For biographical information on Fernández, see ibid., 314n37. The phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” appears to have only become popular in Spain in the late 1920s. See Frank Mintz, ''Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 286; Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 64.</div>
+[301] Chris Jones (1988:107) cited skeletal information from Haviland (1967).
-[[#966|96]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 150–53.
+[302] Nomenclature for the phases of these buildings can be a bit confusing for people unused to archaeological conventions. The phases of construction are numbered from the outside to the inside so that Temple 32-lst refers to the last construction phase of Temple 32. Temple 33–2<sup>nd</sup> refers to the next phrase inward; 33–3<sup>rd</sup> to the next, and so on until the earliest phase of construction is reached.
-[[#976|97]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 152.
+[303] Both Coggins (1976:380) and Chris Jones (n.d.) speculate that Burial 23, the richer of the two graves dug into Temple 33—2<sup>nd</sup> just before the last phase of construction began, contained Shield-Skull. This enigmatic person did not leave any sculpted monuments that survived, but he is recorded on Lintel 3 of Temple 1 as Ah-Cacaw’s father. Jones also describes a significant building program which included Temple 5D-32-lst and the tomb of the twenty-second successor. Other buildings in the East Court and Central Acropolis may have been constructed during the reigns of the four intervening rulers. Unfortunately, since only the twenty-second ruler left us inscribed objects, we cannot know which of those rulers were responsible for the building programs. We interpret the absence of inscribed stelae during the reigns of the twenty-second through the twenty-fifth successors to have been the result of Caracol’s victory; but why the same Tikal rulers left the shattered remains of their ancestors’ stelae lying unattended in front of the North Acropolis, we don’t know.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#986|98]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
+[304] If our reconstruction of events is correct, the twenty-first ruler was captured by Lord Water of Caracol. The twenty-second ruler is in Burial 195 in Temple 5D-32, located to the immediate east ofTemple 33. The central temple held the older tomb of Stormy-Sky, as well as two others inserted into the substructure shortly before the second phase of construction was buried under the third. If the twenty-fifth ruler was in Burial 23 and if Burial 24 held the twenty-fourth ruler, then three of the four kings who ruled between the defeat and Ah-Cacaw’s accession are buried in the buildings fronting the North Acropolis.
-[[#996|99]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 54.
+[305] Shook (1958:31) theorized that the stela was originally mounted in the rear chamber of Temple 5D-32. But since all other Tikal stela were erected in plaza space, we surmise that this one had been carried inside the temple from some other location. Chris Jones (n.d.) suggests that Stela 26 had been mounted in front ofTemple 5D-32, while Stela 31 was originally placed in front of 5D-33. The notion that the offering deposit was situated at the physical threshold of the Otherworld portal of these temples is derived from examples of other back-wall locations of altars and symbolic representations of Otherworld beings in the sanctums of Maya temples, as detailed, for example, in Chapter 6.
-[[#1006|100]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60.
+[306] Chris Jones (n.d.) reports that a fragment of Stela 26 was placed alongside Altar 19 (the altar to Stela 31) in a pit next to the substructure ofTemple 33-lst. Since fragments from both monuments were put in the same cache, he presumes that both stelae were interred in their resting places in a single ceremonial sequence associated with the reestablishment of the Tikal dynastic lineage. Our reconstruction is somewhat different: We do not see any actual sundering in the old line as a result of the defeat by Caracol. There is no epigraphic evidence to suggest the insertion of any usurper Caracol kings; indeed, Caracol evidently did not even raise a victory monument here as they did at Naranjo. The victors apparently contented themselves with the desecration of Tikal royal historical monuments and the imposition of an effective ban on public history in the city. We interpret the ritual deposits of these two stelae—one recording a list of the kings from the lineage during its most aggressive and successful era, and the other recording its most glorious military victory—as a method of compensating for the desecration done to the monuments by the Caracol conquerors and as a means of establishing supernatural support for a new era of military success.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1016|101]]. Rocker, ''Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism'' (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 5–6, 25, 31.</div>
+[307] This description is based on images on the lower register of Room 1 at Bonampak. The event associated with that scene is the ‘fire house-dedication ritual now known from many different sites. Although our scenario concerns the honorable deposit of a desecrated stela at Tikal, the fire ritual was very probably of the same type because the material placed in the caches is identical to that placed in dedication caches in other buildings at Tikal (see Note 42 for a discussion of the interrelationship of dedication and termination rituals).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1026|102]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3–4; IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,''” ''416–18; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 54.Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism</div>
+[308] Harrison (1970) has interpreted the presence of family residences as well as administrative and ritual houses in the Central Acropolis. We presume that these buildings functioned both as residences for the royal family and as council houses for the institutions of governance.
-== {{anchor|Chapter9TheTheoryandPracti}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook12}} {{anchor|Chapter9TheTheoryandPracti1}} Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism ==
+[309] The offering plates we describe here are the flat-bottomed plates found in the lip-to-lip caches especially associated with building termination and dedication deposits. One set of this type of cache vessel (Crocker-Delataille 1985:231 <verbatim>[#354])</verbatim> has zac lac incised on the side of the plate. This name associates these lip-to-lip plates with the great stone censers of Copan, which are called zac lac tun (Stuart 1986e). Zac has the meaning of “white,” but also of something “artificial,” in the sense of human-made. Lac is the word tor plate, while tun specifies that the zac lac was made of stone. Both types of vessels were receptacles for offerings [and both have interiors shaped like buckets or deep pans], Shook’s report does not mention either type of zac lac in Temple 34, but his descriptions of the pits dug in the floor closely resemble the bucket shape inside the Copan censers. We suspect that the Maya thought of them as being the same thing; and although no plates were deposited in the Temple 34 cache pits, the material in these caches closely matches dedication offerings from other deposits which have them. Our presumption that a zac lac would have been used to transport the offerings is based on the many depictions of such plates in scenes of ritual activities from painted pottery. The lac plate was one of the principal containers for offerings of all sorts.
-All forms of syndicalist anarchism argued that workers should form federally structured trade unions that engaged in direct action and were independent of political parties. It was believed that, in order to achieve working-class self-emancipation, these syndicalist trade unions had to pursue the ''double aim'' of winning immediate improvements in the present, and overthrowing capitalism and the state via a social revolution in the long term. These unions also had a ''dual function''. Under present conditions, they performed the function of engaging in class struggle against the ruling classes. During the social revolution, they would expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes and take over the organization of the economy in part or whole. In so doing, they would acquire the new function of being the organs through which the self-management of production and distribution occurred. This social revolution could be initiated by workers launching an insurrectionary general strike.
+[310] These descriptions are based on the wall paintings of Bonampak and Temple XIII from Uaxactun.
-'''The Double Aim of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions'''
+[311] Shook (1958:32) reports that some of the marine materials came from the Pacific, while others came from the Atlantic. Presumably, the Tikal lord traded for material both from the Gulf of Mexico and from the Belizean area of the Caribbean coast.
-Syndicalist anarchists held that trade union activity should have two main goals. These were: (a) defending and advancing the interests of the working classes within existing society and (b) preparing for and ultimately carrying out a social revolution that abolishes capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#1RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndic|1]] For Pouget, “trade union endeavor has a double aim: with tireless persistence, it must pursue betterment of the working class’s current conditions. But, without letting themselves become obsessed with this passing concern, the workers should take care to make possible and imminent the essential act of comprehensive emancipation: the expropriation of capital.”[[#2PougetWhatistheTradeUn|2]]
+[312] Flint and obsidian are associated with lightning strikes in most Maya languages and in much of their mythology. Most interestingly, the small obsidian blades found throughout the region are called u kach Lac Mam in modern Choi. This phrase translates as “the fingernails of the Lighting Bolt.”
-Syndicalist anarchism, therefore, like mass anarchism in general, sought to win immediate reforms in the interests of the working classes—such as shorter working hours, better pay, and improved conditions—force the ruling classes to actually implement previously won reforms, and protect these previously won reforms from encroachment by the ruling classes. Crucially, syndicalist anarchists held that reforms had to be achieved, enforced, and protected through the direct action of the working classes. Even reforms that involved changes to the law had to be achieved “through outside pressure brought to bear upon the authorities and not by trying to return specially mandated deputies to Parliament.”[[#3PougetWhatistheTradeUn|3]]
+[313] Volcanic hematite is a rare iron mineral. It occurs naturally only in the context of active volcanoes—of which there are several in the southern Maya Mountains. The crystal takes the form of flat flakes with mirror-quality surfaces. Although the crystal is virtually noncorruptible by oxidation, it can be ground into a bright reddish-purple powder that can be used for decorative purposes. This powder contains sparkling fragments of the crystal form. Volcanic hematite was highly prized as a mosaic mirror material—superior even to the iron pyrite which the lowland Maya also imported. Hematite is found in relative abundance in Late Preclassic contexts and in decreasing amounts thereafter, suggesting that the known sources in the highlands were limited and became exhausted during the course of the Classic period. The mother-of-pearl backing on this particular mirror is commensurate with the Late Preclassic volcanic hematite mirrors found in the cache of royal jewels at Cerros as described in Chapter 3.
-This strategy generally, but not always, involved a rejection of the iron law of wages, which held that under capitalism real wages would always tend toward the amount required to secure the subsistence of the worker due to either population growth decreasing the value of labor, or higher wages being neutralized by increased costs of living. Pouget labeled it as “illusory” and “false,” because it was empirically untrue, and ignored the fact that increased living costs were themselves a product of class struggle, such as those between landlords and tenants.[[#4EmilePougetDirectAction|4]] Malatesta argued against the iron law of wages on the grounds that between the minimum limit of a worker being paid enough to survive and the maximum limit of a capitalist earning some profit, “wages, hours and other conditions of employment are the result of the struggle between bosses and workers” and so could be changed through collective action.[[#5ErricoMalatestaTowardsAna|5]]
+[314] The practice of deliberately smashing jade artifacts, particularly earflare assemblages, has been identified as an aspect of lowland Maya termination rituals by James Garber (1983). David Grove (1986) has suggested the presence of a similar practice at the Middle Preclassic highland Mexican center of Chalcatzingo and it has been found in relation to one of the earlier phases at Temple 10L-26 at Copan.
-Pouget and Malatesta’s position was not shared by all syndicalist anarchists. Pelloutier, for example, opposed partial strikes; he subscribed to the iron law of wages while still being a syndicalist, because he advocated revolutionary trade unionism as the means to overthrow class society.[[#6JeremyJenningsSyndicalism|6]] Others held that, although any increase in wages would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living, partial strikes were nonetheless important and should be encouraged due to their transformative effect on workers. A 1900 article by Delesalle’s for ''Les Temps Nouveaux'' argued that, while any increase in wages would only be temporary due to the iron law, a strike would still promote “a state of rebellion,” develop class consciousness, and “could be the spark that heralds the revolution.”[[#7PaulDelesalleTheStrike|7]]
+[315] This type of bundle has long been known from narrative scenes on pottery, on carved monuments, and in the murals of Bonampak. The Quiche talked about sacred bundles called the Pizom Q’aq’al. which contained relics from their founding ancestors. The Tzotzil today still use bundles in the rituals of office in much the same way they were used in ancient ceremonies. Juan Pedro Laporte found a lip-to-lip cache in the Lost World group. When opened it was found to hold the same array of marine materials, lancets made from the thorns called cuerno de toro in modern Mexico, jade, shell, and so forth. These objects were lying in a black substance which proved on analysis to be amate-fig bark paper, which had been painted blue and red. Around the entire offering, a band of fibrous cloth had been tied. Marisela Ayala (n.d.) was the first to identify this offering bundle with those represented in Maya imagery.
-The main forms of direct action that syndicalist anarchists advocated to achieve reforms were strikes, boycotts, and sabotage. By sabotage, syndicalist anarchists meant “workers putting every possible obstacle in the way of the ordinary modes of work.”[[#8RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|8]] This included such tactics as working slowly, strictly following legislation or contracts in order to reduce productivity and, at its most militant, damaging machinery or infrastructure so that strike breakers could not continue production.
+[316] Bruce Love (1987:12) describes the smearing of blood on idols and stelae as these rituals are described in ethnohistorical sources.
-This strategy of struggling for reforms through militant tactics was put into practice on multiple occasions by syndicalist trade unions. In 1904 the CGT agreed at its congress in Bourges to campaign for the eight-hour day, which workers had unsuccessfully been petitioning for since 1889. Instead of begging the state to grant this reform, the CGT, following Pouget’s suggestion, decided that they should try to force the ruling classes to give in to their demands by engaging in direct action: workers were to either cease work after eight hours, or go on strike until their demands were met. The CGT selected May 1, 1906, as the day of action and proceeded to prepare for the coming struggle over the next two years. This included holding union meetings and distributing posters with revolutionary messages in order to persuade workers to participate in the movement. How much energy was devoted by the CGT to this campaign can be seen in the fact that during December 1905 alone ten famous syndicalist militants organized conferences in eighty cities.
+[317] In Room 1 at Bonampak, three high-ranked lords are shown being dressed in elaborate costumes. In the dedication scene on the lower register, these same three lords are shown dancing to the music of a band which marches into the picture from their right side. On their left, high-ranked nobles move into the scene in an informal procession. These latter appear to be both witnesses and participants in the ceremonies. I his same kind of dance very likely occurred in all or most dedication rites elsewhere, including 1 ikal.
-The French state unsurprisingly responded to the campaign with repression. On the eve of the strike, key delegates, including Griffuelhes, Pouget, Alphonse Merrheim (secretary of the Federation of Metalworkers), and Gaston Lévy (the CGT treasurer), were arrested and jailed for a few days, after the minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau, claimed to have discovered a nonexistent plot by syndicalists, anarchists, monarchists, and right-wing Catholics to overthrow the Republic. Clemenceau, in addition to this, moved 60,000 soldiers into Paris. Despite this state violence, the strike went ahead and on May 1, 1906, the CGT publicly demanded that the French state reduce the legal working day to eight hours. The next day, the CGT launched a national general strike. The general strike was composed of 295 separate strikes at 12,585 businesses, which demanded a reduction to the workday. A total of roughly 200,000 workers participated in this direct action. Some of the strikes lasted over a hundred days. Only 10,177 workers out of 202,507 succeeded in forcing a capitalist to grant them any reduction to the workday. Despite this, the general strike was not a total defeat. On July 13, 1906, France’s political ruling class responded to the pressure from below by passing a law granting workers a mandatory day off work once per week. Although the CGT continued to campaign for the eight-hour day over the following years, it was not granted to the French working classes until April 1919—as part of the French government’s successful attempt to prevent anything like the ongoing Russian revolution from happening in France.[[#9RidleyRevolutionarySyndica|9]]
+[318] Chris Jones (n.d.) notes that another cache containing fragments of Altar 19, which he associates with Stela 31, and a fragment of Stela 26 were placed in a pit next to Temple 33–1<sup>st</sup>. He sees this as evidence that Stela 26 and 31 were deposited at the same time.
-The CGT was not unique in attempting to wrestle reforms from the ruling classes through direct action. In February 1919, the CNT’s Catalan Regional Confederation (CRT) organized a strike at the Barcelona offices of the Anglo-American electricity company Ebro Power and Irrigation. This action was launched by the CNT, in response to the company firing workers for attempting to form a union.[[#10Thefollowingaccountofthe|10]] When the company refused to give in to the workers’ demands for higher wages and the reinstatement of all the workers who had been fired, the CNT escalated the struggle and organized a strike at the company’s electricity generating plant. This resulted in Barcelona being plunged into darkness, and trams being stranded in the street unable to move. The strike soon grew to include most of the city’s gas, water, and electricity workers when, on February 26, they voted to strike in retaliation to the Spanish state sending in the military to restore the power supply. They were subsequently joined by solidarity strikes outside of Barcelona, in Sabadell, Vilafranca, and Badalona.
+[319] W. R. Coe (1967:48) described the construction sequence for Temple 33-lst in detail. Coggins (1976:445–447) and Chris Jones (n.d.) both agree that this construction project was associated with Ah-Cacaw’s reestablishment of the old lineage. Our understanding of this history descends from theirs, although we offer a slightly different interpretation of the data patterns. We see, for example, Temple 33-lst as both a new construction to declare the renewed authority and power of the dynasty, and as a method of ceremonially deactivating the North Acropolis. The Classic period Maya believed that sacred power and energy was accumulated in material objects (1) as they were used to contain the sacred power manifested in ritual and (2) as the actions of kings in the making of history focused the power of the cosmos onto them. To contain the accumulated power of an object which they wished to bury or discard, the Maya used a set of rituals to terminate the object formally. The dispositions of Stela 26 and 31 are examples of exactly these sorts of rituals; but these termination rituals also included drilling holes in pottery, knocking out the eyes of figures, destroying the faces of human imagery, removing color from sculpture, and many others. David Grove (1981) has proposed that this same behavior accounts for the mutilation of Olmec sculpture. Temple 33-lst seems to function like Temple 14 at Pa- lenque. Built by Kan-Xul after his brother Chan-Bahlum’s death, Temple 14 celebrates the dead brother’s emergence from Xibalba. It also contains the power in the Group of the Cross by blocking the main ceremonial access into it (Schele 1988b). Temple 33-lst performs the same function at Tikal by obstructing the formal, processional access into the center of the North Acropolis, deactivating it as the ritual focus of the dynasty.
-On March 8, the Spanish state responded to the growing strike movement by militarizing the gas, water, and electricity workers who were army reservists subject to military law. The workers were then given the choice between breaking the strike by returning to work or being confined to the barracks as punishment. This state violence did not dampen the strike, which expanded to include tram workers and carters who transported essential supplies such as coal. They, like the gas, water, and electricity workers before them, were soon militarized as well. Almost none of these militarized workers betrayed their class interests by returning to work and, in response, the Spanish state imprisoned 800 of them in the fortress of Montjuïc, in Barcelona. These workers were supported in their struggle by the printers’ union, which refused to publish any of the Spanish state’s proclamations calling up workers for military service or articles in the press opposed to the strike. This even included an announcement by the managers of Ebro Power and Irrigation that declared that workers who did not return to their job by March 6 would be fired. Workers who wanted to learn about the strike could instead read the CNT’s daily ''Solidaridad Obrera'', which published articles informing readers of the latest news.
+[320] In an insightful analysis, Coggins (1976:371) noted this stylistic relationship of this altar to the Caracol tradition and, long before the discovery of Altar 21 at Caracol, she suggested there might have been interaction in that direction.
-Throughout the strike, the CNT sought to win its demands by mobilizing large groups of workers in order to impose unbearable pressure on the company and the state via direct action. This included workers implementing syndicalist tactics by sabotaging the transformers and power cables used by the company to try and restore power to the city, and thereby break the strike. By early March, the CNT’s strike committee were, as a result of this working-class militancy, in a position where they could negotiate with the ruling classes. They successfully forced Ebro Power and Irrigation to increase wages, pay workers’ wages for the period they had been on strike, recognize the union, grant an eight-hour day, and reinstate workers who had lost their jobs due to participation in the strike. The CNT not only issued demands to the economic ruling class, but also demanded that the Spanish state release all prisoners who had been arrested for engaging in class struggle. If the state did not do so in seventy-two hours, the CNT threatened to relaunch the strike.
+[321] We do not yet have a phonetic reading of this verb, but its association with war and captive taking is widespread. Its other significant occurrence is in the heir-designation ritual of Chan-Bahlum at Palenque. Heir-designation rites as they were portrayed at Bonampak also involved the taking and offering of captives.
-In response to the general strike, the Spanish prime minster, Álvaro de Figueroa, attempted to soothe the working classes by decreeing the eight-hour day in the construction industry on March 11, which was later expanded to include all industries on April 3. The CNT had previously agreed to struggle for the eight-hour day at its founding 1910 congress. They achieved this goal in nine years through direct action alone.[[#11Itshouldbekeptinmindth|11]] Despite this great victory, the CNT decided to launch another general strike on March 24 (the resolution was passed by one vote) in response to the electricity, gas, and water companies not allowing all the strikers to return to work immediately, and the Spanish state refusing to free a number of workers imprisoned in Montjuïc—including the CNT’s general secretary Manuel Buenacasa. This time, the Spanish state was ready, and retaliated swiftly to the general strike by imposing martial law, closing all CNT union headquarters, arresting key anarchist militants, and censoring the press. Following this wave of state repression, the CNT was forced to call for a return to work on April 7, 1919.
+[322] This ritual display of captives after a battle is the war event shown most often in narrative scenes in Maya art (Schele 1984a). We can see an excellent example of this in Room 2 at Bonampak (M. Miller 1986:112–130). The event in the Tikal scene is spelled nawah. a term meaning “to dress or adorn” (Bricker 1986:158). Here, the action is the dressing of the captive in the garb of sacrifice. This action included stripping him of his regalia, replacing his battle garb with the cut-cloth kilt of sacrifice, replacing his ear ornaments with paper or flowers, and painting him in the color of sacrifice. Landa (Tozzcr 1941:117–119) reported that blue was the color painted on the stripped bodies of sacrificial victims before they were tortured or killed.
+<br>
+<br>Captives most often appear as sacrificial victims, rather than as warriors engaged directly in battle. Capture, and the rank of those captives taken, were central to the prestige of Maya nobles. Sacrificial victims also appear regularly in burials and in dedication rites. Brian Dillon (1982:44) found a deposit of sacrificial victims who were apparently lying in the belly-down position characteristic of captives when they met their fate. Captives, especially high-ranked ones, were often kept alive for years. They appeared repeatedly in all sorts of rituals, and their survival quite possibly created problems of succession in their lineages.
+<br>
+<br>Peter Harrison (1989) has provided us additional information on Structure 5D-57 that enriches this piece of history considerably. At the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, he demonstrated how the builders of the Central Acropolis used the geometry of the triangle in conjunction with older buildings to establish the location of new buildings. Using this technique. Structure 5D-57 was positioned in relationship to what he calls “Great-Jaguar- Paw’s clan house,” known archaeologically as Structure 5D-46, a great two-storied palace built on the west end of the Central Acropolis during the Early Classic period. So important was this palace to subsequent kings that while they added to it, they were careful to retain the original structure as a part of the functioning Acropolis throughout the subsequent history of the city.
+<br>
+<br>The identity of its original patron is established by a eaehe vessel deposited under the west stairs of 5D-46. The inscription on the pot records that it was made for the dedication of the k’ul na (holy structure) of Great-Jaguar-Paw.” Thus, Ah-Cacaw established the location of the building depicting his display of captives at the dedication of Temple 33 in relationship to the residence of the very ancestor whose victory over Uaxactun is celebrated on Stela 31. It was in Temple 33 that he deposited this tree-stone with such reverence. This is a remarkable folding of history back on itself and a wonderful example of the symmetries the Maya found so fascinating and useful in their construction of political history.
-Both the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and the CNT’s strike against Ebro Power and Irrigation illustrate the general tendency for syndicalist trade unions to focus on struggling for reforms through organizing workers at the point of production. In response to this tendency, there were multiple attempts in both theory and practice to expand the scope of syndicalist action from the workplace to the wider community. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Joan Peiró argued that the CNT had focused too much on strikes in workplaces, and should establish district committees that organized collective action around any issue facing the working classes, thereby fostering direct action on a mass scale.[[#12NickRiderThePracticeof|12]] This same conclusion was reached in a January 1931 article for the CNT’s ''Solidaridad Obrera''. It claimed that syndicalists had focused too much on mitigating “the exploitation of the producers,” and in so doing had “almost entirely forgotten to combat exploitation in the field of consumption,” such as landlords charging extortionate rent.[[#13QuotedinRiderTheBarcel|13]] Organizing against these other forms of exploitation was not only important in and of itself, but also provided an opportunity to radicalize people who might be indifferent to labor struggles, or even oppose union demands when they suffer the negative consequences of prolonged industrial action.
+[323] The phrase, as written here, includes the “fish-in-hand” verb that records bloodletting and vision rituals at other sites. This verb is followed by a standard phrase including tit and a glyph representing a lancet and an “akbal” compound. In the past, we have presumed this “akbal” glyph referred to a performance of the ritual at night, but Victoria Bricker (1986:73–74) has suggested an alternative explanation that seems to be correct. The glyph consists of the signs ti, ya, the “akbal” sign, and H. If the “akbal” sign reads syllabically as ak\ the combination reads ti yak’il, “in his tongue.”
-Such community-based direct action was organized by the CNT itself during the Barcelona rent strike of July 1931.[[#14Thefollowingaccountisbas|14]] The strike grew out of previous rent strikes that had been independently organized by workers in October 1930. This movement then gained the support of the Economic Defense Commission, which had been created by the CNT’s Construction Workers’ Union on April 12, 1931, in order to study the living expenses of workers and examine ways they could be reduced. The Construction Union’s concern with these topics stemmed from the fact that 12,000 of its 30,000 membership were unemployed. On May 1, the commission presented its first demand to a large CNT meeting: a 40 percent reduction in rent. This demand, alongside proposals for combating unemployment and high food prices, was then announced to the wider public through a series of articles in ''Solidaridad Obrera'' that appeared over May 12, 13, and 15. At the end of June and the beginning of July, the commission held a series of meetings in working-class areas of Barcelona and nearby towns, where workers, a significant number of whom were women, were informed of the campaign and heard speeches attacking landlords as thieves.
+[324] This verb consists of T79 (value unknown) superfixed to ta (T565) plus the combination -wan, an inflectional suffix for verbs having to do with position in or the shape of space. This same glyph and variants of it occur at Palenque, Copan, and many other sites associated with the dedication rituals for monuments and houses. The “T” in the number above derives from Thompson’s 1962 method of glyph transcription.
-These meetings were followed by a mass rally on July 5, where the following three demands were agreed upon: (a) that the extra month’s rent demanded by landlords from new tenants as security should be taken as normal rent such that new tenants had to pay no more during the month of July; (b) that rent should be reduced by 40 percent; and (c) that unemployed people should not have to pay any rent. If landlords refused to reduce the rent, workers would respond by announcing that they were going on rent strike as part of a wider movement, and pay nothing.
+[325] For a full discussion of this day and its events, see the later parts of Chapter 4. Proskouriakoff (Coggins 1976:448) first noted that this date is linked to the Temple 1 date.
-The rent strike rapidly grew after its launch and expanded from 45,000 workers in July to over 100,000 in August. The ruling classes responded in late July by banning public meetings of the Economic Defense Commission and evicting workers with the assistance of the police. The tenants organized protests to prevent evictions, reoccupying houses after the eviction had taken place, moving evicted workers to the homes of other CNT members, and marching on the homes of landlords in order to warn them not to reevict tenants. One eviction in early October was prevented by a crowd of pregnant women and children, whom the police officer in charge decided not to attack. Other women protesting evictions were less fortunate, such as those who were charged by eighty police officers on October 21. The rent strike was eventually defeated between November and December, as a result of the state arresting any worker who resisted evictions or returned to their home after eviction. Despite this, it did succeed in bringing many workers into the anarchist movement, and thereby laid the foundation for future mobilizations. The rent strike even continued in some areas, such as in the La Torrassa neighborhood; rent strikers at the end of 1932 attacked the police, seized some of their weapons and attempted to burn down the local office of the chamber of urban property, which was the main landlord association in Barcelona, and had actively encouraged repression of the rent strike.
+[326] Even more intriguing is an observation recently made by Karl Taube in his study of Teotihuacan mirrors and war imagery (Taube n.d.). Following earlier work by George Kubler (1976), Taube notes the appearance of a species of cactus found in the highlands of Central Mexico. Both scholars have suggested that the platform under Ah-Cacaw refers directly to Teotihuacan, and Taube suggests it may refer directly to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. We think this may be correct, but we suggest the reference is far more oblique. At the time of the carving of these lintels, Teotihuacan was in severe decline (Millon 1988), but it had been in full florescence at the time of the conquest of Uaxactun when this iconography became so popular. We suggest the reference is to the conquest of Uaxactun and the long-lasting association of that victory with the memory of the Teotihuacanos. See René Millon’s (1988) evaluation of the Maya-Teotihuacan interaction in his discussion of the fall of Teotihuacan.
-One of the main driving forces behind attempts to expand the scope of syndicalist action beyond the workplace were women within trade unions struggling simultaneously against both class and gender oppression. This can be seen in the FAUD’s Syndicalist Women’s Union (SFB), which was created by and for women in 1920. One of the cofounders of the group was the Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Milly Witkop-Rocker, whose romantic partner was Rudolf Rocker. In 1922 Witkop-Rocker argued in her pamphlet ''What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?'' that “the organization of women on the basis of anarcho-syndicalism is as necessary as the organization of male workers on the same basis. . . . Wherever there is a syndicalist organization, an attempt must be made to create one of women, so that the sections of the syndicalist women’s federation will cover the whole country like a net.”[[#15MillyWitkopRockerWhatD|15]] The main goal of the syndicalist women’s federation was to persuade women to participate in the union, especially those who were full-time housewives not employed as wage laborers, and to develop their consciousness such that they became anarchists. To this end Witkop-Rocker advocated the formation of women’s-only groups that organized a range of activities. This included mutual aid, artistic pursuits, cooking, and educational clubs equipped with libraries, “where the comrades can meet anytime to read or to speak on important issues, and where they can bring their children, if necessary.”[[#16MillyWitkopRockerWhatD|16]] This would have the consequence that women, who were often isolated from one another within their respective homes, would be brought closer together, establish bonds of solidarity with one another, and, through their participation in the union, develop a spirit of independence and personal initiative that they did not have before due to their patriarchal socialization. It was important to organize housewives not only to further the emancipation of women, but also because they could support strikes by boycotting a particular company.
+[327] Scheie (1985a) proposed a reading of bal or balan for the Emblem Glyph ofTikal. New evidence from the Primary Standard Sequence on pottery has lent support to that reading and provided a direct association to this jaguar head. David Stuart (1987b:2–7) has read one of the glyphs in this pottery text as it tz’ibil, “his writing.”
+<br>
+<br>[[]]
+<br>
+<br>In one version of this glyph, the syllable ba is written with a jaguar head, and in another, bal appears as the head of the number 9. This last glyph standardly refers to a human head with the lower jaw covered with a jaguar pelt, and a yax shell sign affixed to its forehead. In many of the toponymic forms of the I ikal Emblem Glyph, the ‘ bundle is prefixed by yax. Since the main sign, as well as the head of the number 9, have phonetic values as bal, the name ofTikal was likely to have been Yax Bal or }ax Balam. The portrait head of the number 9, however, was also used to record the image and the name of the jaguar member of the Headband Twins, who are one of the Classic period manifestations of the Hero Twins. Tikal was apparently named as the special place of this god.
-Witkop-Rocker realized that, in order for women to be able to participate effectively in the workers’ movement, they first had to be emancipated from the crushing toil of housework, giving birth to large numbers of children, and looking after said children. One of the main ways the FAUD and the SFB attempted to contribute toward this emancipation was by organizing around what would today be called reproductive justice. They not only demanded the abolition of laws that criminalized advocating contraception and prohibited abortion, but also held meetings on the “childbearing strike,” educated women about birth control, distributed contraceptives, and either performed illegal abortions or put women in contact with physicians who would. Syndicalist anarchists in Germany did this through participating in, and often becoming prominent members of, public organizations that were neither explicitly anarchist nor syndicalist. This included such organizations as the Reich Association of Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene and the Working Committee of the Free Sexual Reformers Association. A few syndicalist anarchists paid heavily for their actions. For example, the FAUD member Albrecht was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in 1930 because she performed more than a hundred abortions for the local chapter of the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Hygiene.[[#17DieterNellesAnarchosyndi|17]]
+[328] Lintel 3 of Temple 4 depicts the son of Ah-Cacaw seated on a throne, but the point of view is rotated 90+ so that we see a front view of the king. Just as in Temple 1, the throne of the king sits atop a low stepped platform, but here the artist showed clearly the carrying bars of the Maya version of a sedan chair.
-Syndicalist anarchists were clearly committed in both theory and practice to achieving, enforcing, and protecting reforms through direct action within both the workplace and the wider community. In line with mass anarchist theory, they did not view the struggle for reforms as an end in and of itself. For Pouget, winning reforms, “far from constituting a goal, can only be considered as a means of stepping up demands and wresting further improvements from capitalism.”[[#18PougetWhatistheTradeU|18]] Goldman similarly believed that, although syndicalist anarchism struggles for “immediate gains” and “wrests from the enemy what it can force him to yield,” it ultimately “aims at, and concentrates its energies upon, the complete overthrow of the wage system.”[[#19EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|19]]
+[329] Chris Jones (1988:1 10) follows an earlier suggestion by Marcus (1976:90) that the Emblem Glyph of this noble is that of Piedras Negras, based on the identification of the prefix as a leaf. However, the main sign of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph consists of the syllables^, ki, and bi, which can all appear in a variety of substitutions (Stuart 1987b:37). The snake form of the Piedras Negras Emblem Glyph is formed by simply using the head variant of bi. The Emblem Glyph on this bone has the blood group sign inverted, with the dotted part above the shell sign rather than below it. Therefore, we believe that the main sign of the Emblem Glyph of this captive noble is the snake head associated with Site Q and Calakmul.
-Instead of viewing reform and revolution as inherently opposed to one another, syndicalist anarchists viewed struggling for reforms as an evolutionary moment within a process of social change that would eventually culminate in a revolutionary moment. This was because organizing to win immediate improvements under capitalism was the concrete means to generate a mass social movement that was capable of, and driven to, launch a social revolution. Pouget argued that, in order to create an anarchist society, “preparatory work must have drawn together within existing society those elements whose role it will be to make it happen” through “day to day struggles against the current master of production” that undermined the legitimacy and power of capitalists and gradually escalated and intensified to the point where the working classes had developed sufficient “strength and consciousness” to forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[[#20PougetDirectAction6|20]] For Pouget, “whenever one analyzes the methods and value of trade union action, the fine distinction between ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ evaporates,” because, when syndicalist trade unions struggle for either, they use the same method: the direct action of the working classes.[[#21PougetWhatistheTradeU|21]] Reforms like wage increases are “a reduction in capitalist privileges” and a form of “partial expropriation.”[[#22PougetWhatistheTradeU|22]] They are, therefore, a step toward and component of the social transformation that the social revolution will fully bring about.
+[330] Proskouriakoff (in Chris Jones 1988:109) first noted the recurrence of the death date on this bone. The other five events on MT 28 are also deaths, including that of someone named 18-Rabbit-God K on 9.14.15.4.3 and a woman on 9.14.15.6.13. The 18-Rabbit character may be named on Lintel 2 of Temple 1.
-'''The Dual Function of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions'''
+[331] Chris Jones (personal communication, 1986) secs little possibility that a passageway could have been left open to give access to the tomb. Ruler B probably oversaw the building of the substructure over the tomb of his father, although Ah-Cacaw is likely to have commissioned the lintels or at least to have overseen the information that would be put on them after his death.
-Syndicalist anarchists were, like anarchists in general, committed to the unity of means and ends. The application of this theory led them to conclude that, in order to successfully overthrow capitalism and the state, trade unions had to be structured in a manner that prefigured the kinds of large-scale organizations that would exist after the social revolution. As the Russian anarchist Gregori Maximoff wrote in 1927, trade unions “must be built on principles which will serve in the future, i.e. on liberty—the autonomy of individuals and organizations—and on equality.”[[#23GregoriPMaximoffProgram|23]] In order to instantiate these values, trade unions had to be organized through a system of federalism that practiced, to quote Rocker, “free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions.”[[#24RockerAnarchoSyndicalism1|24]]
+[332] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first recognized that the name phrase on Naranjo Stela 6 is the phonetic version of Smoking-Batab’s name. The day sign in the Calendar Round is eroded, but the three possible readings are:
+<br>
+<br>9.14.18. 4. 8 9 Lamat 11 Muan November 28, 729
+<br>9.15.11. 7. 13 9 Ben 11 Muan November 25, 742
+<br>9.16.4.10.18 9 Etz’nab 11 Muan November 22, 755
-Syndicalist anarchists thought that, in constructing and expanding trade unions that prefigured the future anarchist society, they were literally, in the famous words of the preamble to the 1908 IWW constitution, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”[[#25IWWThePreambletotheCo|25]] They held that the trade union had, in addition to its double aim, a dual function. Under capitalism, it performed the function of bringing the working classes together in order to resist the power of the ruling classes through their own direct action. During the social revolution, the trade union would take on a new function by forcefully expropriating the means of production from the ruling classes and establishing federations of workers’ assemblies organized by trade and geographic region. This would be achieved by converting the federations and local sections of the trade union from organizations of economic resistance into organizations of economic administration that self-managed the emerging anarchist economy.[[#26Thereareimportantexceptio|26]]
+; CHAPTER 6: THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MOTHER: Family and Dynasty at Palenque
-The idea that trade unions should perform the dual function of resisting dominant institutions in the present, and taking over and organizing the economy in the future, was not invented by syndicalist anarchists during the 1890s and 1900s. It was, as I showed in chapter 8, first advocated during debates within the First International. It continued to be advocated by anarchists years after the congresses of the First International. In 1887, Lucy Parsons, who would later attend the founding convention of the IWW in 1905, claimed that trade unions built under capitalism were the “embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.”[[#27QuotedinAlbertParsonsAn|27]] In 1927, Maximoff wrote that “the revolutionary trade union, in the view of the Anarchists, are not only organs of the struggle against the contemporary structure; they are also the cells of the future society.”[[#28MaximoffProgramofAnarcho|28]]
+[333] According to one account by the family of Antonio de Solis of Túmbala in 1746, Palenque came to the attention of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century with its “discovery” by Spaniards. During the next forty years, many visitors, both civilian and government sponsored, went to Palenque and made a series of drawings and maps of the site, which are now in archives in Seville and Madrid and at the British Museum. A set of these early drawing and commentaries by Antonio del Rio and Paul Felix Cabrera appeared in Descriptions of the Ruins of an Ancient City, a two-volume work published by Henry Berthoud in 1822. With this publication, the ruined buildings and sculptures of Palenque came to the attention of the Western world and initiated a fascination with ancient Maya civilization that continues today. The most popular travel accounts were those written by John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in their Incidents of Havel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, published in 1841. These books truly brought the Maya to the attention of the Western world and were immensely popular at the time. For those interested in the history of discovery, see Graham (1971), Berlin (1970), and G. Stuart (n.d.).
-Although syndicalist anarchists thought that trade unions should be the organization through which workers took control of and reorganized the economy, they were not generally committed to the view that trade unions should be the only organs of self-management during and after the social revolution. In 1909, in their fictional account of a successful syndicalist revolution Pouget and Émile Pataud claimed that, in addition to trade unions, village assemblies in the countryside, and community assemblies in urban areas at the level of street, district, and city would be formed. These community assemblies could be attended by anyone, regardless of their occupation, and so brought people together as “inhabitants, and not as producers.”[[#29EmilePataudandEmilePouge|29]] Meetings “concerned themselves with measures of hygiene and health . . . [and] took part in the administration of the City. They undertook the work of the moral administration of house property, now proclaimed collective property, and, as a matter of course, placed at the free disposition of all.”[[#30PataudandEmilePougetHow|30]] This view was shared by Besnard, who explained in his address to the IWMA in 1937, that “this notion does not at all imply that anarcho-syndicalism—which is, remember, against the State and federalist—means and aims to be ''everything'' and that ''nothing else ''should exist alongside it.”[[#31PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|31]] It instead aims for self-management in every sphere of life, rather than just the workplace, and as a result, advocates a federation of regional, national, and international communes in parallel to the federation of trade unions.[[#32BesnardAnarchoSyndicalism|32]]
+[334] This royal name combines the features of a snake and jaguar into one glyph block. At the Primera Mesa Redonda of Palenque, a meeting held at Palenque in December, 1973, at which most of Palenque’s kings were given their modern names, we elected to use the modern Choi spelling of this name combination—chan, “snake,” and bahlum, “jaguar.” Later research into the phonetic complements accompanying this name has shown that it was originally pronounced more like its modern Yucatec version, can-balam, but we have elected to retain the original spelling of this name in order not to add confusion by creating different names for the same person.
-The CNT also advocated communes alongside trade unions. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Isaac Puente argued in his pamphlet ''Libertarian Communism'' in 1932 that “life in the future will be organized” through two currently existing institutions: “the free union,” which unites workers on the basis of their labor, and “the free municipality,” which “is the assembly of the workers in a very small locality, village or hamlet” united on the basis of their location.[[#33IsaacPuenteLibertarianCo|33]] These ideas went onto inspire the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress resolutions. They proposed that during the social revolution workers should establish both federations of producers’ associations, which would self-manage the workplace, and “libertarian communes” in each locality, which would organize such things as housing, education, and the “beautification of the settlement” and federate together to form the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[[#34QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|34]]
+[335] The longest inscription was the Hieroglyphic Stair of Temple 26 at Copán. We have deciphered enough of that inscription to know that it recorded a detailed dynastic history of Copán, but unfortunately the stairs were found already badly eroded and out of order for the most part. Time has not been kind to the stairs since they were uncovered in 1898 and much of what was visible then has since been worn away. This inscription is unlikely ever to be deciphered completely, making the panels of the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque the longest intact inscription.
-It is also a mistake to view syndicalist trade unions themselves as being purely workplace organizations. The district committees of the CNT were located in union centers within working-class neighborhoods. They were social spaces that established bonds of mutual support between workers from different workplaces, migrants new to the area, and unemployed workers. In so doing, they spread anarchist theory and practice to workers in varied circumstances, on the basis of their shared belonging to a local community. The ability of the CNT to mobilize large groups of workers during waves of direct action was not based exclusively on union sections in specific workplaces or industries. It also stemmed from the influence that anarchist militants had in face-to-face conversations with their neighbors, friends, and family in homes, cafés, and the streets. Nor did workers in the CNT limit themselves to workplace organizing. They also organized tenants unions and, despite patriarchal opposition from within the union, women’s groups such as Mujeres Libres. This went alongside the construction of numerous forms of associational life, including affinity groups, schools, neighborhood educational and cultural centers called ateneos, theater clubs, hiking clubs, and more. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth. The CNT’s construction of prefigurative organizations therefore occurred both within the workplace and the community.[[#35MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|35]]
+[336] Pacal used the nine katuns leading up to and including his own lifetime as the framework for the dyntistic history he inscribed. Beginning with the katun ending on 9.4.0.0.0, he recorded the last royal accession to occur before each successive katun ended. When more than one king ruled within a katun, he linked their accessions to the half-katun or the thirteen-tun point within the katun. He ended the nine katuns with 9.13.0.0.0, the twenty-year period during which he built the temple and commissioned the tablets and their history. By using this device, Pacal locked all the accessions between Chaacal I and himself to specified period endings, thus setting the whole of Palenque’s history into a firm and indisputable chronological framework. This use of katun succession as the framework of history created the prototype of the katun histories that are common in the later books of Chilam Balam in Yucatán. Lounsbury (1974) first offered the chronological decipherment of the sarcophagus edge, while Berlin (1977:136) recognized the nine-katun sequence as the structural framework in which Pacal presented his history on the tablets above. For a detailed decipherment of the tablets from the Temple of Inscriptions, see Schele (1983, 1986c).
-Syndicalist anarchists, like anarchists in general, advocated prefigurative organizations because it was only through participating in such organizations that the working classes would develop the radical capacities, drives, and consciousness necessary both for struggling effectively against existing dominant institutions and producing and reproducing the future anarchist society. It was thought that workers would learn how to self-manage the economy through their experience of self-managing a trade union, which, like the economy of the future, was structured in a horizontal and federalist manner, made decisions within general assemblies in which everyone had a vote, and coordinated action on a large scale through a system of delegates. Rocker thought that trade unions should function as both “the fighting organization of the workers against the employers” and “the school for the intellectual training of the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remaking it according to Socialist principles.”[[#36RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|36]]
+[337] Inscriptions document at least three, possibly four, more generations on later tablets, bringing the total number of generations to thirteen or fourteen during the entire history of Palenque.
-Syndicalist anarchists thought it was very important to provide such technical education to the working classes, because of their commitment to grounding their revolutionary strategy in an understanding of what the world was really like. In Baginski’s words,
+[338] The inscriptions of Palenque never record the exact kinship relationship between Ac-Kan, Pacal I, and Lady Zac-Kuk, but we can reconstruct it based on the following information. (1) Of the two men, only Ac-Kan became the king of Palenque. The texts of the Temple of Inscriptions are complete in the record of accessions from 9.4.0.0.0 until Pacal II, and Pacal I does not appear in that record. (2) Both men died in 612, but Pacal I died on March 9 while Ac-Kan died six months later on August 11. Most important, the records of their deaths on the edge of the sarcophagus lid are reversed, with the later date recorded first, as if we are to understand these persons in the order Ac-Kan/Pacal, rather than the order of their deaths. (3) Of the two men, only Pacal I is shown as a figure on the sides of the sarcophagus, even though he was never king.
+<br>
+<br>Something about their dynastic roles made it advisable to break the chronological order of the death list to put Ac-Kan before Pacal. At the same time, this something led the Maya to eliminate Ac-Kan from the portrait row and picture Pacal I instead. The most efficient explanation is that they were brothers and that the line passed through Pacal rather than Ac-Kan.
+<br>
+<br>In two other examples on the sarcophagus sides, one of a pair of rulers was eliminated from the portrait gallery, and in those examples we can determine the reason. The first pair, Manik and Chaacal I were born only five and a half years apart, while the other, Chaacal II and Chan-Bahlum I, were born only a year apart. These short periods between births make a father-son relationship between these pairs impossible—they were siblings. Of the first pair of brothers, only Chaacal I appears in portraiture; and of the second pair, only Chan-Bahlum I has a place on the sarcophagus sides. Why? The answer lies in inheritance: The children of only one brother might inherit the throne. The sarcophagus sides depict the direct descent of the line from parent to child. In this interpretation, Pacal I was the sibling of Ac-Kan and he is shown because his child inherited the throne. He won his place in Pacal the Great’s portrait gallery for his role as father of the next ruler, Lady Zac-Kuk, and as the grandfather of the child named for him, Pacal, who became one of the greatest American rulers in history.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the economic power to rule and lead production does not fall in the workers’ laps (in quiet submission to the fate of economic development) without their active engagement; no, they must gain it themselves by fighting with endurance and strength. Workers dream themselves too easily into the idea that one day the “social revolution” will descend to earth like a supernatural godhead in order to heal all wounds and dry all tears in one swoop. Oh no! The sun, which as it set today looked down on shackled slaves, will not as it rises tomorrow behold free people. Workers must educate themselves through their own strength to become thinking and acting people. They have to educate and prepare themselves for the great profession of administration and leadership in production.[[#37MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|37]]</div>
+[339] Such tablets may well be at Palenque in the deep levels of the Palace or in some other building, for deep excavations have rarely been done at Palenque, and then often by accident. The time difference between Lady Kanal-Ikal’s rule and Pacal the Great’s was not long, for she was still alive when her great grandson was born. He was born on March 26, 603 and she died on November 7, 604. Her prominence in Pacal’s records and the twenty-year length of her reign makes likely that Lady Kanal-Ikal commissioned inscriptions and temple constructions during her reign.
-Syndicalist anarchists faced two major problems when trying to implement this theory. First, in order for individual workers to be transformed through their participation within the trade union, they had to be members of the trade union for an extended period of time. A significant number of workers would often join trade unions due to their immediate economic interests, such as a strike, but would leave them once the situation ended. This was especially the case for temporary workers who lacked a permanent employer. As a result of this and other factors, such as workers deciding to join larger reformist trade unions, syndicalist trade unions had a high membership turnover. The SAC, for example, was founded in 1910 and by 1935 had 36,000 members. During this twenty-five year period, a total of 250,000 workers had at one time been registered members of the trade union.[[#38LennartKPerssonRevolut|38]] Even if workers did remain within the trade union over an extended period of time, it did not follow from this that they would actively participate within it and thereby be transformed. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, three hundred workers joined the local union of the CNT in 1932, but only a minority of them were committed anarchist militants. A significant number joined the trade union because it was necessary to find a job, and they did not subsequently absorb anarchist ideas.[[#39JeromeRMintzTheAnarchi|39]]
+[340] He was forty-three years old at the time. He was thirty-seven when his mother died and thirty-nine at his father’s death.
-Second, syndicalist trade unions, like anarchists in general, experienced a huge amount of state repression. The CNT was founded in 1910, only to be made illegal and have its headquarters shut down in September 1911. This occurred as part of the Spanish state’s violent repression of a wave of strikes and antiwar protests, which anarchist workers had encouraged and participated in. The CNT began to reorganize itself from June 1912 onward, when all the militants who had been arrested the previous September were released. The CNT’s paper, ''Solidaridad Obrera'', reappeared in May 1913, and members of the CNT were able to elect the regional committee of the recently legalized CRT in July. By August, the CRT was once again made illegal after it attempted to organize a general strike in support of textile workers. The CRT re-emerged as a public organization from August 1914 onwards only to be briefly banned again in 1920.[[#40ASmithAnarchismRevolut|40]]
+[341] The plan and design of the Temple Olvidado became the hallmarks of Palenque’s architecture: double-galleried interior, thin supporting walls with multiple doors piercing exterior walls, and trefoil vaults arching across the inner galleries. Ihe vault system used in later buildings actually leaned the outer wall against the center wall, above the medial molding. The Palencanos never developed the true arch, but their system gave them the highest ratio of wall thickness to span width ever achieved in Maya architecture. The system also allowed them to pierce the outer walls of their buildings with more doors than any other Maya style, giving Palenque architecture the largest interior volume and best lighting known among the Maya. This innovative sequence began with the lemple Olvidado and culminated with the Group of the Cross and Houses A and D of the Palace.
-In 1924 the CNT was made illegal for a fourth time due to its resistance to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, which had been established in September 1923. The new regime required that trade unions provide the state with a complete list of their activities and membership, including the positions members held in the trade union and their home addresses. The CNT refused, and different segments of the movement disagreed with one another over whether or not the organization should go underground or try to operate as publicly as possible. On May 28, the Spanish state forced the decision when it responded to the assassination of the executioner of Barcelona, Rogelio Pérez Vicario, by making the trade union illegal, banning ''Solidaridad Obrera'', and arresting leading militants. The CNT was only made legal again in 1930 with the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but nonetheless continued to experience significant state repression both under the quasi-dictatorship of Berenguer and the Spanish Republic, which was inaugurated in April 1931.[[#41JasonGarnerGoalsandMean|41]]
+[342] His construction projects probably also included Houses K and L on the south ends of the eastern and western facades, and perhaps other buildings that were found in excavations of the Palace courtyards.
-'''The General Strike'''
+[343] See Scheie (1986a) for a full discussion of the development of Palenque’s architectural style.
-One of the main tactics that syndicalist anarchists advocated and engaged in were general strikes in which a significant number of workers went on strike at once. Rocker viewed the general strike as “the most powerful weapon which the workers have at their command” because it “brings the whole economic system to a standstill and shakes it to its foundations.”[[#42RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|42]] He proposed that the working classes use the general strike in order to achieve both reforms, such as compelling capitalists to grant workers the eight-hour day, and the revolutionary goal of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#43RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|43]] This same perspective can be seen in Delesalle’s 1906 distinction between four different kinds of general strike: (a) a general strike by individual unions; (b) a general strike across all industries on a specific day; (c) a general strike across all industries that places the working class in “a state of open war with capitalist society”; and (d) a general strike that is a revolution.[[#44QuotedinJamesJollTheAn|44]]
+[344] This inference of the identity of the woman named in the Temple of Inscriptions as Pacal’s mother is based on the following pattern of data:
+<br>
+<br>(1) The woman who appears in the equivalent chronological position in the death list on the sarcophagus is his mother, Lady Zac-Kuk.
+<br>
+<br>(2) On the Oval Palace Tablet, the woman named as Pacal’s mother hands him the crown that makes him king, but his father is neither named nor pictured. The parent critical to his legitimate claim to the throne is his mother rather than his father.
+<br>
+<br>(3) His father, Kan-Bahlum-Mo’, never appears in an accession phrase in any of the inscriptions of Palenque. Furthermore, Pacal depicts Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ only on the sarcophagus where he appears as the king’s father and not as a king in his own right.
+<br>
+<br>(3) The goddess is born on a date deliberately contrived to have the same temporal character (see note 35) as Pacal’s birth.
+<br>
+<br>All of these factors emphasize that Pacal’s right of inheritance descended through his mother rather than his father. Pacal’s strategy for explaining the appropriateness of this pattern of descent was to establish an equation between his mother and the mother of the gods. To have named the woman who acceded shortly before his own accession with the name of the goddess is much in keeping with this strategy.
+<br>
+<br>The name itself consists of the bird from the Palenque Emblem Glyph, which is a heron, with feathers in its mouth. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1977) has suggested that this is a play on the name Zac-Kuk, based on the following word plays. The word for heron in Yucatec and Choi is zac bac, “white bone,” or some expression like “white crest.” The zac bac reading works well as the Palenque Emblem Glyph since the main sign in the Emblem Glyph is a long bone or skull, also bac. Lounsbury suggests that the feathers (kuk) in the mouth changes zac bac to zac kuk, thus making a play on the name of Pacal’s mother which was Zac-Kuk, “White (or Resplendent) Quetzal.” No one has, as yet, suggested a reading for the small sign mounted atop the heron’s head in the name. At the 1989 Texas Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Dennis Tedlock offered a different solution by linking the zac bac gloss with the name Xbaquiyalo, the first wife of Hunhunahpu and mother of Hun-Batz’ and Hun-Chuen in the Popol Vuh.
-Syndicalist anarchists were neither the first nor the only group to advocate the general strike as a strategy through which the working classes could transform society in a positive direction.[[#45PhilHGoodsteinTheTheor|45]] In October 1833, an assembly of Glasgow workers associated with the Owenite movement passed a resolution that declared that rather than launching an insurrection to achieve social change, workers should simply fold their arms and abstain from work. This mass stoppage of work would, according to their optimistic prediction, have the consequence that “capital is destroyed, the revenue fails, the system of government falls into confusion, and every link in the chain which binds society together is broken in a moment by this inert conspiracy of the poor against the rich.”[[#46QuotedinGoodsteinGeneral|46]]
+[345] The stairs leading up the front of the Temple of Inscriptions and those leading down to the tomb have risers about 18 inches high. Today, the inner stairs are almost always damp and slippery from condensation in the tunnellike vaults; we assume the same conditions were extant when Pacal was buried.
