Multepal: On the nature and ideology of postclassic Maya political system
The subject of this study is the supralocal political organization of the Maya in the Postclassical period (12th to the second half of the 16th centuries), more precisely, its form known as multepal, based on the example of the Mayapán state. The author states that there is no common notion of the distinctive features of this system in historiography. The aim of this study is to highlight these features and to characterize in detail both its political and socioeconomic dimensions. According to the author, multepal should be viewed not as a unique example, but as a variant of the Postclassical Maya supralocal political organization. This form of government was closely linked to the communal institutions of power and drew its legitimacy from these grass-root forms of organization. In its political dimension, multepal implied the presence of a supreme council of local and/or regional nobility. However, we should consider as its most distinctive characteristic not this feature (for, in fact, power was held by the most powerful family lineages) but the concentration of local nobility in the state’s capital. This concentration allowed to achieve the greatest possible centralization, not only economically (due to the concentration of a significant part of additional goods in one center) but also politically: the necessity of a long-term or permanent presence in the capital, obliged local ruling dynasties to create a more complex administrative apparatus, authorizing officials or junior members of their lineages to manage their domains. The scientific novelty of this article lies in the author’s elaboration of the above-named concept, using the combined data from written sources with that of archaeological excavations. The author considers that the concept of multepal could be applied not only to the Mayapán state, but also to a number of regional political entities of the Guatemalan highlands, Northern and Central Yucatán, as well as Central Petén (Tulum-Tancah, Cozumel, Zacpetén, Topoxté, Hakawitz, Utatlán, and Kawinal). Additionally, the author makes a step towards the refusal of the rigid fragmentation of social reality into separate “spheres”, one of which represents the political organization, that has been well-established in the Maya studies.