Talk:The Maya Lenca Principality

Authenticity disputed

I have serious reservations and doubts as to the authenticity and appropriateness of this article - its contents had been removed once before as unsound, but it seems to have now been recreated.

Among the main concerns:

• The (implausible) account of this 'entity' is completely unreferenced, other than noting the tale is attested in "oral traditions". Now, oral traditions are fine enough as they go, but even if it can be shown that these oral traditions have been documented someplace they by their nature are open to the charge of mythologising the subject; without separate corroborating data it would not be appropriate to describe this account in the factual terms this article presently does.
• It may be doubted that it's even a genuine or at least widely represented version of Salvadoran/Honduran history, oral or otherwise- per Rsheptak's investigations and comments at talk:Lenca people this tale appears to be completely unknown in standard ethnohistorical reference works. The only source previously identified seemed to be one person's attempt at establishing their own supposed genealogy and inheritance of the "Lenca crown"- which would seem to be original research, and hardly a reliable or notable one.
• Claims which identify individuals from a state supposedly founded ca. 900 BC (ie, contemporary with early-mid Olmec) are inheritantly implausible- what inscription, document or series of documents could there possibly be to record this, and even the later events up to the conquest era?

There are a number of other evident concerns. Before proposing that this article be deleted, the article's (re-)creator is invited to supply on this talk page information on the nature and location of the sources used - possibly something has been missed here, but as things stand now I don't think this article and topic has any basis for inclusion in wikipedia.--cjllw | TALK 00:32, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I asked the poster on his talk page a while back for sources. No reply so far. BTW, he appears to be 14. Actually, I also checked all the online available archaeology and anthropology indices, which admittedly are biased towards US and western european sources, and got no hits for any of the names they use for the "principality". Still looking for a scholarly source for the info. Rsheptak 22:14, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Rsheptak. In its first incarnation this article was created by an anon ip last year, so dunno whether the recreator is one and the same. In fact, the material here follows quite closely (if not an actual reproduction) of this site. I'm still dubious.--cjllw | TALK 07:20, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've looked and looked for any mention of this in the scholarly literature (anthropology and history) with no luck. It seems to have been duplicated word for word on all the sites where its reproduced. BTW, the statements about Lempira on the page you link to are empirically false (see my Wikipedia article on Lempira for the Ruiz story). What I would like to find is some indication of this being a widely shared oral tradition. I don't think it is. I asked several Salvadoran friends and they've never heard this story. Anyhow, if I find anything either way, I'll post. Rsheptak 01:11, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Dear comentators: Thank you for all your coments, i totaly understand your position with regard to this work, it is true that the dates cannot be ever confirmed because oral traditions are diferent from facts. I am a Maya lenca and i know these stories and one thing I also know is that all anthropologists and archeologist have consistently denied the xistence of the lenca of eastern El Salvador, even though there are more than 10 archeological sites that predtae the rest of the Pipil in El salvador. One problem is that you base your research and referencing on the build up of available "Western written acounts", all by the way which refer to the Maya s a culture that dispeared in the dim past. For those who do not know, there more than five million maya alive in Central America, is just that academia has condemned them to death since the conquest. I found one writer (Stanislawski)who sort of included some of our ethnicity in his work "Guatemalan Villages of the Sixteen century" it may be a surprise for those who do not know we exist. Secondly, caves such as the antawinikil cave, something you Westeners call Holy spirit or corinto is 15,000 years old, the lenca stories actually mention the animals depicted within it. is this a made up story by the current elder?, perhaps or perhaps is that she is the last left. Thirdly, many names such as MAYA, OLMEC etc, were never claimed by our own ancestors, they are names given by western scholars to label a subgroup of the greater culture. The Lencas still exist, they form 5% of the population of eastern El salvador, thousands were also killed in the last civil war, if the West sugest that because we now coexist within a diferent state and no our own kingdom,I wounder if the Jews in germany were no Jews because they were outside Israel. The sublime ignorancve of academics amazes me. I remember being told since childhood that i was a european, even though Iam so short, mongolic eyes, olive skin, and spoke Lenca. Some academics believe that reality only exist if they can sanction it. Perhaps this is the very point that makes diferent betwen native Amerindian scholars and the new arrivals of the last five hundred years. If anyone wants to debate the Lenca oral tradition, please write to me at royalmaya1<at>gmail.com Thank you. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 125.253.33.88 (talk • contribs) 27 March 2007.

Thank you for replying. I may also email you, but your post raises some points that need to be addressed.

