A ( , , 'province,' 'state,' 'polity') was a system of social and political organisation common to Maya polities of the Yucatán Peninsula, in the Maya Lowlands, during the Mesoamerican Postclassic. There were somewhere between 16 and 24 such provinces just prior to the Spanish conquest of Yucatán.
Extent
The were located in the Yucatán Peninsula of the Maya Lowlands, bounded by a northwest-to-southeast trending crescent, stretching along the base of the Peninsula, from the Bay of Campeche to the Bay of Honduras. To the west, the provinces bordered settlements of Chontal, Nahuatl, and Zoque speakers in eastern Tabasco, eastern Chiapas, and western Campeche (beyond Laguna de Terminos). To the southwest and south, they bordered settlements of Chol speakers in western Peten, northern Alta Verapaz, northern Izabal, northern Copan, northern Santa Barbara, and western Cortes (before the Ulua River). The provinces thereby encompassed all six districts of Belize, the Guatemalan department of Peten, and the Mexican states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán.
Some recent scholarship, employing a revised understanding of the provinces, has proposed to situate the latter only within those portions of the Peninsula predominated by Yucatecan Mayan speakers. Consequently, the limits of the provinces' territory have been proposed as a northwest-to-southeast trending diagonal, from Champoton to the Belize River, resulting in an expanse covering only the aforementioned Mexican states, and the Belizean districts of Corozal, Orange Walk, and Belize.
History
Emergence
Current knowledge of the historical antecedents of the provinces 'is fragmentary and extremely vague for the period prior to the middle of the fifteenth century.' Nonetheless, some post-conquest Maya accounts claim 'Chichen Itza had formerly governed the entire country [Peninsula] for about 200 years,' while other such accounts rather claim 'that Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Mayapan ruled the area during this length of time,' and furthermore, some such accounts claim that Mayapan ruled the Peninsula during a later period. The former claim has been described as 'more or less true of most of northern Yucatán [Peninsula],' while the last claim has been deemed partially accurate, as there is 'some evidence that northern Yucatán from the Gulf of Mexico east to Cupul was, for a time at least, subject to a joint government located at [Mayapan, though] it is doubtful that its hegemony included Campeche and Champoton [and, further,] it appears possible that it did not extend to the east coast of the peninsula.' In case such a centralised government existed at Mayapan, its rule would have been disrupted upon the city's destruction 'about a century before the final Spanish conquest.' It has been further suggested that Nahuatl- or Chontal-speaking settlers, who appear to have come predominantly from Tabasco, may have influenced the constitutions of emerging provinces.
Fall
Hispano-Maya hostilities first broke out in Ecab, capital of the eponymous province in Cape Catoche, in 1517. The Spanish conquest, however, did not properly start until 1527, and was 'an arduous enterprise lasting twenty years.'
Constitution
Types
Many of the provinces were organised as unitary states, governed by a single However, some were rather organised as a confederacy of 'more or less closely knit,' and governed (jointly or severally) by the respective And further still, some 'seem to have been merely collections of towns in a given area, whose relations with one another are largely a matter of conjecture.' Thus, broadly, provinces were organised either as or states, with varying degrees of cohesion.
Divisions
The provinces were first subdivided into constituent towns. Larger towns were further subdivided into though 'little' is known about these second-order units. Consequently, the civil service of provinces featured offices for first-order subdivisions (the province's towns), while that of at least provinces further featured offices for zeroth-order (the province itself) or second-order (a town's wards) subdivisions.