Stone Goods and the Organization of Late Classic Period Regional Economies of the Middle Usumacinta River Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper we present the results of the analysis of nearly 42,000 chert and obsidian artifacts from sites in the Middle Usumacinta River region to examine economic production and exchange at the level of the polity. Our study includes a range of household and non-household contexts, revealing entanglements of the lithic economy within the sociopolitical dynamics of the region during the Late Classic period (AD 600–900). The urban center of Piedras Negras demonstrates a remarkable paucity of long-distance trade goods (e.g., obsidian and greenstone), relative to Yaxchilan, Palenque, and other neighboring polity capitals. Yet, Piedras Negras’s subsidiary, Budsilha, enjoyed better access to some of these same goods, likely resulting from the economic networks surrounding an obsidian workshop found at that site. The craftspeople at Budsilha produced far more blades than were consumed at the site itself, suggesting that they were among the major producers in the area. Coupled with other lines of archaeological evidence, these data point to the complicated nature of Maya economies where economic productivity and trade connections were not equally held among polity capitals and subordinate centers may have enjoyed greater economic opportunity than the polity capitals that governed them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient Maya Embedded Economies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32506