As the Gods Kill

Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya

By Andrew K. Scherer

University of Texas Press

An exploration of war, violence, and sacrifice in precolonial Maya culture and its importance in religious practices.

As the Gods Kill delivers new insights into warfare, weaponry, violence, and human sacrifice among the ancient Maya. While attending to the particularity of a singular historical context, anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Scherer also suggests that Maya practices have something to tell us about human propensities toward violence more broadly.

Focusing on moral frameworks surrounding deliberate injury and killing, Scherer examines Maya justifications of violence—in particular the obligations to one another, to ancestors, and to the gods that made violence not only permissible but necessary. The analysis isolates key themes underpinning the morality of violence—including justice, vengeance, payment, and costumbre (ritual)—and explores the ethics of violent agents, including warriors, ritual specialists, and the gods. Finally, Scherer addresses motivations for warfare, including the acquisition of spoils, tribute, captives, and slaves. An interdisciplinary case study of morality in an ancient society, As the Gods Kill synthesizes scholarship on an important dimension of precolonial American culture while taking stock of its implications for the social sciences at large.

Reviews

In this tour de force, Andrew Scherer breaks new ground in the study of war, violence, and sacrifice in precolonial Maya society. Drawing on diverse lines of evidence—from bioarchaeology and archaeology to epigraphy, iconography, and ethnohistory—he offers fresh insights into how the Maya understood and experienced violence. Informed by sensitivity to, and respect for, Maya senses of morality and ontologies, this work challenges us to reflect on our own notions of violence. The book will be of interest to scholars of Maya culture and those more broadly concerned with the intersections of violence and society. Takeshi Inomata, University of Arizona, coeditor of Mesoamerican Plazas: Practices, Meanings, and Memories

The ancient Maya, like all peoples, experienced and practiced violence as a necessary moral path. Why the Maya did so is eloquently explained by Andrew Scherer. Love of ancestral gods and devotion to sustaining the constant rebirth of the world were among the guiding experiences in the face of acknowledged terror and the gruesome presence of soul-endangering forces. War and sacrifice were necessary and inevitable, but the people and their leaders could face them with courage by following the knowledge of their past and visions of their future. This book is for them and their descendants. David A. Freidel, Washington University in St. Louis emeritus, coauthor of Before Kukulkán: Bioarchaeology of Maya Life, Death, and Identity at Classic Period Yaxuná

Author

Andrew K. Scherer is a professor of anthropology and archaeology 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.