The European conquest of the Americas was never a single event, but was instead a complicated patchwork of smaller events and relations—local and regional treaty making and breaking, warfare, blockades, raids, and outright massacres. Some events, like the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inka Empires or the Trail of Tears, loom large in the popular consciousness, while others are too messy or drawn out to make a tidy story. The conquest of the Maya region was one such messy area, due to the fact that its conquest was a drawn-out process taking almost 200 years that slowly chipped away at an area the size of Georgia and the Carolinas combined.
In this lecture, Woodfill will follow the fate of one kingdom within this larger region—the Lakandon. Heirs to great Classic Maya cities like Palenque, Bonampak, and Yaxchilan, they continued to live in dense urban areas long after the Maya collapse of the 8th-10th centuries. After several violent encounters with early Spanish soldiers and slavers, they abandoned their centuries-old homes and moved deep into the jungle, where they founded a new capital, Sak B’alam (White Jaguar) and continued to resist the Spanish conquest until 1695, after the founding of Harvard!
This lecture will focus on what we know about the colonial Lakandon, what we would like to know, and what we are doing to find out more, beginning with a partnership with the TV show Expedition Unknown (Discovery Channel). Along the way, larger lessons about conquest, colonization, and what it means to be Indigenous will be drawn out and discussed.