By Wendy
Griffin
The
exhibits of the San Pedro Sula
Museum
The
Evidence of Influence of Olmecs from Mexico Northern Honduras
Around
1,000 BC in many different areas of Honduras Mexican Gulf Coast
Most
evidence is Olmec influenced vases, but there are also Olmec influenced statues
from the Honduran
North Coast San Pedro
Sula Museum Tulane
University Rufino Galan
Museum Trujillo
The current
archaeological theories about the early inhabitants of Copan is that these were
probably Lencas living in Copan at this time, according to Brent Metz’s edited
book The Maya-Ch’orti’ Area and the investigations of Manahan and Canuto. In the San Pedro Sula Museum Lake Yojoa Belize
According
to modern potters, some kind of treatment either with an “engrudo” made of
pounded yuca such as the Pech use or “atoll agrio” of ground corn like the
Chorti use, is needed for the ceramic
pots to become waterproof and to not leak. This treatment which is known as
curing the pot is applied after the pot is fired. So it makes sense that the adoption of agriculture
and the development of ceramics happened around the same time. Also the ceramic
pots are needed to cook the beans and prepare the corn as nixtamal (cooked with
lime or ashes) or atol, a kind of porridge. It is interesting that although the
Pech are not Mesoamerican Indians, they make the same shape pots to cook
nixtamal, atol, and beans, and prepare the clay the same way except for the
treatment of waterproofing it. Although the Lencas maintain few words in Lenca
today, all of the different forms of clay pots in the San Pedro Museum have
special names in Lenca, reported the Lenca guard Doña Natividad who made these
kinds and shapes of clay pot when younger living in Yamaraguila. It is not known if the Tolupanes ever learned
to make these shapes. They may have always bought them from Mesoamerican
neighbors.
The Olancho Indians of the Talgua Caves of
1,000 BC did not eat much, if any, corn. The bones were tested for C13, which
is left in the bones after eating lots of corn, and they did not have it, so
corn was probably introduced later to the Pech.
Both the Pech and Tolupanes may have adopted corn in the Post Classic
(900-1500 AD), but the making of tortillas only in the 20th century.
The use of comals or clay griddles to make tortillas does not exist around
1,000 BC in Honduras. The Mayas of Copan
had adopted comals by the middle of the Classic Period (300-900 AD), but the
Lencas may have adopted them after the Spanish conquest and the Pech and
Tolupanes only in the 20th century. The Lenca corn bread at the time of the
Conquest may have been the totopostes, which are cooked directly in the coals
of the fire, which a few Lencas still make. Three stone fires continued in use among
the Lencas and the Pech until the middle of the 20th century. According
to Pech and Tolupan myths, the first corn was pure starch, that if you used it
to make the corn drink “pozol” it did not leave a husk, but that this corn was
lost. This supports the idea that the first uses of corn were as drinks, rather
than breads.
In spite of
the evidence from burning and from corn grinding stones of the beginning of
corn cultivation around 1,000 BC, in the Lenca area of Western Honduras the
population growth and larger villages often associated with widespread corn,
beans and squash cultivation do not seem common until around 500 B.C. The sites
in the Pech area of Colon and Olancho and in the Classic period (300-900 AD),
possibly the Bay Islands, still reflected small populations in each community, heavy reliance on hunting and fishing, and
houses of perishable materials and little indication of use of an elite ceramic
at least through the end of the Classic Period (900 AD), although there are
common red utilitarian ware in the Bay Islands and the Trujillo area in the
Classic Period.
Most of the
archaeological sites known for Yoro and Atlantida seem to be Mesoamerican sites
with many mounds including high temple mounds, corn grinding stones, ball
courts, statues of Nahua speaker Gods or Olmec styles, North Coast Applique and Incised Punctate
ceramics, etc. No one is really sure what a Tolupan archaeology site looks
like, nor have archaeologists identified any ceramic that they think the
Tolupans made, reported Tulane student Roberto Rivera studying the colonial era
Tolupanes. . Like the Pech, the Tolupanes made most things of plant materials,
including houses, into the 20th century, which makes the sites very
hard to find. The Tolupanes and Pech may never have learned to make corn
grinding stones, but rather traded for them or just found them in ruins. Areas where the Tolupanes are known to have
lived in the 19th century have generally been disturbed for banana
plantations like near Santa Rita, Yoro and Candelaria/Palmar between San Pedro
and Omoa/Puerto Cortes, reported anthropologist Wolfgang Van Haagen, making the
work to identify which were Tolupan sites harder.
Before the
Classic Period, the Sula
Valley Highlands Mayan City Guatemala
City
The Mayan dynasty that was founded in Copan
may have first left Kaminaljuyu, which has some Mayan glyphs carved in stone
around 160 AD, and these Mayas moved to Tikal. In Tikal, the combination of Mayas
from the Highlands and warriors from Teotihuacan founded the dynasty in Tikal.
Later Yax Kuk Mo left Tikal dressed in Teotihuacan clothes and with armed
followers, moved to Honduras to found the dynasty of 16 rulers of Copan. The
Mayan dynasty of Quirigua was founded about the same time, according to Brent
Metz’s edited book The Maya-Chorti area.
The Indians of Teotihuacan, Mexico where Mexico City is now influenced
first Tikal and then Copan, such as changing the architecture from bahareque (a
wooden frame filled in with mud or clay) to stone and introducing new plants
like the coyol palm to make palm wine.
The
presence and importance of the Teotihuacan influence is somewhat hidden,
because the rulers of the multi-ethnic city of Teotihuacan made the decision to
not use an alphabet type writing to teach for example, the stories of their
religion, but rather a picture based teaching for books, wall decorations, and
pottery. So not having their own system
of writing, the Teotihuacan influenced rulers may have needed to use Mayan
script to have their stories told in stone. Teotihuacan was the Aztec name for
this city. It seems the inhabitants called it Tula (capital) or Tulan (place of
tule), also written Tollan, from which the name Toltec (people from Tollan)
came from. In Mayan glyphs, the word for the city of Tula is a bunch of tule,
so it is clear the name of the city is related to tule, the water plant used to
make petate mats.
During the Classic period (300-900 AD) when
Copan was at its height, the Mayas of Copan were able to dominate parts of the
Departments of Copan and Ocotepeque, part of Eastern Guatemala including
Esquipulas, and western El Salvador. The Mayas incorporated the Lencas into
their city and their state. The Lenca culture also flourished in Western and
Central Honduras and eastern El Salvador. It was the dominant culture in the
area between Lake
Yojoa Ulua River Caribbean Sea in the Classic Period.
The best known Lenca artefacts from this period are multi-colored painted clay
vessels known as Ulua Polychromes, and Marble Vases also from the Ulua
area. Beautiful examples of both are in
the San Pedro Sula Museum as well as at the new Smithsonian’s National Museum
of the American Indian’s exhibit in Washington, DC. The University of
Pennsylvania’s Museum also has nice examples of both on their website.
This
ceramic is found widely in Lenca area sites such as in the Comayagua valley, in
the Departments of El Paraiso, and Olancho, where they can be seen at the
Comayagua Museum and the Cultural Center in Juticalpa, as well as Western Honduras.
These artefacts were also widely traded in Central America including Ulua
Polychrome in elite tombs in Copan, according to Brent Metz’s book and the
Smithsonian’s exhibit, and Ulua polychrome has also been found on the Gulf
Coast of Mexico, reported US archaeologist
Susan Gillepsie. The drawings on Ulua Polychrome are so clear it is
possible to identify musical instruments, materials clothes are made out, and
hairstyles of dancers, musicians and priests, which make them quite different
from some of the Mayan ceramics of the period like Copador, which have drawings
of figures similar to glyphs, without being real glyphs. Some Mayan ceramics at
La Entrada, Copan
Examples of
Ulua Polychrome are also in Honduran collections in the Comayagua Museum and in
the Banco Atlantida collection in
Tegucigalpa, now available online. Outside of Honduras, it is also possible to
see Ulua Polychrome in the MARI collection at Tulane, the University of
Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, the Smithsonian/Museum of the American Indian
in Washington, DC, the Frederico Lunardi Museum in Italy, and reportedly in a
museum in Denmark brought back by a Danish archaeologist who worked in Honduras
in the 1930’s Mr. Ydes. MARI and the University of Pennsylvania also has
examples of Ulua Marble vases. The
founder of the Cuyamel Fruit Company which had banana plantations between
Puerto Cortes and the Guatemalan border, Samuel Zemurray, was the donor who
permitted the founding of MARI at Tulane, according to Tulane’s website, and
60% of the collection at MARI is from Honduras, reported a Tulane student. Many
of the pieces in the Smithsonian’s collection are also associated with Honduran
banana companies, such as the beautiful pieces from Campo Dos outside of La
Lima, Cortes which had archaeological pieces spanning from the Preclassic to
the time of the Spanish conquest according to a Yaxkin article describing the
Mason collection at the Smithsonian.
