An argument for Classic era Maya market exchange

Ancient Maya Commerce : Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil

“…The multifunctional nature of such plazas precludes the construction of permanent stall-like architecture seen at sites such as Calakmul, Tikal, and Chunchucmil. Additional Classic-period Maya case studies that use the distributional approach come from Cerén (Sheets 2000), Tikal (Masson and Freidel 2012;West 2002), El Perú/Waka' (Eppich and Freidel 2015), Palenque (West 2002), and Chichén Itzá (Braswell and glascock 2002;Braswell 2010), not to mention Chunchucmil (chapter 11, this volume;Hutson et al 2010).…”

“…Hirth's distributional approach to identifying a marketplace assumes that when a good is available at a marketplace, it should have a broad distribution across the site (Hirth 1998(Hirth , 2010; see also Masson and Freidel 2012;Shaw 2012;Stark and garraty 2010). As long as households have the means to purchase that good, archaeologists should find that differences in wealth and/or power among consumers do not skew the distribution of that good.…”

“…The essays that follow draw on broad-ranging, interdisciplinary datasets from the ancient Maya city of Chunchucmil to illuminate some of the thorny questions about ancient economies signaled by the tensions between the two quotations above (see also Hirth 2010;Hirth and Pillsbury 2013a;Masson and Freidel 2012;Shaw 2012). Were Classic Maya households mostly self-sufficient in the sense that each acquired the raw materials and produced the finished goods necessary for daily life?…”

“…Over the last 15 years, many Mayanists have embraced Dahlin's idea of the importance of marketplaces in Classic-period economies, in part because of the research at Chunchucmil Masson and Freidel 2012;Shaw 2012). Postclassic-period commercialism did indeed have roots in the Classic period and potentially earlier (Masson 2002a:9-10;Masson and Freidel 2012:463;Tokovinine and Beliaev 2013:172).…”

“…We do, however, believe that our findings at Chunchucmil join the results of other studies in forcing a revision not just of our understanding of ancient Maya economies, but of ancient Maya life as a whole. As work at sites such as Tikal ( Jones 1996( Jones , 2015, Motul de San José (Halperin et al 2009), Caracol Chase 2004:118-119, 2014), El Perú/Waka' (Eppich and Freidel 2015), Trinidad de Nosotros , Calakmul (Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, andMartin 2009), Buenavista (Cap 2015), Mayapán (Masson and Freidel 2012;Masson and Peraza Lope 2014;Terry et al 2015), Cobá , Maax Na , Chichén Itzá (Braswell and glascock 2002;Cobos and Winemiller 2001:289), Palenque (Barnhart 2007:115), Xunantunich (Keller 2010), Lubaantun (Hammond 1972b, but see West 2002, Ceibal (Bair 2010), Quiriguá ( Jones and Sharer 1986), and elsewhere reveals the importance of market-based exchange, our models of political economy and social organization must change in order to accommodate these revelations. To the extent that Maya economies were embedded in the rest of Maya life-and recent work shows that economies were embedded to a great extent (McAnany 2010;Wells 2006)-new findings in the economic domain demand new thinking about other domains, including politics, ritual, and identity.…”