Resumen

WILLIAMS-BECK, Lorraine A.. Ríos para ritos que consolidaban el poder en las Tierras Bajas mayas noroccidentales. Cuicuilco [online]. 2008, vol.15, n.44, pp.197-228. ISSN 0185-1659.

Reasons revolving around the presence of two rivers, the Homtún and Champotón located in the Yucatan Peninsula's northwestern area, are explored in terms of power relations and their cities, Acanmul y Edzna, symbolic nature for two regional capital Mayan cities situated along their drainage courses. Detailed analyses of urban layout, archaeological contexts, sculpted monuments and other iconographic representations, as well as local environmental characteristics considered as inalienable tropes in which these principal actors were found, suggest symbolic and cosmological rather than economic or political undercurrents for locating these places within a regional framework. A symbolic interpretation of tangible and intangible cultural elements allows us to propose hypotheses regarding the role of these capital cities as places of "creation and good government" situated in a sacred landscape on the context, architectural compound, site, and regional levels. In addition, these cities and other satellite sites within their political jurisdictions probably were part of religious and ceremonial activities carried out along an aquatic circuit that revolved around the annual Maya ritual calendar. Franciscan open and "visita" chapels erected during the late XVI and early XVII Centuries along this dual fluvial route and in other topographically elevated areas found in this particular ecological niche with savannah grasslands, wetlands, and swampy lowlands united by two rivers, appear to sustain the hypothesis regarding a long term presence of religious processions and pilgrimages in this immediate region, whose heritage still remains in one place along the route today.

Palabras llave : sacred geography; pre-Columbian settlement; Ca'anpech; Chakanputun Provinces.

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