Realizing Value in Mesoamerica: The Dynamics of Desire and Demand in Ancient Economies (Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies) 3031441672, 9783031441677

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANCIENT ECONOMIES

Realizing Value in Mesoamerica The Dynamics of Desire and Demand in Ancient Economies Edited by Scott R. Hutson · Charles Golden

Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies

Series Editors Paul Erdkamp, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium Kenneth Hirth, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Claire Holleran, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, UK Michael Jursa, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Jaehwan Lee, Department of History, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) William Guanglin Liu, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong J. G. Manning, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Himanshu Prabha Ray, Gurugram, Haryana, India

This series provides a unique dedicated forum for ancient economic historians to publish studies that make use of current theories, models, concepts, and approaches drawn from the social sciences and the discipline of economics, as well as studies that use an explicitly comparative methodology. Such theoretical and comparative approaches to the ancient economy promotes the incorporation of the ancient world into studies of economic history more broadly, ending the tradition of viewing antiquity as something separate or ‘other’. The series not only focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, but also includes studies of ancient China, India, and the Americas pre-1500. This encourages scholars working in different regions and cultures to explore connections and comparisons between economic systems and processes, opening up dialogue and encouraging new approaches to ancient economies.

Scott R. Hutson · Charles Golden Editors

Realizing Value in Mesoamerica The Dynamics of Desire and Demand in Ancient Economies

Editors Scott R. Hutson Department of Anthropology University of Kentucky Lexington, KY, USA

Charles Golden Department of Anthropology Brandeis University Waltham, MA, USA

ISSN 2752-3292 ISSN 2752-3306 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies ISBN 978-3-031-44167-7 ISBN 978-3-031-44168-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1

Introduction: Realizing Value in Mesoamerica Scott R. Hutson and Charles Golden

1

Part I Approaches to Value 23

2

Postclassic Maya Things and Their Entanglements Marilyn A. Masson

3

Considering Reciprocity and Gratitude in Postclassic Basin of Mexico Economies Kristin De Lucia

51

Chronotopic Value: Objects and Meaning Through Mesoamerican Timespace Mallory E. Matsumoto

79

4

Part II Lithics and Land 5

Assembling Value in Mesoamerica John K. Millhauser, Andrea Torvinen, Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza, Camilo Mireles Salcedo, and Ben A. Nelson

6

Toward an Understanding of Obsidian Values Among the Ancient Maya Through a Comparative Approach Zachary Hruby

109

139

v

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CONTENTS

On Value and Values: The Displayed and Hidden Action of Classic-Period Maya Jades Brigitte Kovacevich and Michael Callaghan Shifting Landscapes of Value in the Maya World Charles Golden

163 201

Part III Crafting 9

10

11

Crafting Jewels, Creating Value: Techné and Tlateccayotl among the Nahuas in the Basin of Mexico Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc Cotton Thread Production, Communities of Practice, and Value in Postclassic Oaxaca, Mexico Marc N. Levine, Arthur A. Joyce, Femke J. Heijting, Stacie M. King, and Pascale Meehan Soft Infrastructure: Realizing Value of Craft Producers in Small Centers and Settlements in Veracruz, Mesoamerica Alanna Ossa

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247

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Part IV Exchange 12

13

14

Exchange Value in Classic Period Maya Economies: The View from Western Belize Bernadette Cap, Rachel A. Horowitz, and Jason Yaeger

309

Magic and Marxism: Valuing Enchantment in the Maya Political Economy Eleanor Harrison-Buck and David A. Freidel

335

Classic Maya Tribute as a Social Register Joanne Baron

361

Part V Inequality 15

Beyond Economic Inequality: Unmeasurable Values, Collective Demand, and Community Building in Classic Period Mesoamerica Tatsuya Murakami

