Abstract
Planting and rain-beckoning rituals are an extremely common way in which past and present human communities have confronted the risk of drought across a range of environments worldwide. In tropical environments, such ceremonies are particularly salient despite widespread assumptions that water supplies are unproblematic in such regions. We demonstrate for the first time that two common but previously under-appreciated Maya rituals are likely planting and rain-beckoning rituals preferentially performed at certain times of the year in close step with the rainy season and the Maya agricultural cycle. We also argue for considerable historical continuity between these Classic Maya ceremonies and later Maya community rituals still performed in times of uncertain weather conditions up to the present day across Guatemala, Belize, and eastern Mexico. During the Terminal Classic period (AD 800-900), the changing role played by ancient Maya drought-related rituals fits into a wider rhetorical shift observed in Maya texts away from the more characteristic focus on royal births, enthronements, marriages, and wars towards greater emphasis on the correct perpetuation of key ceremonies, and we argue that such changes are consistent with palaeoclimatic evidence for a period of diminished precipitation and recurrent drought.
Highlights
The Maya are one of the best-known civilisations of Mesoamerica, noted for their art, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, calendrical systems, and their hieroglyphic script – one of the few fully developed writing systems of the pre-Columbian Americas
1 Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK 2 Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of. This narrative and rhetorical shift in the last century or so of the Classic period is interesting in its own right, and implies a growing disjunction between what was taking place and what the texts relate. It is worth asking why this narrative change appears at precisely this time in Maya history, what was the nature of the rituals the texts record, and what these ceremonies tell us, directly or obliquely, about the preoccupations of the Terminal Classic Maya?
Among ceremonies commemorated on Classic Maya monuments, there are two that prevail during the Terminal Classic and that we examine in detail below
Summary
The Maya are one of the best-known civilisations of Mesoamerica, noted for their art, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, calendrical systems, and their hieroglyphic script – one of the few fully developed writing systems of the pre-Columbian Americas. Increased frequency of ritual activity in times of environmental stress among the Maya has been documented by several ethnographic studies (e.g., Girard 1949, 1995; Freidel and Shaw 2000) More important for this particular study are recent studies of material remains in caves of Western Belize (Moyes 2006; Helmke 2009; Helmke et al in press), which have shown that there is an evidence of increased ritual activity in caves during the latter part of the Late Classic period (ca AD 680-960) coincident with climatic drying. The focus on these two rituals is advantageous since
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