, and a full month and a week, we go back to the Archipelago. Oh, and I've got tests coming up again, so this will be the last post for about three weeks or so. The next batch of posts will be about the Mississippians, which this post already touches on very slightly.
From “The Evolution of Pre-Taiguano Yucayan Society,” paper by Miquel Tlaxcualcuani and Izapella Cipactōnal
Stage III, c. 1250-1350. Stage III societies correspond to the “Despotic Age of Caciques” so reviled by Taiguano and Cuban sources alike. The natural result of the gradual enslavement of the vast majority of the Yucayan population and the elevation of a professional warrior-nobility, the Age of Caciques was marked by four processes whose consequences were fundamental to understanding the later Imperial Era in the Yucayan Archipelago: 1) Increasing social stratification; 2) Increasing administrative centralization; 3) Increasing contact with both Mesoamerica and the
Caniba; 4) Increasing Mesoamericanization of Yucayan culture.
1) Increasing social stratification
By 1250, Yucayan society was divided into two main classes: the free
yuguazabarahu nobility, headed by the cacique or monarch, and the enslaved
pentasrix peasantry.
The
yuguazabarahu class had once been free peasants, but in their transition to noble status they gradually became landless; the land was more productive when cultivated by
pentasrix, whose agricultural pursuits could be far better controlled and exploited by the elite. To compensate for the loss of land directly farmed by the freemen, the caciques allowed
yuguazabarahu matrilines to govern specific communities of
pentasrix and receive the lion’s (or perhaps the jaguar’s?) share of their labor and production in a feudal-like contract.
The
yuguazabarahu class itself was divided into two. The upper nobility, the
nitaino, had belonged to high-status lineages in Stages I and II. They still controlled the largest
pentasrix communities, played the most important roles in the bureaucracy, had their lineage palaces directly next to the royal palace, and had privileged access to certain prestige goods, including llama wool cloth. The cacique rarely married outside the
nitaino class.
The lower nobility, the
naboria, were descendants of the free peasant lineages in Stages I and II. The
naboria controlled smaller
pentasrix communities, often served
nitaino nobles as village governors, and lived in the outskirts of the capital. Because they had limited ways to accumulate capital through their
pentasrix communities, and because the
nitaino looked down on trade, they were the primary merchants in the realm.
The noble lineages lived in the capital itself, in walled lineage palaces surrounded by the humble dwellings of their followers. Archaeologists invariably find that fourteenth-century Yucayan capital settlement patterns resemble a conglomeration of independent villages, each of them surrounding a
yuguazabarahu compound, far more than a unified city; this presumably reflected the degree of autonomy each lineage enjoyed. Archaeological surveys of Haitian cities suggest that the average Yucayan capital in 1300 was home to some eighty of these lineage palaces, with about a third of them
nitaino.
The
pentasrix represented around 85% of the population. They were considered the property of their noble lineage to be sold at will and were banned from leaving their communities or marrying outside their community without noble permission.
The priestly class was also divided into two. The upper-class priests came from the
yuguazabarahu, received training in religious academies, and officiated worship to the Sweetness artifacts of the noble lineages and the new Mesoamerican gods. The lower-class priests came from the
pentasrix and helped in the religious life of the commoners.
Laws promulgated by the caciques closely regulated the division between the classes. Marriage between a
pentasrix and a
yuguazabarahu was forbidden, any child of a union between a
pentasrix and a
yuguazabarahu was considered the child of the
pentasrix alone, a
yuguazabarahu could freely kill or sell a
pentasrix, the
pentasrix were banned from using any good produced outside the realm, the
pentasrix were forbidden from ever leaving the realm unless as merchant ship rowers or as goods to be sold, and so on.
2) Increasing administrative centralization
It would be impossible for even an archaeology undergraduate to fail to distinguish eleventh-century and thirteenth-century Yucayan settlement patterns.
