Ancient Maya Commerce: Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil

Ancient Maya Commerce presents nearly two decades of multidisciplinary research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico—a thriving Classic period Maya center organized around commercial exchange rather than agriculture. An urban center without a king and unable to sustain agrarian independence, Chunchucmil is a rare example of a Maya city in which economics, not political rituals, served as the engine of growth. Trade was the raison d’être of the city itself. Using a variety of evidence—archaeological, botanical, geomorphological, and soil-based—contributors show how the city was a major center for both short- and long-distance trade, integrating the Guatemalan highlands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of the northern Maya lowlands. By placing Chunchucmil into the broader context of emerging research at other Maya cities, the book reorients the understanding of ancient Maya economies. The book is accompanied by a highly detailed digital map that reveals the dense population of the city and the hundreds of streets its inhabitants constructed to make the city navigable, shifting the knowledge of urbanism among the ancient Maya. Ancient Maya Commerce is a pioneering, thoroughly documented case study of a premodern market center and makes a strong case for the importance of early market economies in the Maya region. It will be a valuable addition to the literature for Mayanists, Mesoamericanists, economic anthropologists, and environmental archaeologists.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/anthro_book/1000/thumbnail.jp

Reflecting on PASUC Heritage Initiatives through Time, Positionality, and Place

This paper reports on heritage initiatives associated with a 12-year-long archaeology project in Yucatan, Mexico. Our work has involved both surprises and setbacks and in the spirit of adding to the repository of useful knowledge, we present these in a frank and transparent manner. Our findings are significant for a number of reasons. First, we show that the possibilities available to a heritage project facilitated by archaeologists depend not just on the form and focus of other stakeholders, but on the gender, sexuality, and class position of the archaeologists. Second, we provide a ground-level view of what approaches work well and which do not in terms of identifying aspects of cultural heritage that are relevant to a broad swath of stakeholders. Finally, we discuss ways in which heritage projects can overcome constraints to expanding community collaboration

Chunchucmil’s Urban Population

The previous chapter established that nearly all of what we mapped at Chunchucmil was occupied at the end of the Early Classic period. This allows us to combine mapping and excavation to discuss the structure of the city at this critical time. As we explain below, settlement in and around Chunchucmil was not homogeneous. We lump this settlement into five zones each with different characteristics: (1) site center, (2) residential core, (3) residential periphery, (4) settlement fingers, and (5) hinterland. This chapter presents the characteristics (size, settlement density, kinds of occupation) of these zones and then supplies a population estimate

Ancient Maya Rural Settlement Patterns, Household Cooperation, and Regional Subsistence Interdependency in the Río Bec Area: Contributions from G-LiHT

Research on intensive agricultural features contributes to the social relations of farming, including the means by which farmers mobilize labor and the possible destination of surplus. Lidar provides high-resolution data on ancient houses and agricultural features at a regional scale. This paper uses lidar data from NASA’s G-LiHT airborne imager to derive insights about rural demography, interhousehold cooperation, and subsistence interdependency among the ancient Maya. We assess the differences in intensity of agricultural investment in rural and urban areas of the Río Bec region of southern Campeche and Quintana Roo, Mexico, leading to inferences about regional food exchange and complex economies. The scale of interconnected ridges and terraces clearly implies interhousehold cooperation, yet this cooperation was not centralized. Rather, we envision a landscape of smallholders who jointly planned the layout and articulation of agricultural features but pooled most of their labor at the level of the household