THESE ARE OUR MOUNTAINS NOW: STATECRAFT AND THE FOUNDATION OF A LATE CLASSIC MAYA ROYAL COURT Nicholas P. Carter David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Abstract This article presents a synthesis of newepigraphic readings of hieroglyphic texts from the sites of Sacul and Ixkun, in the northwestern Maya Mountains of Guatemala, with archaeological data previously published by the Atlas Arqueológico de Guatemala. It proposes that a late eighth century king of Sacul broke with his former allies at Ucanal to establish himself as a local suzerain, sponsoring a new vassal kingdom at Ixkun in the process. Visible in both the hieroglyphic and stratigraphic records, these events recapitulated on a smaller scale the geopolitical practices of hegemonic Maya kingdoms like Calakmul and Tikal. The Sacul king’s strategic cultivation of a separate but dependent court sheds light on the possibilities of and limitations on Classic Maya kingship. Lowland Maya (Figure 1) polities of the Classic epoch (a.d. 250–1000) were normally ruled by monarchs with the title of ’ajaw (“lord”) or, beginning late in the Early Classic period (a.d. 250–600), k’uhul ’ajaw (“holy lord”). In hieroglyphic inscriptions, kings are attributed so-called “emblem glyphs,” personal titles that identify them as the holy lords of named dynasties rather than of fixed locations (Berlin 1958; Mathews and Justeson 1984; Stuart and Houston 1994:6–7). The greatest diversity of such dynastic names in the hieroglyphic corpus appears during the eighth century—a time when lowland populations were at their peak, when sub-royal noble titles proliferated in the inscriptions, and when non-ruling members of royal families also used the k’uhul ’ajaw title (Houston 2012:167; Jackson 2013:82–86). Such an abundance of different dynasties, each claiming royal status, can be interpreted in two ways. First, the abundance of dynas- ties reflect the disintegration of formerly territorially extensive king- doms, with subordinate nobles rebelling or demanding recognition as k’uhul ’ajaw in exchange for continued loyalty. The weakening of royal power relative to the aristocracy prefigures nobles’ revolts of the kind proposed as explanations for the early ninth-century collapse of some royal courts (e.g., Fash 1983:287, 2005:98–2001; Houston and Stuart 2001:76). The other interpretation is that they are textual corre- lates of a geopolitical strategy whereby ambitious kings raised vassals to royal status and sent them to govern newly acquired or tenu- ously held territories. Both models describe real processes that unfold- ed in different times and places. Archaeological data and careful attention to the historical contents of epigraphic inscriptions are neces- sary to distinguish which operated in any particular case. This paper investigates one such case: that of the northwestern Maya Mountains of southwestern Petén, Guatemala, a region where multiple royal dynasties were established in the Late Classic period (a.d. 600–830). Archaeological and epigraphic data suggest that the political landscape of the region was shaped by cooperation and conflict between local rulers and potentates from outside it. One strategy they employed was the creation of nominally independent royal courts whose kings owed their posi- tions to overlords. This strategy reproduced on a smaller scale the long-distance machinations of Maya hegemons like Tikal and Calakmul, pointing to the practical and ideological limitations of Maya kingship as an administrative institution. CLASSIC MAYA STATECRAFT Controversies over the nature, size, and number of Classic Maya polities (see Sharer and Golden 2004 for an overview) have largely been superseded by culturally and historically specific studies of how Maya courts worked (e.g., Inomata and Houston 2001; Jackson 2013) and how they interacted over time (e.g., Martin and Grube 2008). By the end of the Late Classic period, there were dozens of nominally independent lowland Maya king- doms, each with its own k’uhul ’ajaw. Below the holy kings were other lords with a variety of hereditary and royally-bestowed claims and titles. Some governed subject centers, while others served as attendants in central courts (Houston and Inomata 2009: 166–167; Jackson and Stuart 2001:222–226). Particularly in the Usumacinta River region, governors called sajal, who administered towns and territories on behalf of kings, are celebrated in monumen- tal texts and portraits. Yet those same sources suggest that their status was variable: the kings of Yaxchilan exercised tighter control over their sajal vassals than did their rival kings at Piedras Negras, whose governors had stable multigenerational dynasties of their own and carried on diplomatic relations with other kings (Golden et al. 2008:253). Use of an emblem glyph implies a claim to royal status, but not necessarily true sovereignty in the sense of being unaccountable to 233 E-mail correspondence to: nicholascarter@fas.harvard.edu Ancient Mesoamerica, 27 (2016), 233–253 Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016 doi:10.1017/S0956536116000316 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0956536116000316 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 209.6.225.172, on 29 Nov 2016 at 11:30:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.