Taking the Thumb Off the Scale: Identifying Local Production in the Middle Preclassic Maya Lowlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle Preclassic (1000 – 400 B.C.) Maya Lowlands were peppered with autonomous communities connected by webs of socioeconomic interactions at the local and regional scales. Increasingly complex social relationships were forged in Middle Preclassic centers and later developed into the institutionalized hierarchies of Classic Maya society. Archaeologists have investigated the roles economic relationships played in Maya sociopolitical development, but studies have tended to focus on trade in clearly non-local commodities, such as obsidian or green stone. The production and exchange of goods created from locally available materials has received less attention, and identification of locally produced goods presents several problems. Recent provenance studies of Middle Preclassic pottery illustrate methodological and interpretive issues in defining local economies and their relation to social complexity. The geographic extent of areas defined as "local" by chemical data is large enough to include several independent polities, thus subsuming important interactions between emerging political centers. Microscopic analysis further indicates that presumed "local" pottery comprises a range of material variability, likely reflecting differences in both provenance and practice. The local vs. import dichotomy implied by chemical studies of Middle Preclassic pottery, and its implications for understanding social complexity, must be reassessed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25358