-The idea of the general strike continued to be advocated during the First International. At the Brussels Congress of September 1868, a resolution was passed that stated that, if a war broke out, then workers would stop it through the “legal practical means” of ceasing all work.[[#47QuotedinJulianPWArcher|47]] Several months later Bakunin argued in “Organization and the General Strike,”'' ''which was published in ''Égalité'' on April 3, 1869, that the recent wave of strikes in Europe indicated that “the struggle of labor against capital is growing ever stronger . . . and that we are advancing at a great pace toward Social Revolution. . . . As strikes spread and as neighbors learn about them the general strike comes ever closer. These days, with the idea of liberation so current amongst the proletariat, a general strike can result only in a great cataclysm, giving society a new skin.”[[#48MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|48]]
+[346] While we have no way of determining who enacted the rituals described in this scenario, the fact that these particular actions were done is clear from the archaeological record at Palenque and from records of other burial rites, especially those of Ruler 3 at Piedras Negras (Stuart 1985a). The description of the objects deposited inside the coffin and tomb are drawn from Ruz (1973) and from his description of the sacrifice of five victims (1955). The description of the scale and feel of being in the tomb comes from the days Scheie spent locked inside the tomb helping Merle Greene Robertson photograph the stucco sculptures modeled on the walls.
-The Belgian Federation of the Saint-Imier International, which included both anarchists and collectivists who were not anarchists, endorsed the general strike as a revolutionary strategy during their congress of August 1873 held in Antwerp. Guillaume responded to this in May, writing that “the general strike, if it was realizable, would certainly be the most powerful lever of a social revolution. Just imagine the effect of the immense labor machine being stopped on a fixed day in all countries at once. . . . In a word, the whole people descending into the street, and saying to their masters: ‘I will only start work again after having accomplished the transformation of property which must put the instruments of labor into the hands of the workers.’”[[#49QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|49]]
+[347] The drawings which survive on the sarcophagus sides are carefully drawn and beautifully designed. However, the carving, especially in the areas at some distance from the image of the falling Pacal, are very sloppily executed. Merle Robertson and Scheie take this contrast to mean that the carving was executed at the last minute and in a rush. See Merle Robertson (1983) for a detailed photographic record of the tomb.
-He was nonetheless unsure if “the International Federation of trade unions . . . will ever be strong enough, solid enough, universal enough to be able to carry out a general strike.”[[#50QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|50]] The general strike continued to be discussed and debated during the September 1873 Geneva Congress of the Saint-Imier International. The Belgian delegates unsurprisingly argued that the general strike was “a means of bringing a movement onto the street and leading the workers to the barricades.”[[#51QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|51]] Guillaume similarly insisted that the general strike, as understood by the International, was the social revolution and that revolutionaries should focus on bringing it about. Although Guillaume had previously described a general strike as occurring on a fixed day, he now asked: “Should the ideal of the general strike . . . be that it has to break out everywhere at an appointed day and hour? Can the day and hour of the revolution be fixed in this way? No! . . . The revolution has to be contagious.”[[#52QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|52]]
+[348] Xoc appears briefly on the Palace Tablet as the man who dedicated the north building of the Palace after Kan-Xul had been taken captive by the king of Tonina. He never became the king, but he apparently was a high-ranked official in the kingdom because he functioned as the surrogate of the captured Kan-Xul until a new king was selected from the royal clan. Given his age of thirty-three at the time of Pacal’s death, we have assumed he served Pacal as well as his descendants.
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, the idea of the general strike was frequently discussed by French trade unionists during the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement. In 1887, at the Montluçon Congress of the National Federation of Trade Unions (FNS), two anarchist workers, Berger and Combomreil, responded to the French state socialist Jules Guesde’s proposal that capitalism should be abolished through the seizure of state power. They advocated the general strike as an alternative method for achieving social change. A year later, the FNS passed a resolution at its congress from October 28–November 4 in Le Bouscat which stated that “the general strike, i.e., the complete cessation of labor, or the revolution, may be used by the workers for their emancipation.”[[#53GoodsteinGeneralStrike5|53]]
+[349] Chaacal, in fact, did become king after Kan-Xul was taken captive and executed at Tonina. His parentage statements do not name either Chan-Bahlum or Kan-Xul as his father. He was apparently the offspring of one of the women in Pacal’s lineage, perhaps a sister of Chan-Bahlum and Kan-Xul. Chac-Zutz’ was a cahal, who became an important figure (maybe the war chief of the kingdom) during Chaacal’s reign.
-During the 1880s and 1890s, many French trade unionists conceived of the general strike in a manner that differed significantly from how syndicalist anarchists would later theorize it in the early twentieth century. Aristide Briand cowrote a text with Pelloutier in 1892, while Pelloutier was still a member of the Marxist led French Workers’ Party and had yet to become an anarchist. It was not published in full, but, in it, they depict the general strike as a “peaceful and legal” affair in which workers saved up enough money and provisions to last fifteen days without work and, on an agreed date, stayed at home. It was imagined that, in the absence of the working classes’ labor, capitalism would quickly cease to function and be abolished “smoothly, without the spilling of blood, solely by the combination of rest.”[[#54QuotedinJenningsSyndical|54]]
+[350] The offerings of the plaster heads, the plates and cups of food, the royal belt, and the slaughtered victims are located in the plans below.
+<br>
+<br>[[][Jester God headband mask]]
-Syndicalist anarchists, in comparison to many earlier advocates of the general strike, were not naive and understood that a society-wide strike that encompassed all branches of production was extremely unlikely to occur, especially at the beginning of the strike. Nacht, for example, wrote in 1905 (under the pen name Arnold Roller) that a general strike in which the entire international working classes simultaneously laid down their tools and overthrew capitalism was a beautiful idea that will nonetheless “always be a dream.”[[#55ArnoldRollerTheSocialGe|55]] Given this, syndicalist anarchists aimed to achieve the more feasible goal of organizing a general strike that began in key industries the economy could not function without, such as coal, gas, railway, and shipping. From this starting point, the general strike would, in theory, spread to the wider economy as workers in more and more industries either decided to join the strike in solidarity with its aims and as a response to state repression toward the strike, or were forced to cease work entirely due to the strike’s disruption of key infrastructure and raw materials not being transported to factories. This would in turn create a situation in which the large number of workers who were not organized within trade unions, or who were apolitical, were forced by the unfolding wave of events to take sides, participate in the general strike and thereby become radicalized.[[#56RollerSocialGeneralStrik|56]]
+[351] The other possibility is that the portraits represent the great king Pacal and his wife Lady Ahpo-Hel.
-Unlike the previously mentioned proponents of the general strike, syndicalist anarchists did not view it as a form of passive resistance in which the working classes simply ceased work, folded their arms, and waited for dominant structures to collapse. In the advent of a revolutionary situation, they proposed that workers should use the general strike as a platform from which to launch the forceful expropriation of the means of production, land, and the necessities of life from the ruling classes and establish federations of workplace and community assemblies. During her speech at the 1905 founding convention of the IWW, Lucy Parsons proposed that socialism could be achieved via a “general strike,” in which workers occupied their workplaces in order to “take possession of the necessary property of production.”[[#57LucyParsonsFreedomEqual|57]] That same year, Nacht wrote that a successful general strike “accomplishes expropriation and communalizes the means of production.”[[#58RollerSocialGeneralStrik|58]] Pouget and Pataud imagined in 1909 a fictional revolutionary general strike in which “the Unions in each industry, in each profession, took possession of the factories and workshops” and reorganized production on a communist basis by means of free agreement between federations.[[#59PataudandPougetHowWeSh|59]] Besnard argued in 1930 that a revolutionary general strike was distinguished from normal strikes on the grounds that workers would not only cease work, but also “''occupy'' the place of production, ''get rid'' of the boss, ''expropriate'' him, and ''get ready'' to get production moving again, but in the interests of the revolution.”[[#60QuotedinRichardsMalates|60]]
+[352] Merle Robertson (1979) first associated the imagery on these piers with glyphic accounts of Chan-Bahlum’s heir-designation. The fact that Chan-Bahlum became a living incarnation of the sun is declared by him in his own textual account of this ceremony in the Temple of the Sun in the Group of the Cross.
-Syndicalist anarchists tried to clearly differentiate their active militant conception of the general strike from previous passive conceptions. For Nacht, writing in 1905, the term “social general strike” should be used to refer to a general strike that involves the expropriation of the ruling classes and the establishment of an anarchist society, in order to clearly differentiate it from general strikes for reforms, such as higher wages or universal suffrage.[[#61RollerSocialGeneralStrik|61]] In 1907, the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam passed a series of resolutions on syndicalism that varyingly referred to “the revolutionary General strike” and “the General Strike with Expropriation.”[[#62MaurizioAntonioliedThe|62]] Decades later, in 1930, Besnard referred to “the expropriatory general strike, with violence,” which would be “''insurrectional''.”[[#63QuotedinRichardsMalates|63]]
+[353] The badly damaged condition of these stucco portraits and the texts that once accompanied them preclude identifying them with security, but logically they should be the most important ancestors in Chan-Bahlum’s claim to legitimacy. One possible pattern is that they all represent his father Pacal, but the headdresses, one of which is a jaguar head, suggest that they are meant to represent different individuals. The Maya often represented their names in the imagery of their headdresses. The jaguar headdress, then, may refer to Chan-Bahlum I, his great-great-great-grandfather.
-Some syndicalist anarchists equated the general strike with the social revolution, while others were careful to distinguish between the two. Nacht claimed that since a “social general strike” would involve the expropriation of the means of production and the establishment of an anarchist society, it followed that “the General Strike is not only the introduction of the revolution but is the social revolution itself.”[[#64RollerSocialGeneralStrik|64]] Malatesta, in comparison, held in 1907 that “the general strike has always struck me as an excellent means to set off the social revolution.”[[#65AntonioliedInternationa|65]] Malatesta’s conceptualization was shared by at least some syndicalist trade unions. At the founding 1910 congress of the CNT, a report on the general strike was approved and later read aloud again at the CNT’s 1911 congress. The report proposed that “the general strike, the withdrawal of labor by all the workers at any given moment, entails such a great disturbance in the ordinary course of today’s society of exploited and exploiters that it will unavoidably have to cause an explosion, a clash, between the antagonistic forces that are now fighting for survival.”[[#66CNTTheFirstCongressof|66]] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles described “the social general strike . . . as the prelude to the social revolution.”[[#67IWADeclarationofthePri|67]]
+[354] At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan depicted the designation of his heir by showing a high-ranking noble displaying him at the edge of a pyramid. The audience on the mural consists of fourteen high-ranked individuals, but the ritual would have been held publicly, the entire community in attendance (M. Miller 1986b:59–97). At Palenque, Chan-Bahlum did not represent the audience, but we know it included everyone who stood in the plaza under the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions. In the Group of the Cross, he used a pyramid glyph to describe the action of heir-designation (Scheie 1985b) as being “pyramided.” The glyph actually reads le.match’ul na (using the transcription punctuation from Thompson s <verbatim>[1962]</verbatim> A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs) or lem ch’ul na: in Yucatec lem is glossed by Barrera Vasquez as “meter, encajar, introducir. To become the heir was “to introduce the child from the pyramid,” exactly the scenes Chan-Bahlum displayed on the Temple of Inscriptions piers.
-Syndicalist anarchists did not think that all it took to initiate a revolutionary general strike was a trade union boldly proclaiming it on a fixed date whenever they fancied.[[#68RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|68]] They believed, instead, that it would develop out of smaller strikes for immediate improvements. In Pouget and Pataud’s 1909 novel ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', they describe a period of escalating class conflict prior to the launching of the general strike: “strikes followed strikes; lockouts were replied to by boycotts; sabotage was employed with ruinous intensity.”[[#69PataudandPougetHowWeSh|69]] Under such conditions the antagonism between workers and capitalists developed to the point that workers came to consider themselves to be in a continuous war against the ruling classes. Through their experience of collective struggle within trade unions, they developed radical capacities, drives, and consciousness such that “the working class became more warlike. They took possession of the streets, and familiarized themselves with the tactics of resistance. They learned how to stand their ground before bodies of police, and how to deal with the troops marched against them.”[[#70PataudandPougetHowWeSh|70]]
+[355] Although the first royal temple at Cerros is designed around the quincunx or five-fold principle, the later public buildings there are triadic in concept. The earliest architects created an innovative variety of building designs, but the triadic principle was the most pervasive.
-In this fictional account, the class conflict then exploded into a revolutionary situation, after a violent skirmish between striking construction workers and the police and army culminated in a massacre, during which the military shot at and launched a cavalry charge against the demonstrators. In response, syndicalist trade unions seized their opportunity and called for a general strike in solidarity with the victims of state violence, a strike they claimed would continue until the state had prosecuted the soldiers.[[#71PataudandPougetHowWeSh|71]] This general strike against a specific act of state violence morphed over time into a revolutionary movement against capitalism and the state due to a combination of: (a) syndicalist trade unions spreading anarchist ideas among participants of the general strike, publicly calling for the social revolution and preparing for the social revolution by seizing weapons and organizing workers’ militias; (b) the working classes being compelled to expropriate and distribute goods in order to meet people’s needs, especially for food; and (c) the working classes responding to increasingly extreme state violence against the general strike by overthrowing the ruling classes.[[#72PataudandPougetHowWeSh|72]]
+[356] The glyphic phrase for these small inner houses, pib na, consists of<em>pib,</em> the word for “underground” as in the pits used for cooking, and na, “edifice or building.” Pib na is also the term for a “sweat bath” used by women after childbirth. Many cosmologies of modern Maya in Chiapas refer to a sweat bath in the heart of the mountain. This image may be intended here also.
-The manner in which syndicalist anarchists described the general strike can sometimes give the false impression that they thought a general strike could overthrow class society without the need for armed conflict and the violent destruction of the state. Such an interpretation ignores what the vast majority of syndicalist anarchists wrote. Pouget and Pataud’s fictional general strike included workers assaulting government buildings, such as police stations and parliament, in order to achieve “the dissolution of the bourgeois State” by “disorganizing . . . dismantling and thoroughly disabling it.”[[#73PataudandPougetHowWeSh|73]] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles claimed that “the decisive struggle between the capitalism of today and free communism of tomorrow will not be without conflict,” and, as a result, they recognized the need for “violence as a means of defense against the violent methods of the ruling classes during the struggle for the possession of the factories and the fields by the revolutionary people.”[[#74IWADeclarationofthePri|74]] At the 1910 founding congress of the CNT, it was agreed that, given the violence of the state, “it would be impossible for a peaceful general strike to last very long”; workers would have to engage in “violent” protests against the forces of state repression and thereby defeat “the tyrants.”[[#75CNTTheFirstCongressof|75]] This position was expanded upon in resolutions of the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress that proposed that the defense of the revolution should be achieved by “the people armed.”[[#76QuotedinPeiratsCNTinth|76]]
+[357] The text on the Tablet of the Cross writes this second event as yoch-te k’in-k’in, “he became the sun.”
-Some syndicalist anarchists did argue that a revolutionary general strike would provide a more effective means of defeating the police and military than the previous strategy of launching insurrections that established barricades. Nacht claimed in 1905 that the widening of streets since the French Revolution of 1789 and the uprisings of 1848 meant that “the heroic times of the battle on the barricades have gone by.”[[#77RollerSocialGeneralStrik|77]] In the aftermath of World War I, Berkman wrote in 1929 that workers at a barricade would not be able to defeat a trained military supported by artillery, tanks, bombers, and poison gas. Such an idea of revolution was “obsolete,” and had to be replaced by one that focused on the true power of the working classes: their ability to withdraw labor.[[#78BerkmanAnarchism19697|78]] Rocker similarly wrote that the general strike was a replacement for “the barricades of the political uprising.”[[#79RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|79]]
+[358] All three panels have the same text on them, but the text is split in different ways in each temple. In the Temple of the Cross, it reads “ten days after he had become the stood-up one (yoch-te acai) and then he spoke of (iwal chi-wa or che-wa) U-Kix-Chan, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, the child of Pacal, Blood Lord of Palenque.” In the Temple of the Foliated Cross, the first event (yoch-te) appears on the left panel and the second (chi-wa) is on the right. In the Temple of the Sun, the glyphs from the left panel survive on Maudslay’s (1889—19O2:P1.86) reproduction of Waldeck’s original drawing, but nevertheless some of them are readable. The first phrase reads chumlah ti ahau le and paraphrases “He was seated as king, Mah Kina Chan-Bahlum, Blood Lord of Palenque.” The second section of the text is much more difficult, but the best probability is that it begins with a Distance Number that leads to the event ten days after the accession (9.12.11.13.0 5 Ahau 13 Kayab) and then jumps to the right tablet where the event was once written. Today only the long name phrase of the actor, Chan-Bahlum, survives on the right panel.
-Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud all hoped that a general strike would occur over such a large area and involve so many workers that the military would be forced, by the sheer scale of the revolt, to scatter their troops into smaller units that could then be more easily defeated in combat or persuaded to join the workers in revolt.[[#80RockerAnarchoSyndicalism1|80]] The idea that a significant number of troops would mutiny and refuse to obey their orders to crush the general strike was not purely wishful thinking and had some basis in experience. In 1871, the Paris Commune was created after army soldiers, who had been sent to seize cannons from the national guard in the district of Montmartre, disobeyed multiple orders to fire on workers and guardsmen defending the cannons and, instead, fraternized with the people, a significant number of whom were women. Several years later, in 1907, a detachment of troops decided to mutiny on their way to suppress a CGT picket line.[[#81JohnMerrimanMassacreThe|81]] During Spain’s tragic week of 1909, a general strike against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco mutated into an armed insurrection, in which, the working classes attacked the police specifically, while persuading some local soldiers to not fire on them. The insurrection was soon defeated when soldiers from outside Barcelona were called in and the barricades that workers had assembled were destroyed by artillery.[[#82BookchinSpanishAnarchists|82]]
+[359] Mayanists are still debating the identification of this smaller figure. Floyd Louns- bury (in his seminar on Maya hieroglyphic writing, 1975) first proposed that he is Chan- Bahlum at his heir-designation. Since all three of the texts located near his head record this heir-designation and, in’two of the three texts, a war event which took place more than a year later on 9.10.10.0.0, this interpretation has merit. In fact, it has resurfaced recently in a presentation by Basse and it has the support of David Stuart. Another alternative interpretation emerged at the 1987 Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Tom Jones proposed this figure represents the lineage founder, Bahlum-Kuk. Since founders also appear in accession scenes at Yaxchilan (Lintel 25) and Copan (the bench from Temple 11), this interpretation also has merit.
+<br>
+<br>For the present, we still hold to the older interpretation of this shorter figure as Pacal, based on the following arguments:
+<br>
+<br>(1) There is a transfer of a scepterlike object (in the Temple of the Cross a Quadripartite Scepter; in the Temple of the Foliated Cross, a Personified Perforator; and in the Temple of the Sun, a shield and eccentric-shield device). These transferred objects represent the power of the throne, and rulers at Palenque and other Maya sites wield them in scenes of rituals. If the smaller figure is Chan- Bahlum at his own heir-designation, he is already controlling these objects at age six. Lounsbury (personal communication, 1989) has suggested that this is a ritual in which the child was made acquainted with the objects he would one day wield as king. We find this interpretation less satisfying than one in which these objects are transferred from the former king, now deceased, to his son who is becoming the new king.
+<br>
+<br>(2) In the heir-designation presentation on the Temple of Inscriptions piers, the size of the child (104 cm) matches closely the size of six-year-old Choi children in the region today (M. Robertson 1979.132–133). The scale of the child presented in the Bonampak murals conforms to this size in direct proportion to the adult who holds him. The muffled figure in the Group of the Cross may be smaller than the larger figures, but he is still of a size larger than a six-year-old in proportion to the larger figure. The Temple of Inscriptions child when stretched out to full height is only 56 percent of the height of the adults who hold him. while the smaller figure in the Group of the Cross is between 73 percent and 78 percent of the height of the larger figure. According to Robertson’s modern measurements, a 1.04-meter six-year-old from the Palenque region is around 60 percent of the height of a 5’ 6” (1.70m) adult.
+<br>
+<br>(3) If the scene is the documentation of Chan-Bahlum’s accession rites, and this interpretation is well supported by the inscriptions, then the composition format of each temple means to present this small figure as the source of power. He holds the objects of power on the inner tablet while the new king holds them on the outer panels. There is a transfer of these objects from the smaller person to the larger one as the scene moves inside to outside. The larger figure also dons the costume of kings in its most ancient and orthodox version during the transition from inside to outside: He wears minimal jewelry and a cotton hipcloth on the inside and the full costume over those minimal clothes on the outside. In addition, the larger figure takes the smaller person’s place when the scene moves from the inside to the outside of the sanctuary, especially in the composition of the Temple of the Cross. The scenes in all three temples emphasize the transformation of the tall figure from heir to king in the movement from inside to outside, and within this program the smaller figure is presented as the source of Chan-Bahlum’s claim to the throne—and that person was either Pacal, his father, or Bahlum-Kuk, the founder of his dynasty.
+<br>
+<br>(4) Finally, in the heir-designation event, the six-year-old child was not the main actor, either at Palenque or at Bonampak. The child was displayed as the heir, but the father, who was the acting king, oversaw that display. At Bonampak, Chaan-Muan went to war, not the child, and at Palenque, Pacal memorialized the thirteenth-haab anniversary of this heir-designation in the Tableritos from the Subterranean building of the Palace without mentioning Chan-Bahlum at all. Chan-Bahlum, the six-year-old child, was the recipient of the action in the heir-designation rites, but the source of those actions was his father, Pacal.
+<br>
+<br>The argument for identifying the smaller figure as Chan-Bahlum at his heir-designation has strengthened with the recognition that the two outer panels of the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun depict Chan-Bahlum at points in his accession rituals separated by at least ten days. The fact that Chan-Bahlum appears on more than one date, involved in more than one action on the outer panels, reinforces the possibility that he is shown at two different ages and in two different actions on the inner panel. Although we believe this latter interpretation to be less probable, it is a viable possibility that must also be kept in mind.
-Even if Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud were overly optimistic about the effectiveness of a general strike in diminishing the power of the military and police, they nonetheless did all advocate an armed uprising as part of the general strike, and thought that workers would have to defend themselves from the violence of the police and army. Pouget and Pataud’s account of how this would happen was, by far, the most eccentric. In their novel, they depicted the forces of reaction, including the invading armies of foreign states, being easily defeated by a variety of science-fiction weapons. This included electromagnetic waves that caused far away enemy ammunition to explode and aerial torpedoes dropped from remote-controlled planes.[[#83PataudandPougetHowWeSh|83]] These weapons were so ridiculous for the time that it is unclear if the authors seriously advocated them, or merely intended to entertain the reader. Kropotkin nonetheless asserted in his preface to the 1913 English edition of Pouget and Pataud’s book that the authors had significantly underestimated the violent resistance that the social revolution would face and have to overcome.[[#84KropotkinDirectStruggle|84]]
+[360] The Tzotzil-speaking Maya of Zinacantan in highland Chiapas still regard the Christian crosses at the base of their sacred mountains as the doorways to the Otherworld which contains their ancestors. The shamans of this community regularly commune with the supernatural at these holy places (Vogt 1976).
-Although syndicalist anarchists generally attempted to produce a realistic conception of the general strike, they consistently faced two key problems when trying to implement it. First, syndicalist trade unions in Europe and the United States were unable to organize or initiate genuine national general strikes across multiple key industries by themselves, due to them having either small memberships or large memberships concentrated in specific parts of a country or industries. Given this, in order to launch national general strikes they had to rely on support from reformist trade unions, which failed to materialize on a number of occasions. In Spain, the CNT, whose membership was largest in Catalonia, organized a short general strike in December 1916 with the General Union of Workers (UGT), which was affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). This was followed by a general strike in August 1917, for which the leadership of the PSOE-UGT seriously failed to prepare, and which was only launched after they were forced into action by the UGT’s largest union independently calling for a general strike. A few years later, the UGT refused to support a general strike in 1920. When Primo de Rivera established himself as dictator of Spain in September 1923, the CNT responded by calling for a general strike, while the UGT not only did not support the general strike but collaborated with the regime.[[#85BookchinSpanishAnarchists|85]]
+[361] See Schele and M. Miller (1986:76–77, 265–315) for a detailed discussion of the World Tree and its appearances in death and bloodletting iconography of the Maya.
-Second, general strikes organized by anarchists were militarily crushed on numerous occasions. A long list of examples can be found in the history of Spanish anarchism. To give one, on February 16, 1902, a general strike in Barcelona—which spread to nearby industrial towns—was launched in solidarity with the striking Metalworkers’ Federation, who had been on strike for two months. The general strike only lasted a week and was defeated following the declaration of martial law, the deployment of the military, the closure of union headquarters, and the arrest of several hundred organizers.[[#86ASmithAnarchismRevolut|86]] Spanish syndicalist anarchists were themselves aware of this problem. The CNT’s report on the general strike, which was approved at the founding 1910 congress, claimed that “experience has taught us that” when the general strike is “localized at one point and the workers of the rest of the nation remain completely passive, the forces of public order, at the service of the bourgeoisie, will concentrate on that location, and it will be relatively easy for the government to crush the revolt.”[[#87CNTTheFirstCongressof|87]]
+[362] The aged god on the right has never been securely identified. Kelley (1965) suggested God M, but demonstration of his identification has not materialized. The only other portrait we have of this god appears on a small incised bone, probably from the Palenque region (see Crocker-Delataille 1985: Pl. 395). The composition of these two old gods bent under the weight of the throne precisely anticipates the display of captives on Late Classic stelae from the site of Coba (Thompson, Pollock, and Chariot 1932).
-This is not to say that general strikes were always unsuccessful. Swiss anarchists participated in a 1907 general strike against local chocolate companies, including Nestlé, after a worker was unfairly fired. The general strike, which lasted from March 25 to 29, spread to Montreux, Lausanne, and Geneva in response to gendarmes firing on and wounding ten workers. It resulted in the rehiring of the worker, recognition of the trade union, and various material improvements.[[#88AntonioliedInternationa|88]] Even when general strikes were militarily crushed or failed to achieve their immediate objectives, they could still bring about social change. This includes the previously mentioned 1906 CGT general strike that won the weekend and the 1919 CNT general strike that won the eight-hour day. On other occasions general strikes were, even if defeated, important acts of working-class resistance against domination and exploitation by the ruling classes. It is, from an anarchist perspective, better to rebel against oppression and lose than to not rebel at all, especially since workers do not know going into a struggle whether or not they will emerge victorious.
+[363] God L is now recognized as one of the chief gods of the Maya Underworld. Most important, he is the deity shown presiding over the gods on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the day of the current creation (M.D. Coe 1973:107—109). Chan-Bahlum s repeated depiction of this god asserts the ability of the king to control the effects of God L and other Xibalbans in his community, and perhaps his ability as king to gain the willing cooperation of these gods in the affairs of the kingdom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#19|1]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 56–57.</div>
+[364] This set of gods was first noticed by Berlin (1963), who gave it the name Palenque Triad” because it was in the Palenque inscriptions that he first saw them. Building on Berlin’s identification, Kelley (1965) identified their birth dates in the Group of the Cross and suggested associations between these Maya gods and other Mesoamerican supernaturals. Lounsbury (1976, 1980, 1985) sorted out chronological problems concerning their histories and recognized the names of their parents in the I ablet of the Cross. He has also made extensive arguments concerning their identities. In Maya art, these gods appear both singly and as a triad of gods at other Maya sites. Most important, GI and GUI, the first and second-born gods, are the beings most often depicted in the very earliest public images created by the Maya during the Late Preclassic period. They are not just Palenque gods.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#29|2]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''432–33.</div>
+[365] The text that records this event falls into a couplet which characterizes the action in two ways. In the first, the god yoch-te ta chan “entered into the sky. In the second, he dedicated a house named “wac-ah-chan xaman waxac na GI or raised up sky north eight house GI.” The first glyph naming the house consists of the number six prefixed to a sky glyph with two ah signs above it. The word for “six is wac. Barrera Vasquez (1980:906) lists a homophone, wac, as “cosa enhiesta” (enhestar means “to erect, to set up, to hoist [up], and to raise [up]“). Wac-ah chan is “raised up sky. i his proper name is followed by the glyph for “north” (xaman) and the portrait head of GI preceded by the number eight (waxac) and phonetic na (“edifice”).
+<br>
+<br>The most likely reference here is to the act of raising the sky from the primordial sea of creation, an act known to be part of many Mesoamerican origin myths. This house is further characterized as yotot xaman, “the house of the north. The same wacah chan phrase names the inner sanctuary of the Temple of the Cross and World T ree on its inner panel. The god’s action was to establish the primary axis of the world by setting the sky in its place and establishing its order. Since this is an action twice associated with the north, we suggest it corresponded in the Maya mind to the set of the polar star and the circular movement of the constellations around that axis. In the tropics, the polar star is much lower than in the temperate zone, and the movement of the constellations through the night is even more noticeable, resembling as much as anything the shifting of patterns around the inside of a barrel. This axial pivot of the sky creates the great pattern through which the sun and the planets move and it was a pattern created by GT 542 days or a year and a half after this era began (Scheie 1987e and n.d.a).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#39|3]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 434.</div>
+[366] Floyd Lounsbury first deciphered the chronology of this difficult passage. The text begins with a Distance Number of 8.5.0, a birth verb, and then a series of glyphs recording 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, the era date. Before Lounsbury proposed this solution, most researchers had assumed that the birth referred to the Initial Series event. In this interpretation, the Distance Number must be in error since the Initial Series date is 6.14.0 before 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, rather than the 8.5.0 written in the text. Lounsbury used known patterns of Mayan grammar to show that there are actually two different births given here, and that the name of the person born 8.5.0 before the era has been deleted from the text. The missing name, however, can be reconstructed—again by using known patterns of Mayan grammar—as the subject of the next event. The name in question is GT, the god who ordered the sky a year and a half after the era began. See Lounsbury (1980 and 1985) for a full discussion of the chronology and grammar of these passages and the identities of the gods of the Palenque Triad.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#49|4]]. Émile Pouget, ''Direct Action ''(London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 10–13.</div>
+[367] Lounsbury (1976) called this kind of numerology “contrived numbers.” Such numbers are composed of two dates: The earlier one is usually from a time previous to the 4 Ahau 8 Cumku creation date, and the other is a historical date of significance in the present creation. The Distance Number (amount of time) that separates the two is contrived by using highly factorable numbers, so that both dates fall on the same point in time in several different cycles. The two dates manipulated by Chan-Bahlum, 12.19.13.4.0 8 Ahau 18 Zee and 9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahau 13 Pop, fall 9.8.16.9.0 or 1,359,540 days apart in the Maya Long Count. This number is 2<sup>2</sup> x 3<sup>2</sup> 5 x 7 x 13 x 83 yielding the following relationships:
+<br>
+<br>| 1,359,540 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 5,229 | (26) | gives the same day number |
+<br>| | 3,735 | (364) | computing years |
+<br>| | 1,734 | (780) | Mars period and three tzolkins (3 x 260) |
+<br>| | 1,660 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
+<br>
+<br>This puts Pacal s birth in relation to Lady Beastie’s on the same day in the tzolkin (8 Ahau), the same point in the Mars cycle, and during the time when the same Lord of the Night reigned. Most important, both persons were born twenty days after time moved into the south-yellow quadrant of the 819-day count. And both quadrants began on 1 Ahau.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#59|5]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''51.</div>
+[368] In the account of genesis given in the Popol Vuh, First Mother is a daughter of a lord of Xibalba. V hen the skull of First Father impregnates her by spitting in her hand, she is forced to flee to the world of humanity. As in Chan-Bahlum’s story, the First Mother spans the worlds.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#69|6]]. Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''16–17. During the Saint-Imier International, Guillaume advocated the general strike while being wary of partial strikes for increased wages because he thought they were unlikely to succeed and could instead bring suffering to workers and sap their revolutionary spirit. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''222–25.</div>
+[369] The two births are: 12.19.11.13.0 1 Ahau 8 Muan (June 16, 3122 B.c.) for GT and 1.18.5.4.0 1 Ahau 13 Mac (November 8, 2360 B.c.) for GIL The elapsed time between them is 1.18.13.9.0 or 278,460 days. This sum factors out as 2<sup>2</sup> x 3<sup>2</sup> x 5 x 7 x 13 x 17 and gives the following patterns of cycles:
+<br>
+<br>| 278,460 <verbatim>=</verbatim> | 1,071 | (260) | same day in the tzolkin |
+<br>| | 357 | (780) | same day in the Mars cycle and 3 tzolkins |
+<br>| | 119 | (2,340) | gives the same Lord of the Night |
+<br>| | 765 | (364) | computing year |
+<br>| | 153 | (1,820) | seven tzolkin/five haab cycle |
+<br>| | 340 | (819) | same day in the 819-day quadrant |
+<br>| | 85 | (3,276) | same quadrant of the four 819-day sequence (east, red, and 1 Imix) |
+<br>
+<br>These cycles make the two births fall on the same day in the 260-day tzolkin, on days ruled by the same Lord of the Night, and on the same day in the same quadrant of the 819-day count. The First Father, GI’, was born in the last creation; his reflection in this creation is his child GII.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#79|7]]. Paul Delesalle, “The Strike!,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/library/strike-paul-delesalle. For other examples, see Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle; Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''78–79, 197–210.</div>
+[370] The “fish-in-hand” glyph appears on Lintels 13, 14, and 25 of Yaxchilan with scenes of the Vision Serpent, while on Lintels 39, 40, and 41, the scenes depict Bird-Jaguar and two of his w ives holding Double-headed Serpent Bars. The action associated with this verb is the materialization of the Vision Serpent. Since the k’ul “holy” sign follows the “fish-in-hand” when it is inflected as a transitive root, the action is something done to the “holy” liquid of the body—in other words to “blood.” This action results in the appearance of the Vision Serpent. In those examples where it is not followed by the k’ul “holy” sign, God K appears in the object slot, although we do not yet fully understand what meaning is intended. Perhaps this association of God K with “fish-in-hand” reflects the frequent appearance of this god in the mouth of the Double-headed Serpent Bar. It is the vision often brought forth by the ritual. “To manifest a vision (or a divinity)” is an appropriate paraphrase to use for the present, although the final phonetic reading of the “fish-in- hand” glyph may refer to this action metaphorically or through the vision side of the rite.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#89|8]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 84. For the history of sabotage as a strategy see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 44–46; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 120–23; Dominique Pinsolle, “Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage,” in ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', ed. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 44–58.</div>
+[371] Constance Cortez (1986) and others have identified this bird with Vucub-Caquix of the Popol Vuh. Cortez suggests that this bird represented the idea of order in nature. When it acted with hubris, imitating the glory of the sun, the natural world was out of order. In the story of the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins opposed Vucub-Caquix, and by defeating him, brought nature back into its proper balance and behavior once again. In this interpretation, the Celestial Bird represents an universe in which order is mediated by the king in his role as the avatar of the Hero Twins.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#99|9]]. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 132–33; Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 20–30, 116–17, 121, 137. Nicholas Papayanis, “Alphones Merrheim and the Strike of Hennebont: The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Day in France,” ''International Review of Social History'' 16, no. 2 (1971): 159–83. Spanish trade unionists, including anarchists, also organized a general strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1906, after being inspired by the CGT’s campaign. See Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 130–31.</div>
+[372] On the Tablet of the Cross, these events appear immediately behind Chan- Bahlum’s legs, linked to his accession by a Distance Number.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#109|10]]. The following account of the strike is based on Murray Bookchin, ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998),'' ''160–63; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''292–99.</div>
+[373] Lounsbury (personal communication, 1978) was the first to recognize that Jupiter and Saturn were frozen at their stationary points less than 5+ apart in the sky. He informed Dieter Diitting of the alignment in 1980 and then Diitting and Aveni (1982) extended the hierophany to include this quadruple conjunction with Mars and the moon also in close proximity on that day (July 20, 690, in the Julian calendar). They located the planets as follows:
+<br>
+<br>| <strong>Planet</strong> | <strong>Longitude</strong> | <strong>Latitude</strong> |
+<br>| Mars | 219°.10 | — 2°. 18 |
+<br>| Jupiter | 221°.94 | + 0°.83 |
+<br>| Saturn | 225°.52 | + 2°.04 |
+<br>| Moon | 231°.80 | — 1°.80 |
+<br>
+<br>They describe the phenomena as follows: “... all four planets were close together (a quadruple conjunction) in the same constellation Scorpio, and they must have made quite a spectacle with bright red Antares shining but a few degrees south of the group as they straddled the high ridge that forms the southern horizon of Palenque. The night before 2 Cib 14 Mol the moon would have been just at the western end of the planetary lineup, but the night after it would have been well out of range to the east. The month before and after, Mars would have shifted appreciably away from Jupiter and Saturn. Therefore, the date of the inscription is the best one where the four were closest together.” Aveni continues, “Though conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn with given tolerance in separation are skewed to occur about five times a century, the inclusion of a third planet in the grouping reduces the frequency of occurrence to about once a century.’ Diitting and Aveni speculated that the Palencanos saw this conjunction as a replay of the birth of Triad gods with the moon representing their mother, Lady Beastie. This interpretation seems likely since Chan-Bahium carefully bridged from those births to this 2 Cib 14 Mol event.
+<br>
+<br>Perhaps the most remarkable new piece of information on this date was discovered independently by Stephen Houston and David Stuart (in a letter dated October 19, 1989) and Nikolai Grube (in a independent letter also dated October 19, 1989). The event on this day is written pili u waybil on the Tablet of the Sun and pili u chiltin in the other temples. Houston, Stuart, and Grube all identify way and its past participial waybil as the word meaning “nagual” or “spirit or animal counterpart.” In sixteenth-century Tzotzil (a language very close to the Choi spoken at Palenque), chi’il is “companion, familiar thing, friend” (Laughlin 1988:189).
+<br>
+<br>The verb, which is glyphically spelled pi-lu-yi, seems most closely related to the verb pi’len, which is glossed in Choi (Aulie and Aulie 1978:93) as “acompañar (to accompany)” and “tener relación sexual (to have a sexual relationship).” The second meaning is known to have been used by the Maya as a metaphor for astronomical conjunction, just the event recorded in this phrase. Grube suggested in his letter that the naguals of the Palenque Triad were in conjunction (or had come together) and that the Palencanos regarded the planets as the naguals (or spirit counterparts) of the Triad Gods. Merging his observation with Aveni’s interpretation gives new and important insight into how the Palencanos thought about the events they saw in the sky: The naguals of the three Triad Gods— Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars—were reunited with the nagual of their mother—the moon.
+<br>
+<br>This spectacular hierophany apparently was the trigger event for the house rites that followed over the next three days. However, this day is very near the seventy-fifth tropical year anniversary of Pacal’s accession, which took place only five days after this hierophany. Considering Chan-Bahlum’s preoccupation with the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, this anniversary must also have played a part in his calculations.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#119|11]]. It should be kept in mind that, even after this legislation was passed, workers went on strike to demand that the eight-hour day was implemented. See A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''302–3.</div>
+[374] There are several possible houses that may be the Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building. The Temple of the Cross is the most likely candidate because it contains the dynastic list that includes Bahlum-Kuk‘s name as the founder. However, the text behind Chan- Bahlum on the Temple of the Foliated Cross actually has the words pib nah and yotot following Bahlum-Kuk’s name in a passage that may refer to that temple. We suspect, however, that Chan-Bahlum referred to the entire Group of the Cross as the “Mah Kina Bahlum-Kuk Building.” The last and most distant possibility is the Temple of Inscriptions. Mathews (1980) identified an Initial Series date over the piers of the Temple of Inscriptions with the 819-day count appropriate to the 2 Cib 14 Mol series of events. He suggested the date intended here was the hierophany, but it was just as likely to have been 3 Caban 15 Mol, with Chan-Bahlum’s dedication of Ins father’s funerary building as the event taking place. This last solution seems the least satisfactory of the four because of Chan-Bahlum’s deliberate linkage of the 3 Caban 15 Mol dedication event to the mythological dedication of GT. To us, it is more logical to assume he would have reserved such elaborate explanations for his own buildings.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#129|12]]. Nick Rider, “The Practice of Direct Action: The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” in ''For Anarchism: History'','' Theory and Practice'', ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989), 87.</div>
+[375] In the Temples of the Foliated Cross and the Sun, a Distance Number of three days stands between 3 Caban 15 Mol and this bloodletting event. However, the 3 Caban 15 Mol event is not recorded at all on the Tablet of the Cross. In that context, the Distance Number must be counted from the date of the astronomical event, 2 Cib 14 Mol. This chronology places the bloodletting on 5 Cauac 17 Mol rather than 6 Ahau 18 Mol.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#138|13]]. Quoted in Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88.</div>
+[376] The only surviving pier reliefs are from the Temple of the Sun. The inscription is fragmentary but the date is indisputably 9.12.19.14.12 5 Eb 5 Kayab and the verb is the same. The Initial Series date and its supplementary data were on the south pier, while the verb and actor were on the north pier. The figures on both inner piers are badly damaged, but Pier C has a flexible shield with a Tlaloc image on it. For the Maya, this Tlaloc iconography signals bloodletting and war, so that we can speculate with some certainty that the 5 Eb 5 Kayab event involved the taking and sacrifice of captives. We have lost the piers on the other two temples, but since the balustrades and sanctuary doorjambs in all three temples repeat the same basic information in the same discourse pattern, it is likely that the piers repeated the same information on all three temples.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#148|14]]. The following account is based on Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88–98; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 105–7, 112–18, 120. There had been earlier attempts by Spanish anarchists to organize tenants in 1903–4 and 1917–18. See A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''162, 265–66.</div>
+[377] Although astronomy plays an important role in the timing of the events of Chan-Bahlum’s history—he ended his accession rites on a maximum elongation of Venus and dedicated the Group of the Cross during a major planetary conjunction—the dedication of the pib na was not timed by astronomy. Like Ah Cacaw of Tikal, he went to Tlaloc war on an important anniversary.
+<br>
+<br>While the association is distant, the 5 Eb 5 Kayab dedication of the inner sanctum may also have been associated with a Venus cycle. The final event of his ten-day-long accession ritual occurred during a maximum elongation of Venus as Morningstar. The dedication of the pib na took place almost exactly five rounds of Venus later, but the planet was twenty days from its elongation point on that day. Chan-Bahlum may have been observing Venus as well as the tropical year in timing the dedications of the pib na. although it is clear that Venus was not the primary factor.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#158|15]]. Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?,” trans. Jesse Cohn, Anarchist Library website, n.d., https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/milly-witkop-rocker-what-does-the-syndicalist-women-s-union-want.</div>
+[378] Only one jamb panel is preserved from each sanctuary, and of these only the panel from the Temple of the Foliated Cross is complete. Since this panel formed a joint with the outer panel, the border on the outer panel continued onto the edge of the doorjamb. Using this pattern, we can ascertain that the surviving fragments are all from the right sides of the doors. It is possible, therefore, that the left doorjambs recorded the birth of the Triad Gods, but until additional fragments are discovered, we will not know the entire pattern.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#168|16]]. Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?”</div>
+[379] The clearest demonstration of the relationship of the central icon with the name of the sanctuary occurs in the Temple of the Foliated Cross. There the icon is a maize tree emerging from a monster with a kan-cross in its forehead while the name of the house is a tree sign over a kan-cross. Since this same relationship must hold for the other two temples, we can identify wacah chan as the name of the tree on the Tablet of the Cross. The Temple of the Sun is more difficult, but the glyph on the balustrade is a variant of the “new-sky-at-horizon” glyph that occurs as a name at Copan. Here it has Mah Kina preceding it, possibly as a reinforcement that the GUI shield in the icon of this temple represents the sun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#178|17]]. Dieter Nelles, “Anarchosyndicalism and the Sexual Reform Movement in the Weimar Republic” (paper presented at the Free Love and Labour Movement workshop at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2000).</div>
+[380] The term used here is the T606 glyph which has been taken as “child of mother” (Schele, Mathews, and Lounsbury n.d.). David Stuart (n.d) has recently suggested a reading of u huntan for this glyph, citing glosses from the Motul dictionary of Yucatec for “to take care of a thing” and “to do something with care and diligence.” He suggests that the term refers to the child as the object of the mother’s care and nurturing. It is this sense, as “the objects of caretaking,” that the gods are related to the king—he cares for them like a mother.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#188|18]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 433.</div>
+[381] In this context, as with the 2 Cib 14 Mol conjunction event, the gods are named as the “cared-ones” of Chan-Bahlum. This same relationship between these gods and Pacal occurs on katun-ending dates in the Temple of Inscriptions. The glyphic terms, Tl.1.606:23, u huntan. identifies the king as the caretaker of the gods in the sense that a mother cares for her child. Since the Maya believed that the act of bloodletting literally gave birth to the gods (Stuart 1984a), we deduce that the king’s role as caretaker and nourisher took place in the context of bloodletting.
+<br>
+<br>The importance of this role as “nurturer of the gods” is illustrated in the Popol Vuh version of the genesis myth. The following passage describes the gods’ motivation for trying again to create humanity after the first attempt had failed.
+<br>
+<br>“The time for the planting and dawning is nearing. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. How else can we be invoked and remembered on the face of the earth? We have already made our first try at our work and design, but it turned out that they didn’t keep our days, nor did they glorify us.
+<br>
+<br>“So now let’s try to make a giver of praise, giver of respect, provider, nurturer.” (Tedlock 1986:79).
+<br>
+<br>The way a community provided sustenance to a king was through tribute, and in Quiche the word tzuqul, “provider,” means “nourish, support, raise, bud, sprout, be born, rear, and support by tribute” (Edmonson 1965:136). The way humanity sustained and nourished ihe gods was through bloodletting. When the king was in this role as “caretaker of the gods,” he became their mother by giving them birth and sustenance. It is this metaphor that Chan-Bahlum used on the doorjambs of the sanctuaries.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#198|19]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 91.</div>
+[382] Chaacal III evoked the accession of Lady Beastie in his own accession records to relate his own mother to the great founding deity of the Palenque dynasty. Kan-Xul, the younger brother of Chan-Bahlum, was captured late in his reign by a ruler of Tonina. This political disaster apparently threw the succession into confusion. Chaacal III, the next king to come to the throne, chose his accession date so that it would fall into a contrived relationship of numerology with the accession of Lady Beastie (Lounsbury 1976:220–221). Even more interesting is the fact that the date of Lady Beastie’s accession, as written on the Tablet of the Cross, is in error. Two mistakes have been detected:
+<br>
+<br>1. The Distance Number that is written was calculated from the 819-day count date, 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’, rather than the Initial Series date, 8 Ahau 18 Zee.
+<br>
+<br>2. To find the Calendar Round reached by the Distance Number, the scribe used 20 calculating years (1.0.4.0 in the Long Count). Each time one calculating year is added to a Calendar Round, the tzolkin day stays the same, the day of the month stays the same, but the month drops back one as follows:
+<br>
+<br>1.12.19. 0. 2 9 Ik 0 Cumku + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 20. 4. 2 9 Ik 0 Kayab + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 21. 8. 2 9 Ik 0 Pax + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 22. 12. 2 9 Ik 0 Muan + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 23. 16. 2 9 Ik 0 Kankin + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 24. 0. 2. 2 9 Ik 0 Mac + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>1.1.19. 25. 0. 6. 2 9 Ik 0 Cch + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>2. 0. 0.10 2 9 Ik 0 Zac + 1.0.4.0 equals
+<br>2. 1. 0.14. 2 9 Ik 0 Yax
+<br>
+<br>The Distance Number written in the text falls between 12.19.13.3.0 1 Ahau 18 Zotz’ (the 819-day count) and the ninth interval above. The Calendar Round written in the text is the eighth interval above, 9 Ik 0 Zac. The scribe stopped one interval short of the correct answer.
+<br>
+<br>The Maya knew they had made a mistake because in the very next notation they counted from interval nine, rather than interval eight. They may have left the erroneous Calendar Round in the text because they believed the gods had caused the error. When Chaacal contrived the numerological relationship between his accession and Lady Beastie’s, however, he used the erroneous Calendar Round rather than the correct one. Apparently. history as it was engraved in the stone, erroneous or not, became the gospel according to Chan-Bahlum.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#208|20]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 6.</div>
+; CHAPTER 7: BIRD-JAGUAR AND THE CAHALOB
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#218|21]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.</div>
+[383] According to Teobert Maier’s (1901–1903) descriptions, the temples of Yaxchilân were painted white with a red band below the medial molding.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#228|22]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.</div>
+[384] Maudslay named the ruins Menché Tinamit after the Maya people he found living nearby. Maier (1901–1903:104) renamed the city using a combination ofyax, “blue” or “green,” and the word chilan, which he thought meant “that which lies or is scattered around,” referring to the fallen stones of the ruined buildings. Maier criticized Maudslay’s use of what he believed was an ersatz term, and then he proceeded to supply his own. Unfortunately, Maier’s coined name has stuck, although Maudslay’s name was more likely what the Indians living along the river called the old city.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#238|23]]. Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 50–51.</div>
+[385] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) published two detailed studies of the life of Shield-Jaguar and Bird-Jaguar. These two studies remain today the finest example of historical studies of the Maya inscriptions.
-[[#248|24]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60.
+[386] In her study of the history of kingship and the physical orientation of buildings at Yaxchilan, Tate (1986b) identified a group of temples oriented toward the rising sun at summer solstice. Since many of the house dedication dates at Yaxchilan are on or near summer solstices, this orientation is not simply fortuitous.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#258|25]]. IWW, “The Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (1908),” in ''Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology'', ed Joyce L. Kornbluh (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 13.</div>
+[387] This king’s name consists of a sign representing male genitals surmounting a jaguar head. The name was probably Yat-Balam, “Penis of the Jaguar,” but his name was published as “Progenitor-Jaguar” in the National Geographic Magazine (October 1985).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#268|26]]. There are important exceptions to this generalization. The Argentinean FORA opposed the idea that the structure of the future society could be constructed within capitalism. Malatesta also argued in 1922 that trade unions were not establishing the framework of the future society due to the extent to which they were divided according to the capitalist division of labor. See Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 102–4, 107–8; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 113–14.</div>
+[388] David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first recognized the accession passage of Progenitor-Jaguar on Hieroglyphic Stair 1. This date is best reconstructed as 8.14.2.17.6 7 Cimi 14 Zotz’. The latest date known at Yaxchilan, 9.18.17.13.14 9 lx 2 Zee (April 13, 808), occurs on Lintel 10. a monument of the last king in the dynasty, Mah Kina Ta-Skull. Yaxchilan was certainly abandoned within fifty years of this date.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#278|27]]. Quoted in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 110. The same point was made by Albert himself. See ibid., 173.</div>
+[389] The great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakofl’ published two seminal papers on her “historical hypothesis” demonstrating her belief that the contents of the Maya inscriptions were primarily historical. The first study (Proskouriakoff 1960) focused on the dynastic sequence of Piedras Negras to prove her thesis, but she did not give personal names to the Maya rulers she identified. However, in a paper published for a more general audience less than a year later, Proskouriakoff (1961a) described her methodology and gave names to these two great kings of Yaxchilan. as well as other personalities of Maya history.
+<br>
+<br>The six years between 1958 and 1964 were an extraordinary lime in Maya studies. Proskouriakoff’s work followed a study by Heinrich Berlin (1959) that had anticipated her results. Berlin had already identified the names of historical people on the sarcophagus in the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque. David Kelley (1962) contributed his own study of the history of Quirigua less than a year later. With these seminal studies, we began to speak truly of Maya history as they themselves wrote it and meant it to be understood.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#288|28]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 50. See also Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435; Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 73–74.</div>
+[390] The history we present here is based on several sources, including Proskouriakoff’s (1963–1964) papers, Carolyn Tate’s (1986a) study of Yaxchilan architecture and statecraft. Mathews’s (1975) work on early Yaxchilan history, and long-term conversationsand debate with Peter Mathews, David Stuart, Sandy Bardslay, and many of Scheie’s students, especially Ruth Krochock and Constance Cortes. After this chapter was finished, we received a copy of Peter Mathews’s (1988) dissertation on Yaxchilan and have added information from that source as it is relevant.
-[[#298|29]]. Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth'' (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 118.
+[391] Shield-Jaguar’s birth is not recorded on any of the surviving Yaxchilan monuments, but Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) was able to reconstruct it from other glyphic information as having occurred within five years of 9.10.15.0.0.
-[[#308|30]]. Pataud and Émile Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 118.
+[392] The third and the eighth successors were also named Bird-Jaguar, which was probably Xtz’unun-Balam in Mayan. The father of Shield-Jaguar was the third Bird- Jaguar, and his grandson, the great Bird-Jaguar, was the fourth. We shall call the grandfather 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar because his name phrase invariably contains a 6-Tun glyph that is not included in his grandson’s name.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#318|31]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
+[393] Recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs of House C of the Palace at Palenque. the event (an “ax” war and a “capture”) took place on 9.11.1.16.3 6 Akbal 1 Yax (August 28, 654). The Yaxchilan lord who participated in these events was Balam-Te-Chac, who is named ayihtah (“sibling”) of Shield-Jaguar, the ahau of Yaxchilan. This brother does not appear in Yaxchilan’s inscriptions, but at Palenque the context is clearly war and capture. Note that Shield-Jaguar had very likely already been designated heir to Yaxchilan’s throne. Why else would Pacal demonstrate the importance of the Yaxchilan visitor by naming him the sibling of an eleven-year-old who was not yet a king?
-[[#328|32]]. Besnard, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism''.
+[394] The term used for the relationship, ihtan, is “sibling” in modern Chorti, but in the set of kinship terms used by many Maya people, “siblings” include the children of a father’s brothers as well as one’s own brothers and sisters. The Yaxchilan cohort may, therefore, have been the child of one of 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar’s brothers, rather than his son.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#338|33]]. Isaac Puente, ''Libertarian Communism'', (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 5, 17.</div>
+[395] On Lintel 45, Ah-Ahaual is named “the ahau of (yahau);’ the king of a domain named with a serpent segment with a phonetic ni attached. On Stela 19, this same location is spelled with the phonetic complements ma and na. Since this same serpent-segment glyph appears in the xaman, “north,” glyph with the value ma or man, we suggest the place was known as Man. This Emblem Glyph appears in several other contexts, including the name of Ruler B’s mother at Tikal (see Stela 5). No one has yet associated this Emblem Glyph with a particular archaeological ruin; but in light of Shield-Jaguar’s focus on this capture, the domain was important and prestigious in the Maya world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#348|34]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 104–5.</div>
+[396] This is a unique event in Maya history as we now understand it. Women were recorded in the historical inscriptions because of their roles either as wives or mothers of important Maya lords. Although two women ruled in their own right at Palenque, Temple 23 is the only major Maya monument known to have been dedicated by a woman for the express purposes of celebrating personal history. The rarity of this circumstance points to the extraordinary and pivotal importance of this woman in Yaxchilan’s history.
-[[#358|35]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''21, 80–88, 120–37; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'', 34–48; Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
+[397] At Yaxchilan, kings used two forums to display their political messages—the slab-shaped tree-stones erected in front of buildings and the lintel stones that spanned door openings into the interiors of temples. In the local tradition, tree-stones displayed two complementary scenes (Tate 1986a); A period-ending bloodletting rite was depicted on the temple side and a capture on the river side of the monument. The lintels, on the other hand, displayed only one scene; but since a building usually had several sculpted lintels, the various scenes and texts could be orchestrated into larger programs of information. The scribes favored two kinds of compositional strategies in these larger programs. They could place a series of different actions and actors in direct association within a single building or they could divide a ritual or text into parts, which were then distributed across the lintels of a building. By using these multiple scenes in various combinations, the king was able to construct compelling arguments for his political actions. He could interpret history by showing how individual actions were linked into the larger framework of history and cosmic necessity. Retrospectively constructed, these linkages between different rituals and events became the central voice of Yaxchilan’s political rhetoric.
