Tuesday, March 21, 2023

David Webster on Fortifications among the Maya

  

The Technology of Classic Maya War: Fortifications

 

Throughout much of the Old World, cities were characteristically protected by walls, and it is tempting generally to equate the presence or absence of warfare with the presence of formal fortifications. Unfortunately, this reasoning does not work for ancient Mesoamerica. Although some fortified places certainly existed, most political centers did not have defenses even where warfare was intense (e.g., in the Postclassic Basin of Mexico). The Spanish did encounter several kinds of Contact period Maya fortifications. In some cases, political centers were built in defensible positions such as on islands. Ditches were bug around some centers, often supplemented by wooden palisades and sometimes dense hedges of thorny plants. A few centers were surrounded by formal stone walls, probably topped by palisades. Quickly erected barriers were also positioned along paths in the forest to delay enemy forces and make them vulnerable to ambush.

 

Many of these same strategies were situationally used by the Maya throughout pre-Spanish times but were never universally present. A major difficulty is archaeological detection of fortifications. Wooden palisades, plant hedges, or even small ditches might leave few traces, and in any case the long occupation and continued growth of many Maya centers probably obliterated fortifications present during earlier phases. My own opinion is that fortifications were quite common components of the Maya, landscape from Preclassic to Postclassic times, but other scholars would disagree.

 

Fortunately, we do have direct archaeological evidence for many pre-Contact period centers protected by earthworks, ditches, stone walls and/or palisades, defensible positions, or some combination of these. One of the earlier known fortifications, the great earthwork at Becan, was probably built at the end of the Late Preclassic. One of the latest is the stone wall around the city of Mayapán, abandoned only two generations before the Spanish arrived. Most known fortifications date to the Postclassic period, but this is probably as much an artifact of the archaeological record as any shift in military activity or strategy.

 

There were several defensive arrangements. In some cases, whole centers were fortified with artificial barriers as at Becan. Elsewhere, walls were built only around the innermost monumental cores of centers. Ridge-top or peninsula sites were defended by walls or ditches. At Tikal not only the site core but also the immediate hinterland of about 120 square kilometers was protected by ditches and natural swamps. Some ramshackle fortifications, as at Dos Pilas and Aguateca, were erected around site cores using scavenged building materials, and obviously represent last-ditch defensive measures.

 

In all cases fortifications are simple in design and inexpensive to build, and the Maya seem to have evolved no distinctive tradition of sophisticated military architecture. Defenses generally served to protect the ruling apparatus of a polity, and only rarely any sizable residential population. Very few centers seem to have been fortified from their beginnings. However amateurish they were by Old World standards, Maya fortifications were probably quite effective given the low technological and logistical capabilities of Maya armies. (David Webster, “Ancient Maya Warfare,” in War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica, ed. Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein [Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquia 3; Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999], 344-45)

 

Further Reading:

 

Mesoamerican Fortifications and the Book of Mormon