In addition
to elite ware, like Ulua Polychrome, there were also other Lenca ceramics made
in different regions of Western and Central Honduras .
The high presence of these in sites like in the Sensenti, Ocotepeque and
Cucuyugua, Copan areas, give the impression that the main population in these
areas were Lencas in the Classic period, not Mayas, reported Erlend Johnson, a
Tulane archaeology student. There are
also other differences between Lenca and Maya sites, such as Mayan families
tended to have several buildings around a patio—a kitchen, a sleeping house, a
warehouse to store things, etc. while the Lenca families tended to have
everything in one single house, reporter Payson Sheets in Brent Metz’s book The
Maya-Chorti Area. Bigger more important Lenca sites still have ceremonial
temple mounds and plazas, but stone houses were not common in Lenca cities as
existed in Copan’s elite neighbourhoods, an innovation the Mayas adopted from
the Peten area of Guatemala which was influenced by Teotihuacan in Mexico.
Sensenti and Cucuyugua may indeed have been part of the multi-ethnic state of
Copan and may have had a Mayan elite ruling them, but current analysis supports
the idea that the principal population there were Lenca in the Classic period.
Even in the city of Copan
The Lencas
may have been important as middle men in trade for the Mayas of Copan in the
Classic Period. There is clear evidence that the Mayas of Copan used cacao,
probably as a drink. A small container
with the glyph of cacao was tested by Hershey’s and it indeed contained 1,000
year old cacao traces. Only two
containers with glyphs on them for plants have tested positive for that
plant. The other was a container that
said my tobacco leaves among the Yucatan Mayas, and indeed it had traces of
tobacco from the Post Classic period.
However, in
the analysis of the pollen of the Copan area for the Classic area, there is no
evidence of cacao pollen, according to a study in Brent Metz’s book The
Maya-Chorti Area. Mayan ceramics have
not been found in Northeastern Honduras in the Classic Period where the cacao
grew wild, but painted Lenca ceramics have been found, reported Dr. Paul Healy.
So maybe the Lencas were bringing the cacao from Northeastern
Honduras to the Mayas of Copan. There is evidence that canoes were
used in long distance trade in the Classic era in Honduras, including the
presence of Classic era ceramics on the Bay Islands and Classic era goods found
in underwater archaeology off the Coast of Belize, due to canoes turning
over. In the Post-Classic era, canoe
travel become the main transportation route between Mexico and Central America,
which is part of what led to the decline of Lenca and Maya centers in the interior along
the old land routes, like Copan Ruinas
for the Mayas and Salitron Viejo among the Lencas. The large site of Salitron
Viejo with over 400 structures and impressive temple mounds is now underwater
because of the El Cajon dam, but the archaeological pieces from there are in
the Comayagua Museum.
By Wendy
Griffin
Like the
Mayan ruins of Copan and many lowland Mayan centers in Guatemala like Tikal and
Quirigua, many important Lenca cities, all found in valleys near water, were abandonded at the end of the Classic
Period (around 900 AD), including Salitron Viejo which is now under water due
to the El Cajon Dam, Yarumela in the Comayagua Valley, and the Dos Pasos site in Olancho near the site
of San Francisco de la Paz (called San Francisco Zapota in the colonial period).
Hilltop forts, villages and religious sites appear around Honduras Copan Eastern
Guatemala and Western El Salvador
there are also Post Classic sites in the mountains, including the forts of the
Chorti hero Copan Galel, according to
Rafael Girard and regular villages according to studies reported by Brent Metz’s
edited book The Maya-Chorti Area..
Hilltop
forts and villages usually indicate warfare. Their presence in Honduras is
probably due to the arrival of various waves of warrior, slave taking societies
of Nahua speakers and Oto-Mangue speakers from Central and Gulf Coast Mexico.
The Nahua speakers are referred to variously as Pipils (the leaders), Nicaroas
(name of the chief in Nicaragua), Mexican Indians (Mexica is what the Aztecs
called themselves), Cholulatecas (Nahua speakers from Cholula), brethren of the
Toltecs (Nahua speakers from a Post Classic Mexican state founded on the Gulf
Coast of Mexico in an area known as La
Huasteca, Toltec means “El Sabio”, the one who knows. In Honduras El Sabio is
used to describe the healer (curandero) and can be used to describe the witch
who does curses (el brujo). They are
also Nahoas or Nahuas (which Alberto Membreño also translates as “Brujo” or
Witch/the one who does curses) and “Jicaques” which the Spanish used to refer to all
non-Christian Indians. The Quiche and
Cachiquel may also have called them Yaqui, the name of a related Mexican
language and Non-Mesoamerican tribe from Northern Mexico
and their leader from Tula Guatemala
A warfare
technique known to the invading Mexican Indians was to burn the houses of the
Indians they were attacking, as can be noted in the El Bosque section of Copan
Ruinas in the Postclassic. This also had the effect of burning up their crops
that they had stored in or near their homes.
These Mexican Indians eventually took over significant parts of the
lands of the previous Copan state including Esquipulas area in Guatemala,
Central and Western El Salvador, and parts of Ocotepeque. They also greatly affected the Lenca area not
part of the Copan state. Previously
archaeologists blamed the malnutrition of the Copan Valley Indians at the end
of the Classic Period on deforestation by the Maya-Chortis. But in fact pollen
counts show the area was not deforested, that there were lots of wild trees.
Copan like all cities like New York and San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa depended
on food imported from the countryside, from within their state and probably
from Lenca areas and other areas of Honduras not part of their state. The
malnutrition seen at the end of the Classic Period could have been caused by
disruptions in the trade routes due to attacks by these Mexican Indians in
Lenca areas and finally in the Copan state itself, which disrupted trade in
food and burnt up food stored in houses with palm thatched roofs. Evidence of attacks and purposeful
destruction at the end of the Classic period exist in Copan.
Because one or more provinces of mixed Nahuas
and Honduran Indians was called Payaqui (meaning among Nahuas) or Hueyalato (El
mayor-The Most Important One, the Large One), sometimes the word “Paya” seems
to have referred to Nahua speakers as well as to the modern speakers of the
Pech language. In colonial era documents a Payaqui province is reported in both
the Chorti area (Eastern Guatemala , Western Honduras , Northwestern El
Salvador ) and in the Olancho or El Paraiso area of Eastern Honduras . One province or small state that extended from
the Naco and Sula valleys in Santa Barbara to at least Choloma, Cortes was
called Naco for the capital city (Sula,
Santa Barbara was part of this state) and another province in Yoro was called
Sulaco (the place of the Sulas) for that city and river in Yoro. Later the
Spanish missionaries reported Sules (people from Sula or Sulaco) and Comayugues
(people from one of at least 3 towns called Comayagua or Comayagüela) in the
Agalta Valley in Olancho, but it is not clear if the Sulas and Comayaguas ran
away there after the major revolts in the gold mining area of Honduras in the
1540’s or if they were the same ethnic groups that was there at the time of
Conquest (los Acaltecas, explained below).
These
states may have been multiethnic with various languages being reported there,
including for Naco-- Chorti, Care (a dialect of Lenca), and Nahua. In the
1540’s the largest town in Northwestern Honduras was Malachoa, Santa Barbara
with 1,000 people and the language reported there was Mexicano or Nahua
according to Raul Alvarado’s new book on the history of Santa Barbara. The personal names of the Toqueguas along the
Montagua River in Guatemala and in the San Pedro Sula/Ulua area at the time of
Spanish conquest show some Nahua and some Maya-Chol names, both based on the
calendar probably indicating leaders, and names of another ethnic group, probably
the common people, that might be Lencas or Jicaques, according to Dr. Sheptak.
In the former Chorti area of central and Western El Salvador, almost the whole
area becomes populated with Nahua speakers, although in the town of Izalco
(place of obsidian in Nahua), the archaeology shows a significant population of
Lencas, even though the Spanish report Nahua speaking leaders and belonging to
the Pipil state of Cuscatlan. The Lencas
might have been there against their will as obsidian miners.