-[[#368|36]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 57.
+[398] Proskouriakoff (1963–1964) reconstructed this date as 9.14.8.12.5, but Mathews (personal communication, 1979) has noted that this event recurs on Lintel 23 where the date clearly reads 9.14.14.13.17, a placement supported by the presence of G7 as the Lord of the Night on Lintel 26. We accept the later placement as the correct reconstruction.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#378|37]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 22.</div>
+[399] There are three sequential narrative lines in these lintels: (1) the texts on the outer sides record three separate rituals in the dedication sequence of the temple (the side of Lintel 24 was destroyed when it was lightened for transport to England [Graham 1975- 1986, vol. 3:54]); (2) the texts on the undersides picture the sequence of historical events; (3) they also picture the three stages of the bloodletting rite which took place on each of those historical occasions. Thus, the sculptors let us understand the action sequence of the bloodletting rite and simultaneously that this ritual took place at three different points in time. See Scheie and M. Miller (1986) for more complete descriptions of the iconography and rites depicted on these lintels.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#388|38]]. Lennart K. Persson, “Revolutionary Syndicalism in Sweden Before the Second World War” in ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'', ed., Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 87.</div>
+[400] A second glyph, which looks like crossed torches, can be seen in the background next to the serpent’s head. This is the glyph that occurs at Copan as a substitute for the lineage founder’s name in “numbered succession” titles. The presence of this glyph in the name phrase referring to the figure emerging from the serpent’s jaw identifies him as the founder Yat-Balam.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#398|39]]. Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 157–65.</div>
+[401] There is the possibility, of course, that other depictions once existed and are now destroyed. However, accession was not a favored subject for sculptural representation at Yaxchilan, although it was frequently recorded in glyphic texts. The only other picture of an accession known is Bird-Jaguar’s on Lintel 1.
-[[#408|40]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 203–5, 211, 316–17, 323; James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 223–25.
+[402] The bloodletting on Lintel 24 took place exactly twenty-eight years (28 x 365.25) plus four days after Shield-Jaguar’s accession.
-[[#418|41]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 162–69, 234–35, 243; Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'', 190–91. For repression under the Spanish republic, see Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City''.
+[403] Ihe only other women to hold such prominent places are Lady Zac-Kuk of Palenque and Lady 6-Sky of Dos Pilas who appears on the stela of Naranjo. The first woman was a ruler in her own right, while the second reestablished the lineage of Naranjo after a disastrous defeat at the hands of Caracol.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#428|42]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 81, 82.</div>
+[404] Mathews (1988:171) suggests that Lady Xoc, whom he calls Lady Fist-Fish, was probably buried in Structure 23 in Tomb 2. He describes nine carved bones found in the tomb and notes that six of them carry her name.
-[[#438|43]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 80–82.
+[405] The inscription records the dedication of an object written as pa.si.l(i). In Chorti (Wisdom n.d.), pasi is glossed as “open, open up, break open, make an opening.” The pasil is apparently the east doorway itself, which was perhaps opened up into the building to become the resting place of this lintel.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#448|44]]. Quoted in James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 202.</div>
+[406] Toni Jones and Carolyn Jones discovered the important secrets hidden in this Lintel 23 text and presented them at the 1989 Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#458|45]]. Phil H. Goodstein, ''The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland ''(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 15–25; Max Beer, ''A'' ''History of British Socialism'', vol. 2 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921), 81–90; William Benbow, “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm.</div>
+[407] The main sign of the Calakmul Emblem Glyph (also known as Site Q) is a snake head. On Stela 10. exactly this main sign occurs with the female head and the word ah po. This is the form of the Emblem Glyph title used especially to designate women. The reader should also note that the identification of the snake Emblem Glyph is still questioned by several epigraphers. This particular version is the one Mathews identified with Site Q. It is also the Emblem Glyph of the kingdom allied to Caracol and Dos Pilas in the star wars history detailed in Chapter 5. It is interesting that the “batab” title in Lady Eveningstar’s name uses the directional association “east.” Berlin (1958) first suggested this title should be read “batab,” a documented title in Yucatec sources meaning “ax-wielder.” Although we now know the title refers to the god Chae rather than to the Yucatec title, epigraphers still use “batab” as the nickname of the title. Normal Yaxchilán versions of this title all have the “west” direction connected with their names. The change in directional association may reflect her status as a foreigner from the east.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#468|46]]. Quoted in Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 21.</div>
+[408] Bird-Jaguar was thirteen years old when the sculpture was dedicated and about seventeen at the time of the house dedication rituals.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#478|47]]. Quoted in Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 129.</div>
+[409] Other dates and events in Temple 23 texts include the dedication of the temple sculptures on August 5, 723; the dedication of Lintel 26 on February 12, 724; the twentyfifth anniversary of Shield-Jaguar’s accession on March 2, 726; and finally, the dedication of the temple itself on June 26, 726. (Note that this last date is very near a summer solstice [Tate: 1986b].) The inscriptions describing these events also specify that they took place next to the river, probably in or very near the location of Temple 23. Stuart and Houston (n.d.) have identified glyphs naming specific topographic features within a polity. These topographic features can include witz, “mountain,” and nab, “water, lake, or river,” and they are often accompanied by a locative glyph called the “impinged bone.” Lady Xoc’s names on Lintels 24 and 25 end with a combination including T606 (perhaps another locative), the glyph for “body of water,” nab, and the main sign of Yaxchilán’s Emblem Glyph, a “split-sky.” These glyphs should refer either to the river itself or just as likely to the flat shelf next to the river on which Temple 23 was built.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#488|48]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''41</div>
+[410] This marriage may have simply renewed an old alliance. The Early Classic lintels from Yaxchilán discussed in Chapter 5 record that an ambassador from the Calakmul king visited the tenth successor of Yaxchilán soon after he acceded to the throne. We suspect Yaxchilán was in alliance with Cu-Ix, the Calakmul king who installed the first ruler at Naranjo. He was surely allied to Caracol in the Tikal wars. The alliance of the Calakmul king with the Yaxchilán dynasty may have secured at least their agreement not to interfere, if not their active participation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#498|49]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+[411] Her name consists of a skull with an infixed ik sign that Lounsbury (personal communication, 1980) has identified as Venus in its aspect of Eveningstar. This component of her name precedes a sky glyph and usually a series of titles.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#508|50]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+[412] The inverted-L shape, next to the ankles of the shorter figure on the left, faces that figure and most likely identifies it as Shield-Jaguar. The composition presses this figure against the frame, giving it less space as well as a smaller size. The monument was commissioned by Bird-Jaguar, who apparently used the scale difference and compositional device to subordinate his father, even though at the time of the event shown, Shield-Jaguar was the high king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#518|51]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+[413] The figures shown in the ancestral cartouches above the sky register may be the parents of either actor, but the protagonist of Stela 11 is clearly Bird-Jaguar. His parents (Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar) are named glyphically as the ancestral figures on the other side of the monument. We suspect the ancestors on this side represent Bird- Jaguar’s parents as well.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#528|52]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 224. For more information on this debate, see David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''50–51.</div>
+[414] David Stuart (n.d.) has recently identified Great-Skull-Zero as the ichan of Bird-Jaguar’s son. This relationship term stands for mother’s brother in Choi, making him Lady Great-Skull-Zero’s brother and Bird-Jaguar’s brother-in-law. In fact, the relationships of Great-Skull-Zero and Lady Great-Skull-Zero to Bird-Jaguar’s son and future heir (who was not yet born at the time of this bloodletting) are featured in the two actors’ names. Here her name ends with the phrase “mother of the ahau.” Lord Great-Skull- Zero’s ends with yichan ahau, “the mother’s brother of the ahau.” In his name, the chan part of the yichan glyph is written with the head variant of the <verbatim></verbatim> sky glyph.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#538|53]]. Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 53–55.</div>
+[415] Since both the woman and man hold Personified Perforators in their hands, they both apparently let blood in this rite.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#548|54]]. Quoted in Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'','' ''16. See also, 232n25; Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 57–58.</div>
+[416] The scenes on Lintels 15, 16, and 17 deliberately reproduce the same actions shown on Lintels 24, 25, and 26, which are: Lady Xoc materializing the dynasty founder at Shield-Jaguar’s accession; Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar letting blood to celebrate the birth of his heir; and their preparation for a battle on the occasion of the dedication of the building. Bird-Jaguar’s lintels show him and a wife letting blood to celebrate the birth of an heir; his capture of a noble shortly before his accession; and the vision quest of another of his wives, probably as part of the dedication rites of the building. He carefully echoes the compositions of the Structure 23 lintels, but substitutes ritual events important to his own political succession.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#558|55]]. Arnold Roller, ''The Social General Strike'' (Chicago: The Debating Club No.1, 1905), 6.</div>
+[417] A detail of this stela was published in the National Geographic Magazine. October 1985:521.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#568|56]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 7–9; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 82; Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 95; Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''15, 27–28, 50–51, 91–93.</div>
+[418] Bird-Jaguar became a three-katun lord on 9,15.17.12.10, meaning that this stela could not have been carved until after that date. If it was originally erected in the temple where it was found, it had to have been carved after 9.16.3.16.19. It is a retrospective stela depicting this bloodletting event as a part of Bird-Jaguar’s strategy of legitimization.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#578|57]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 82–83.</div>
+[419] The other two lintels in this building date to April 2, 758, and June 29, 763. They depict Lady 6-Tun of Motul de San José and Lady Balam-Ix engaged in the “fish- in-hand” bloodletting rite on those dates. The Bird-Jaguar depiction is then a retrospective one, carved sometime after 763, to link the bloodletting rites of his wives to the earlier 9.15.10.0.1 ritual so important to his demonstration of legitimacy.
-[[#588|58]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'','' ''32.
+[420] Besides the three lintels depicting this ritual at Yaxchilán, similar rituals occur in detailed depictions in the murals of Bonampak and in several pottery scenes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#598|59]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''103–38. Quote in ibid.,'' ''121.</div>
+[421] This day was nine days after the summer solstice so that the sun rose within 1° of the solstice point. Venus was at 71.06° and frozen at the stationary point after its first appearance as Morningstar. The sun rose through Gemini, and Venus was poised near the Pleiades and the bright star we call Aldcbaran. We do not know what the Maya called this star.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#608|60]]. Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” in Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''271.</div>
+[422] Temple 23, Lady Xoc’s house, is named on Lintel 23 with an sun-eyed dog head. On Lintel 21, Temple 22 is named the Chan-Ah-Tz’i. both in its earlier version and in the later rebuilding dedicated by Bird-Jaguar. This ritual could have taken place anywhere in the city, but we are reconstructing it here because all of the representations of the 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting are distributed around Lady Xoc’s building. This spatial point was critical to Bird-Jaguar’s quest for the throne.
-[[#618|61]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 5–6.
+[423] Tom Jones (1985) provided convincing evidence that the Usumacinta was called Xocol Ha at the time of the conquest.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#628|62]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 134–35.</div>
+[424] Given that Lady Xoc was around twenty years old when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she would have been between forty-five and fifty years old when Bird-Jaguar was born and very likely beyond her childbearing years. Any of her own children who were still alive would very likely have been adults or adolescents at that time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#638|63]]. Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” 271.</div>
+[425] At the time of this event, Shield-Jaguar was ninety-four years old (+ two years). Lady Xoc’s birth date is not known, but sixty-seven years passed between Shield-Jaguar’s accession (in which she had participated as an adult) and her death date on 9.15.17.15.14. Presuming she was at least eighteen when Shield-Jaguar acceded, she died around age eighty-five. At the time of this 9.15.10.0.1 bloodletting, she would have been in her late seventies. If she had given birth to Shield-Jaguar’s child around the time of his accession, that child would have been in his late sixties by the time of our event; grandchildren would have been in their forties; great-grandchildren in their twenties; and great-great-grandchildren in their early childhood. Since most Maya did not live beyond their forties (although the elite appear to have had considerably longer lives and better food resources than the common folk), we suspect that the problem in Yaxchilán’s succession may have been that the extremely long-lived Shield-Jaguar had outlived the sons he’d had by his principal wife and perhaps many of his grandsons from that marriage as well. If this was the situation, the rivalry here would have been between grandsons or perhaps great-grandsons of Lady Xoc and Shield-Jaguar on one side and the son of Shield-Jaguar and Lady Eveningstar on the other. Both claims would be equally legitimate and interpretable as a direct descent from a king, although the claim of a son would have been the stronger, especially if Shield-Jaguar publicly favored that offspring.
-[[#648|64]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 7, 8.
+[426] The costume was worn by nobles who aided the king in scattering rites at Yaxchilán, by nobles who witnessed an heir-designation at Bonampak, and by emissaries who delivered gifts to kings. This last scene is depicted on a painted pot in the burial of Ruler A at Tikal.
-[[#658|65]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''124.
+[427] We cannot know the exact sequence of the events which took place during these rites We have arranged the individuals sequentially as a narrative device, but it is also possible that all the principals drew blood at the same time. The other sequences—the dancers, the placement of the high king inside a building, the musicians, and so forth—are based on the lower register of Room 1 and Room 3 at Bonampak, and on Piedras Negras Lintel 3.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#668|66]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor,” Libcom website, January 17, 2017, https://libcom.org/article/first-congress-national-confederation-labor-cnt-barcelona-september-8-10-1911.</div>
+[428] Representations of people undergoing bloodletting rarely show pain, and eyewitness accounts of the ritual specifically mention that the participants do not react in pain. (See Tozzer 1941:114, note 552.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#678|67]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418.</div>
+[429] Exactly this sequence of events, including the change of headdresses, is shown on Stela 35.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#688|68]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 81; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 477.</div>
+[430] David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) first identified a set of glyphs on Lintel 14 (E3-D4) and on Stela 10 and 13 at Copan as the name of the Vision Serpent in the manifestation shown on the Yaxchilan lintel.
-[[#698|69]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 5.
+[431] Stela 2 of Bonampak shows the king’s mother and his wife helping him in a sacrificial rite exactly as we have imagined in the Yaxchilan event.
-[[#708|70]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 8.
+[432] We have reconstructed this scene from a stucco sculpture which was modeled on the rear of Temple 21 immediately behind Stela 35, which showed Lady Eveningstar in this very bloodletting rite. In the stucco relief, a large male sits in the center with another male and a female on his right and two females on his left. We propose these are the principals of the bloodletting ritual—Shield-Jaguar with Bird-Jaguar and Lady Great- Skull-Zero on his right and with Lady Xoc and Lady Eveningstar on his left.
-[[#718|71]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''1–3, 9, 12.
+[433] M. Miller and Houston (1987) first recognized that these scenes occur not in ballcourts, but against hieroglyphic stairs.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#727|72]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''41–42, 57–58, 64, 67–84, 94.</div>
+[434] On the day of the bailgame, October 21, A.D. 744, Venus was 46.218° from the sun and only five days away from its maximum elongation as Morningstar. As we have seen repeatedly, this kind of Venus date often provided the stimulus for ritual events, especially those involving war and sacrificial rites. See Lounsbury (1982).
-[[#737|73]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 80, 82.
+[435] A total of thirteen panels make up this sculpted stoop, which is located immediately in front of the three doors of Temple 33. The center panel, depicting Bird-Jaguar at play, is the widest and is designed to be the pivot of the entire program. Steps I, II, and III show three women, one of which is Lady Pacal (Shield-Jaguar’s mother), holding Vision Serpents in their arms in rituals that perhaps began different ballgames. The fact that Bird-Jaguar’s grandmother is depicted suggests that these three women represent different generations, but the inscriptions are too badly effaced to identify the other two.
+<br>
+<br>The remaining ten steps portray males in the midst of the bailgame. The ball is frozen in flight, either to or from the hieroglyphic stairs. Again the badly eroded texts of some panels preclude identification of the actors pictured, but we can identify Shield-Jaguar on Step VI, Bird-Jaguar the Great on Step VII, his grandfather, 6-Tun-Bird-Jaguar HI, on Step VIII, and the cahal Kan-Toc on Step X. Presumably these steps represent different ballgames, since different generations are shown engaged in play. We may also assume that Bird-Jaguar used this step to bring together all the people, king and cahal, kinsmen and allies, who were important to his status as high king.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#747|74]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” 418.</div>
+[436] The verb is the so-called “scattering” glyph without the drops. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) has recently suggested a reading of .ye for this hand. In proto-Cholan (Kaufman and Norman 1984:137),^e’ is given as “take in the hand.” Lomil, the glyph that follows, is the word for lances or other tall staffs. The actions may be another holding of the tall flapstaff. The first glyph of the highly eroded name phrase following the verbal phrases is “5 katun ahau,” a title exclusively used at Yaxchilan in Shield- Jaguar’s name phrase. We surmise, then, that the actor was the then-deceased Shield- Jaguar.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#757|75]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).</div>
+[437] It is possible of course that Bird-Jaguar fabricated this information after the fact and that in reality he had no authority to conduct any ritual at the time of this period ending. This history was, after all, recorded after his accession and is thus a retrospective creation. We suspect, however, that the record is a true one. When he erected this stela sometime after his accession, that particular period ending would still have been fresh in everyone’s mind. If he was required to recruit and retain alliances with cahal lineages in order to hold his throne, documenting a brazen lie would certainly, it seems to us, be a counterproductive strategy.
+<br>
+<br>For this reason we assume that, by that time, he had gained enough support to participate in, if not lead, the ritual. Therefore, in his reconstruction of the story, he could declare that this rite took place in what had become his kingdom on the later date.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#767|76]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 110.</div>
+[438] Stela 11 was erected in front of Structure 40, a temple built next to an important Shield-Jaguar temple. Before that temple stood five stelae, four recording Shield-Jaguar’s greatest captures (Stelae 15, 18, 19, and 20) and the fifth recording the first flapstaff event. The proximity of the Stela 11 to Shield-Jaguar’s monument, and the prominent place of Bird-Jaguar’s accession in its texts (this information is recorded in the bottom register and on the edges of the stela), identify the flapstaff event and the captive presentations as events critical to Bird-Jaguar’s campaign demonstrating his right to the throne.
-[[#777|77]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 8.
+[439] On Lintel 16, Bird-Jaguar designates this captive as the cahal of a king who ruled a site named by an unknown Emblem Glyph with a snakelike head as its main sign.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#787|78]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 196–97.</div>
+[440] Ix Witz (Jaguar Mountain) is another unknown kingdom. David Stuart (1987b:21) first identified its Emblem Glyph.
-[[#797|79]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 83.
+[441] GII is also known as the Manikin Scepter or by the name Kauil.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#807|80]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 83; Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 10–15; Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 48–49, 59–61, 67–77, 90–96.</div>
+[442] These bundles were critical to the ritual lives of the Maya. In ethnohistorical sources, they hold the sources of the lineage power, and are olten described as having been left by the semi-divine ancestors who founded those lineages. The bundles are recorded as holding idols, jades, eccentric flints, and similar objects. Eccentric flints and eccentric obsidians were worked into irregular, nonutilitarian shapes that often included human or deity profiles. During the Classic Period, it’s fairly certain they were used to store idols such as the Manikin Scepter and the Jester Gods. A bundle has been found archaeologi- cally in the Lost World group at Tikal (Marisela Ayala, personal communication, 1986 and n.d.). Made of ficus-bark paper tied closed with a woven-fiber band, the bundle was inside a lip-to-lip cache made of an angle-sided plate with an identical plate inverted and set over it as the lid. The bundle inside held the remains of marine creatures and the thorns used in bloodletting. Other similar caches regularly contain bloodletting instruments such as thorns, stingray spines, obsidian, and flint blades. Archaeologists found human blood on one such flint blade discovered in a cache at Colha, Belize (Dan Potter, personal communication, 1987). Merle Robertson (1972) first proposed the association of these bundles with the bloodletting rite, a suggestion that has since been confirmed archaeologi- cally. This lintel at least partially confirms her hypothesis, for the verb written in the text over the woman’s head states that she will soon let blood.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#817|81]]. John Merriman, ''Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 39–44; Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 138.</div>
+[443] The text records that she will let blood by naming Chanal Hun Winik Chan, the particular Vision Serpent she will manifest.
-[[#827|82]]. Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''133–37; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 173–77.
+[444] The text on this lintel is very badly eroded, but based on a detailed examination ofthe original stone, Tate (1986a:336) has proposed readings of 9.16.6.11.0 3 Ahau 3 Muan or 9.17.6.15.0 3 Ahau 3 Kankin. We think this structure was built by Bird-Jaguar. The lintel, therefore, should be dated to the earlier of these two possibilities.
-[[#837|83]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''164–65, 194–207.
+[445] Tate (1986a:3O7) argues that the careless sculptural style and the lack of a date resembles the very late style used by the last documented ruler of Yaxchilân. However, since the building is part of Bird-Jaguar’s program to legitimize himself, we suggest that the scene depicts the first Shield-Jaguar flapstaff event that is also shown on Stela 50.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#847|84]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 561.</div>
+[446] This woman has the Ik Emblem Glyph in her name, like the woman on Lintels 15 and 39. Here, however, two different people seem to be named: on Lintels 15 and 29 the woman has the title Lady 6-Tun preceding the Emblem Glyph, whereas on Lintels 41 and 5 the woman has Lady 6-Sky-Ahau as her name. If these are separate women, then Bird-Jaguar is associated with four women—Lady Great-Skull-Zero (the mother of his child), Lady Balam of Ix Witz, and these two ladies from Motul de San José.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#857|85]]. Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''150–52, 174–76, 190–91; Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 75–78, 162–63; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''264–65, 275–83, 335.</div>
+[447] The Lintel 42 name phrase of this cahal has the “captor of Co-Te-Ahau” title that appears consistently in this fellow’s name phrase.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#867|86]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''92–94, 122–23. For other examples, see ibid., 281–83; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''117–18.</div>
+[448] Tate (1985) has argued this woman is the same Lady Balam of Ix Witz. However, since that lady had already appeared on Lintel 43 two days earlier, we think it more likely that Bird-Jaguar wished to associate yet another of his wives with this bloodletting sequence. We suspect she is the second wife from Motul de San José.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#877|87]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).</div>
+[449] On lintels carved after the date of this capture, both men, whenever they named themselves, included the names of the captives in their titles. They did this regardless of whether or not the narrative action was set before or after the capture itself.
+<br>
+<br>The scene we are discussing here may not be the actual capture, for the captives are already stripped and wearing the cut cloth that signifies sacrifice. This event probably occurred after the capture when the victims are displayed and torture begins. See the fourth wall of Bonampak Room 2 for a graphic description of this phase of the ritual (M. Miller 1986b: 113–130, Pl. 2).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#887|88]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''47–48.Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism</div>
+[450] The two protagonists are about the same height, but more important, the two scenes occupy an equal amount of compositional space. Bird-Jaguar is contrasted to Kan-Toe by the more elaborate detail of his costume and by the larger size of the text referring to his actions. Kan-Toe’s inscription is the smaller secondary text between the figures.
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook13}} {{anchor|Chapter10OrganizationalDuali1}} {{anchor|Chapter10OrganizationalDuali}} Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism: From Bakunin to the Platform ==
+[451] Lintel 54 was over the center door, while Lintel 58 was on the left and 57 on the right.
-A significant number of mass anarchists thought that federations of trade unions or community groups were insufficient to bring about the social revolution. They held that anarchists must, in addition to this, form specific anarchist organizations that would exist alongside mass organizations. These specific anarchist organizations were advocated as the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. This theory has come to be known as organizational dualism. In the past, specific anarchist organizations were often called an anarchist union. This language was not confusing to historical anarchists because they mostly spoke languages other than English and so distinguished between syndicates and the anarchist union, rather than trade unions and the anarchist union.
+[452] David Stuart (n.d.) first read the glyph for this relationship and recognized that it clarified the role Great-Skull-Zero played in Bird-Jaguar’s history.
-During the course of anarchism’s history, numerous specific anarchist organizations were founded. For example, in January 1891, Italian anarchists formed the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party, at a congress in Capolago, Switzerland. In the following months, anarchist groups from across Italy formed regional federations committed to the Capolago program. This growth in formal organization was cut short by the combination of state repression following May Day demonstrations, and significant push back from antiorganizationalist anarchists. By the end of the year, the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.[[#1DavideTurcatoMakingSense|1]] Later attempts by Italian anarchists to form a national federation committed to a common program culminated in the establishment of the Italian Anarchist-Communist Union in 1919, which changed its name to the Italian Anarchist Union in 1920. The Italian Anarchist Union, which participated as a key force in the USI and the factory occupation movement of the Bienno Rosso, spread its ideas via the paper ''Umanità Nova''.'' ''At its peak in the early 1920s, the paper sold 50,000 copies a day, and was in some areas the most widely read paper among workers.[[#2CarlLevyGramsciandtheAn|2]]
+[453] Notice that Chel-1 e is represented on both lintels as approximately the same size as his father, in spite of the fact that he was five on 9.16.5.0.0 and fourteen on 9.16.15.0.0. His smaller scale is apparently designed to represent him as simply “child.”
-Given the enormous scale of the history of organizational dualism, I shall focus on only three main aspects of its theoretical development. These are: (a) Bakunin’s advocacy of organizational dualism between 1868 and 1872; (b) various proposals made between the 1890s and 1930s on what the relationship between anarchism and syndicalism (or trade unions in general) should be; and (c) debates between proponents of platformist and synthesist specific anarchist organizations that occurred from 1926 onward.
+[454] This is the temple housing the western set of duplicating lintels, which include Bird-Jaguar and his cahal Kan-Loe at the capture of Jeweled-Skull; a bird-scepter ritual with Lady 6-Sky-Ahau; a basket-staff event with Kan-Toc; and a bundle/Manikin Scepter event with another wife. Temple 1 exalts the cahal Kan-Toc, very probably to seal his alliance to Bird-Jaguar during his life and to his son after Bird-Jaguar’s death.
-'''Bakunin and the Alliance'''
+[455] The name of this person is a jaguar head holding a cauac sign in a paw raised beside its head. This position is one of the variants of the penis glyph in the founder’s name. This visitor appears to be named Yat-Balam, but obviously he cannot be the founder of Yaxchilán’s dynasty, who was long dead. Either he is a namesake, or the Piedras Negras lord is flattering the Yaxchilán lord by using the founder’s name for him.
-The strategy of organizational dualism was first advocated by Bakunin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, he argued that anarchists should simultaneously organize and participate within mass public organizations that had a broad program, such as trade unions, and also form small secret organizations committed to a narrow anarchist program. This theorizing occurred, in parallel, to Bakunin’s actual attempts to form secret revolutionary organizations. The history of these attempts is extremely complex, but a condensed version follows.
+[456] Proskouriakoff (1961a) first identified these figures as youths and suggested that this is an heir-designation rite.
-During his 1864–67 stay in Italy, Bakunin tried to transform the loose network of revolutionaries he knew into an organization that adhered to a specific program.[[#3WolfgangEckhardtTheFirst|3]] In late 1864, Bakunin, who had recently moved from London to Florence, founded his first proper revolutionary organization: the Brotherhood. Although the Brotherhood certainly existed, and had a membership of at least thirty individuals from largely republican circles, it did not last long and soon faded away after Bakunin moved to Sorrento, near Naples, at the end of May 1865. Bakunin, who was becoming increasingly socialist and shifting closer to his mature anarchist politics, then moved to Naples in October, and met a number of republican revolutionaries. Sometime between late 1865 and early 1866, Bakunin persuaded these individuals to join a new secret revolutionary socialist organization called the International Brotherhood, which was the spiritual successor to the previous Brotherhood based in Florence.[[#4EHCarrMichaelBakunin|4]]
+; CHAPTER 8: C O P Á N : THE DEATH OF FIRST DAWN on Macaw Mountain
-Bakunin subsequently cofounded two distinct but overlapping organizations: the public International Alliance and the secret Alliance in October 1868. The public International Alliance applied to join the First International and, after its application was rejected, converted itself into a Geneva section of the First International in July 1869. The Geneva public Alliance decided to disband in August 1871, in the aftermath of various splits and conflicts within the Romance Federation of the First International, and took this decision without consulting Bakunin. The original secret Alliance disbanded soon after its founding, due to personal conflicts between its members. It continued to exist only as an informal social network composed of a few individuals who were mainly from Spain, Italy, and Switzerland and members of Bakunin’s inner circle. At around the same time, a distinct secret organization called the Alianza de la Democracia Socialista was founded in Spain, to coordinate the activity of key militants and promote the growth of the Spanish section of the First International. The Alianza decided to dissolve itself in April 1872 and continued to adhere to this decision, despite Bakunin writing a letter attempting to persuade them to do otherwise. A few months later, Bakunin cofounded a new secret society, called the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries in September 1872, after Bakunin had been expelled from the First International by the Hague Congress.[[#5EckhardtFirstSocialistSch|5]]
+[457] The name of the last great king of that community, Yax-Pac, means “First Sun-at- Horizon” or “First Dawn.” Mo’-Witz, or “Macaw Mountain,” was a sacred place in or near the community alluded to by several Late Classic kings there. The death of Yax-Pac was indeed the death of first dawn in the valley, for the contentious rivalry between the kings and their nobility was a key factor in the demise of the kingdom.
-An early example of Bakunin’s strategy of organizational dualism can be found in his 1866 ''Programme of the Brotherhood''. He proposed that “''the dedicated revolutionaries of every land''” should gather “''at once into both public and private association'' with the twofold object of broadening the revolutionary front and at the same time paving the way for simultaneous concerted action in all countries in which action proves initially possible, through secret agreement among the wisest revolutionaries of those countries.”[[#6MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|6]] The central task of these revolutionaries was to fuse, or in other words, organize, “the elements of social revolution” that “are already widespread in practically all countries of Europe” into “an effective force.”[[#7BakuninSelectedWritings9|7]] In the autumn of 1868, Bakunin wrote in the draft program of the secret Alliance that the organization had been founded in order to help “prepare, organize and hasten” the social revolution by pursuing the immediate “dual objective” of (a) spreading revolutionary consciousness through “journals, pamphlets and books” and “founding public associations” and (b) recruiting “intelligent, energetic, discreet men of good will who are sympathetic to our ideas, both in Europe and as far as possible in America, in order to form an invisible network of dedicated revolutionaries, strengthened by the fact of alliance.”[[#8BakuninSelectedWritings1|8]]
+[458] Many of the ideas presented in this chapter are the result of collaboration among Dr. William Fash, Barbara Fash, Rudy Larios, David Stuart, Linda Scheie, and many other people who have worked on the Copan Mosaics Project and the Copán Acropolis Project. William Fash (1983a; Fash and Scheie <verbatim>[1986];</verbatim> Fash and Stuart [n.d.]) first suggested that nonroyal lineages competing with the royal house of Copán contributed to the collapse of central power in the valley.
-The same idea was expressed by Bakunin in the March 27, 1872, letter he wrote to an Italian named Celso Ceretti, who admired the republican revolutionary Garibaldi. In it, Bakunin advocated a “secret alliance” composed of “nuclei intimately bound together with similar nuclei presently being organized, or that will be organized, in other regions of Italy and abroad.”[[#9QuotedinRavindranathanBak|9]] This organization had “a double mission: at first they will form the inspiring and vivifying soul . . . of the International Workingmen’s Association in Italy and elsewhere, and later they will occupy themselves with questions ''that will be impossible to discuss publicly''. They will form the necessary bridge between the propaganda of socialist theories and revolutionary practice.”[[#10QuotedinRavindranathanBa|10]]
+[459] Data on the history of the Copán Valley is drawn from William Fash’s (1983a) study of the process of state formation in the valley. Found in the deepest levels under Group 9N-8 (Fash 1985), the earliest deposit at Copán consisted of ceramics; obsidian; bones of deer, turtle, rabbit, and peccary; burned earth; and carbon. Fash interpreted this as a seasonal camp. Viel, the ceramist for the Proyeto Arqueología de Copán, associates this early ceramic phase, Rayo, with the Cuadros phase of the Soconusco Coast and the Tok phase at Chalchuapa (Fash 1983a: 155). The pottery included brushed tecomates and flat- bottomed, flaring-walled bowls decorated with shell stamping, red slip, and hematite paint.
-Bakunin did not propose the formation of a secret revolutionary organization because he had a hidden authoritarian agenda. He was motivated by the deeply practical view that a secret revolutionary organization was necessary in order to avoid state repression. In a April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza, he argued that the organization could not be public, because, if it were, it would be persecuted and crushed.[[#11MichaelBakuninTotheBro|11]] This concern with secrecy is especially understandable given that Bakunin himself had been imprisoned in 1849 by the state of Saxony for having fought in an insurrection launched by the people of Dresden. He was subsequently handed from one state to another, imprisoned by Saxony, then by Austria, which kept him chained to a cell wall for a year, and then finally Russia from May 1851 onward. Both Saxony and Austria sentenced Bakunin to death, only to alter his sentence at the last minute after a secret agreement was made to transfer him ultimately to Russia. He remained imprisoned in Russia’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where all his teeth fell out due to scurvy, until the Tsar permanently banished him to Siberia in 1857.[[#12CarrBakunin189224240|12]]
+[460] William Fash (1985 and n.d.a) describes this cemetery in detail and associates its ceramics directly with the Middle Preclassic ceramics discovered by Gordon (1898) in the caves of the Scsemil region of the valley, which Fash interprets as part of a very early burial complex. He (1983a: 157–158) cites Middle Preclassic occupations in Group 9N-8, the Bosque, and in the Main Group, while cautioning that the full settlement pattern cannot be reconstructed from the present data. Of the rich burials containing jade, those referred to as Burials VHI-27 and IV-35, he comments that only Burial V at La Venta (Veracruz, México) rivals the Copán tombs in quantity and quality of jade. He takes the jade and the pottery incised with Olmec imagery to “indicate intimate familiarity with heartland Olmec ritual practices.”
-Bakunin thought that the mass public organization—the First International—and the small secret anarchist organization—the Alliance—had distinct but complementary roles in the revolutionary process. The role of the mass public organization was to unite as many workers as possible within an organization that prefigured the future society and to engage in large-scale direct action against the ruling classes. The role of the small, secret, specific anarchist organization was, in comparison, to enable dedicated revolutionaries to coordinate their activity effectively and participate in the collective struggles of the working classes. In so doing, anarchists would spread their ideas and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. Bakunin explained his views on this topic in a private letter he wrote to the Alianza member Charles Alerini between May 3 and 6, 1872. According to Bakunin,
+[461] See Scheie and M. Miller (1986: 70, 80, 104, 119, Pl. 17, 28–30) for a discussion of some of the jade and ceramics from this early period.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The Alliance and the International, although they both seek the same final goals, follow, at one and the same time, different paths. One has a mission to bring together the labor masses—millions of workers—[reaching] across differences of trades or lands, across the frontier of every state into one single compact and immense body. The other, the Alliance, has a mission to give a really revolutionary direction to these masses. The programs of the one and the other, without in any way being opposed, are different, in keeping with the extent of the development of each. That of the International, if it is taken seriously, contains in germ—but only in germ—the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance is the elaboration of the program of the International.[[#13BakuninSelectedTexts210|13]]</div>
+[462] William Fash (1983a: 176) sees this growing density in settlement on the best agricultural lands as the result of social and political motivations which gradually usurped subsistence needs. As the dynasty established itself at the Acropolis, Copanecs found it advantageous to place their residential groups as near the king as possible, and thus gave over their best agricultural lands to the burgeoning population. Fash speculated that events taking place in the city were important enough to lure people into settling areas previously occupied by permanent agricultural settlements, in one of the zones of occupation, El Cerro de las Mesas, people deliberately chose inconvenient locations for settlement, perhaps for purposes of defense or for some as yet undetected religious or political reasons.
-Bakunin thought that the mass public organization and the specific anarchist organization should have distinct programs due to their different roles. The First International’s role was to unite workers from around the world into federations of trade unions that engaged in the struggle for immediate improvements via direct action, and thereby laid the foundation from which the social revolution could arise. Given this, it should have a broad program inclusive to as many workers as possible and be based on their shared class interests to achieve better living conditions, emancipation, and international solidarity in the class struggle.[[#14BakuninSelectedTexts210|14]] Were the First International to adopt a narrow program, it would fail in its mission, and merely create “a very small association, a sect, but not an armed camp for the proletariat of the entire world [set] against the exploiting and dominant classes.”[[#15BakuninSelectedTexts210|15]] The Alliance, in contrast, had to have an explicitly revolutionary program that advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This included a commitment to atheism, which Bakunin held should not be part of the First International’s program, because that would exclude the millions of workers who believe in God.[[#16BakuninSelectedTexts211|16]]
+[463] The noncalendric text on Stela 17 does not survive, but phrases in the 8.6.0.0.0 texts on Stela I (Smoking-Imix-God K) are repeated in the record of the same event on Stela 4 (18-Rabbit) (Stuart 1986b). The second event on Stela I is unfortunately destroyed, but the last glyph in the text records the main sign of the Copan Emblem Glyph with the “impinged bone” sign that identifies its function here as a location—the kingdom of Copan as a physical entity with a geographical location. This is equivalent to the locational forms of the Tikal Emblem Glyph we encountered on Tikal Stela 39 in Chapter 5. This reference appears to be to the founding of the kingdom itself (Scheie 1987b).
+<br>
+<br>Altar I’ also has an early date (Morley 1920:192) of 7.1.13.15.0 or October 9, 321 B.C., a date remarkably close to the beginning of Copan’s Late Preclassic decline. Unfortunately, the Copanecs did not record the event occurring on that date.
-This view was repeated almost word for word by Bakunin in his April 1872 letter to the members of the Spanish Alianza. This went alongside the clarification that Bakunin rejected the position that all socialist consciousness had to be brought to workers in the mass public organization by the secret organization of revolutionaries. Bakunin instead maintained that workers would develop their own radical ideas, due to both the influence of revolutionaries and their own experiences of class struggle. He thought that in an International with a broad program “it will happen that, more and more educated by the struggle and by the free propaganda of different ideas, directed by their own instinct and increasingly raised to revolutionary consciousness by practice itself and the inevitable consequences of the universal solidarity of the struggle of labor against capital, the masses will elaborate, slowly, it is true, but infallibly, their own thoughts, theories that will emerge from bottom to top.”[[#17BakuninTotheBrothersof|17]]
+[464] Excavations in the 1988 and 1989 seasons of the Copan Acropolis Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash have uncovered buildings and inscribed monuments contemporary to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s reign.
-Although Bakunin thought that a small secret society of dedicated revolutionaries would play an important role in the process of workers becoming organized and adopting socialist ideas, he remained committed to the self-emancipation of the working classes. In his resignation letter to the Jura Federation in 1873, he reminded them that the “organization of the forces of the proletariat . . . should be the work of the proletariat itself.”[[#18BakuninSelectedTexts249|18]] A number of modern authors have argued against such an interpretation of Bakunin on the grounds that these public declarations are contradicted by his private programs and letters in which, they allege, he argued for a fundamentally authoritarian and un-anarchist strategy. According to these critics, Bakunin preached anarchism in public while privately advocating the organization of a hierarchical secret society that would seize power and establish an unaccountable top-down dictatorship that ruled society from the shadows. The two main sources cited to support this interpretation are Bakunin’s April 1, 1870, letter to Albert Richard and his June 2, 1870, letter to Sergei Nechaev.[[#19ForexampleHalDraperKar|19]] These interpretations misrepresent what Bakunin proposed within his letters and take certain quotes out of context.
+[465] Sylvanus Morley in his Inscriptions of Copan (1920) worked out much of the chronology of Copan’s inscriptions. Later scholars, including David Kelley (1962; 1976:238–240), Joyce Marcus (1976), Gary Pahl (1976), Berthold Riese (n.d.; 1988; Riese and Baudez 1983), and David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, Linda Scheie, and others in the Copan Notes have revised Morley’s chronology and identified a series of Copanec rulers. Peter Mathews (n.d.) first noted “numbered succession” titles at Yaxchilan and Copan, which Riese (1984) subsequently demonstrated had a wide distribution in the Maya inscriptions. The identification of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as the founder began when David Stuart managed to identify his dates as belonging to the fifth century. Stuart communicated his finding to William Fash in a letter dated November 1985. Collaborative work between Stuart and Scheie (1986a and Scheie 1986b) led to Yax-Kuk-Mo’s identification as the dynastic founder. Later Copan kings reckoned the establishment of their dynasty from the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ and gave themselves titles which reflected their numerical position in the line following him: for example, Smoke-lmix-God K called himself ‘the twelfth successor of Yax-Kuk-Mo’.” However, we also note that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was not the true founder of the kingdom, nor its first ruler. Stuart (personal communication, 1985) identified the notation of an even earlier king as a “first successor” on Stela 24.
-His letter to Richard did advocate ideas that can sound authoritarian and incompatible with anarchist strategy, such as his endorsement of a “collective, invisible dictatorship.”[[#20BakuninSelectedWritings|20]] In order to refute ominous authoritarian readings of Bakunin, it is necessary to establish in detail exactly what Bakunin meant by an “invisible dictatorship” by placing this phrase within the full context of the letter. First, Bakunin repeated both the standard anarchist critique of state socialism and the standard anarchist conception of a social revolution. He rejected centralization, minority rule, and a revolutionary state modeled on the French Revolution, in which decisions for an entire country are made by a single committee, on the grounds that they were a means that would never lead to a free socialist society. The revolution, he said, should instead be achieved through the formation of a federation of workers’ associations that would expropriate the means of production, liquidate the state, establish workers militias, and coordinate production and distribution through a system of delegates.[[#21BakuninSelectedWritings|21]] Bakunin’s letter is, in this respect, entirely consistent with his statements elsewhere.
+[466] See Carlson (1977) for a history of the astronomical conference interpretation of Altar Q and an evaluation of the evidence. David Stuart (personal communication, 1984) first suggested that the dates on Altar Q are early, rather than contemporary with the altar itself. Joyce Marcus (1976:140–145) first suggested that the Altar Q figures are portraits of rulers, while Riese (n.d.) identified the entire composition as Copan’s sixteen rulers seated in the numerical order of their succession.
-Second, the reason Bakunin referred to an “invisible dictatorship” is that he is attempting to persuade Richard to abandon state socialist strategies. Richard was a French member of the Alliance who never fully endorsed its anarchist program, and would go on to write a pamphlet arguing for the reinstatement of Napoleon III as Emperor. Bakunin wrote, “you remain more than ever a supporter of centralization and the revolutionary State. Whereas I am more opposed to it than ever, and see no salvation except in revolutionary anarchy, guided on all issues by an invisible collective power—the only dictatorship I accept.”[[#22BakuninSelectedWritings1|22]] As a result the only occasions when Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter is when he is contrasting the “invisible dictatorship” he supports with the “overt dictatorship” that Richard wrongly advocates.[[#23BakuninSelectedWritings1|23]] Bakunin’s use of language for rhetorical purposes is similar to how Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” instead of “rule of the proletariat,” when he was in dialogue with followers of Blanqui due to their support for revolutionary dictatorships.[[#24ForanoverviewofMarxsus|24]]
+[467] The first event is a “God K-in-hand” event. This verb is associated with the display of scepters and is specified by a noun incorporated into the hand holding the scepter or appended to the rear of that hand. The second event is spelled ta.li, a verb which in Choi and Chorti (the language of the Copan region) means “to come” or “to arrive.” In both phrases, the glyph that follows the verb appears in later texts as a replacement for the name of Yax-Kuk-Mo’ in numbered successor titles. It appears to refer to the idea of “founder,” or perhaps “lineage,” in some way we do not yet understand.
-Third, at no point does Bakunin claim that the “invisible dictatorship” will make decisions and impose them on the working classes. He instead held that it would only act to influence or guide the working classes. He declared that, during a revolution,
+[468] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) has found this monument, broken into three parts and deposited in a building under Temple 10L-26, the building of the famous Hieroglyphic Stairs of Copan. The date on this monument is exactly the same as that on Stela J, 9.O.O.O.O. The front of the te-tun records the date and the king who reigned when this great period ending turned. David Stuart (in Stuart et al. 1989) found the fragmentary remnant of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s name on the last glyph block in this passage, thus confirming that he was reigning. The protagonist and owner of the te-tun, however, was his son, the second ruler in the Altar Q list. We have confirmation, therefore, from a monument carved during or soon after his lifetime that Yax-Kuk-Mo’ was indeed a real historical person. Furthermore, this monument was treated with special reverence, carefully cached inside the temple before it was buried in preparation for the next stage of construction. When a later descendant evoked ancestral greatness by constructing the Hieroglyphic Stairs, he chose to put it in this location very probably because he knew a temple of the founder of his line lay deep under Temple 10L-26.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">supporters of overt dictatorship, advocate the muting of passions, and speak for order, trust and submission to the established revolutionary powers—in this way they reconstitute the state. We, on the other hand, must foment, awaken and unleash all the passions, we must produce anarchy and, like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest, we must steer it not by any open power but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies—a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power.[[#25BakuninSelectedWritings|25]] </div>
+[469] In the interim nomenclature used by the Copán Acropolis Project, buildings are designated by bird names, substructures by colors, and floors by names of archaeologists and other persons. This early temple has been dubbed Papagayo (‘‘Macaw”) until the history and various levels of the main structure, 10L-26, are fully known and numbered.
-This view is repeated later in the letter when Bakunin wrote that only the “invisible collective force . . . can preserve and guide the revolution.”[[#26BakuninSelectedWritings|26]] In advocating an “invisible collective force,” Bakunin was not endorsing a clandestine organization that guides workers by violently forcing them to behave in a particular manner. Bakunin is instead repeating language from Proudhon, who defined ''collective force'' as when the combined and organized action of individuals results in a group that possesses collective capacities to change the world that are greater than the sum of the capacities of each individual member.[[#27PierreJosephProudhonProp|27]]
+[470] Stromsvik (1952:198) published a drawing of a mask he found on a terrace under Structure 10L-26 (The Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs). He considered the terrace to be contemporary with the first Ballcourt. Investigations in the Copán Archaeological Project have refined the chronology dating the first phase of the Ballcourt and the earliest floors of 10L-26 to the last half of the Bajic phase (A.D. 300–400) (Cheek 1983:203). During the Copan Mosaics Project (1985-present), Dr. William Fash has continued Strómsvik’s work and found even earlier platforms and structures, some of which are decorated with massive stucco sculptures. They have also found predynastic levels, but the relationship of those levels to Papagayo Temple and other early levels of the Acropolis are still under investigation. Since Stela 63 was set in the floor when Papagayo was constructed, that temple can be dated to between 9.0.0.0.0 and 9.0.5.0.0 (435–440). It was constructed after Ballcourt I was in place, but throughout the subsequent history of the kingdom, the temple in this location (in whatever manifestation) was always associated with one or another of the various stages of the Ballcourt.
-Bakunin made similar points in his later letter to Nechaev, who was a Russian acquaintance of Bakunin committed to the formation of an authoritarian top-down secret society that engaged in any means, including assassinating members of the ruling classes and launching coups, to trigger a revolution. As in the previous letter, sections of it can be quoted out of context in order to give the false impression that Bakunin was a hidden authoritarian, such as his advocacy of “''the collective dictatorship'' of a secret organization.”[[#28BakuninSelectedWritings|28]] Such an interpretation should be rejected once again. Bakunin argued, in line with anarchist theory, that any revolution based on the seizure of state power by a ruling minority would result in new forms of oppression and exploitation, rather than emancipation. He thought that any attempt to abolish class society that “is at all artificial, and deals in secret plots, sudden assaults, surprises and blows, is bound to wreck itself against the State, which can only be conquered and broken by a spontaneous popular socialist revolution. And therefore the sole object of a secret society must be not to create an artificial force outside the people, but to arouse, unite and organize spontaneous popular forces; in this way the only possible, the only effective army of the revolution is not outside the people, but consists of the people themselves.”[[#29BakuninSelectedWritings|29]]
+[471] In the summer of 1989, Scheie talked with Rudy Larios, Richard Williamson, and William Fash about the architectural history of this early temple. Although analysis of the archaeological data has just begun, all three archaeologists agree that Stela 63 was set in the back chamber of this building when it was built. This dates the construction to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’s son, who was presumably the second successor. At a later time, the fourth successor, Cu-Ix, then placed his step in front of the temple to associate himself with the founder. Larios also has clear evidence that the construction of Papagayo is atop another large platform, which may date to the reign of Yax-Kuk-Mo’. Furthermore, that platform is atop yet another huge platform that must be from predynastic times. The excavations have not yet reached bedrock so that we anticipate finding even earlier structures during the next few field seasons.
-During this period, the word “spontaneous” was generally used by anarchists to refer to when workers acted voluntarily of their own volition, rather than being forced to do something. Such spontaneous action was compatible with workers being influenced to act in a particular manner by the words and deeds of those around them. The role of the secret organization of committed revolutionaries was, therefore, to encourage and support a process of working-class self-emancipation. Bakunin wrote that if the working classes are the “revolutionary army,” then the secret organization would be the “general headquarters of this army, and the organizer not of its own, but of the people’s forces, as a link between the people’s instincts and revolutionary thought.”[[#30BakuninSelectedWritings1|30]]
+[472] Papagayo Temple was uncovered during the 1988 field season of the Copán Mosaics Project under the direction of Dr. William Fash. The step sits in front of Stela 63, which had been erected in the rear chamber by the second ruler when the temple was built. The step has a now-damaged inscription consisting of thirty glyphs on top of the step and a single row on the front edge. The name of the fourth successor occurs on this edge and also on Stela 34, a fragment of which was found lying on the plaza just west of Stela J (Grube and Scheie 1988). The stela fragment had been recut and used (perhaps as a cache) in some as yet unidentified construction. We now know that Papagayo was open at least through the reign of the fourth successor and perhaps later.
-This would be achieved by forming a series of secret small groups that were dispersed throughout a country and united under a common program. During a revolutionary situation, they would formulate a set of ideas that were “the very essence of popular instincts, desires and demands,” spread them “among a crowd of people who would be struggling without any purpose or plan,” and thereby “create round themselves a circle of people who are more or less devoted to the same idea, and who are naturally subject to their influence.”[[#31BakuninSelectedWritings1|31]] They would then collectively participate within ongoing popular movements in order to “lead the people toward the most complete realization of the social-economic ideal and the organization of the fullest popular freedom. This is what I call ''the collective dictatorship'' of a secret organization.”[[#32BakuninSelectedWritings|32]]
+[473] The dates and names in this historical reconstruction are drawn from analyses by David Stuart (1984 letter to Fash and 1987) and in the Copón Notes, a series of short research reports produced during the Copán Mosaics Project. Copies are on file in the Archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Tegucigalpa and Copán, Honduras, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Notes of particular interest to the dynastic history are Notes 6, 8, 14–17 from the 1986 season, and Notes 20–22 and 25–26 from the 1987 season, and Notes 59–67 from the 1989 season.
-Just as in his letter to Richard, Bakunin introduced this phrase in order to contrast the methods by which anarchists will “influence the people” with the “publicly declared dictatorship” that he opposed.[[#33BakuninSelectedWritings|33]] Bakunin’s so-called dictatorship would not give orders to workers who were subject to their authority and forced to obey by the threat of corporal punishment or court-martial. He explicitly wrote that,
+[474] The ritual demarcation of space to facilitate the entry of powerful people into the Otherworld spans Maya history from the Late Preclassic construction of the four-posted temple summits, such as Structure 5C-2<sup>nd</sup> at Cerros, to the historical treatise of the early Colonial period called the “ritual of the bacabs” (Freidel and Scheie 1988; Roys 1965). Present-day Maya shamans continue this practice in their construction of “corrals” (Vogt 1976) and altars. The posts of the sacred spaces given in the prayers of the “ritual of the bacabs” are called acantun, “upright or set-up stones”; and acante’, “upright or set-up trees.” Stelae at Copán are specifically called te-tun or “tree-stone.” Smoke-Imix-God K departed from normal practice by using stelae to demarcate the entire core area of his kingdom, while under most circumstances Maya kings used stelae as the permanent markings of the central position held by themselves within the sacred space during their entry into the Otherworld.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">It does not impose any new resolutions, regulations or ways of living on the people, and only unleashes their will and gives a wider opportunity for their self-determination and their social-economic organizations, which should be created by them alone from the bottom upwards, and not from the top downwards. The organization must be sincerely impregnated with the idea that it is the servant and helper of the people, and by no means their ruler, and also not in any circumstances, not even on the pretext of the people’s welfare, should it ever be their master.[[#34BakuninSelectedWritings|34]]</div>
+[475] William Fash (1983a:217–232) suggested that these outlying stelae were erected to mark the establishment of a state under Smoke-Imix-God K around A.D. 652. Much of the epigraphic evidence he cites in that study has since been replaced or reinterpreted. For example, the Early Classic history of Copan is far more detailed and regular than it appeared to be in 1983. While we now question if Smoke-Imix-God K changed the system at Copán as much as it once appeared that he had, he was still responsible lor placing inscribed monuments throughout the valley. Smoke-1 mix-God K also erected a stela at Santa Rita (Stela 23) and, at about this same time, the lords of Rio Amarillo (Schele 1987d) inscribed altars acknowledging the rule of Copán’s high king. While Smoke-Imix-God K may have inherited a polity that already qualified as a state, he extended its domain farther than it had ever been before.
-The secret organization instead “influences the people exclusively through the natural, personal influence of its members, who have not the slightest power, are scattered in an unseen web throughout the regions, districts and communes, and, in agreement with each other, try, in whatever place they may be, to direct the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people toward the plan that has been discussed beforehand and firmly determined.”[[#35BakuninSelectedWritings|35]] Its only methods to direct and influence mass social movements were persuasion and acting as organizers. It would, Bakunin believed, “carry out a broadly based popular propaganda, a propaganda that would ''really'' penetrate to the people, and by the power of this propaganda and also by ''organization among the people themselves'' join together separate popular forces into a mighty strength capable of demolishing the State.”[[#36BakuninSelectedWritings|36]]
+[476] David Stuart (1987a) first identified the name on Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix- God K. The record of the Copán king occupies the outer rim text, while another date and event are recorded in the interior. The interior date, 9.11.0.11.11, falls 231 days after the period ending. The event phrase includes the glyph ta yuc. I his termine is the Chorti word for “join things, unite, a joining, union” (Wisdom n.d.:771). Smoke-Imix may then have united or joined that polity to his own.
+<br>
+<br>This action explains why the first great ruler of Quiriguá, Cauac-Sky, recorded that he acceded u cab, “in the territory of” 18-Rabbit of Copán. Quiriguá was in the hegemony of Copán after 18-Rabbit’s predecessor “joined” it to the kingdom. Further evidence supporting the conclusion that Smoke-Imix actually brought Quiriguá under his hegemony comes from later rulers’ practice of citing themselves as “Black Copán Ahau and of claiming descent from Yax-Kuk-Mo’ as their founder (Schele 1989c).
