Nuts and Bolts of the Real "Business" of Ancient Maya Exchange (Part 1)

Studies of ancient Maya political economy are now moving past decades of debate over broad and vague concepts of the "existence" of broadly defined markets, disembedded palace economies, unspecified modes of exchange, and state control versus autonomy or heterarchy. The evidence now emerging from excavations, technical analyses, epigraphy and ethnohistorical analogy allows us to reexamine the building blocks underlying Maya political economies, including specific production activities, mechanisms of distribution (gifting, tribute, marketplace exchange, official bureaucracies), goods of low, middle, and high value, the social identities of producers, merchants, and officials, and variation in the location and function of economic features within sites or regions. Papers in this session illustrate ways in which the nuts and bolts of Maya economies contributed to an articulated and complex economy that bound together particular individuals and social groups across geopolitical units of varying scales. The session’s papers emphasize sound empirical data and clear links to grounded research questions of the sort needed to reconstruct a nuanced model for dynamic Precolumbian Maya economies.