Abstract
Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250–900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch’ahb’ that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.
Highlights
Ritual acts of blood sacrifice are dominant themes in PreColumbian art and archaeology, and are an essential topic for understanding the development of early complex societies in Mesoamerica, as Arthur Demarest suggested over 30 years ago
Many scholars recognize that sacrificial rituals involving the dedication of human lives and blood to supernatural beings were essential to the religious foundation and political order of Mesoamerican societies [6,7,8], cultural evolutionary explanations for these behaviors are not featured prominently due to earlier monolithic views of religious change [1]
This ancient ritual practice is cited as a key example in more general discussions about the role of costly signals in the cultural evolution of religion [9,10]
Summary
Ritual acts of blood sacrifice are dominant themes in PreColumbian art and archaeology, and are an essential topic for understanding the development of early complex societies in Mesoamerica, as Arthur Demarest suggested over 30 years ago. Sociologists and anthropologists have long made similar arguments that intense rituals enhance social cohesion and promote cooperation for human society [2,3,4] These so-called ‘‘costly ritual behaviors’’–and the traces they leave in the archaeological and historical records–are worthy subjects of scientific inquiry that require explanations derived from a unified theoretical framework [5]. Rather than assume that blood rituals form part of a universal Mesoamerican religion, we focus our attention on the distribution and spread of bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts We examine this specific class of sacrificial practices because selected examples of Classic Maya bloodletting have been used to illustrate how these extravagant and costly displays increased the level of commitment to dominant ideology in past complex societies [9,10]. With these considerations in mind, our aim is threefold: 1) to analyze the temporal and spatial variation of bloodletting rituals in the Maya hieroglyphic record, 2) to examine factors associated with the uneven distribution of these bloodletting records, and 3) to demonstrate how current cultural evolutionary models can provide key insights on the historical dynamics of past cultural practices
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