-Critics of Bakunin have not only misrepresented what Bakunin meant by an invisible or collective dictatorship but also failed to mention that, in several other sources, he makes exactly the same proposals as in his letters to Richard and Nechaev without using any dictatorial language. This is extremely important, because the only two instances in which Bakunin advocates a dictatorship as an anarchist are in two letters he wrote as attempts to persuade authoritarian revolutionaries to adopt anarchist strategy. Outside this context, Bakunin does not use this language, and so it appears most likely that he only adopted the language as a rhetorical device, and not as an expression of his hidden authoritarian agenda.
+[477] Etsuo Sato (1987) interprets the appearance of polychrome in the Valley of La Venta as evidence of elites who had access to exotic pottery. He sees these elites as being both heavily influenced by Copanecs and in contact with peoples at Naco and in the Sula Valley.
-In the 1868 program of the International Brotherhood, Bakunin wrote that a social revolution must be created by workers themselves through their own organs of self-management. Within such a revolution, “''the unity of revolutionary thought and action must find an agent'' in the thick of the popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and all the energy of the revolution. That agent must be ''the secret universal association of international brothers''” which is “a kind of revolutionary general staff” that spreads ideas and organizes workers in order to act as the “intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.”[[#37BakuninSelectedWritings|37]] This text is almost identical to passages from Bakunin’s letters to Albert and Nechaev but, at no point, does he refer to any invisible dictatorship. Indeed, he explicitly writes that “this organization rules out any idea of dictatorship and custodial control” since “supreme control must always belong to the people.”[[#38BakuninSelectedWritings|38]]
+[478] These monuments include the bifaccd Stela C (9.14.0.0.0), Stela F (9.14.10.0.0), Stela 4 (9.14.15.0.0), Stela H (9.14.19.5.0), Stela A (9.14.19.8.0 or 9.15.0.3.0), Stela B (9.15.0.0.0), and finally, Stela D (9.15.5.0.0). Stela C, the first monument in this set, dates to the same first appearance of Venus celebrated by Ah Cacaw on Stela 16 at Tikal (see Chapter 6). Stela C reflects this association with Venus by linking the period ending to a Venus date occurring before the beginning of this creation. Other analyses have placed Stela C at later dates, but the text specifies that the stela was erected (tz’apah) on 9.14.0.0.0.
-The same opposition to dictatorship appears elsewhere. In September 1869 ''La Liberté ''published Bakunin’s article, “A Few Words to My Young Brothers in Russia.” In the article, he insisted that formally educated young people in Russia should “go among the people” and “learn amid these masses whose hands are hardened by labor how you should serve the people’s cause. And remember well, brothers, that the cultured youth should be neither master nor protector nor benefactor nor dictator to the people, only the midwife of their spontaneous emancipation, the uniter and organizer of their efforts and their strength.”[[#39MichaelBakuninTheBasicB|39]]
+[479] In the 1987 excavations, William Fash drove a tunnel into the rear of the platform directly under the temple. Although no cache was found, the excavation uncovered a muzzle stone exactly the same size and shape as the corner Witz Monsters that decorated the 18-Rabbit temple. With present data, we have no way of determining which king commissioned the earlier phase of the building, but clearly that earlier building displayed the same iconography as the later version. See Larios and W. Fash (n.d.) for a preliminary analysis of the final phases of Temples 22 and 26.
-Two years later, he wrote in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State”'' ''that during a social revolution,
+[480] Two broken fragments with inscriptions were set in the step of the final phase of this temple. One records the first katun anniversary of 18-Rabbit’s accession (David Stuart personal communication, 1987) and the other is the death date of Smoke-Imix-God K (Schele 1987a). These two dates as well as the style of the God N sculpture found cached in the later building identify the time of the earlier building as the second half of the reign of 18-Rabbit.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">All that individuals can do is elaborate, clarify and propagate the ideas that correspond to the popular feeling and, beyond this, to contribute by their ceaseless efforts to the revolutionary organization of the natural power of the masses, but nothing beyond that. And everything else should not and could not take place except by the action of the people themselves. Otherwise one would end with political dictatorship, that is to say, the reconstruction of the State . . . and one would arrive by a devious but logical path at the re-establishment of the political, social and economic slavery of the popular masses.[[#40BakuninSelectedWritings|40]]</div>
+[481] William Fash (1983a:236–237) cites Viel’s analysis of the source of Ulua polychrome as the Comayagua Valley, rather than the Sula Valley. Furthermore, caches found within the Early Classic phases of Structure 10L-26 (the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairs) include greenstone beads and earflares identical in technical workmanship and design to the greenstone artifacts excavated at the central Honduran site of El Cajón by Kenneth Hirth (1988).
-Bakunin described the Alliance in his April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza as
+[482] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication) documents evidence for death rates higher than birth rates in the Copán pocket during the Late Classic period. 18-Rabbit had to recruit newcomers from outside the valley to keep the population growing, and his strategy apparently succeeded, for by the end of the eighth century, population exceeded the capacity of the Copán pocket to sustain them.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Fundamentally a militant organization whose purpose is the organization of the power of the masses for the destruction of all states and all of the religious, political, judicial, social, and economic institutions currently existing, for the absolute emancipation of the subjugated and exploited laborers of the whole world. The purpose of our organization is to push the masses to make a clean sweep, so that agricultural and industrial populations can reorganize and federate themselves according to the principles of justice, equality, freedom and solidarity, from the bottom up, spontaneously, freely, apart from any official tutelage, whether of the reactionary or even the so-called revolutionary kind.[[#41QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|41]]</div>
+[483] Kelley (1962:324), following a suggestion by Proskouriakoff, pointed out the u cab expressions at Quiriguá, noting that cab means “town, place, and world.” David Stuart (1987a) first interpreted this passage to indicate that Cauac-Sky’s installation was under 18-Rabbit’s authority and perhaps even took place at Copán. This interpretation is in keeping with his identification of the protagonist of Quiriguá Altar L as Smoke-Imix-God K of Copán.
-The evidence clearly shows that Bakunin was not a hidden authoritarian who preached anarchism in public, and top-down minority rule by a secret society in private. His public and private statements were entirely consistent with one another, and with his anarchist commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. Bakunin held, in short, that the success of a social revolution required a specific anarchist organization of dedicated militants who organized secretly to avoid state repression and were united under a common theoretical and strategic program. The main goal of this organization was to participate in popular social movements in order to spread anarchist ideas, and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state and building an anarchist society.
+[484] Morley (1915:221) first noted that this 9.15.6.14.6 6 Cimi 4 Zee date was important to Quiriguá’s history, while Kelley (1962:238) suggested that it referred to “a conquest of Quiriguá by Copán, or perhaps to the installation of a Copanec ruler at Quiriguá.” Proskouriakoff(1973:168) took the prominence of the date at Quirigua to indicate that the Quirigua ruler had the upper hand in the encounter. Following her mentor’s suggestions, Marcus (1976:134—140) pointed out that Cauac-Sky, the ruler of Quirigua, was the “captor of” 18-Rabbit, the king of Copan. She correctly identified the event as a battle in which Quirigua achieved independence of Copan.
+<br>
+<br>The verb associated with this date consists of an “ax” followed by the T757 auxiliary verb. This verb records “astronomical” events in the codices, and at Dos Pilas and other sites it appears with “star-shell” war events (see Scheie 1982:351 for a listing). In most of the examples from the Classic inscriptions, the event appears to be “battle,” but on pottery, the “ax” glyph is particularly associated both with scenes of decapitation and with the names of gods shown in the act of self-inflicted decapitation (one example occurs on the famous painted pot from Altar de Sacrificios). This association with sacrifice opens the possibility that the action recorded is execution by decapitation. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1989) and Jorge Orejel (n.d.) have both suggested a reading of ch’ak, “to decapitate,” for the glyph.
-In two letters, Bakunin referred to this as an invisible or collective dictatorship, but in so doing all he actually meant was that a specific anarchist organization would influence the wider working classes through persuasion and acting as key organizers and militants within the ongoing class struggle. In his mind, this would occur in parallel with, and as a complement to, workers transforming themselves through their own experiences of revolutionary practice within mass public organizations that were committed to broad programs. During an evolutionary period, this included such organizations as trade unions. Once a revolution had been launched, increasingly large numbers of workers would continue this process of self-transformation and self-organization within federations of producers’ and consumers’ associations, and federations of workers’ militias. The role of the specific anarchist organization was to prevent the emergence of any new system of minority rule and to promote forms of organization and decision-making that enabled worker self-management.
+[485] The case of Copan is not entirely unique. Palenque suffered a similar disaster when Kan-Xul, the younger brother and successor of Chan-Bahlum, was captured by Tonina and presumably sacrificed. Palenque, like Copan, did not enter into a hiatus, but rather continued under the aegis of its old dynasty. The political reactions at both Copan and Palenque included, however, the emergence of the lesser nobility as players in the game of history. In both kingdoms, the kings struggled in vain to reassert the centrality of the dynasty.
-Bakunin attempted to implement this theory by participating in the broad public First International via a secret informal social network known as the Alliance. This secret network was never in a position where it could influence the working classes during a social revolution, and failed to live up to the great role that Bakunin had given it. Despite these limitations, its importance should not be underestimated. It was arguably the first specific anarchist organization in history, and its members played a key role in formulating the theory and practice of the anarchist movement. From the intellectual and practical foundation that Bakunin and the Alliance built, the future history of specific anarchist organizations would emerge.
+[486] Smoke-Monkey’s accession appears on the base of Stela N and on Steps 40 and 39 of the Hieroglyphic Stairs as 9.15.6.16.5 6 Chicchan 3 Yaxkin (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), a day on which Venus was 45.68° from the sun.
-'''Syndicalism and Specific Anarchist Organizations'''
+[487] This date is recorded on the north panel of the east door of Temple 11 as 5 Cib 10 Pop or 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (the correct form of the Calendar Round). On this date, the Eveningstar was 7.09° beyond the sun, enough for first visibility after superior conjunction. The action recorded on this date is “it appeared, the Great Star.” Previously, Scheie (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:123) had placed this first appearance forty-six days after the accession of the next king, Smoke-Shell, but the Long Count used for that date was in error. Smoke-Shell acceded on 9.15.17.13.10 11 Oc 13 Pop or February 18, 749, fourteen days after Smoke-Monkey’s death.
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, mass anarchists continued to advocate the strategy of simultaneously forming mass organizations and small specific anarchist organizations. In the buildup to the 1881 International Social Revolutionary Congress in London, Kropotkin proposed in letters to Malatesta, Cafiero, Schwitzguébel and an unnamed Belgian comrade, that anarchists should form “two organizations; one open, vast, and functioning openly; the other secret intended for action.”[[#42QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|42]] The secret organization was to be composed of dedicated anarchist militants who were experienced and action oriented. The public organization was, in comparison, to be a trade union that grouped workers “under the flag of the Strikers’ International.”[[#43QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|43]] The trade union was advocated both because it was the sole means through which “the forces of labor, the masses, can be successfully grouped together” and because it would “provide forces, money and a place for secret groups” to operate.[[#44QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|44]] This secret organization would be a direct continuation of the Intimité Internationale, a secret association of anarchists within the Saint-Imier International that he had joined in 1877 and that, when he was writing, still existed.[[#45CahmKropotkin1061453|45]]
+[488] On the base of Stela N, the name of Smoke-Shell’s father follows an yune “child of” statement. In that phrase, he is named as a Turtle Shell Ahau (Scheie and Grube 1988). The turtle-shell glyph in this title is a variant of the God N (Pauahtun) glyph that names the lord whose accession is recorded in the north-south text-bands on the base. In that clause, the “Pauahtun Ahau” is clearly named as the former king, Smoke-Monkey. The fifteenth successor, Smoke-Shell, was therefore the child of the fourteenth successor, Smoke-Monkey.
-In the years after 1881, Kropotkin remained an advocate of organizational dualism. Nettlau described him as advocating “''the penetration of the masses and their stimulation by libertarian militants, in much the same way as the Alliance acted within the International''.”[[#46MaxNettlauAShortHistory|46]] To support this view, Nettlau cited a 1914 letter where Kropotkin argued that “the syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of workers’ association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be carried on without a plunge into parliamentarism. But, evidently, it does not achieve this goal automatically, since in Germany, in France and in England, we have the examples of syndicates linked to the parliamentary struggle . . . There is need of the other element which Malatesta speaks of ''and which Bakunin always professed'',” namely a specific anarchist organization.[[#47QuotedinNettlauShortHis|47]]
+[489] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) holds open the possibility that Smoke-Monkey may have started some of the work on the final stage of Temple 26. Considering that six years passed between Smoke-Shell’s accession and the dedication of the building on 9.16.4.1.0 (Stuart and Scheie 1986b), the project may well have been begun during Smoke-Monkey’s reign.
-What element Malatesta spoke of can be established by examining the articles he wrote during the 1890s. In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists “should organize among ourselves, among folk who are perfectly persuaded and perfectly in agreement; and, around us, in broad, open associations, we should organize as many of the workers as we can, accepting them for what they are and striving to nudge them into whatever progress we can.”[[#48MalatestaTheMethodofFre|48]] This view was repeated in 1897, when he wrote that anarchists should “set up as many groups of convinced and agreeable comrades as possible,” and also “join the labor movement with fervor, helping already existing workers’ organizations and striving to promote new ones.”[[#49ErricoMalatestaALongand|49]] In 1899, he continued to argue for the “organization of us anarchists and the anarchist organization of the masses.”[[#50MalatestaErricoMalatesta|50]]
+[490] The date of this dedication event is recorded on the center strips on the eastern incline of the Ballcourt. Although reconstructing the date is problematic, it appears to record the Calendar Round 10 Ben 16 Kayab (or less likely 10 Kan 17 Kayab). The 10 Ben possibility falls on 9.15.6.8.13, a day only 113 days before 18-Rabbit’s death at Quirigua. 18-Rabbit’s accession is recorded in an Initial Series date in the same text, thus confirming that he commissioned the final phase of the Ballcourt (Scheie, Grube, and Stuart 1989). Rudy Larios (personal communication, 1989) has confirmed that Ballcourt III is associated with Structure 10L-26—2<sup>nd</sup>, the level under the final phase. This juxtaposition of the dedication date with the capture opens the possibility that 18-Rabbit may have been taken captive in a battle to secure sacrificial victims for his new ballcourt.
+<br>
+<br>The proper name of Ballcourt III is recorded on the Hieroglyphic Stairs on fragments now mounted in Step 44. These fragments include an unreadable date and the name of the Ballcourt as the Ox Ahal Em Ballcourt (Scheie and Freidel n.d.). The proper name translates as “Thrice-Made Descent” and relates to the mythological events recorded on the Bailgame Panel from Temple 33 at Yaxchilan (Fig. 7:7).
+<br>
+<br>The “thrice-made” event is recorded as a descent in this naming and as a decapitation sacrifice at Yaxchilan, but the references are the same. Both the descents and the sacrifices refer to the Popol Vuh myth. The first descent and sacrifice was of Hun-Hunahpu and Vucub-Hunahpu, the first set of Twins. The second descent into Xibalba, which resulted in the second sacrifice, was made by the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They sacrificed each other in order to trick the Lords of Death into defeat. The third descent is that of the king in his guise as the avatar of the Hero Twins. This descent can be accomplished by two means—his own ecstatic journey through bloodletting or by the decapitation of a captive who goes as his messenger. The Ballcourt was then a portal to the Underworld as was the inner sanctum of the temple. The iconography of all three sets of Ballcourt Markers reflects this idea, for each shows the confrontation of the Hero Twins with a Lord of Death (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:251–252, 257) through a quadrifoil shape. This shape symbolized the mouth of the cave and the opening to the Otherworld from Olmec times onward. The playing alley was like a glass-bottomed boat with transparent windows opening on to the Underwater domain of Xibalba. There, the great confrontation of humanity with death played itself out in the myths that became the Popol Vuh. Captives played a losing game and were dispatched in the “thrice-made descent.” Ironically, 18-Rabbit himself may have been dispatched by exactly this means.
-Malatesta held, in line with Bakunin, that the mass organization should not have a distinctly anarchist program. In June 1897, he argued that “the workers’ organizations . . . gather the exploited for the economic struggle against the masters” on the basis of “the interests shared by all workers . . . regardless of persuasion” and so must “be separate and distinct from the organizations of the various parties,” including specific anarchist organizations.[[#51MalatestaPatientWork174|51]] Several months later in November, he distinguished between “the workers’ movement—which should be whatever it can be and vary with the varying degree of development attained by the proletarians . . . and the anarchist party, which should be made up of men subscribing to the same ideas and bound by common purposes.”[[#52MalatestaPatientWork364|52]] Malatesta came to adopt this position in response to the lessons of the International in Italy. The Italian section “was never anything other than the anarchist socialist party,” and so “was weak as an organization for economic resistance” because “it was unable to make headway among the masses who were frightened by its overly advanced program . . . and it was weak as an anarchist party because many of its members were workers who had little grasp of anarchy and socialism and, having been drawn by the hope of immediate revolution, melted away every time an insurrectional attempt, or the hope of it, failed.”[[#53MalatestaPatientWork364|53]]
+[491] It has about twelve hundred glyph blocks, but most of the blocks hold two or more words. There are generally thirty-five glyphs per step and a minimum of sixty-four steps. Some of the steps have figures in the center, which reduces the number of words per step, but recent excavation suggests there were more than the sixty-four reconstructed stairs. 2,200 is about the right count.
-After the birth of revolutionary syndicalism as a doctrine between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, Malatesta’s advocacy of organizational dualism was articulated in response to the ideas of the CGT and other revolutionary syndicalist trade unions. Malatesta’s critique of the theory of revolutionary syndicalism is sometimes misrepresented as a rejection of revolutionary trade unionism in and of itself. Such a perspective ignores the fact that during his debate with the revolutionary syndicalist and CGT member Monatte at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, Malatesta argued that he was a supporter of the labor movement and advocated anarchists entering trade unions to spread anarchist ideas among workers. As a result, he described himself as “a syndicalist, in the sense of being a supporter of the syndicates,” who advocated “syndicates that are open to all workers without distinction of opinions, absolutely neutral syndicates,” rather than “anarchist syndicates.”[[#54MaurizioAntonioliedThe|54]] What Malatesta rejected was revolutionary syndicalism as “a doctrine” in the sense of the position that trade unionism is “''sufficient unto itself''” and “a necessary and sufficient means for social revolution.”[[#55AntonioliedInternationa|55]]
+[492] Marcus (1976:145) first noted the appearance of the Palenque Emblem Glyph on Copan Stela 8, a monument we now know records that Yax-Pac was the child of this woman. When she traveled to Copan, she apparently brought a royal belt inscribed with the names of family members, which her descendants at Copan inherited and passed down through their family. By an unknown process, this belt traveled to Comayagua, where it was bought from an Indian at the end of the nineteenth century and given to the British Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:82, Pl. 21).
-Over the following decades, Malatesta repeatedly argued that revolutionary syndicalism was wrong, because trade unions are a necessary but insufficient means to revolution. In 1927, he insisted that,
+[493] William Fash (1983b) identified the household groups in the Copan with sian otot, the Chorti Maya patrilocal residential system documented in detail by Wisdom (1940). He posits that the ancient settlement pattern reflects a system similar to the modern one, thus identifying the numerous residential compounds as patrilineal residences.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Today the major force for social transformation is the labor movement (union movement). . . . The anarchists must recognize the usefulness and importance of the union movement; they must support its development and make it one of the levers in their action, doing all they can to ensure that, by cooperation with other forces for progress, it will open the way to a social revolution. . . . But it would be a great and fatal mistake to believe, as many do, that the labor movement can and should, of its own volition, and by its very nature, lead to such a revolution.[[#56MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|56]]</div>
+[494] William Fash (1983a: 192–195) gives a count of 1,489 structures (not including invisible structures or those washed away by the Rio Copan) within the 2.1 km<sup>2</sup> entered on the Ballcourt. He allows five people per structure and assumes that 84 percent of the total structures were residential, arriving at a density of 2,977 people per square kilometer. Webster (1985:24) accepts a figure of 15,000 to 20,000 for the Copan pocket and a density of 5,000/km<sup>2</sup> for the Sepulturas and Bosque zones. The rural zones were less densely settled with an overall density of 100/km<sup>2</sup>. Webster (1985:50) argued for a maximum population of 20,000 for the entire Copan drainage, and he communicates that Sanders believes that the densities near the Acropolis were too high to have been supported by any feasible agricultural methods available to the Copanecs in the eighth century. The hinterlands around Copan supported the dense populations in the pocket.
-Malatesta thought that trade unionism was insufficient to achieve a social revolution, because he believed that trade union activity was constituted by forms of practice that, over time, had a tendency to transform them into reformist institutions concerned with reproducing themselves within capitalism, rather than abolishing class society. As he explained in 1907, “Labor movements, which always commence as movements of protest and revolt, and are animated at the beginning by a broad spirit of progress and human fraternity, tend very soon to degenerate; and in proportion as they acquire strength, they become egoistic, conservative, occupied exclusively with interests immediate and restricted, and develop within themselves a bureaucracy which, as in all such cases, has no other object than to strengthen and aggrandize itself.”[[#57MalatestaMethodofFreedom|57]]
+[495] William Fash (1983a:3O5-3O8) calculates that the pocket’s capacity to support about 10,000 people was exceeded by a significant factor in the eighth century, forcing shorter fallow periods as well as massive deforestation. The loss of topsoil on the intramountain zones, he suggests, led to a depletion of the soils that was so permanent that only pine forest could survive in these highly acidic areas, even today. He further notes that deforestation affected local rainfall and exacerbated the problem further. All of this occurred simultaneously, exactly when the nucleated zone around the Acropolis was occupied by up to 15,000 people, 50 percent more than could have subsisted on the agricultural base within the pocket. It was a prescription for disaster.
-Trade unions must, if they are to fulfill their purpose, be open to any worker who wants to win immediate improvements from the economic ruling classes. The consequence of this is that trade unions will be forced by circumstances to “moderate their aspirations, first so that they should not frighten away those they wish to have with them, and next because, in proportion as numbers increase, those with ideas who have initiated the movement remain buried in a majority that is only occupied with the petty interests of the moment.”[[#58MalatestaMethodofFreedom|58]] In addition, given their function of winning immediate improvements for their membership, trade unions will have to operate not too far outside the law, interact with the political and economic ruling classes, and concern themselves primarily with the interests of workers who belong to the trade union, rather than workers who their membership competes with in the labor market. These factors would, in turn, lead trade unions that gain a large membership to “assure, in accord with rather than against the masters, a privileged situation for themselves, and so create difficulties of entrance for new members, and for the admission of apprentices in the factories; a tendency to amass large funds that afterwards they are afraid of compromising; to seek the favor of public powers; to be absorbed, above all, in co-operation and mutual benefit schemes; and to become at last conservative elements in society.”[[#59MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|59]]
+[496] In the most recent tunneling under the East Court, Robert Sharer and Alfonso Morales (personal communication, 1989) have found a sharp division between buildings constructed with rough stone covered by thick plaster surfaces and those built with finely finished coursing covered with thin plaster. Sharer (personal communication, 1989) tentatively dates this building to the first half of the seventh century—that is, to the end of Butz’-Chan’s reign or to the first half of Smoke-Imix-God K’s. About this time, the Copanecs apparently switched from plaster to stone as the medium of architectural sculpture, thus suggesting that the wood necessary for making plaster had become a rare commodity. Certainly by 18-Rabbit’s reign, stone was the primary medium for architectural sculpture. Indeed, the building under his version of Temple 22 also used stone as its sculptural medium. If this is the correct interpretation, then the valley environs may have been seriously deforested by the beginning of the Late Classic period.
-For Malatesta, this tendency of trade unions to develop into reformist institutions that balanced the interests of capital and labor was confirmed by such examples as the American Federation of Labor in the United States. It “does not carry on a struggle against the bosses except in the sense that two businessmen struggle when they are discussing the details of a contract. The real struggle is conducted against the newcomers, the foreigners, or natives who seek to be allowed to work in any industrial job” such that “skilled workers look down on manual workers; whites despise and oppress blacks; the ‘real Americans’ consider Chinese, Italians, and other foreign workers as inferiors. If a revolution were to come in the United States, the strong and wealthy Unions would inevitably be against the Movement, because they would be worried about their investments and the privileged position they have assured for themselves.”[[#60ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|60]] Kropotkin shared Malatesta’s concerns. In 1919, he complained that in England, after the collapse of the First International, “the daily struggle of local unions against the exploiters took the place of more distant ends . . . the majority of the active members of the workers’ unions, occupied day after day with the organization of these unions and their strikes, lost sight of the final end of the workers’ organization—social revolution.”[[#61PeterKropotkinDirectStru|61]]
+[497] Rebecca Storey (1987 and personal communication, 1987–1989) has documented severe stress in the Copan Valley populations, especially in the eighth century. This stress was indicated in skeletons found in elite contexts as well as those excavated from the lower strata of Copan society. She notes high death rates for people between five and sixteen, exactly the ages that should have had the lowest rate of death, and she has also found evidence of widespread anemia. In her words, the people who lived in the valley during the eighth century were sick and getting sicker, and this was true for the elite as well as commoners.
-The history of the CGT can itself be used to illustrate Malatesta’s argument against revolutionary syndicalism. In 1919, a major and potentially revolutionary strike wave spread across France. It mobilized 1,150,718 workers in 2,026 strikes. One of the major strikes in this wave of revolt began on June 2, when 170,750 metalworkers in Paris and its suburbs, who belonged to thirteen local unions, went on strike for a forty-four-hour workweek and higher wages. This strike was independently organized by the rank and file as a reaction to the secretaries of the CGT’s Federation of Metalworkers signing an agreement with capitalists that granted a forty-eight-hour workweek. In so doing, the Federation had undercut ongoing negotiations between the capitalists and the Parisian local unions concerning a forty-four-hour workweek.
+[498] This is the earliest monument of Yax-Pac left to posterity. In light of its periodending association, it may well be his first foray into public history.
-A significant number of workers who took part in the strike, which expanded to include other regions of France, attempted to transform it into a revolutionary movement against capitalism itself and to achieve political objectives, such as an end to French military intervention against the Russian revolution and amnesty for political and military prisoners. They called for a general strike and the establishment of a new Paris Commune. The strike ended on June 28, before any of this could occur, because the union secretaries decided to achieve a purely economic settlement with the capitalists and government, which won increased wages and reaffirmed the previous agreement of a forty-eight-hour workweek. Despite thinking of themselves as genuine radicals committed to the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism, the secretaries decided to not support political or revolutionary demands or enlist the wider support of the CGT as a whole. Given their social position as trade union bureaucrats, they acted to balance the interests of capital and labor and focused exclusively on reformist rather than revolutionary goals.[[#62NicholasPapayanisAlphonse|62]]
+[499] In 1985, David Stuart made a new drawing of the stair under Temple 11 at the end of a tunnel driven by Strdmsvik. He recognized that the text records the dedication of Structure 11-Sub 12, a temple that originally stood on a platform that was the same height as the floor of the West Court.
-Anarcho-syndicalists argued that revolutionaries should respond to the problem of trade unions becoming increasingly reformist over time by explicitly committing them to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. In 1925, Malatesta rejected this position and argued against those who aspired to merge the labor and anarchist movements by giving unions an explicitly anarchist program. He noted that the purpose of a trade union is to unite as many workers as possible in order to win immediate reforms, such as higher wages and improved working conditions, and thereby act as “a means of education and a field for propaganda” until workers “are in a position to make the social revolution.”[[#63MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|63]] Yet, since the majority of workers are not anarchists, any trade union that allowed only committed anarchists to join it would “be the very same thing as an anarchist group and would remain unable either to obtain better conditions or to bring about the revolution.”[[#64MalatestaMethodofFreedom|64]] His claim that anarcho-syndicalist trade unions would end up being specific anarchist organizations that called themselves trade unions was certainly applicable to some groups. The French CGTSR, for example, had only six thousand members in 1936, hardly the size necessary to be an organ of genuinely large-scale class struggle.[[#65DavidBerryAHistoryofth|65]]
+[500] Mary Miller (1986:83–84; 1988; M. Miller and Houston [1987:59]) pointed out this association of bailgame scenes, hieroglyphic stairs, and sacrificial scenes, and identified the Reviewing Stands at Copan as the sides of a false ballcourt. She identified the location as underwater and the rising god on the stairway as Chac-Xib-Chac.
-On the other hand, if an anarcho-syndicalist trade union allowed any worker into it and thereby performed its function as an organ of large-scale class struggle then, as it grew in size, it would come to be an organization in which the majority of members were not anarchists and its anarchist program would exist only on paper as “an empty formula to which nobody pays any more attention.”[[#66MalatestaMethodofFreedom|66]] Malatesta concluded that any “fusion” of anarchism and the trade union movement would result “either in rendering the union powerless to attain its specific aim, or in attenuating, falsifying and extinguishing the spirit of Anarchism.”[[#67MalatestaMethodofFreedom|67]]
+[501] Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that Proskouriakoff commented on these crocodiles in the field notes she kept while working on reconstruction drawings for the Carnegie expedition under Strdmsvik.
-Given this, Malatesta rejected the strategy of committing existing trade unions to an anarchist program or splitting off from large, moderate trade unions to form much smaller anarchist ones. He instead argued that anarchists should participate within the largest trade unions as a militant minority in order to be able to influence the largest number of workers and counteract the tendency of trade unions to become reformist. In Malatesta’s specific context during 1920s Italy, this was the syndicalist USI and the General Confederation of Labor, which had close ties with the Italian Socialist Party. His position, though, could apply just as well to less radical trade unions.[[#68MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|68]]
+[502] See Scheie (1987c) for an analysis of the chronology and events recorded in this inscription. The date and event is repeated on the west panel of the north door above in Temple 11, where Smoke-Shell, Yax-Pac’s predecessor, appears as the protagonist. We suggested the event corresponded to his apotheosis and emergence from the Underworld after he had defeated the Lords of Death (see Scheie and M. Miller 1986:265–300).
-According to Malatesta, the “revolutionary spirit must be introduced, developed, and maintained by the constant actions of revolutionaries who work from within their ranks as well as from outside, but it cannot be the normal, natural definition of the Trade Unions’ function.”[[#69MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|69]] Anarchists who participate in the trade union movement should, “strive to make them as much as possible instruments of combat in view of the Social Revolution. They should work to develop in the Syndicates all that which can augment its educative influence and its combativeness—the propaganda of ideas, the forcible strike, the spirit of proselytism, the distrust and hatred of the authorities and of the politicians, the practice of solidarity toward individuals and groups in conflict with the masters. They should combat all that which tends to render them egotistic, pacific, conservative,” which included amassing large amounts of money and “the appointment of bureaucratic officials, paid and permanent.”[[#70MalatestaMethodofFreedom|70]]
+[503] He dedicated the Reviewing Stand 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769) and Altar Z on 9.16.18.9.19 12 Cauac 2 Zac (August 21, 769). The last glyph in the altar text is ya. tz’itni, spelling the word yatz’in. It occurs in the name of a person (not the king) given in a second clause. Since yitz’in is “younger brother,” and since noyatz’ or yatz’in word with an appropriate meaning occurs in either the Yucatecan or Cholan languages, we suspect this glyph may identify this second person as the “younger brother of the king.”
-Although Malatesta advocated anarchist participation within the trade union movement, he insisted that anarchism should not subsume itself into it, but instead maintain an independent existence within specific anarchist organizations. He argued that anarchists should work within the trade union movement for “anarchistic purposes as individuals, groups and federations of groups” and “always keep in contact with the Anarchists and remember that the labor organizations do not constitute the end but only one of the various means, no matter how important it may be, of preparing the advent of anarchy.”[[#71MalatestaMethodofFreedom|71]] There is, he said, “an impelling need for a specifically anarchist organization which, both from within and outside the unions, struggle for the achievement of anarchism and seek to sterilize all the germs of degeneration and reaction.”[[#72MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|72]] In other words, Malatesta advocated syndicalism (in the broad sense of revolutionary trade unionism) plus a specific anarchist organization.
+[504] 9.17.0.0.0 13 Ahau 18 Cumku (January 24, 771) has long been known as an eclipse date from its appearance in the eclipse tables of the Dresden Codex. David Kelley (1977: 406) noted that the glyph recording “dark of the moon” for 9.17.0.0.0 on Quirigua Stela E is closely related to the glyph recording the same eclipse station on Dresden, page 51b at BL At Tikal, this solar eclipse darkened 20 percent of the sun beginning at 12:49 P.M. and ending at 3:09 P.M. (Kudlek 1978). It is registered in the inscriptions of Quirigua on Stela E and at Copan on the east panel of the south door of Temple 11. The first appearance of the Eveningstar is also recorded in Temple 11 (south panel, west door) on the day 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771). Venus was separated from the sun by 7.46+ and high enough to be observed above Copan’s mountainous horizon.
-He was not alone. In 1888, Spanish anarchists formed the Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region in order to provide the Federation of Resistance Against Capital, a federation of politically neutral trade unions, with a revolutionary orientation.[[#73GeorgeRichardEsenweinAna|73]] Decades later in 1907, an anonymous member of the anarchist movement in Bohemia reported: “We are syndicalists. But syndicalism for us is only a means of action and not an end. We view it as a means of anarchist propaganda. It is thanks to syndicalism that we have been able to put down firm roots among the textile workers and miners in northern Bohemia, whose trade unions are under our direct influence. Most of these unions are flanked by an anarchist group made up of the best educated and most conscious workers. Our revolutionary miners are preparing the struggle for an eight-hour day.”[[#74AntonioliedInternationa|74]]
+[505] On 9.17.0.0.0, Yax-Pac also dedicated Altar 41, recording the dedication rituals on two of the edges of the flat slab, and the Cosmic Monster and a toad on the other two edges. This altar reflects the cosmic nature of this katun ending.
-Some, but not all, anarcho-syndicalists advocated the formation of both mass syndicalist trade unions committed to an anarchist program, which were open to all workers, and smaller specific anarchist organizations, which were composed exclusively of dedicated militants. Focusing on Spain, the former general secretary of the CNT’s Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí, gave a speech on anarchism and syndicalism in 1920. He claimed that although anarchists should participate in trade unions in order to “watch over their development and to provide them with direction” such that they “become more libertarian,” this “does not by any means imply that the existing anarchist groups must be dissolved. Not at all. The more influence they exercise, the more Anarchism and anarchists there will be.”[[#75SalvadorSeguiAnarchisma|75]] Ultimately, as Seguí pointed out, it was the influence of anarchist groups that led to the CNT adopting anarchist communism as its goal in 1919.
+[506] Temple 21 has fallen into the cut made by the Copan River along the eastern edge of the Acropolis. We have no information on its patron, but fragments found on the platform behind it include Tlaloc-war iconography among other motifs.
-Several years later in 1927, the FAI was founded during the CNT’s period of illegality—between 1924 and 1930—under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Its founding was initiated by the Portuguese Anarchist Union, the Federation of Spanish-Speaking Anarchist Groups in France, and the Federation of Anarchist Groups in Spain.[[#76JuanGomezCasasAnarchist|76]] The strategic motivations for a new specific anarchist organization can be seen in the manifesto issued by the Anarchist Liaison Committee of Catalonia, which had been set up to organize the founding of the FAI. They described themselves as workers who were active CNT militants and supporters of the doctrine of the IWMA. It was asserted that “it is not enough to be active inside the union. . . . Outside of the unions, absolutely independently, we disseminate our theories, form our groups, organize rallies, publish anarchist reading material, and sow the seed of anarchism in every direction.”[[#77QuotedinChristieWethe|77]] This activity in anarchist groups was essential in order to ensure that anarchists both instigated and inspired the coming social revolution such that it was not defeated, as had recently happened in Russia, by the establishment of a new minority political ruling class. Anarchists had to “organize ourselves in anarchist groupings in order to impregnate the anarchist revolution” and “propel it as far forward as we may.”[[#78QuotedinChristieWethe|78]]
+[507] Although very little evidence survives, William Fash and I have surmised the north door was in fact carved as a monster mouth based on some of the fragments lying on the stairway below the temple. Principal among these fragments are huge stones carved with parallel curving lines that appear to represent the palette of an open mouth.
-This commitment to an anarcho-syndicalist version of organizational dualism was repeated at the founding meeting of the FAI in July 1927. The minutes claim that the labor organization itself should struggle not only for day-to-day improvements, but also, for universal human emancipation and anarchism. At the same time, an “anarchist organization of groups should be established alongside it, with the two organizations working together for the anarchist movement.”[[#79QuotedinCasasHistoryof|79]] It was proposed that the CNT and the FAI should “hold joint plenums and local, district, and regional meetings” and “form general federations of the full anarchist movement” with “general councils composed of representatives of the unions and the groups. The general councils will name Commissions of Education, Propaganda, Agitation, and other areas of equal concern for both organizations.”[[#80QuotedinCasasHistoryof|80]] By organizing joint councils, the FAI and CNT would establish a ''trabazón'' with one another, which can be translated into English as an “organic link.” This trabazón was subsequently implemented at the CNT’s national conference in January 1928, where delegates from the FAI and CNT agreed to form a National Committee of Revolutionary Action and a National Prisoners’ Aid Committee composed of members of both organizations.[[#81JasonGarnerGoalsandMean|81]]
+[508] Both Bill and Barbara Fash argued in their comments on this chapter that we have proof for only two of these Pauahtun figures. One head is located under the huge ceiba tree that stands over the northeast corner of the building, and the other lies among the fragments in the Plaza below the temple. Since no evidence of Pauahtunob has been found on the south side, the design probably had the cosmic arch of heaven only on the northern facade that faced out toward the Great Plaza. Barbara Fash also pointed out to us that Proskouriakoff mentioned in her field notes seeing and recognizing segments of the reptilian body of the Cosmic Monster in the rubble associated with Temple 11.
-The strategy of anarcho-syndicalism plus a specific anarchist organization was also advocated by anarchists outside of Spain. The French anarcho-syndicalist Besnard argued during his speech at the IWMA congress of 1937 that “anarcho-communist groups,” which were distinct from the trade union, should “go ''prospecting'' among the laboring masses,” “seek out recruits and temper militants” and “carry out active propaganda and intensive pioneering work with an eye to winning the greatest possible number of workers hitherto deceived and gulled by all the political parties, without exception, over to their side and thus to the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions.”[[#82PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|82]]
+[509] A summary of the events as we understood them in 1985 appears in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123). In the 1987 field season, David Stuart worked extensively with these texts and supervised the reconstruction of several of the most important panels, particularly the two west panels in the north-south corridor. In November 1987, Scheie reconstructed additional parts of the north panel of the west door. These reconstructions and corrections have allowed a much more accurate understanding of the chronology and events, which are as follows:
+<br>
+<br> a. North door, east panel. The accession of Yax-Pac on 9.16.12.6.16 6 Caban 10 Mol (July 2, 763).
+<br>
+<br>North door, west panel. The dedication of the Reviewing Stand and perhaps the apotheosis of Smoke-Shell on 9.16.18.2.12 8 Eb 15 Zip (March 27, 769). 9.14.15.0.0 (September 17, 726) continues to the south door, where the actor is recorded.
+<br>
+<br> b. South door, east panel. The finish of the 9.14.15.0.0 event with 18-Rabbit as the actor. The 9.17.0.0.0 period ending and eclipse.
+<br>
+<br>South door, west panel. The 9.17.2.12.16 1 Cib 19 Ceh (September 26, 773) dedication of the Temple. David Stuart recognized the nature of this event in his 1987 work.
+<br>
+<br> c. East door, north panel. The first appearance of Venus as Eveningstar on 9.15.15.12.16 5 Cib 9 Pop (February 15, 747), an unknown event on 9.17.1.3.5 9 Chicchan 13 Zip (March 24, 772), and a repetition of the 9.17.2.12.16 event, but specified for the xay, “crossing,” of the interior corridors.
+<br>
+<br>East door, south panel. The 819-day count and Long Count for the dedication date, 9.17.2.12.16 (continues to west door).
+<br>
+<br> d. West door, north panel. Continuation of the date from east door and the dedication event. 9.17.5.0.0 period-ending ritual and the latest date in the building.
+<br>
+<br>West door, south panel. The dedication event and the 9.17.0.0.16 3 Cib 9 Pop (February 9, 771) first appearance of the Eveningstar.
-The relationship between mass organizations and specific anarchist organizations was not the only topic that anarchists debated. They also argued with one another about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and what role they should play in the class struggle.
+[510] The text and figures on this bench are described and analyzed in Scheie and M. Miller (1986:123–125), but some new information of interest has surfaced since that analysis. Each of the twenty personages sits on a glyph, but in 1986 we thought the glyphs did not name any of Copan’s rulers. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has suggested the glyph under Personage 14 refers to the seventh successor, and that the one under Personage 15 is identical to the name of the eleventh successor. However, even with several glyphs associated with the names of particular rulers, the glyphs do not appear to record a series of personal names, but rather a continuous text. Furthermore, I had erroneously taken all ten glyphs on the left side to be in mirror image, signaling that the order of the figures unfolded outward from the central text. This interpretation is wrong. The glyphs under the first four personages on the left (Personages 1—4) read in the correct order. The left text is then broken into at least two clauses. One is written in proper reading order and records the dedication of the bench. The second one we do not yet understand, but we know it is related to the dynastic history of the kingdom. This new analysis does solve one problem in the previous interpretation—there are sixteen successors in the dynasty, including Yax-Pac, but twenty figures on the bench. With the separation of four of these figures and their glyphs into a separate clause, the number of dynasts depicted now becomes the correct one, sixteen.
-'''Platformism and Synthesism'''
+[511] The ambitious size of the building exceeded the technological capabilities of the Copanecs and caused problems almost immediately. The east-west gallery was simply too wide for the capability of a corbeled vault, especially with the weight of a second story above it. The new walls built by the architects to support the failing vault narrowed the interior corridor to half its former width and severely constricted the readability of the inscriptions. Some of these inscriptions appear to have been covered over, especially those on the west door.
-In 1918, the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) was founded in Ukraine. It was viewed by Voline, who was one of its members, as a specific anarchist organization that would embrace anarchist communists, anarcho-syndicalists, and individualist anarchists and thereby achieve what he termed a “united anarchism.”[[#83PaulAvrichTheRussianAna|83]] The Nabat’s first congress on November 18 described its primary duty as “organizing all of the life forces of anarchism; uniting the various strands of anarchism; bringing together through a common endeavor all anarchists seriously desirous of playing an active part in the social revolution.”[[#84NabatProceedingsofNabat|84]] This aspiration never became a reality due to the anarcho-syndicalists deciding not to join. In response, the Nabat choose not to send a delegate to the third All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists.[[#85AvrichRussianAnarchists|85]]
+[512] Ricardo Argurcia (personal communication, 1989), co-director of the Copan Acropolis Project, informed us that the building immediately under the final phase of Temple 16 faced east instead of west. He suspects that the entire West Court was not formulated architecturally until Yax-Pac built Temple 11 and 16. If his assessment is correct, then Yax-Pac deliberately created the primordial sea and the Underworld in this West Court as a part of his political strategy.
-In November 1920, the militants of the Nabat, including Voline, were arrested by the Bolshevik secret police and imprisoned in Moscow. After an extensive campaign for the release of anarchist prisoners, which included imprisoned anarchists going on hunger strike, the Bolshevik government released a number of anarchists on the condition that they leave the country immediately. Among them was Voline, who left for Berlin in January 1922. That year, the anarchists who had fled to Berlin in order to escape Bolshevik state repression formed the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. Between June 1923 and May 1924, this group published the anarchist journal ''Anarkhichesky Vestnik ''(Anarchist Herald) as part of a collaboration with the New York Union of Russian Toilers. The journal, edited by Voline and Peter Arshinov, published articles advocating the formation of specific anarchist organizations that united anarchists from different tendencies in order to combine the best ideas from anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism.[[#86AvrichRussianAnarchists|86]]
+[513] Williamson, Stone, and Morales (1989) have connected the iconography of Temple 16 to the Tlaloc-war imagery we have discussed throughout this book. Ricardo Ar- gurcia’s (personal communication, 1989) excavations of Temple 16 have proved beyond doubt that the last phase was built during Yax-Pac’s reign. This new dating clearly connects Temples 11 and Temple 16 as part of a unified project, very probably conceived and executed together. The iconography of the West Court with its death and Underwater imagery was intentionally created as a single statement, rather than accumulated through several reigns.
-This position came to be known as the ''anarchist synthesis'' and was expounded not only by Voline but also by the French anarchist Sébastien Faure. In his 1928 article ''The Anarchist Synthesis'','' ''Faure utilized an analogy with chemistry to argue that anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism were “three elements” that should be mixed together and synthesized through a process of ongoing experimentation. This would reveal which “dosage” of each element was most appropriate for a given context such that the “formula” would vary “locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.”[[#87SebastienFaureTheAnarch|87]] The organizational basis for this synthesis in France was the recently formed Association of Anarchist Federalists (AFA), which was described by Faure as “an entirely new regrouping of anarchist forces” that would unite all committed anarchists “without distinction of tendency” in order to “give more cohesion, influence and effectiveness to our dear propaganda” and enable anarchists “to work together rather than against one another, to live in peace rather than make war.”[[#88FaureTheAnarchistSynthe|88]]
+[514] William Fash (1983a:31O-314) first proposed that Yax-Pac used this kind of strategy in dealing with the factionalism evident in the archaeology associated with the latest phrase of Copan life. The epigraphic information upon which he based his ideas has changed drastically since his initial presentation, but our analysis of Yax-Pac’s strategy grows from his initial insights.
+<br>
+<br>The houses we talk about are the principal structures in large, multiple-court residential compounds. These particular structures have benches in them, as do a large number of buildings in the residential compounds, but in general they are large and more elaborately decorated than adjacent buildings. The function of these benches is debated, with some researchers asserting they were simply beds. Clearly, some functioned as sleeping platforms, but the Maya themselves called them chumib, “seat.” From pottery scenes, we deduced that the benches served a number of purposes, including sleeping, working, the conducting of business, audiences with subordinates, and a variety of rituals. The structures with these inscribed “seats” were very probably the rooms from which the lineage heads conducted the business critical to their peoples. They were called otot, “house,” by the Maya, but they are houses in the sense that modern people sometimes have offices in their homes. These structures were more than residential.
-In Faure’s ''Anarchist Encyclopedia'', published in 1934,'' ''Voline repeated this view when he defined the anarchist synthesis as “a tendency currently emerging within the libertarian movement seeking to reconcile and then ‘synthesize’ the different currents of thought that divide this movement into several more or less hostile fractions.”[[#89VolineSynthesisanarchis|89]] Voline, in other words, sought not only to unite different anarchists in the same organization but also to combine the different ideas of anarchist tendencies together. This was motivated by two main positions. First, although anarchism’s fragmentation into distinct subtypes had initially led to beneficial developments in anarchist theory and practice, it had in the long run ceased to be useful and resulted in unnecessary conflict between anarchists who each viewed their “parcel” as “the sole truth and bitterly fought against the partisans of the other currents.”[[#90VolineSynthesisAnarchis|90]] In so doing, they ignored the important ideas that other anarchist tendencies had to offer and the fact that anarchism could be improved by fusing each separate element together into an organic whole. Second, any specific anarchist organization composed of different kinds of anarchist that did not establish a synthesis of their different ideas would only be “a ‘mechanical’ assemblage” in which “each holds on to his intransigent position,” resulting in “not a synthesis, but chaos.”[[#91VolineSynthesisAnarchis|91]]
+[515] For a description of this group under its older designation CV-43, see Leventhal (1983).
-In parallel with the emergence of Voline and Faure’s anarchist synthesis, a distinct and opposed tendency developed that came to be known as ''platformism''. In June 1926, members of the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, which had relocated to Paris in 1925, issued ''The'' ''Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft)'' through their new journal ''Dielo Truda'' (The Cause of Labor). The ''Platform ''emerged out of discussions within the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, whose members included Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, and Ida Mett, about how a specific anarchist organization should be structured and operate in order to overcome the perceived disorganization and ineffectiveness that the anarchist movement had fallen into. In so doing, they hoped to ensure that the anarchist movement would not be defeated, as it had been in Russia, during the next revolution.[[#92AlexandreSkirdaFacingthe|92]]
+[516] This bench text begins with a date corresponding to the dedication of the building in which it is housed. The chronology leads to a future (at the time of the inscribing) enactment of the scattering rite by Yax-Pac on 9.17.10.0.0. The date of the dedication is difficult to decipher but 9.17.3.16.15 is one of the more likely possibilities. The event is the God N dedication event of a house by an offering which had something to do with Smoke-Shell. Since that ruler was long dead at the time of the dedication, we presume this was a offering “to” rather than “from” Smoke-Shell (Schele 1989a). The alternative explanation is that the date of the dedication fell within the reign of Smoke-Shell, but that it was not commemorated by the installation of this bench until shortly before 9.17.10.0.0. In this scenario, both kings would have been active participants.
-The Dielo Truda group, in line with organizational dualism in general, advocated the formation of mass organizations that brought the working classes together on the basis of production and consumption, such as trade unions, workers’ councils, or cooperatives, and a specific anarchist organization that united the most revolutionary and militant workers under an anarchist-communist program.[[#93TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|93]] The function of such a specific anarchist organization, which they called ''the general union of anarchists'', was to prepare the working classes for a social revolution, awaken and nurture class consciousness, spread anarchist ideas, coordinate action, and participate effectively in collective struggles. In so doing, it would ensure that anarchism became “the guiding light,” “spearhead,” or “driving force” of the social revolution when it occurred, such that there was an “''anarchist theoretical direction of events''.”[[#94TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|94]]
+[517] Altar W’ was set in this same group. Dated at 9.17.5.9.4, the text celebrated the dedication of that altar and names the lineage head as the “third successor” of a person named Skull, who was a ballplayer. Presuming this person was the founder of this particular lineage, he may have been the lord who built the structure with the monkey/God N scribe in the time of 18-Rabbit.
-By this, the Dielo Truda group did not mean that the general union of anarchists should seize power, establish themselves as a political ruling class, and impose their ideas from the top down in the name of the working classes whom they claimed to represent. Rather, they sought only “to assist the masses to choose the genuine path of social revolution and socialist construction” and establish the “genuine self-governance of the masses,” which would be “the practical first step along the road to the realization of libertarian communism.”[[#95TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|95]] This goal was to be achieved by participating within mass movements, such as trade unions, in order to spread anarchist ideas within them and steer the movement in an anarchist direction.
+[518] Berthold Riese (in Webster, W. Fash, and Abrams 1986:184) had originally dated this monument to 9.17.16.13.10 11 Oc 3 Yax. Grube and Schele (1987b) proposed a different reading of the day as 11 Ahau and placed the Long Count at 9.19.3.2.0. Stuart, Grube, and Schele (1989) have proposed a new reading of the haab as 3 Ch’en rather than 3 Yax. This new combination gives 9.17.10.11.0 11 Ahau 3 Chen, a placement that is far more in keeping with the style of the carving and with the notation that Yax-Pac was in his first katun of reign when the house dedication occurred.
-The'' Platform'' differed from other forms of organizational dualism in its conception of how the specific anarchist organization should be structured. The Dielo Truda group held that specific anarchist organizations should, in order to effectively influence the working classes, adhere to a narrow ideological and tactical program that would act as a guide for achieving their shared goals via an agreed-upon route. This position emerged from their experiences of the Russian revolution. Arshinov argued in his 1925 article “Our Organizational Problem” that the anarchist movement in Russia had been outmaneuvered by other revolutionary tendencies because it had adopted “positions that were, yes, correct, but too general, acting all at once in a diffuse way, in multiple tiny groups, often at odds on many points of tactics.”[[#96QuotedinSkirdaFacingthe|96]] In order to prevent this from happening again, specific anarchist organizations should be committed to ideological and tactical unity such that every member agrees on a specific route to achieve concrete objectives. Doing so ensures that the organization’s limited resources are deployed in the same direction and prevents different segments of the organization from engaging in tactics that do not complement and support one another, such as one group advocating participation in trade unions while another tried to persuade workers not to join them.[[#97TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|97]]
+[519] David Stuart (personal communication, 1985) first identified the name phrase of Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac. This man’s relationship to the king can be deduced from two monuments (Schele and Grube 1987a). The parentage statements of the king, given on Stela 8, and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac’s, given on Altar U, name the same woman of Palenque as their mother. Yax-Pac’s father is never given, but we deduce he was Smoke-Shell’s son, based on his position as the sixteenth successor. The younger half brother was, however, not the son of Smoke-Shell. Since Yax-Pac was under twenty at the time of his accession, and since his father reigned for less that fifteen years, we speculate that Smoke-Shell died while his wife was still young. She produced his heir in Yax-Pac, but after his death she remarried and produced another son by a different father, making Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac a half brother. On Altar U (Fig. 8:19), her name includes her status as the mother of the king.
-The Dielo Truda group therefore rejected Voline and Faure’s theory of the anarchist synthesis. They thought it made little sense to advocate the synthesis of anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism. It was already the case that anarcho-syndicalists advocated communism as a goal and most anarchist communists advocated participation in trade unions. Nor was there any need to incorporate the insights of individualist anarchism. Individualists rejected the need for collectively organized class struggle, and anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism were already based on a commitment to the freedom of the individual. In addition, it was impractical to attempt to synthesize the different anarchist tendencies into a single organization, because its members would continue to have fundamentally incompatible views on theory and practice. The organization would inevitably disintegrate when these disagreements arose to prominence during collective struggles.[[#98TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|98]]
+[520] Venus was 46.35° from the sun on the anniversary and 46.21° on the bloodletting five days later.
-The authors of the'' Platform'' believed that the common ideological and tactical program of the specific anarchist organization should be implemented through each individual member engaging in revolutionary self-discipline, and enacting the decisions that had been collectively agreed upon.[[#99MakhnoStruggle6768|99]] They wrote that “the federalist type of anarchist organization, while acknowledging every member of the organization’s right to independence, to freedom of opinion, initiative and individual liberty, charges each member with specific organizational duties, insisting that these be rigorously performed, and that decisions jointly made be put into effect.”[[#100TheGroupofRussianAnarch|100]] This included a commitment to seeing decisions made by majority vote at congresses as binding on every group within the organization. The authors of the'' Platform'', in parallel with this, rejected the “unaccountable individualism” of some anarchist groups in favor of a system of “''collective responsibility''” whereby the general union of anarchists “will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of each of its members” and “each member will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of the Union as a whole.”[[#101TheGroupofRussianAnarch|101]]
+[521] There are some important differences between the Altar ‘ figures and those on Altar Q, Altar L, and the bench from Temple 11. The latter three monuments depict human figures all wearing a particular kind of breast ornament which appears to be associated with ruling lords at Copán and, interestingly enough, with the noble whose portrait was carved on Stela 1 from Los Higos, one of the largest sites in the La Venta Valley to the north at the edge of Copán’s hegemony. The Altar T figures were a mixture of fully human representations and fantastic beasties on the sides. We do not know whether these figures are to be interpreted as a glyphic text or as beings called from Xibalba, but they are clearly not meant to be understood as ancestors. Furthermore, the four fully human figures on the front surface are not identified by names. We do not know which represents Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, or whether to interpret the four figures as ancestors or contemporary patriarchs. Regardless of our confusion, the imagery on the altar clearly evokes Altar Q and the Temple 11 bench, both of which were in place when Altar T was carved.
