Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983 - 36

The

Bows

the
by James

Lacandon
D. Nations

the tropical rainforest of southeastern Mexico,
white limestone cliffs rise up majestically from
In deep jungle lakes considered sacred by the
Lacandon Maya, the forest Indians who inhabit
the area. Painted on one of these cliffs in a style
reminiscent of the Classic Maya, who lived here from
a.D. 300 to 900, a monkey-like figure offers a pot of
incense to the lake's deity and namesake - Tzïbanah,
"the painter of houses." Below this figure a later
and less talented hand has scrawled a crude drawing
of a man, followed by a dog, in endless pursuit of
a fat wild pheasant. The stick-man carries the
traditional hunting and defense weapon of the
Lacandon Maya- the bow and arrow.
Today, this ancient artist's descendants still
paddle across Lake Tz'ibanah in mahogany canoes
to pray beneath the cliffs to ancestral gods for
cures, good crop yields and protection from the small
devils that live underground. But these same
Lacandones hunt wild pheasant and other game
with Remington and Winchester rifles rather
than bows and arrows. As a hunting weapon, the
bow and arrow has been abandoned in the continuing
cultural conflict between the Lacandones and
the industrialized world. Yet bow and arrow manufacture remains as important to modern Lacandones as it was to their ancestors. The intended
victims of today's bows and arrows, however,
are no longer forest animals or marauding humans,
but tourists from distant cities. Once the primary
weapon for securing meat and protecting the family,
the Lacandon bow and arrow is now a source of
income through sales to outsiders.
In its transformation from weapon to tourist
souvenir, the Lacandon bow and arrow has changed
only slightly over the centuries. This living
example of bow and arrow manufacture is important because while archaeologists write lengthy
descriptions of stone projectile points, they tend to
ignore the weapons to which these points were
attached. Bows and arrows are manufactured primarily of perishable materials - wood, cane, fibers,
and feathers - which do not withstand the decay
of time. The unbroken heritage of the most traditional
of today's Maya Indians provides an ethnographic
window for viewing the methods and means of
bow and arrow making among the Lacandones'
ancestors, the Precolumbian Maya.
and where the bow and arrow was introWhen
duced into the western hemisphere is uncertain,
but presumably the weapon arrived in the New
World with one of the recent migrations of Asian
hunters across the Bering Strait into North
America. Prom there it spread downward through
Middle and South America as Homo sapiens
36

Archaeology

Arrows

and

and John

Maya
E. Clark

gradually colonized the New World. But use of the
bow and arrow did not spread evenly throughout
the aboriginal Americas. Some societies appear to
have adopted it long before others learned of it.
It apparently was introduced into the Maya area
during the Early Postclassic era (ca. A.D. 1000),
probably by mercenary Toltecs from the Valley of
Mexico. In the Postclassic Maya world, the bow and
arrow supplanted the atlatl, or spear thrower,
which had been previously introduced by the Teotihuacanos of central Mexico.
Before this relatively late introduction, the bow
and arrow is notably absent among the Maya.
Artwork and graffiti at Classic Maya sites from
Yaxchilan to Tikal depict military leaders and
ceremonies of human sacrifice with spears, throwing
sticks and clubs, but no bows and arrows. Not
until the sixteenth century do descriptions of bow
and arrow use among the Maya appear. In the
Yucatan the Spanish bishop, Diego de Landa, reported Conquest-era scenes of sacrificial victims
slain with bows and arrows. His description of these
weapons suggests that they were identical to the
bows and arrows the Lacandon Maya make todaystraight hardwood bows used to propel fletched,
composite arrows with cane shafts, hardwood foreshafts and stone tips.
Who exactly are these people who provide the
least altered living link with the ancient Maya?
The Yucatec-speaking families recognized today
as the Lacandon Maya brought the bow and
arrow with them into Chiapas, Mexico from the
rainforest of northern Guatemala during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before that
time, Choi-speaking Maya Indians had hunted
the eastern Chiapas jungle - also with bows and
arrows, as both ethnohistorical and archaeological
sources make clear. No doubt these Choi Maya
frequently encountered the abandoned stone cities
of their Classic ancestors, although even then
these cities lay buried in the jungle vegetation that
had reclaimed them centuries earlier.
When westerners invaded the Maya world in the
sixteenth century, the Choi were attacked and
killed during Spanish military excursions into the
region. The survivors were relocated into colonial
towns where they were put to work for the Spanish
god and king, leaving the Chiapas rainforest
essentially vacant. During the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Yucatec-speaking hunterfarmers fleeing disease and disruption in their traditional territory, the rainforest of the Guatemalan
Peten, crossed the Usumacinta River into what
formerly had been Choi territory.
Ignorant of the distinct historical origins of these
new immigrants, colonial Spaniards referred to
both the removed Choi-speakers and the new Yucatec-

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983