Entry 27: Archaeology and the early Taiguano state
From “The Evolution of Pre-Taiguano Yucayan Society,” paper by Miquel Tlaxcualcuani and Izapella Cipactōnal
Columbus arrived in year 132 of the Anno Taivanico, which begins with the return of the Prophetess to Haiti in AD 1362. By that year there must have been few who could remember the early Taiguano state, that is, the kingdom’s history prior to the Paper Bonfire on AT 53 / AD 1414, a massive book burning that destroyed virtually all sources ever recorded in Haiti prior to that date.
The Taiguanos’ Orwellian justification for the Paper Bonfire has already been much made of:
Who were the early Taiguanos?
Traditional accounts claim that the first Taiguanos were slaves from Mayapán who fled the turmoil of the civil war that brought Cemānāhuatēpēhuani to power. They took over the kingdom of Xaragua with the aid of the exiled mercenary-king Tēzcatl, initiating an ideological program that involved the pursuit of greater social equality and first introducing the worship of the deity Bacocolon, a culture hero and creator god. An attempt to restore the status quo by the other kings of Haiti was foiled in the 1367 Battle of Ximani, and over the next four decades all of the island came under the Prophetess’s direct administration.
For obvious reasons, archaeological work on the city of Cocopan has been difficult. However, the above-mentioned Pyramid of Bacocolon in the Maisi temple complex, which significantly predates the Taiguano state, suggests that the worship of the Feathered Lord as a god of cultural achievement had been an important element of state religion even in the Age of Caciques. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the cosmology of pre-fourteenth century Yucayan state cults, it is probable that the Taiguano cult of Bacocolon was nothing more than an amplification of practices whose basic elements predated any Prophetess.
Recent field surveys of fourteenth-century peasant households in twelve Xaragua village sites suggest that the livelihood of the rural population was virtually unchanged by the Taiguano takeover. There was no marked improvement in living standards as Taiguano sources purport, nor are the larger residences of elected village headsmen archaeologically identifiable, until the early fifteenth century more than four decades after the establishment of Taiguano control.
In the Age of Caciques, noble families had sent their minor sons to control village life directly rather than allow the peasants to elect their own representatives. The greater freedom of the fifteenth-century Haitian peasantry and Taiguano acquiescence to village autonomy – the vertical withdrawal of state power – thus correspond to the horizontal territorial expansion of Taiguano power across the entire island. The retreat of the state from village life, it turns out, is far better explainable as a logical response to the administrative burdens of ruling a state five times larger than any ever before than by any ideological commitment.
The fourteenth-century fortress of Huihozemi, as important as it is to the Taiguano account of events as the site of zealous defense against an overwhelming enemy, is archaeologically invisible. Surveys of the mountain, both extensive and expansive, have been conducted repeatedly to no avail. The surviving ruins there are the remnants of new constructions of the mid-sixteenth century.
According to Taiguano accounts, the four eastern kingdoms were integrated peacefully by the will of their final rulers. Yet the capitals of all four kingdoms were abandoned soon after Taiguano takeover, and in all four sites, archaeologists have found extensive signs of destruction around the time the Taiguanos took control. The royal palace complexes, in particular, are universally razed to the ground. Landscape archaeologists have identified a general decline in the number of peasant communities across the late fourteenth century, with the estimated population of the island of Haiti falling from 1,000,000 to some 800,000, one hitherto masked by the rapid surge in population during fifteenth-century Taiguano prosperity. Clearly there was significantly more bloodshed than the sources suggest.
Who then were the early Taiguanos? A key clue lies in a recent survey of the fourteenth-century capital of the Higuey kingdom, abandoned following the area’s takeover by the Taiguanos in 1404. As aforementioned, the capitals of early fourteenth-century Yucayan kingdoms were separated into several dozen neighborhoods, each inhabited by a specific noble lineage and the dynasty’s slaves and followers. The neighborhoods controlled by nitaino (upper nobility) dynasties and those under naboria (lower nobility) families are distinguishable in both scale and the artistic skill of their remains.
When Higuey was taken, every nitaino neighborhood was looted, then haphazardly destroyed. No luxury goods are to be found, presumably because they were categorically stolen during or after the destruction. On the other hand, evidence of systematic burning and of sudden and terminal depopulation is clear, and the ground was levelled afterwards. The naboria neighborhoods, however, were evacuated in an organized fashion, the buildings remained standing, and the dynastic palaces were on-and-off inhabited into the fifteenth century.
In 1414, the noblemen of Higuey destroyed all their ceramics with syllabic inscriptions in the Paper Bonfire. The survey identified the site of destruction in a nearby hillock and recovered the potsherds present. It was found that in all cases where dynastic names could be reconstructed, the lineages were naboria ones. The Taiguano conquest had purged the nitaino from positions of power and supplanted them with naboria.
