Measuring Dimensions of Exchange and Economic Transition in Three Districts of Lower Dover, Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although Hirth’s (1998) distributional approach has been recently applied to identifying markets at Classic Maya centers, much research still has yet to be done on the diversity and origins of Classic Maya modes of exchange. This picture is even less clear at small Late Classic (AD 600-900) Maya centers such as Lower Dover, Belize, where evidence for Hirth’s configurational and contextual hypotheses is often ambiguous: the former requires clear architectural evidence of market exchange, while the latter is irrelevant to small polities. We analyze multiple household variables including artifact frequencies and architectural volume to assess the presence of a centralized marketplace through application of the distributional approach and to describe other shifts in modes of exchange for Lower Dover. The sample consists of 23 commoner and intermediate elite settlement groups spread over three districts. Univariate and multivariate analyses strongly suggest that market relations proliferated at Lower Dover in the Late Classic, and that other exchange relationships, including commensal modes of exchange, may have changed substantially. This study not only illustrates the exchange relationships of a small Classic Maya polity, but also employs a diversity of methods that may prove fruitful for further economic research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32910