• No one wrote that the Lenca were gone, either in Honduras or El Salvador. There are large groups of Lenca in both countries, both at the time of the Spanish conquest and today.
• Archaeologists (of prehistory) can only talk about material culture. The honest ones do not claim to know how the people at the timeframes you identify (900 B.C. to 900 A.D.) identified themselves ethnically, with the exception of a group of maya, where the existance of maya writing is assumed to indicate a maya identity (although there have been interesting speculations that some of the people who used maya writing were not necessarily maya, but used it as part of a multilingual identity, say in Copan, for example). Its undeniably that there were people who self-identified as pipil in eastern El Salvador at the time of the Spanish conquest (say 1525-26). Their oral tradition says they wandered in to eastern El Salvador after 1200 A.D. Its also undeniable that there are archaeological sites in eastern El Salvador that have a different material culture than what has been identified as Pipil, and that those sites pre-date Pipil. I don't know who they were.
• The dating on Corinto/Holy Spirit Cave is 6,000 to 10,000 years ago (or 4-8000 B.C.), based largely on style and themes, not on radiocarbon dates.
• There were attempts under Spanish and later Republican rule in Central America that sought, at various times, to simply convert everyone into being mestizo by eliminating the "indio" as a possible census category, not to mention the conscious manipulation of "casta" and status over time. I can demonstrate this for Honduras and assume it probably went on in El Salvador and Guatemala as well, since they were all part of the same Audiencia. This makes demographic studies almost impossible.
• I wonder if the same sort or processes are going on in El Salvador as in Honduras. In Mexico, a rhetoric of "we're all descendants of the great Aztec state" has been part of Mexican nationalism. In Honduras, there's been a well studied "mayanization" process. I wonder if in El Salvador its not a "Pipilization"?
• I have no doubt there are Lenca people in eastern El Salvador today. I don't know when they got there, or how long they've been there. Its rare for people to remain in the same place for 1000's of years.
• What honestly puzzles me is how a widely shared oral tradition could have escaped both the "western" and salvadoran scholarly literature. The Lenca in prehistory were divided into a number of different dialects. In Honduras alone, it appears as if there may have been two or three ('Care' is the only one I remember offhand), and Honduran Lenca is/was a different dialect from the western Salvadoran Lenca. It appears that only one Honduran dialect survived to modern times and its speakers do not share your oral tradition, so at a minimum you need to be clearer about what group of Lenca you're speaking about. BTW, they do claim Lempira, and their accounts of his death match reasonably well the recently discovered manuscript first-hand account by the Spanish of his death (see the Lempira entries in the Spanish and English versions of Wikipedia for details).

I'm very open to native scholarship and oral tradition. I don't question your assertion that this is your oral tradition. I just don't have any idea of how widely shared it is.

I'm glad you took the time to anwer us. Rsheptak 19:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Royalmaya/anon contributor, I'll join Rsheptak in welcoming your responses and explanations. Just to add, in principle this being an oral tradition is not itself an insurmountable problem (but it certainly needs to be explicitly identified as such). However, properly speaking before we can mention it on wikipedia it needs to be:

• (a) established as a widely known or held one, and
• (b) corroborated as such by some independent, written and verifiable sources.

So far the only written source detectable is the mayalenca.com website (possibly you yourself have some connection with that site?) At present that site does not seem to be sufficient on its own to provide Verification of the account.

There is another issue- as mentioned above the article's text is a near-verbatim reproduction of the material appearing on that site, which among other things gives rise to copyright concerns. Even if the website's owners were to give explicit permission to republish the material here, it is much better practice to not simply reproduce its contents.

Look forward to any further information. Many thanks, --cjllw | TALK 07:34, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Turns out I was half right. El Salvador is undergoing both mayanization and pipilization according to Robin Delugan's dissertation. Rsheptak 01:07, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

For information on Eastern El Salvador archaeology and languages I suggest you look up Andrews, E. Wyllys's 1976 Archaeology of Quelepa, El Salvador and John Longyear III's 1944 Archaeological investigations in El Salvador, Memoirs Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Vol. 9. No. 2, this one talks about Los Llanitos site. For Lencan as a language Lyle Campbell's 1997 American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Quelepa in eastern El Salvador according to Wyllys’s is the largest Lencan site in El Salvador and its first occupation was in 500 B.C. at the start of the Uapala phase (Wyllys 1976:79-186). Archaeologist Author Demarest revises the date to about 300 B.C. in his 1986 The Archaeology of Santa Leticia and the Rise of the Mayan Civilization (Demarest 1986:137). According to Lyle Campbell the Salvadorian Lencan also known as Chilanga arrived in El Salvador at about 1 A.D. (Campbell 1997:167). Thus the Lenca would of been responsible for the Shila I phase (150-500 A.D.) in the Early Classic. For further readings on mestizaje or mayanization in El Salvador turn to Virginia Q. Tilley's 2005 Seeing Indians. —The preceding Cheleguanaco comment was added by 68.146.113.79 (talk) 20:16, 2 April 2007 (UTC).

Thanks I'm familiar with all of that except the Tilley piece. Assigning a particular culture to a particular site can only be done on the basis of similar material cultures. Even sites with Maya Hieroglyphic writing are only assumed to be occupied by Maya speakers. Its a tricky business to get from language to material culture. You have to be able to demonstrate the continuities from a material culture where language is known back through a continuous chain of material cultures to the one you're trying to assign. Ask yourself what the material evidence is for Quelepa being Lenca, for example. Rsheptak 22:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

The information on Salvadoran archaeology is most interesting, but we are still left with the problem of what to do about this particular article. Even if various sources were to attribute some sites' occupations to Lenca cultures, it's extremely doubtful that any arch. source has anything to say about the "Princely House of Managuara Najochan" or the genealogical narrative outlined in this article. We are still lacking any corroborating source mentioning this as a widely-held genuine oral tradition, and further clarification from the article's creator(s) is still outstanding.

If there are no further developments over the next couple of days, I propose that this article be scrubbed and turned back into a redirect to Lenca people, if it is not to be deleted altogether. Any countering views?--cjllw | TALK 23:59, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Does any page link to this one? The Lenca page does not. If not, I suggest leaving it for now along with the disputed tag. If it is deleted, I suspect someone will just recreate it again. Rsheptak 23:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

No, it's an WP:ORPHAN, no pages link to here. Even so, keeping material active when there's a very good chance that the contents are misleading or (thus far) completely unverifiable doesn't seem to be the way to go- there's enough of that kind of thing out there in wikipedia mainspace.

Accordingly I've changed the article back into a redirect to Lenca people- if someone thinks there's a viable and verifiable article in this then we can reassess in light of any new material which may be supplied- preferably on this talk page or some other relevant one first. I've put a WP:MESO banner on this talk page so it can be more readily monitored for any recent changes to it.--cjllw | TALK 06:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Maya Lenca Limak

The disinformation that's on the internet is amazing. It is time to Re-educate. Cazsel281 (talk) 19:11, 25 May 2021 (UTC)