The naboria were the principal merchant class in the Age of Caciques, to the point that archaeologists often use evidence of involvement in the grain export trade as a shorthand for identifying a neighborhood as naboria. While the presence of modern cities atop the Taiguano-era provincial capitals preempts a careful study of early Taiguano trading patterns, evidence from Mesoamerica suggests that trade between Haiti and Mesoamerica actually increased following the emergence of the Taiguano state. The naboria merchants, then, must have actively benefited from the coming of the Taiguanos.
The archaeological data suggests that the Taiguano revolution was not the enterprise of a small group of fleeing slaves motivated solely by their zeal, a story that strains credibility. (Our son’s impression that the Taiguano account is reminiscent of an Internet forum story may not be far off the mark.) Rather, it was a class conflict. The pre-Taiguano nobility of Haiti had been divided into two classes, the nitaino high nobility, whose income derived from land and slaves, and the naboria lower nobility, who formed the principal merchant class. The nitaino, headed by the Cacique and his royal family, dominated the political domain and venerated a large pantheon of Sweetness effigies. The naboria, who had accumulated great wealth through their mercantile connections, chaffed against the limitations in the system. Opposing themselves to the hierarchical ideals and polytheistic patrons of the nitaino class, the naboria began to call for greater social equality and identify themselves as devotees of the Feathered Serpent god, the foreign god of social mobility and human achievement.
The result was the Taiguano movement, a radical naboria revolution against the system.
This revisionist theory still leaves much open to discussion. How reliable are the Taiguano accounts that survive? Did the Prophetess exist? What role did the mercenary king Tēzcatl play, if any? What was the relationship between the Taiguano movement and the Maya civil war? These are all questions for which we have no answer yet.
The Taiguanos’ Orwellian justification for the Paper Bonfire has already been much made of:
May the old books burn, may their ashes scatter to the far reaches of the Earth.
We burn all these pages, full of lies and nothing more. These are falsehoods that the idols whispered to the shamans, the conjurers, and other sorts of gullible men. The idols are powerless by themselves. Can an idol move its hands to eat? Can it move its feet to walk and run? Yet they are very powerful for the foolishness of men. They whisper, as a prostitute whispers, ‘Feed me, move me, serve me as your master and be my slave.’ Man listens and obeys. He becomes the most abject slave of the idol, even though he could overthrow his master of wood and stone at any moment. He forgets Bacocolon. And men teach their children the whispering lies of the idols and write it down in books, so that all their descendants will be slaves evermore.
Burn, burn the teachings of the idols; may we be freed from their clammy stone hands.
The histories of the old kings are the histories of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer be remembered by men. The songs of the old kings are the songs of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer pollute our ears. The laws of the old kings are the laws of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer decree our lives.
May the idols die. May their rites and their histories be forgotten to all humanity, and the idols thereby die a second death.
Bacocolon, accept the sacrifice of these idolatrous books, a worthy sacrifice.
Thankfully for historians, the Taiguanos never dreamed that there could be ways of systematically understanding the past other than through written and spoken testimony. Archaeology was spared by them, and it turns out to support very little of the traditional Taiguano account of the fourteenth century. Indeed, the only reliable element of the Taiguano story may be the dates given for Taiguano expansion; archaeology does strongly suggest that Xaragua was conquered in the 1360s, Maguana in c. 1380, and the rest of the island in c. 1400.We burn all these pages, full of lies and nothing more. These are falsehoods that the idols whispered to the shamans, the conjurers, and other sorts of gullible men. The idols are powerless by themselves. Can an idol move its hands to eat? Can it move its feet to walk and run? Yet they are very powerful for the foolishness of men. They whisper, as a prostitute whispers, ‘Feed me, move me, serve me as your master and be my slave.’ Man listens and obeys. He becomes the most abject slave of the idol, even though he could overthrow his master of wood and stone at any moment. He forgets Bacocolon. And men teach their children the whispering lies of the idols and write it down in books, so that all their descendants will be slaves evermore.
Burn, burn the teachings of the idols; may we be freed from their clammy stone hands.
The histories of the old kings are the histories of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer be remembered by men. The songs of the old kings are the songs of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer pollute our ears. The laws of the old kings are the laws of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer decree our lives.
May the idols die. May their rites and their histories be forgotten to all humanity, and the idols thereby die a second death.
Bacocolon, accept the sacrifice of these idolatrous books, a worthy sacrifice.
Who were the early Taiguanos?
Traditional accounts claim that the first Taiguanos were slaves from Mayapán who fled the turmoil of the civil war that brought Cemānāhuatēpēhuani to power. They took over the kingdom of Xaragua with the aid of the exiled mercenary-king Tēzcatl, initiating an ideological program that involved the pursuit of greater social equality and first introducing the worship of the deity Bacocolon, a culture hero and creator god. An attempt to restore the status quo by the other kings of Haiti was foiled in the 1367 Battle of Ximani, and over the next four decades all of the island came under the Prophetess’s direct administration.
For obvious reasons, archaeological work on the city of Cocopan has been difficult. However, the above-mentioned Pyramid of Bacocolon in the Maisi temple complex, which significantly predates the Taiguano state, suggests that the worship of the Feathered Lord as a god of cultural achievement had been an important element of state religion even in the Age of Caciques. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the cosmology of pre-fourteenth century Yucayan state cults, it is probable that the Taiguano cult of Bacocolon was nothing more than an amplification of practices whose basic elements predated any Prophetess.