397

CONTENTS

16

“Inequality of What?” Multiple Paths to the Good Life Scott R. Hutson

Index

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447

List of Contributors

Joanne Baron Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, USA Michael Callaghan University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA Bernadette Cap San Antonio College, San Antonio, TX, USA Kristin De Lucia Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos, El Colegio de Michoacán, La Piedad, Michoacán, México David A. Freidel Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA Charles Golden Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA Eleanor Harrison-Buck Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA Femke J. Heijting Independent Scholar, Huissen, Netherlands Rachel A. Horowitz Anthropology Department, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA Zachary Hruby Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY, USA

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Scott R. Hutson Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA Arthur A. Joyce University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Stacie M. King Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Brigitte Kovacevich University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA Marc N. Levine University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA Marilyn A. Masson Department of Anthropology, University at Albany SUNY, Albany, NY, USA Pascale Meehan University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc Museo del Templo Mayor, Ciudad de México, Mexico Mallory E. Matsumoto Department of Religious Studies, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA John K. Millhauser Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA Tatsuya Murakami Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA Ben A. Nelson School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Alanna Ossa State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, USA Camilo Mireles Salcedo Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada Andrea Torvinen Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Jason Yaeger Anthropology Department, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX, USA

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Map of Mesoamerica showing major locations discussed in this book At Mayapan, translucent, higher quality chalcedony raw materials used for tools and flakes concentrate at high-status contexts (left), whereas commoner domestic contexts (right) had greater proportions of weathered, patinated material, as illustrated by these narrow, pointed bifacial tools A worn greenstone chisel (top left) and piece of raw material (top right) accompanied central concentrations of broken effigy censers, part of termination rites at two buildings of a ceremonial group (Itzmal Ch’en) at Mayapan; photos on the bottom row illustrate more finely made jade objects at the group’s temple Altar offerings at the Mayapan Itzmal Ch’en temple (top) and at an elite residence at Caye Coco, Belize (bottom) illustrate the symbolic importance of ordinary or fragmented artifacts in a ritual context An upper-status child burial at Mayapan House Q-40 was accompanied by a unique urn effigy vessel (top left) and numerous metal and shell artifacts, including the tweezers (top right), small metal and shell rings (bottom left), and monkey effigy bell (bottom right)

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27

29

31

36

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.5

Fig. 2.6

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

A perforated miniature mask (top left), three female figurine head fragments, three animal figurine fragments, and two bivalve pendants accompanied an upper-status child burial at House Q-40, Mayapan A Classic period K’awiil (God K) effigy scepter was reused as an offering at the Postclassic site of Laguna de On, Belize Map of the Basin of Mexico with key sites relevant to the text Aztec merchants on the road (top) and selling their wares (below). Florentine Codex, Book IX: The Merchants, [Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana], World Digital Library, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.10620 Example of a household offering from Xaltocan Mexico. A cut long bone and a tortoise shell are not included in the photo (photograph by author) Jade pendant from Piedras Negras that was recovered from the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza: (a) front view; (b) side view; (c) reverse with hieroglyphic inscription. Gift of C. P. Bowditch, 1910. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 10-70-20/C6100 Bottom fragment of Stela 4 from Piedras Negras, showing K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II standing above two captives with a large belt ornament on his waist. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2004.29.7573 Bottom fragment of Stela 10 from Piedras Negras, showing Itzam K’an Ahk IV sitting on a throne affixed with a large belt ornament. Photograph by Teobert Maler (1895), Piedras Negras II / El Petén, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut/Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, CC-BY-NC Stela 40 from Piedras Negras, showing Itzam K’an Ahk IV wearing a large belt ornament on his back as he scatters incense into the open tomb of a female ancestor: (a) photo of carved scene; (b) detail of upper half. Gifts of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1958. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 58-34-20/ 68456.1 & 58-34-20/68459

