Whose Lime Is It Anyway? Burnt Lime as Commodity in the Classic Period Northern Lowlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Burnt lime (calcium hydroxide) has been crucial for architectural, dietary, and other purposes in Maya society since as far back as the Formative period. The recent identification of hundreds of pit-kilns used for lime production in the Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula allows for an investigation of the socioeconomic organization of the precolonial Maya lime industry. This paper discusses the importance of burnt lime as a commodity within Classic Maya society and presents the results of spatial analyses of the pit-kilns in relation to other archaeological and environmental features. The distribution of the lime production features suggests that the Puuc lime industry was decentralized and organized at the small corporate group level. Some of these groups likely incorporated limestone extraction and processing into a broader multi-crafting subsistence strategy. Those small corporate groups that did not produce their own lime would have had to acquire it from producing groups through an intra-community exchange system. The paper provides a model for investigating the production and distribution of this crucial perishable material and raises questions about the valuation of lime as a commodity that existed at various points on a spectrum from necessity to luxury depending on compositional, functional, and social factors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35686.0