The Lencas controlled a different obsidian
mine in La Esperanza, but this area also had leaders and towns with Nahua names
at the time of Conquest and obsidian from this mine is found in archaeological
sites associated with Pipil-Toltec Nahua speakers in Copan and Santa Barbara,
Honduras, El Salvador and Chichen Itza, Mexico , together with obsidian from
Mexican mines and El Salvadoran mines. Even towns specifically mentioned as
belonging to the Payaqui (between Nahuas-mixed Chorti and Nahuas) Confederation
on the El Salvadoran side of the modern border, like Masahuat, the Spanish
report large populations of Nahua speakers in the colonial period, according to
William Fowler the principal ethnohistorian of the Pipil-Nicaro/Central
American Nahua speakers. Some archaeologists have a theory that Nahua speakers
were trying to get a monopoly of the obsidian sites in Mexico and Central
America to control the trade in this stone used to make swords called macanas,
knives, arrow heads, lance heads, awls, and ceremonial pieces. Nahua place
names in the early colonial period also clustered around places with other
resources like gold mining areas-Ocotepeque, Sula/Quimistan/Naco area in Santa
Barbara, and in Colon , Olancho and the Rio Platano/Ciudad Blanca area of the
Mosquitia.
Cities now in
Honduras like Antigua Ocotepeque (previously Azacualpa) and La Jigua (now the
archaeological site La Puente near La Entrada, Copan) were reported in the
early colonial period as having leaders speaking Nahua and another Indian
language which they call Chontal (which can refer to any non-Nahua language or
Indian group, like Maya-Chortis or Lencas) and in Ocotepeque the chief had a Nahua name
Mazate (Deer is Mazat in Nahua and Mazatl en Nahuatl), however the Indians of
the community all said, he is our leader and he speaks for us, reported Erlend
Johnson, a Tulane archaeology student studying in Ocotepeque archaeological
sites. Politically the department of Ocotepeque was divided at the time of Conquest
with the towns of Antigua Ocotepeque and Azacualpa being controlled by the
Pipil-Toltecs of Esquipulas, Guatemala, but part of the rest of the department
controlled by a state Cerquin whose capital was in the Lenca area of Gracias
and Intibuca, but which may have had Nahua leaders based on their names. Part
of the modern Department of Ocotepeque is still controlled by Lencas,
particularly the Lenca majority county or municipio of Belen Gualcho,
Ocotepeque, which was 97% Lenca according to the 2001 Ethnic Census, analysed
by Dr. William Davidson. Guarcho is the name in Lenca of a local bird, reported
Doña Natividad, the Lenca guide at the San Pedro Sula Museum.
The name of
the Chorti chief who led the resistance against the Spanish in the Honduran/Guatemala
border area near Esquipulas and the El Salvadoran/Honduran border area in 1530
was Copan Galel, and Copan comes from the Nahua word for Bridge. (Copante in
Honduran Spanish is a tree trunk put across a stream to be able to cross it and
comes from this Nahua word). Cities thought to be Chorti, maybe with some
Lencas, like Sensenti, and some thought to be controlled by Nahuas like in the
Lake Guijar region and the Ostua River area on the Salvadoran/Guatemalan border
followed Copan Galel in his uprising against the Spanish where he supposedly
commanded 30,000 men. The Indian cities of Esquipulas and Chiquimula, Guatemala
(both place names are of Nahua origin) which were part of the same state
Chiquimula de la Sierra as Copan Galel, did not participate in the rebellion. Although many historians and archaeologists do
not believe in the existence of the Payaqui (among Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (El
Mayor-the Most Important/largest State) supposedly founded by the Toltec king
Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl and his followers in the border area between Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvador in the Post Classic, a colonial era Spanish report
said that all the areas thought to be inhabited by Nahua speakers in Honduras
by the ethnohistorian who studies Pipil and other Nahua speakers in Central
America William Fowler—the Sula/Naco area, the Olancho area, the Trujillo/Aguan
River area, the Comayagua area, as well as Gracias a Dios (a Spanish department
that included what is now Lempira, Intibuca and part of Ocotopeque), paid
tribute to Copan Galel, the Chorti chief with the Nahua name on the
Ocotepeque/Guatemala border, who was a captain of the Toltecs of Esquipulas,
Guatemala.
Esquipulas, Guatemala is a short distance from
the Ocotepeque border and there were footpaths connecting the Copan Ruinas area
and the Ocotepeque area in Honduras to
Esquipulas used until recently. The name
of Esquipulas probably comes from the Nahua speaker god Esquipul, the black
tiger or panther at night who devours
human hearts. This was the Central American Nahua version of the Aztec god
Tezcalipochla (Smoking Mirror). This god
was the patron god of sorcerers and his name comes from a type of mirror used
to see the future or for divination. Among
the Aztecs this god required human sacrifice, which his name in Central America
would seem to indicate was also the case here. Human sacrifice was reported in
the nearby Pipil or Nahua speaker town of Mita, Guatemala in early Spanish
colonial reports. The Nahua speaker gods
who are remembered in place names in
Santa Barbara like Quia the rain god (now Quimistan) and Ilama the
grandmother creator goddess of the Nahua speaking Nicaroas (Ilamatepeque-the
Hill of the goddess Ilama) north of the
Chorti area, who also required human
sacrifices, probably shows that the
presence of Nahua speakers so close to the Maya-Chortis was probably very
disfavorable for them.
The initial
attacks of the Nahua speakers and Chorotegas who spoke Mangue who immigrated
from Mexico to settle first on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala and El Salvador
by canoe, would have had to pass through the Chorti region to reach these
areas. Either they went down the Montagua River through the Chorti area of
Eastern Guatemala to reach the Coast or they went down the Chamelecon or Ulua
or other Western Honduran rivers, which also end in the Chorti area, and they
would have had to go through these areas to reach the Coast. As these ethnic
groups were known to be warlike, who took slaves to sell, to work, to be wives,
and to sacrifice, just the passing of these tribes to the Coast with the
burning of crops and houses and taking of slaves could account for the moving
of the Chorti and the lencas to the hills at the end of the Classic period.
The Post
Classic History of the Maya Chorti Region of Western Honduras Rewritten by
Archaeologists
By Wendy
Griffin
Many
Hondurans have been confused about the modern Maya Chorti, because previous archaeological reports said that
there were no Mayas in the Post Classic period (900-1500 AD) in Copan. These Hondurans thought if there were no
Mayas then, then the modern Chortis who live principally in three municipios or
counties near the Guatemalan border near Copan Ruinas, but also in Ocotepeque
according to the 2001 Ethnic Census, are either not Mayas, not Indians, or not
Hondurans, and certainly not the descendants of the Mayas of Copan, a classic
period (300-900 DC) site. New archaeological research shows that there were
Chortis and other Indians living in the mountains of the departments of Ocotepeque and Copan in
the Post Classic period (900-1500 DC), as well as in nearby towns which because
of decisions related to banana companies on the Coast now happen to be located
on the Guatemalan side of the border like Jupilingo, Guatemala, a colonial Indian
town that was only 9 miles from Copan Ruinas, and in the mountains of Jocotan
and Camotan counties, in Guatemala, where most modern speakers of Chorti live.
The classic
period state of Copan (identified by the glyph Zots the bat in Maya, and not
the name Copan) extended into eastern Guatemala including Esquipulas and the
Camotan river area and the ruins at Quirigua, parts of the departments of
Ocotepeque and Copan in Honduras and into Western El Salvador. The Chortis lost
much of their land in El Salvador and in the Esquipulas area in the Postclassic
period due to Nahua speakers, who may have controlled politically much of the modern Chorti area. The fact that there
are Nahua place names in the valleys apt for cacao plantations (for example
Copan (from copante-bridge), Jocotan (place of Jocote plums), Camotan (place of
camotes the Central American sweet potato), Chiquimula (the place of a specific
bird), Sensenti, Azacualpa (in the pyramid or the place of the temple mound of
the god of Aztec merchants the Pochteca), Ocotepeque (hill of ocote, the
resinous pine used to light houses), Esquipulas (place of the god Esquipul) are
all derived from Nahua) and the Chorti or Chol place names for villages and
rivers are primarily in the mountain areas of Western Honduras and Eastern
Guatemala is suspicious. Either the Nahua speakers either displaced the Chortis
from their valleys in Post-Classic period (900-1500 DC) and controlled the
cacao production and/or the Nahuas politically controlled the areas where the
Chortis lived.
The
language where the Chorti live now in Eastern Guatemala and Western Honduras
and was also a language in El Salvador in the early conquest period was
identified as “apay”, a word which has no meaning in the Chorti language, and
which was considered different from Mexicano (Nahuatl) or Mexicano corupto
(Pipil or Nawa or Nahuat, a branch of Uto-Aztecan languages which is related to
Nahuatl of the Aztecs and more closely to the Nawa of Veracruz, Mexico.). The
language of the modern Chorti is related to the Mayan languages of Chol and
Chontal in Mexico. The Chontal Indians
of Mexico called themselves yokotan, speakers of the Yokoto language, according
to the Wikipedia article on them. The Mayas of Yucatan, also do not call
themselves Mayas but rather Yucatan. The five munipios where the Chortis live
in Guatemala used to all be one municipio called Jocotan (place of the jocote
plums in Nahua), but perhaps is the Pipil pronounciation of the name of the
Mayas of the area for themselves, since all the words related to Mayan groups
who may have been present in the Chorti area in the classic or Post Classic
period Yucatan, Jocotan, and Yokotan are similar.