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5 Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Stela 13 from Piedras Negras, showing Ha’ K’in Xook scattering incense with a large belt ornament on his waist. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2004.29.7561 Map of northern Mesoamerica with sites, regions, and obsidian sources mentioned in the text. Digital elevation model and historic air photos provided courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Mexico Map of the Maya area and the sites discussed in the text A visual comparison of 3s blade width, thickness, weight, and use-wear quotient between the sites from the Peten discussed in the text Map showing the location of Maya sites and the Motagua Valley in Guatemala (Map by Brigitte Kovacevich) Jade Earflare (or headdress flare) from Cancuen (Photo by Brigitte Kovacevich) Jade flare polisher or abrader from Cancuen (Photo by Brigitte Kovacevich) Winged Plaque with carving of Olmec Maize God on the obverse side from the Middle Formative period with a Late Preclassic (100 BC–100 AD) incised scene of a ruler with hieroglyphs on the reverse (Drawing by Alexandre Tokovinine) Reworked Maya Belt Plaque (Drawing by Alexandre Tokovinine) The archaeological zone of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (Drawing by Victor Solís Ciriaco and Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc) Experimental archaeology workshop on lapidary objects: (a) replicating a serpentine scepter on travertine; (b) anthropomorphic figurine on slate (Photos by Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc) Examples of Tenochca imperial style objects: (a) obsidian pectoral; (b) travertine scepters; (c) serpentine sculpture; (d) turquoise mosaic (Photos by Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc)

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167 168 175

179 180

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4 Fig. 11.5 Fig. 12.1

New materials identified in Tenochtitlan: (a) imperial green jadeite; (b) blue jadeite; (c) fluorite; (d) serpentine; (e) transparent gray obsidian; (f) jet (Photos by Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc) New relics and styles detected in Tenochtitlan: (a) Olmec axe; (b) Mayan plaque; (c) Teotihuacan noseplug; (d) Mezcala pendant (Photos by Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc) Lower Río Verde Region of Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico Spindle whorls from the Lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca. (a) Early Postclassic Yugüe phase whorls from Río Viejo, Operation B, (b) Late Postclassic Yucudzaa phase whorls from Tututepec, Residences A, B, and C Spindle whorls and mold from Tututepec household excavations: (a–b) Assortment of whorl types; (c) biconocial type whorls; (d) whorl mold with top, profile, and bottom views (image at far right has biconical whorl inserted into mold; mold images not to scale) Distribution of Late Postclassic biconical whorls along the Pacific coast of Oaxaca and Chiapas, with inset images below from (a) Tututepec (Heijting, 2005); (b) Copalita (Matadamas Díaz & Ramírez Barrera, 2010: Fig. 29); (c) Acapetahua (Voorhies & Gasco, 2004: Fig. 51, modified) Map showing Sauce center and PALM and Speaker survey blocks in south-central Veracruz, Mexico Map showing SAP collections and sampling rings Ordinal size groupings of individual mound volumes weighted by their Postclassic pottery percentages Spindle whorl counts and artifact associations by rings from Sauce High density summary visual analysis of pottery types by rings from Sauce Map of the Mopan River valley showing sites discussed in the text

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239 249

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263 279 282 291 293 295 311

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 14.1

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5

Fig. 14.6 Fig. 14.7 Fig. 14.8 Fig. 14.9 Fig. 14.10 Fig. 16.1 Fig. 16.2

Fig. 16.3

Ritual examples of ikaatz: (a) K1004 (all K-numbers indicate photos by Justin Kerr. Creative Commons License BY-SA 4.0. Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC); (b) K7750; (c) Itzamna Court Vase, drawing by the author from Coe and Houston (2015, plate XVIII); (d) Yaxchilan Lintel 1, drawing by author after photo by Ian Graham. https://peabody.harvard. edu/yaxchilan Other examples of ikaatz: (a) K7727; (b) K0793 Mythological examples of patan: (a) K1398; (b) K8076 Earliest identifiable historical reference to patan, K5453 Other patan examples: (a) K1775; (b) drawing by author from K3395 Dry goods commonly offered as tribute: (a–b) K5453; (c) K2914; (d) K4339; (e) K0624 Rarer dry goods: (a) K2697; (b) K2220; (c) K3832; (d) K7797; (e) K4617; (f) K2026; (g) K7727 Confrontation scene, K1489 A lack of tribute for God D: (a) K2026; (b) drawing by author from Tunesi (2008, figure 1) Further examples of God D’s court: (a) K7727; (b) K4999 Map of Ucí-Cansahcab area with sites mentioned in the text Above: East side of megalithic Structure 42S2, Yaxché/ 21 de Abril, facing west. Below: West side of megalithic Structure 51, Kancab, facing east (a) Map of the Structure 42S2 residential group, Yaxché/21 de Abril, showing locations of excavations; (b) Map of the Structure 51 residential group, Kancab

