Modem research and humanitarian studies of refugee displacement have shown that such migrations are a highly varied and complex phenomenon. Only rarely do they involve movements of large groups retaining political and social identity. The archaeological standards for identification of “site unit intrusions” would only be met by such coherent large-scale movements. Furthermore, this is not the most common form of war-related refugee displacements. Instead, individual households, extended families, or small villages seem to be the most common units for migration, often without some males who perished in war, were captured, or w ho were still involved in conflicts. As cogently argued by Ashmore et al. (Chapter 14, this volume), small communities appear to have retained significant autonomy utilizing their own local economic and ideological programs for cohesion or division. The Xunantunich region data cited by these authors also help to explain the rapid abandonment of that region during the Terminal Classic period (which was parallel to events at Piedras Negras, the Petexbatun, Cancuen, and other earlier abandoned cities of the west). With the inability of local rulers in the Pasion/Usumacinta region to respond to stresses of immigration and overpopulation, to disrupted trade routes, and to warfare, local groups at the small community or extended family level may have merely exercised their option to move away to other areas in the north or east.
Recent regional endemic warfare in central and east Africa provides some insights into these issues. In Somalia, warfare between major powers later degenerated into intensified conflict between villages and even between fortified districts within the capital city of Mogadishu. A process of rapid political devolution reduced the nation to rule by rival factions under petty warlords. Throughout this process, emigration was under way as populations moved within the nation or to adjacent countries. The units of migration varied from whole towns to fragments of families (mothers and some children) (McKinley 1997). Yet, this gradual small-scale emigration came to total hundreds of thousands of individuals within two decades (Hampton 1998: 81-84).
A more peaceful northern zone that received continuous small group migrations was the northwestern region around the town of Bossaso. The population of Bossaso alone increased from 10,000 to 80,000 during the 1990s (McKinley 1997). It is also interesting to note attempts at political reformulation in the face of such population movements. While warlords vied savagely in the south, leaders in Bossaso attempted to consolidate the diverse elements in their region, including refugee populations, by experimenting with new unifying political concepts, especially “experiments in clan-based government” (McKinley 1997). For a period, a thirteen-member council of elders was established by Bossaso military leaders drawing upon heads of sub-clans and even minority groups. Disputes were mediated by this council, which itself was legitimated by the ancient Somali principles and ideology of clan-based rule.
It is not difficult to see the parallels between these political efforts at postwar adaptation in Somalia and the experiments in council rule in the Puuc, Copan Valley, and elsewhere (see Carmean et al. Chapter 19, this volume; Fash et al. Chapter 10, this volume; Fash et al. 1992). There were probably a variety of new, old, and revitalized political formations in the Terminal Classic Maya landscape, like that of Somalia today or as in early medieval Europe. The diversity of political formations helps to explain the extreme regionalism of Terminal Classic culture and styles. It may explain the eclectic mixture of ancient and foreign elements in art, artifacts, and architecture at sites such as Seibal, Nohmul, and the Puuc centers, as leaders drew upon both traditional and exotic symbols to try to legitimate their power and consolidate their polities in the midst of chaos (e. g., Ringle et al. 1998; A. Chase 1985b).
Without drawing analogies too closely, we should view Altar, Seibal, Punta de Chimino, Nohmul, the Puuc sites, and even Chichen Itza with an awareness of this complexity of processes of warfare, migration, and political innovation. It now appears that Seibal, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza might all be best regarded as such “experiments in government” drawing upon traditional Classic Maya concepts, but with a new amalgam of ancient cults and exotic elements. These and many other Terminal Classic polities may not have represented a new Postclassic order of society, nor Mexicanized invaders. Instead, they might have been a reoriented “last gasp” of Classic Maya politics and ideology in a world disrupted by war, population movements, and economic change (e. g. Robles and Andrews 1986).
THE END IN THE WEST AND ITS IMPACT
These regional political formulations had varying degrees of success—some ending by the early tenth century, others perhaps surviving until a. d. 1050, others becoming the basis of Postclassic society. Most of these polities slowly declined. In Belize, northern Yucatan, and the central Peten lake district, they were replaced in gradual transitions or rapid transformations into new Postclassic states and alliances. The K’ul Ajaw complex and its monumental propaganda were, however, conspicuously absent from these Postclassic states.
In the Pasion and Petexbatun regions, the splendid Terminal Classic political experiments rapidly declined. These late centers at Altar, Seibal, and Punta de Chimino had looked inward and to the past for most of their legitimating symbols. While a millennium later their monuments would awe—and utterly confuse—modem scholars, the kings of the late eighth and ninth centuries would see their populations slowly dwindle and disperse. By the Early Postclassic there were much-reduced and scattered populations and few centers with public architecture.
While the pattern in the western Peten is clear, a broader speculation about the Terminal Classic has also been presented in this chapter. I have argued that stresses and problems were experienced by other Late Classic states, but that emigration from early collapsing western polities effected change in other regions. Yet the validity of such a hypothesis must be verified (or rejected) by future researches and especially chronological studies. At present this remains a circumstantial argument, since the chronologies in the eastern and northern lowlands are still too imprecise to allow more specific, testable hypotheses on direct or indirect culture-historical or processual linkages between these regions.
What is certain is that the end of the Classic period of Maya civilization in western Peten was indeed a “collapse” in any normal use of that controversial, colloquial term. In most kingdoms there was “a rapid loss of sociopolitical complexity,” a political collapse as defined by Tainter (1988) and Cowgill and Yoffee (1988). In many cases, in western Peten, warfare, site destruction, and/or declines in population accompanied these changes. Not only the Petexbatun but the entire far-western region seems to have experienced these changes. A limited countercurrent to this decline was created by the Terminal Classic enclaves at Seibal, Altar, Punta de Chimino, and elsewhere with their reformulated version of lowland political ideology. Yet these failed attempts to hold together some of the western communities only reinforce the general pattern of a radical and rapid change in the west.
For at least part of the Maya world (though perhaps only that zone!) the end of the Classic period still can be seen as the end of the Classic Maya political order, the economic system that maintained it, and the elaborate art and ideology that legitimated it. These early events in the west certainly would have had an impact on the declines, transitions, transformations, and florescences in other lowland regions in the Terminal Classic period. Vigorous and populous Postclassic societies would arise from those transformations in many other regions. Yet in many zones of western Peten itself, state-level societies would never re-emerge.
World History