Cacao was a major tribute of the former and
modern Chorti areas during the colonial era, reported Brent Metz, even though
cacao pollen was not found in the Copan area in the classic period (300-900 AD)
samples analysed by archaeobotanists. Thus it was probably introduced in the
Post Classic period. The introduction of intensively cultivated cacao was also reported
by the Spanish at the time of contact in other areas possibly associated with
Nahua speakers and Nahua language place names in Honduras such as the Ulua
valley region near modern San Pedro, and the Aguan Valley near modern Trujillo
and Chapagua, Colon and Agalteca, Yoro.
So partly
previously archaeologists reported erroneously that there were no Maya-Chortis
in Honduras in the Postclassic period because 1) they were looking in valleys
when the sites were in the mountains due to warfare caused by Indians invading
from Mexico, 2) they had failed to identify correctly the ceramics of the
Postclassic period which included among others Copador (Maya), Tohil Plumbate, Fine orange, and red
designs on a white base (which I believe is indicative of Nahua speakers, such
as Naco Bichrome) up until the time of the Spanish conquest according to dating of obsidean artifacts
found with them and Postclassic ceramics from northeastern Honduras like North
Coast Applique have also been found in the La Entrada region of Copan), 3) the
housing style changed and the houses were built at the level of the ground
instead of raised up, so archeologists probably just missed the sites, reported
Erlend Johnson, a Tulane archaeology student. 4) Archaeologists did not
investigate much the other parts of the Copan state, including the Guatemalan
side of the border and the sites in the department of Ocotepeque where the bulk
of the Chorti population appears to have been living in the Post Classic/Conquest
periods. The Postclassic/Contact period
fort of Copan Galel, the Chorti leader who rose up against the Spanish in 1530
in Honduras, Rafael Girard reported finding at Paso de la Conquista, near La
Brea, Ocotepeque while his other fort was at Citalá in El Salvador, also part
of his domain.
The process
of abandoning the low lands in favour of the mountains has also been reported
among the Mayas of Guatemala, and the Lenca, the Pech, and the Jicaques of
Honduras. The Miskitos and Sumu speakers like Tawahkas abandoned the Pacific
Coast of Nicargua for the mountains and then the rainforest of the Honduran and
Nicaraguan Mosquitia for the same reason, separating the Pech of Honduras and
the Rama of Nicaragua who speak languages of the same language family Macro-Chibcha.
The Matagalpas were displaced from Choluteca Department and parts of El Paraiso
Department in Honduras, leaving part of the Matagalpa speakers in El Salvador
where their language is known as Cacaopiera, separated from the Matagalpa
speakers in El Paraiso Department and the mountains of central Nicaragua. In
the colonial records, Matagalpas are known as Pantasmas, or Chontales
(foreigners in Nahua and a Department in Nicaragua) or Ulwa or Ulua. The name
Matagalpa for the tribe for which .-li meant water like Danli, Oropoli,
Moroceli, was invented by a linguist in 19th century. Chichi- in
place names like Chichigalpa (the place of a lot of speakers that we can not
understand in Nahua and a Department in Nicaragua) or plant names chichipate (the
cure of the Indians who do not speak Nahua so we do not understand them) and
Chontales can refer to a lot of different Indians including Lencas, various
groups of Mayas, Xincas, and tropical forest tribes like the Pech, the Sumu
speakers, or the Matagalpas.
The Spanish
in the colonial era were not linguists and often used names like Ulwa or Lenca
or Pantasma and Parakas, without this name necessarily referring to the
ancestors of the people who spoke these languages until recently, notes Gotz
von Houwald in his book Mayagna. The exact linguistic and historic relationship between Matagalpa-Cacaopeira and
Lenca and these two languages and the language called Ulwa in colonial
documents (modern Ulwa is a Sumu language spoken in the Southern Nicaraguan
Mosquitia) is not clear. Since much of El Paraiso Department of Honduras was
not conquered in the colonial period and no archaeological work has been done
other than to observe temple and house mounds in the border region, reliable
information about who actually lived there in the past is scarce, and who lives
there in the present is obscured by the decision of the Honduran government to
not include most of the ethnic groups which used to live there like Nahuas,
Matagalpas, Ulwas, Chorotegas, as possibilities in the 2001 Ethnic Census.
People who felt they belonged to one of these Indian groups had to choose the
category of Other.
One Post
Classic site has been found right within the main Copan Ruinas area, a section
called El Bosque, which is now open to the public. It had
the same ceramics (including a Fine orange ware and a red design and on a white
base ceramic and Tohil Plumbate) and
obsidian sources (La Esperanza, El Salvador and Pachuca, Hidalgo green obsidian
a Toltec controlled site in Mexico) as Toltec associated burials in El Salvador reported in William Fowler’s book on the
Pipil-Nicarao and as a Postclassic site in Santa Barbara known as El Coyote.
These ceramics are also common in the Department of Cortes where San Pedro Sula
is and the San Pedro Museum has a very nice collection of Fine Orange ware,
while good examples of the red on white Naco Bichrome and Tohil Plumbate can be
seen in Banco Altantida’s collection, part of which is now online. Naco
Bichrome often has a bird figure with snake fangs, perhaps representing the God
Quetzalcoatl (Quetzal-snake) of Nahua speakers, while Tohil Plumbate often has
a face of the rain god Tlaloc or Quia of the Nahua speakers, such as in the new
exhibit in the Copan Ruinas Museum in the town on Central Park, not at the
ruins itself.
This site in El Bosque, reported by Manahan
and Canuto in 2009, confirms that
warfare was a significant problem in Post-Classic Western Honduras as not only
did the rooms at the site have up to 100 obsidean arrow and lance points each,
presumably shot at the inhabitants of the rooms, but before or after being attacked, the buildings were set
on fire, a typical tactic in Honduran warfare into the 19th century.
This early Post Classic site may have been associated with Payaqui (among
Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (the big one), the confederated state reportedly founded
by the Toltec king Ce Acatl, as this site was built from around the time
Payaqui was supposedly founded and then it was abandoned 100 years later. The
Nahuatl speaking Aztecs continued to visit the ruins of Teotihuacan in the
Valley of Mexico for certain ceremonies, even though these ruins were built
before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico, so it would make sense that
Nahua speakers from Mexico who founded Payaqui would also do ceremonies at the
ruins of Copan, even if they were not the ones that built them. The buildings in El Bosque and the Center of
Copan Ruinas do show signs of being reused for ceremonies in the Post Classic
period (900-1500 AD).
Besides the
Nahua speakers who founded Payaqui in the Chorti area of Eastern Guatemala,
Western Honduras and Eastern El Salvador, the Western Honduras area was also
probably affected by attacks of slave trading Chorotegas who migrated from
Cholula in Central Mexico to the Gulf of Fonseca in Honduras prior to the
Toltec King and his follower’s migration and also by the Maya Quiche of
Guatemala who also immigrated from Mexico in the Post Classic. The Maya Quiche in their histories report attacking other
villages, and wiping out whole lineages, etc., although they reported receiving
signs of kingship from the Toltecs and instruction in the finer points of
Toltec law, so while perhaps they would not have attacked them, they might have
attacked the Chortis and Lencas in the area. Also not all Nahua speakers had the same
origins before coming to Central America. For example, the Mayas of Guatemala
called the Indians who came from Tula Yaquis. Yaquis who are still a Mexican
indian group in Northern Mexico speak an
Uto-Aztec language related to Nahua. Other Nahua speaking groups which arrived
later, such as the Nicarao who eventually settled in Nicaragua and El Salvador
and possibly Trujillo or Nahua groups that came during years of famine in
Central Mexico due to lack of rains in the 1200’s, and Nonalalcos, Nahua
speakers who may have been mixed with Mayas in their migrations south from
Central Mexico, may have attacked Nahua speaking people who arrived earlier, sometimes
called Pipil-Toltecas, as well as the Mayas and the Lencas. The Pipil-Toltecas
may also have picked up Mayan speaking allies, such as Chols or Yucatec
speakers, from the Mayan communities in
Southern Mexico such as Palenque in Chiapas and Chichen Itza in Yucatan in
their immigrations on the way to Honduras, Eastern Guatemala, and El Salvador.
This technique of picking up soldiers along the way also continued in Honduras
until the mid-1900’s.
