Military campaigns of the ancient Maya: organization and logistics

This article is devoted to the investigation of the warfare and the organization of the military campaigns of the ancient Maya in the Late Classic period (7 th and 8 th centuries AD). Under the influence of the so-called «theocratic conception», which took shape in the 1930s and 1940s and described the ancient Maya as an essentially peaceful culture, at the end of the last century the Maya were still being viewed as a society, in which warfare was at a low level of development and which practiced military campaigns of short duration. It is made clear, using several examples of military campaigns (in 744 in Central Peten, the struggle to achieve dominance on the left bank of the River Usu-masinta in the fifties and eighties-nineties of the 7 th century and the campaigns led by the ruler of the town of Yaxchilan in the 790s), that the Mayan forces were assembled using a complex structure. The organization of military campaigns could take a long time (more than one month) and the campaigns were not limited to a single battle, which would be recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions, but involved a wide-ranging series of events.