Late Classic Marketplace Pottery Exchange in the Three Rivers Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The understanding of Maya marketplaces has long been hindered by the lack of archaeological data to support their identification. The ceramic data presented here serves as one aspect of an overarching project that uses a configurational approach and a set of cross-cultural marketplace indicators to investigate the presence of an integrated regional market system in Three Rivers Region (TRR) during the Late Classic. The regional focus of this project provides for a more global view of artifact exchange. An important aspect of this research is to examine the comparability of goods among regional sites and households to identity supply chains. Neutron activation analysis (NAA) of selected sherds can provide an independent way of determining the potential existence of a market as well as a means of cross-verifying the data obtained from other types of analyses. In this paper, we discuss our hypotheses and preliminary analyses regarding the exchange of utilitarian as well as high-quality ceramic types between various sites in the TRR.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37856.0