-Most controversially of all, the Dielo Truda group proposed the formation of an executive committee that would achieve coordination and coherence between different sections of the general union of anarchists. They advocated an “''Executive Committee''” tasked with the “implementation of decisions made by the Union, which the latter have entrusted to it; theoretical and organizational oversight of the activity of isolated organizations, in keeping with the Union’s theoretical options and overall tactical line; scrutiny of the general state of the movement; maintenance of working and organizational ties between all of the organizations of the Union, as well as with outside organizations.”[[#102TheGroupofRussianAnarch|102]] The authors of the Platform were aware that the executive committee could potentially take on a life of its own and subordinate or oppress the membership. In order to prevent this from happening, they proposed that “the rights, responsibilities and practical tasks of the Executive Committee will be prescribed by the Congress of the General Union.”[[#103TheGroupofRussianAnarch|103]]
+[522] Stuart (1986a) first identified the proper name of Altar U. See Schele and Stuart (1986b, 1986c) for analysis of the chronology and inscription on Altar U.
-The'' Platform'' aroused a great deal of debate within the European anarchist movement. These responses tended to be based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting its ideas due, in part, to a poor French translation produced by Voline, and the ambiguous language within the ''Platform'' itself, such as references to collective responsibility, an executive committee, and anarchists providing theoretical direction.[[#104SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|104]] In 1927, a different group of Russian anarchists, which included Mollie Steimer, Senya Fleshin, and Voline, released a critique of the'' Platform''. They interpreted the'' Platform'' as advocating the formation of a centralized party ruled from the top-down, by an executive committee that was merely a central committee under a different name. This centralized party would, in turn, act as leader and director of both the anarchist movement and working-class movements in general, rather than offering only ideological assistance to other workers as equals in the class struggle. As a result, they concluded that the Dielo Truda group had abandoned anarchist principles in favor of authoritarian Bolshevik ones.[[#105MollieSteimerSimonFlesh|105]] This negative evaluation of the ''Platform'' was shared by Berkman and Goldman.[[#106AvrichRussianAnarchists|106]]
+[523] The name is written Yax.k’a:ma:la.ya or Yax K’amlay. Nikolai Grube (personal communication, 1988) brought to our attention that the root k’atn in Yucatec means “to serve another,” as well as “obligation, offering of the first fruits, and offering.” K’amtesah is “administrator or he who serves” (Barrera Vasquez 1980:371). Chorti (Wisdom n.d.:607) has k’am as “use, service, value” and k’amp’ah as “be of use or value, serve, be occupied with.” If, as Grube suggests, -lay is a derivational suffix, then this man may have been known by the office he fulfilled—“First Steward (or Administrator).”
+<br>
+<br>In earlier analyses, we had taken this Yax-Kamlay glyph to be a title taken by Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac upon his seating. However, in the summer of 1989, David Stuart found this same name on Stela 29, on the new altar from Temple 22a, and on a house model located near a residential building just south of the Acropolis. He convinced us that Yax-Kamlay and Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac were, in fact, two different individuals. The relationship of Yax-Kamlay to Yax-Pac is less clear than that between the king and Yahau- Chan-Ah-Bac. Nikolai Grube and Schele speculate that a glyph in his name on Altar U reading i.tz’Lta is an unpossessed form of “younger brother.” If this reading is correct, then he would have been a younger full brother of the king. At present, however, this reading is only a possibility. Confirmation of the proposed relationship must wait until incontrovertible evidence is found.
-A more politely written response was issued by Malatesta in October 1927. Malatesta, like Steimer, Fleshin, and Voline, viewed the'' Platform'' as rejecting the anarchist commitment to free initiative and free agreement in favor of a Bolshevik-inspired authoritarian system of organization. The'' Platform’s'' advocacy of collective responsibility, binding congress resolutions made by majority vote, and an executive committee was interpreted by Malatesta as being a proposal for an organization in which decisions are made by elected representatives. If these representatives make binding decisions through simple majority voting then, when there are more than two factions at a meeting, the decision will be made by a numerical minority of representatives elected by a minority of the organization.[[#107MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|107]] He argued that,
+[524] On the eastern side of Stela 5, the Serpent Bar holds two tiny ancestral figures in its gaping mouths. On the northern, left side of the king, the ancestor holds a stingray spine, while on the southern, right side, another holds the bowl full of the blood that has brought him forth from the Otherworld.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">if the Union is responsible for what each member does, how can it leave to its individual members and to the various groups the freedom to apply the common program in the way they think best? How can one be responsible for an action if one does not have the means to prevent it? Therefore, the Union and in its name the Executive Committee, would need to monitor the action of the individual members and order them what to do and what not to do; and since disapproval after the event cannot put right a previously accepted responsibility, no-one would be able to do anything at all before having obtained the go-ahead, the permission of the committee.[[#108MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|108]]</div>
+[525] We refer here to Stela 6, which was mounted in a small, unexcavated compound about a hundred meters west of Stela 5. From a point fifty meters to the south and equidistant from each, both tree-stones can be seen.
-As a result, Malatesta concluded that the Dielo Truda group had proposed means that would, “far from helping to bring about the victory of anarchist communism . . . only falsify the anarchist spirit and lead to consequences that go against their intentions.”[[#109MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|109]]
+[526] Here we have Yax-Pac pausing after he has left the causeway that led west from the Acropolis to a large complex on the slope above and to the east of Stela 5. From his position, he would have seen the cast face of Stela 5, and after walking fifty meters to the west, he would have seen the west face of Stela 5 and the front of its nearby companion, Stela 6. The latter monument celebrated 9.12.10.0.0, a date which corresponded to a stationary point ending the retrograde motion of Venus after its heliacal rising as Morningstar. The same monument has the first historical record of a ritual action by 18-Rabbit, who was to become king after the death of Smoke-Imix.
-In response to these critiques the authors of the'' Platform'' issued a number of texts clarifying their position. First, they were not in favor of subordinating the working class to the top-down rule of an anarchist organization. They explicitly wrote that “the action of steering revolutionary elements and the revolutionary movement of the masses in terms of ideas should not be and cannot ever be considered as an aspiration on the part of anarchists that they should take the construction of the new society into their own hands. That construction cannot be carried out except by the whole of laboring society, for that task devolves upon it alone, and any attempt to strip it of that right must be deemed anti-anarchist.”[[#110TheGroupofRussianAnarch|110]]
+[527] This was the glyphic name of Temple 11 recorded on the west panel of the south door (Stuart, personal communication, 1988).
-Given this, anarchists “will never agree to wield power, even for a single instant, nor impose their decisions on the masses by force. In this connection their methods are: propaganda, force of argument, and spoken and written persuasion.”[[#111TheGroupofRussianAnarch|111]] The'' Platform’s'' references to anarchists providing direction to the working classes only meant that they would influence other workers and persuade them to adopt anarchist ideas in just the same manner that famous anarchist theorists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus, and Malatesta had already done. The'' Platform'' merely held that in order for this ideological direction to become a “permanent factor” it was necessary to form “an organization possessed of a common ideology . . . whose membership engage in ideologically coordinated activity, without being side-tracked or dispersed as has been the case hitherto.”[[#112TheGroupofRussianAnarch|112]] This organization would then participate in, for example, the trade union movement “as ''the carriers of a certain theory, a prescribed work plan''” in order to “''disseminate'' within the unions its ideas regarding the revolutionary tactics of the working class and on various events.”[[#113TheGroupofRussianAnarch|113]]
+[528] We are supposing Yax-Pac was standing on the west causeway due south of Stelae 5 and 6. On that day, January 25, 793, the sun would have risen above the far mountainous rim o’ the valley (about 8 of altitude) at 112° azimuth. From the vantage point we have taken, the sun would appear in a line directly between Temple 16 and Temple 11, but Temple 11 would have dominated the scene.
-In summary, although the revolution can only be made by the working classes themselves, it is also the case that “the revolutionary mass is forever nurturing in its bosom a minority of initiators, who precipitate and direct events” and “in a true social revolution the supporters of worker anarchism alone will account for that minority.”[[#114TheGroupofRussianAnarch|114]] Once the working classes “have defeated capitalist society, a new era in their history will be ushered in, an era when all social and political functions are transferred to the hands of workers and peasants who will set about the creation of the new life. At that point the anarchist organizations and, with them, the General Union, will lose all their significance and they should, in our view, gradually melt away into the productive organizations of the workers and peasants,” rather than subjecting workers to their rule.[[#115TheGroupofRussianAnarch|115]]
+[529] The identification of Temple 22a is the result of brilliant work by Barbara Fash (1989 and B. Fash et al. n.d.). In working with the sculpture excavated in the fallen debris around Temple 22a, Fash associated the pop, “mat,” signs that were built into the entablatures of all four sides of the building with the ethnohistorical term for “council houses” documented in post-Conquest sources. Known as Popol Nah, these buildings were specifically designed for meetings of community councils. Fash points out that Temple 22a is the only major public building in the Acropolis that has a large front patio attached to the building. Since it provides more floor space than the interior, she suggests that the major lords of the Copán kingdom came here to counsel with the king in meetings that must have resembled the conciliar assemblage of lords that we have seen on Piedras Negras Lintel 3 (see Fig. 7.21).
+<br>
+<br>In the summer of 1989, she found even more remarkable evidence by asking Tom and Carolyn Jones to work with the fragments of huge glyphs that had been found around Temple 22a in recent excavations. They managed to reassemble enough of these glyphs to identify them as a series of locations. Later work by Fash confirmed the likelihood that beautifully carved figures sat in niches above these locations. Given the combination of richly dressed figures with a toponymic, it seems likely that the figures simply read “ahau of that location.” The Popol Nah then may have been graced not only by mat signs marking its function as a council house, but with representations of the ahauob who ruled subdivisions of the kingdoms (or principal locations within it) for the kings. It is not unlike a modern meeting of state governors who come to counsel the president.
+<br>
+<br>The dating of Temple 22a is more complicated. Barbara Fash and David Stuart managed to put together a series of glyphs that also went around the building above the mat signs. They are clearly day signs reading 9 Ahau, which should in this context and without any additional calendric information refer to an important period-ending date. The only 9 Ahau that falls on a hotun (5-tun) ending within the time that is archaeologi- cally and stylistically feasible is 9.15.15.0.0 9 Ahau 18 Xul (June 4, 746). This falls shortly before Smoke-Monkey’s death, so that the Popol Nah may be the only surviving construction from his reign. The sculptural style and the figures deliberately emulate Temple 22, the magnificent temple built by 18-Rabbit, but Smoke-Monkey seems to have elevated conciliar rule to new status at Copan by placing this building in such a prominent place. Perhaps he found such a change in the long-standing practice of governance to be prudent after 18-Rabbit’s ignominious end.
-Second, in advocating an executive committee within the specific anarchist organization they were not proposing the formation of “a Party Central Committee . . . that issues orders, makes laws and commands.”[[#116TheGroupofRussianAnarch|116]] The authors of the'' Platform'' not only thought that an executive committee was consistent with anarchism, but that “such an organ exists in many anarchist and anarchist-syndicalist organizations.”[[#117TheGroupofRussianAnarch|117]] What the'' Platform'' called an “Executive Committee” had no coercive powers. It was merely “a body ''performing functions of a general nature in the Union''” that would not restrict the activity of groups within the organization and instead only “steer their activity” by providing “ideological or organizational assistance,” such as advising a group on the current “tactical or organizational line adopted by the Union on a variety of matters.”[[#118TheGroupofRussianAnarch|118]]
+[530] This oddly shaped altar-bench was found in the rear chamber of Temple 22a during the 1988 field season. Four important dates are featured in its chronology. These include 9.18.5.0.0 4 Ahau 13 Ceh (September 15, 795, a day recorded with Yahau-Chan- Ah-Bac here and on Altar U); 9.17.9.2.12 3 Eb 0 Pop (January 29, 780, the date Yax- Kamlay was seated); 9.17.10.0.0 (December 2, 789, an important period ending and anchor for the chronology); and 9.17.12.5.17 4 Caban 10 Zip (March 19, 783, the first katun anniversary of Yax-Pac’s own accession). All three major actors, Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac, Yax-Kamlay, and Yax-Pac are mentioned. It is interesting that the undated Stela 29 (Altar O’ under Morley’s designations), which is almost exactly the same size and style as this altar, also mentions Yax-Kamlay and Yax-Pac. It was found in the East Court and may originally have been paired with the Temple 22a stone (Scheie et al. 1989). W. Fash (personal communication, 1989) believes the wear pattern, the position, and the shape of the stone suggest it was part of a seat, perhaps the backrest.
-If a group within the specific anarchist organization decided to adopt its own tactical approach then one of three outcomes would occur: the minority would agree to follow the majority position within the organization because it is not an issue of supreme importance; the minority and majority position would coexist if feasible; or, the minority would leave the organization to form their own group. Crucially, which of these outcomes transpired “will be resolved, not by the Executive Committee which, let us repeat, is to be merely an executive organ of the Union, but by the entire Union as a body: by a Union Conference or Congress.”[[#119TheGroupofRussianAnarch|119]]
+[531] The use of large zoomorphic altars at Copan was initiated by 18-Rabbit, but these altars were usually associated with stelae. Other altars, usually all glyphic, had been known since Smoke-Imix-God K’s reign, but those rarely combined inscriptions and figures. The first experiment utilizing this combined format was Yax-Pac’s Altar Q, but Altars U and T represent innovative experiments in both style and size. Since Quirigua rulers were experimenting with large boulder sculpture during the same period, Copan’s abandonment of the stela format may signify synergy between both the artists and rulers of the two sites.
-Third, the idea of collective responsibility did not entail the view that the members of the organization would have to follow the orders of an executive committee. Arshinov explained in his response to Malatesta that the members of the organization would be united under a common program that they all supported and which, in so far as they were members, was binding upon them. Given this,
+[532] William Fash (personal communication, 1989) informs us that bone, jade, and alabaster fragments were found inside the tomb, so it had definitely been occupied. Who occupied it, we don’t know. The stela commemorating Yax-Pac’s death was set in the corner formed by the west wall of the substructure and the wall that formed an entry gate to the East Court. It was juxtaposed to Temple 18 in a way that would be expected if Yax-Pac was buried there twenty years after the dates inscribed on the building. The tomb was constructed so that it could be entered after the building of the temple was completed. However, without inscriptions to identify the occupant, his identity will remain a matter of speculation.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the practical activity of a member of the organization is naturally in complete harmony with the overall activity, and conversely the activity of the organization as a whole could not be at odds with the conscience and activity of each member, assuming he has accepted the program fundamental to this organization. It is this which characterizes the principle of collective responsibility: the Union as a body is answerable for the activity of each member, in the knowledge that he could only carry out his political and revolutionary work in the political spirit of the Union. Likewise, each member is fully answerable for the Union as a whole, since its activity could not be at odds with what has been determined by the whole membership.[[#120ArshinovTheOldandNew|120]]</div>
+[533] While it is true that kings are shown holding weapons on the Temple 26 stairs, there they are sitting on thrones in the passive mode. They are not actively going to or returning from battle.
-From Arshinov’s response, it is clear that Malatesta’s critique was based on a misunderstanding of what the authors of the'' Platform'' meant by collective responsibility. Malatesta himself realized that this was potentially the case. He wrote in a December 1929 letter to Makhno that,
+[534] Two other monuments can be dated to the twelve years between the end of Katun 18 and the king’s anniversary. Altar R, which was found on the platform in front of Temple 18, commemorates Yax-Pac’s accession and another event which took place on 9.18.2.8.0 7 Ahau 3 Zip (March 9, 793). The other monument, Altar F’, was found behind Structure 32 (Morley 1920:373) in a residential compound just south of the Acropolis (Fig. 8:11). This square altar has binding ribbons engraved around its perimeter and a text of sixteen glyphic blocks. It is a difficult text, which records the accession of yet another lineage head to an office which we do not yet understand (Scheie 1988a). All we can say about this office is that it was not the office of ahau. The accession took place on 9.17.4.1.11 2 Chuen 4 Pop (775 February 3, 775) and its twenty-fourth tun anniversary on 9.18.8.1.11 10 Chuen 9 Mac (September 30, 798). The text records that the anniversary ritual occurred in the company of Yax-Pac, who was in his second katun of reign.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">I accept and support the view that anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause; and respect the agreements that have been made—except when wishing sincerely to leave the association. . . . I maintain that those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association. Perhaps, speaking of collective responsibility, you mean precisely that accord and solidarity that must exist among the members of an association. And if that is so, your expression amounts, in my view, to an incorrect use of language, but basically it would only be an unimportant question of wording and agreement would soon be reached.[[#121MalatestaAnarchistRevolu1|121]]</div>
+[535] We have already discussed a royal visit from Bird-Jaguar to Piedras Negras, but in general, the kings preferred to send ahauob as their representatives. See Scheie and Mathews (n.d.) for a discussion of these visits and other patterns of interaction between Classic period kingdoms.
-Malatesta further clarified his views on the topic in a July 1930 letter he wrote to a platformist group, based in the Montmartre district of Paris. Although he continued to reject the phrase “collective responsibility” in favor of “moral responsibility,” he wrote “I find myself more or less in agreement with their way of conceiving the anarchist organization (being very far from the authoritarian spirit which the ‘Platform’ seemed to reveal) and I confirm my belief that behind the linguistic differences really lie identical positions.”[[#122ErricoMalatestaOnColle|122]] Malatesta was, nonetheless, not a platformist since he thought that specific anarchist organizations should have a slightly broader program, and rejected the position that congress resolutions passed by majority vote should be binding on every group within a specific anarchist organization, rather than only those groups who voted in favor of them.
+[536] See Baudez and Dowd (1983:491–493) for the analysis of the iconography and inscriptions in Temple 18. Just below that building, the latest date associated with Yax-Pac was on Stela 11. Riese argues that the opening date in that text, which is written as 6, 7, or 8 Ahau, must be later than 9.18.0.0.0 based on the “3-katun ahau ’ title in Yax-Pac’s name. Since naked ahau dates are usually associated with period endings, the following Long Count positions are possible:
+<br>
+<br>9.16.15.0.0 7 Ahau 18 Pop
+<br>9.17.5.0.0 6 Ahau 13 Kayab
+<br>9.19.10.0.0 8 Ahau 8 Xul
+<br>
+<br>Since Yax-Pac’s numbered katun titles refer to katuns of reign, rather than to katuns of life as at most other sites (Scheie 1989b), they cannot be used to estimate his age. However, they do confirm the placement of the Stela 11 date. He was a 1-katun ahau between 9.16.12.5.17 and 9.17.12.5.17; a 2-katun ahau between 9.17.12.5.17 and 9.18.12.5.17; and, a 3-katun ahau between 9.18.12.5.17 and 9.19.12.5.17. Since the first dates fall before his accession, and the second within his second katun of reign, only the third date, 9.19.10.0.0, is a possibility.
-<u>The immediate practical effect of the Platform appears to have been somewhat limited. The </u>Dielo Truda group organized a number of discussion meetings on the'' Platform'' that were attended by militants from around the world, including France, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, and China. This culminated in an attempt to form an Anarchist International at a meeting held in a Parisian cinema on March 20, 1927.[[#123SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|123]] During the meeting, Makhno proposed a five-point program to be discussed: “(1) recognition of the class struggle as the most important factor of the anarchist system; (2) recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement; (3) recognition of syndicalism as one of the principal methods of anarcho-communist struggle; (4) the necessity of a ‘General Union of Anarchists’ based on ideological and tactical unity and collective responsibility; (5) the necessity of a positive program to realize the social revolution.”[[#124QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|124]]
+[537] Stuart (1984, 1988c) has made a direct connection between the imagery of Vision Serpents and the Double-headed Serpent Bar.
-These five points were then pedantically rephrased by the attending delegates in a manner that changed their language but not their ultimate meaning. The wording agreed upon was: # <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of the struggle of all oppressed and exploited against state and capitalist authority as the most important factor of the anarchist system; </div>
+[538] On the sarcophagus of Palenque, the king Pacal falls into Xibalba with the same smoking image in his forehead as a sign of his transformation in death (Scheie 1976.17). Several people have noted the same smoking shapes with the figures on Altar L, but in that scene, the devices penetrate the turban headdresses. On the Palenque sarcophagus and Stela 11, the celts penetrate the flesh of the head itself.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of the labor and union struggle as one of the most important means of anarchist revolutionary action; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">necessity in each country of as general as possible a Union of Anarchists who have the same goals and tactics, as well as collective responsibility; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">necessity of a positive program of action for the anarchists in the social revolution.[[#125QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|125]] </div>
+[539] There is also a possibility that the text refers to a branch of the lineage deriving from 18-Rabbit-Scrpent, a name also recorded on Stela 6. The glyph between this 18- Rabbit’s name and Yax-Kuk-Mo’ is u loch, a term for “fork (as of a tree)” in Yucatec and “to fold or bend” in Chorti. We are presuming, for the present, that 18-Rabbit-Serpent is the same person as 18-Rabbit-God K, for this former name appears on Stela 6, dated just eight years before 18-Rabbit-God K’s accession. David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) has expressed doubts, however, that the two 18-Rabbits are the same person, and that possibility must remain open. In late 1989, another alternative occurred to us—that the I8-Rabbit-Serpcnt name phrase refers to the special Tlaloc-war Vision Serpent on the front of Stela 6 and presumably also on Stela 11. In this interpretation, the “fish-in-hand” verb in the Stela 6 text refers to the appearance of this particular Vision Serpent, while u loch, the phrase on Stela 11, also means “to hold something crosswise in the arms”—exactly the position of the Vision Serpent on both stelae.
+[540] Grube and Scheie (1987a) identified this ruler and read his name glyph as U-Cit- Tok’, “the patron of flint.” The Calendar Round of his accession, 3 Chicchan 3 Uo, can fit into the dynastic sequence at Copan only at this Long Count position.
-Before the delegates could move on to discuss these points, the French police broke into the meeting and arrested everybody in attendance. The commission elected to form the Anarchist International, whose members were Makhno (Ukrainian), Ranko (Polish), and Chen (Chinese), issued a letter on April 1 that declared the existence of an International Libertarian Communist Federation and, for reasons that are unclear, expressed the original five-point program for discussion that had been formulated by Makhno, rather than the version that delegates had revised. This contributed toward delegates from other anarchist groups, including the Italian anarchists who were members of the Italian Anarchist Union, deciding to disassociate from the project.[[#126SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|126]] Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli explained in their letter that the members of the Pensiero e Volontà group had decided not to join because,
+[541] The office into which U-Cit-Tok was seated does not appear in the text, but this may be the result of a historical accident. If we assume that the original intention was to carve all four sides of the monument, as is the case with most other altars at Copan, then the inscription would probably have continued onto one of the other sides. Since the carving was never finished, the text ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">there exists among you a spirit which is quite distant from that which underlies our way of conceiving an international anarchist organization, that is one which is open to the greatest number of individuals, groups and federations who agree with the principles of struggle organized in an anarchist way against capitalism and the State, on a permanent national and international basis, but all this without any ideological or tactical exclusivism and without any formalism that could impede the autonomy or freedom of the individuals in the groups or of the groups themselves in the various national and international unions.[[#127LuigiFabbriCamilloBerne|127]]</div>
+[542] Morley (1920:289) first suggested that Altar L is in an unfinished state, a conclusion Barbara Fash (personal communication, 1987) also made when she drew the altar. She was the individual who brought this to our attention.
-The first specific, anarchist organization to express support for platformism was the Federation of Anarcho-Communist Groups of the United States and Canada, which was composed of workers from the Russian empire and financially supported the publication of ''Dielo Truda''.[[#128LipotkinRussianAnarchist|128]] The federation declared in January 1927 that “the Conference agrees with the Organizational Platform” and views its ideas as “timely and desirable.”[[#129QuotedinLipotkinRussian|129]] Other Russian anarchists living in North America rejected the ideas of the Platform, and formed the Federation of Russian Workers’ Organizations of the United States and Canada in 1927. After several years of dialogue and negotiations, the two rival federations united into a single federation in July 1939.[[#130LipotkinRussianAnarchist|130]]
+[543] Both William Fash and Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1986–1987) have described this incident to us.
-The second specific anarchist organization to adopt platformism was the French Anarchist Communist Union. At its autumn 1927 congress in Paris, a majority of delegates voted to rename the organization the Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Union. This was accompanied by a number of dramatic changes to how the organization functioned. The results of majority votes were now binding on all individual members; positions adopted at annual congresses could not be subject to criticisms within the pages of the Union’s official paper, ''Le Libertaire'', except during a three-month period immediately prior to the next congress; membership was only possible via a group, meaning isolated individuals could no longer join; and being a member involved paying a subscription fee and receiving a membership card. The 1927 congress resulted in a split within the organization. Proponents of synthesist anarchism left to form the previously mentioned AFA. These changes to the Anarchist Union did not last long. The platformist position was soon defeated at the 1930 Paris Congress where, despite a speech by Makhno, the synthesist delegates won the vote by fourteen to seven, regained control of the organization, and abandoned the above policies. In response, the platformists left and formed the Libertarian Communist Federation in 1934, only to rejoin the Anarchist Union two years later in 1936.[[#131BerryFrenchAnarchistMov|131]]
+[544] This estimate comes from Rebecca Storey (personal communication, 1987), the physical anthropologist who is investigating the skeletal remains from the burials of Copan.
-Despite the various negative interpretations of the Platform, its commitments were not a break with anarchism. They were instead one of many ways in which anarchists sought to build upon and update the kind of specific anarchist organization that Bakunin had advocated, decades previously. This remains true even though other anarchists thought their proposals were misguided. Although proponents of organizational dualism disagreed about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and make decisions, they nonetheless agreed on the need to unite committed revolutionaries under a common program in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and to push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engagement in actions that provided an example to others.
+; 9. Kingdom and Empire at Chichén Itzá
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#110|1]]. Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 80–81; Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''254–58, 272.</div>
+[545] The Great Collapse of the ninth century is one of the major social disasters of Precolumbian history (see Culbert 1973). E. W. Andrews IV (1965; 1973) underscored the fact that the northern lowland states of the ninth and tenth centuries were enjoying prosperity and expansion in the wake of the Great Collapse of the southern lowland kingdoms. Recent discussion and analysis of the relative destinies of northern and southern lowland Maya (Sabloffand E. W. Andrews V 1986) points to a significant overlap in timing between the fall of the southern kingdoms, the rise of the northern kingdoms, and ultimately, the rise of the conquest state of Chichén Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#210|2]]. Carl Levy, ''Gramsci and the Anarchists ''(Oxford: Berg, 1999), 119–25; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 186–87, 196.</div>
+[546] The most famous architectural style of the northern lowlands is the exquisite Puuc veneer stone masonry (Pollock 1980), regarded by many scholars as the epitome of Maya engineering and masonry skill. This style emerges in the Late Classic and persists through the Early Postclassic period (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986). The north central peninsular region also displays a style called Rio Bec (Potter 1977); and between the central peninsular Rio Bec sites and the concentration of Puuc-style cities in the hills to the north and west, there are communities with architecture of another, related style called Chenes (Pollock 1970). The northern tradition includes the temple-pyramid complex of the southern kingdoms, but there is also an emphasis on constructing many-roomed structures atop large solid pyramids. This change in emphasis may reflect a particular focus upon activities and events involving assemblies of leaders as opposed to the cultic focus upon rulers expressed in temple pyramids (Freidel 1986a) seen in the Late Classic southern lowlands.
-[[#310|3]]. Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''2,'' ''156–57.
+[547] The Maya of the time of the Conquest were still literate in their own system of writing. The most famous aboriginal treatises are the Books of Chilam Balam (Edmonson 1982, 1986), which are principally records of the katuns and their prophecies. These books are named after the last great Maya prophet: chilam. “interpreter [of the gods],” and balam. “jaguar,” which was probably his family name. Roys (1967:3 and 182–187) suggested that Chilam Balam lived during the last decades of the fifteen century or perhaps during the first part of the sixteenth century and that his lasting fame came from his foretelling the appearance of strangers from the east who would establish a new religion. Roys (1967:3) says, “The prompt fulfilment of this prediction so enhanced his reputation as a seer that in later times he was considered the authority for many other prophecies which had been uttered long before his time. Inasmuch as prophecies were the most prominent feature of many of the older books of this sort, it was natural to name them after the famous sooth sayer.”
+<br>
+<br>The Books of Chilam Balam were recorded in the Yucatec Maya language, but written in Spanish script. The “prophecies” offered do have components that resemble the Western idea of fortune-telling, but the foretelling is based on detailed accounts of the major historical events and political struggles between competing communities and families from the late Precolumbian through the Colonial periods. Dennis Puleston (1979) argued that the fatalistic beliefs of the Maya and their acceptance of the essential cyclicality of time transformed such records of the past into rigid predictions of the future. We have tried to show in previous chapters that the Maya implementation of history as a guide to the future was subtle and politically imaginative. Bricker (n.d.) provides an elegant proof that some passages in the Books of Chilam Balam are direct transliterations of the glyphic originals. Archaeologists have been wrestling with these fragmentary historical accounts from the vantage of the record from excavation and survey for many years (Tozzer 1957; Pollock, Roys, Proskouriakoff, and Smith 1962; Ball 1974a; Robles and A. Andrews 1986; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#410|4]]. E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 308–18; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 29–34, 38–40, 48–56; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 16–22; Arthur Lehning, “Bakunin’s Conceptions of Revolutionary Organizations and Their Role: A Study of His ‘Secret Societies,’” in ''Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr'', ed. Chimen Abramsky (London: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 57, 61–63. Bakunin had previously attempted to establish a secret society of revolutionaries in 1848, which was two decades before he became an anarchist, but this attempt was unsuccessful and never went past the planning stages. See Carr, ''Bakunin'','' ''181–86.</div>
+[548] As noted in Chapter 1, evidence from linguistic reconstructions and particular spellings in the Classic inscriptions indicate that Yucatec was spoken by the peoples occupying the northern and eastern sections of the Yucatán Peninsula. This zone included at least the modern regions of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Belize, and the eastern third of the Petén. Northern and southern lowlands were linked in the Preclassic period by means of shared ceramic styles and by trade materials such as greenstone and chert brought through the southern lowlands or from them. In return, the northern lowland peoples may have traded sea salt (Freidel 1978; E. W. Andrews V 1981) from beds along their northern and western coasts. The northern lowland Maya participated in the early establishment of the institution of kingship, as seen in the famous bas-relief carved into the mouth of the cave of Loltún, which depicts a striding ahau wearing the Jester God diadem and the severed jaguar head with triple plaques on his girdle (Freidel and A. Andrews n.d.). Stylistically, this image dates to the Late Preclassic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#510|5]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''2–12,'' ''47–65, 71–78, 153–58, 243–62, 318–19, 350–51, 354–55; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''183.</div>
+[549] Our story of Chichón Itzá is based on less secure data than the stories we have offered about the southern kings. The northern Maya cities, with the notable exception of Dzibilchaltún on the northwestern plain, have not enjoyed the extensive and systematic investigations aimed at cultural interpretation that have been carried out at several of the southern cities we have written about. At Dzibilchaltún, E. Wyllys Andrews IV conducted long-term and systematic research (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980). The settlement-pattern work at this site (Kurjack 1974) first alerted Maya scholars to the enormous size of some of these cities, a fact which took a long time to be accepted. Work of this quality and detail is only now in progress at sites like Cobá, Isla Cerritos, Sayil, Ek Balam, and Yaxuná.
+<br>
+<br>Furthermore, in spite of the efforts of many epigraphers over more than sixty years, the hieroglyphic texts of the north are not as well understood as those of the south, partly because they have a higher percentage of phonetic signs and their calligraphy is far more difficult to read. The first date to be deciphered in the Chichen inscriptions was the Initial Series date 10.2.9.1.9 9 Muluc 7 Zac (Morley 1915). During the following two decades, the Carnegie Institution of Washington conducted the excavations that uncovered the remainder of the presently known hieroglyphic monuments of the Chichón Itzá corpus (Martin 1928; Morley 1925, 1926, 1927, 1935; Ricketson 1925; Ruppert 1935). Hermann Beyer’s (1937) structural analysis laid the foundation for later epigraphic research on this body of texts, while Thompson (1937) was the first to explain the tun-ahau system of dating used at Chichón Itzá. Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) raised difficult questions about the presence of Maya inscriptions on “Toltec” architecture at the site.
+<br>
+<br>David Kelley (1968; 1976; 1982) has been working with the texts of Chichón Itzá and Uxmal for many years, and he must be credited with the identification of several key relationship terms in the complex and partially understood network of family ties among nobles of the Chichón community. His structural analyses and interpretations have pushed far beyond the work of previous researchers. He also identified the inscriptional name, Kakupacal (Kelley 1968), an Itzá warrior mentioned in the Books of Chilam Balam, as an ancient ruler of Chichón Itzá. His important work inspired Michel Davoust (1977, 1980), who vigorously pursued the hypothesis that Chichón Itzá was ruled by a dynasty whose names are preserved in the texts.
+<br>
+<br>James Fox (1984a, 1984b, n.d.) has made several major contributions to the unraveling of the Chichón Itzá texts; most notably, he correctly identified the Emblem Glyph of this capital. Jeff Kowalski (1985a, 1985b, 1989; Kowalski and Krochock, n.d.) has made substantial headway in the analysis of texts from Uxmal and other Terminal Classic communities of the north, including Chichón Itzá. Ian Graham, master of the Corpus of Hieroglyphic Writing Project at Harvard University, has generously allowed scholars to work with his drawings of northern lowland texts. David Stuart has contributed fundamentally to the interpretation of the political organization of Chichón Itzá, both in his publications (Stuart 1988a; Grube and Stuart 1987) and in his generous sharing of work in progress through personal communications. Stuart’s decipherment of the sibling relationship at Chichón is the cornerstone of an epigraphic interpretation of conciliar rule there.
+<br>
+<br>Finally, we draw heavily upon the work in progress of Ruth Krochock (1988) whose master’s thesis on the lintels of the Temple of the Four Lintels is a tour de force of method. It is a programmatic breakthrough in the interpretation of the political rhetoric of Chichón Itzá as focused upon the simultaneous participation of contemporary leaders in dedication rituals. Our attempts to push beyond Krochock’s interpretation are based upon intensive consultation with her and with Richard Johnson, Marisela Ayala, and Constance Cortez at the 1988 Advanced Seminar in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Austin and with Ruth, Jeff Kowalski, John Carlson, and others at the 1989 workshop. They are further based upon continued correspondence with Ruth Krochock. We appreciate her helpful advice and words of sensible caution. We also note that Virginia Miller (1989) has independently made many of the same associations between the Tlaloc-warrior of Classic period iconography and the Toltec warriors of Chichón Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#610|6]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 92.</div>
+[550] The actual extent of Chichón Itzá has never been documented, since only the central core of the city has been mapped. The description of the city’s limits we use here is an estimate attributed to Peter Schmidt by Fernando Robles and Anthony Andrews (1986). In the Atlas oj ) ucatán, Silvia Garza T. and Edward Kurjack provide an estimate of thirty square kilometers (Garza T. and Kurjack 1980).
+<br>
+<br>The traditional interpretation of the history of Chichen Itzá (Tozzer 1957) holds that the city was occupied several times by different groups of people, generally moving from a Maya “old” Chichen to a Toltec Mexican “new” Chichen represented in the great northern center of the city. We support the view, as recently argued by Charles Lincoln (1986), that Chichón Itzá was a single city continuously occupied through its history. As Lincoln points out, the notion of an early Maya Chichón makes little sense, for it would leave the city without a discernible spatial center. The Maya were quite flexible in their city planning, but no Maya capital lacks an easily identified center.
+<br>
+<br>Viewed as a single city, Chichón Itzá is strikingly diverse and cosmopolitan in its public and elite architecture, registering styles from both Maya country and from México. Traditionally, Chichón Itzá’s Mexican cultural expression has been attributed to a conquest of the northern lowlands by Toltec Mexicans operating out of their capital in Tula Hidalgo, México (see Diehl 1981 on Tula). George Kubler (1975) argued that Tula displays only a fraction of the political program and architectural design found at Chichón Itzá, and it is more likely that Chichón was the dominant community in the acknowledged relationship with Tula. To be sure, Maya groups collaborated with Gulf Coast and Mexican peoples, probably merchant-warrior brotherhoods of a kind that later facilitated the economy of the Aztec Empire; but the Maya civilization was the fundamental source of ideas and imagery in this new government. We believe that Kubler is correct and that Chichón Itzá developed into a truly Mesoamcrican capital, like Teotihuacán before it. This was perhaps the only time in Maya history that their culture stood center stage in the Mesoamerican world. Because we regard the great period of Chichón Itzá to be Mesoamerican and Maya, and not the product of a Toltec invasion, we use the traditional attribution of “Toltec” Chichón Itzá in quotations.
-[[#710|7]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''92.
+[551] We will generally avoid as much as possible any references to the histories and chronicles, collectively termed the Chilam Balams, passed down to the time of the Europeans. No doubt there is significant historical information in these texts, but despite the brilliant efforts of Joseph Ball (1974a; 1986) and other scholars who worked before the Chichón texts had been even partially deciphered, it will take much future work to coordinate, in any useful way, the evidence of archaeology and epigraphy with that of ethnohistory. These histories are fraught with metaphorical allusions and political manipulations. Some essential assertions of the chronicles are confirmed by archaeology, principally the fact that foreigners entered the northern lowlands and, in alliance with native nobility, established new states such as Chichón Itzá. Some key figures in the historical narratives can also be found in the ancient texts, figures such as Kakupacal of Chichón Itzá (Kelley 1968). Eventually, there will be an historical framework that accounts for all of these forms of evidence.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#810|8]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''173–74. For the evidence that this program was a draft, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''285, 317–19.</div>
+[552] The timing of the rise of the Puuc cities relative to the southern kingdoms is still a matter of controversy. Most specialists feel comfortable in dating the beginning of the Puuc florescence at about 800 A.D. or a half century earlier (Robles and A. Andrews, 1986:77). This date would establish contemporaneity of at least half a century between the kings of the Puuc and those of the south.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#910|9]]. Quoted in Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''160.</div>
+[553] Jeff K. Kowalski (1985a; 1985b; 1987) in his study of Uxmal has carried out the most extensive investigation of the political organization of the Puuc cities as revealed in iconography and epigraphy.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1010|10]]. Quoted in Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''160.</div>
+[554] These terms were popularized by J.E.S. Thompson (1970), who proposed that these were barbarian “Mexicanized Maya” who, through energetic trade, warfare, and diplomacy, penetrated the lowlands from their homeland in the swampy river country bordering the Maya domains on the west and established a new hegemony in the period of the Great Collapse. While the details are controversial, most scholars presently adhere to the general notion of a Putún or Chontai movement into the lowlands in Terminal Classic times (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986).
+<br>
+<br>At some point in their peregrinations, the Itzá, often regarded as one group of Putún Maya, established cities along the western coast of the Yucatán peninsula, at Chanpotón— Chan Putún—and elsewhere in Campeche. Edmonson (1986), in his translations of the Chilam Balam books, would place this Itzá settlement prior to their incursions into the center of the peninsula to establish Chichón Itzá. The archaeology of this western coastal region is intriguing, but poorly known. On the one hand, there is the city of Xcalumkin (Pollock 1980) with its veneer mosaic architecture; Late Classic hieroglyphic dates on texts; and use of the ahau-cahal relationship, an innovation which originated in the Western Rivers district of the south at kingdoms such as Yaxchilán. On the other hand, there is Chunchucmil, situated to the north and very close to the rich salt beds of the western coast (Vlchek, Garza, and Kurjack 1978; Kurjack and Garza 1981). This Classic period city covers some six or more square kilometers and has densely packed house lots, temples, and pyramids. Until we have better archaeological control over this region, we will be required to treat the garbled history of its occupation with great caution.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1110|11]]. Michael Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 17, 2014, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain-1872. Bakunin’s ''Œuvres complètes'' incorrectly dates the letter to June. For the correct date of writing, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 244, 422. For other examples of Bakunin making this argument, see Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''93; Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''215.</div>
+[555] Robles and A. Andrews’s (1986) review of the evidence for the settlement size and organization of Coba. See also Folan, Kintz, and Fletcher (1983) and Folan and Stuart (1977) for discussion of the settlement patterns at Coba.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1210|12]]. Carr, ''Bakunin'', 189–224, 240.</div>
+[556] Stone roads, sacbe, were built by Maya from the Preclassic period onward. Although these roads no doubt could have served prosaic functions, such as commerce and rapid mobilization of troops, all of our descriptions from observers after the Conquest (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) show that such roads functioned principally as pathways for ceremonial processions and pilgrimages among related nobilities. Such rituals were, in all the cases we have come across, political statements of obligation and responsibility. Kurjack and E. W. Andrews V (1976) establish the archaeological case for such an interpretation of settlement hierarchy linked by intersite roads. The roadways of Cobá have been extensively reported on by Antonio Benavides C. (1981).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#139|13]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''210. This letter to Alerini has been misattributed within Bakunin’s ''Œuvres complètes'' as being part of Bakunin’s May 21, 1872, draft letter to Tomás González Morago. This error is repeated in Zurbrugg’s edition of Bakunin. See Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''259–61,'' ''281, 512–13n55.</div>
+[557] The original homeland of the Itzá is a matter of continuing dispute. They may have been speakers of a Maya language, probably Chontai, and the best guess places their original communities in the Chontalpa, a stretch of flat, swampy land to the east of the mighty Usumacinta and north of the Peten. The garbled histories of the Chilam Balam books give some reason to suspect that the Itzá established sizable communities along the western coast of the peninsula (perhaps even some of the Puuc-style communities on this coast were Itzá) before making their bid for hegemony in Yucatán by controlling the coastlands. The Maya of the Tabasco-Campeche coastlands were multilingual at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Many of them spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and they were astute, opportunistic merchants and warriors (Thompson 1970). Archaeological survey of the western and northern coasts by Anthony Andrews (1978) confirms the presence of coastal enclaves with pottery diagnostic of the Sotuta Ceramic Sphere associated with Chichén Itzá and the Itzá incursions. Certainly, the people who established Chichón Itzá as a great capital had adopted many ideas of governance from Mexico (Wren n.d.). Hence it is likely that they had Mexican allies in their adventures on the peninsula.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#149|14]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 210, 213.</div>
+[558] The pottery associated with Chichén Itzá, and its “Itzá” occupation, is called Sotuta Sphere. This survey work along the coast has been carried out primarily by Anthony Andrews (1978). Much of what follows is based upon the syntheses of Andrews and Fernando Robles (A. Andrews and Robles 1985; Robles and A. Andrews 1986). The wide range of Mexican sources of obsidian traded by the Itzá is documented at Isla Cerritos (A. Andrews, Asaro, and Cervera R. n.d.).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#159|15]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 210.</div>
+[559] This important site is undergoing long-term investigation by Anthony Andrews and Fernando Robles and their colleagues.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#169|16]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''211–15. For the programs of the Alliance, see Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''173–75.</div>
+[560] Izamal boasts one of the largest pyramids in the northern lowlands. Surface remains of monumental stucco masks which decorated the pyramid, along with the cutstone monolithic-block facading on its terraces, indicate that its major period of construction dates to the Early Classic, long before the Terminal Classic incursions of the Itzá (Lincoln 1980). In the absence of further field investigation, we cannot say how substantial the community may have been at the time of the incursion. Clearly, however, the great pyramid on this otherwise flat plain constituted a famous geographic marker which the Itzá could refurbish as a capital with little additional labor investment.
+<br>
+<br>David Stuart (personal communication, 1988) has alerted us to the fact that ethnohis- torical documents (Lizana 1892: Chapter 2) describe Izamal as the capital of a lord named Hun-Pik-Tok, warrior captain of an army of “8.000 flints.” He also identified the same name, Hun-Pik-Tok, in the inscription of the Casa Colorada and on the lintel from Halakal. Hence there is both ethnohistorical and epigraphic evidence to support the hypothesis that Izamal was an established capital of the Itzá at the time of the temple dedications at Chichén Itzá. These dedications occurred during Katun 2 of the tenth baktun, the likely time of Chichén Itzá’s founding as the principal city of the Itzá. Hun-Pik-Tok and Kakupacal, a famous lord of Chichén Itzá mentioned several times in these dedication events throughout that city, are both mentioned on the Casa Colorada, so we can surmise they were contemporaries.
+<br>
+<br>Hun-Pik-Tok reappears on a monument from Halakal, a small satellite community of Chichén Itzá to the east of that city. Most interesting is the fact that Hun-Pik-Tok and another lord named on a lintel from the Akab Tzib from Chichén Itzá are both named as vassal lords of Jawbone-Fan, who was a K’ul Cocom (Grube and Stuart 1987:8–10).
+<br>
+<br>Archaeologically, Lincoln (1986) has noted the presence of Sotuta ceramics at Izamal.
+<br>
+<br>It may well prove significant that both Chichén Itzá and Yaxuná, the frontier community of the Coba state, are both roughly halfway between Izamal and Cobá. This is the zone of struggle between the Itzá and the kings of Cobá. As we have seen in the case of the great wars between Caracol, Tikal, and Naranjo, struggle between hegemonic Maya states could focus on the border communities between them—in their case Yaxha and Ucanal, which sat roughly halfway between Tikal and Caracol.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#179|17]]. Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain.”</div>
+[561] Calculation of the size of southern lowland kingdoms is still a tricky business (see Chapter 1). Peter Mathews (1985a and 1985b) posits that emblem-bearing polities constituted the principal states which claimed territorial domain over the smaller communities ruled by second-and third-rank nobility. On this basis, and taking into account exceptional conquest events such as Tikal’s incorporation of Uaxactún, the largest southern lowland hegemonies were on the order of 2,500 square kilometers in size. Recently (April 1989), Arthur Demarest and Stephen Houston have suggested in oral reports that the kingdom of Dos Pilas may have encompassed 3,700 square kilometers. This remains to be confirmed though field investigation. Calculation of the size of the Cobá state at the time when the great causeway linking it to Yaxuná was built is based upon Robles and A. Andrews’s map (1986: Fig. 3:4) and the following premises. First, Cobá controlled the coastlands directly fronting the kingdom on the east, some 25 kilometers distant from the capital. This information is based upon study of the distribution of distinctive ceramics of the Cobá Western Cepech Sphere relative to the distribution of Chichén-related Sotuta Sphere ceramics along that coast. Chichén Itzá evidently skirted the coast in front of Cobá when it established communities on the Island of Cozumel (see Freidel and Sabloff 1984; A. Andrews and Robles 1985).
+<br>
+<br>Second, this estimate of kingdom size is calculated by allowing for a corridor of 25 kilometers surrounding the great causeway along its entire route. This figure provides us with a minimal support population for labor, sustenance, and defense during the construction. The timing of the construction of the causeway is equally tricky relative to the war between Chichén Itzá and Cobá. Robles (1980) places its construction at the beginning of the Terminal Classic period, about A.D. 800. We believe that the war between Cobá and Chichén Itzá was under way in earnest by the middle of the ninth century, for the spate of dedications defining Chichén Itzá’s first major temples occurs between A.D. 860 and 880. Present evidence does not allow final resolution of the two possibilities: Either Cobá built the causeway in response to the incursion of the Itzá, as we have postulated in this chapter, or, alternatively, they built the causeway to declare a hegemonic kingdom prior to the Itzá threat. The latter possibility opens the intriguing prospect that the Itzá were posing as “liberators” of the central north, appealing to peoples already subjugated by Cobá. This was a tactic used frequently by conquerors in the ancient world. Sargon of Akkad “liberated” Sumer from rival indigenous hegemonic states in Mesopotamia.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#189|18]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 249.</div>
+[562] The regalia of some lords of the Yaxuná polity shows a striking resemblance to that of lords in tribute procession at Chichén Itzá.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#199|19]]. For example, Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 3,'' The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 55–57, 93–96; Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 4,'' Critique of Other Socialisms'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 130, 144–47; Paul Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13, 46, 67; Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''263,'' ''271–72, 276–77, 282, 286–87, 306–7; James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 87</div>
+[563] Research at Dzibilchaltún (E. W. Andrews IV and E. W. Andrews V 1980) documents a dramatic decline and eventual cessation of public construction with the arrival of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the city. E. W. Andrews and E. W. Andrews (1980:274) place that arrival at about A.D. 1000, but since these diagnostic ceramics occur in above-floor deposits of earlier buildings, they warn that the A.D. 1000 date may be too late for the change. Our own scenario would place the collapse of Dzibilchaltún about 100 years earlier.
-[[#209|20]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180.
+[564] Recent excavations by the Centro Regional de Yucatán (of the Instituto Nacional Autónoma de México) show the presence of Sotuta Sphere ceramics in the main plaza areas of Uxmal (Tomas Gallareta N., personal communication, 1987).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#219|21]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''178–81.</div>
+[565] The interpretation of events at Yaxuná and, through the Yaxuná record, of Chichén Itzá’s wars with the Puuc cities and Cobá, is based upon ongoing research by Southern Methodist University, sponsored by the National Endowment lor the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and private donors (Freidel 1987).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#229|22]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 178. For information on Richard, see Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 159–61, 217–8; Carr, ''Bakunin'','' ''343–44, 349, 363, 414–15; Eckart, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''205.</div>
+[566] The Advanced Seminar on the Maya Postclassic at the School of American Research, Santa Fe (Sabloff and E. W. Andrews V 1986), concentrated attention on this problem. See especially the contribution by Charles Lincoln (1986).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#239|23]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180. For the two other occasions Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter, see ibid., 178, 181.</div>
+[567] Tatiana ProskouriakofF (1970) firmly pointed out the fact that “Toltec” art was found in direct association with Maya hieroglyphic texts and questioned the then popular interpretation that the people who dominated Chichén Itzá at the time of the creation of this art were illiterate foreigners. There is no reason to suppose that any rulers of the Maya before the European Conquest were illiterate, for all of the Maya kings used the calendrics predicated upon literacy as a political tool (Edmonson 1986). Further, the gold disks dredged from the sacred cenote, clearly pertaining to the late or ‘ Toltec” period as identified by the iconography, have glyphic inscriptions (S. K. Lothrop 1952). A goldhandled bone bloodletter from the cenote (Coggins and Shane 1984) also carries a glyphic inscription. The fact that these objects are made from gold (a medium ignored by or unknown to Classic period kings) identifies them as late. Finally, Linca Wren (n.d.) and Ruth Krochock (1988) have reported the discovery of a portable hemispherical sacrificial stone from Chichón Itzá that carries a glyphic inscription. This stone also depicts a duplicate of the decapitation scenes that decorate the playing-wall panels of the Great Ballcourt, a clearly late Chichón building.
+<br>
+<br>But the matter of the literacy of the audience of late Chichón Itzá, the city that built the final temples and courts of the great platform, is far from secure. As Chariot pointed out (Morris, Chariot, and Morris 1931), processional figures in the great assemblies of the northern center often have glyphlike emblems floating above their heads. For the most part, these are not identifiable as Maya glyphs. Some look like Mexican glyphs and others are indecipherable. Were these portrayed peoples truly illiterate, or were they simply complying with the current customs of Mesoamerican elite public display, in which literacy played no part? We can pose the question, but we cannot answer it yet.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#249|24]]. For an overview of Marx’s usage of the term, see Draper, ''The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin ''(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 11–35; Richard N. Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 1,'' Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850 ''(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 284–336.</div>
+[568] Ruth Krochock (n.d.) must be credited with the fundamental identification of the simultaneity of participants in dedication rituals at Chichón, with particular reference to the lintels in the Temple of the Four Lintels. The family relationships posited in the following discussion are predicated principally upon the syllabic identification ofyitah, the “sibling” relationship glyph linking protagonists into single generations (Stuart 1988a: Fig. 54g-i; personal communication, 1988), and upon “child of mother” and “mother of” relationships discussed by Krochock (1988).
-[[#259|25]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180.
+[569] The technical name for this building is Structure 3C1 in the nomenclature of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Ruppert 1952:34).
-[[#269|26]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''182.
+[570] This rather stunning insight was first presented in a graduate seminar on “Caching Rituals and Their Material Remains” held at the University of Texas at Austin, spring semester, 1989. Using the caches of the city as her clues and examining the archaeology of the High Priest’s Grave, Annabeth Headrick proposed that this temple and the seven- lobed cave under it are early in Chichen’s history and functioned as the prototype of later buildings to the north, such as the Castillo and the captive procession in front of the Temple of the Warriors.
+<br>
+<br>The inscription on one of the inner columns (Lincoln 1986:Fig. 5:1) of the temple accompanies the image of a captive rendered in the style of the Temple of the Warriors columns. The Long Count for the 2 Ahau 18 Mol Calendar Round has been interpreted as 10.8.10.11.0 because that date falls within a katun ending on 2 Ahau, the last glyph in the text. However, the 2 Ahau does not occur within the expected formula phrase for Yucatec-style dates. We think it may simply refer to the opening Calendar Round date and not Io the katun within which that date fell. In this alternative interpretation, the date of the column could as easily be 10.0.12.8.0 (July 3, 842) or 10.3.5.3.0 (June 7, 894). Furthermore, the earliest placement, 10.0.12.8.0 2 Ahau 18 Mol, has the virtue of making the date of the High Priest’s Grave the earliest known date at Chichón Itzá. Headrick associated the cave under this temple with Chicomoztoc, the origin cave of seven lobes famous from Aztec myth. The presence of this cave points to the High Priest’s Grave as an “origin” building in the cosmic landscape of Chichón Itzá, exactly as the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán marks it as an “origin” temple (Heyden 1981).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#279|27]]. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 554, 654–55.</div>
+[571] This new fire, called suhuy kak, “virgin fire,” was described by Landa in his Relación de Yucatan (Tozzcr 1941:153 155, 158) in association with a number of different ritual occasions, including the New Year ceremonies and the Festival of Kukulcan at Mani.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#289|28]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193. For Nechaev’s views and actions, see Ronald Seth, ''The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki'' (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966), 31–36; Philip Pomper, “Nechaev and Tsaricide: The Conspiracy within the Conspiracy,” ''The Russian Review ''33. no. 2'' ''(1974): 123–38.</div>
+[572] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes a persuasive case for the association of such sacrifice with the images on the Four Lintels. In the Chilam Balam books (Edmonson 1986), a great serpent deity at Chichón Itzá, named hapay can, “sucking snake,” is said to have demanded many nobles from other communities as sacrificial victims.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#299|29]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''182–83.</div>
+[573] James Fox (n.d.) recently identified this date as an important Jupiter date. In fact it is also a Saturn date, for Jupiter (253.81 + ) and Saturn (259.97 + ) had just begun to move after they had hung frozen against the star fields at their second stationary points for about forty days. This is the same hierophany recorded at Palenque on the 2 Cib 14 Mol house dedication and on Lady Xoc’s bloodletting (Lintel 24) at Yaxchilán. David Stuart (personal communication, 1989) noticed that the glyph appearing with the 2 Cib 14 Mol event (pil or pul) also recurs in the Casa Colorada text. Unfortunately, there it is recorded with the 7 Akbal event, which has no obvious astronomical associations.
