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INTRODUCTION
The study of war is now a firmly entrenched aspect of Maya archaeology. Advancements in epigraphic decipherment have worked in conjunction with the analysis of fortifications, war-related iconography, settlement patterning, site destruction episodes, and bioarchaeological evidence to continually refine our understanding of the role war played in past Maya societies (Chase and Chase 2003; Inomata 2008; Martin 2020; O'Mansky and Demarest 2007; Schele and Miller 1986; Webster 2000). While there are volumes on the geopolitical, systemic, evolutionary, and structural consequences of social conflict, less attention has been paid to the particulars of Maya martial practice. As a result, social actors and their embodied experiences have been largely overlooked, leaving issues of agency in Maya warfare underdeveloped. To account for this imbalance, we advocate for redoubled focus upon tactics, strategy, fortifications, materiel, captivity, embodiment, and the myriad other practical elements implicated in the process of making war among Maya peoples. Such an approach serves to address a simple, yet crucial, question: how did Maya peoples practice war?
In this article, we are not trying to create a universally applicable definition of war. In a similar vein, we do not address the related theme of violence, though a discussion of this issue can be found in the article by Kim et al. (2023) within this Special Section. Defining war and violence is akin to outlining a definition of culture. Our more modest goal is to take widely accepted aspects of war-making and examine them in the Maya cultural context. Accordingly, we seek to examine the phenomenon of armed combat between social groups, and the processes entailed in preparing for and administering the outcomes of a martial engagement or campaign. The articles in this Special Section expand on the above themes by applying comparative, regional, and experiential perspectives.
Military historians specializing in Old World cultures have been more apt to analyze the particulars of war as listed above, while the works that do exist on the details of martial practice in the Americas tend to address the era of European colonization and beyond (e.g., Jones 1998; Keener 1999; Malone 1991; McNab 2010; Restall 1998; Restall and Asselbergs 2007). This void in the literature could, in many cases, be attributed to an absence of written records that describe...