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374 375 376 377 378 382 384 385 386 388 435

438

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 5.1

Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Table 5.4

Table 5.5

Table 6.1 Table 6.2

Common understandings of value Counts of artifacts by raw material types in the chipped stone collections from the Malpaso Valley and Talleres 3 at Los Guachimontones Sources of obsidian identified in the Malpaso Valley collection Comparison of chipped stone artifact types (combining all raw materials) for sites in the Malpaso Valley and the Postclassic contexts at Talleres 3, Los Guachimontones Comparison of chipped stone from the Malpaso Valley with sites where core-flake technology predominated and chipped stone from Talleres 3 at Los Guachimontones with sites that used core-blade technology Comparison of obsidian colors in each collection with the proportion of colors in uncommon artifact types compared to all artifact types. Color categories present at both sites do not mean that the same obsidian sources were used at each site A comparison of overall counts and weights of obsidian artifacts from the sites discussed in the text A comparison of 3s blades from the sites discussed in the text with a focus on blade metrics and use-wear quotient

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117 118

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131 153

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 11.1 Table 12.1

Table 14.1

Tututepec Whorl Types and Proportions (modified from Levine [2007: Table 6.04]) Spindle Whorl Frequencies from Sites in the Lower Río Verde Region Counts of residential mounds by ceramic types per ring, showing high density and 75th percentile results Characteristics of obsidian assemblages from the Buenavista del Cayo and Xunantunich marketplaces Tribute register repertoires

257 257 296

320 371

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Realizing Value in Mesoamerica Scott R. Hutson

and Charles Golden

Introduction The construction, imagination, and experience of “value” shapes our daily choices—how we spend our time, where we choose to invest labor, how we engage with others within and beyond our communities, and what we assign to realms of exchange or consider inalienable and priceless. Value is a total social fact (Mauss, 1966 [1925]), a reality that requires a degree of consensus among individuals—consensus established in part through the marketplace. Yet, the establishment, meaning, and social power of value remain subjects of debate among social scientists even for modern cultures and economies.

S. R. Hutson (B) Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Golden Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. R. Hutson and C. Golden (eds.), Realizing Value in Mesoamerica, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4_1

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How might archaeologists infer consensus (or lack of consensus) about value in the past? What manner of relationships produce and reproduce value and how do these relations extend over time? How can we glean from material culture the relationships between value, wealth, and social identity in pre-Colonial Mesoamerica? Recent research on Mesoamerican economies has begun to offer greater inroads to these puzzles, highlighting complexities in patterns of production, exchange, and consumption that promise to shed light on pre-Columbian notions of value and challenge long-held approaches to method and theory on these topics. Particularly in the Maya area, stretching from eastern Mexico through northern Central America, growing acceptance among scholars of the material evidence of marketplaces has helped archaeologists recognize additional incentives that may have guided the economic decisions of ancient actors. We no longer envision risk-averse subsistence provisioning of households and extractive tribute requirements from royal courts as the only concerns shaping economic strategies and investments of time and labor. The option of producing surplus for market exchange introduces a profit motive that was sorely missing in overly substantivist models. Yet, fine-grained data have also illuminated intra- and inter-site variability that cannot be fully explained by profit-making and household concerns as more traditionally understood, such as ensuring subsistence and satisfying the demands of a political economy. We argue that paying closer attention to the concept of value within a cultural context that includes markets as one, but only one, important economic driver can help us build on recent progress in the study of ancient Mesoamerican economies. Nearly a quarter century ago, the press for this volume, Palgrave Macmillan, published a watershed book in economic anthropology: David Graeber’s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001). In that work, Graeber (2001: xii) defines value as “the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality—even if in many cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor’s imagination.” Graeber places action, as opposed to things, at the core of the definition of value. His definition opens many paths to exploring the values that have inspired many of the authors in this book and can provide a lens for reading even the chapters that do not follow Graeber. The contributions to this volume by Bernadette Cap and coauthors (Chapter 12), Alanna Ossa (Chapter 11), Brigitte Kovacevich and Michael