-[[#309|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''190.
+[574] Karl Ruppert (1952) has described the architecture at Chichón Itzá and provides a map showing the survey squares that are the basis for this nomenclature.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#319|31]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''192–93.</div>
+[575] The Maya used stone axes in battle, but there are also abundant images documenting that the ax was also specifically a sacrificial instrument (Schele and M. Miller 1986).
-[[#329|32]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193.
+[576] These knives are especially evident in the sacrificial scenes of the gold battle disks (S. K. Lothrop 1952).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#339|33]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191–92.</div>
+[577] The final three glyphs in the names of the three persons to the left of the drawing are uinic titles. These titles declare that these men are ulnic, that is to say, “men (in the sense of humans)” of a particular rank or location. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to read that rank.
-[[#349|34]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191.
+[578] Patio Quad structures, also called Gallery Patio Structures, have several diagnostic features which can occur in varying combinations: (1) sunken central patios; (2) masonry shrines built against the back wall; (3) colonnaded front rooms; and (4) colonnades bordering the central patio. Generally, the plan of the building is square and the walls are of masonry. Based upon settlement location and associated excavated debris at Chichón Itzá, Freidel (1981b) proposed that these buildings are elite residences. These buildings occur rarely in the Maya area outside of Chichón Itzá. Examples are known at Nohmul in Belize (D. Chase and A. Chase 1982) and on Cozumel Island (Freidel and Sabloff 1984: Fig. 26a), but they also occur in the contemporary highland communities of Mexico (e.g.. in the Coxcatlan area, Sisson 1973).
-[[#359|35]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193.
+[579] Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1970) pointed out some time ago that the association of glyphic texts with typical “Toltec” images in the case of this building suggests that the patrons of the latest artistic and architectural programs of the city were not illiterate foreigners.
-[[#369|36]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''194.
+[580] David Stuart (personal communication, 1987) pointed out to us a reference in Landa to a set of brothers who ruled at Chichón Itzá. They purportedly came from the west and built many beautiful temples in the city (Tozzer 1941:19, 177).
-[[#379|37]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
+[581] Ralph Roys (in Pollock et al. 1962) extensively discusses the political organization of the Mayapán Confederacy, which was ruled by this principle. Edmonson (1986) translates multepal as “crowd rule.” Barrera Vasquez (1980:539–540, 785) glosses multepal as “united government (or confederation) that was prevalent during the dominion of Mayapán until the middle of the fifteenth century when a great revolution resulted in the destruction of that city.” Mui is listed as “in combination, to do something communally or between many...” and “in a group.” Tepal is “to reign and to govern.”
-[[#389|38]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
+[582] Mayapán, although a relatively unspectacular ruin by Maya standards (J. Eric Thompson called it “a flash in the Maya pan”), has exceptionally well-preserved remains of buildings made with stone foundations and wooden superstructures. The Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pollock et al. 1962) carried out long-term work at the site, so we have a lot of information on its organization. Essentially, both Chichón Itzá and Mayapán show a central focus upon a four-sided pyramid associated with colonnaded halls. Although the halls at Mayapán are organized in a circle around the pyramid, while the halls at Chichón Itzá are to one side of its great northern central platform, neither of these arrangements is comparable to the vaulted masonry buildings found in Puuc cities and in the southern cities described in previous chapters. Contact-period colonnaded halls (Freidel and Sabloff 1984) functioned as assembly halls for men in public service, as schools for boys being trained in the arts of war and in the essentials of the sacred life, as dormitories for men fasting in preparation for festivals, and as quarters for militia. These halls were not the public residences of important people. Noble residences (Smith in Pollock et al. 1962) were to be found throughout the city of Mayapán. We have seen that the buildings which were equivalent to the colonnaded halls found in southern kingdoms, such as the Palace of Pacal at Palenque, were the public lineage houses of dynasties. Multepal, then, has its material expressions in the organization of the communities in which this form of government prevailed.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#399|39]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 164. See also, 27.</div>
+[583] Ralph Roys (1962:78) gives the fall of Mayapán as occurring in a Katun 8 Ahau, ca. A.D. 1451.
-[[#409|40]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''203.
+[584] The cocom reading was first identified in the texts of Chichón Itzá by Grube and Stuart (1987:10).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#419|41]]. Quoted in Eckhardt,'' First Socialist Schism'', 244.</div>
+[585] James Fox (1984b) identified this combination of signs as the Chichen Itza Emblem Glyph.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#429|42]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''145.</div>
+[586] Our interpretation of the architectural and artistic program of the Temple of the Warriors complex draws heavily upon the skill and brilliance of Jean Chariot, an artist and iconographer. Chariot, along with Ann Axtel Morris and Earl Morris (Morris et al. 1931), published articles on the bold and comprehensive architectural excavations and restorations carried out in these buildings by the Carnegie Institution of Washington earlier in this century. Chariot proposed the hypothesis that the reliefs are attempts at public portraiture. He based this evaluation upon the fact that the artists depicted individualistic detail both in the warriors’ regalia and in their faces, where preserved. Chariot also noted the intriguing presence of glyphlike elements floating above a number of the individuals. These symbols are not recognizable as true Maya glyphs, but they do seem to distinguish these people one from another. It is perplexing that the artisans did not use known glyphs to convey such information, for the elite of Chichón Itzá were certainly aware of glyphic writing throughout the history of the city. Such late and diagnostic media as the gold battle disks and other gold artifacts from the cenote (S. K. Lothrop 1952) carry glyphic inscriptions.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#439|43]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 146.</div>
+[587] Actual specimens of the throwing spears and the parry sticks were cast into the cenote at Chichón Itzá and were retrieved by modern scholars. They are housed in the museum in Merida.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#449|44]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 146, 147. See also Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 146–47.</div>
+[588] The Itzá Maya especially favored the goddess Ix-Chel, Lady Rainbow, consort of the high god Itzamna and the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine. The island of Cozumel was sacred to Ix-Chel at the time of the Conquest and was also a strategic sanctuary of an oracle of the goddess. Cozumel Island was controlled by the Itzá during the height of their power and the oracle may have originated during that time. The depictions of old women at Chichén include some with skull heads who are dancing with old Pauahtunob. These may well represent the goddess. The woman in this procession, however, is no doubt a real person just like the other portraits. Either she is a representative of the goddess, or possibly she is the matriarch of the principal sodality. Recall that the genealogies of Chichén Itzá describe the descent of the principal group of brothers from their mother and grandmother. In that case, the procession would have occurred in the time of the great captains who dedicated the lintels throughout the city.
-[[#459|45]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'','' ''106, 145, 317–18n77; David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''54–55.
+[589] Tozzer (1941:121) describes the binding of limbs with cotton-cloth armor in preparation for war.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#469|46]]. Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''277.</div>
+[590] This is the High Priest’s Grave. The seven-lobed cave was reached by an artificial shaft, sealed by seven graves filled with bones and a wealth of sacred objects, such as rock crystals, jade, shell, clay vessels, and more (see Thompson 1938; Marquina 1964:895–896).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#479|47]]. Quoted in Nettlau, ''Short History'', 280–81.</div>
+[591] Landa in Tozzer (1941:93–94) describes this form of mock battle in the following way: “One is a game of reeds, and so they call it Colomche, which has that meaning. For playing it, a large circle of dancers is formed with their music, which gives them the rhythm, and two of them leap to the center of the wheel in time to it, one with a bundle of reeds [the shafts of throwing spears and arrows are so termed in this text], and he dances with these perfectly upright; while the other dances crouching down but both keeping within the limits of the circle. And he who has the sticks flings them with all his force at the second, who by the help of a little stick catches them with a great deal of skill.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#489|48]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''173.</div>
+[592] This scenario is highly speculative, but it is also commensurate with the fact that the bound prisoners in processions at Chichén Itzá are usually displayed in full regalia and not stripped for sacrifice as in southern Classic depictions. One way to account for this iconography is to propose that there were ritual events that combined mock battle and formal sacrifice. The Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest practiced arrow sacrifice which indeed did combine elements of battle and sacrifice (Tozzer 1941:118), but here the victim was stripped naked in Classic Maya fashion before being tied to a post.
+<br>
+<br>The closest example of what we envision here is found at the Late Classic site of Cacaxtla in highland México (Foncerrada de Molina 1978; Kubler 1980). Here beautifully preserved polychrome-painted murals depict a sacrificial slaughter of battle captives. Some of the victims in this scenes are stripped, but others, including the leader of the losing side, wear full regalia and still carry shields. They are shown with gaping wounds in their flesh from knife and dart wounds and one is depicted dismembered at the waist. There is a sense of a dramatic public slaughter of captives taken in battle.
+<br>
+<br>Although the Cacaxtla murals are a long way from the Maya lowlands, their iconography and style show clear connections to the Maya and they are roughly contemporary to or slightly earlier than Chichen Itzá. Badly ruined murals from the Puuc site of Mulchic (Barrera Rubio 1980:Fig. 3) include not only battle scenes, but also sacrificial scenes in which knife-wielding lords bend over a victim who is wearing an elaborate headdress. The body of the victim is eroded, but this headdress suggests that he was in full regalia at the time of sacrifice. This example is close enough in space and time to the Chichén Itzá context to ofler encouragement that future discoveries of mural scenes in the northern lowlands will either confirm or disconfirm the existence of mock-battle sacrifice in the region. Meanwhile, we hold that the transformation of highborn captives from sacrificial victims to members of the confederacy is the most promising political hypothesis for the success of Chichén Itzá.
-[[#499|49]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 112.
+[593] Arthur Miller (1977) coined these terms for the two major images in the murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars, one of the three buildings attached to the Great Ballcourt complex containing political imagery.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#509|50]]. Malatesta, Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''79.</div>
+[594] We are accepting that the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá is equivalent to the “ancestor cartouche“ of Classic period iconography to the south. The conjunction of images that leads us to this conclusion is found especially in the upper registers of stela imagery in the Late Classic period. At Yaxchilán, figures identified glyphically and by image as the mother and father of the protagonist sit in cartouches (Proskouriakoff 1961a:18, 1963- 1964:163; Schele 1979:68; Stuart 1988:218–219) often shown wdth snaggle-toothed dragons in the four corners (see Fig. 10:2). In contrast to the Yaxchilán pattern, Caracol monuments show Vision Serpents emerging from bowls and sky bands in the upper register. Some of the people emerging from the open maw of these serpents are identified glyphically as the parents of the protagonists (Stone, Reents, and Coffman 1985:267–268). In Terminal Classic renditions, the serpent and the cartouche are replaced by dotted scrolls David Stuart (1984) identified as the blood from which the vision materializes. At Jimbal and Ucanal, the characters floating in these blood scrolls are the Paddler Gods and warriors carrying the regalia of Tlaloc war. At Chichén Itzá, the same spearthrower-wielding warriors emerge from Vision Serpents on the gold disks from the Cenote and from sun disks in the upper register of the Temple of the Warriors columns. To us, this consistent association of Vision Serpents, the Ancestor Cartouches, Blood/Vision Scrolls, and Warriors with spearthrower and darts form a cluster of ancestor-vision imagery, which includes Captain Sun Disk of the Chichén Itzá representations.
+<br>
+<br>Several other scholars have also dealt with this imagery, but none have proposed the argument we present here. In a discussion of Yaxchilán Stela 1, David Stuart (1988:181) noted the correspondence between the ancestor cartouches of the Classic period and the Central Mexican sun disk. However, Stuart did not associate those ancestral images with the sun disk and Tlaloc-warrior presentations at Chichén Itzá. Charles Lincoln (n.d.) noted the correspondence between the Sun Disk at Chichén Itzá and the cartouches at Yaxchilán, but he argued that the disks at Yaxchilán are specifically dualistic and pertain to the sun and moon. Actually, Spindin (1913:91–92) got closest by associating the sun imagery of the Classic period ancestor cartouches with these sun disk icons from Chichén Itzá and suggested a Maya origin for both.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#519|51]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''174–75.</div>
+[595] See Kelley (1982, 1983:205, and 1984) and Lincoln (1986:158) for arguments concerning these characters.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#529|52]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''364.</div>
+[596] Ruth Krochock (1988) makes the persuasive case that the feathered serpent is, in fact, the Blood Vision Serpent of traditional Maya royal ritual. She suggests that the bird image connected with it might be related to the Principal Bird Deity, who is, in turn, linked with the World Tree. At the same time, there are strong associations between the eagle and heart sacrifice in Mexican religion.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#539|53]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''364.</div>
+[597] Mary Miller and Stephen Houston (1987) have documented the fact that ballgame sacrifice took place on grand stairways outside of ballcourts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#549|54]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.</div>
+[598] This link between the bailgame and war was discussed in the context of Preclassic ballcourts at Cerros in Chapter 3. The people of Chichén Itzá and their enemies all used the bailgame as a metaphor for the wars they were fighting. At Chichén Itzá, a small ballcourt directly west of the Mercado Patio Quad hall has a bas-relief procession of warriors pushing captives before them (Ruppert 1952). This composition is nearly identical to a relief procession at the site ofX’telhu, one of the satellites ofYaxuná, which shows the warriors wearing the skin apron and tight leather belt of the ballgame in one of its forms. At Yaxuná, the Ballcourt Complex is the only original construction dating to the Terminal Classic period when the war was waged. The severed head of the victim of sacrifice in the ballcourt or in ballgame ritual was closely associated by all of the contenders with the image of a skull from which waterlilies emerge. This skull with emerging waterlilies was a symbol of fertility and renewal (Freidel 1987). This head is at the center of the baseline in the battle scene illustrated here.
-[[#559|55]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 121.
+[599] The skull-rack platform at Chichón liza has the standard form of such structures, but its walls are carved with the images of skulls set in rows. 1 ozzer (1957:218–219) associated this gruesome imagery with the practice of taking heads as trophies of war and relics of the dead, both of famous lords who died naturally and captives who died in sacrifice. The trophies from sacrificial rituals and battle were preserved on great wooden racks called tzompantli by the Aztec (Tozzer 1957:130–131) that were contrueted in the most important sacred spaces at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, and at Chichón Itzá, the capital of the Itzá Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#569|56]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''483.</div>
+[600] These relationships, evidently linking three male individuals, arc found on a monument from Uxmal described by Jeff Kowalski (1985b). He identified the glyph as a relationship, although Stuart’s itah decipherment was not then known.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#579|57]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''338.</div>
+; 10. The End of A Literate World and Its Legacy to the Future
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#589|58]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''341. See also Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 29.</div>
+[601] Tozzer (1941:28) quotes from Gaspar Antonio Chi, Landa’s Yucatec informant: “They had written records of important things which had occurred in the past ... the prognostications of their prophets and the lives of their lords; and for the common people, of certain songs in meter ... according to the history they contained.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#599|59]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 341.</div>
+[602] The Maya of the Postclassic period did enjoy commercial prosperity and brisk trade with peoples beyond their borders. Their homes were well built and their technology was generally on a par with that of their ancestors, although, unlike the Classic period peoples, they used metal. The lords of the Late Postclassic Maya, however, simply did not have the command of the social energy of their people that the lords of the Classic period could bring to bear on public works, especially central monumental architecture. It is not that these people were less devout than their ancestors: They built many shrines and temples, but these were as frequently dedicated to gods as to ancestors and as frequently found in homes as in centers. Some Mayanists regard this change not as a dissipation of energy so much as a reorientation to other goals, particularly the material well-being of the rising mercantile cadres, the p’olomob. Be that as it may, the Postclassic Maya who greeted the Spaniards were at best between eras of greatness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#609|60]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 112–13.</div>
+[603] The first systematic study of the collapse was conducted as a School of American Research seminar (Culbert 1973). Several recent books have concentrated on the problem of the collapse from the viewpoint of Teotíhuacán’s collapse in the eighth century (Diehl and Berio 1989); from the viewpoint of Postclassic archaeology in northern Yucatán and the Petón (Sabloff and Andrews V 1986a); and as a worldwide phenomenon (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#619|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 585.</div>
+[604] The only such system to be excavated in the immediate vicinity of a center which rose and then collapsed, Cerros in Belize (Scarborough 1983), shows that the canals silted in beyond use within a century of the political abandonment.
-[[#629|62]]. Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 121–36.
+[605] This inscription includes the earliest known usage of a calendric name in a Classic Maya name phrase. This tradition of naming a child for the day in the tzolkin on which he was born was prominent among peoples of western Mesoamerica, such as the Zapotee, the Mixtec, the Cacaxtlanos, the Huastecs of El Tajin, and presumably, the Teotihuacanos, but the Classic Maya used an entirely different system. Since the clay in the pot came from the plain in front of Palenque, we suggest that the man whose accession is recorded in the text or perhaps the person who gave the vase to the Palencano lord in whose grave it was found was one of the Putún Maya.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#639|63]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 465. For Malatesta’s later clarifications of this article, see Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''27–34.</div>
+[606] Robert Rands (personal communication, 1975) discovered that the clay has chemical traces produced by the grasses out on the plain. It was manufactured in the region where the Putún Maya are thought to have lived.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#649|64]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 465.</div>
+[607] Lauro José Zavala (1949) reported finding this skeleton in the rubble of the west end of south gallery of the House AD in the Palace. He speculated that the man was accidentally caught in the collapse of the vault and never dug out.
-[[#659|65]]. David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''151, 255.
+[608] The portrayal of the captive lords of Pomoná in their anguish is intensely personal and intimate, among the finest portraits ever achieved by Maya artists. The artists’s concentration on the victims leads Mary Miller to believe that they were vassals from the defeated town who were forced to carve this monument in tribute to their conquerors. If this was the case, then Pomoná at least survived as a place of skilled artisans until the opening of the ninth century A.D.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#669|66]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''466.</div>
+[609] We met this Calakmul king in Chapter 4. He installed the first ruler of Naranjo on his throne and he apparently sent a visitor to participate in rituals conducted by the contemporary king at Yaxchilán, who may have been an ally.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#679|67]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''465.</div>
+[610] Demarest, Houston, and Johnson (1989) report that this log palisade was built around the central plaza of Dos Pilas during the last years of its occupation. They also report that Punta de Chamino, a site built on the end of a peninsula jutting into Lake Petexbatún, has massive fortifications across the neck of the peninsula. Warfare was endemic and highly destructive during the last years of the Petexbatun confederacy.
-[[#689|68]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''32–33; ''Method of Freedom'', 397–98; ''Life and Ideas'','' ''109.
+[611] Jeff Kowalski (1989) has traced the Itzá style up the Usumacinta to Seibal and this set of late sites in the highlands of Chiapas.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#699|69]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''110.</div>
+[612] The Classic diaspora into the adjacent highlands is subject to continued interest and interpretation. See John Fox (1980, 1989) and David Freidel (1985a) for some consideration of the issues.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#709|70]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''341–42.</div>
+[613] The notable community here is Lamanai (Pendergast 1986), an ancient center and community which not only survived the collapse but continued to flourish up to the Spanish Conquest. Although clearly participants in the Maya elite world of the Classic period, Lamanai rulers raised few stelae during their history. But there is no certain correlation of historical kingship and the success or failure of government in Belize: Altun Ha, another center of great antiquity and wealth, never raised stelae and yet it succumbed in the time of the collapse. The Belizean situation underscores the fact that historical kingship was a major strategy of Maya governance, but not the only one. Maya centers rose and fell throughout the lowlands without raising stelae or declaring other public inscriptions. Yet at the same time, the correlation between the collapse of lowland society and the failure of historical kingship demonstrates the centrality of this institution, despite the examples of survival beyond the silencing of the historical record. Nevertheless, there are many and complex relationships between historical kings and their nonhistorical counterparts to be worked out in the future (see Freidel 1983).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#719|71]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 466–67.</div>
+[614] Sabloff and Willey (1969) first suggested that Seibal’s late florescence resulted from the intrusion and takeover by non-Petén foreigners. Rands (1973) suggested that the ceramics associated with that intruding group are related to the Fine Paste wares from the Palenque-Tabasco region. These foreigners appear to have been Thompson’s Putún Maya (see note 18) who gave rise both to the Itzá of Yucatán and the invaders who took Fine Orange ceramics with them as they went up the Usumacinta River.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#728|72]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 483.</div>
+[615] The four-sided pyramid is a very old architectural design among the Maya, going back into the Preclassic period at such sites as Tikal and Uaxactún. Although it occurs periodically throughout the Classic period, it seems to have enjoyed resurgence to a position of special prominence in the Terminal Classic period. See Fox (1989) for a discussion of the quadripartite principle in the consolidation of segmentary lineages into new states in the Postclassic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#738|73]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–22.</div>
+[616] David Stuart (1987:25–26) first read the verb in this passage as yilah. “he saw it,” and realized that the Seibal passage record a visit by foreign lords to participate in the period-ending rites conducted by Ah-Bolon-Tun.
-[[#748|74]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 43.
+[617] See Jeff Kowalski’s (1989) very useful comparison of the Seibal iconography to that of Chichén Itzá. In particular, Kowalski identifies an element called the “knife-wing” in the headdress of one of Ah-Bolon-Tun’s stelae. This element is important in the serpent-bird of prophecy iconography of lintels at Chichén Itzá (Krochock 1988). This complex, in turn, ties into the Vision Serpent-ancestor iconography of Captain Sun Disk, described in this chapter.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#758|75]]. Salvador Seguí, “Anarchism and Syndicalism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Libcom website, https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-syndicalism-salvador-seguí.</div>
+[618] Sabloff and Willey (1967) proposed that the southern lowlands might have experienced invasion by barbarians moving up the Western Rivers district at the time of the Collapse. One impressive pattern was the introduction of fine-paste wares from the Tabasco region in conjunction with the barbarian Maya stelae at Seibal. Ihompson (1970:3–47) called these invaders Putún and proposed they were Chontal-speaking Maya who had lived in Tabasco for most of the Classic period. He suggested that they expanded upriver in the chaos at the end of the Classic period. Kowalski (1989) and Ball and Taschek (1989) accept Thompson’s scenario and have added new support to the hypothesis.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#768|76]]. Juan Gómez Casas, ''Anarchist Organization: The History of the F.A.I'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 76–77, 92–97, 107–16; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''32–43.</div>
+[619] Don Rice (1986:332) argued from ceramic, stylistic, and architectural evidence that the late occupants of Ixlú were intruders. Because the shape of the benches built inside the buildings at Ixlú resembles those of late Seibal, he (1986:336) suggested they migrated to Lake Petén-Itzá from Seibal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#778|77]]. Quoted in Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 37.</div>
+[620] Peter Mathews (1976) long ago showed the affinity of this Ixlú altar to a text on Stela 8 at Dos Pilas. This parallelism suggests that the Ixlú lords might have been refugees from the collapse of the Petexbatún state.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#788|78]]. Quoted in Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 37, 38.</div>
+[621] A column from Bonampak now in the St. Louis Art Museum names its Bonampak protagonist as the yahau, “subordinate lord,” of the king of Tonina.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#798|79]]. Quoted in Casas, ''History of the F.A.I'','' ''110.</div>
+[622] Mary Pohl (1983) has reviewed the archaeological evidence for the ceremonial caching of owls, noting that pygmy owls were favored by the Maya. 1 he iconography of owls is not so specific as to require identification of the carved images as pygmy owls, but these are what the Maya deposited. Pygmy owls, according to Pohl, frequent the mouths of caves and hence inspire denotation as messengers from the Otherworld. These pygmy owls may refer to the bird of omen called cu/i in Yucatec, Choi, and Tzeltal and the owl of the spearthrower-shield-owl title we first encountered with Jaguar-Paw, the conqueror of Uaxactun.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#808|80]]. Quoted in Casas, ''History of the F.A.I'','' ''110.</div>
+[623] The Feathered Serpent could also be represented as a raptorial bird that tore out the hearts of sacrificial victims. The taloned-Kukulcan images that decorated the Temple of the Warriors display an ancestral head peering out from between its open beak, in an analog to Classic-period depictions of ancestors peering out of the mouth of the Vision Serpent.
-[[#818|81]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 214, 222–26.
+[624] See the discussions by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and Samuel K. Lothrop of these disks and their correspondences to southern lowland imagery and texts (Lothrop 1952).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#828|82]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism. For another example, see Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015),'' ''50–52.</div>
+[625] Scholars have long recognized the significant impact of Maya influence on sites like Xochicalco and Cacaxtla. Now that we have recognized the place of Tlaloc warfare in Classic Maya imagery, we see that Chichcn Itza’s representation of war is clearly not inspired by the Toltec, but by the Maya past. Tlaloc warfare as it is represented at Cacaxtla seems also to be inspired by the Maya model rather than that of Teotihuacan. Furthermore, as George Kubler suggested, Tula, Hidalgo, the capital of the Toltec, may well have emulated the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza rather the reverse. Mary Miller (1985) has shown that the famous Chae Mool figure of Postclassic Mesoamerica derives from Maya imagery of captives and sacrificial victims.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#838|83]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 205.</div>
+[626] The word can also means “four” and “sky,” so that the name also might have meant “four-star” or “sky-star.” Avendano (Stuart and Jones n.d.) said that the name meant “the star twenty serpent.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#848|84]]. Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''487.</div>
+[627] The accounts of the Conquest of the Itza of Lake Peten-Itza were published by Philip A. Means (1917). Dennis Puleston (1979) was the first to connect the prophesies of the Books of the Chilam Balam with Can-Ek’s reaction and the newly recovered histories of the Classic period.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#858|85]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 207–8.</div>
+[628] The trip we describe here is a new entrada recorded in a manuscript George Stuart discovered in 1989. He provided us with a copy of the transcription, translations, and the commentary written by Grant Jones (Stuart and Jones n.d.) and has very graciously allowed us to use the events of the entrada and the description of Can-Ek contained in this document.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#868|86]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 222, 232–33, 238–39, 241; Lazar Lipotkin, ''The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 119–21, 123. For a text advocating united anarchism, see ibid., 283–86.</div>
+[629] The size difference between the elite and commoners is one that is documented from Preclassic times onward. Can-Ek’s light complexion may have resulted from a life-style that kept him out of the fierce tropical sun far more than his subordinates.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#878|87]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828.</div>
+[630] The cloth of costumes in the Bonampak murals also have glyphs drawn on them, and the ahaus in the first room wear ankle-long white capes amazingly like Avendano’s description.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#888|88]]. Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis.”</div>
+[631] Avendano (Means 1917:128) says, “We had to observe and wonder on some rocks or buildings on some high places—so high that they were almost lost to sight. And when we caught sight of them clearly, the sun shining on them in full, we took pleasure in seeing them; and we wondered at their height, since without any exaggeration it seemed impossible that work could have been done by hand, unless it was with the aid of the devil, whom they say they adore there in the form of a noted idol.”
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#897|89]]. Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197.</div>
+[632] This and all other direct quotations come from Avendano’s own description of this entrada as they were translated by Means (1917).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#907|90]]. Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 199–200.</div>
+[633] Avendano’s description (Means 1917:137) is full of the irritation the Spanish felt at the uninvited and intimate attention.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#917|91]]. Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 203.</div>
+[634] This episode (Means 1917:140) recalls the threats presented by the Chacans in Avendano’s first visit.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#927|92]]. Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 121–25; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 192.</div>
+[635] This episode is recorded in Means (1917:140).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#937|93]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 200–201.</div>
+[636] This 12.3.19.11.14 I lx 17 Kankin date is March 13, 1697, in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, this day fell on 12.3.19.11.4 4 Kan 7 Kankin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#947|94]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201. See also, 213; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 64–65.</div>
+[637] Dennis Puleston (1979) first connected this particular prophecy to Can-Ek’s surrender and tried to show that the katun prophecies of the Books of the Chilam Balam were derived at least partially from Classic and Postclassic history. He suggested that Can-Ek’s fatalism was characteristic of Prehispamc Maya historical thought also. The imminent arrival of Katun 8 Ahau was just as likely to have been the stimulus. 8 Ahau is repeatedly associated with the collapse of kingdoms and the change of governments.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#957|95]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201, 207.</div>
+[638] See Tozzer (1941, 77–78) for discussion of the suppression of Maya native literature.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#967|96]]. Quoted in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''122.</div>
+[639] Martin was the director of the Proyecto Lingiiistico “Francisco Marroquin,” an organization started in the 1960s to train native speakers in linguistics so that they could record and study their own languages.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#977|97]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193, 211. See also Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''62–63.</div>
+[640] Nicholas Hopkins and Kathryn Josserand also helped give the workshop. Nora England of the University of Iowa translated the English version of the workbook into Spanish with the help of Lola Spillari de López. Steve Eliot of CIRMA printed and reproduced the Spanish-version workbook and CIRMA provided support and a room for workshop sessions.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#987|98]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Problem of Organization and the Notion of Synthesis (March 1926),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 188–91; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193.</div>
+[641] In 1989, Linda Scheie returned to Antigua to give a second workshop. An extra day added to the workshop gave time to finish the full analysis of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs. The final session heard a translation of that inscription read in all the languages of participants—English. Spanish, Classical Maya, Chorti, Pocoman, Cakchiquel, Quiche, Achi, Ixil, Mam, Jalcaltec, and Kanhobal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#997|99]]. Makhno, ''Struggle'', 67–68.</div>
+[642] The correlation we have used throughout this book set 594,285 days between the zero date in the Maya calendar and the zero date in the Julian calendar, January 1, —4712. Although we believe this is the correct correlation, it is two days out of agreement with the calendars that are still maintained by the Maya of the Guatemala highlands. The correlation that brings the ancient and modern calendars into agreement sets 584,283 days between the two zero dates. In this second correlation, July 23, 1987, falls on 12.18.14.3.17 3 Caban 5 Xul.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1007|100]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212.</div>
+; Glossary of Gods and Icons
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1017|101]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212. See also Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 240–41.</div>
+[643] See Cortez (1986) for a full discussion of the Principal Bird Deity in Late Preclassic and Early Classic contexts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1027|102]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.</div>
+[644] In this scene, Chac-Xib-Chac rises from the waters of the Underworld in a visual representation of the first appearance of the Eveningstar (Scheie and M. Miller 1986: Pl. 122). GI of the Palenque Triad, who shares many features with Chac-Xib-Chac, is also associated with Venus, principally through his birth date, 9 Ik, a day associated with Venus throughout Mesoamerican mythology. Hun-Ahau of the Headband Twins is yet another aspect of Venus for he shows up in the Dresden Codex as a manifestation of Morningstar. All three of these gods are thus associated with one or another apparition of Venus and may represent different aspects of the same divine being.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1036|103]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.</div>
+[645] Thompson (1934 and 1970b) thoroughly discussed these directional sets of gods and their associations. M.D. Coe (1965) associated this directional organization of gods with the functions and layouts of Yucatecan villages. He (Coe 1973:14–15) also demonstrated that the gods identified by Thompson as bacabs arc the Pauahtuns of the codices and ethnohistorical sources.
-[[#1046|104]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''131.
+[646] This palace scene with the Young Goddesses of Two and the rabbit scribe is painted on a pot now in the Princeton University Museum (Scheie and M. Miller 1986:115a). The creation on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku is depicted on the Pot of the Seven Gods (M.D. Coe 1973:106–109).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1056|105]]. Mollie Steimer, Simon Fleshin, Voline, Sobol, Schwartz, Lia, Roman, Ervantian, “Concerning the Platform for an Organization of Anarchists,” in ''Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin'', ed. Abe Bluestein'' ''(Minneapolis, MN: Libertarian Publications Group, 1983), 52–53, 58, 61–62.</div>
+[647] See Taube (1985) for a full discussion of the Maize God and his place in Classic Maya iconography.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1066|106]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 242–43.</div>
+[648] Examples of the Paddlers in the inscriptions of Copán represent the Old Stingray God with kin signs on his cheeks and the Old Jaguar God with akbal signs (Scheie 1987f).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1076|107]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''486–91.</div>
+[649] The alphabetic designations of god images derive from a distributional study of gods and their name glyphs in the Dresden Codex. Not wishing to presume the meaning of the names, Schellhas (1904) used the alphabet as a neutral designation system.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1086|108]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 486–87.</div>
+[650] See David Stuart (1987b:15–16).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1096|109]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 486.</div>
+[651] David Stuart (1988c and 1984) outlined much of the evidence linking the Serpent Bar to the symbolism of the vision rites.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1105|110]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform (November, 1926),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''219.</div>
+[652] David Stuart (1988c) first outlined how this merging of images and functions is distributed in Maya images.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1115|111]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 222.</div>
+ References
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1125|112]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists (August 1927),” in Skirda ''Facing the Enemy'', 229–30.</div>
+<biblio>
+The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1. Oxford University. Aberle, David F.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1135|113]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 219–20.</div>
+Distinguished Lecture: What Kind of Science Is Anthropology? American Anthropologist 89(3):551–566.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1145|114]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 230.</div>
+Adams, Richard E. W., Walter E. Brown, and T. Patrick Culbert
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1155|115]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 235.</div>
+Radar Mapping, Archaeology, and Ancient Maya Land Use. Science 213:1457- 1463.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1165|116]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.</div>
+Andrews, Anthony P.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1175|117]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.</div>
+Puertos costeros del Postclásico Temprano en el norte de Yucatán. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1 1:75–93. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1185|118]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 217.</div>
+Andrews, Anthony P., Frank Asaro, and Pura Cervera Rivero
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1195|119]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 218.</div>
+n.d. The Obsidian Trade at Isla Cerritos, Yucatán, México. Journal of Field Archaeology (in press).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1205|120]]. Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism,” 240.</div>
+Andrews, Anthony P., Tomás Gallareta N., Fernando Robles C., Rafael Cobos P.
-[[#1215|121]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''107–8.
+Isla Cerritos Archaeological Project: A Report of the 1984 Field Season, Report submitted to the Committee for Research and Exploration, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1225|122]]. Errico Malatesta, “On Collective Responsibility,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/platform-english/on-collective-responsibility-errico-malatesta.</div>
+Andrews, Anthony P., and Fernando Robles C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1235|123]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''124–28, 134–35.</div>
+Chichón Itzá and Cobá: An Itzá-Maya Standoff in Early Postclassic Yucatán. In The Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 62–72. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1245|124]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'','' ''205–6.</div>
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1255|125]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 206.</div>
+Archaeology and Prehistory in the Northern Maya Lowlands: An Introduction. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 2, edited by Robert Wauchope and Gordon R. Willey, 288–330. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[[#1264|126]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''135; Garner, ''Goals and Means'','' ''206.
+The Development of Maya Civilization After Abandonment of the Southern Cities. In The Classic Maya Collapse, edited by T. Patrick Culbert, 243–265. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1274|127]]. Luigi <u>Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli, </u>“Reply by the Pensiero e Volontà Group to an Invitation to Join the International Anarchist Communist Federation,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/reply-by-the-pensiero-e-volonta-group-to-an-invitation-to-join-the-international-anarchist-communist-federation.</div>
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, and E. Wyllys Andrews V
-[[#1284|128]]. Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 127–29, 180, 191.
+Excavations at Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán, México. Middle American Research Institute Pub. 48. New Orleans: Tulane University.
-[[#1294|129]]. Quoted in Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 138.
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, V
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1304|130]]. Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 129–31, 145–49, 180, 191–92. It is sometimes claimed that anarchists in Bulgaria were the first to adopt the ''Platform''. I have been unable to verify this due to how little information about the Bulgarian anarchist movement is available in English.</div>
+Dzibilchaltún. In Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians 1, edited by Victoria Bricker and Jeremy A. Sabloff with the assistance of Patricia Andrews, 313–344. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-[[#1314|131]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''173–76; Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''135–36, 143.
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff
-== {{anchor|Chapter11ConclusionBetwee1}} {{anchor|Chapter11ConclusionBetwee}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook14}} Chapter 11: Conclusion ==
+Classic to Postclassic: A Summary Discussion. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 433–456. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Between 1868 and 1939, anarchists living in Europe and the United States developed a political theory that guided their attempts to bring about fundamental social change. This theory can be summarized as follows. Anarchists were antistate socialists who advocated the achievement of freedom, equality, and solidarity. For anarchists, these values were interdependent, such that the realization of one of them can only occur through the realization of all three at once. Although all anarchists advocated freedom, they disagreed with one another about how to define it. Some anarchists defined freedom as nondomination such that a person is free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the arbitrary power to impose their will on them. Other anarchists defined freedom as the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things such that a person becomes more free as their opportunities expand. One of the main reasons why anarchists valued freedom is that it is a prerequisite for people fully developing themselves and realizing their human potential. Irrespective of how they defined freedom, anarchists agreed that humans can, given the kind of animals we are, only be free in and through society.
+Andrews, E.Wyi lys, V, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, editors
-In order for this to occur, society has to be structured in an egalitarian manner. There must be no hierarchical divisions between rulers who issue commands and make decisions and subordinates who obey and lack decision-making power. Organizations should instead be structured horizontally, such that each member is neither a master nor a subject. They are instead an associate who has an equal say in collective decisions, and so, codetermine the voluntary organization with every other member. Such equality of self-determination must go alongside equality of opportunity. Each individual should have access to the external conditions that are necessary for self-development, and having the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things, such as food, health care, and education. The reproduction of such a society requires solidarity, in the sense of individuals and groups cooperating with one another in pursuit of common goals and people, in their personal lives, forming reciprocal caring relationships, such as by being a loving parent, good friend, or supportive teacher.
+a Late Lowland Maya Civilization. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state, alongside all structures of domination and exploitation,[[#1Thisincludedbutwasnotli|1]] should be abolished in favor of a stateless classless society without authority, in which everyone is free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society ''anarchy''. The abolition of capitalism and the state was primarily justified on the grounds that they are violent hierarchical pyramids in which decision-making flows from the top to the bottom. The majority of the population are workers who lack real decision-making power over the nature of their life, workplace, community, or society as a whole. They are instead subject to the power of an economic ruling class—capitalists, landowners, bankers, etc.—and a political ruling class—monarchs, politicians, heads of the police, generals, etc. The economic ruling class derive their power from the private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions but not private property and so, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage. The political ruling class sit at the top of the centralized, hierarchical state and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey, due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force, such as the police, prisons, and courts. All states, regardless of whether they are a monarchy, dictatorship, or parliamentary democracy, exercise institutionalized violence in order to enforce and maintain the domination and exploitation of workers, and thereby perpetuate the power and privilege of both the economic and political ruling classes.
+Ashmore, Wendy
-The creation of anarchy requires the abolition of capitalism and the state but the ruling classes will never give up their power voluntarily and instead violently defend it. They must be overthrown. The majority of anarchist theory was concerned with how to do this. Anarchists argued that the goal of universal human emancipation could only be achieved through the formation of working-class social movements that engage in class struggle against the political and economic ruling classes and, ultimately, launch a social revolution.
+Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by W. Ashmore. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-Anarchists envisioned the social revolution as a lengthy process of simultaneous destruction and construction. Workers would destroy the old world by launching an armed insurrection that violently smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. This victory would be achieved by workers’ militias, who would also defend the social revolution from counterattack. Workers would build the new world by creating an anarchist society, which is the totality of social structures from which anarchy could later emerge. During and immediately after the social revolution, anarchists aimed to establish: (a) the collective ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) the self-management of social life, including production and distribution, through workplace and community assemblies in which collective decisions are made via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two; (c) the abolition of money and markets in favor of a system of decentralized planning; and (d) the reorganization of production, such that people engage in a combination of mental and physical labor, unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers, and the length of the working day is significantly reduced.
+Aulie, H. Wilbur, and Evelyn W. de Aulie
-In order to achieve this goal, anarchists had to overcome the fact that capitalism and the state are self-reproducing. Society is constituted by a process of human beings with particular consciousness engaging in practice: deploying their capacities to satisfy a psychological drive. In so doing, they simultaneously change both the world and themselves. The interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice, such that individuals engage in practices that develop historically specific capacities, drives, and consciousness. The consequence of this is that as people engage in practice, they also create and re-create themselves as the kinds of people who reproduce the social structure itself.
+Diccionario Ch’ol-Español: Español-Ch’ol. Serie de Vocabulario y Diccionarios Indígenas ‘Mariano Silva y Aceves” 21. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
-Abolishing capitalism and the state, creating an anarchist society, and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society requires the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the capacity to make decisions through general assemblies, the drive to not oppress others, and the consciousness that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society are constituted by forms of practice that develop people fit mainly for reproducing capitalism and the state, rather than abolishing them. Class society systematically fails to produce the kinds of people that both an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need. Such individuals, of course, would be produced by a properly functioning anarchist society, but this fact does not help anarchists presently living under class society. Anarchists therefore face a paradox: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society.
+Ayala Falcón, Marisela
-The anarchist solution to this problem was revolutionary practice. Humans are not solely the product of their circumstances. They can also chose to engage in actions that simultaneously develop new capacities, drives, and consciousness; modify existing social structures; and construct whole new social structures. This is not to say that any form of revolutionary practice could lead to an anarchist society. Anarchists argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating anarchy. They, in short, advocated the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries propose for achieving social change have to be constituted by forms of practice that develop people into the kinds of individuals who are capable of, and are driven to: (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and, (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society. If social movements select means that fail to do this then they would, regardless of people’s good intentions, never achieve the ends of anarchism.
+n.d. El bulto ritual de Mundo Perdido, Tikal, y los bultos mayas. A MS in the possession of the authors.
-The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends shaped both what strategies they advocated and which ones they rejected. Anarchists thought that the social revolution would emerge out of an extended evolutionary period, during which change was slow, gradual, and partial. In order for this evolutionary period to culminate in a revolution, working-class social movements have to spread their ideas and form social networks through print media, talks, and recreational activities; construct organizations that prefigure the future anarchist society; and engage in class struggle via direct action. Anarchists advocated these means not only because they were effective and won results, but also because of the forms of practice that constituted them. Through engaging in direct action with prefigurative organizations, workers simultaneously change the world and themselves. A group of workers might form a tenant union, organize a rent strike against their landlord, and make collective decisions about the rent strike within a general assembly. In so doing, they change social relations—rent decreases and workers gain more power over their landlord—and change people—workers develop the capacity to organize a rent strike and make decisions within a general assembly, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another, and realize that housing should be free.
+Ball, Joseph
-During the course of the strike, these workers not only change social relations and themselves, but also construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a tenant union. Long-term participation in this tenant union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness further. This makes the organization of new actions possible, such as a larger rent strike that mobilizes workers in an entire city. These kinds of actions could continue and multiply over time, as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. Through the struggle against capitalism and the state, workers could develop into people ready to emancipate themselves and achieve anarchist goals.
+a A Coordinate Approach to Northern Maya Prehistory: A.D. 700–1000. American Antiquity 39 (l):85–93.
-Anarchism emerged in parallel with, and in opposition to, various forms of state socialism that aimed to achieve a stateless classless society through the conquest of state power. Anarchists replied that the means of conquering state power could never achieve the ends of universal human emancipation. Socialist parties that engaged in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state would, over time, abandon their revolutionary program and become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state. If a socialist party succeeded in conquering state power, whether by elections or force, the result would not be a society in which workers themselves self-managed social life. They would instead create a new form of minority class rule, in which the working classes were dominated and exploited by the party leadership that actually wielded state power. The minority of rulers would be transformed by the exercise of state power and become tyrants who were primarily concerned with expanding and reproducing their power and furthering their specific interests in opposition to, and in conflict with, the interests of the working classes whose name they ruled in. They would never give up their power voluntarily, and would violently repress any working-class social movements who resisted them. The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.
+b A Teotihuacán-style Cache from the Maya Lowlands. Archaeology 27:2–9.
-Although anarchists in general shared these basic strategic commitments, the movement was divided between two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization and advocated the formation of small affinity groups, that were linked together via informal social networks and periodicals. They rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and argued that anarchists should immediately engage in an escalating series of assassinations, bombings, and armed insurrections against the ruling classes and their institutions. The goal of these attacks was to spread anarchist ideas and inspire other workers to rise up. This would result in a chain reaction of revolt, as an increasingly large number of workers launched insurrections, formed a mass movement, and initiated the social revolution.
+Southeastern Campeche and the Mexican Plateau: Early Classic Contact Situation. Actes du XXII Congrés International de Americanistes 8:271–280. Paris.
-Mass anarchists, in contrast, advocated the formation of both affinity groups and large-scale formal federations of autonomous groups, which coordinated large-scale action through regular congresses attended by instantly recallable mandated delegates. They argued that anarchists could generate a mass movement that was driven to, and capable of, launching an armed insurrection that abolished class society through the struggle for immediate reforms in the present. In order for this struggle to build toward revolution, rather than collapse into reformism, it had to be achieved by engaging in direct action within prefigurative organizations. Anarchists would facilitate this process by acting as a militant minority within social movements in order to influence other workers to adopt anarchist ideas and implement anarchist strategy.
+Teotihuacán, the Maya, and Ceramic Interchange: A Contextual Perspective. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G. Miller, 125–146. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-The main form of mass anarchism was syndicalist anarchism, which argued that trade unions were the primary social movement under capitalism that could fulfill anarchist goals. This was because trade unions could pursue the double aim of struggling for immediate reforms and attempting to launch a social revolution via an insurrectionary general strike. In so doing, they would perform a dual function. They could act as organs of resistance that struggle against dominant institutions in the present and then, during the social revolution, take over the organization of the economy (in part or whole) and transform into organs of self-management. Syndicalist anarchists disagreed about whether or not trade unions should be politically neutral, or formally committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means.
+Campeche, the Itzá, and the Postclassic: A Study in Ethnohistorical Archaeology. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization, Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 379–408. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-A significant number of mass anarchists thought that trade unions were a necessary but insufficient means to achieve revolution. These proponents of organizational dualism argued that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and, in addition, smaller specific anarchist organizations composed exclusively of anarchist militants. These specific anarchist organizations were the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within larger and broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to other workers. Proponents of organizational dualism nonetheless disagreed about how to do this, and argued with one another about a variety of topics, including how broad or narrow a specific anarchist organization’s program should be, and whether or not congress resolutions should be binding on every section of an organization, or only those who voted in favor of them. These disagreements led to the formation of distinct tendencies, such as <u>synthesists </u>and platformists.
+Ceramics of the Lowlands. A paper presented at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, “At the Eve of the Collapse: Ancient Maya Societies in the Eighth Century A.D.,” held on October 7–8, 1989.
-Numerous anarchist women, and some men who supported them, realized that the achievement of anarchy required the organization of women-only groups in order to struggle against class and gender oppression simultaneously. These groups aimed to combat sexism and promote women’s liberation within both the anarchist movement, and wider society. In so doing, they would enable women to unlearn their patriarchal socialization and fully participate in the class struggle as equals to male workers. These women-only groups were either mass organizations that were open to all women workers, informal anarchist affinity groups, or formal organizations of dedicated anarchist militants. Some organizations were women’s sections of syndicalist trade unions, while others were independent.
+Ball, Joseph, and Jennifer Taschek
-This book has been concerned with what historical anarchists thought. It was not written as a mere exercise in digging up curious individuals from the past or compiling historical facts for their own sake. I want to help modern workers develop their own ideas about how to change the world, and I thought I could do this by summarizing the theory and actions of the main antiauthoritarian wing of the historical workers’ movement. This project is only partially complete since, for the purposes of this book, I narrowly focused on anarchists living in Europe and the United States. To properly understand the history of anarchism one must also examine the ideas and actions of anarchists who lived in Latin America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.
+Teotihuacán’s Fall and the Rise of the Itzá: Realignments and Role Changes in the Terminal Classic Maya Lowlands. In Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacan: A.D. 700–900, edited by Richard Diehl and Janet Berio, 187–200. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-Modern anarchists should read not only Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Goldman but also authors like Ricardo Flores Magón, M. P. T. Acharya, He-Yin Zhen, Liu Shipei, Itō Noe, Kōtoku Shūsui, and Hatta Shūzō. These anarchists should not be treated as tokens, who are only referenced when responding to false accusations that anarchism was historically an exclusively white or European social movement. Their ideas must instead be treated as being of equal importance, such that their views are fully incorporated into our understanding of what anarchism is. Nor should they be viewed as separate from the anarchist movement in Europe and the United States. All these authors read and were influenced by European anarchists. Several of them, such as Magón, Acharya, and Kōtoku, lived in Europe or the United States for parts of their life. The different anarchist movements around the world were so interconnected with one another, through transnational networks and migration flows, that the complete history of anarchism can only be written as a global history.
+Barrera Rubio, Alfredo
-Modern anarchists should not merely repeat the ideas of dead anarchists. The fact that a dead anarchist wrote it does not make it true. We must make arguments grounded in evidence for why anarchist positions are correct, rather than merely quoting dead anarchists as if their words were scripture. We must learn not only from their successes, but also from their failures, inadequacies, and inconsistencies. Most importantly of all, we have to develop our own ideas in response to our specific situations and problems, such as climate breakdown and ecological collapse; the resurgence of fascism; modern border systems; the gig economy; and transphobia. This is itself in line with what historical anarchist authors themselves wrote. They consistently reiterated the point that anarchist theory and practice had to develop in response to specific concrete situations and that people in the future would, and should, develop ideas that they were not in a position to even conceive. In order to do so, we need to draw upon not only distinctly anarchist theory, but also the best ideas that have been developed by various social movements of the oppressed and exploited over the past 150 years. This includes, but is not limited to, feminism, queer theory, the disability rights movement, Marxism, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous critiques of settler-colonialism, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
+Mural Paintings of the Puuc Region in Yucatán. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 173–182. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-This work has already begun. During the 1970s, participants in the woman’s liberation and Black power movements came into contact with anarchist ideas and, independently of one another, developed anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism as distinct tendencies. Anarcha-feminists argue that the personal is political and analyze the manner in which women are oppressed by men in daily life, such as women being expected to do the majority of chores, men talking over women at meetings, or women being subject to emotional and physical abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. In response to patriarchy within the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminists have advocated the formation of women’s only groups and insisted that prefiguration requires transforming interpersonal dynamics and interactions, rather than only organizational structures and methods of collective decision-making. This has included arguing that anarchists must develop effective responses to intimate partner violence within social movements.[[#2DarkStaredQuietRumours|2]]
+Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo
-Proponents of Black anarchism argue that Black people have been excluded from the benefits of citizenship and subject to specific forms of white supremacist state violence. This has resulted in numerous examples of Black people self-organizing independently of the state in order to survive. Emancipation cannot be achieved through the incorporation of Black people into white supremacist states, or the creation of new Black states. They reject authoritarian modes of organization and suggest that the centralization and hierarchy of the Black Panther Party played an important role in its demise and failure to achieve fundamental social change. Black liberation can only be achieved through the formation of horizontal social movements that bring all workers of color together in order to engage in direct action and self-direct their struggle, rather than be subordinate to the leadership of white radicals.[[#3DanaMWilliamsBlackPant|3]]
+Diccionario Maya Cordemex, Maya-Español, Español-Maya. Mérida: Ediciones Cordemex.
-Both anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism are part of a more general tendency within modern anarchism that draws upon Black feminism to emphasize the manner in which all structures of oppression form an interlocking web in which each component is defined in terms of its relationship to every other component. Different structures of oppression interact with, shape, and support one another to such an extent that they mutually constitute one another. The relations between structures of oppression are part of what each structure is. A Black working-class lesbian, for example, does not experience patriarchal + racist + homophobic + economic + state oppression, whereby each form of oppression is separate and independent. She instead experiences the product of these five structures interacting with one another to create life experiences that cannot be reduced to a single primary oppressive structure or the sum total of multiple oppressive structures. Society is not a Venn diagram where Black men experience racism, women experience sexism, and Black women experience both. Black women experience not only racism and sexism but also forms of oppression that are unique to them as Black women and are not shared by Black men or white women. This is because the interconnections between structures of oppression, such as racism and patriarchy, create outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.[[#4DericShannonandJRogue|4]]
+Baudez, Claude F., and Anne S. Dowd
-The abolition of capitalism and the state will not, by itself, lead to the abolition of patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and so on. Even if we accept the premise that these structures of oppression arose, or at least massively expanded, due to the development of class society in general or capitalism in particular, it is still the case that these social structures have become self-reproducing and will not automatically disappear due to the establishment of socialism. They will instead continue to exist, but be mediated through new economic and political relations. The creation of stateless socialism would, for example, end elements of patriarchy that require the existence of capitalism and the state, such as sexist corporate advertising and anti-abortion laws, but other aspects of patriarchy would continue to exist, like people of all genders being socialized into patriarchal gender roles, or men sexually harassing women in public. This would result in the fusion of patriarchal and socialist relations, such as, possibly, collective decisions being made in general assemblies where men treat women as their intellectual inferiors. We cannot focus exclusively on class and wait until after the revolution—which may never come or be defeated—to address other issues. We must instead struggle against all forms of oppression simultaneously. The self-emancipation of the working classes can only be achieved through intersectional class struggle.
+La decoración de Templo 18. In Introducción a la arqueología de Copón, Honduras, Tomo II, 447–500. Tegucigalpa: Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-Although historical anarchist theory needs to be updated, it should not be abandoned or discarded. It contains numerous insights that can guide us in the modern world. The oppression we witness on a daily basis is not an inevitable nor an unchangeable aspect of human life. It is instead the product of hierarchical social structures that divide humanity into masters and subjects. These social structures are made by human beings and so can be unmade and replaced with new and better ways of living together. Authoritarians imagine that emancipation can be achieved if good people with the correct ideas take control of the reins of power. Anarchists realize that this has never happened, and will never happen. Regardless of people’s good intentions, or the stories they tell themselves, they will be corrupted by their position at a top of a hierarchy and become primarily concerned with exercising and expanding their power over others in order to serve their own interests. If human beings are not inherently good, then no person is good enough to be a ruler.
+Baudez, Claude F., and Peter Mathews
-Cold war propaganda taught us that our only choice is between really existing capitalism or really existing state socialism. We are asked to pick between rule by a minority of elected politicians who serve the interests of capital, or rule by a one-party dictatorship led by a supreme leader; the impersonal domination of market forces, or the top-down bureaucracy of state central planning; the prison industrial complex, or the gulag; surveillance and repression by the FBI, or the NKVD. The history of socialism reveals that a large segment of the workers’ movement developed a third way: anarchist socialism and the establishment of federations of workplace and community assemblies that enable people to self-manage their own lives. This is not to say that creating anarchist socialism will be easy. The history of the workers’ movement shows how hard it is to change the world. Any struggle for emancipation will face the overwhelming violence of the ruling classes, and we must prepare ourselves for this. The modern state is better armed and has developed superior forms of surveillance, crowd-control, and counterinsurgency than its historical predecessors.
