Modeling Maya Political Organization.

Political organizations; Mayas; Archaeological databases; Toponymy; Hierarchies; Political participation

Classic lowland Maya political organization and practice are poorly understood. The scaffold for elucidating these phenomena has been built through epigraphic decipherments, but Classic texts provide only terse records of dynasts, their achievements, and event histories, rather than exegeses of pragmatic state functioning. Nonetheless, Mayanists continue to privilege these texts over other kinds of evidence. Here I critique this logocentric position, arguing (1) that to understand Classic political order and practice, it is necessary to build and explore (i.e., test) models of organization incorporating multiple kinds of data, archaeological as well as epigraphic. I focus on modeling broad principles of geopolitical organization, arguing (2) that the basis of Maya rulers' power was "control" of time, with cities rotating in and out of power according to calendrical intervals of varying length. Moving in retrograde chronology, from recent times back into the Classic period, I argue (3) that support for a calendrically based model of geopolitical order can be recovered from varied sources, including ethnohistoric data, indigenous texts from the Colonial period, and patterning in various kinds of material culture such as architectural and iconographic programs, dated stelae, periods of site florescence, and site-size hierarchies, along with toponym distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]