The Pomoná Kingdom and its Hinterland

Preliminary Interpretation on the Settlement Pattern

The initial archaeological survey in the Pomoná hinterland revealed a four-tier site hierarchy system where expectably Pomoná and Panhale occupy the first and second echelons. El Faisán, and Crisóforo Chiñas, and perhaps Rancho La Herradura would be tertiary centres, San Carlos, Km 7, and Chan Marín/Suchité, fourth level sites, and Rojo Gómez would pertain to a fifth tier. Although, this particular hierarchical scheme still needs to be corroborated by the results of the ceramic analysis.

At the outset I emphasised on how the strategic location of Panhale would have given it an advantage in terms of the control of the access to and fro the Tabasco coastal plain. Our survey of the site also shows that Panhale is a site that could have been easily defended and with its ready access to water and sufficiently productive agricultural land, it could have easily withstood a prolonged siege. These characteristics would have been of tremendous importance for Pomoná especially in the atmosphere of increasing warfare that characterised the Late Classic Period. Thus in this context, Panhale may have also offered safe haven to a besieged Pomoná nobility in times of adversity.

Up river from Panhale, at a distance ranging between 3 to 15 km from it, eight other sites are found: La Urania, Lindavista, Chinikiha, Camino a Las Delicias, Ojo de Agua, Las Delicias, San José de los Rieles, Sta. Margarita and Sto Tomás I (Figure 22). Unfortunately due to security reasons, we were unable to visit these sites. Nevertheless, Gerardo Delgado has included a general characterisation of these sites in his survey map. According to his 5-tiered site hierarchy, these sites would correspond to Classes II and III, with masonry structures and covering an area between 3 to 5 square km. In our site hierarchy scheme these would correspond to the same echelon as Panhale, that is, they would be considered secondary sites. On the basis of a GIS-based spatial model, which I shall describe below, I propose that with the exception of Sto. Tomás I, these secondary sites belonged to Pomoná’s political sphere, while the latter fell within the Piedras Negras domain.

All of these sites are strategically located either at those points where the presence of rapids force the river traveller to portage, or at the intermontane valley passes. The hieroglyphic inscriptions tell us that in the western lowlands, these subsidiary sites were the seats of a secondary yet important echelon of the Late Classic Maya nobility, the sahal. Perhaps the best-known example of these types of sites is La Pasadita. La Pasadita is located about 10 km inland from the eastern bank of the Usumacinta River on the Guatemalan side of the river. Mathews (1988) has dealt extensively with the hieroglyphic texts from La Pasadita and Yaxchilán, and the site has been the subject of a recent archaeological survey carried out by Golden and colleagues (1999, FAMSI Reports). On the basis of this information, Golden has argued that the relationships established between the Yaxchilán king and his sahal, helped develop a defendable frontier between Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras.

In this milieu Panhale’s role in the political structure of Pomoná may have been similar to that of La Pasadita for Yaxchilán, that is: the maintenance of a defendable frontier between Pomoná and Piedras Negras. Given the physical constraints that the passage from the upper to the middle Usumacinta the environment poses, I argue that access to, and control of, the routes of communication represented a matter of "national security" in the ambience of endemic warfare that prevailed during the Late Classic. From this it follows that those sites located in the vicinity of critical points, such as a portage or a natural pass in the mountain ranges must have been deemed strategically important for the maintenance of the territorial integrity, and the accruement of the kingdom’s domain.

Estimating territorial extent

With the above considerations in mind the task then, was to devise a way to estimate the extent of area that can be effectively covered by a given site. This in turn assisted me in the definition of the proposed boundary between Pomoná and Piedras Negras. In the definition of these areas I worked on the premise that the effort involved in moving across the natural terrain would determine the size of a territory controlled by a given centre.

A series of 1:50,000 INEGI maps containing the topography, hydrology and seasonal flooded lands of the region were digitised and a basic interpolation routine was performed to create the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of this section of the Upper Usumacinta region. When considering the effort of moving over the natural terrain two types of frictions were considered: isotropic and anisotropic. Isotropic friction refers to the friction that is equal in all directions, while the latter considers frictions that have both direction and magnitude, e.g., walking up or down a slope. To account for the first form of frictions, digital maps for perennial and seasonal water bodies and the river network, which included the location of rapids and cascades, were digitised. Anisotropic friction was obtained by deriving the degree and direction of the slopes from the DEM. This resulted in a series of cost surfaces that reflect the effort of moving during the dry and rainy seasons, upstream and downstream, from each of the primary centres.