+Capture and Sacrifice at Palenque. Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson and Donnan Call Jeffers, 31–40. Palenque: Pre-Columbian Art Research, and Monterey: Herald Printers.
-When reading about the history of social movements it is easy to focus on large-scale acts of revolt that can appear to have come out of nowhere. This book has itself mentioned numerous strikes, riots, insurrections, and revolutions. Learning about these events is an important part of labor history, but to focus exclusively on them leads to a distorted view of the past and how social change happens. Members of historical socialist movements did not spend the majority of their time participating in huge actions that rapidly transformed society and the future course of history. The bulk of their lives as revolutionaries were spent doing much more mundane activities. They produced, distributed, and read radical literature; organized and attended picnics; performed in a theater club; watched a public debate; discussed politics with friends, family, and colleagues; attended an endless series of meetings for their affinity group or trade union; wrote and received a vast amount of letters; and so on.
+Benavides C., Antonio
-These small, mundane activities can appear to be of little importance when viewed in isolation. Yet when they were repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year by groups of people, they took on greater significance. These small activities produced and reproduced the social relations, capacities, drives, and consciousness that were the foundation of social movements. Without these seemingly insignificant acts, repeated over and over again, the large exciting moments of rebellion and revolution never would have occurred in most instances or would have occurred on a much smaller scale.
+Los Caminos de Coba y sus implicaciones sociales. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
-Unfortunately, time is not on our side. Capitalism’s insatiable drive for profit and economic growth is destroying the environment. The climate crisis is not merely coming, it has already begun. Things are only going to get worse. Billionaires and politicians are not going to save us. We have to save ourselves. The actions we take now determine the future we and future generations face. Our only choice is collective struggle. We have to generate a social force that can dismantle the fossil fuels industry and, in so doing, achieve survival pending revolution. In response to these dire circumstances, a large number of people have put their hopes in the election of socialist politicians into parliaments and congresses. Historical anarchist theory informs us why this strategy is mistaken: even if socialists manage to win an election, which frequently does not happen, they will be compelled by the threat of capital flight and their institutionalized role as managers of the capitalist economy to implement policies that serve the interests of the very corporations driving climate change forward. Socialist politicians will not transform the state. The state will transform them. We have to instead develop the power of workers to engage in direct action outside of and against the state, disrupt the smooth functioning of the economy, and, in so doing, impose external pressure onto the ruling classes to give into our demands.
+Berlin, Heinrich
-Even if the specifics of historical insurrectionist anarchism, mass anarchism, syndicalist anarchism, and organizational dualism are deemed to be no longer appropriate strategies within modern society, the core insight of historical anarchist strategy would remain—anarchist ends can only be achieved through anarchist means. Our task remains that of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: to develop forms of practice that can simultaneously resist, and ultimately overthrow, the ruling classes and render us fit to establish a society with neither masters nor subjects. Tomorrow can only grow out of today and the march toward anarchy begins now.
+El glifo “emblema” en las inscripciones mayas. Journal de la Société des América- nistes, n.s. 47:111–119. Paris.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|1]]. This included, but was not limited to, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, hierarchically organized religion, authoritarian modes of education, and the oppression of nonhuman animals. It should nonetheless be kept in mind that a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory.</div>
+Glifos nominales en el sarcófago de Palenque. Humanidades 2(10); 1–8. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#211|2]]. Dark Star, ed. ''Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader'', 3rd Edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012); Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and Feminism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun (Brill, 2017), 253–84; Lucy Nicholas, “Gender and Sexuality,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 603–21; Institute for Anarchist Studies, ''Perspectives on Anarchist Theory'', no. 29,'' Anarcha-Feminisms ''(Portland, OR: Eberhardt Press, 2016).</div>
+The Palenque Triad. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, n.s. 52:91–99. Paris.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#311|3]]. Dana M. Williams, “Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the Development of Black Anarchism,” ''Journal of Black Studies'' 46, no. 7 (2015): 678–703; Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, ''Anarchism and the Black Revolution ''(London: Pluto Press, 2021); William C. Anderson, ''The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021).</div>
+. Estudios Epigraphicos II. Antropología e Historia de Guatemala, vol. xx, no. I, 13–24. Guatemala: Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#411|4]]. Deric Shannon and J. Rogue, “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality,” Anarkismo website, https://www.anarkismo.net/article/14923; J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism,” in ''Quiet Rumours'', 43–46. For an overview of intersectionality from a nonanarchist perspective, see Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, ''Intersectionality'','' ''2nd edition'' ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).</div>
+Miscelánea palencano. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, LIX:107–135.
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+Brown, Kenneth L.
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+Cabrera Castro. Rubén, Saburo Sugiyama, and George Cowgill
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+Carlson, John
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+Carr, H. S.
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+Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase
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+b Glimmers of a Forgotten Realm: Maya Archaeology at Caracol, Belize. Orlando: University of Central Florida.
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+Closs, Michael
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+Coe, Michael D.
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+A Model of Ancient Community Structure in the Maya Lowlands. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:97–114.
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+Lords of the Underworld: Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University.
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+Coe, William R.
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+a Tikal, Guatemala, and Emergent Maya Civilization. Science. 147:1401–1419.
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+a A New Order and the Role of the Calendar: Some Characteristics of the Middle Classic Period at Tikal. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 38–50. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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+b Teotihuacán at Tikal in the Early Classic Period. Actes de XLI1 Congrés International des Américanistes 8:251–269. Paris.
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+n.d. There’s No Place Like Hom. A paper presented at “Elite Interaction Among the Classic Maya,” a seminar held at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, October 1986.
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+a Polyvalance in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, edited by John Justeson and Lyle Campbell, 17–76. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pisacane, Carlo. “Political Testament.” Translated by Davide Turcato. Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, September 22, 2011. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/carlo-pisacane-propaganda-by-the-deed-1857.</div>
+b The Hieroglyphic Band in the Casa Colorada. A paper presented at the American Anthropological Association, November 17, 1984, Denver, Colorado.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Plechanoff, George. ''Anarchism and Socialism''. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912.</div>
+n.d. Some Readings Involving Dates at Chichón Itzá. A paper presented at “The Language of the Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Postgate, Raymond W., ed. “Debates and Resolutions of the First International on The Control of Industry.” In ''Revolution from 1789 to 1906'', 392–94. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.</div>
+Fox, John W.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pouget, Émile. “The Basis of Trade Unionism.” Libcom website, November 19, 2010. https://libcom.org/article/basis-trade-unionism-emile-pouget</div>
+Lowland to Highland Mexicanization Processes in Southern Mesoamerica. American Antiquity 45(l):43–54.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Direct Action''. London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003.</div>
+Maya Postclassic State Formation: Segmentary Lineage Migration in Advancing Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Party of Labour.” Libcom website, November 19, 2010. https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
+On the Rise and Fall of Tuldns and Maya Segmentary States. American Anthropologist 91(3):656–681.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “What Is the Trade Union?” In ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'', edited by Daniel Guérin, 427–35. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
+Freidel, David A.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology''. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.</div>
+Maritime Adaptation and the Rise of Maya Civilization: The View from Cerros, Belize. In Prehistoric Coastal Adaptations, edited by B. Stark and B. Voorhies, 239–265. New York: Academic Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''What Is Property?'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.</div>
+Cultural Areas and Interaction Spheres: Contrasting Approaches to the Emergence of Civilization in the Maya Lowlands. American Antiquity 44:6–54.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Puente, Isaac. ''Libertarian Communism''. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005.</div>
+a Civilization as a State of Mind: The Cultural Evolution of the Lowland Maya. In The Transition to Statehood in the New World, edited by Grant D. Jones and Robert Kautz, 188–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Raevsky, Maxim. ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019.</div>
+b Continuity and Disjunction: Late Postclassic Settlement Patterns in Northern Yucatán. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 311- 332. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Reclus, Élisée. “An Anarchist on Anarchy.” In Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, ''136–49. </div>
+c The Political Economics of Residential Dispersion Among the Lowland Maya. In Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, edited by Wendy Ashmore, 371–382. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus''. Edited by John Clark and Camille Martin. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.</div>
+Political Systems in Lowland Yucatán: Dynamics and Structure in Maya Settlement. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard M. Leventhal, 375–386. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, and Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Development of Liberty in the World.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, September 2, 2016. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/elisee-reclus-the-development-of-liberty-in-the-world-c-1850.</div>
+Polychrome Facades of the Lowland Maya Preclassic. In Painted Architecture and Polychrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, edited by E. Boone, 5–30. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877.” In Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 188–91.</div>
+s New Light on the Dark Age: A Summary of Major Themes. In Ike Lowland Maya Postclassic, edited by Arlen F. Chase and Prudence M. Rice, 285–309. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September 1872.” In Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 179–83. </div>
+a Terminal Classic Lowland Maya: Successes, Failures, and Aftermaths. In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 409–430. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rocker, Rudolf. ''Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism''. London: Freedom Press, 1988.</div>
+b Introduction. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, xiii-xxii. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004.</div>
+c The Monumental Architecture. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. I: An Interim Report, edited by Robin A. Robertson and David A. Freidel, 1–22. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,''” ''1919. Translated by Cord-Christian Casper. Academia.edu website, n.d. https://www.academia.edu/39134774/Rudolf_Rocker_Syndicalist_Declaration_of_Principles.</div>
+Yaxuna Archaeological Survey: A Report of the 1986 Field Season. Dallas: Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The London Years''. Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005.</div>
+n.d. The Monumental Architecture: Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 5. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press (in preparation).
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Marx and Anarchism.” Anarchist Library website, April 26, 2009. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-marx-and-anarchism.</div>
+Freidel, David A., and Anthony P. Andrews
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Nationalism and Culture''. Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937.</div>
+n.d. The Loltun Bas-relief and the Origins of Maya Kingship. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in press).
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', edited by Friends of Aron Baron, 47–56. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
+Freidel, David A., Maria Masucci, Susan Jaeger, Robin A. Robertson
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rogdaev, N. “On the Anarchist Movement in Russia.” In Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam'', 176–95. </div>
+n.d. The Bearer, the Burden, and the Burnt: The Stacking Principle in the Iconography of the Late Preclassic Maya Lowlands. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, Vol. VII, edited by Merle Greene Robertson. Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rogue, J., and Abbey Volcano. “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism.” In Dark Star, ''Quiet Rumours'','' ''43–46.</div>
+Freidel David A., and Jeremy A. Sabloff
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Roller, Arnold. ''The Social General Strike''. Chicago: The Debating Club No. 1, 1905.</div>
+Cozumel: Late Maya Settlement Patterns. New York: Academic Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Santillán, Diego Abad de. ''After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain''. Translated by Louis Frank. New York: Greenberg, 1937.</div>
+Freidel, David A., and Vernon L. Scarborough
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Schapiro, Alexander. “Introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
+Subsistence, Trade and Development of the Coastal Maya. In Maya Agriculture: Essays in Honor of Dennis E. Puleston, edited by K. V. Flannery, 131–155. New York: Academic Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Schwitzguébel, Adhémar. “On Resistance Funds.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 138–40. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
+Freidel, David A., and Linda Schele
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Seguí, Salvador. “Anarchism and Syndicalism.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Libcom website, August 2, 2015. https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-syndicalism-salvador-seguí.</div>
+a Kingship in the Late Preclassic Lowlands: The Instruments and Places of Ritual Power. American Anthropologist 90(3):547–567.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Shannon, Deric, and J. Rogue. “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality.” Anarkismo website, November 11, 2009, https://www.anarkismo.net/article/14923.</div>
+b Symbol and Power: A History of the Lowland Maya Cosmogram. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 44—93. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Stalin, Joseph. ''Works'','' ''Vol. 1,'' 1901–1907''. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954.</div>
+n.d. Dead Kings and Living Mountains: Dedication and Termination Rituals of the Lowland Maya. In Word and Image in Maya Culture, edited by William Hanks and Don Rice. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press (in press).
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Steimer, Mollie, Simon Fleshin, Voline, Sobol, Schwartz, Lia, Roman, and Ervantian. “Concerning the Platform for an Organization of Anarchists.” In ''Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin'', edited by Abe Bluestein, 50–62. Libertarian Publications Group, 1983.</div>
+Furst, Peter T.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Taber, Mike, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889–1912''. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.</div>
+Fertility, Vision Quest and Auto-Sacrifice: Some Thoughts on Ritual Blood-letting Among the Maya. In The Art, Iconography, and Dynastic History of Palenque, Part HI: Proceedings of the Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, 211–224. Pebble Beach, Calif.: Robert Louis Stevenson School.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Tucker, Benjamin. ''Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism''. 2nd ed. New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897.</div>
+Garber, James F.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Varlin, Eugène. “Workers Societies.” Translated by Iain McKay. Anarchist Writers website, October 6, 2018. https://anarchism.pageabode.com/precursors-of-syndicalism.</div>
+Patterns of Jade Consumption and Disposal at Cerros, Northern Belize. American Antiquity 48(4):800–807.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Voline. “Synthesis (Anarchist).” In ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', edited by Mitchell Abidor, 197–205. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019.</div>
+The Artifacts. In Archaeology at Cerros, Belize, Central America, Vol. 1: An Interim Report, edited by R. A. Robertson and D. A. Freidel, 117–126. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Unknown Revolution 1917–1921''.'' ''Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019.</div>
+Garza Tarazona de Gonzalez, Silvia, and Edward B. Kurjack
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Warren, Josiah. ''The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren''. Edited by Crispin Sartwell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.</div>
+Atlas arqueológico del estado de Yucatan, Tomo 1. Merida: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Wilson, Charlotte. ''Anarchist Essays''. Edited by Nicolas Walter. London: Freedom Press, 2000.</div>
+Gibson, Eric C., Leslie C. Shaw, and Daniel R. Finamore
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Winstanley, Gerrard. “''The Law of Freedom” and Other Writings''. Edited by Christopher Hill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.</div>
+Early Evidence of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing at Kichpanha, Belize. Working Papers in Archaeology, No. 2. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Witkop-Rocker, Milly. “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?” Translated by Jesse Cohn. Anarchist Library website, n.d. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/milly-witkop-rocker-what-does-the-syndicalist-women-s-union-want.</div>
+Gordon, George Byron
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Yuzuru, Kubo. “On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928).” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 379–81. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
+Caverns of Copán. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. I (5). Cambridge.
-<div style="text-align:center;">'''Secondary Sources'''</div>
+Graham, Ian
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ackelsberg, Martha. ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
+Ihe Art of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, and New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Adams, Matthew S. ''Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism''. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.</div>
+–1986 Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Adams, Matthew S., and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War''. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.</div>
+Grove, David
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Anderson, Benedict. ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination''. London: Verso, 2013.</div>
+Olmec Monuments: Mutilation as a Clue to Meaning. In The Olmec and Their Neighbors: Essays in Memory of Matthew W. Stirling. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Archer, Julian P. W. ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact''. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.</div>
+Ancient Chalcatzingo. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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+Grube, Nikolai
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Avrich, Paul. ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018.</div>
+Städtegriinder und “Erste Herrscher” in Hieroglyphentexten der Klassischen Mayakultur. Archiv für Völkerkunde, 69–90. Wien: Museum für Völkerkunde.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarchist Portraits''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.</div>
+Grube, Nikolai, and Linda Schele
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+^873 U-Cit-Tok , the Last King of Copan. Copán Note 21. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006.</div>
+b The Date on the Bench from Structure 9N-82, Sepulturas, Copán, Honduras. Copán Note 23. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hon- dureño de Antropología e Historia.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.</div>
+Cu-Ix, the Fourth Ruler of Copán and His Monuments. Copán Note 40. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Russian Anarchists''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
+Grube, Nikolai, and David Stuart
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Avrich, Paul, and Karen Avrich. ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.</div>
+Observations on T110 at the Syllable ko. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing No. 8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
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+Hamilton, Rachel
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Bakunin was a Racist.” Anarchopac.com, October 31, 2021. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-bakunin-was-a-racist. </div>
+n.d. The Archaeological Mollusca of Cerros, Belize. Manuscript to be included in the final reports of the Cerros Project, dated 1988.
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+Hammond, Norman
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation''. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.</div>
+Unearthing the Oldest Maya. National Geographic Magazine 162:126–140.
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+n.d. Excavation and Survey at Nohntul, Belize, 1986. A paper presented at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, April 1986.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Bantman, Constance, and Bert Altena, eds. ''Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies''. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.</div>
+Hammond, N., D. Pring, R. Wilk, S. Donaghey, F. P. Saul, E. S. Wing, A. G. Miller, and L. H. Feldman
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+The Earliest Lowland Maya? Definition of the Swazy Phase. American Antiquity 44:92–110.
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+Hansen, Richard
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Beer, Max. ''A History of British Socialism'', Vol. 2. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921.</div>
+Excavations on Structure 34 and the Tigre Area, El Mirador, Petén, Guatemala: A New Look at the Preclassic Lowland Maya. A master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bernecker, Walther L. “The Strategies of ‘Direct Action’ and Violence in Spanish Anarchism.” In ''Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'', edited by Wolfgang J Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, 88–111. London: The Macmillan Press, 1982.</div>
+Las investigaciones del sitio Nakbe, Peten, Guatemala: Temporada 1989. A paper delivered at the Tercer Simposio del Arqueología Guatemalteca, Guatemala City, July 1989.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, Christopher J. ''The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.</div>
+Harrison, Peter
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, David. ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009.</div>
+The Central Acropolis, Tikal, Guatemala: A Preliminary Study of the Functions of Its Structural Components During the Late Classic Period. A Ph.D dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, David, and Constance Bantman, eds. ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational''. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.</div>
+Architecture and Geometry in the Central Acropolis at Tikal. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, held in Palenque, Chiapas, México, in June 1989.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berthier, René. ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877''. London: Anarres Editions, 2015.</div>
+Haviland, William A.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Boehm, Christopher. ''Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.</div>
+Stature at Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Ancient Maya Demography and Social Organization. American Antiquity 32:316–325.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Boggs, Carl. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control.” ''Radical America'' 11 (1977): 99–122.</div>
+Ancient Lowland Maya Social Organization. In Archaeological Studies in Middle America. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 26, 93–117. New Orleans.
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Bookchin, Murray. ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998.</div>
+Dynastic Genealogies from Tikal, Guatemala: Implications for Descent and Political Organization. American Antiquity 42:61–67.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Breines, Wini. “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law.’” ''Social Problems'' 27, no. 4 (1980): 419–29.</div>
+Healy, P. F., J. D. H. Lambert, J. T. Arnason, and R. J. Hebda
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+Caracol, Belize: Evidence of Ancient Maya Agricultural Terraces. Journal of Field Archaeology 10:773–796.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Buttà, Fausto. ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism''. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.</div>
+Heyden, Doris
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cahm, Caroline. ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.</div>
+Caves, Gods, and Myths: World-View and Planning in Teotihuacán. In Mesoamerican Sites and World-Views, edited by Elizabeth Benson, 1–37. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Campbell, Al, and Mehmet Ufuk Tutan. “Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks.” ''Studies in Political Economy'' 82, no. 1 (2008): 153–70.</div>
+Hirth, Kenneth
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cappelletti, Ángel J. ''Anarchism in Latin America''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
+Beyond the Maya Frontier: Cultural Interaction and Syncretism Along the Central Honduran Corridor. In The Southeast Classic Maya Zone, edited by Elizabeth Boone and Gordon Willey, 297–334. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Carlson, Andrew R. ''Anarchism in Germany'', Vol. 1, ''The Early Movement''. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972.</div>
+Hopkins, Nicholas
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+Mitchum, B.
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+Moholy-Nagy, Hattula
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+Spatial Distribution of Flint and Obsidian Artifacts at Tikal, Guatemala. In Maya Lithic Studies: Papers from the 1976 Belize Field Symposium, edited by Thomas R. Hester and Norman Hammond, 91–108. Special Report No. 4. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio.
-''Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States''
+Molloy, John P., and W. L. Rathje
-<div style="color:#000000;">© 2023 Zoe Baker</div>
+Sexploitation Among the Late Classic Maya. In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 430–444. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-<div style="color:#000000;">This edition © 2023 AK Press (Chico / Edinburgh)</div>
+Morley, Syl vanus Griswol d
-<div style="color:#000000;">ISBN 978-1-84935-498-1</div>
+An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphics. New York: Dover Publications. 1975 reprint.
-<div style="color:#000000;">E-ISBN 978-1-84935-499-8</div>
+The Inscriptions at Copan. The Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 219. Washington, D.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948753</div>
+The Chichén Itzá Project. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 259–273. Washington, D.C.
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+Archaeology. Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book 26, 231–240. Washington, D.C.
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+Inscriptions at the Caracol. In The Caracol of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 454, edited by Karl Ruppert. Washington, D.C.
-<div style="color:#000000;">Chico, CA 95973</div>
+Morris, Earl H., Jean Chari ot, and Ann Axtell Morris
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+The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Vols. 1 and 2. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 406. Washington, D.C.
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+Nakamura, Seiichi
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+Proyecto Arqueológico La Entrada, Temporada 1986–1987: resultados preliminares e interacción interregional. A paper presented at IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondurena, held in La Ceiba, Altántida, Honduras, June 22–26.
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+Oakland, Amy
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+Teotihuacán: The Blood Complex at Atetelco. A paper prepared for a seminar on the transition from Preclassic to Classic times, held at the University of Texas, 1982. Copy in possession of author.
-<div style="color:#000000;">Edinburgh, EH6, 7BN</div>
+Orejel, Jorge
-<div style="color:#000000;">Scotland</div>
+n.d. An Analysis of the Inscriptions of the Petex Batun Region. A paper prepared for the graduate seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, University of Texas, 1988.
-<div style="color:#000000;">www.akuk.com</div>
+Pahl, Gary
-<div style="color:#000000;">akuk@akpress.org</div>
+Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Copán: A Catalogue and Historical Commentary. Ph.D dissertation, University of California. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.
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+Parsons, Mark
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+Three Thematic Complexes in the Art of Teotihuacán. A paper prepared at the University of Texas. Copy in possession of author.
-<div style="color:#000000;">Cover photographs (top) courtesy of Centro Studi Libertari / Archivio Giuseppe Pinelli, Milan, Italy (bottom) courtesy of Abel Paz Fund, Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation Archive (CNT)</div>
+Pasztory, Esther
-<div style="color:#000000;">Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, recycled paper</div>
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+Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
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+a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by E. P. Benson, 7–48. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
+b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
+a Human Sacrifice Among the Classic Maya. In Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, edited by Elizabeth Boone, 7–49. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
+b Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
+a Balan-Ahau: A Possible Reading of the Tikal Emblem Glyph and a Title at Palenque. Fourth Round Table of Palenque, 1980, Tol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 59–65. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
+b Some Suggested Readings of the Event and Office of Heir-Designate at Palenque. Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, 287–307. Albany: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany.
+c The Hauberg Stela: Bloodletting and the Mythos of Classic Maya Rulership. In Fifth Palenque Round Table 1983, Fol. VII. gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Virginia M. Fields, 135–151. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
+a Architectural Development and Political History at Palenque. In City-States of the Maya: Art and Architecture, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, 110–138. Denver: Rocky Mountain Institute for Pre-Columbian Studies.
+b The Founders of Lineages at Copan and Other Maya Sites. Copán Note 8. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+c Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies. University of Texas.
+d Yax-K’uk’-Mo’ at Copán: Lineage Founders and Dynasty at Ancient Maya Cities. Copón Note 8. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+a A Possible Death Date for Smoke-Imix-God K. Copón Note 26. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+b Stela I and the Founding of the City of Copán. Copón Note 30. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+c The Reviewing Stand of Temple 11. Copón Note 32. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+d Notes on the Rio Amarillo Altars. Copón Note 37. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+e Notebook for the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing Workshop at Texas. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas.
+f New Data on the Paddlers from Copán Stela 7. Copón Note 29. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+a Altar F’ and the Structure 32. Copón Note 46. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+b The Xibalba Shuffle: A Dance After Death. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 294—317. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
+a A House Dedication on the Harvard Bench at Copán. Copón Note 51. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+b The Numbered-Katun Titles of Yax-Pac. Copón Note 65. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+c Some Further Thoughts on the Copán-Quiriguá Connection. Copón Note 67. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+n.d.a House Names and Dedication Rituals at Palenque. In Visions and Revisions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press (in press).
+n.d.b The Demotion of Chac-Zutz’: Lineage Compounds and Subsidiary Lords at Palenque. In the Sixth Round Table of Palenque, gen. ed., Merle Green Robertson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (in press).
+n.d.c The Tlaloc Heresy: Cultural Interaction and Social History. A paper given at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.
+n.d.d Blood-letting: A Metaphor for “Child” in the Classic Maya Writing System. A manuscript prepared in 1980 for an anthology in honor of Floyd G. Lounsbury.
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+a The Brother of Yax-Pac. Copan Note 20. Copán, Honduras: Copan Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+The Father of Smoke-Shell. Copón Note 39. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+Schele, Linda, Nikolai Grube, and David Stuart
+The Date of Dedication of Ballcourt III at Copán. Copán Note 59. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+Schei e, Linda, and Peter Mathews
+n.d. Royal Visits Along the Usumacinta. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
+Schele, Linda, Peter Mathews, and Floyd Lounsbury
+n.d. Parentage Expressions from Classic Maya Inscriptions. Manuscript dated 1983.
+Schele, Linda, and Jeffrey H. Miller
+The Mirror, the Rabbit, and the Bundle: Accession Expressions from the Classic Maya Inscriptions. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
+Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller
+The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
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+a Te-tun as the Glyph for “Stela.” Copón Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+b The Chronology of Altar U. Copón Note 3. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+c Paraphrase of the Text of Altar U. Copón Note 5. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+Schele, Linda, David Stuart, Nikolai Grube, and Floyd Lounsbury
+A New Inscription from Temple 22a at Copán. Copán Note 57. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
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+The Ball Courts at Copan. Contributions to American Anthropology and History 55:185–222. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
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+a Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. RES 7/8, 6–20.
+b Epigraphic Evidence of Political Organization in the Usumacinta Drainage. Unpublished manuscript in possession of the authors.
+a The Inscription on Four Shell Plaques from Piedras Negras, Guatemala. In The Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, Pol. 6, gen. editor, Merle Greene Robertson; vol. editor, Elizabeth Benson, 175–184. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.
+b A New Child-Father Relationship Glyph. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, 1 & 2, 7–8. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
+a The Hieroglyphic Name of Altar U. Copan Note 4. Copan, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+b The Chronology of Stela 4 at Copán. Copán Note 12. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+c The Classic Maya Social Structure: Titles, Rank, and Professions as Seen from the Inscriptions. A paper presented at “Maya Art and Civilization: The New Dynamics,” a symposium sponsored by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, May 1986.
+d The “Lu-bat” Glyph and its Bearing on the Primary Standard Sequence. A paper presented at the “Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigrafía Maya,” a conference held in Guatemala City in August 1986.
+e A Glyph for “Stone Incensario.” Copán Note 1. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
+a Nuevas interpretaciones de la historia dinástica de Copán. A paper presented at the IV Seminario de Arqueología Hondureño, held in La Ceiba, Honduras, June 1987.
+b Ten Phonetic Syllables. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 14. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
+a Letter dated February 10, 1988, circulated to epigraphers on the ihtah and itz’in readings.
+b Letter to author dated March 8, 1988, on the iknal/ichnal reading.
+c Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 175–221. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
+n.d. Kinship Terms in Mayan Inscriptions. A paper prepared for “The Language of Maya Hieroglyphs,” a conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, February 1989.
+Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, and Linda Schele
+A New Alternative for the Date of the Sepulturas Bench. Copan Note 61. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+Stuart, David, Nikolai Grube, Linda Schele, and Floyd Lounsbury
+Stela 63: A New Monument from Copán. Copán Note 56. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+Stuart, David, and Stephen Houston
+n.d. Classic Maya Place Names. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research.
+Stuart, David, and Linda Schele
+a Yax-K’uk’-Mo’, the Founder of the Lineage of Copán. Copán Note 6. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+b Interim Report on the Hieroglyphic Stair of Structure 26. Copán Note 17. Copán, Honduras: Copán Mosaics Project and the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+Stuart, George
+n.d. Search and Research: An Historical and Bibliographic Survey. In Ancient Maya Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press (in preparation).
+Stuart, George, and Grant Jones
+n.d. Can Ek and the Itzas: New Discovered Documentary Evidence. Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research (in preparation).
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+a The Language of Symbols in the Ritual Environment at Yaxchilán, Chiapas. A Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
+b Summer Solstice Ceremonies Performed by Bird Jaguar III of Yaxchilán, Chiapas, Mexico. Estudios de Cultura Maya XVI:85–112. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
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+a A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel. Journal of Anthropomorphic Research 44-- 183–203.
+b A Study of Classic Maya Scaffold Sacrifice. In Maya Iconography, edited by Elizabeth Benson and Gillett Griffin, 331–351. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
+n.d. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Cult of Sacred War at Teotihuacán. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.
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+Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 589. Washington, D.C.
+A Blood-Drawing Ceremony Painted on a Maya Vase. Estudios de Cultura Maya 1:13–20. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
+A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
+a Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
+b The Bacabs: Their Portraits and Glyphs. In Monographs and Papers in Maya Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 61 edited by William R. Bullard, Jr. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
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+The Hieroglyphic Texts of Las Monjas and Their Bearing on Building Activities. In Las Monjas by John Bolles. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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+Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. XVIII. Reprinted with permission of the original publishers by Kraus Reprint Corporation. New York, 1966.
+Chichón Itzá and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporaneous Maya and Toltec. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, XI and XII. Cambridge.
+Turner, B. L., II
+Comparison of Agrotechnologies in the Basin of Mexico and Central Maya Lowlands: Formative to the Classic Maya Collapse. In Highland-Lowland Interaction in Mesoamerica: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Arthur G.Miller, 13–47. Washington, D C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
+Turner, B. L., II, and Peter D. Harrison
+Prehistoric Raised Field Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands: Pulltrouser Swamp, Northern Belize. Science 213:399–405.
+Valdés, Juan Antonio
+Uaxactún: recientes investigaciones. Mexican 8(6):125–128.
+Los mascarones Preclássicos de Uaxactún: el caso del Grupo H. In Primer Simposio Mundial Sobre Epigraphía Maya, 165–181. Guatemala City: Asociación Tikal.
+Vlchek, David T., Silvia Garza de Gonzál ez, and Edward B. Kurjack
+Contemporary Farming and Ancient Maya Settlements: Some Disconcerting Evidence. In Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture, edited by Peter D. Harrison and B. L. Turner II, 211–223. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
+Vogt, Evon Z.
+The Genetic Model and Maya Cultural Development. In Desarollo Cultural de los Mayas, edited by E. Z. Vogt and A. Ruz, 9–48. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
+Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
+n.d. Indian Crosses and Scepters: The Results of Circumscribed Spanish-Indian Interactions in Mesoamerica. A paper presented at “Word and Deed: Interethnic Images and Responses in the New World,” a conference held in Trujillo, Spain, December 12–16, 1988.
+Walker, Debra S.
+n.d. A Context for Maya Ritual at Cerros, Belize. A paper presented at the Advanced Seminar on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Austin, Texas, March 21, 1986.
+Wauchope, Robert
+Modern Maya Houses: A Study of Their Significance. Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. 502. Washington, D.C.
+Webster, David
+Defensive Earthworks at Becan, Campeche, Mexico: Implications for Maya Warfare. Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University Pub. 41. New Orleans.
+Warfare and the Evolution of Maya Civilization. In The Origins of Maya Civilization, edited by R. E. W. Adams, 335–371. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
+Cuca, Chacchob, Dzonot Ake: Three Walled Northern Maya Centers. Occasional Papers in Anthropology Number 11. Department of Anthropology. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University.
+Recent Settlement Survey in the Copán Valley, Copán, Honduras. Journal of New World Archaeology V(4):39–63.
+Webster, David L., William L. Fash, and Elliot M. Abrams
+Excavaciones en el Conjunto 9N8: Patio A (Operación VIII). In Excavaciones en el area urbana de Copán, 157–319. Tegucigalpa: Secretaria de Cultura y Turismo, Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia.
+Willey, Gordon R.
+The Artifacts of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Tol. 64(1). Cambridge.
+The Classic Maya Hiatus: A Rehearsal for the Collapse? In Mesoamerican Archaeology: New Approaches, edited by Norman Hammond, 417—130. London: Duckworth.
+Excavations at Scibal, Department of Peten, Guatemala, Number 1, Artifacts. Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Vol. 14. Cambridge.
+Willey, Gordon, and Richard Leventhal
+Prehistoric Settlement at Copán. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 75–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.
+Williamson, Richard, Donna Stone, and Alfonso Morales
+Sacrifice and War Iconography in the Main Group, Copán, Honduras. A paper presented at the Seventh Round Table of Palenque, in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, June 1989.
+Wisdom, Charles
+The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
+n.d. Materials on the Chorti Languages. Collection of Manuscripts of the Middle American Cultural Anthropology, Fifth Series, No. 20. Microfilm, University of Chicago.
+Wren, Linea
+n.d. Elite Interaction During the Terminal Classic Period of the Northern Maya Lowlands: Evidence from the Reliefs of the North Temple of the Great Ballcourt at Chichón Itzá. In Classic Maya Political History: Archaeological and Hieroglyphic Evidence, edited by T. P. Culbert. A School of American Research Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
+Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, editors
+The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
+Zavala, Lauro José
+Informe personal de exploraciones arqueológicas: segunda temporada 1950. An unpublished report provided by Alberto Ruz Lhull.
+</biblio>
+ Index
+<biblio>
+agriculture. 39–40, 56, 62, 93–94, 255. 433–434. 439
+at Copan, 321–322. 336, 488 raised-field, 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433
+swidden, 39
+ahau, 17, 20, 21, 45, 53–54, 57, 58,
+. 419, 423, 436 ahauob, see kings; nobility Ah-Bolon-Tun, king of Seibal. 387–389, 393, 505
+Ah-Cacaw, king of Tikal. 184,
+–212, 413, 451. 461, 462–466 accession of, 208 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 202 Calakmul vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213 costumes worn by, 209–211 in dedication rituals, 197 203, 205, 206–211. 462–465
+height of, 195. 198, 462 name glyph of, 462
+ritual performances of, 202–203, 209 son of, 214. 466
+stelae of, 204–205, 213, 486 tomb of, 205. 214. 466 war captives of, 205–206, 211, 212, 215, 457
+altars, 386, 389, 506
+at Caracol, 171, 173, 456, 464 at Copan, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337, 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 491–492, 493–194
+Altun Ha, 159, 505
+ancestor cartouches, 372, 393, 479, 503 ancestors, 26, 39, 57, 84, 153, 202–203, 207. 275, 307, 394, 395, 506 founding, 85, 87, 116, 140–141, 159–160, 222, 256–257, 271, 310–313, 431, 432, 470 as orchards, 217, 221 relics of, 135, 463 on stelae, 141, 441
+Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–76, 101, 114–116, 124, 125. 142. 226, 243, 245, 425, 429, 434, 436, 454, 473
+bailgame of, 74–75, 76. 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488
+as kingship prototypes, 115–116, 211. 239, 316, 376, 488
+symbols of, 114–115, 125, 245
+Andrews, Anthony P., 498
+Andrews, E. Wyllys, IV, 495, 496
+Argurcia, Ricardo. 490
+armor, cotton, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502
+astronomy, 73, 76, 78. 81, 98, 276. 425, 480
+see also specific planets
+Avendano y Layóla, Andrés de, 397–400, 506–507
+Aveni, Anthony F., 473–474
+“ax,” 173, 456, 487
+axes, 145, 358, 364, 501
+Ayala Falcon, Marisela, 447. 463, 496 Aztecs, 147, 377–378, 421, 429, 431, 433, 444, 497, 498. 500, 504
+Baby Jaguar, 392, 406
+backracks, 211, 213, 242, 390, 454
+Bahlum-Kuk, king of Palenque, 217, 221–222, 254. 261, 470, 474 baktun, 7 8, 81, 82, 341, 3 85, 430, 446
+Ball, Joseph, 423, 497
+ballcourt markers, 77, 158, 173, 455, 488
+at Teotihuacan, 158, 451
+at Tikal, 146, 149, 154, 156, 158, 451 ballcourts, 77, 158, 353, 451 455
+at Caracol, 173, 455
+at Cerros, 104–105, 123, 126, 451
+at Chichén It/a, 77. 368, 370, 371–372, 373
+at Copan. 77, 308, 312, 316, 319, 321, 325, 344, 428, 485, 487–188 false, 322–323, 489
+“Thrice-Made Descent,” 487—488
+at Ucanal, 194–195, 461 bailgame, 38, 76–77, 158, 176–177, 373, 429, 451 455
+of Ancestral Hero Twins, 74–75. 76, 77. 126, 376, 383, 487–488
+of Bird-Jaguar, 283, 289, 487 purposes of, 126
+war captives in. 126, 177. 179. 457.
+–488, 503–504
+Bardslay, Sandy. 477
+Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo, 472, 501
+Battle Disks, 395
+benches, 327, 328–330. 336–337, 371, 490, 491, 492. 493, 506
+Benson, Elizabeth, 421
+Berlin. Heinrich, 49, 58, 245, 419, 420. 423. 457, 458, 459, 461, 467, 471. 477. 478
+Beyer, Hermann, 496
+Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 263–264, 270–305, 329, 330, 338, 361 370. 375, 383, 473, 479, 481–482
+accession of, 275, 285, 287–290 bailgame of. 283, 289, 487 birth of, 266, 268, 269, 271,
+bloodletting rituals of. 276–282, 285–286, 291
+bundle ritual of, 298–301 flapstaff rituals of, 275, 278, 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 303, 383
+heir-designation ritual of, 298–301 marriage alliances of, 273, 294 rivals of, 271–272
+state visits of, 265, 303–305. 494 stelae of, 270. 275, 276, 283, 285, 287, 288. 291
+Bird-Jaguar (continued)
+war captives of, 285, 287, 291, 292, 295, 301
+black (ek), 66
+bloodletters, 135
+obsidian, 90, 202, 233, 275, 404, 432
+stingray spines, 135, 281, 425, 492 bloodletting rituals, 19, 38, 64, 66,
+–71, 87, 164, 233–235, 243, 334, 399, 404, 426–427, 432, 444
+of Ah-Cacaw, 158, 202
+of Bird-Jaguar, 276–282, 285–286, 291
+of Chan-Bahlum, 233–234, 257, 259, 260, 475
+of First Mother, 248, 254—255, 260
+“fish-in-hand” glyph and, 254, 257, 268, 276, 357, 473, 480, 494
+giving birth to gods through, 89, 259, 260, 425, 427, 475^76
+of Great-Jaguar-Paw, 149, 156–157, 443
+of Lady Eveningstar, 276, 279–280, 287, 291, 481
+of Lady Great-Skull-Zero, 275–276, 280, 287, 292, 479
+of Lady Wac-Chanii-Ahau, 184
+of Lady Xoc, 266–268, 289–290, 291, 293, 478, 501
+materializations through, 70, 87, 89, 425, 427, 437, 441
+pain unexpressed in, 279, 481
+paper and, 89, 101, 202–203, 233–235, 275
+penis perforation in, 89, 111, 149, 202, 233, 281, 286, 426, 447
+of Stormy-Sky, 188, 203, 208
+tongue perforation in, 89, 207, 266, 268, 271, 276, 279, 286, 426, 465
+in villages, 89–90, 101, 307
+blood scrolls, 134, 164, 170, 316, 3 86, 391, 395, 406, 438–139, 503
+“blue-green” (yax), 66, 150, 310, 436, 440, 465, 476
+Bonampak, 236, 264, 383, 392, 432, 469, 471, 480, 481, 506
+murals at, 87, 298, 424, 444, 447, 458, 462, 463, 464, 470, 506 Bonpland, Aimé, 420
+books, 18, 38, 55, 74, 399, 401
+codices, 50, 54, 84, 396, 420, 421, 431, 489
+see also Chilam Balam, Books of;
+Popol Vuh
+Bricker, Victoria, 458, 465, 495
+Brown, Kenneth L., 452
+bundle rituals, 293, 294, 298–301, 304
+bundles, sacred, 201, 289, 394, 404, 463, 482
+burials, burial rituals, 45, 56, 103, 131–132, 149, 421–122, 453, 456, 480
+offerings in, 56, 134, 307–308, 421, 483
+of Pacal the Great, 228–235, 468, 469
+sacrificial victims in, 134, 233, 469, 475
+see also tombs
+Cabrera, Paul Felix, 466
+cacao, 38, 92, 93, 94, 101, 435
+Cacaxtla, 163, 374. 380, 444, 453, 502–503, 504
+caches, 102, 120–122, 161, 200–201.
+–394, 435. 437–438, 450, 452, 462–463, 465, 486
+cahalob, see nobility cuh rank, 374 calabtun, 81, 430 Calakmul, 384, 388, 424, 440
+Ah-Cacaw vs., 205, 209, 211–212, 213
+Emblem Glyph of, 456–457, 466, 479 in wars of conquest, 174–179, 181–183, 184. 191, 211–212, 213, 214
+Calendar Round, 45, 81, 82, 83, 344, 430
+calendars, 46, 78, 79–83, 84, 90. 144, 165, 252, 399–400, 402, 429, 430–431, 432, 442, 451, 472–473, 476, 504, 507 haab (365-day), 81, 83, 84 Long Count, 81–83, 399, 430–431, 442, 451, 507
+tzolkin (260-day), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84, 400, 451
+Campbell, Lyle, 422
+Can-Ek, king of Itza, 396–401, 402, 506–507
+canoes, 60–61. 277, 397, 398, 424 seagoing, 100, 351, 377, 434
+Captain Serpent, 371–372, 503
+Captain Sun Disk, 371–373, 393, 503, 505
+captives, war, see war captives
+Caracol, 181, 183, 189–190, 193, 104–195, 319, 373, 391, 424, 449, 452, 454–455, 461, 503 altar at, 171, 173, 456, 464 ballcourt at, 173, 455 monuments effaced by. 167, 172–173, 178–179, 196, 462
+Naranjo conquered by, 174–179, 205, 211, 212, 214, 317, 478. 499 stylistic influence of, 174, 205, 464 Tikal conquered by, 167, 171–179, 197, 214, 317, 457, 458, 462, 499 tribute paid to. 178 cargo officials, 42–43, 44 Carlson, John, 496 Carr, H. Sorayya, 434 cartouches, 52–53, 54
+ancestor, 372, 393, 479, 503 Catherwood, Frederick, 46, 217, 261, 466
+Cauac-Sky, king of Quirigua, 317, 456, 486, 487
+caves, 67, 72, 98, 368, 385. 423, 427. 488. 496, 500, 502, 506
+ceiba trees, 61, 72, 306, 489
+Celestial Bird, 90, 242, 243, 255, 398, 407, 473, 503
+Celestial Monster, see Cosmic Monster cenotes, 48, 61, 352, 395, 500, 502 censers, 101, 146, 203, 279, 280, 281. 342, 369, 434, 443
+Cerros, 15–16, 74. 98–129, 211, 215, 228, 243, 253, 308, 379, 423, 433–438, 460, 504 abandonment of, 127–128 ballcourts at, 104—105, 123, 126, 451 daily life of, 98–103 docking area of, 100 founding of, 106, 116–117, 434, 437
+houses at, 98–99, 110, 119–120 kingship at, 98–129
+labor force of, 106, 107, 116, 119, 122, 123
+location of, 98
+original village at, 98–103, 105, 119, 123
+patriarchs of, 100–101. 110
+temple pyramids at, 15, 104—128, 136, 138, 170, 238, 435, 438, 439, 440, 470
+trade at, 98, 100–103, 434
+water management at, 105, 119
+Chaacal III, king of Palenque, 230, 469, 476
+Chae, 392, 427, 479
+Cha-Chae ritual, 44
+Chae Mool, 366, 506
+Chac-Xib-Chac (God B), 70, 144–145, 151, 201, 242, 285, 323, 408, 489
+Chan-Bahlum, king of Palenque, 21, 124–125, 217–261, 305, 316, 435 accession of, 235, 240–241, 242, 471 bloodletting rituals of, 233–234, 257, 259, 260, 475
+dedication rituals of, 242, 256–260, 268 , 473–4 74, 475
+dynastic claims of, 235–261
+Group of the Cross erected by, see Group of the Cross, Palenque in heir-designation rituals, 235–237, 239–241, 242, 432, 469–471
+name glyph of, 466
+in Pacal the Great’s burial ritual, 228–235
+plaster portrait of, 260
+six-digit deformity of, 236 war captives sacrificed by, 233, 236, 243, 258, 259, 260
+Chariot, Jean. 500, 502
+Chase, Arlen F. and Diana Z., 455, 456, 461
+Cheek, Charles, 452
+Chel-Te-Chan, see Shield-Jaguar II, king of Yaxchilan
+Chichen Itza, 14, 61, 163, 332, 346–376, 385, 389, 392–396. 495–504, 506
+Casa Colorada at, 357, 362–363, 498–499, 501
+Castillo at, 349, 356, 368
+Cenote of Sacrifice at, 48, 352, 395, 500, 502
+Emblem Glyph of, 363–364, 496, 502
+empty throne of, 370–371, 394
+Great Ballcourt at, 77. 368, 370.
+–372, 373
+High Priest’s Grave at, 356, 368, 385, 387, 500, 502
+High Priest’s Temple at, 356 inscribed monuments of, 355, 356–364, 496
+multepal government of, 357, 359–364, 370–371, 374, 501. 502 nonglyphic monuments of, 349, 355–356, 358, 364–374
+Northwest Colonnade at, 364, 374 pottery of, 351, 354–355, 498 processions at, 364–370, 372, 500, 503–504
+serpent imagery of, 356, 357, 372–373, 394–395, 501, 503
+size of, 349, 497
+Temple of the Chae Mool at, 356.
+, 393–394
+Temple of the Four Lintels at, 357, 496, 500
+Temple of the Hieroglyphic Jambs at. 358
+Temple of the Jaguar at, 366, 372, 373, 374
+Temple of the Warriors at, 356, 364–371, 372, 373, 374, 394, 500, 502, 503, 506
+two apparent occupations of, 354–355, 356–357, 358, 497, 500, 501
+war captives in, 366–370, 372, 373–374, 502–504
+Watering Trough Lintel at, 356 Chilain Balam, Books of, 209, 346–347 351, 378, 393, 467, 495, 496, 497, 498, 501 prophecies of, 396, 397, 400, 401, 506, 507
+Chinkultic, 385
+Chontai (Putun) Maya, 350–351, 380, 382, 385, 497, 504
+Christianity, 45, 77
+Maya’s conversion to, 396–401 ch’ul (“holy”). 71, 423, 426, 473 clans, 84–85, 133, 311, 431 Classic period, 26–33, 52, 57–60, 74, 86, 87, 130, 308, 309, 310, 402, 423, 484
+Early, 26–27, 57, 145, 165, 313
+Late, 27–30, 57, 59, 60, 204, 313, 349, 387, 424, 486, 489
+Terminal, see Terminal Classic period
+climate. 61–62, 322
+Closs, Michael, 443. 458, 460 clubs, 146, 153, 184, 295, 364 Coba, 349, 352–354, 374, 430, 459, 471, 496
+sacbe road of, 353, 498 size of, 351, 498, 499
+Cocom family of Mayapan, 361–363, 371, 396, 499, 502
+codices, 50, 54, 84..396, 420. 421, 431, 489
+Coe, Michael D„ 49, 425, 429, 440 Coe, William R„ 434, 437, 438, 464 Coggins, Clemency, 438, 442—4–43, 452, 453, 454. 456, 458, 462, 464 colors, 133, 201, 464 of costumes, 397 of four cardinal directions, 66, 67, 78, 83
+of temple pyramids, 111–112, 162, 476
+Columbus, Christopher, 77, 379, 401 Comitan, 392 compounds, residential, see residential compounds
+construction pens. 106, 123, 204, 438 containment rituals, 73–74, 110. 229, 428, 464
+contracts, 92. 433
+Copan, 16, 50, 51. 58, 87, 193, 306–345, 346, 351, 422, 423, 431, 432, 437, 443, 457, 465, 475, 478, 483–495 agriculture at, 321–322, 336, 488 altars at, 311, 322, 324, 327–328, 331–332, 336, 337. 338–340, 344, 484, 489, 401–492, 493–494
+Ballcourt at, 77, 308, 312, 316, 319, 321, 325, 344. 428. 485, 487–488
+in Classic period, 308, 309, 310, 313, 484, 486, 489
+council of brothers at, 324, 331–340, 489, 492, 493
+decline of, 338–345, 381, 401–402 deforestation and, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
+disease in, 322, 335, 336, 379, 489 early inhabitants of. 306–307 Emblem Glyph of, 309, 484 founding of, 309–310, 484 Great Plaza at, 307, 308, 313, 316, 322, 325, 489
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 312, 313, 319, 341, 427, 466–167, 484, 487, 488 nobility of, 311, 314–315, 316–319, 320, 322, 325, 328–330, 335, 337–338, 341, 487
+Palenque and, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
+platforms at. 324, 327, 485, 486 population of, 308, 317, 321–322, 335, 343, 345, 379, 483–484, 486, 488
+in Preclassic period. 308, 310, 484
+Quingua and, 315, 317–319, 342, 486–187
+residential compounds at, 85–86, 308–309, 316–317, 321, 328- 330, 335, 337, 345, 483–184, 488, 491
+Reviewing Stands at, 322–323, 489 temple pyramids at, 14, 308, 309, 312–313, 316, 319, 321, 322–327, 336, 341, 342, 427, 428, 432, 484, 485, 486. 488–489, 490–401, 492–193
+tombs at, 308, 341, 483, 493 urban development of, 308–309 villages at, 307, 308, 309, 330, 332, 339
+corbel-arch construction, 123, 433, 490
+Cortes, Hernando, 38, 377–379, 396, 398
+Cortez, Constance, 473, 477, 478, 496
+Cosmic (Celestial) Monster, 66, 70, 114–115, 170, 242, 316, 325–326, 330, 340. 388, 389, 408, 425, 436, 489
+cosmos, 19, 55, 67, 69–70, 73, 78, 84, 87, 137, 218, 242
+costumes, 115, 139, 144, 145, 161, 209–211, 268, 278, 389, 397, 471, 480, 499, 506
+burial, of Pacal the Great, 229–230, 242, 469
+staff king, 165, 454
+of Teotihuacan, 162, 163, 453
+of Tlaloc-Venus war, 146–147, 149, 15 3, 159–160, 163, 194, 205, 209–210, 258, 259, 260, 319, 341, 367, 370, 443, 444, 475
+of war captives, 367, 373–374, 464, 482, 502–503
+of women, 279, 280 cotton, 94. 101, 435
+armor made of, 151, 243, 268, 341, 367, 502
+council houses (Popol Nah), 200. 336–337, 367, 369, 371, 463, 492–493
+Cozumel Island, 15, 351, 378–379, 400, 458, 501
+craftsmen, 40, 42, 91, 337, 344–345 of temple pyramids, 106–107, 108, 109, HO, 111–112, 116, 120, 435, 436
+Crane, Cathy J., 434, 435
+creation mythology, 81, 82, 84, 106, 142. 429–430
+creation date in, 245, 252, 471, 472 in Group of the Cross texts, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
+see also Popol Vuh
+Cuello, 164, 421, 422
+Cu-Ix, king of Calakmul, 175, 383, 457, 479
+Culbert, T. Patrick, 423
+Curl-Snout, king of Tikal. 147, 154–158, 159–160, 162, 210, 361, 438, 442–143, 453
+accession of, 155, 157, 448–449, 450–451
+stelae of, 155, 159, 171
+tomb of, 160, 197, 199
+darts, 152, 184, 201, 206, 358, 369, 393, 449
+dates, see calendars
+Davoust. Michel, 496
+“dawn” (pac), 483
+“day” (kin), 81. 145
+days, 52–53, 78–81, 82–83, 84
+decapitation. 75. 1b
+axes in, 145. 358, 501
+sacrifice by, 124, 126, 145, 149, 158, 243, 245, 358. 373, 451, 487–488, 501
+see also severed heads
+dedication rituals, 104, 106, 323, 357, 428, 432
+of Ah-Cacaw, 197–203, 205, 206–211. 462–465 .
+caches in, 102, 120–122, 161, 200–201, 393–394, 435, 437–438, 450. 452, 462–463, 465, 486
+of Chan-Bahlum. 242, 256–260. 268, 473–474, 475
+offerings in, 94, 104, 106, 120–122, 123. 127, 145, 328, 435, 437–438, 491
+sacrificial victims in, 145, 164, 206, 211
+deforestation, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
+del Rio, Antonio, 46, 420, 466
+Demarest, Arthur A., 499, 505
+Dillon, Brian, 447, 464
+directions, four cardinal, 66, bl, 316, 326, 387, 410, 426
+temple trees as, 107, 109, 435, 485
+time and, 78, 83
+disease, 44
+in Copan, 322, 335, 336, 379, 489
+disembodied heads, 142, 243
+“door” (ti yotof), 11
+doorways, 71–72, 104, 110, 358, 427 Dos Pilas, 179–195, 258, 319, 320, 379, 383–384, 389, 443, 452, 456, 487, 499, 505, 506
+Emblem Glyph of, 180. 458
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, I8l, 182, 458
+in wars of conquest, 179–186, 2H-212
+Double-Bird, king of Tikal, 174
+stelae of, 167, 173, 455
+Dresden Codex, 396, 420, 421, 431, 489
+drum censers, 101, 434
+drums, 100, 151, 184, 235, 277, 368
+Diittirig, Dieter, 473—474
+Dzibilchaltun, 51, 354, 496, 499
+earflares. 127, 141, 201, 486
+of mask panels, 107, 111, 435–436 “earth” (cab), 21. 52, 53, 66, 317, 400, 426, 444, 486
+east (lakin), 6b, 426
+eccentric flints, 243, 409, 482
+Edmonson, Munro, 498, 501
+-Rabbit, king of Copan, 315–319, 323–325, 326, 327, 329, 335, 341, 419, 424
+stelae of, 312, 316, 322, 339, 484, 486, 492
+as war captive, 317–319, 321, 337, 456, 486–187, 488, 493
+Eliade, Mircea, 427–428
+Eliot, Steve, 507
+El Mirador, 128, 130, 136, 140, 144, 174, 211, 422, 423, 434, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440 El Perú, 181, 456–437 El Salvador, 56, 307, 422 Emblem Glyphs, 58, 60, 423, 424, 429, 438, 444, 477–478
+of Calakmul, 456–457, 466, 479
+of Chichén Itzá, 363–364, 496, 502
+of Copán, 309, 484
+of Dos Pilas, 180, 458
+of Naranjo, 186, 459
+of Palenque, 49, 227, 468, 488
+of Piedras Negras, 466
+of Tikal, 141, 142, 153, 180, 207–208, 391, 441, 443, 456, 458, 459, 465–466, 484
+of Yaxchilán, 479
+England. Nora, 507
+face painting, 101, 151, 152
+Fahsen, Federico, 441, 442, 447, 450–451
+fairs, 92, 93, 433
+Fash, Barbara, 483, 489, 492–493, 494 Fash, William, 428, 431, 432, 483, 484, 485 486, 487, 488, 489, 491, 493, 494 festivals, 88, 91. 92, 93, 95, 144, 202, 264, 432
+of modern Maya, 42–43, 44, 45.
