11 - Agriculture and Trade in the Colonial Period Southern Maya Lowlands

Abstract

This chapter discusses the agriculture and trade in the Colonial period of southern Maya Lowlands. Throughout the Colonial period, agricultural production remained far more than a subsistence enterprise. Evidence suggests that apparent demand for certain highly valued agricultural products, in particular cacao, continued to stimulate native entrepreneurial activity and the elaboration of native-controlled systems of interregional exchange. This observation is not intended to deny completely the long implicit assumption that the Southern Maya Lowlands remained unconquered because of the sheer ideological intransigence of the inhabitants. This ideological resistance, which remained a constant source of Spanish irritation, was but one aspect of a remarkable system of interregionally articulated Maya activity. This system was characterized by the Maya-controlled network of long-distance exchange, by the continuous movement of anti-Spanish refugees from northern Yucatan into the Southern Lowlands, and by the formation of Maya political alliances that reinforced the Maya ability to maintain systemic independence from Spanish meddling and colonial control. Throughout the Colonial period, the northern frontier of the Chan region was an open one, far more significant in terms of exchanges of people, ideas, and goods than the frontiers with Chontal/Chol-speaking neighbors to the south and west. This openness, coupled with the fact that the Chan region remained a poorly known frontier zone in the Spanish system for many years, was a major stimulus for agricultural diversity, interregional trade, and political interaction until the conquest of the Lake Petén Maya in 1697.