Ancient Maya Defensive Barricades, Warfare, and Site Abandonment

Abstract

In a recent report (Latin American Antiquity11:283-299), Bruce Dahlin presents evidence from Chunchucmil, Yucatan, and other ancient lowland Maya centers, which indicates that low stone and earth barricade walls may have been important defensive constructions. He also postulates that population annihilation occurred during Maya warfare, particularly at Chunchucmil. In this commentary I explore alternative explanations regarding Maya defensive works and warfare derived from recent archaeological research and historic sources from the Maya lowlands. The existence of palisades or thorny bush on barricade walls, and more gradual abandonment of Maya sites during episodes of conflict, warrant further consideration and testing along with Dahlin"s intriguing hypotheses.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.