The crucial difference is
nucleation. Stage I Yucayan societies had dispersed settlement patterns, with population densities roughly equal all across the
cacicazgo. It would have been trivial for
naboria families to cross the border and join another chiefdom, or for peripheral sub-caciques and war captains to initiate cross-border raids on their own.
With the rise of warfare in Stage II and the ballooning of the
pentasrix population, this state of affairs became unsupportable. To prevent their enslaved peasants from fleeing home and rival neighbors from taking their slaves, caciques concentrated the
pentasrix population in intensely cultivated areas around their capital. Peripheral areas were naturally emptied of people through slave raiding, and for the first time in history, Yucayan polities had clearly defined borders.
The following data from a study of Stages I and III settlements in the Cuban kingdom of Maisi, with “capital area” defined as the portion of the kingdom within 120 kilometers of the capital, is telling:
The sparsely populated border areas were defended by lines of fortifications, which soon made slave warfare a costly and unproductive means of acquiring slaves. After 1250, most Yucayan slaves sold to Mesoamerica were
pentasrix criminals who had run afoul of the new legal systems of the caciques.
With such immense populations of slaves in the immediate vicinity of the capital, more efficient methods of state control became imperative. As seen from the graph above, communities were consolidated into larger villages, on average twice as larger as Stage I ones. As mentioned, each
pentasrix community belonged to a
yuguazabarahu lineage. However, no lineage was ever permitted to control two adjacent communities, as to block any noble family from consolidating control over an entire region in an affront to royal power. Most
nitaino families thus controlled widely disparate communities across the realm and relied on village governors from the
naboria class to govern local slaves directly.
Royal agents regularly visited each
pentasrix community to hold censuses, keep track of local conditions, and ensure that the
yuguazabarahu were not plotting against the cacique. If a certain community had grown to more than fifteen hundred people, the royal agents recommended that it be divided into two. This allowed a constant supply of new
pentasrix communities to reward noble lineages with and ensured that noble power could not balloon in pace with the ballooning population.
The caciques adopted the Mesoamerican merchants’ syllabary and used it to keep censuses and pass laws and decrees. These laws regulated every aspect of
pentasrix life, at least according to later Taiguano sources. Guaiqui says in his
Letters to Christopher Columbus:
In the Age of the Caciques, they had laws that said, they had laws written in their crude and ugly syllabaries that said,
“The pentasrix shall not marry, because they will have more children if every man were to copulate with every woman. And the pentasrix shall be told to copulate like rats, like monkeys. And the pentasrix shall not put his penis in a woman’s mouth or anus, because they will not have children this way. And the pentasrix shall not copulate with those of their same gender, because they will not have children this way. And the pentasrix are to always go naked, and to be beaten if they hide their genitals, and to be sold to the Maya if they wear a loincloth, because their nakedness shows that they are slaves, and they will have more children this way.”
The Caciques thought that the pentasrix were animals, and this was not according to taiguan, and we abolished them.
Other
yuguazabarahu nobles served in the cacique’s small bureaucracy as generals, harbormasters, and diplomats. These were the most prestigious positions possible for a Yucayan nobleman, and because promotion to these posts was based on recommendations from existing post-holders, they were closed to the
naboria class.
3) Increasing contact with both Mesoamerica and the Caniba
In Stage I, Yucayan ships had dominated contact between Mesoamerica and the Archipelago. The dynamics were reversed in Stage II; Yucayans stayed home, Mesoamericans went east. By Stage III, trade on the Blue-Green Road had become roughly as Columbus found it, with both Mesoamerican and Yucayan ships full participants.
Sources from the fifteenth-century Cuban kingdom of Maisi suggest that the
nitaino scorned trade. Any self-respecting
nitaino noble would have more than enough
pentasrix villages under his control to live a comfortable life without having to leave his homeland for uncertain adventures overseas. This meant that a Yucayan merchant vessel was universally captained by a
naboria noble, transporting both his own cargo and the goods of
nitaino on their behalf. Most sailors were
pentasrix from the
naboria captain’s community.