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Callaghan (Chapter 7), and several others emphasize the connections between action and value. Graeber sees value as relational in the sense that actors pursue goals that they believe others hold in high regard. Value is also relational in the sense that, as chapters by Eleanor HarrisonBuck and David Freidel (Chapter 13), Marilyn Masson (Chapter 2), John Millhauser and coauthors (Chapter 5), Kristin De Lucia (Chapter 3), and others highlight, value is not inherent in an object but rather arises from an object’s context in broader assemblages of things and its relations with both human and non-human people. As Graeber’s quote suggests, however, there is no singular collective understanding of value. Multiple and conflicting understandings of what is important and what is meaningful—what is valuable—coexist within any society, as chapters by Tatsuya Murakami (Chapter 15), Hutson (Chapter 16), and Golden (Chapter 8) underscore, even as moments of exchange create the impression of shared formulations of value. As an emergent social quality, value can be said to have a sort of agency of its own that can only partly be attributed to materiality. Its origin in and relationship to shared human interactions can be easily obscured, giving it the seeming reality of something natural, of inherent qualities. It mobilizes desires in myriad ways and moves people to diverse kinds of action. People choose every day how to invest those most limited resources of time and energy: gamble? produce goods for exchange? acquire fashionable commodities? channel surplus into upgrading one’s house? safeguard inalienable goods? build social alliances? relax? service debt relations with other than human beings? publish an edited volume on value in Mesoamerica? These choices presuppose a conceptualization of agency that is more nuanced than traditional economic models whose preferred protagonist (H. economicus ) has little choice for action beyond rational maximization of profit. Even as scholars embrace such fluidity, we must also recognize that in some cases value is durably structured by many factors, creating doxa that shapes action in ways that actors may not even realize, much less be able to question (Bourdieu, 1977: 164). For example, systems of belief and patterns of practice establish apparently shared understandings of high values for certain goods that become “entangled” in webs of meaning (Hodder, 2011, 2012). A well-known instance of this process in Mesoamerica is the symbolic interplay between maize and jade, established in the Preclassic period, which created a long-lasting standard of

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value largely impervious to the manipulations of later actors in the Classic period (Gillespie, 2012; Taube, 2005). Inequalities in social structures are another example of constraints that circumscribe people’s possibilities for action and investment. Indeed, a close consideration of the multiplicity and dynamism of values may promote a more careful understanding of inequality. Archaeologists have typically focused on a limited suite of material markers to indicate measurements of value, wealth, and inequality. We quantify polychrome pots and count jade beads, spondylus shells, or other exotic long-distance trade goods and take these metrics to indicate a household’s access to limited—and valuable—resources. In the absence of significant artifact inventories for a robust sample of households (or an understanding of acquisition costs even if we had such household data), it has become common of late to measure inequality with a single variable: house size, filtered through the analytical lens of Gini indices (e.g., McLellan & Haines, 2023; Smith et al., 2014; Thompson et al., 2021). Yet such measures of inequality may not help predict other indicators of well-being (Murakami, Chapter 15; Munson & Scholnick, 2022). In cases where we might interpret differences between two households as a reflection of inequality, such differences may instead indicate that one household prioritizes different meanings and desires (De Lucia Chapter 3, Hutson Chapter 16). In other words, the lesser household is not necessarily impoverished; rather, its actions reflect a different weighting of values. While a study of value can help nuance studies of inequality, we also recognize that many differences do reflect inequalities, often crushing ones, that should not be downplayed. The chapters in this volume seek to move beyond staid and static notions of value that have served scholars so well and for so long without merely reformulating precolonial indigenous peoples as post-modern subjects. This book brings together case studies from many parts of Mesoamerica, including Western Mexico, the Basin of Mexico, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and various parts of the Maya Lowlands (Fig. 1.1). Chronologically, the chapters range from the Late Preclassic period (300 BCE–250 CE) to the Spanish Conquest in the early sixteenth century. All the authors shared drafts of their papers as part of a “lightning round” session at the April 2023 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Portland, Oregon. Our goal is to contribute to a broader dialog on ancient systems of value. We recognize the difficulty of this task given that our own daily lives are inextricably bound to capitalism. Yet as Ossa pointed out in our

