Ritual responses to drought: An examination of ritual expressions in Classic Maya written sources

Abstract

Planting and rain-beckoning rituals are an extremely common way in which past and present human communities have confronted the risk of drought across a range of environments worldwide. In tropical environments, such ceremonies are particularly salient despite widespread assumptions that water supplies are unproblematic in such regions. We demonstrate for the first time that two common but previously under-appreciated Maya rituals are likely planting and rain-beckoning rituals preferentially performed at certain times of the year in close step with the rainy season and the Maya agricultural cycle. We also argue for considerable historical continuity between these Classic Maya ceremonies and later Maya community rituals still performed in times of uncertain weather conditions up to the present day across Guatemala, Belize, and eastern Mexico. During the Terminal Classic period (AD 800-900), the changing role played by ancient Maya drought-related rituals fits into a wider rhetorical shift observed in Maya texts away from the more characteristic focus on royal births, enthronements, marriages, and wars towards greater emphasis on the correct perpetuation of key ceremonies, and we argue that such changes are consistent with palaeoclimatic evidence for a period of diminished precipitation and recurrent drought.

Ofrendas y rituales postclásicos dedicados a Chaahk en el sitio maya de Chilonché (Petén, Guatemala)

“…La comparación de los resultados derivados de los análisis arqueológicos con los epigráficos, etnohistóricos, etnográficos y los estudios paleoclimáticos es, por tanto, susceptible de aportar sugerentes resultados acerca de los cambios en la práctica ritual a finales del Clásico maya, como consecuencia de dichos episodios de sequía, tal como sostienen Jobbová y colaboradores (2018:759).…”

La carga de la miseria: tiempos de crisis según los relatos históricos, proféticos y literarios mayas

“…Va a suceder con todo rigor sobre todos» (Bricker 1990: 172 Debemos buscar, entonces, en nuestras investigaciones arqueológicas no sólo las evidencias de catástrofes naturales como causa desencadenante de una crisis, sino también las consecuencias que traían aparejadas de desorden y competición por los recursos escasos, incluso la intervención oportunista de un reino limítrofe que saca partido de la situación de debilidad de otro. Quizá una vía interesante es la propuesta recientemente por Jobbová et al (2018), quienes analizan el cambio en el comportamiento ritual maya a lo largo del Clásico Terminal y lo sostienen hasta los tiempos coloniales. Para estos investigadores los grandes rituales públicos de la elite maya se desplazaron desde un foco primordial centrado en los nacimientos, entronizaciones, matrimonios, guerras y rituales de la realeza, a aquellos que tuvieron un fundamento profundo en la fertilidad y la abundacia de los alimentos.…”

Revisiting mechanisms of the Mesoamerican Midsummer drought

“…The annual cycle of precipitation in parts of southern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean exhibits a bimodal signal characterized by two wetter periods and a drier period in between during Midsummer, most commonly referred to as Midsummer drought (MSD; Mosiño and García 1966;Magaña et al 1999;Gamble et al 2008;Perdigón-Morales et al 2018;Zhao and Zhang 2021) or locally as canícula and Veranillo (Dilley 1996). The MSD, as a relatively drier spell during the rainy season, is known to impact agriculture and crop-yield (Jobbová et al 2018;Harvey et al 2018), and recent evidence has highlighted both changes to the timing of the MSD (Anderson et al 2019) and increasingly damaging impacts of droughts to local farmers (Hellin et al 2017;Chen et al 2017). The relevance of the MSD calls for improved seasonal and climate predictions of its strength and timing.…”