Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With National Science Foundation funding, in 2022 a group of eight independent projects, assisted by several consultants, began collaborating to investigate the hypothesized existence of an integrated market system in the Three Rivers Region of northwestern Belize during the Late Classic period (CE 600–850). While such systems are best understood on a regional level, regional integration and other aspects of exchange are difficult to gauge in the absence of known marketplace locations, which remain an important missing component of premodern market research worldwide. The coordinated research had four overlapping goals, two theoretical and two methodological. The principal theoretical objective was to confirm the existence of suspected marketplaces in the region; the second was to examine the comparability of goods between these marketplaces, specifically ceramics. Methodologically, the main goal was to test the feasibility of the configurational approach in identifying actual marketplace locations by applying a cross-culturally developed set of archaeological indicators. Additionally, researchers sought to assess the potential for coordinated investigation and data sharing across neighboring projects to mitigate the limitations of the usual, narrower geographical scope and problem-solving focus of each individual archaeological project. While research and analyses are still ongoing, this symposium presents the first results.