On the structure of Mayapan state administrative system

The article discusses the administrative system of the Mayapan state, a regional Late Postclassic Maya hegemony that controlled an extensive area of the Northern Yucatan. My objective is to reconstruct the hierarchy of administrative tiers of this early state. To achieve this, the examining of the main elements of sociopolitical and geographical organization among the Yucatec Maya of the Contact period (i.e., "province", cuchcabal, cah, cuchteel, cacab, and extended family) - with the emphasis on supralocal, the most unstable structures -is supposed. The sources used are of Early Colonial origin. These are Diego de Landa's Relation de las cosas de Yucatan, the corpus of Relaciones de Yucatan of 1579-81, a number of Franciscan dictionaries (Calepino and Diccionario of Motul, Bocabulario de Maya Than, and Diccionario de Ticul), and documents from the local noble dynasties' (Cocom, Xiu, and Canul) archives. I conclude that: 1) Contact-period "provinces" of Yucatan in most cases demonstrate no continuity with the former second-rank supralocal polities subjugated to Mayapan. Some of them (Mani, Sotuta, etc.) could probably have some Mayapan-era prototypes, albeit different in scales and contours. A number of other "provinces" (Chakan, Ah Kin Chel, etc.) obviously cannot be linked to any supposed subpolity inserted into Mayapan state. 2) Still, such polities undoubtedly existed along with directly subjected local structures (cah) as did Caucel whose rulers in the middle of the 16^th century pretended to hold a privilege granted by the Mayapan government. 3) The administrative system of the Mayapan-led hegemony lacked uniformity. Depending on specific conditions (absence or existence of a supralocal polity analogous to the 16^th-century cuchcabal) it could have 4 or 5 hierarchical tiers. The second variation was possible if there was in the region a supralocal polity analogous to the 16^th century cuuchcabal, a sort of quite extensive early state with a population of several tens of thousands. 4) Cah, a type of geographically and politically organized community having its own settlement center and rural zone as well as its own military and bureaucratic organization was the basic territorial and political unit. 5) Cah was divided into village communities called cuchteelob that were primarily social, and not political, organizations. They could recourse to independent political activity only in anomalous conditions, and it used to be limited to synecism and subsequent formation of a new cah. This articulation by cuchteelob probably used to coincide with the simultaneous infra-cah geographical division by rural settlements called cacabob.

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