As we enter the world of Maya archaeology, we need to sweep aside some unstated assumptions about ancient states. In spite of efforts by anthropologists, social scientists who study ancient states are still caught in the dilemma of the “Other.” What I mean is that we often think of ancient nonWestern societies or states as characterized by values that are directly opposed to those of our own society and political system—that is, the Western democracy of the United States. Thus, ancient states become the opposite of modern democracies: we see them as completely exploitative and undemocratic, incapable of including any democratic institution (such as councils) and capable only of producing exploitative and absolute kings who were followed by obedient farmers, traders, craft specialists, and so on. This view of ancient states is a legacy of Karl Marx (1966, 70), who described Asian ancient states as the “Asiatic mode of production” or “Oriental Despotism,” and later this view was championed by Karl Wittfogel (1957).2 This mode of production also encompassed the ancient states of the New World (Offner 1981). While the specifics of Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” have been rejected, the overall perspective on ancient states that this model promotes has prevailed (Offner 1981; McFarlane, Cooper, and Jaksic 2005; Blanton and Fargher 2008). Premodern states are often seen as exploitative, but excavations at Motul de San Jose give a different impression: Maya people lived well at the site during the Late Classic period. For example, most structures were built with walls and roofs of stone, an architectural feature often identified with the elite class only (see Foias et al. 2012; Chapter 5).
Another unfortunate consequence of Marx’s ideas about what he called the “Asiatic mode of production” is that until recently, most scholarship on political organization in ancient states focused on the role of paramount rulers as if they are the only ones with agency or political power. This view presents everyone else in antiquity as having a “herd mentality,” as people who lacked self-reflection and were completely mystified by the elite ideologies of domination (Blanton and Fargher 2008, 7; see also Chapter 2). But archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence point to the agency of all groups in human societies, albeit with different degrees of influence (Blanton and Fargher 2008, 7). Thus, we must credit ancient states with as much complexity as we can envision for ourselves today rather than as despotic systems with monolithic politics and economies. As we will see in the case of the Classic Maya and as other archaeologists and anthropologists have found in other civilizations of antiquity, political governments (or states) are not monolithic, operating with one mind and one voice, but rather are fractured into factions and subgroups that may have very different and competing discourses, goals, and intents (Yoffee 2005; Saitta 1994; Offner 1981; A. Smith 2000; see Chapters 5 and 6).
Although the extreme view that sees ancient states as characterized by “unrestricted exploitation of the masses, [and] terroristic methods of control” (Murdock 1957, 546 reflecting on Wittfogel 1957) is inaccurate, the opposite is just as unlikely, and this is the problem with some of the current models of agency theory. Although it may not be intentional, agency models give the impression that there was no exploitation in the past because everyone had less or more agency and therefore those who had less must have agreed to their loss of power (Pauketat 2000, 2007; but see other contributions in Dobres and Robb 2000).3 This stance is a direct response to the exclusive focus of modernists on political economy and a model of top-down hierarchy in which the power of the state was omnipresent and all encompassing. The reality of the past is that systems were predominately neither hierarchical nor equal; the truth lies somewhere in between, depending on local circumstances and historical contingencies. There is no doubt that there was exploitation in the past, but not to the degree envisioned by advocates of the “Asiatic mode of production” (as shown by the evidence from Motul de San Jose; see Chapter 5 and 6). However, some institutions in ancient states gave access to political power to some groups more than to other groups, and in that sense, disadvantaged groups were “exploited” by the political elites and the political institutions (Whitmeyer 1997, 222), as we will investigate in several chapters. The role of the archaeologist is to discover how, where, and when power was practiced more inclusively or more exclusively. In this endeavor, though, we also have to be careful not to impose the dominant institutions of today’s society on the past: As Mann reminds us, “State, culture, and economy are all important structuring networks, but they almost never coincide” (Mann 1986, 2).
Finally, one more point has to be made about the pre-Hispanic Maya people who populated the Classic period polities. McAnany’s Ancestral Maya Economies in an Archaeological Perspective (2010) makes a critical point: Ancient Maya people were much more about doing (and being) and less about thinking. They were much less cerebral than us, in the sense that they would not spend most of their time thinking about human behavior, as we social scientists or students tend to do. They would embody their thoughts about how things are done in the way they conducted themselves daily. A second point in McAnany’s work is important for non-anthropologists: the critical relationship between tradition, objects, and identity in every human culture. We as members of a modern capitalist and industrialized society often think of ourselves as separate from the objects we use, but what if we had made the objects we used by hand after long hours of labor?4 Our identity would be much more tied to these objects and to the process of making them. These objects, be they shoes, clothing, hats, houses, would be part and parcel of “us” and our identity. What if the success of our work was likely only if we followed the prescribed or traditional way of doing it and only if we gained the blessings of the right gods? These traditions and rituals would become critical to our identity also. Instead of thinking of production as an economic process driven by calculations of efficiency and least effort (as we do in capitalist societies today), production would be craft work that shaped our identity, interwoven with ritual and tradition.
Extending this argument, all that human beings make (and that later archaeologists encounter as the archaeological record) is a series of discourses (about identity, power, ideology, etc.).5 By deciding to do anything in a particular manner, each individual is asserting his or her power to do it. The archaeological record accumulates through such decisions and actions and such assertions of power to do something. Figurines are the discourses of their makers, pottery vessels are the discourses of their potters, painted polychrome vases and stone monuments are the discourses of their makers and patrons, the royal elites, and so on.
We can paint a rich picture of Classic Maya politics but it has to be done carefully by combining multiple lines of evidence and multiple discourses. We will need to shift between spatial scales, from small to large sites, and between time scales, from short term to long term, to bring to fruition the comparative approach that archaeologists have used so much and that has recently been championed by Brumfiel (2006) as the heart of anthropology today (see also Pyburn 1997). A point in time and space takes meaning if it is compared with another point in time or space: Patterns bring into relief differences over time and across space, and both similarities and differences are critical to reconstructing the lives of our predecessors.
World History
