The inhabitants of Yaxuna, over the long-term, reaped the benefits of living in a strategic locale relative to trade routes crossing the interior of the northern lowlands. Some 100 kilometers south of the nearest salt beds on the northern coast,
Yaxuna traders may well have moved that precious condiment overland into towns and cities of the central lowlands beginning in Preclassic times. (The public buildings are massive and there are links in both ceramics and architecture to the south.) In the Early Classic period, Yaxuna had rulers who were clearly mainstream in their access to exotic wealth and craft objects (Suhler and Freidel 1998; Freidel and Suhler 1998). Again, our data register a prosperous community with far-flung trading ties. In the Late Classic, Yaxuna was quite clearly part of a larger, regional network, as manifested in the longest intersite stone road in the Maya world tying it to Coba, the largest city in the northeastern lowlands. The Terminal Classic witnessed the construction of two elaborate Puuc-style palaces at Yaxuna, only one of which was investigated by our project (the other, a two-story palace, is in the Southeastern Acropolis.) Again, outside alliances are strong in this period. Through all these periods, we have data from the settlement zone to show the existence of sizable residential populations, populations no doubt attracted by the prospects of profitable work.
But clearly there was a price to be paid for living in a community, whether independent capital or vassal to outsiders, that was strategic in the commercial and political interests of regional powers. Violence marked the succession of periods we so dispassionately correlate with ceramic spheres and architectural styles, and we predict that future settlement archaeology at Yaxuna will further document its impact on the lives of ordinary residents. One can get a glimpse of northern lowland urban warfare in the Terminal Classic victory murals painted in the Upper Temple of the Jaguars and the Monjas at Chichen Itza. Nevertheless, the objective of conquest or takeover at Yaxuna must have been generally aimed at capitalizing on the presence of the community (as the populations remain high across the transitions), so, the majority of the time, the dangers to citizenry must have been offset by the advantages. Such equations, however, fatally changed with the advent of the Terminal Classic period. Chichen Itza, located only twenty kilometers north of Yaxuna, needed no additional strategic commercial entrepot or military garrison town in the central northern lowlands. It could provide those functions perfectly well. The goal of Chichen Itza’s war against Yaxuna must have been apparent to the people there as well as to their rulers. The desperation evinced in the rapidly thrown up fortifications around their high places is clear enough: none of these places had a chance to withstand any lengthy siege. Visual inspection of the recent CRY-INAH work to the south of the North Acropolis and to the west of the ballcourt group shows a broad, roughly oval plaza area demarcated by small, masonry range structures on low platforms. It would be reasonable to speculate that this was Chichen Itza’s little market town at Yaxuna after thorough destruction of the Puuc-style palaces and other more ambitious facilities of the previous Yaxuna IVa phase. We have in hand clear data that the Northern Acropolis was neglected in this phase. The demotion of Yaxuna from a town to a village under the Itza is pretty decisive.
The fall of Yaxuna in the Terminal Classic seems tied, then, to the rise of Chichen Itza in a purely local geographical sense in that they were natural competitors for regional trade passing through the north-central interior. Commensurate with this notion of a trade node in the area, we see glimpses throughout Yaxuna’s history of strangers and struggles involving alliance to polities outside the area. But why, then, did Yaxuna not recover when Chichen Itza’s own people finally fell back on their last redoubts and were slaughtered by their enemies? The Postclassic population at Yaxuna was small and ephemeral at best.
20.17 Burial 19 Postclassic incensario fragments.
However, someone remembered the glory of the white road that stretched eastward from Yaxuna to Coba like the legendary white umbilicus still recounted today in some villages as linking Chichen Itza to the east coast. They built a small Postclassic shrine on the platform at the terminus of the causeway and placed a few precious items in it. Perhaps with the fall of Chichen Itza the main trade routes really had shifted decisively to the coast in the Postclassic period, as Rathje and Sabloff (1973) proposed in anticipation of their work on Cozumel Island. Conversely, perhaps the rise of Chichen Itza in the first place was motivated by the presence of high-volume trade routes in the northern interior (Krochock 1998), along with rich chocolate-growing lands in the many earth-filled sinkholes of that area. Such scenarios imply that the eighth century north of the eighteenth latitude was still a time of prosperity and large farming populations capable of sustaining such trade (and not a time of catastrophic drought and famine). Such speculations are not without potential for testing, but they point to the need for more systematic excavation in interior sites of the northern lowlands.
World History