The site of
Palenque became depopulated about the time the Nahua immigrations to Central
America, and the Chols were hiding in the Lacadon forest when the Spanish came.
An oral tradition collected in Chiapas, Mexico in the colonial period and
reported on the website Chiquimula Online, links Culhuacan, a Toltec
neighbourhood in the Valle of Mexico founded by people from Teotihuacan,
Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico and Chiquimula, Guatemala, the capital of the state
Chiquimula de la Sierra. Most Guatemalan Maya-Chorti lived in Chiquimula de la
Sierra and Copan Ruinas now in Honduras was probably part of that state at the
time of Spanish conquest. The name Tula
or Tulan (a place of a lot of tule, the water reed used to weave petate mats)
also links Teotihuacan in the Valle of Mexico (represented by the glyph for a
bundle of tule in Mayan glpyhs), Tulan or Tolan (the place where the Toltecs
originated from and immigrated from), Chichan Itza (also called Tula Sywa),
Cholula (also called Tula Cholula) and Tula, Hidalgo.
The place
names Culhuacan and Chulula were also found in the Sula Valley when the Spanish
divided the towns of Santa Barbara and Cortes into “encomeindas” and given to the Spanish who helped conquer
Northwestern Honduras in 1536. Both Mayas speaking Chol and Nahuas (Mexicanos)
were reported in the Departments of Cortes and Santa Barbara in the early
colonial period. The word Acalt in Nahua
can refer to junco, Carrizo, and especially tule, the plant, so Acalteca (now
Agalteca in Eastern Yoro and there are Agaltatecas in other Departments of
Honduras) can refer to the people from the place of tule (Tulan) or the people
followers of the king Ce Acatl (one tule or one reed). The name Toltecas is
thought to refer to people who were good at practical crafts. Perhaps this would
include makers of things from “acatl” like mats of tule (petates in Honduran Spanish),
Carrizo baskets and junco baskets. These
crafts are still practiced in Nahuizalco (Nahuas of the Place of obsidian), El
Salvador, and among the Maya-Chortis of both Honduras and Guatemala, the Lencas
and the people of Santa Barbara who often call themselves junqueros (people who
work with junco) because of the commonness of this craft in Santa Barbara.
Junco is made from a freshwater water reed similar to the plant used to for
tule, but is a different plant, reports Adalid Martinez, a native of Santa
Barbara.
In the colonial period there was a language
Cholti in Eastern Guatemala, now extinct, which was also related to the Mayan
languages of Chol, Chorti and Chontal. These are the modern forms of the
language used to write Mayan glyphs at Copan Ruinas in the Classic Period,
according to Brent Metz’s The Maya Chorti Area. With the loss of the Yucatec,
Chol and Cholti Mayan languages and the Pipil or Nahua language in Honduras and
Guatemala, these Indians who either switched to speaking Spanish or Chorti, are
either identified as Ladinos or as Chorti or “indios” (Indians) of Santa
Barbara or El Paraiso now without specifying the tribe. In the colonial period
there was also a language called “Alaguilac” reported in the Chorti areas like
Jocotan, Ocotepeque, Copan Ruinas, Western El Salvador which was reportedly a
mixture of Nahua and Chorti, with Nahua predominating, but this language is
undocumented with word lists or examples of sentences, and so its exact
identification remains controversial. The
Chorti language, like Lenca, was influenced by the Nahua language of the Pipils
who came before the Conquest and Central Mexican Indian Nahuatl speaking
soldiers the Spanish brought with them and settled in their areas after the
Conquest.
The King Ce
Acatl was known as the Son of maguey by his descendants. Maguey is a succulent
plant which fiber is extracted from by rubbing the green leafy part off. Maguey
string crafts are especially common among the Maya Chorti. Related plants are
pita (called ixtle in Mexico), henequen, mescal and agave, all of which are
used by the Lencas of Honduras. Mescal is still used by the Nahuas of Olancho
and is known among the Chorti who consider maguey superior and less likely to
break. Pita was known by the Mayas who
cultivated it and by the Pech and the Miskitos who collected it wild. There
were Miskito Indians who made cloth from this plant, reported Miskito Scott
Wood in his new book on the history of the Mosquitia, which was typical of
common Mexican Indians, who by law during the Aztec Empire could not wear
cotton imported from Central America which was reserved for the wealthy. Pita was important for some Pech crafts like
marracas and bows and arrows. These Miskito Indians who made pita cloth (ixtle)
may have been remainders of the Nahua Indians of the Ciudad Blanca and the
Aguan Valley area who escaped to the Mosquitia after the Spanish Conquest.
The name
Pipil comes from the Nahua word Pipiltin, the class of leaders in their culture
from which both the political and the
religious leaders were drawn. The fact that the name Pipil is used in Central
America to describe Nahua speakers supports the idea of them being leaders in
multi-ethnic states at the time of Conquest. One Honduran commented that
Hondurans used to call all El Salvadorans Pipils. The Nahua cities and countries
were organized into administrative units or neighborhoods based on kinship.
These neighborhoods/lands controlled by the clan which had a clan leader were
called calpuli in Nahua.
Many places
in Honduras are called Calpules, including outside of San Pedro Sula, El
Paraiso, Choluteca, etc. According to Alberto Membreño writing around 1901,
Hondurans used the word Calpules to describe a place with a ruin, which since
many Ladino Hondurans may be descendants of Nahua speakers was an interesting
comment. The name Nahuat according to
Membreño meant witch, and according to Lyle Campbell, the words nahua (witch,
priest, healer) and nagual (the animal protect spirit of a person) and the
concept that the priest or witch could change into his nagual probably goes
back to Olmec times (1000 BC) and contact with the Mixe-Zoque languages of the
Olmecs. Stories of witches changing into pigs, coyotes (or dogs known as
cadejos), owls (lechuzas), jaguars are common throughout Honduras and are told
by Chortis, Lencas, Ladinos and the Pech. This belief is seen also in Olmec
statues of were-jaguars or men changing into jaguars.
The name
Esquipul, the black tiger that devours human hearts, the Nahua god whose name
is remembered in the Guatemalan town of Esquipulas comes from the belief that
the god or his priest could change into the black tiger or jaguar whose form
was the constellation of stars Ursa Major.
Among the modern Chorti of Honduras “nagualito” is also used to refer to
saints in the Catholic church, reports Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez.
Among the
Pech the word for saint is “sikin” and a church is “sikinko” (house of a
saint). There is an 1807 religious
ceremony of the Indians of the Valley of Agalta-Tonjagua, Pacura and from
Catacamas, Olancho, not Pech areas, but probably Nahua speaker areas, that
includes paintings of gods of the sun and the moon (not significant in the Pech
religion) and a large statue made of yuca with a face of native paper, probably
amate paper known among Nahua speakers of Honduras and remembered in place
names like Amatillo (little fig tree) at the Honduras-El Salvador border
crossing. This statue or idol in 1807 in the Olancho mountains was called
tzikin. Tzikinko or Sikinko, the Pech
word for church, would mean the place of this idol in Nahua. That the Chorti
ancestor ceremony done on the first of November is also called Tzikin or
Tzikineo, seems to show all these words are related. The word Tzikin is
supposedly related to head, and that is why ayotes (Honduran squashes) with a
head shape are eaten in many forms during a Tzikin among Honduran Chortis.
Ladino children in Copan Ruinas throw rotten tomatoes, which also have head
shapes, and yell Tzikin, tzikin through the streets of Copan Ruinas the night
of tzkin in the Chorti villages. The
altar for a Chorti Tzkin is made of wooden bars lashed together to form a table
or bed, known as tapesco in Honduran Spanish, and is covered with a petate mat
made of tule. Petate and tapesco are words of Nahua origin.
Archaeobotanists
had already reported evidence of corn cultivation during the Post Classic and
obsidian arrowheads had been from this period in the Copan region, so they
thought some Hondurans Indians who were farming and hunting still lived there
during this period. In fact near the modern Chorti villages of Sesimil I y II,
there is an archaeological site from the Post Classic period in the mountains.
Archaeologists who studied the bones of the Mayas of Classic period Copan who
found signs of malnutrition in the bones had previously blamed the Mayas
themselves for their collapse, saying that they had deforested the valley with
overpopulation, new archaeobotanical studies reported in Brent Metz’s book The
Maya Chorti Area found that the area was not deforested, that there were more
wild trees at the end of the Classic period than at the beginning. Re-examining
the archaeological evidence, the archaeologists now say the city and the state
of Copan was probably attacked violently at the end of Classic period, as is
visible from some deliberate destruction of the site and the abandonment of the
site.
