Unit-Stamped Red Jars in the Southern Lowlands: New Insights into Ceramic Production and Exchange

Summary

Monochrome red jars and bowls featuring unique unit-stamped designs have been excavated from Late Classic contexts throughout the southern Petén and the areas surrounding the Maya Mountains. Adorning apparently utilitarian vessels, these unit-stamps show both a consistency in size and application across their spatial range, as well as a great diversity in the preferred motifs depicted. Combining a new ceramic chronology developed at Lubaantun and data from across southern Belize and the southern Petén, this paper seeks to understand how the unit-stamp designs and the vessels they adorned varied spatially and temporally. An attempt is also made to establish if one area in particular was the progenitor of the monochrome red unit-stamped system, or if it developed in situ across multiple sites in the Southern Lowlands. Additionally, the new data are compared to the dominant polychrome types from the same area to determine the variation between elite and non-elite exchange networks. From both the new and reinterpreted data, new explanations of the relationships between elite and non-elite pottery production and exchange from the Late Classic Maya Lowlands are explored.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage