Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association最新文献

In the twentieth century, an emphasis on generating big models to explain cross-cultural similarities and differences, particularly with respect to environmental factors, culminated in some essentialist views that negatively characterized the complexity and stability of Maya area civilization and economic foundations. These assumptions about Maya “Others”—as those who are doomed to fail and as weak contrasts to central Mexican contemporaries—still prevail in recent literature. They are dismissive of historical accounts as well as decades of concerted archaeological research. It is time to consider these new data that attest to the stability, resiliency, and commercial sophistication of Maya places and peoples through time. Local historical contingencies gave rise to considerable variation in economic strategies for production and exchange and webs of interdependency provided safeguards for linked cities, towns, and rural places.

New World households engaged in multiple forms of exchange: markets, redistribution, gifting, debt, reciprocity, and more. Determining the degree of prominence of each of these forms in ancient economies gives clues to the economic basis of leadership and the daily lives of households. A major method for inferring forms of exchange from household assemblages is Hirth's distributional approach. This paper applies the distributional approach to domestic inventories in two places where markets are unlikely: the Preclassic Maya in and around Ucí, Yucatan, Mexico; and Inka-period settlements in the Upper Mantaro Valley, Peru. The data presented in this paper show an equitable distribution of fancy pottery among households of both high and low socio-economic status in both areas. These somewhat unanticipated results could provoke several interpretations. At one extreme we could posit an important role for market exchange. At the other extreme, we could reject the logic of the distributional approach. This paper argues for a more circumspect track that uses additional lines of evidence to make inferences about incipient market exchange coincident with the rise of centralized leadership in the Maya area and poorly documented, possibly concealed market exchange nestled within Inka command economies. [Preclassic Maya, Inka economies, market exchange, households]

Within the last decade a new economic paradigm has emerged that emphasizes the variability in economic strategies the pre-Hispanic Maya employed. Among the most important developments is the discovery of marketplaces at several Classic Maya (250–900 CE) sites. Investigations into them and into market systems continue to fuel research, but invite broader consideration of what the presence of marketplaces might mean for regional systems of provision and control. The settlement densities revealed by new lidar data add urgency to this quest. Researchers should also consider the role of merchants, which is looming larger in our views of the pre-Hispanic Maya world. This article examines the implications of the preliminary identification of a marketplace at the city of Maax Na for economic activities, actors, and market systems in the Three Rivers Region of Guatemala and Belize.

This study focuses on the identification of Maya neighborhood marketplaces during the Late/Terminal Classic period (550-900 CE) in the urban landscape of Yaxnohcah, Campeche, Mexico. We use a configurational and contextual approach to identify four marketplaces that are situated in a strategic inner ring 1.5–2.5 km from the epicenter of the city. Physical features of the marketplaces include a plaza area of 2000–3100 m², low perimeter platforms surrounding the plazas, multiple corner entries, easy access to pedestrian corridors, association with large elite households or civic complexes, and equidistance from other neighborhood marketplaces. Artifact frequencies within the plaza support the identification of these complexes as markets, while a locational analysis identifies the service area of each. Finally, we consider the role of these marketplaces as anchors for residential zones during the Late Classic period.[Maya, Campeche, Late Classic, Neighborhoods, Marketplaces]

In evaluating the contributions to this issue, this chapter questions the predictable co-occurrence of cities with markets and states, a long-held position in western social theory. However, an extreme relativism is also flawed, and the projection of anti-capitalist fantasies on past, other peoples have equally distorted interpretations of the archaeological record and blinded researchers to the reality of market economies in societies including the Maya. Ultimately, the power of the comparative method entails more than the identification of commonalities between different market traditions. It can also serve to illuminate how market economics were embedded in distinct cultural, ideological, and material worlds. Calculating self-interest, supply-and-demand, and impersonal exchange do not operate according to a single behavioral logic but are shaped by ideologies of identity and desire specific to distinct regimes of value. Therefore, attention to the cultural and spatial context of economic transactions—in the original spirit of Polanyi—remains indispensable to interpreting how markets may have shaped historically particular constructions of personhood, community, inequality, place, and the ontological status of commodities. In the end, I argue that archaeologists also need to investigate the political affordances of markets as specific urban places and not simply as epiphenomena to a priori political or economic institutions.

The discovery of Classic Maya marketplaces within urban cores—the seats of royal power—brings into question the potential ways royal rulers contributed to the organization and effectiveness of marketplaces. Though Maya rulership is legitimated through family lineage, engagement in marketplaces could have presented rulers with an additional path toward maintaining order, gaining household allegiance, and accumulating wealth. Using multiple variables, I examine marketplace facilities at the sites of Buenavista del Cayo and Classic Xunantunich, located in the Mopan River valley of Belize. Findings show that the two marketplaces are largely complementary to each other in the types of goods available, suggesting similar functions. The timeframes in which the marketplaces were in use overlap during a transition of power from Buenavista del Cayo to Xunantunich. From this I suggest that the function and success of the marketplaces may have influenced the actions of rulers. In this case, rulers could have influenced trade networks and swayed household allegiances, all the while gaining wealth and power by levying taxes and monitoring wealth accumulation by non-royal elites.

The growth of Teotihuacan in the first millennium CE entailed the development of an extensive, dynamic, and multifaceted economic system. Teotihuacan's economy likely included forms of market exchange, making it an important case study for research concerning the origins of market economies. The settings in which goods changed hands and the social significance of economic interactions are not well understood, however. Here, I discuss how contexts of exchange may be reconstructed through the study of domestic artifacts. I focus on ceramics associated with Teotihuacan's neighborhoods and outlying communities, emphasizing recent data from settlements south of the capital. Compositional analyses are important for tracing exchange networks; macroscopic analyses of assemblage content and stylistic variation are also needed to estimate the scales at which goods circulated and to comprehend the social aspects of economic transactions. Finally, I consider the diverse kinds of physical settings in which market exchange may have occurred. Tendencies to view marketplaces primarily as large, architecturally formal, permanent, and centrally located may constrain our ability to identify and assess the significance of those that were small, informal, and situated within communities.

Polanyi's categorical models of exchange systems (reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange) have provided a powerful tool for characterizing ancient (and modern) economies. While such models are useful in some respects, they obscure variations within each economic system and similarities between different systems. This chapter explores different dimensions of exchange, including market exchange, as a methodological framework for assessing the nature of exchange systems. Then, it examines the nexus of economy and social relations and provides a more nuanced understanding of the variations and commonalities of economic systems using a case study from Teotihuacan, the capital of a regional state in pre-Contact Mesoamerica (150–600 CE). [exchange, market economy, Polanyi, consumption approach]

Previous research in the Mixtequilla region of south-central Veracruz documented commercial market exchange centered on the Middle Postclassic period (1200–1350 CE) center of Sauce. However, residential evidence and the spatial articulation of exchange (commercial or not) with centers has not been evaluated systematically for both the Preclassic (600 BCE – 300 CE) and Late Classic (600–900 CE) periods. These periods are of particular interest in evaluating the association of political centers with commerce because they are marked by the formation of a large capital and state (Cerro de las Mesas) during the Preclassic, and the breakdown of this state into several likely competing polities (Nopiloa, Azuzules, and Zapotal) in the Late Classic. Density collections of ceramics at residential mounds made by Stark's Proyecto Arqueológico La Mixtequilla provide evidence for changes in the scale and network distributions of exchange over time.[Veracruz, quantitative methods, markets, Preclassic, Late Classic]