+Fields, Virginia, 423, 449–450 “fire” (kak), 357, 360, 500 fire rituals, 200–203, 357, 373, 462–463, 500
+“first” (yax), 332, 436–437, 440, 483, 492
+First Father (GI’), 245–251, 254, 255–256, 260, 475 birth of, 252, 253, 472, 473 First Mesa Redonda of Palenque. 14, 49, 466
+First Mother (Lady Beastie), 142, 231, 236, 245–251, 252–255, 256, 261, 474
+accession of, 247, 254, 476 birth of, 223, 246, 252, 472 473 bloodletting ritual of, 248, 254–255, 260
+Lady Zak-Kuk analogous to, 223, 227, 245, 252–253, 254 zac uinic headband of, 253–254 “fish-tn-hand” glyph, 254, 257, 268, 276, 357, 473, 480, 494 tlapstaff rituals, 274–275, 278. 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 303, 383, 481 flayed-face shield, 243, 409 flints, 201, 463
+eccentric, 243, 409, 482 Flint-Sky-God K, king of Dos Pilas, 179–186, 188, 191, 194. 211–212, 383, 459, 461
+marriage alliances of, 181, 183–186, 195, 320
+sons of, 181, 214, 458
+stela of, 182–183
+war captive of, 181, 183
+Follett, Prescott H. F., 447 forests, 59, 61–62, 306, 349 deforestation of, 322, 335–336, 343, 345, 488–489
+Förstemann, Ernst, 46
+Forsyth, Donald, 422 fourfold pattern, sacred, 112, 116, 121, 149, 388, 394, 410, 426, 436, 437, 488, 505
+see also directions, four cardinal
+Fox, James, 496, 501, 502
+Fox, John W., 422, 505
+Freidel, David A., 15–16, 41, 42, 43, 44. 48 49, 404–405, 426, 458, 501, 505
+Furst, Peter T., 427, 432
+GI, 245–251, 253, 257, 260, 413–414 434, 471–472
+GI’, see First Father
+G1I (God K: Kawil), 78, 143, 181, 211, 236, 245–251, 254, 257, 276, 289, 343, 384, 410, 414, 429, 473
+Manikin Scepter of, 294, 295, 298, 301, 371, 389, 482
+GUI, 142, 211, 245–251, 253, 257, 395, 414, 434, 436, 471 472
+glyphic tags, 112, 436
+God B (Chac-Xib-Chac), 70, 144–145, 151, 201, 242, 285, 323, 408, 489
+God C, 410, 426
+God D (Itzamna), 366, 410
+God K, see GII
+“God K-in-hand” events, 311, 312, 317, 484
+God L, 241, 243, 410–411, 471
+god masks, 151, 209, 285, 370, 371, 398
+God N (Pauahtun), 316–317, 325, 327, 329, 330, 410, 414, 486, 487, 489, 491
+gods, 38, 66, 67, 71, 84, 149, 429 giving birth to, through bloodletting ritual, 89, 259, 260, 425, 427, 475–476
+Graham, Ian, 420, 456, 458, 460, 461, 496
+graphic forms, 53–54
+Great-Jaguar-Paw, king of Tikal, 144–149, 152, 153, 159, 162, 163, 165, 179, 195, 199, 348. 448, 464–465, 506
+bloodletting ritual of, 149, 156–157, 443
+name glyph of, 149, 440 Smoking-Frog’s relationship to, 155–157
+stelae of, 144–145, 146, 442
+Grolier Codex, 421, 431
+Group of the Cross, Palenque, 233, 237–261, 268, 297, 419, 432, 464, 470–471
+pib na of, 239, 242, 243, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258–260, 261, 470, 474, 475
+reliefs on, 239–244
+Temple of the Cross in, 14, 237, 239–240, 242–243, 246–247, 252–254, 255–256, 257, 259, 426, 429. 470, 472, 474, 476
+Temple of the Foliated Cross in, 237. 240–242, 243. 248–249, 254–255, 256, 257, 259, 471, 475
+Temple of the Sun in, 124–125, 237, 240–242, 243, 250–251, 256, 257, 258–259, 469, 471, 475
+texts on, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
+Grove, David, 464
+Grube, Nikolai, 45, 420, 441. 446, 459, 474, 484, 487, 491, 492, 494
+Guatemala, 39, 56, 307, 401, 420, 422, 424
+haab (365-day) calendar (vague year), 81, 83, 84
+Hammond, Norman, 421, 451, 453
+Hansen, Richard, 422, 423, 434, 438 Harrison, Peter, 463, 464
+Harvard-Arizona Cozumel project, 15, 419
+Hauberg Stela, 87, 423
+Haviland, William A., 431, 433, 439, 462 headbands, 102, 115, 121, 135, 200, 253, 436, 439 pendants of, 102, 422 zac uinic, 253–254
+Headband Twins, 411, 436, 466 headdresses, 147, 156, 211, 242, 277, 279, 370, 450, 454, 469, 481, 494, 503, 505 balloon. 146, 209, 444 Mosaic Monster, 164, 210, 453 tasseled, of Teotihuacan, 162, 452
+Headrick, Annabeth, 500 heads, 287 disembodied, 142, 243 see also severed heads heart-extraction rituals, 357, 358, 369, 373, 503, 506 heir-designation rituals, 235–237, 239–241, 242, 298–301. 304. 432, 469–471
+helmets, 151, 153, 184, 268, 367 hematite, 94, 121, 201, 463
+Hero Twins, see Ancestral Hero Twins hieroglyphic stairs, 264, 283. 481
+at Copan, 312, 313, 319, 341, 427, 466–467, 484, 487. 488
+at Dos Pilas, 181, 182, 458 illegible resetting of, 194, 461 at Naranjo, 174, 178, 179, 184, 194–195, 461
+at Palenque, 265, 477
+Hirth, Kenneth, 486 historical hypothesis, 46–49, 50, 171–172, 455, 477
+“holy” (chul), 71, 423, 426, 473 hom glyph, 148, 158, 184–186, 343, 373, 446–447, 459 460
+Honduras, 39, 56, 306, 317. 423, 485, 486
+Hopkins, Nicholas, 422, 424, 426, 431, 507
+hotun, 337, 338, 493
+“house” (na; otot), 71, 256, 427, 491 Houston, Stephen, 45, 420, 421, 424, 441, 447, 455, 456–457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 474, 479, 481, 489. 499. 503, 505
+“human being” (uinic), 81, 253, 377, 430, 500
+Hun-Ahau (Ancestral Hero Twin), 74–76, 436
+symbolized by Venus, 114–115, 125, 245
+incense, 100, 101, 228, 281, 369, 404 Incidents of Travels in Central America,
+Chiapas and Yucatan (Stephens and Catherwood), 46, 261, 466
+Isla Cerritos, 351, 496, 498
+Itzá Maya, 57, 396–401, 421, 497418 see also Chichen Itzá
+Itzamna (God D), 366, 410
+Ix-Chel (Moon Goddess), 366, 377, 378, 412–413, 502
+Ixlú, 389, 391, 506
+Izamal. 351, 498–499
+Izapa, 74. 423
+jade, 91, 92, 93, 94
+in burial offerings, 56, 307, 308, 421.
+jewelry of, 102, 103, 120–121, 127, 200, 201, 211 463
+ritually broken, 103, 127. 201. 463 “jaguar” (balam, bahlum\ 52, 217, 466, 495
+jaguar imagery, 124—125. 143, 164, 211, 243, 444
+of mask panels, 112–114, 139, 440 Jaguar-Paw, king of Calakmul.
+–183, 191, 211–212, 213 accession of. 181–182. 184, 458 as war captive. 205–206. 211, 212, 214. 215, 457
+Jaguar Sun God, 112–114, 124, 211, 243, 245, 260, 451 see also Gill
+Jester God, 115. 135, 143, 201, 211, 253, 411, 422–423, 436, 437 jewelry, 93, 100. 115, 281, 397. 486 jade. 102, 103, 120–121, 127, 200, 201, 211. 463 pectoral, 102, 121. 135, 211, 439, 491–492
+Jnnbal. 391
+Johnson. Richard, 496. 505
+Jones, Carolyn, 478, 493
+Jones, Christopher, 439, 440, 441, 448, 454, 455, 461–462, 464, 466
+Jones, Grant, 506
+Jones. Tom, 470, 478, 480, 493 Joralemon, David, 426, 432 Josserand, J. Kathryn, 421, 422, 424, 507
+Jupiter, 83. 147. 158, 163. 164, 192, 256, 268, 343. 438, 443–446.
+. 456, 461, 473–474, 501 Justeson. John, 424, 430, 431
+Kaminaljuvu, 21, 162, 164, 442, 443,
+’ 451. 452
+Kan-Bahlum-Mo’ of Palenque, 221, 223, 225, 468
+Kan-Boar, king of Tikal. 167, 199, 454
+Kan-cross Waterlily Monster, 243, 411–412
+Kan-Xul. king of Palenque, 223, 228–235, 419, 464
+as war captive, 392, 424. 468, 469, 476, 487
+katun, 45, 78, 81. 144, 145, 209, 325, 338, 430, 442, 446, 451, 454. 467. 489, 494, 495
+prophecies of, 396, 397, 399–400
+Kaufman, Terrence S., 422
+Kawil. see GII
+Kelley, David. 49, 419, 420, 421, 443, 449, 457–458, 471, 477, 484, 486, 489, 496, 503
+kin (“day”: “sun”), 81. 112, 115, 145, 426
+kings, 17, 18, 19, 21, 43, 57, 58, 76, 90, 116, 120, 128–129, 363, 400 accession of, 5 9, 15 9–160, 242 charisma of 120, 128, 215, 217. 311, 427, 442
+failure of, 128
+obligations of, 92
+propaganda of, 128, 149, 159–160, 163, 193, 437
+ritual performances of, 105, 108, 110–111. 114, 116, 117, 118–119, 121, 136, 139, 201, 295, 314, 435, 436, 485
+as shamans, 65, 66, 72–73, 87–88,
+. 105, 110. 427
+social system and, 65, 86–95, 97–98 state visits of, 92, 433
+succession of, 59, 87, 121–122, 174, 256, 424, 431. 432, 456, 464 trade and, 90, 98, 101–102 tribute paid to, 91–92, 93, 94, 99, 178, 380, 442
+victorious, history written by. 55, 271
+wars of, see war, sacred; war captives: wars of conquest women as, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
+as World Tree, 67–68, 90, 242–243 see also specific kings
+kingship, 4, 52, 56–60, 63, 96–129, 260,
+, 317. 320, 338, 375–376, 380, 389, 422, 496
+Ancestral Hero Twins as prototypes of. 115–116, 211, 239, 316, 376, 488
+cargo officials vs., 43 at Cerros, 98–129 community cooperation necessary to, 116. 119, 128
+emblems of, 141–142, 143 functions of, 98
+invention of, 96–98, 128, 308, 434 symbols of, 68–69, 94. 139, 142, 201.
+, 245, 294, 311, 312, 342, 393, 394, 440, 470
+kinship, 45. 84–87, 253, 359–361. 422, 432
+clans in, 84–85, 133, 31 1, 431 “sibling” relationships in, 156, 360, 375,“449, 500. 504
+yichan relationship in. 300, 303, 479
+see also lineages
+Kirchhoff. Paul, 420
+Knorozov, Yuri. 49, 421
+Kowalski, Jeff K , 496, 497. 504, 505
+Krochock Ruth. 477. 496–497, 500.
+, 503
+Kubler, George, 419, 465, 497, 506 Kukulcan, cult of, 362, 371, 394—395, 506
+labor force, 91, 93, 94, 97, 136, 195, 215, 439, 442
+at Cerros, 106, 107, 116. 119, 122, 123
+Lady Beastie, see First Mother Lady Eveningstar of Calakmul and
+Yaxchtlan, 269, 270, 272–273, 276–282, 293, 299, 301. 370, 479 bloodletting ritual of, 276, 279–280, 287, 291, 481 death of. 285, 291
+Lady Great-Skull-Zero of Yaxchilan, 275–282, 285, 287, 289, 295 bloodletting rituals of. 275–276, 280, 287, 292, 479 bundle ritual of, 298–301
+Lady Kanal-Ikal, king of Palenque, 221–223, 224, 467
+Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Dos Pilas and Naranjo, 183–186, 195, 221, 459, 460. 461, 478 bloodletting ritual of, 184 journey of, 183–184 son of, see Smoking-Squirrel, king of
+Naranjo
+stelae of, 184–185, 187–188, 190.
+, 460 war captive of. 190 Lady Xoc of Yaxchilan, 265–271, 273, 276, 277–278, 282, 287. 288, 295. 296. 301. 479 age of, 269, 480
+bloodletting rituals of, 266–268, 289–290, 291, 293, 478, 501
+death of, 284, 285, 291, 478 unusual prominence of, 268, 478
+Lady Zak-Kuk, king of Palenque, 221, 223–225, 227–228, 266, 467. 468, 478
+First Mother analogous to, 223, 227, 245, 252–253, 254
+name glyph of, 227, 468 political ability of, 224—225
+Lamanai. 128, 136, 436, 437, 438, 505
+Landa, Bishop Diego de, 425, 433, 464, 500, 501, 502, 504
+La Pasadita, 301–302, 329
+Laporte Molina, Juan Pedro, 452, 463
+Larios, Rudy, 483, 485
+Laughlin, Robert, 43
+La Venta, 38, 315, 422, 423, 486, 492
+Leiden Plaque, 143, 144, 441
+Leyenaar, Ted J. J.. 429
+Lincoln, Charles, 497, 499, 500, 503 lineage compounds, 88, 158–159, 203, 308, 501
+benches in, 328–330, 491 patriarchs of, 328–329 of scribes, at Copan, 85, 316–317, 329–330, 345, 431
+lineages, 57, 84–87. 125, 201, 208, 319, 422, 431. 432, 438, 484
+matrilineal descent in, 270, 271, 360, 363–364, 366, 502; see also Chan-Bahlum, king of Palenque; Pacal the Great, king of Palenque
+patrilineal descent in, 84—85, 94, 133, 431
+logographs, 52, 421
+Long Count, 81–83, 399, 430^31, 442, 451
+zero date of, 82, 83, 507
+Lord Kan II. king of Caracol, 171,
+, 174, 176–178. 189–190, 212, 320, 455
+Lords of Death, 74–76, 77, 124, 125, 126, 235, 243, 316, 383
+Lords of the Night, 81, 82, 156, 449, 473
+Lord Water, king of Caracol, 171.
+–174, 195, 348, 455, 462
+accession of, 173
+sons of, 174, 176, 456
+Lothrop, Samuel K , 506
+Lounsbury, Floyd G, 49. 421, 429, 431, 440, 443–444, 458, 461, 467, 468, 470, 471, 472, 473, 479
+Love, Bruce. 463
+“Macaw Mountain,” 335, 483
+Machaquila, 385
+MacLeod, Barbara, 427, 429
+MacNeish, Richard S., 421
+Madrid Codex, 396, 421, 431
+Mah-Kina-Balam, king of El Peru. 181, 457
+maize, 19, 38, 99, 243, 259, 260, 281, 307, 321, 335
+“male-genitalia” glyph, 363–364, 483
+Maier, Teobert, 46, 48, 262, 476 Manikin Scepter, 294, 295, 298, 301, 371, 389, 482
+Marcus, Joyce, 423, 452, 456. 457, 466, 484, 487, 488
+markets, 92–93, 433 marriage alliances, 59, 158, 215, 265, 443, 458
+of Bird-Jaguar, 273, 294
+marriage alliances (continued) of Flint-Sky-God K, 181, 183–186, 195, 320
+of Shield-Jaguar, 270–271, 479
+of Smoke-Shell, 319, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
+Mars, 192, 256, 343, 473–474 mask panels, 15, 106, 108–109, 111–115, 116, 120, 121. 133, 164, 211, 435–437, 498 earflares of, 107, 111, 435–436 jaguar imagery on, 112–114, 139, 440 at Tikal, 169–170, 454 at Uaxactun, 136–139, 169, 439–440 masks, god, 151, 209, 285, 370, 371, 398
+“mat” (pop), 440, 492
+Matheny, Ray T., 434
+Mathews, Peter, 14, 49, 421. 423, 424, 430, 431, 432, 440, 441, 442, 443, 447. 448, 450, 454, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 474, 477. 478, 479, 484, 506 matrilineal descent, 270, 271, 360, 363–364, 366, 502 see also Chan-Bahlum, king of
+Palenque; Pacal the Great, king of Palenque
+Maudslay, Alfred P., 46, 470, 476
+Maw of the Underworld, 69–70, 72, 327, 332, 412
+Maya, 17–33, 37–95 bilingual, 5O--51 Christian conversion of, 396–401 chronology of, 26–33, 55- 60 diet of, 99, 101, 131, 434 fatalism of, 400, 507 height of, 195, 198, 471 highland, 38, 42, 43, 57 lowland, 38, 50–51, 56, 57. 59, 61, 346
+political geography of, 57–60, 215, 261
+population of, 57, 423, 424 region settled by, 22–25, 37–39, 40–41, 51
+social system of. see social system technology of, 60–61, 96–97, 346, 433–434, 495
+world view of, 19, 38, 52, 56, 64–77 writing system of, see writing system Maya, modern, 39—45, 50, 65, 309, 330, 332, 401 403, 404–405, 424, 426, 429, 470
+division of labor in, 42 extended families of, 39–40, 45, 84, 97
+festivals of, 42–43, 44, 45, 92 oral traditions of, 44, 54, 74 public officials of, 42–43, 44, 428 rituals of, 42, 44, 94 shamans of, 44 45, 72, 401, 405, 427, 485
+Mayan, 39, 421, 426, 427 pronunciation of, 20–21
+Mayapan, 398, 501–502
+Cocom family of, 361–363, 371, 396, 499, 502
+Means, Philip A., 506, 507 merchants, 92, 93, 351, 433 Mesoamerica, 18, 37–38, 56, 81, 142, 254, 367, 401, 420, 444
+Mexican Year Sign, 412, 443, 444 Mexico, 37, 39, 56, 97, 163, 346, 349, 374–375, 396, 497, 501
+Middleworld, 66, 67, 74, 76, 425 Mije-Zoquean languages, 97, 422 Miller. Arthur G., 454. 503
+Miller, Jeffrey, 440, 456, 457, 458 Miller. Mary E., 404, 424, 425, 426, 427, 432, 441, 444, 447, 471, 481, 489, 503, 505, 506
+Miller, Virginia, 497
+Millon, René, 444, 453, 465 mirror-image texts, 326 mirrors, 393
+mosaic, 121, 201, 394, 437, 463 Moholy-Nagy, Hattula, 452
+Molloy, John P., 459
+money, 38, 92–93, 94, 405
+Monte Alban, 162, 444, 452
+months (uinic, uinal), 81, 82, 83, 430 moon, 81, 83, 201, 245, 256, 459, 473–474
+Moon Goddess (Ix-Chel), 366, 377,
+, 412–413, 502 Moon-Zero-Bird, king of Tikal, 143, 144, 441
+Morales, Alfonso, 488, 490
+Morley, Sylvanus G., 47, 420, 484, 486, 494
+Morris, Ann Axtell and Earl H., 502 mosaic mirrors, 121, 201, 394, 437, 463 Mosaic Monster, 164, 205, 210, 453 Motul de San José, 291, 294, 295, 388 “mountain” (witz), 68, 71, 427, 479 mountains, 67, 225, 335, 471
+temple pyramids as, 71–72, 106, 121, 239
+multepal government, 357, 359–364, 370–371, 374, 501, 502
+murals, 305, 371–373, 503
+at Bonampak, 87, 298, 424, 444, 447, 458, 462, 463, 464, 470, 506
+at Teotihuacan, 158, 162, 164, 451, 453
+at Tikal, 133, 134
+at Uaxactun, 449
+mythology, see creation mythology: Popol Vuh
+Nah Tunich, 51, 183, 457, 459 Nakamura, Seiichi, 423 Nakbe, 422, 423, 438–439 Naranjo, 58, 181, 183–195, 258, 319, 320, 384, 423, 432, 457, 462 conquered by Caracol, 174–179, 205, 211, 212, 214, 317. 478, 499
+Emblem Glyph of, 186, 459 Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 174, 178, 179, 184, 194–195, 461
+Ucanal conquered by, 189–190, 194–195, 205, 212, 213, 460–461, 499
+Yaxhâ conquered by, 181, 191–192, 212, 213, 452, 499
+Naum-Pat, 377–379, 400
+nobility (ahauob; cahalob), 17, 18, 21, 43, 60, 65, 88, 89, 133, 134, 145. 200, 231, 235, 294, 351, 354, 441, 442
+Bird-Jaguar and, see Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilân
+comparative robustness of, 135–136, 380, 397, 433, 439, 506
+of Copan, 311, 314–315, 316–319, 320, 322, 325, 328–330, 335, 337–338, 341, 487
+ethnic markers of, 385, 387
+life-style of, 92, 480, 506
+rationale for, 98, 434
+state visits of, 92, 93, 433 in temple pyramid rituals, 118 titles of, 58–59, 85, 94, 358, 360, 374, 424, 431, 469, 501
+see also Chichén Itza
+Nohmul, 159, 451, 501 north (xaman), 66, 426, 472, 477 numbers, 81, 429
+arithmetic with, 92, 433
+sacred, 78, 108
+in writing system, 82 numerology, 84, 253. 429, 431, 472, 476
+obsidian, 93, 102, 131–132, 152, 153, 184, 201, 463
+bloodletters, 90, 202, 233, 275, 404, 432
+green, 159, 351, 451, 453 offerings, 131, 134- 135, 200–201, 404, 469
+in burials, 56, 134, 307–308, 421, 483 dedicatory, 94, 104, 106, 120–122, 123, 127, 145, 328, 435, 437–438, 491
+flowers as, 104, 106, 435
+plates for, 200, 463
+Olmec, 38, 56, 84, 105–106, 142, 164, 254, 307. 422, 428, 430, 431, 464, 483, 487
+Orejel, Jorge. 487
+Otherworld. 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 89, 98, 104, 111, 225, 232, 241, 260. 404, 405, 425, 426, 485 owl, as symbol, 156–157, 394, 443, 444, 449–450, 506
+Pacal I of Palenque, 222–223, 467
+Pacal the Great, king of Palenque, 14, 21. 82, 121, 156, 217–237, 260–261, 265, 305, 316, 382, 419, 430, 432, 449, 477 /
+accession of, 224, 474 birth of, 223, 252, 467, 472–473 burial costume of, 229–230, 242, 469
+burial of, 228–235, 468, 469 dynastic claims of, 217–224, 227–228, 467
+great-grandmother of, 221–223, 224, 467
+in Group of the Cross reliefs and texts, 242–243, 252–253, 255, 470–471
+mother of, see Eady Zac-Kuk, king of Palenque
+plaster portraits of, 231–232, 261, 469
+sarcophagus of, 217, 219, 221, 225–226, 228, 229–233, 236, 261, 398, 467, 468, 469, 494
+tomb of, 217, 221, 225–227, 228–233, 261, 469
+wife of, 469
+Pacay, Eduardo “Guayo,” 402–403 Paddler Gods, 389, 391, 412, 503 Pahl, Gary, 484
+Palenque, 13–14, 15, 16, 38, 49, 50, 51, 58, 87, 216–261, 265, 316, 346, 351, 396, 400, 419, 421, 423, 424, 431, 433, 438, 449, 452, 465. 466–476, 487, 501 architecture of, 216, 217, 225, 467 collapse of, 217, 381–382 Copan and, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491
+Emblem Glyph of, 49, 227, 468, 488 Group of the Cross at, see Group of the Cross, Palenque
+Hieroglyphic Stairs at, 265, 477 Palace at, 225
+Tablet of the 96 Glyphs of, 402, 507 Temple of the Count at. 225
+Temple of the Inscriptions at, 13, 217–237, 258, 430, 432, 467, 468, 474, 477
+Temple Olvidado at, 225, 467—1–68
+women as kings of, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
+Palenque Triad, 142, 223, 245–251, 252, 256, 257, 259–261 413–414, 471–472, 474, 475 see also GI: GII: Gill
+paper, 18, 50, 74, 421, 431, 433, 463
+as bandages 152
+bloodletting and, 89, 101, 202–203, 233, 235, 275
+in fire ritual, 202–203
+Paris Codex, 421, 431
+Parker, Joy, 16
+parry sticks, 364–365, 502
+Parsons, Lee, 422
+Pasztory, Esther, 453
+Patio Quad structures, 358, 501 patriarchs, 42, 56–57, 72, 85, 92, 97, 133, 201, 307, 319
+ofCerros, 100–103, 110
+of Cocom family, 361–362
+of lineage compounds, 328–329 patrilineal descent, 84–85, 94, 133, 431 Pauahtun (God N), 316–317, 325, 327, 329, 330, 410, 414, 486, 487, 489, 491
+pectoral jewelry, 102. 121, 135,211, 439, 491–492
+Pendergast, David M., 451
+penis perforation, 89, 111, 149, 202, 233, 281, 286, 426, 447
+Personified Perforator, 243, 255, 287, 414, 470, 479
+phonetic complements, 52, 447, 466 phoneticism, 49, 50, 421, 446 pib na, 239, 242, 243, 253. 255, 256, 257, 258–260, 261, 470, 474, 475
+pictun, 81, 430
+Piedras Negras, 264, 433, 437, 443, 455, 468, 477, 481, 493
+Emblem Glyph of. 466
+Pomona conquered by, 382–383, 452, 505
+state visits to, 265, 303–305, 494 platforms, 72, 106–107, 118, 123–124, 125, 132–133, 136
+at Copan, 324, 327, 485, 486
+houses on, 120
+at villages, 101, 434
+plazas, 38. 70–71, 106, 108, 117–118, 119, 266, 314, 425
+Pohl, Mary, 506
+pole star, 66, 256, 472
+political geography, 57–60, 215, 261
+Pomona, 382–383, 452, 505
+Popol Nah (council houses), 200, 336–337, 367, 369, 371, 463, 492–193
+Popol Vuh, 74–76, 77, 126, 245, 399, 425, 428, 429, 435, 436, 468, 473, 475–476, 487–488 population, 57, 423, 424
+of Copan, 308, 317, 321–322, 335, 343, 345. 483–484, 486, 488 portal temples, 118
+Postclassic period, 33, 57, 163, 361, 377–379, 396–401, 422, 423, 442, 504
+pottery, 307, 422, 423, 424–425. 433, 465, 483, 486, 491
+of Chichen Itza, 351, 354–355, 498 cylindrical tripod, 161, 452 ritually broken, 103, 106, 127, 428
+power: accumulation of, 72–73, 122, 203–204, 252, 428, 464
+objects of, 121–122, 200, 243, 464 power points, 67, 104, 122
+containment rituals at, 73–74, 110, 229, 428, 464
+edges as, 98 termination rituals at, 103, 120, 127–128, 134, 145, 203, 313, 428, 435, 438, 459–460, 464
+Preclassic period, 26, 45, 56–57, 74, 128–129, 438
+Early, 56, 421, 422
+Middle, 56, 180, 308, 420, 422
+Late, 57, 98, 112, 130, 136, 145, 164, 237, 308, 310, 421, 422, 423, 426, 431, 439, 441, 484
+Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, 14, 49, 466 primogeniture, 84, 85, 305. 431 Principal Hird Deity, see Celestial
+Bird processions, 364–370, 372, 500, 503–504 “progenitor,” 263, 363 prophecies, 378, 396—400, 401, 495, 504, 506, 507 Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 47–49, 171–172, 187, 262, 420, 442, 448, 453, 455, 459, 460, 465, 466, 477, 478, 483, 486, 487, 489, 496, 500, 501, 506 Puleston, Dennis, 426, 427, 433, 495, 506, 507
+Putun (Chontai) Maya, 350–351, 380, 382. 385’ 497, 504
+Puuc hills region, 349–354, 355. 374.
+, 497, 501 pyramids, see temple pyramids
+Quadripartite Monster, 70, 414—415, 425
+Quen Santo, 392
+Quiche Maya, 74, 422, 425, 428, 429, 463
+Quirigua, 49, 420, 424, 449, 456. 477.
+Copan and, 315, 317–319, 342, 486–487
+radiocarbon dating, 421, 434, 437
+Rafinesque, Constantine, 46 rain, 44, 61–63, 322, 335, 336, 393, 488 Cosmic Monster and, 66, 70 raised-field agriculture. 93, 94, 97, 379–380, 393, 433
+Rands, Robert, 504, 505
+Rathje, William L., 419, 459
+Recinos, Adrian, 425, 429 red (chac), 66 residential compounds, 84, 382 at Copan, 85–86, 308–309, 316—317, 321, 328–330. 335, 337, 345, 483-4X4. 488, 491
+of modern Maya, 39, 40 42, 45 Patio Quad structures, 358, 501 types of, 85–86 see also lineage compounds Rice, Don S., 506
+Ricketson, Oliver G. and Edith B., 439 Riese, Berthold, 432, 444, 484, 491, 494 Robertson, Merle Greene, 419, 420, 421, 434, 468, 469, 471, 482
+Robles, Fernando, 498 royal belt, 143, 144, 145, 211, 232, 242, 415, 440, 469, 488
+Roys, Ralph L , 433, 495, 501, 502
+Ruppert, Karl, 501
+Ruz Lhuillier, Alberto, 228, 468
+Sabloff, Jeremy A.. 419, 505
+sacbe roads, 351, 353, 355, 357, 498
+sacred geography, 67, 84, 423
+cities as, 70–73, 428
+sacred round (tzolkin calendar), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84, 400, 451
+salt, 92, 93, 351, 496, 498
+Sanders, William T., 432, 488
+San Diego clifl drawing, 87
+Sato, Etsuo, 486
+Satterthwaite, Linton, 454—455, 457
+Saturn, 83, 147, 158, 163, 192, 256, 438. 444–446, 450. 456, 461, 473–174. 501
+Scarborough, Vernon L., 437 scattering rituals, 328, 342, 480, 491 Scheie. Linda, 13–15, 37, 39, 49, 401–403, 404, 421, 424, 425, 426, 427, 432, 440, 441, 447, 457, 465, 467, 468, 471, 477, 483, 484, 485, 487, 489, 490, 491, 492, 494, 507
+Schellhas, Paul, 429
+scribes, 50, 53, 55, 58, 227, 400, 430, 465, 476, 478
+lineage compound of, at Copan, 85, 316–317, 329–330, 345, 431
+patron gods of, 316–317, 329 Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar, king of Tikal,
+–142, 144, 441
+segmentary social organization, 56–57, 422
+Seibal, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387–389, 391, 393, 452, 505, 506
+Seler, Eduard, 46
+semantic determinatives, 52–53, 436 sentence structure, 54
+Serpent Bar, 68–69, 90, 142, 242, 342, 384, 415, 426, 473, 492, 494 serpent imagery, 356, 357, 372–373, 394–395, 501, 503, 506
+severed heads, 124, 131, 149, 358, 451 on skull racks, 368, 373, 504 worn around necks, 151, 184, 341 see also decapitation
+“shaman” (way), 45, 441, 474 shamans, 15, 45, 97, 103, 133, 200–203, 229, 235, 369, 420, 427–428, 432, 437, 471
+divination stones of, 94, 103, 201, 394
+H-men, 401, 405
+kings as, 65, 66, 72–73, 87–88, 95, 105, 110, 427
+of modern Maya, 44–45, 72, 401, 405, 427, 485
+Sharer, Robert J., 488
+“shield” (pacal), 162, 217, 419, 449–150
+Shield-God K, king of Dos Pilas, 194, 214
+Shield-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 263, 265–271, 273–284, 295, 296, 299, 301
+accession of, 265–267, 269, 276, 289, 383, 478, 480
+age of, 265, 271, 273, 274, 275, 277 birth of, 265, 477 death of, 271, 283, 291
+flapstaff rituals of, 274–275, 278, 282, 284. 285, 293, 303
+marriage alliances of, 270–271, 479 stelae of, 265, 275, 285 war captives of, 265, 268, 273, 477—478
+Shield-Jaguar II, king of Yaxchilan, 297–303, 383
+birth of, 276, 285–287, 289–290 in heir-designation ritual, 298–301 shields, 151, 152, 156, 160, 209, 258, 259, 268, 341, 367, 443, 444, 474
+flayed-face, 243, 409
+Shield-Skull, king of Tikal, 195, 208, 215 tomb of, 197, 199, 462
+Shook, Edwin M.. 462, 463 “sibling” (ihtan; itah: yitah; yitan), 156, 265, 360, 375. 449, 477, 500, 504
+-Tun-Bird-Jaguar, king of Yaxchilan, 265, 270, 283, 477. 480 skull-racks, 368, 373, 504 “sky” (chan), 52, 255, 436–4.37, 472 “sleep” (wayel), 81, 429 Smith. A. Ledyard, 447–448 Smoke-Imix-God K, king of Copan, 312, 313–315, 316, 317, 319, 488 stelae of, 314, 333, 334, 344, 484, 485–486, 492
+Smoke-Monkey, king of Copan, 319, 336, 487, 493
+Smoke-Shell, king of Copan, 319–320, 325, 328, 341, 487, 491 marriage alliance of, 319, 320, 330–331, 333, 488, 491 stela of, 322 smoktng-ax, 231, 236, 245
+Smoking-Batab, king of Naranjo, 214. 466
+Smoking-Frog of Tikal, king of Uaxactun. 146–149. 152–160, 162, 163, 179, 361, 442 443, 448–449. 450 identity of, 153–158 length of reign of. 153, 157–158 name glyphs of, 153 stelae of. 146–147, 153–154, 158, 159, 210, 447
+Smoking-Squirrel, king of Naranjo, 184. 186–195, 205, 213, 214–215. 423, 461 mother of, see Lady
+Wac-Chanil-Ahau of Dos Pilas and Naranjo son of, 214. 466 stelae of, 187–188, 190–191, 192–193, 194, 460 war captives of. 190--191, 192, 193, 194, 460–461
+smoking torch symbol, 342–343, 494 “snake” (chan), 52, 217, 255, 436–437, 466
+social system, 84–95, 96–98 economic aspects of, 90–95 kings and, 65, 86–95, 97–98 kinship in, see kinship
+solar year, 78, 81, 429 south (noho!), 66, 426
+Spanish conquest, 15, 18, 20, 38, 45, 57, 74, 78, 346, 361, 377–379, 395, 396–401, 426
+spears, 184, 201, 243. 364, 371, 502 “spearthrower,” 156–157, 162, 449–450 spearthrowers, 146, 152, 153, 157, 160, 161, 164, 184, 201, 209, 364, 371, 373, 393
+spelling, 49, 52–53, 421
+Spinden, Herbert J., 47, 420, 427 spirit tube, 230, 232, 233
+Split-Earth, king of Calakmul, 213, 466 spondylus shells, 92, 93, 94, 100, 121, 135, 200, 278
+staff kings, 165–168, 204, 213, 390, 454 stairways, 106, 107–108, 118. 387
+war captives and, 179, 283, 322–323, 503, 504
+star war, see Tlaloc-Venus war state visits, 59, 92, 93, 181, 264—265, 424, 433, 479
+of Bird-Jaguar, 265, 303–305, 494 of Yax-Pac, 342, 494
+stelae, 47, 48, 56, 57, 86–87, 89, 140, 144, 172, 181, 195, 309–310, 351 of Ah-Cacaw. 204 -205, 213, 486 ancestors on, 141, 441 of Bird-Jaguar, 270, 275, 276, 283, 285, 287, 288, 291
+blood smeared on, 202. 463 of Curl-Snout, 155, 159, 171 of Double-Bird. 167, 173, 455 of 18-Rabbit, 312, 316, 322, 339, 484. 486, 492
+of Flint-Sky-God K, 182–183 of Great-Jaguar-Paw, 144—145, 146, 442
+of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, 184—185, 187–188, 190, 193, 460
+of Lord Water, 171 rededication of, 197–203, 462–463, 464
+of Scroll-Ahau-Jaguar, 141–142 of Shield-Jaguar, 265, 275, 285 of Smoke-Imix-God K, 314, 333, 334, 344, 484, 485 486. 492 of Smoke-Shell, 322
+of Smoking-Frog, 146–147, 153–154. 158, 159, 210, 447
+of Smoking-Squirrel, 187–188, 190–191, 192–193, 194, 460 of Stormy-Sky, 148, 155, 156, 158, 159–160, 163, 166, 184, 197, 200, 203, 205, 208–209, 210, 211, 438, 450–451
+styles of, 165–167
+tn Terminal Classic period, 382–383, 384–386, 388–393
+of Waterlily-Jaguar, 311, 313
+of Yax-Pac, 330, 336, 342–343, 344
+Stephens, John Lloyd, 46, 217, 261, 466
+“steward” (k’amlay), 332, 492 stingray spines, 134, 201
+as bloodletters, 135, 281. 425, 492 “stone” (tun), 81, 427, 430, 457 Storey, Rebecca, 486, 489, 494, 495 Stormy-Sky, king of Tikal, 147, 155–157, 162, 164, 165, 204, 207, 214, 438, 440, 441 accession of, 159–160, 450–451 bloodletting ritual of, 158, 203, 208 stelae of. 155, 156, 158, 159–160, 163, 166, 184, 197, 200, 203, 205, 208–209, 210, 211, 438, 450–451 tomb of, 160, 168, 197, 199, 208–209, 454, 462
+Strömsvik, Gustav, 485, 489
+Stuart, David, 45, 419, 420, 424, 425, 426, 427, 431, 432. 440, 441, 442, 447, 449, 456–457, 458. 459, 465, 466, 470. 474, 475, 477, 479, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 489, 490, 491, 492, 494, 496, 498, 501, 503, 505
+Stuart, George, 420, 507 summit temples, 108, 109, 110–111, 199, 314, 435, 485 sun, 66, 70, 83, 101, 104. 142, 242, 255, 425, 431, 492 ritual path of, 110–111
+Yax-Balam symbolized by, 114, 115
+“sun” (kin), 112, 115, 426 sun disk, 372, 393, 394, 503 Sun God, 112–115, 395, 416
+Jaguar, 112–114, 124, 211, 243, 245, 260, 451
+swidden agriculture, 39 syllabary signs, 52, 53, 446 syntactical analysis, 49–50, 421
+Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, 402, 507 Taladoire, Eric, 451 talud-tablero-style temple pyramids, 161. 442, 451, 452, 453
+Tate, Carolyn, 477. 482
+Taube, Karl, 426, 429, 447, 453, 465
+Tedlock, Dennis, 425, 429, 468 “temple” (yotot; ch’ul na), 71, 427, 474 Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, 13, 130, 217–237, 258, 432, 468, 474 construction of, 225–227 king lists on, 217–224, 227–228, 467 temple pyramids, 38, 68, 70, 71–73, 94, 346, 352, 387–389. 495, 498, 501, 504
+at Cerros, 15, 104–128, 136, 138. 170, 238. 435, 438, 439, 440. 470 at Chichen Itza, see Chichen Itza colors of, 111–112, 262, 476 construction of, 91, 105–112, 123, 433, 438
+at Copan, 14. 308, 309, 312–313, 316, 319, 321, 322–327, 336, 341, 342, 427. 428, 432, 484, 485, 486, 488–489. 490–491, 492^93 craftsmen of, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 111–112, 116, 120, 435, 436 directional trees in, 107, 109, 435, 485
+foundations of, 106, 122 gateway buildings of, 139 lower terraces of, 108–109 mask panels of, see mask panels meaning of, 106, 112–116, 120 as mountains, 71–72, 106, 121, 239 Olmec, 105–106 optical effects of, 108 at Palenque, see Palenque pausing stations of, 108 platforms of, 72, 106–107, 118, 123–124, 125
+plazas of, 38, 70–71, 106, 108, 117–118, 119, 266, 314, 425 portal temples of, 118 stairways of, 106, 107–108, 118, 3 87 summit temples of, 108, 109, 110–111. 199, 314. 435, 485 talud-tablero-style, 161, 442, 451, 452, 453
+at Teotihuacan, 161, 162, 385, 438, 442, 451, 452, 453, 500
+at Tikal, 131, 132, 133–136, 168–171, 195–197, 204–205, 213, 215, 439, 451, 454, 461–462, 463–464
+T shape of, 106–107, 435 twin-pyramid complexes of, 171, 204, 213. 454
+at Uaxactun. 136–139, 169, 211, 439–440, 447–448, 449
+viewing spaces of, 117–119
+World Tree in, 105
+at Yaxchilan, 262, 266–268, 271, 273, 275–276, 277, 285–295, 297–301, 430. 476, 477, 487
+Teotihuacan, 97, 130–131, 380, 443, 465, 497. 504
+ballcourt markers at, 158. 451 costume of, 162, 163, 453
+murals at, 158, 162, 164, 451, 453 pottery of, 161, 452
+as sacred center of creation, 162–163, 453, 500
+temple pyramids at. 161, 162, 385, 438, 442, 451, 452, 453, 500
+trade network of, 158, 159–164, 451–453
+wars of conquest originated by, 147, 152, 159–163, 164, 444, 446
+Terminal Classic period, 30–33, 57, 171. 261, 313, 346–352, 356, 379–103, 422. 441, 495
+stelae of, 382–383, 384–386, 388–393 termination rituals, 103, 120, 127–128, 134, 145, 203, 313, 428, 435, 438, 459–460, 464
+te-tun (“tree-stone”), 71, 72 see also stelae
+texts, 18, 54–55, 57. 112. 421
+on Group of the Cross, 218, 221, 245–261, 470–471
+longest, 217, 319, 466–467, 488 mirror-image, 326
+Thompson, J. Eric S., 47, 49. 50, 420–421, 426, 465, 496, 497, 501, 505
+Tikal, 21, 57, 61, 128, 130–212, 243, 258, 264, 308, 319, 343, 353, 373, 375, 424, 431, 433, 434, 438–466, 489 ancient name of, 211, 465—466 architecture of, 133
+Ballcourt Markers at, 146, 149, 154, 156, 158, 451
+burials at, 131–132, 149, 456 conquered by Caracol, 167, 171–179, 197, 214. 317, 457, 458, 462, 499 construction at, 136, 165, 195, 439, 461–462
+decline of, 380, 388, 390–391. 397, 506
+early inhabitants of, 131–132 effaced monuments of, 167, 172–173, 178–179, 186, 462
+Emblem Glyph of, 141, 142, 153, 180, 207–208, 391, 441, 443, 456, 458, 459, 465–166, 484 founding of, 434
+Lost World Complex at, 158, 442, 452
+mask panels at, 169–170, 454
+murals at, 133, 134
+patron god of, 211
+staff kings of, 165–168, 204, 213, 390, 454
+temple pyramids at. 131, 132, 133–136, 168–171, 195–197, 204–205, 213, 215, 439, 451. 454, 461–462, 463^64
+Teotihuacan’s trade with, 158, 159–164, 451–153
+tombs at, 131, 133–136, 160–161, 174, 177–178, 179, 197, 199, 205, 214, 438, 452, 462, 466
+Uaxactiin conquered by, 130, 144–160, 184, 197, 210, 242, 442–143, 446–448, 465, 506 time, 18, 45, 47, 65, 73, 77–84, 495 days in, 52–53, 78–81, 82–83, 84 directional quadrants of, 78, 83 months in, 81, 82, 83, 430 numbers in, 78, 81, 429 writing system and, 52–53, 54, 430 see also calendars
+Tlaloc, 160, 164, 205, 258, 276, 416, 443, 444, 452, 453, 475
+Tlaloc-Venus war (star war), 130–131,
+, 162–164, 173, 179, 181,
+, 327, 365, 373, 375, 393, 452, 489, 490
+costumes of, 146- 147, 149, 153, 159–160, 163, 194, 205, 209–210, 258, 259, 260, 295, 319, 341, 367, 370. 443, 444, 475
+owl as symbol of, 156–157, 394, 443, 444, 449–150. 506
+planetary alignments in, 147, 153, 163, 164, 176, 178, 190, 192, 438, 443–446, 456, 457–158, 460, 461
+see also wars of conquest
+tombs, 121. 447–448, 478
+of Ah-Cacaw, 205, 214, 466
+at Copan, 308, 341, 483, 493
+of Curl-Snout. 160, 197, 199
+of Pacal the Great, 217, 221, 225–227, 228–233, 261, 469
+of Shield-Skull, 197, 199, 462
+of Stormy-Sky, 160, 168, 197, 199, 208–209, 454, 462
+at Tikal, 131, 133–136. 160–161, 174, 177–178, 179, 197, 199, 205, 214, 438, 452, 462, 466
+see also burials
+tongue perforation, 89, 207, 266,
+, 271, 276, 279, 286, 426, 465
+Tonina, 392–393, 423, 458, 506
+Kan-Xul captured by, 392, 424, 452, 468, 469, 476, 487
+Tozzer, Alfred M., 425, 502, 504, 507 trade, 51, 61, 92–93, 97–98, 315, 347, 351, 422, 496
+at Cerros, 98, 100–103, 434
+kings and, 90, 98, 101–102
+by Teotihuacan, 158, 159–164, 451—453
+transportation, 60–61
+trees, 61, 72, 90, 306, 489
+directional, in temple pyramids, 107, 109, 435. 485
+as symbols, 66
+“tree-stone” (te-tun), 71, 72
+see also stelae
+tribute, 91–92, 93. 94, 99, 178, 380, 442
+Tula, 375, 393, 497, 506
+tumplines, 61, 424
+tun (360-day year), 81, 430
+tun (“stone”), 81, 427, 430, 457
+tunkul drums, 151
+twin-pyramid complexes, 171, 204, 213, 454
+tzolkin (260-day) calendar (sacred round), 38, 52, 79–81, 83, 84.
+, 451
+Uaxactun, 20, 21, 128, 130–164, 170, 215, 305, 308, 375, 385, 391, 423. 436, 437, 458, 463
+conquered by Tikal, 130, 144–160, 184, 210, 242, 442–143, 446–448, 465. 506
+defeated king’s family sacrificed at, 151. 447–148
+murals at, 449
+temple pyramids at, 136–139, 169, 211, 439–440, 447–448. 449
+tombs at, 447—448
+Uayeb, 81, 429
+Ucanal, 385–386, 391, 503
+ballcourt at, 194–195, 461
+conquered by Naranjo, 189–190, 194–195, 205, 212, 213, 460–461, 499
+U-Cit-Tok, king of Copan, 343–344, 381
+name glyph of. 494
+uinic (“human being”), 81, 253, 377, 430, 500
+uinic, uinal (months), 81, 82, 83, 430 Underworld, see Xibalba
+Uxmal, 14, 354, 496, 497, 499, 504
+vague year (haab calendar), 81, 83, 84
+Valdes, Juan Antonio, 439
+Valdez, Fred, 420
+vases, 161–162, 381–382, 426, 456, 487
+Venus, 70, 77, 81, 83, 156, 158, 170, 242, 260, 323, 431, 436, 438, 450, 453, 486 as Eveningstar, 177, 193, 213, 241, 319, 325, 457–158, 479, 487, 489
+Hun-Ahau symbolized by, 114–115, 125, 245
+as Morningstar, 101, 176, 178, 192, 208, 319, 330, 334–335, 343, 457, 475, 487, 491, 492
+see also Tlaloc-Venus war villages, 60, 63, 65, 72, 97, 421 bloodletting rituals of, 89–90, 101, 307
+at Copan, 307, 308, 309, 330, 332, 339
+migrations from, 92, 432–433 original, at Cerros, 98–103, 105, 119, 123
+platforms at, 101, 434 vision quest, 87, 89, 134. 242, 243, 254–255, 257, 426–427, 432, 473
+Vision Serpent, 68–70, 90, 137, 138–139, 202, 207, 232, 233, 254, 266, 275, 276, 279, 287. 319, 322, 339, 369, 389, 394–395, 417, 425, 426, 473, 494, 503
+Vogt, Evon Z., 426, 428
+wacah chan, see World Tree war, sacred, 64–65, 124, 144 battle gear for, 151, 448 causes of, 60 central metaphor of, 124 code of, 145, 151–152 monuments to, 124–125, 126 ritual preparation for, 151 season for. 62
+war captives, 60, 65, 127, 143, 144, 152, 164, 166, 181, 265, 354, 384, 386, 390–391, 452, 459, 461, 462
+of Ah-Cacaw, 205–206, 211, 212, 214, 215, 457
+in ballgame, 126, 177, 179, 457, 487–188, 503–504
+of Bird-Jaguar, 285, 287, 291, 292, 295, 301
+Chan-Bahlum’s sacrifice of, 233, 236, 243, 258, 259, 260
+in Chichen Itza, 366–370, 372, 373–374, 502–504
+costumes of, 367, 373–374, 464, 482, 502–503
+-Rabbit as, 317–319, 321, 337, 456, 486–487, 488, 493
+of Flint-Sky-God K, 181, 183
+Kan-Xul as, 392, 424, 468, 469, 476, 487
+kept alive for years, 190, 193, 194, 464
+of Lady Wac-Chanil-Ahau, 190 ritual display of, 190–191, 193, 194,
+war captives (continued)
+ritual display of (continued) 205–206, 213, 292, 367, 382, 464, 471
+ritual sacrifice of, 87, 124, 126, 145, 149, 178, 206, 209, 268, 373, 432, 451, 488
+of Shield-Jaguar, 265, 268, 273, 477–478
+of Smoking-Squirrel, 190–191, 192, 193, 194, 460–461
+stairways and, 179, 283, 322–323, 503, 504
+wargames, 369, 502
+wars of conquest, 58, 130–215,
+–342, 354, 380, 441–442,
+, 499–500
+Calakmul in, 174–179, 181–183, 184, 191, 211–212, 213, 214
+code of, 152–153
+Dos Pilas tn, 179–186, 211–212
+originated by Teotihuacan, 147, 152, 159–163, 164, 444, 446
+.tee also Caracol; Naranjo; Tikal; Tlaloc-Venus war
+water, 13, 61, 243, 417, 426, 457, 458, 479
+management of, 93, 97, 105, 119
+waterlilies, 93, 94, 104, 209, 331, 341, 504
+“waterlily” (nab), 94, 417, 458
+Waterlily Jaguar, 124, 436
+Waterlily-Jaguar, king of Copan, 311, 313
+Waterlily Monster, 418
+Kan-cross, 243, 411–412
+waterways, 60–61, 93, 433, 504
+Webster, David, 441
+west (chikin), 6b, 426, 447
+white (zac), b6, 83, 468
+white earth, 104, 106, 110, 119, 123
+Willey, Gordon R., 48, 171, 455, 458, ’ 505
+Williamson, Richard, 485, 490
+Wisdom, Charles, 488
+witz (“mountain”), 68, 71, 427, 479
+Witz Monsters, 239, 316, 325, 407, 418, 486
+on mask panels, 137–139, 169–170, 439–440, 454
+women, 99, 133, 177–178, 268, 360, 363–364, 438, 455. 479
+costumes of, 279, 280
+as kings, 221–225, 227–228, 245, 252–253, 478
+World Tree (wacah chan), 66—70, 71, 407, 418, 425, 426, 427, 428, 439, 471. 503
+on Group of the Cross, 242, 255, 256, 259, 472, 475
+kings as, 67–68, 90, 242–243 on Pacal the Great’s sarcophagus, 225–226, 232, 398
+tn temple pyramids, 105
+Yax-Cheel-Cab, 378, 396, 398, 399
+Wren, Linea, 500
+writing system, 14, 19, 45–55, 97, 346, 379, 495, 502
+calligraphy of, 50, 55 cartouches in, 52–53, 54 on costumes, 397, 506 decipherment of, 46–50, 401, 420, 426
+elements of, 52–53 glyphic tags in, 112, 436 graphic forms in, 53–54 homophones in, 52, 421, 436–437, 472
+literary genres of, 54 logographs in, 52, 421 numbers in, 82
+phonetic complements in, 52, 447, 466
+semantic determinatives in, 52–53, 436
+sentence structure in, 54
+spelling in, 49, 52–53, 421
+syllabary signs in, 52, 53, 446
+texts of, 18, 54–55, 57, 112, 421
+time and, 52–53, 54, 430
+word plays in, 52, 468 see also books; scribes
+Xibalba (Underworld), 66, 84, 90, 153, 209, 226, 239, 241, 242, 327, 376, 399, 425, 427, 473, 490
+Lords of Death in, 74–76, 77, 124, 125, 126, 235, 243, 316, 383
+Xulttin, 145, 392
+Xunantunich, 385
+Yahau-Chan-Ah-Bac of Copan, 21, 331–340, 344, 491, 492, 493
+Yat-Balam, king of Yaxchilân, 263, 265, 266–268, 277, 278, 477, 478
+yax (“blue-green”; “first”), 66, 150, 310, 332, 436–437, 440, 465, 476, 483, 492
+Yax-Balam (Ancestral Hero Twin), 74–76, 142, 436 symbolized by sun, 114, 115
+Yax-Cheel-Cab (First World Tree), 378, 396, 398, 399
+Yaxchilán, 21, 87, 174–175, 176, 207, 262–305, 329, 330, 424, 433, 443, 449, 455, 457, 459, 473, 476 483, 484, 503 decline of, 383
+Emblem Glyph of, 479
+lintels of, 47, 175, 265–268, 269–270, 275–276, 285–295, 297–301, 303, 444, 447, 478, 487
+temple pyramids of, 262, 266–268, 271, 273, 275–276, 277, 285–295, 297–301, 430, 476, 477, 487
+Yaxhá, 181, 191–192, 212, 213, 452, 499
+Yax-Kamlay of Copán, 332–338, 493 name glyph of, 492
+Yax-Kuk-Mo’, king of Copán, 310–313, 319, 322, 327, 341, 343, 344, 484, 485, 486
+Yax-Moch-Xoc, king of Tikal, 140–141, 144, 198 name glyph of, 440
+Yax-Pac, king of Copán, 21, 311, 319, 320–343, 424, 425, 488, 489, 490–491 492–494 accession of, 320, 322 brothers of, 331–340, 344, 361, 491, 492, 493 death of. 342–343, 483 mother of, 320, 330–331, 488 state visit of, 342, 494 stelae of, 330, 336, 342–343, 344
+Yaxuná, 16, 42, 44, 352–354, 374, 404–405, 496, 499
+perimeter communities of, 353–354, 504
+yellow (kan), 66
+yichan relationship, 300, 303, 479
+zac lac (“offering plates”), 200, 463
+zac uinic headband, 253–254
+Zavala, Lauro José, 505
+Zinacantan, 43. 426. 428, 471
+</biblio>
+<br>