Recent field surveys of fourteenth-century peasant households in twelve Xaragua village sites suggest that the livelihood of the rural population was virtually unchanged by the Taiguano takeover. There was no marked improvement in living standards as Taiguano sources purport, nor are the larger residences of elected village headsmen archaeologically identifiable, until the early fifteenth century more than four decades after the establishment of Taiguano control.
In the Age of Caciques, noble families had sent their minor sons to control village life directly rather than allow the peasants to elect their own representatives. The greater freedom of the fifteenth-century Haitian peasantry and Taiguano acquiescence to village autonomy – the vertical withdrawal of state power – thus correspond to the horizontal territorial expansion of Taiguano power across the entire island. The retreat of the state from village life, it turns out, is far better explainable as a logical response to the administrative burdens of ruling a state five times larger than any ever before than by any ideological commitment.
The fourteenth-century fortress of Huihozemi, as important as it is to the Taiguano account of events as the site of zealous defense against an overwhelming enemy, is archaeologically invisible. Surveys of the mountain, both extensive and expansive, have been conducted repeatedly to no avail. The surviving ruins there are the remnants of new constructions of the mid-sixteenth century.
According to Taiguano accounts, the four eastern kingdoms were integrated peacefully by the will of their final rulers. Yet the capitals of all four kingdoms were abandoned soon after Taiguano takeover, and in all four sites, archaeologists have found extensive signs of destruction around the time the Taiguanos took control. The royal palace complexes, in particular, are universally razed to the ground. Landscape archaeologists have identified a general decline in the number of peasant communities across the late fourteenth century, with the estimated population of the island of Haiti falling from 1,000,000 to some 800,000, one hitherto masked by the rapid surge in population during fifteenth-century Taiguano prosperity. Clearly there was significantly more bloodshed than the sources suggest.
Who then were the early Taiguanos? A key clue lies in a recent survey of the fourteenth-century capital of the Higuey kingdom, abandoned following the area’s takeover by the Taiguanos in 1404. As aforementioned, the capitals of early fourteenth-century Yucayan kingdoms were separated into several dozen neighborhoods, each inhabited by a specific noble lineage and the dynasty’s slaves and followers. The neighborhoods controlled by nitaino (upper nobility) dynasties and those under naboria (lower nobility) families are distinguishable in both scale and the artistic skill of their remains.
When Higuey was taken, every nitaino neighborhood was looted, then haphazardly destroyed. No luxury goods are to be found, presumably because they were categorically stolen during or after the destruction. On the other hand, evidence of systematic burning and of sudden and terminal depopulation is clear, and the ground was levelled afterwards. The naboria neighborhoods, however, were evacuated in an organized fashion, the buildings remained standing, and the dynastic palaces were on-and-off inhabited into the fifteenth century.
In 1414, the noblemen of Higuey destroyed all their ceramics with syllabic inscriptions in the Paper Bonfire. The survey identified the site of destruction in a nearby hillock and recovered the potsherds present. It was found that in all cases where dynastic names could be reconstructed, the lineages were naboria ones. The Taiguano conquest had purged the nitaino from positions of power and supplanted them with naboria.
The naboria were the principal merchant class in the Age of Caciques, to the point that archaeologists often use evidence of involvement in the grain export trade as a shorthand for identifying a neighborhood as naboria. While the presence of modern cities atop the Taiguano-era provincial capitals preempts a careful study of early Taiguano trading patterns, evidence from Mesoamerica suggests that trade between Haiti and Mesoamerica actually increased following the emergence of the Taiguano state. The naboria merchants, then, must have actively benefited from the coming of the Taiguanos.
The archaeological data suggests that the Taiguano revolution was not the enterprise of a small group of fleeing slaves motivated solely by their zeal, a story that strains credibility. (Our son’s impression that the Taiguano account is reminiscent of an Internet forum story may not be far off the mark.) Rather, it was a class conflict. The pre-Taiguano nobility of Haiti had been divided into two classes, the nitaino high nobility, whose income derived from land and slaves, and the naboria lower nobility, who formed the principal merchant class. The nitaino, headed by the Cacique and his royal family, dominated the political domain and venerated a large pantheon of Sweetness effigies. The naboria, who had accumulated great wealth through their mercantile connections, chaffed against the limitations in the system. Opposing themselves to the hierarchical ideals and polytheistic patrons of the nitaino class, the naboria began to call for greater social equality and identify themselves as devotees of the Feathered Serpent god, the foreign god of social mobility and human achievement.
The result was the Taiguano movement, a radical naboria revolution against the system.
This revisionist theory still leaves much open to discussion. How reliable are the Taiguano accounts that survive? Did the Prophetess exist? What role did the mercenary king Tēzcatl play, if any? What was the relationship between the Taiguano movement and the Maya civil war? These are all questions for which we have no answer yet.
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