Naboria merchant ships anchored off every eastern Mesoamerican port, from the Huasteca to Ācuappāntōnco, and in some ports – like the coastal cities of the League of Mayapán – they represented the single largest foreign merchant demographic. There was a
naboria population in Ācuappāntōnco, and though we have no sure evidence, it is very likely that some
naboria merchant ships sailed into Jocay harbor.
Trade was an easy way to raise state revenue, and Yucayan caciques welcomed both Mesoamericans coming to their ports and
naboria leaving from them. The office of harbormaster was one of the most prestigious government posts in any
cacicazgo, and most kings and
yuguazabarahu families alike put their slaves to work on plantations to cultivate cash crops in high demand in Mesoamerica, including maize and other staples, wide varieties of tropical fruits, tobacco, honey, cacao, and raw cotton. Yucayan manufacturing was still at an underdeveloped stage in the fourteenth century, and foodstuffs were
the undisputable export of the Archipelago. It may not have been uncommon for caciques to wear Mesoamerican cloth woven with cotton produced from their own country.
The decline in the number of war slaves that could be acquired within the Archipelago pushed
naboria slave traders to look for slaves elsewhere. To the north, they sailed beyond their traditional slave-hunting grounds in Calusa lands as far as a land full of sandbanks and islands that the natives called Tsenacommacah, “Densely Inhabited Land,” although the Yucayans could not have thought it very densely inhabited compared to either Mesoamerica or their own isles. To the west, they passed the Mississippi Delta and finally found the deserts of Aridoamerica, though no Yucayan seems to have ever circumnavigated the entire Gulf of Mexico. To the south, they passed the Lesser Antilles and reached the South American mainland.
Slaves were not the sole commodity purchased by Yucayan ships abroad, and goods from both the Southeast’s temperate forests and the jungles of northern South America were early and important commodities.
To both north and south, the Yucayans found peoples who, as a general rule, did not build with stone, nor use writing, nor – at least initially – partake in the cultural language of the Mesoamericanate world, the civilizational sphere where Mesoamerican ideas and concepts held currency. These cultural differences were perceived as inferiority, and the Yucayans thus identified their northern and southern mainland neighbors as
Caniba, “barbarian,” which has since become a very famous English word.
The Yucayan perception of the world.
4) Increasing Mesoamericanization of Yucayan culture
The Yucayan elite of the Age of Caciques explicitly modeled itself on Mesoamerican examples. They wore Mesoamerican cloth, read Mesoamerican books, used Mesoamerican tools, and spoke a register with increasing Mesoamerican influence. Columbus noticed this early on. “The people of the Indies have two numbers,” he says. “The common people use one set, where “five” means “hand” and “twenty” means “man.” The grandees and magnates use another set based on twenties, wholly foreign and much more eloquent.”
This cultural influence is most archaeologically conspicuous in the sphere of elite religion.
All state temple complexes of the Age of Caciques have been lost. All but the famous Great Temple of Maisi were razed in the Revolutionary Era, and even the Maisi temples were destroyed in the 1520s. Thankfully, two recently discovered sources – a sketch of the Maisi temple by a very early Spanish observer and a late fifteenth-century Taiguano description of what the author describes as “the Great House of Idolatry in Maisi” – have been coupled with archaeological research on the former temple precincts to allow us a more comprehensive understanding of the religion of this last Cacique-state in the Yucayan Archipelago.
A diagrammatic reproduction of the Maisi temple is given above.
From afar, the most distinguishing feature of the Maisi temple complex must have been the ceremonial stone walls. These are Mesoamerican features; Stage I Yucayan sacred sites use earthenworks and trenches (both of which are still found in the Maisi temple), but not walls.
