and Director of Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World at Brown University. He is the author of Mortuary Landscapes of the Ancient Maya and coeditor of Substance of the Ancient Maya and Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice.
Scherer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya, and reported the following:
Page 99 jumps in the middle of an important component of the book: – a discussion of how precolonial Maya fighting forces were organized. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one-page glimpse misses the broader breadth and depth of the book, including its central aim: to think through the interplay between violence and morality. On page 99, I draw largely on early Spanish colonial sources from the 16th century AD to show that the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico amassed increasingly large armies following each expedition, relying on ever-wider political alliances to resist the earliest of Spanish incursions. The point being that Maya armies were potentially large and likely comprised of large swathes of the adult male population, as needed. While the evidence for military organization for precolonial times is more opaque, I do draw comparisons between some of the military titles employed at the time of the conquest and those that we see written in Classic period texts of the seventh and eighth centuries AD to suggest some parallels. At the very end of the page, I note that women were probably not involved in war as trained combatants, but likely were participants in ritual violence. Beyond page 99, I highlight how the use of some of these military titles provides a glimpse into the broader morality of killing at war and in ritual violence among the precolonial Maya, including the ambivalence felt towards some killers.Learn more about As the Gods Kill at the University of Texas Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue