Early Maya cities featured monumental complexes with pyramids, plazas, and other structures, which centered on a shared religion. These complexes were used for rituals, including astronomical observances. But by the time kingship emerged, in 400 B.C., many of these complexes had been radically transformed. To solidify their power, rulers throughout the Maya lowlands changed the complexes, installing their mark on the landscape to reshape how these places would be remembered, according to a Dartmouth study published in Ancient Mesoamerica.1
- 1. “Just as political leaders today often seek to brand themselves, so too did early Maya rulers,” says Ryan H. Collins, a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. “Maya rulers seemed to have had real angst about the past world and think that it could interfere with their authority, so they would try to tweak it, or even erase it altogether. These rulers saw themselves as the embodiment of the Maya sun god and wanted to put their personal stamp on the city, so monuments and the ways people experienced the city were modified to reflect a ruler’s desires over his or her lifetime.”
Ryan H. Collins. Selective Memory: Monumental Politics of the Yaxuná E Group in the First Millennium B.C.. Ancient Mesoamerica, 2021; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0956536121000304
In seeking continuities and disjuncture from the precedents of past authorities, the Mesoamerican emergent ruling class during the Formative period were active agents in directing changes to monumental space, suggesting that memory played a vital role in developing an early shared character of Maya lifeways (1000 B.C. to A.D. 250). The trend is most visible in the civic ceremonial complexes known as E Groups, which tend to show significant patterns of continuity (remembering) and disjuncture (forgetting). This article uses the northern lowland site of Yaxuná in Yucatan, Mexico, to demonstrate the use of early selective strategies to direct collective memory. While there are E Groups in the northern Maya lowlands, few Formative period examples are known, making Yaxuná a critical case study for comparative assessment with the southern lowlands. One implication of the Yaxuná data is that the broader pattern of Middle Formative E Groups resulted from sustained social, religious, political, and economic interaction between diverse peer groups across eastern Mesoamerica. With the emergence of institutionalized rulership in the Maya lowlands during the Late Formative, local authorities played a significant role in directing transformations of E Groups, selectively influencing their meanings and increasingly independent trajectories through continuity and disjuncture.