Southern Maya Area - Competing Theories

Competing Theories

Discussions of the Southern Maya area as important if not essential to the rise of Classic Maya civilization and must be related to discussions of the putative primacy of developments in the Northern Petén, and vice versa. Fundamentally, the debate is between those who put more weight on the temporal priority of complex cultural and social achievements in the South and those who favor northern Guatemala for these developments. Large Preclassic cities with structures boasting the most massive scale in the ancient Maya world include El Mirador, Nakbe, Tintal, Wakna, and others from the Mirador Basin, north of the greatest Maya city in Classic times, Tikal. Without doubt, these cities represent an extraordinary development in Maya civilization; however, their dating remains essentially Late Preclassic, and scant evidence is found of two of the hallmark traits of Classic Maya civilization: upright carved shaft stones called stelae, which marked the birth of the cult of kingship, and hieroglyphic writing. While stelae and hieroglyphic writing from the Preclassic abound in the Southern area, proponents of the Lowlands, i.e., the Mirador Basin, as the origin locus for Maya civilization assert that the first Maya societies to reach the level of the state, accordingly, base their claim fundamentally on size and scale of construction, as well as on myriad evidence of distinct connections between these northern cities including even the sacbeob, the “white ways” or “high roads” that networked among them.

Some of the debates between Southern Maya area scholars and what might be called the “autocthonous school” of Maya scholarship – those advocating a unique or primary role to antecedents to Classic Maya civilization in the Northern Petén – are based as well on highly theoritized accounts of expansion of Maya peoples as interpreted by changing ceramic spheres. While some evidence supports the “Chicanel Expansion,” one does not find Chicanel pottery in the southern Highlands nor, indeed, in any significant quantity anywhere in the Southern area in the Preclassic

While evidence such as size and scale of site and of individual structures (e.g., El Tigre at El Mirador) is compelling, developments in the Southern area remain resilient against conclusive consensus. The temporal priority of plentiful as opposed to scant evidence of stelae and writing in the Preclassic south compared to the Mirador Basin must be based principally on absolute dating, although this problem, itself, becomes difficult to resolve when events are dated by 14C (“calibrated” or “uncalibrated”) – still the most widely used absolute dating method in Mesoamerica – and which cannot be rendered more fine-grained than ca. 100 years and often is less precise. Accordingly, the debate about temporal priority will remain unresolved unless and until other absolute dating methods such as archaeomagnetics and luminescence (hitherto, thermoluminescence), are applied more widely, or Long Count-dated texts, e.g., Cycle 6, are found earlier than those found thus far, which are Cycle 7. While relative dating methods – principally ceramic – are highly reliable, having been cross-referenced from many sites, and with sophisticated statistics available, unless anchored to absolute dates, these remain uncertain especially when the scholar’s focus is on the early periods of development in Mesoamerica.