The cost surfaces were used to run a spatial allocation routine that estimated the areas that would be optimally covered from each primary centre, resulting in an initial territorial extent for these kingdoms. In these estimations I plotted Santa Elena as the possible centre of the "Wah-Bird Site", thus obtaining the eastern limit of Pomoná’s territory. Next, the secondary sites of the region were plotted on this map in order to identify the primary centre on which they fell. Once again a cost surface was derived, and this time all of the sites (centres and subsidiary sites) were plotted, and the same spatial-allocation routine was run to obtain the area optimally covered by each individual site. Finally, the areas of each site were reclassified assigning it the identifier of the primary centre on which they had originally fallen, thus compiling in this way a final potential territorial extent, and in the process the possible boundaries between these kingdoms (Figure 23).

Defending the frontiers

The map with the preliminary proposed boundary between Pomoná and Piedras Negras suggests that Pomoná may have been in control of all but one of the sites: Sto. Tomás I. Of all these sites, Panhale, due to its vantage position dominating the coastal plain and the last stretch of the Upper Usumacinta River may have been instrumental to Pomoná’s territorial integrity.

The devastating attacks on Pomoná in 792 and 794 that resulted in the capturing of several important sahals imply the participation of a sizeable army of at least several hundred warriors coming from Piedras Negras and La Mar. The logistics required in mobilising an army this size involve not only securing supplies for the marching army, but also a route that would conceal to certain extent the army’s movements from military outposts, while providing relative ease of movement.

Hassig’s work (1992) on Aztec warfare can help me illustrate this point. He estimated that the marching rate for the Aztec army unit varied between a low of 2.4 km per hour, to a high of 4 km per hour. These figures result in a day’s march of 19 to 32 km. However, marching over mountainous terrain requires 20% more time (Hassig, 1992:66). The distance between Piedras Negras and Pomoná is 50 km in straight line. If we take into account the characteristics of the terrain, the marching rate would have been of about 2 km per hour. At this rate, a day’s march would have covered around 16 km, thus it would have taken the Piedras Negras forces around three days to reach their objective following the easiest route.

Hassig’s analysis also show that an army unit of 8,000 men marching in double columns would stretch between 12,000 and 6,000 meters. If the attack on Pomoná involved a combined force of about 2,000 men (at the very least) marching in double columns from Piedras Negras and La Mar, then the length of the column could have extended for about 2 km. An army this size would have been visible from Panhale or any of the other Pomoná’s subsidiary centres located along the river or the mountain passes. A view-shed routine was ran on the DEM of the region, which yielded all the areas visible from Panhale in a 10 km radius (Figure 24).

Next, a route between Piedras Negras and Pomoná was obtained through a least-cost routine (Figure 25). Notice however, that in order to access the coastal plain en-route to Pomoná, the Piedras Negras forces must have crossed through the territory controlled by Panhale. Let us bear in mind however, that the hieroglyphic inscriptions record a successful Piedras Negras incursion. Thus in this context two courses of action are possible, the first one is, that Piedras Negras was able to subvert Pomoná’s political structure by attaining the alliance of Panhale. The second one, that the combined forces of Piedras Negras and La Mar took alternative routes. If the latter was the case, the options are limited and we should be able to identify these.

Towards the end of our 2001 field season, we received a report of the existence of a wooden box with hieroglyphic inscriptions located in a small community within the municipality of Tenosique (Figure 26, shown above). This community is located in a valley within the last limestone ridges of the Upper Usumacinta region; a fault in the ridges provides the only natural access to this valley. The box proved to be a remarkable find indeed, Peter Mathews and Stanley Guenter have deciphered the hieroglyphic text and the information that can be gleaned from it points towards a Piedras Negras affiliation of this valley. During our 2002 field season we will conduct an archaeological survey of this valley and the sites located along the last stretch of the Upper Usumacinta. We are convinced that this area holds the key to understand the dynamics of the interaction between Pomoná and Piedras Negras.

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