The rise of the ancient Maya royal dynasty may have been a part of commoners’ lives that is often overlooked.
Self-described “divine lords” at a Maya site called Tamarindito in what’s now Guatemala left glowing hieroglyphic tributes to themselves as heads of a powerful “Foliated Scroll” dynasty.
New findings suggest that Tamarindito’s bigwigs waited for generations to see their subjects, or maybe plotted to get followers, according to Markus Eberl, an archaeologist and epigrapher at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and his colleagues.
Tamarindito’s kings founded their capital by about the year 400 as It is a small hamlet that may only have a few peopleThe scientists report that the royal court is being used along with a few residential clusters for non-elites. Latin American Antiquity.
It took about 150 years for enough people to trickle in to Tamarindito to enable the site’s rulers to expand their power, Eberl says. Foliated Scroll rulers established a second capital, and other settlements in northern Guatemala at that time. These rulers rose to power in the period between 550 and 800.
Eberl claims that the writing and royal art at Tamarindito, and other Classic Maya sites, suggest that kings have absolute power. “In the case of Tamarindito, Maya rulers had to legitimize their authority and build power, likely negotiating with and convincing non-elites” to become subjects.
Hieroglyphics proclaiming the divine power and mythological origins of Foliated Scroll rulers have been studied since Tamarindito’s discovery in 1958. The hieroglyphic emblem depicting those rulers showed the curly stalk a lowland Guatemalan water lily. Over seven field seasons beginning in 2009, Eberl’s group excavated and surveyed much of the site and documented all surviving royal inscriptions.
Illegal logging at Tamarindito made it possible to identify most of the site’s structures in ground surveys.
Eberl states that there were no signs of a Tamarindito precursor settlement. This makes the site an excellent place to learn how Maya rulers built a power center.
Tamarindito’s early activities focused on the construction of a ceremonial area that included a pyramid, a palace and large plaza high on a hill 70 meters high. This small-scale ritual area had the plaza as its central point. The researchers estimate that these structures could have been built by 23 to 31 workers in 25 years.
But Foliated Scroll rulers’ royal ambitions, as expressed at the ritual center, far outpaced demographic reality. Despite a sparse number of locals, Tamarindito’s plaza initially provided space for around 1,650 people to gather, Eberl says. Any public assembly would have fallen far short of the plaza’s crowd capacity, he suspects.
Decorative styles of pottery recovered from 43 groups of non-elite dwellings at Tamarindito largely date to between 600 and 850, when most of the site’s residents arrived, the investigators say — several hundred years after the city was founded. During this time, the ritual plaza was extended.
Maya people constructed There are even bigger ceremonial spots than the one at TamarinditoAround 3,000 years ago (SN: 6/3/20). Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, believes that these ritual centers were attended periodically by large groups spread across large areas.
It’s unclear whether enough ancient settlements existed within a day’s walk of Tamarindito to have supported large plaza gatherings on special occasions, says Estrada-Belli, who did not participate in the new study. Tamarindito’s rulers signified their power over a wide area by constructing an impressive ritual center, he suspects.
Eberl claims that Tamarindito had fewer than a thousand inhabitants at its peak. That’s a surprisingly limited number considering that aerial laser maps reported by Estrada-Belli and colleagues have revealed large, Interconnected Maya cities now obscured in forestsIn other parts of northern Guatemala (SN: 9/27/18).
Estrada-Belli explains that the next step will be to build an aerial laser mapping of Tamarindito covering at least 100 km to verify if it is built in relative isolation.