What
happened to the Chortis and Pipils of Western Honduras in the Colonial Period
in Honduras?
By Wendy
Griffin
If the
Chorti chief Copan Galel, a captain of the Toltecs of Esquipulas, Guatemala had 30,000 well trained
men at his disposal to fight against the Spanish in Ocotepeque, the population
of the Post Classic state he was in charge much have been at least 150,000
people, estimates Honduran historian Pastor Gomez. The Post Classic site of Copan was probably in
the mountains in what is now Ocotepeque Department according to Lawrence
Feldman in the book the Maya-Chorti area. The Spanish forced the Indians to
relocate this city of Copan to a valley, also probably in Ocotepeque, in the
early colonial period, according to Feldman in the book The Maya-Chorti Area.
This policy was known as “reducción”, and
was designed to have workers near the Spanish and to make it easier to
Christianise them for the Catholic priest.
This colonial period town of
Copan in Honduras was mentioned by Domingo Juarros, a Guatemalan historian, but
it seems to have later disappeared, either through death due to disease, or
because the Spanish hauled them off somewhere else, or the Indians decided not
to pay tribute and ran away into the mountains. Both on the Guatemalan side and
the Honduran side the modern Chorti villages are characterized by being high up
in mountains of difficult access even now with roads and in the dry season.
Priests who served in Honduras frequently complain of mud and muddy paths
(caminos frangosos).
The Spanish
king was still issuing orders to” reduce” the free Indians of the mountains in
Sensenti, at that time the name of the modern Department of Copan, to force
them to live in towns in the valleys in 1802, a few years before Honduran
independence from Spain, which shows there were still free Indians in the
mountain, even if this area had been in contact with the Spanish since 1525.
The Honduran bishop who analysed the state of the Catholic church area by area
at the end of 1700’s was also scandalized because the Indians in the mountains all
over Western Honduras were also not practicing Christianity and were certainly
not getting married in the Catholic Church or being buried according to
Catholic practices. They were also not being counted as part of the Catholic
parishes, which was the task of the Spanish Catholic priests in Chiquimula,
Guatemala and in Ocotepeque. Unlike the Lenca area where most priests belonged
to religious orders who made great sacrifices to go from mountain town to
mountain town, the parishes of Chiquimula which included the area now covered
in 11 municipios or counties and in Ocotepeque, Honduras there were regular
priests descended from traditional Spanish families who were not inclined to go
into the mountains after the Indians. The regular priest in Ocotepeque was one
of only 6 regular priests in all of Honduras, which probably reflected the high
percentage of Spanish there, reported Erlend Johnson a Tulane archaeology
student studying Ocotepeque. The 1804 census of Honduras clearly says, this
census does not include the valleys and the mountains, which in fact make up
most of the Honduran landscape. The
census was primarily designed to find out how many tax paying Indians and
Indians available for forced labor there were, so it was to the Indians’
advantage to not be counted as a “tribute paying Indian”.
The Indians of Copan were included as an
“encomienda” around 1575, which means they had to work for a Spanish overlord
and pay tribute, although this “encomienda” probably refers to the Copan in
Ocotepeque Department. The community of “Copanique” is included in the
“encomiendas” given in 1537 after the defeat of Naco, Santa Barbara, but it clearly
states Copanique is a community in the Valley of Naco. It is likely immigrants
from Copan, whether brought willingly or unwillingly, formed a small community
in the Naco valley before the Spanish Conquest, and named it after their home
town. A Spanish official Diego de Palacio visited the ruins of Copan in 1575
and he reported finding Indians there. The Chorti areas of Copan and
Ocotepeque, Honduras and Guatemala still had encomienderos or Spanish people
who controlled Indian villages until around 1675. Both on the Guatemalan and
Honduran sides there are reports of many problems between Spanish cattle owners
and the Indians who were forced to plant indigo and/or cacao, plus complaints
about forced labor requirements which included Indian slavery before 1545, and
dragging Indians all over Honduras to mine gold. Honduran Indians were also
forceably settled in towns in Guatemala like Chiquimula, reportedly founded by
the Spanish with Indians from Copan near the Indian town of Chiquimula,
Guatemala.
A land
title was given to the Indians of Copan Ruinas for 12 miles from the border
around 1675. In other parts of the former kingdom of Copan in Honduras, there
were Indian towns with land titles like La Jigua, near modern La Entrada Copan,
Ocotepeque, Sensenti and Cucuyugua. Names
of the Indian towns in the muncipio or county of Copan Ruinas like Tapesco
appear in in land title disputes in the late colonial period, although the
Indians may have periodically abandoned villages to avoid paying taxes or
forced labor. This was especially true after the decision to build the fort at
Omoa and raise taxes and sell Indian lands which together are known as the
“Bourbon Reforms”. The Indians who went
to build the fort at Omoa during four months rotations often died of yellow
fever, malaria, dengue and other fevers of the coast, plus their families were
left alone while they did this forced labor requirement. The Chorti areas of
Chiquimula and Zacapa, Guatemala as well as Western Honduras were affected by
this new labor requirements. A current Chorti town Carrizalon in Copan Ruinas,
Honduras was founded in 1820 and permanently inhabited since then. It probably
was founded as part of this running away from Spanish authorities at the end of
the colonial period.
The Spanish
were prohibited from settling too close to the Indian communities, but as the
Spanish government was often short of money, the Spanish King from time to time
offered land owners who had no title or titles with problems, such as being
extended by someone not authorized to give land titles, the chance to
“componer” or fix their land titles. The first land title near the Indian town
of La Jigua. Copan was issued around 1638, about the time former Minister of
Culture and historian Pastor Fasquelle’s family founded their hacienda or
cattle ranch there. Indians were also
periodically required to “componer” or fix their titles, both in paying cash to
the King and to go and get a land surveyor whose office was usually in Guatemala
City and have him resurvey their lands, basically paying for the land over
again, that had always been theirs. The files of some Indian towns like
Catacamas and Texiguat, El Paraiso are huge due to complaints about land, land
titles, fixing land titles, and labor requirements. The archives of the Indian
towns of the Department of Ocotepeque, some over 400 years old, are seriously
affected by termites, as can be seen on the bilingual website of Erlend Johnson
about the archaeological sites in Sensenti and Cucuyagua. The archives of the colonial
town of Ocotepeque were purposely set on fire, probably to burn the land
titles.
Another
technique to avoid paying tribute was to work for the Spanish as “naborias” or
“lavorios”. Indians with the legal
status of “lavorio” or “naboria” worked full time for the Spanish doing
personal service, both as domestic servants and as workers on farms and
haciendas. This legal status existed by the 1550’s and continued all through
the colonial period in Honduras. Although technically naborias were not slaves
and could not be sold, the Protector of the Indians said the Spanish said to
one another sell me your naboria for a cheese or 25 pounds of yucca around 1550.
It seems eventually this abuse was stopped.
The
advantage of being a lavorio or naboria was the Indian did not have to pay
tribute, money or cacao to the Spanish king nor participate in forced labor off
the hacienda or farm. The Spanish landowners were not particularly careful in
reporting their workers as either “naborios”
who were Indians or as Ladinos. At the end of the colonial period,
mulatos and naborios were reported together in one category as non-tributary
people. Ladinos was a term used for
legal purposes, prinicipally in deciding who pays which tax and forced labor
requirements. In the colonial period, it
could refer to people who were mestizo, mulatto, blacks, mixture of black and
Indians (usually called mulatos in Honduras), and to Indians who were Christian
and spoke Spanish. There are colonial
documents which refer to indios de habla ladino (Indians who spoke Ladino) and
actual legal cases of Indians petitioning to change their legal status to
Ladino to get a break on taxes, reported Erlend Johnson and Roberto Rivera of
Tulane. The fact that Black slaves ran away to the cities and declared
themselves ladinos is well documented, for the example in the book “Blackness
in Central America”, so it is not surprising Indians would do the same.
In the 19th century the term of Ladino
becomes generalized to refer to anyone who was not Indian. In the census in 1890, the category of people
described as Ladinos included whites with European passports on Utila,
Garifunas, Black Bay Islanders, mulattos, as well as every other imaginable
mix, as the only other category was “indio”. As there was an anti-Indian
vagrancy law at the time that Indians would be picked up and forced to work for
you if they could not prove they were working, it was not anyone’s benefit to
be called “indio” and the population numbers for “indios” (Indians) in these
censuses and following censuses are highly suspect and those of the colonial
period are incomplete as they only counted tribute paying Indians under Spanish
control. Naborios, Indians who lied about being Ladinos, and free Indians were
not included in the census of tributary Indians and the records indicate there
were some of all of these, especially free Indians.
