In this chapter I explore Classic Maya political dynamics by scrutinizing the internal organization of Maya polities, or the middle scale of political analysis. One of the key variables may be the presence (or absence) of a bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy is tied to the old debate about the degree of centralization in Classic Maya states; Chase and Chase (1992) argue that “centralized bureaucracies were clearly in evidence at sites like Tikal and Caracol” (309). More important, though, the existence of a Maya bureaucracy relates to the nature of internal political processes and human agency in Classic Maya polities.
To better understand the connection between centralization and bureaucracies, we need to reflect on what anthropologists mean by centralization. While definitions abound, we can take Roscoe’s definition (1993) as a useful starting point: political centralization is the concentration of decision-making in the hands of a few or as few as possible. Thus, political centralization requires a cadre of officials or administrators who carry out the political decisions of the few and who monitor the populace to ensure that these decisions are followed. Maya scholars often envision this body of officials as a bureaucracy, but in this chapter, I argue that this name might not be appropriate for Classic Maya administrations.
The potential existence of a Classic Maya bureaucracy also relates to new perspectives on power dynamics, as articulated by Stein and Rothman in their “organizational dynamics of complexity” model for the Near East (Stein and Rothman 1994; Stein 1994b, 1998; Rothman 2004) and by Marcus (1998) in her “dynamic model” for the Maya area (see also Iannone 2002;
Demarest 1992, 1996c; Foias 2003, 2007). Following these new perspectives, our discussion must change from whether or not a polity is centralized to how centralized a polity is and from whether or not a bureaucracy is present to the degree of bureaucratization. Because power is now seen as always in flux, political analysis must better define political processes and strategies that are the ongoing attempts of rulers and other active political factions or actors within Maya polities to centralize power.1
Most sociologists view bureaucracy as a central feature of modern industrial societies (beginning with Weber 1964 [1947]), and some historians argue that the first centralized bureaucracies appeared in European states during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Kiser and Cai 2003). However, there are earlier examples, including the Qin Chinese Empire (221-206 BC) (Kiser and Cai 2003) and some ancient Near East civilizations. Sumerian city-states of the Early Dynastic periods (ca. 2900-2350 BC) and later empires of the Near East also had proto-bureaucratic administrations, but these may not have been centralized under the state, and seemed to have operated as parallel organizations in temples and royal palaces (Liverani 1996; Maisels 1999; Rothman 1998, 2004; Wiesehofer 1996). Maisels (1999) locates the beginning of bureaucratization in ancient Sumer and describes the Lagash temple functionaries from the Ur III period (the late third millennium BC) in the following manner: “Here we find ‘high managerialism’ of an order that did not appear until the twentieth century AD” (167). In other words, although bureaucratization reached its maturity in modern times, the process evolved in some states in earlier periods. It is also important to note that these ancient bureaucracies (or administrations) may be political, military, or ecclesiastical.
While I begin this chapter by exploring whether Maya polities had bureaucracies, I consider other issues of the internal organization of these kingdoms, such as the nature of their administration and finance institutions. Variations in internal political organization as seen in the examples I describe below highlight that politics is a result of the interplay of local circumstances, successful and unsuccessful strategies by leaders and factions, alliances or compromises among these individuals or factions, and the material resources at the disposal of these individuals or factions.
Bureaucracy and the Qin Chinese Empire
Kiser and Cai (2003) outline why the process of bureaucratization begins at such an early date in the earliest Chinese Empire, the Qin Dynasty (221-206
BC). Based on their cross-cultural analysis, Kiser and Cai argue that two factors cause the beginning of bureaucratization. The first is intense warfare because “military competition and war force states to adopt more efficient bureaucratic forms,” and the second is “improved monitoring capacity arising from technological advances in communications, transportation, and record-keeping” (512). The authors write that because monitoring technologies were not developed until the industrial revolution, warfare was the most important driver of the development of bureaucratic structures in antiquity. To understand why constant and intense war leads to bureaucracies, we should consider the multiple consequences of conflict in ancient times. The aristocracy is usually weakened (because they are the ones that generally die on the battlefield) and the political field is thus opened up for innovations and attempts by the ruler to control more of the state affairs; models of bureaucratic organization develop in the successful military and then political institutions adopt them; roads are built for transportation of armies and supplies, and this improved communication system enhances monitoring of the populace by other groups; and, personnel trained in the military within a developing bureaucratic framework can transfer their expertise to the political institution (ibid.).
