Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places: War in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes

Abstract

Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places is a book largely by archaeologists, but it is not intended to be only for other archaeologists. The editors include a chapter by historian Matthew Restall, and all the authors make an effort to speak clearly enough to be understood beyond the borders of their respective subfields. The work stems from a 2011 symposium at Dumbarton Oaks entitled “Conflict, Conquest, and the Performance of War in Pre-Columbian America.” The intention at that forum was not merely to parade individual scholars' specific contributions but to work together to expose commonalities and patterns. Implicitly, participants also wished to work together to make a statement that would be heard.In their introduction, the editors, Andrew Scherer and John Verano, explain that the book is especially concerned with two interrelated questions: “How was war produced and reproduced in Pre-Columbian America? And what were the social, political, and material ramifications of both warmongering and peacemaking?” (p. 1). In the symposium and the book, the editors drew together scholars studying both Mesoamerica and the Andes in an effort to increase interregional dialogue and to come up with variegated answers.It was a relief to me as a reader to come early on upon a promise to not take as given certain purported truisms that in fact are highly misleading. For example: “Although some scholars have claimed that Aztec warfare was a purely ritual practice for the objective of capturing enemies for sacrifice … this assertion has been shown to be both overstated and too simplistic” (p. 6). Similarly, for the Andean world, the book promises to take issue with the “problematic assumptions” that warfare was largely ritual and “that ritual somehow makes warfare less consequential” (p. 8). And lest readers take from its title that the book promises a cornucopia of current intellectual fashions with very little substance, the editors hasten to reassure us on this score as well: “We appreciate the attention given to the body in broader academic discourse yet find some of the language in this scholarship at best faddish and at worst curiously dehumanizing” (p. 10). No, theirs is a book that focuses on “the body” in the sense that we have yet to understand how war's violence was part of ordinary people's lived experiences and on “place” in the sense that Mesoamerican warfare did unfold over battlefields that we have yet to envision effectively.The 15 individual contributions in general complement each other well. Arthur Joyce, in “Warfare in Late/Terminal Formative-Period Oaxaca,” argues against his field's prevailing idea that “predatory expansion” motivated most Mesoamerican warfare, demonstrating instead how the archaeological evidence proves that “smaller and less complex polities were also involved in warfare” on a nearly constant basis (p. 130). In the immediately preceding chapter, entitled “Invasion: The Maya at War, 1520–1540s,” Restall examines the historical documents of the early sixteenth century and finds within them evidence of old strategies and tactics (specifically, secret intelligence gathering and urban ambush). Taken together, these two essays illustrate how we are to understand the sometimes-daily potential for violence faced by precolonial Mesoamerican villages.There are, however, moments when one wishes for more complementarity. In “Sacrifice at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan and Its Role in Regard to Warfare,” Ximena Chávez Balderas demonstrates that most of the skeletons of the victims found at the Templo Mayor do not give evidence of having been warriors taken in battle. Many must therefore have been given as tribute, which is very much in keeping with scholars' notion that, as Chávez Balderas outlines it, “the Mexica state used warfare to establish tributary obligations, not to acquire territory” (p. 171). Yet here follows an example of the ways in which the volume might have benefited from increased participation by historians. The author informs us that the children sacrificed to the rain god Tlaloc “all … presented metabolic and dental disease related to acute dietary deficiencies” (p. 191). However, she is not ready to conclude that this is evidence of their having been taken from distressed rural communities as prisoners in time of war; she wonders if it simply means that they were chosen as victims because Tlaloc was the patron of a disease that they happened to have. If she were to consult the historical record, she would find that there is ample documentary evidence for the first interpretation and none for the second. However, it is, I suppose, inevitable that a historian reading this book will decide that it needs more history. The editors Scherer and Verano might reasonably counter that they did as much as was practicable in including us at all.