The Spanish conquest and the Maya collapse: how ‘religious’ is change?

Abstract

The phenomenon of the Spanish Conquest of the Maya region suggests strongly that, in the process of socio-cultural transformation, ‘religion’ has no meaning as a concept with its own particular dynamic. There is no such thing as ‘religious’ change that is not also tied to other sorts of changes and indeed to continuity. One dramatic change was the adoption by whole communities, or large segments of communities, of Christian burial practice in which the body was placed in the supine position, head to the west, facing east. Christian burial is seen to represent ‘religious conversion’ but it was one of a broad sweep of changes in how power was gained and wealth appropriated, and the way in which killing was socially sanctioned through warfare. Evidence is accumulating from sites in Belize that a significant change in burial practice also took place at time of the Maya collapse in the ninth and tenth centuries. The question that remains to be answered is whether or not the new interment practices were part of a pattern which, like the burials of the Conquest period, reflected broader socio-cultural transformations.

Keywords:

• Maya
• Spanish Conquest
• Christianity
• burial practices
• religion
• Classic Maya collapse

Acknowledgements

Research in Belize has been supported by many organizations over the years, most recently by the British Academy and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. We also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the National Geographic Society, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the US embassy through the Institute of Archaeology (NICH) in Belize, York University (Ontario, Canada) and Claude Belanger. We are indebted to the Institute of Archaeology in Belize for permission to carry out the investigations, and for their support of the work. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

Here I use ‘cache’ in the sense of something hidden or buried.

A good example is the war in Iraq (Ricks 2006).

See, for example, the description of Cortés's siege of Tenochtitlan (Pagden 1986, especially pp. 260–5) with regard to the perpetual misunderstanding between Cortes and the Aztec rulers when Cortes continued to think that, because he had killed so many people, Tenochtitlan would surrender.