To show that bureaucratization develops only in civilizations with significant conflict, Kiser and Cai take a broad perspective, comparing the intensity and frequency of war and the degree of bureaucratization in China during the Qin Dynasty, the Neo-Assyrian Empire (883-608 BC), Persia during the Achaemenid Dynasty (559-330 BC), ancient Greece in the time of the Delian League (478-404 BC), Rome during the time of the Republic (509-44BC) and the Empire (27 BC-AD 476), the Ottoman Empire (1453-1918), early modern England (1485-1640), and early modern France (1515-1789) (Kiser and Cai 2003, 513). They indeed find that the civilizations with most intense warfare, such as Qin Dynasty China, also have most bureaucratic political systems.
Kiser and Cai’s analysis can help us reflect if the Maya also developed a bureaucratic administrative structure during the Classic period because of high levels of conflict. Webster’s (2000) review of Classic Maya warfare provides preliminary evidence about its frequency using data compiled by Mark Child (1999, quoted in ibid.). One hundred seven war events (marked by the glyphs “to chop,” “to fall,” and “to capture”) involving 28 centers are recorded for the period from AD 512 to AD 880. Webster emphasizes that this is “a biased and extremely incomplete sample” because Childs’s data included only 28 centers and only a subset of all glyphs possibly associated
With warfare (96). Keeping in mind this bias, the data indicates that a war took place approximately every 3 years, or 29.1 percent of the time. Evidence from the center of Yaxchilan indicates that it was involved in a war every 13 years, or a much lower 7.7 percent of the time. When we compare these numbers with the frequency of war among the Qin Dynasty state and empire, Assyria, Persia, Rome, and so on, (Kiser and Cai 2003, 523, Table 1), it becomes clear that the level of Classic Maya warfare was lower than in the other civilizations. The Qin State and the Greek Delian League experienced warfare for 75 percent of the period of the study, and the Ottoman Empire, early modern England, and France experienced war around 50 percent of that time (AD 1100-1800). Kiser and Cai use other measures such as the duration of war, the rate of military drafting, and casualties per year to compare levels of conflict, but such information is hard or impossible to come by for the Maya because they did not keep such records in the hieroglyphic texts that have been preserved (see the discussion in Webster 2000). The overall picture Webster (2000) and other scholars (Demarest 1997; Inomata and Triadan 2009) present is that prior to the Terminal Classic, the Classic Maya generally experienced a less frequent, less intense, and less destructive form of warfare than the Qin Empire or the Greek Delian League did. This is not to deny that in some cases war was destructive, for example the burning of Aguateca (Inomata 2008) or the sacrifice of an entire dynastic family at Yaxuna (Suhler, Ardren, and Johnstone 1998; Freidel, MacLeod, and Suhler 2003). Nevertheless, the lower overall incidence of war among the Classic Maya compared to Qin China seems to suggest, according to Kiser and Cai’s model, that it is unlikely that the Maya would have developed a bureaucratic administration.
To extend the comparison between ancient Chinese bureaucracy and Classic Maya administrative structure a little further, by the middle of the Han Empire (AD 2), the successor to the Qin Empire, the Chinese bureaucracy had between 120,000 and 150,000 officials for a population of almost 60 million people (Kiser and Cai 2003, 532n42; Loewe 1986, 120, 206). Another example of massive administration comes from the Mughal Empire, where there were as many as 309,000 officials for an estimated population of over 100 million around AD 1595 (Blanton and Fargher 2008, 74). Scholars estimate that the Classic Maya population in the lowlands (several million people) was much lower than in Han China or Mughal India (Rice and Culbert 1990). If we take the Han number of officials as an estimate for the size of a bureaucracy in relation to population size, we would expect to see some 5,000 officials among the many Classic Maya city-states of the lowlands. Considering that the number of Classic Maya polities varied over time from 12 to some 30 small to large units, we are talking about 167 to 417 officials per state. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Restall (2001, 364) estimates that the size of a typical royal court in Yucatan at the time of Spanish Conquest was about 50 (specifically this is the court of Nachi Cocom of the So-tuta polity). Taking into consideration that the Sotuta polity was probably smaller than some of the Classic period states, it is conceivable that large hegemonies such as those controlled by Tikal, Calakmul, and Caracol may have had more than 417 officials.
Regardless of how large the Classic period officialdom was, bureaucracies are more than large numbers. More important, bureaucracies incur great expenses. Kiser and Cai (2003) emphasize that they are inefficient in premodern polities because of low monitoring and sanctioning capabilities and hence will only develop under extreme circumstances of frequent conflict. Yoffee (2005) observes that in ancient Mesopotamia, heavy bureaucracies rapidly depleted their polities financially. Furthermore, bureaucracies are defined by specific means of recruitment and payment, a hierarchical organization, a public (rather than a privatized) administration, and an impersonal ethos among officials (Weber 1964 [1947]; Kiser and Cai 2003; Jackall 1988).
World History
