Nuts and Bolts of the Real "Business" of Ancient Maya Exchange (Part 2)

It is time for scholars to work together to model the basic framework of Maya economies across time and space. This session moves beyond simple descriptions of broadly characterized "exchange" between "centers" or "states" by tracking the specific activities and features that bound economies together at different levels of the social hierarchy. A more relativistic approach highlights local variation and sidesteps the pitfalls of artificial dichotomies, ideal types, or presence/absence queries regarding key economic institutions. Papers in this session draw on diverse interdisciplinary categories of evidence essential for reconstructing a more accurate model of a range of specific economic activities that were potentially articulated with one another into complex and dynamic systems. We focus on specific evidence for agents, facilities, transport mechanisms, webs of debt, constraints and freedoms, strategies for and challenges to stability, and commodities that were made and exchanged according to gradations of value. These factors, among others to be evaluated, were the nuts and bolts that held society and economy together through the longue durée of Maya society. Important variation on the local level revealed by symposium papers will provide the dimensions that are necessary in moving toward a new synthesis.