In the Tegucigalpa and Comayagua areas, it has
been well documented that many Indians left the Indian towns after the Bourbon
Reforms at the end of the colonial period to become “peons” or naborias on
Spanish haciendas to avoid taxes. Other Indians from Comayaguela, the Indian
twin city of Tegucigalpa, ran away to Suyapa after land laws changed in the
independence period to permit ladinos to settle on Indian lands. After not hearing from these Indians for two
centuries, the Indians of Suyapa, the miserably poor community at the edge of
Tegucigalpa near the UNAH university, have formed an Association of “Indios
Naborios” of Suyapa to protest the proposal of a Model city in their area. If
there are 10 people in Honduras who know what an “Indio naboria” was I would be
surprised, but faced with loss of their land due to the fact that Model City
law permits expropriation of their land under Eminent domain, the people of
Suyapa have formed this Association to try to get their lands rights protected
as Indian land rights. Suyapa was an
Indian village during the colonial period, and the Virgin of Suyapa was found
in a vision to a Honduran Indian from this village.
The
downside of being Ladino or naboria is that you could not own land with a land
title. While Naborias and Ladinos often lived on the land of the Spanish
landowners, many Ladinos also ran away and settled on Indian controlled lands,
both free Indian lands and in Indian towns with land titles called “pueblos de
indios”. In spite of laws specifically
preventing Ladinos from settling in Pueblos de Indios which had legal land
titles like Antigua Ocotepeque, indeed almost all the Indian towns in the 1804
census before Independence had a Ladino neighbourhood, including Antigua
Ocotepeque. In free areas, the Ladinos
settled on lands, and held it by guns or by any means possible, since they
could not legally get a land title. Both
the Ladinos’ lack of land titles and the tradition of taking land and keeping
it any possible means continues to inform and affect the land situation in
Honduras of both Ladinos and the minority groups like the Chorti and Garifuna,
etc.
The fact
that it costs money for lawyers and surveyors, and to get a land title and
getting a surveyor used to require speaking to the Central government in either
Guatemala or Tegucigalpa in person and taking the time to walk there and back,
is another reason why many people did not have and still often do not have valid land titles. The issue
that many Indians did not speak Spanish and very few rural people had any
ability to read and even today it is hard to know exactly what the law is
regarding land, and that land laws were not administered fairly or clearly in
regards to poor people, Indians and blacks (or sometimes even to foreigners),
all add to the problems of why many people, both Indians and non-Indians, lose
land due to problems with land titles and many transfers of land are at the
margin of the law in Honduras.
After
hauling Western Honduran Indians everywhere to work in gold mining, including
to Alax, a gold mine in Ocotepeque, the
mines in the Lempira area, and the Naco/Sula/Quimistan areas where many of them
died and the Olancho area where they escaped into the mountains, and also
hauling them to Guatemala such as using Indians from Copan to found the Spanish
city of Chiquimula according to Chiquimula Online, epidemics brought by the
Spanish and warfare, and selling the Honduran Indians as slaves in Cuba and
Santo Domingo, the Indian population under the control of the Spanish in
Ocotepeque and Copan at the end of the 16th century, before the
Pilgrims went to the US in the 1620’s, was about 1% of what it had been prior
to the Spanish conquest, estimated Pastor Gomez in his book on gold mining, black slaves, and Interethnic
relations in the 16th century in Honduras.
That some
of the Maya Indians escaped during the big Indian and Black slave revolts in
the Olancho gold fields along the Guayape River in the 1540’s which kept the
Spanish out of Olancho for over a year and which eventually made mining with
slaves of any race impossible in Santa Barbara, Colon and Olancho, is that
there are archeological ruins of a single Maya style house and patio in parts
of Olancho reported Chris Begley, as if the single Maya ran away to the
mountains and built his style of house there, far from the other Indians of the
area or the Pech and other Indians native to the area. The Chortis also report
some archaeological artefacts found in the Mosquitia are similar to what is
made in the Copan Ruinas area.
The
Importance of Pipil Gods, Holy Places, and Ceremonies Continue in the Old
Payaqui area
By Wendy
Griffin
The name of
the Chorti chief who led the resistance against the Spanish in the
Honduran/Guatemala border area near Esquipulas and the El Salvadoran/Honduran
border area in 1530 was Copan Galel, and Copan comes from the Nahua word for
Bridge. (Copante in Honduran Spanish is a tree trunk put across a stream to be
able to cross it and comes from this Nahua word). Cities thought to be Chorti,
maybe with some Lencas, like Sensenti, and some thought to be controlled by
Nahuas like in the Lake Guijar region and the Ostua River area on the Salvadoran/Guatemalan
border followed Copan Galel in his uprising against the Spanish where he
supposedly commanded 30,000 men. The Indian cities of Esquipulas and
Chiquimula, Guatemala (both place names are of Nahua origin) which were part of
the same state Chiquimula de la Sierra as Copan Galel, did not participate in
the rebellion.
Although
many historians and archaeologists do not believe in the existence of the
Payaqui (among Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (El Mayor-the Most Important/largest
State) a confederated state supposedly founded by the Toltec king Ce Acatl and
his followers in the border area between Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in
the Post Classic among the Maya Chortis even though it was mentioned by at
least two colonial era documents, a colonial era Spanish report said that all
the areas thought to be inhabited by Nahua speakers in Honduras by William
Fowler the ethnohistorian who studies Pipil and other Nahua speakers in Central
America—the Sula/Naco area, the Olancho area, the Trujillo/Aguan River area,
the Comayagua area, as well as Gracias a Dios (a Spanish department that
included what is now Lempira, Intibuca and part of Ocotopeque), paid tribute to
Copan Galel, the Chorti chief with the Nahua name on the Ocotepeque/Guatemala
border, who was a captain of the Toltecs of Esquipulas, Guatemala. The fact that Payaqui was reported also in
Northeastern Honduras at the time of Cortes’s arrival in 1524, possibly in
Olancho, also supports the ideas that by the end of the Post Classic all of
these Nahua influenced areas were loosely confederated into Payaqui.
The name
Payaqui continues to surface in popular culture in this region. There is a
hotel in the Esquipulas, Guatemala area called Payaqui which has a website.
There is a building in Tegucigalpa called Payaqui. There used to be a popular
Honduran musical group called Payaqui. The name of the Indians called Payas may
be related to the inhabitants of Payaqui, rather than refer strictly to the
Pech.
The
importance of Esquipulas, Guatemala did
not disappear with the arrival of the Spanish.
The modern town of Esquipulas is
a short distance from the Honduran Ocotepeque border and there were footpaths
connecting the Copan Ruinas area and the Ocotepeque area in Honduras to Esquipulas used until recently, for
example by Chortis who made a pilgrimage to Esquipulas during the fair 15
January for the Black Christ of Esquipulus
or during Holy Week. The name of
Esquipulas probably comes from the Nahua speaker god Esquipul, the black tiger
or panther at night who devours human
hearts. This was the Central American Nahua version of the Aztec god
Tezcalipochla (Smoking Mirror). This god
was the patron god of sorcerers and his
name comes from a type of mirror used to see the future or for divination.
Among the Aztecs this god required human
sacrifice, which his name in Central America would seem to indicate was also
the case here. A jaguar which takes out human hearts appears in Pech legends
attacking the Pech, too. Human sacrifice was reported in the nearby Pipil or
Nahua speaker town of Mita, Guatemala by the Spanish in the early colonial
period. The Nahua speaker gods who are
remembered in place names in Santa
Barbara like Quia the rain god (now Quimistan) and Ilama the grandmother
creator goddess of the Nahua speaking Nicaroas (Ilamatepeque-the Hill of the
goddess Ilama) north of the Chorti
area, probably shows the presence of Nahua speakers so close to
the Chortis was probably very disfavorable for them. The Conquistador of
Eastern Guatemala and Western Honduras Pedro
Alvarado had Indian troops from the Central Mexico region who told him that
these Nahua speakers were the brethren of the Toltecs.
The modern
town of Esquipulas was founded by the Spanish a few miles away from the
Postclassic Toltec town of Esquipulas,
according to the official Esquipulas website. The Basilica of Esquipulas which
houses the Black Christ of Esquipulas is
a major center of pilgrimage for people all over Central America and at least
15 towns in Honduras have Black Christ of Esquipulas images including Gualala,
the site of a big Guancasco with Ilamatepeque and Chinda, Santa Barbara, El
Carbon, a Pech community Olancho that used to receive visits of the people of
the Agalta valley during the fair, and Esquipulas del Norte (previously
Azacualpa), Olancho which is north of the Nahua Indian communities of Jano and
Guata, Olancho and which was majority Indian in the 1930’s.
