8 Calakmul: Agent Risk and Sustainability in the Western Maya Lowlands

Abstract

Great attention has been focused on the southern trade routes across the Yucatan Peninsula through Tikal but little to the potential for crossing through Calakmul further to the north. This chapter shows that a combination of topography and politics make the Calakmul corridor the more efficient transit route. The political turmoil generated by Teotihuacan's involvement in Lowland trade following C.E. 378 cascaded into centuries of conflict between cities along the Tikal corridor and inhabitants of alternative routes. We trace the evolution of this conflict as influenced by landscape and climate, and decisions of the ambulatory Kaan Dynasty of El Mirador, Dzibanche, Calakmul and finally Calkini. The conflict seems to have played out in the elevated interior of the peninsula, the bone of contention perhaps being control of the Calakmul corridor through the Candelaria River. We suggest there are sufficient parallels between the Calakmul and European Rhône River corridors to draw a productive analogy between two, including that they both fall under the same synoptic climate system. Because the post-Columbian world economic system rose indirectly from the Rhône corridor, the two systems make a good test bed for thinking about the future evolution of the world system. The scale of comparison is rendered feasible by viewing the systems in terms of the scale of information transfer in which

The drop that makes a vase overflow: Understanding Maya society through daily water management

“…It remains unclear whether water was led to replenish bajo-margin reservoirs or to irrigate crops. Calakmul was situated next to a large bajo, which could have provided access to seasonal sources of water for agriculture (Folan et al, 1995;Gunn et al, 2014).…”

From Calakmul to the Sea: The Historical Ecology of a Classic Maya City That Controlled the Candelaria/Champoton Watersheds

“…In the headwaters of these branches are the major interior settlements of Calakmul on the Tomatillal, Naachtun (Philippe Nondedeu) and Yaxnohcah (Brewer et al 2017;Reese-Taylor et al 2012) on La Esperanza, and El Mirador on the Candelaria branch (Hansen 2004). Calakmul and El Mirador, the two mega-centers of Maya population in the Late Preclassic and Early Classic, appear to have co-evolved in the early period of Maya cultural development (Folan et al 1995;Gunn et al 2014b). It is not impossible that the decline in population of El Mirador, though not abandonment, was associated with the Kaan dynasty moving its headquarters to Calakmul (Gunn et al 2014b), a thought reinforced by the transformation of El Mirador into a pilgrimage site in the Classic Period (Hansen 2004).…”

Geo-cultural Time: Advancing Human Societal Complexity Within Worldwide Constraint Bottlenecks—A Chronological/Helical Approach to Understanding Human–Planetary Interactions

“…An interesting example has emerged in the Maya lowlands. The Classic Period (200-900 CE) of the Maya lowlands came to be organized for the most part around water-managing cities such as Calakmul, Caracol, and Tikal (Scarborough 1993;Martin and Grube 2008;Lucero et al 2011;Chase and Scarborough 2014;Gunn et al 2014b;Scarborough 2017). They were in large part city states although since scholars have learned to read Maya writing it has become clear that there was an alliance between Calakmul and Cara-col that approached the scope and form of an empire during the Calakmul Golden Age in the 500 s and 600 s CE.…”

“…Also, during the approximately 2000-year history of the Maya interior urban system (about 1000 BCE-1000 CE), it was buffeted by regional volcanoes (Tankersley et al 2011), global cooling (Gunn et al 1995;Brenner et al 2003) that caused local droughts, and external conquests (Freidel et al 2007) that injected regional politics into local Maya lowlands economies. These and other events repeatedly fragmented polities and resulted in a 200-year struggle for dominance between the Calakmul-Caracol alliance and the Teotihuacan-Tikal alliance (Martin and Grube 2008;Gunn et al 2014b).…”

“…After about 1500 CE, the period of the great European colonial empires began. Some Mesoamerican states were conquered by the Spanish, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the western lowland Maya actually joined the Hapsburg world reorganization viewing them as a similar maritime culture (Scholes and Roys 1968;Faust 1998;Gunn et al 2014b;Gunn 2019). In these cases, empires from the Roman to the great age of European colonization funneled huge amounts of resources that were energy subsidies to the central parts of empires.…”