Ancient Maya Embedded Economies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Economies are embedded within the sociopolitical dynamics of society, thus providing a lens through which to study broader organizational frameworks. In this session, we examine the entanglement of economies with political, social, and religious practices to understand integration processes of the ancient Maya. The organization of ancient Maya economies has been a subject of much debate and discussion. Many early studies focused on the dichotomization of elite and non-elite economies and the ways in which economies legitimate hierarchies. Economic activities can function to create such divisions and it is important to understand how they do so. More recently, scholars have turned to question how economic networks crosscut socioeconomic and political boundaries, placing an emphasis on integration processes. Through utilizing both approaches, we can gain more nuanced understandings of interaction networks that in turn affect understandings of the broader organizational principles of the ancient Maya. Papers in this session utilize diverse datasets from multiple regions of the Maya world to provide a comparative perspective.