Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective

Abstract

The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs has enabled scholars to better understand Classic society, but many aspects of this civilization remain shrouded in mystery, particularly its economies and social structures. How did farmers, artisans, and rulers make a living in a tropical forest environment? In this study, Patricia McAnany tackles this question and presents the first comprehensive view of ancestral Maya economic practice. Bringing an archaeological approach to the topic, she demonstrates the vital role of ritual practice in indigenous ecologies, gendered labour, and the construction of colossal architecture. Examining Maya royalty as a kind of social speciation, McAnany also shows the fundamentality of social difference as well as the pervasiveness of artisan production and marketplaces in ancestral Maya societies. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book situates Maya economies within contemporary social, political, and economic theories of social practice, gender, actor-networks, inalienable goods, materiality, social difference, indigenous ecologies, and strategies of state finance.

Making money in Mesoamerica: Currency production and procurement in the Classic Maya financial system

“…The ability to produce large quantities of cloth was thus an indication that a household had a surplus of female labor, whether through polygynous marriages or servile labor. In commoner households, by contrast, fewer women were responsible for all household tasks and could devote less time to weaving (McAnany , 119).…”

The Earliest Maya Farmers of Peten: New Evidence from Buenavista-Nuevo San José, Central Peten Lakes Region, Guatemala

“…An almost complete bark beater was also found in this fill level (Figure 7(b)). Although their main function has been suggested to be paper production, more recently, McAnany has proposed that they may have been used to make cloth at least during the Preclassic when they are much more frequent and more broadly distributed than in the Classic period [95].…”

Ancient Maya Commerce : Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil

“…Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) played a large role in the exchange of bulk luxuries throughout the prehistory of Mesoamerica (e.g., King 1979:267), and particularly in the Late Postclassic period (Berdan 1987;McAnany 2010;M. E. Smith 2003;Stark et al 1998).…”

“…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. Thinking just about identity, for example, there is good reason to believe that Maya women played many important roles in commerce (Clendinnen 1991;McCafferty and McCafferty 1988;Wurtzburg 2015).…”