Tuesday, March 21, 2023

David Webster on Seasonal Warfare among the Maya

  

Maya warfare must have been strongly seasonal, especially if any large number of commoners was involved. Farmers could have been efficiently detached from their agricultural pursuits only during the dry season (roughly December through May in the southern heartland of the Lowlands), and terrain would have been most passable at this time. Another consideration was logistics. Unless they were in friendly territory or had water transport, Maya forces had to carry their food on their backs. Reents-Budet illustrates a Classic vessel apparently showing elite warriors being helped by women to load up with arms and provisions for a campaign. Commoner porters may have carried supplies, but in any case they had to eat, too. This energetic constraint severely limited the duration and spatial extent of Maya campaigns. One partial solution was probably to forage for food from dispersed farmsteads and fields in enemy territory, which would most efficiently have been done just before the crops were harvested or just after they had been stored. Foraging for wild resources would have been ineffective to support sizable bodies of warriors. (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], 347)

 

Further Reading:

 

John L. Sorenson, "Seasons of War, Seasons of Peace in the Book of Mormon," in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon: Insights that you may have missed before