Out of the five central constructions of the Maisi temple complex, two are dedicated specifically to Mesoamerican deities. To the north stands the Pyramid of Bacocolon, dedicated to the Feathered Serpent god of Mesoamerica. It is telling that the Pyramid of Bacocolon is nearly as large as the earthen Sweetness Mound that honors the Sweetness effigies of the state. In the southeastern corner of the complex, there is a pyramid temple to the Maya merchant god Ek Chuah, referred to by Yucayans as Acazua. The Pyramid of Acazua is again as large as the traditionally Yucayan feasting halls in the southwest. Even the ball court is characteristically Mesoamerican, although ball games were played in the Archipelago long before sustained mainland influence. A Maya ball player could have played well in Maisi.
The Pyramid of Bacocolon is especially interesting. Bacocolon was of course the central deity of Taiguano monolatry, and Taiguano sources always claim that the worship of Bacocolon was first introduced by the Taiguano state. Indeed, Taiguano sources credit the Pyramid of Bacocolon in Maisi – the deity’s only pyramid in Cuba in 1492 – to the patronage of the Second Guacayaraboque.
Here is where archaeology comes into play. Like many other Mesoamericanate cultures, the people of Maisi built new layers to their pyramids rather than rebuild them all, and the Spaniards were not able to destroy all of the innermost layers. When the temple complex was abandoned, they survived for archaeological study.
Radiocarbon dating on artifacts recovered from these early prototypes of the Pyramid of Bacocolon suggests that the building was first built in the late thirteenth century, nearly two centuries before Taiguano expansion into Cuba, and that it was expanded several times over the course of the fourteenth century by independent Maisi kings. Clearly, Mesoamerican influence on Yucayan religion long predates the Taiguano state cult.
Carvings on the surviving portions of the pyramid suggest that even in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Bacocolon was a central deity strongly associated with royal authority. In each of the carvings where the deity appears directly, he is dressed in royal guise, often being served
cohoba hallucinogens by the cacique of Maisi himself or receiving the blood of the cacique in autosacrificial rituals. The god’s association with culture, civilization, and scientific and artistic achievement also predates the Taiguano. In particular, the carvings appear to be associated with all ten of the “five
taiguan arts” and “five
taiguan sciences” pursued by fifteenth-century Yucayan artists and philosophers. For the former, the carvings portray:
- A lavishly dressed scribe at work on a codex with a paintbrush in his hand, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan art of painting
- The cacique of Maisi eyeing the sun as he places the foundation stone of a solstical shrine, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan art of architecture
- A team of sculptors at work on the base walls of a pyramid, possibly the very Pyramid of Bacocolon, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan art of stonecarving
- Five nitaino noblemen singing or chanting before a royal audience with an orchestra behind them, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan art of orchestral music; the harp characteristic of late fifteenth-century Taiguano music is missing, verifying sixteenth-century accounts claiming a 1444 invention inspired by the Panamanian musical bow
- The cacique and twenty nitaino noblemen dancing with an orchestra behind them, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan art of musical dance
For the latter, the carvings portray:
- The royal council in a hallucinogen-induced trance, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan science of religion
- The cacique on an observatory beneath a star-strewn night, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan science of astronomy
- A nitaino nobleman measuring the angle of a field, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan science of mathematics
- A nitaino nobleman touching the point of an arrow, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan science of warfare
- A nitaino nobleman listening to a standing Nahua warrior, a seated Maya merchant, and a chained Calusa slave, the Maisi analogue to the taiguan science of geography
Clearly, the Taiguano state owes much to its reviled predecessor states.
The blue lines are drawn according to Helen Hornbeck Tanner’s map of communications networks in “The Land and Water Communication Systems of the Southeastern Indians” in
, but there’s bound to be mistakes. Myer’s classic 1926 map of his 125 Southeast Indian trails is probably better, but I couldn’t find an easily accessible version.
The Maisi temple complex is a hodgepodge of features from OTL Taino ceremonial sites – the oval-shaped village of En Bas Saline, Haiti, and the astronomically aligned circular Plaza de Chacuey in the Dominican Republic especially (see
) – and the ceremonial precinct of Tenōchtitlan.
