Washington State U. study suggests Mayans utilized market-based economics

A new study in Latin American Antiquity by Washington State University (WSU) has shown that the ruling Mayan K’iche’ elite took more of a hands-off approach to trade than archaeologists previously thought.

The study, published Jan. 5 by WSU Insider, showed that for managing the procurement and trade of obsidian by people of the Guatemalan highlands, the Mayans bought and sold goods with far less oversight from their K’iche’ rulers than many archeologists suspected.

“Scholars have generally assumed that the obsidian trade was managed by Maya rulers, but our research shows that this wasn’t the case at least in this area,” said Rachel Horowitz, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at WSU, in the release. 

“People seem to have had a good deal of economic freedom including being able to go to places similar to the supermarkets we have today to buy and sell goods from craftsmen,” she added.

Obsidian is a glass-like rock used to make tools and weapons. Access to nearby sources of obsidian was managed by local people through independent and diverse acquisition networks, research showed. The availability of obsidian resources and the prevalence of craftsmen to shape it resulted in a system that mirrored modern market-based economies.

Horowitz performed geochemical and technological analysis on obsidian artifacts excavated from 50 sites around the K’iche’ capital of Q’umarkaj and surrounding region to determine where the raw material originally came from and techniques of its manufacture. 

Her results showed that the K’iche’ acquired their obsidian from similar sources in the central K’iche’ region and Q’umarkaj, indicating a high degree of centralized control, the release stated.

“For a long time, there has been this idea that people in the past didn’t have market economies, which when you think about it is kind of weird," she said. "Why wouldn’t these people have had markets in the past? The more we look into it, the more we realize there were a lot of different ways in which these peoples’ lives were similar to ours.”

Horowitz’s analysis suggested that local sites had access to their own sources of obsidian and developed specialized places where people could go to buy blades and other implements made from the rock. 

Researchers borrowed obsidian blades and other artifacts from the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans, which were excavated in the 1970s. 

Horowitz said she plans to examine more of the collection, which is housed in Guatemala, to discover further details about how Mayans conducted trade, managed their economic systems and generally went about their lives. 

The study and new insights into how the Mayans conducted their economic systems could have significant implications for our understanding of the economic and political systems of ancient civilizations, WSU reported.