Besides the
Black Christ, the Esquipulas area is also important because that is where the
Maya Chortis took water from a special pool where the water spirits lived
before they did the ceremonies in April to bring the rains. Some of these rain
bringing ceremonies coincide with the Good Friday/Saturday of Glory weekend
while the 15 January date of The Black Christ of Esquipulas is immediately
after the rain divination technique called “cabañuelas” in Honduras. During the
first 12 days of January many Honduran peasants, from Choluteca to Olancho
including the Pech to the Trujillo area and in Western Honduras read the signs
to see if it is going to be a good agricultural year as far as rain. In many
cultures, if divination goes badly, people try to do religiously something to
change it. Although the cabañuelas (little cabins or booths, referring to the
booths of the Jewish harvest festival in Spanish where they announced how the
weather would be the next year) has the same name as a Spanish technique for
reading the weather, the Honduran and Central American cabañuelas technique
reads the weather from 1 to 12 January, while signs for Spanish cabañuelas are
read in August. In Honduras Spanish
words often refer to something else than it does in Spain or elsewhere in Latin
America, as any American who has tried to order enchiladas or tacos in Honduras
will tell you.
Since the
pre-Columbian god Esquipul at Esquipulas, Guatemala was associated with fortune
telling and divination, and he was associated with black, which is the color
associated with rain among the Mayas, and was at the site of the sacred pool
where the Maya spirits who brought the rain lived, and his celebration was at
the end of process to determine if it was a good year for rain, the original
reasons that so many Central Americans including Honduran Chortis, Lencas and
many Salvadorans went to Esquipulas for the fair or for Holy Week may not have
had to do exactly with a Christian Christ. Dr. William Davidson has written a
book about the pilgrimages of Hondurans to churches with Black Christs of
Esquipulas.
The Mexican
Indian merchants also had the custom to sell during fairs in Central America
before the Spanish came, they told Conquistador Hernan Cortes in Mexico.
Esquipulas’s fair was such a big draw for sales that Lenca Indians from
Guajiquiro, La Paz would walk to Esquipulas to get a fine dress for their
fiancé to be married in, reported Doris Stone in 1943. The trade in obsidian, which interested the Spanish not at all, continued to reach the
colonial era Indian sites along the Ulua River such as Ticamaya. Indians who
spoke “la voz Azteca” (Nahuatl) were still controlling the contraband trade to
Danli in the 19th century and the contraband trade in feathers from
Eastern Honduras through Mexico to the Indians of the Southwest United States
continued also. Olancho Indians walked to the fairs of San Miguel, in El
Salvador to sell still in the 1860’s. Medicinal plants only produced in Mexico
like tilo or in the Guatemalan mountains like rosemary continue today along
this invisible trade route to Honduras where they show up in very humble trade
stands.
The combination of pre-Columbian Gods
associated with rain and special dates associated with Christian Christ figures
is seen elsewhere in Honduras. For example, even though the convent in
Catacamas, Olancho, currently located near several Nahua Indian towns, was run
by Franciscan monks, the patron saint of Catacamas in whose honor the patron
saint’s fair and the Guancasco previously done with Culmi was held is not St.
Francis, but rather was “El Señor de las Aguas” (Our Lord of the Waters) and
his saint’s fair is held at the end of Hurricane season in early December, noted
David Flores in his book “The Historical Evolution of Honduran folkdances”.
If the
Spanish reported that the Indians in the mountains had not stopped their
traditional religions by the end of the colonial period, it is not surprising
that other major days for rain making ceremonies or celebrations such as the
“chilateo” (drinking of corn drink with cacao) in the Lenca and Chorti area
include 24 and 25 April are celebrated
as the Days of San Marcos and San Gaspar and 3 May, the Day of the Cross and
also when the rains usually start in Honduras continued into the 20th
century and some even today. Honduran and Guatemalan Indians often saw Crosses
as having other symbolism like a world tree, which joined the underworld (where
the water spirits lived), our level of the world and the heavens where the
spirits who controlled the clouds and winds lived. The ceremonies around 25
April including the padrineo de agua (the god father of the water) still done
by the Maya Chortis of Honduras often included a sacrifice of a chicken next to
a sacred well which they call pozos, probably replacing the human sacrifice
done on that date among the Nahuas speakers of El Salvador and the Aztecs, and
other Mesoamericans. The sacrifice of people because it was not raining next to
or in wells by Mayas as well as next to
lakes among Pipils and Aztecs is well documented for the pre-Columbian period
including at Quirigua Guatemala in classic period (300-900 AD) which was at
times part of the State at Copan and at Chichen Itza’s famous cenote or sacred
well in Yucatan in Mexico as well as Mita, Guatemala (Pipil), the Nahuas of
Olancho, Honduras, and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City-Aztecs).
Archaeologists
think modern crosses among the Maya replace the functions of the stone stelaes
among the Mayas of the Classic Era (900-1500 DC). Crosses on hilltops, in caves often near
water, at the edge of communities, and in other sacred places are still
important among some traditional Mayas and Lencas in Honduras, noted Eliseo
Fajardo who studies the Maya Chorti and Julian Lopez, a Lenca from Guajiquiro
who teaches economics at the UPN and wrote a book on the Lencas of Guajiquiro
in relationship to 20 years of development projects in that area. Doris Stone
had also noticed the importance of crosses in the mountains and ceremonies in caves by water in Lenca
ceremonies and communities in the 1940’s.
The Patron Saint’s fair celebrations of Saint
John the Baptist held around 23 June which is the near the summer solstice or
longest day of the year in the Chorti area
also included a dance “Bailes de los
Gigantes” (The dance of the Giants) which supposedly shows the beheading of
Saint John the Baptist, but really tells the story of the Popol Vuh according
to Rafael Girard, and previously
sacrifice of ducks or turkeys in the game “Carrrera de patos” (a rain of ducks)
which is based on the Spanish game “Carrera de Cintas” (the ribbon race) but instead
of capturing ribbons, they capture ducks hung on a rope and sacrifice them.
This game also existed in Lenca area fairs.
In the Olancho area, the Pech were taught,
probably by the former Nahua speakers of Olancho, to play a game of sacrificing
a chicken, by burying it up to neck in the ground and giving children around 8
– 10 years old who are blindfolded a machete to cut the head off the chicken
for the celebration of St. John’s the Baptist Day. Although games and part of a Saint’s
Celebration, the result is the sacrifice of blood on this important date in the
solar calendar. In the Trujillo area,
which has a different pattern of rain coming off the Caribbean, the patron
saint’s festival of St. John the Baptist on 24 June is associated with the
start of the light rainy season, which usually begins the next day. St. John
among the Garifunas is associated with thunder, as is common in the much of
Caribbean where St. John the Baptist is often associated with the Yoruba
thunder god Shango. The Garifunas say he is sad that the party is over, and
that is why he begins thundering and bringing rain the next day.
The Nahuas taken from Western, Northern and
Central Honduras, and even El Salvador and Guatemala to the gold mining areas
of Rio Guayape, Rio Paulaya and Sico (Tayaco), Rio Platano, and Rio Patuca
(Yare) in the sixteenth century were
also able to run away from the Spanish and either live in the Agalta Valley in
Olancho, the El Paraiso area, or among the Miskito Indians where they may have
been known as the Rah, and among the Jicaque Indians. In Honduras the name Jicaque referred
to all unconquered or uncivilized Indians and not just the Tolupanes. The modern Chorti think that some Chortis also
escaped to the Mosquitia and other free parts of Northeastern Honduras.
The Pipil
sacred agrarian calendar began at the beginning of February, which is now
celebrated as the Day of the Virgin of Candelaria (2 February) or the Virgin of
Suyapa (3 February), both strongly celebrated by Lencas. The Maya Chortis used
to celebrate “demandas” with drums and processions to the virgin at the
beginning of February. The Pipil sacred calendar ended for the first corn crop
around 14 September when the Chortis celebrate El Festival de Elote (The Corn
Festival) and a “chilateo” (the drinking of corn drinks). In addition to the ceremonies at the
beginning of the rainy season, on the 25 th of April and 3rd of May
when the rains began, there was another festival on the 2 November, at the end
of the rainy season among the Pipils. This seems to have combined with the Maya
Chorti ceremony for the ancestors Tzikin, and Catholic celebrations brought by
the Spanish to celebrate the Day of the dead and All Saint’s Day around the 1st
and 2nd of November. The
Pipil legends of the sisimite, the cipotio or duende, the Sucia or Ciguanaba
(Sihuanaba, spirit of a woman) also continue among the Lencas, Pech, Ladinos,
Chortis, and Miskitos until today. See the Wikipedia articles in Spanish on the
Señorío de Cuscatlan and mitologia pipil for these stories and ceremonies.
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