Economic Foundations of Mayapán Project: Results of the 2001 Season

Summary

As our work at Mayapán has thus far been six weeks in duration (Figure 27, shown above), this challenge is a bit of a reach for us at this early stage in our research. The data we’ve described here does attest to certain aspects of the city’s political economy in some interesting preliminary ways. On the local level, we have identified additional evidence for a lithic production and consumption industry in chert and chalcedony tools that was an important part of household maintenance activities, and probably craft and agricultural activities as well. Other household production industries at the site reflected in our surface collections include shell working and activities involving concentrations of lithic tools. Shell was one important currency for the marketplaces of the Late Postclassic Maya, and we see that manufacture of shell ornaments was an activity associated with some upper status houselots at the city. Metate concentrations, scarcely analyzed at this point, suggest collective houselot activities of food production. Animal age profiles in assemblages associated with elite rituals and feasting suggest that game was another resource that Mayapán occupants generated internally, especially deer, turkey, and dogs. Parrots were kept in at least one location. Clifford Brown’s prior work at the site (1999) also suggests that pottery production was an important local industry at Mayapán and we hope, with his help, to further analyze this trend. We thus see in Mayapán’s local industries a profile of a booming production economy, in which residents of the urban center made much of the materials essential for daily life. There is no evidence that households were independently self-sufficient, however, but rather, it appears that occupational specialists produced materials for exchange in the city’s markets for local and perhaps regional consumption. Environmental investigations planned by Bruce Dahlin and his team at the city will investigate questions of agrarian production. We hypothesize that garden plots existed throughout the city’s intermittent open spaces both inside and outside of the walls.

What of Mayapán’s exchange relationships with the outside world? Differential distribution of obsidian provides an intriguing glimpse of an exchange economy that affected residents of Mayapán to varying degrees. At least one-third of the site’s stone tools (based on our sample), were comprised of obsidian blades, and this reflects an aspect of long distance interdependency of the city’s residents on trade. Braswell’s (n.d.) sourcing work at the site identifies much of this obsidian to the Ixtepeque source, in a pattern that parallels that observed at sites along the east coast and in Belize (Masson and Chaya 2000). This shift to primary reliance on Ixtepeque obsidian in the Late Postclassic world temporally coincides with Mayapán’s rise to power, and raises the question of this city’s role in stimulating or negotiating long distance trading networks.

Other materials brought in from the outside include marine shell raw materials, which were converted to ornaments at the site. Fish, while present, is one coastal resource that is not abundant within the faunal assemblages examined thus far. This may be a preservation problem as otoliths were far more common than fish bone. Textiles, along with shell, were also important as exchange currencies in Postclassic marketplaces. Spindle whorls, although known from the site, were not abundant in the areas collected this summer–especially in comparison to their frequency at northern Belize sites (Masson 2000). Textiles may have been another important commodity obtained through trade at Mayapán. Other valuable items such as greenstone axes and copper artifacts, are present at the site, and greenstone was more common at Milpa #1 near the monumental zone than elsewhere in our survey. Further work will assist us in quantifying these items that occur in lower numbers than everyday household materials so that we can better evaluate the full dimensions of Mayapán’s exchange economy. We look forward to collecting additional data in the subsequent three years of survey, excavation, and analysis planned for the site.

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