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group discussions in Portland, many of us do not understand our own economies very well. In fact, without advocating for a strictly formalist approach to economies (Cancian, 1966; Cook, 1966; Schneider, 1974), we argue that the distinctions in perception and practice between capitalist and non-capitalist economies are not as stark as once thought by substantivist economic anthropologists (Polanyi, 1944). As Harrison-Buck and Freidel point out in their chapter, modern market behaviors retain social and moral dimensions at their core—a situation that was long seen as the hallmark of “pre-modern” economies distinct from capitalism (see also Granovetter, 1985; Ostrom, 1992; Zelizer, 2012). One of the themes that crosscut contemporary and ancient understandings of value is the difficulty of defining it and understanding it without recognizing the relations that constitute it. Relations are at the core of the definition of value we provided above: “the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality” (Graeber, 2001: xii). Stated differently, value always depends on its broader linkages. The authors in this book talk about value in very different ways but are unified by an appreciation of the way that value inheres in relations—as opposed to being intrinsic in a “thing.”

Fig. 1.1 Map of Mesoamerica showing major locations discussed in this book

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Table 1.1 Common understandings of value Value measured in the amount of labor (Adam Smith, Karl Marx) Value measured in the skill of the labor (Adam Smith, Karl Marx) Value in terms of scarcity of materials (David Ricardo) Use value in the satisfaction of basic needs (nutrition, shelter, livelihood, task completion) Historical/biographical value (Arjun Appadurai) Sentimental value (Igor Kopytoff) Value in the sense of values: the ideals that orient life and inform a sense of what is proper Sacred value: desirability based in alignment with cosmological principles Exotic value: geographically distant contacts equate to cosmological power (Mary Helms) Inalienable value: parting with an object means surrendering core identities (Annette Wiener) Exchange value in the sense of what one is willing to pay (Georg Simmel, Carl Menger) The personified value of gifts that motivate recipients to action (Marcel Mauss) Value in a linguistic sense of meaningful difference (Ferdinand de Saussure)

Our central goal in this introduction is to trace some of the common ways in which the authors connect value to actors (human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate) and projects. No introduction can provide an exhaustive catalog of the kinds of relations that produce value, or what value can mean (but see Mathews & Guderjan, 2017; Papadopolous, 2012). Yet as editors, we would be doing a disservice to the readers if we failed to sketch the range of approaches that recur in the subsequent chapters. Thus, Table 1.1 provides a list of some of the processes and relations that make things valuable. In the remaining sections we expand on how the chapters in this book treat the concept of value.

Hau, Knowledge, and Value Several of the chapters in this volume build on the long anthropological and sociological tradition suggesting that the value of an item can be enhanced due to its associations with specific people. Marcel Mauss (1966 [1925]) famously explored this and other themes in his essay The Gift . To simplify grossly, Mauss wrote about several cases in which the value of an item—its capacity to motivate action—arises, in part, from its

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connection to a person. Specifically, in the context of gift exchange, a gift motivates the recipient to give something in return. Mauss’ most famous example, drawn from the Maori of New Zealand, is just one version of this principle. Among the Maori, the gift contains the spirit—the hau—of the giver and in seeking to return home, the spirit moves the recipient to offer a counter gift. Mauss’ broader purpose was to critique the notion that self-interest must be at the core of “economic” actions. But a legacy of The Gift is the recognition that cross-culturally, well beyond the Maori case study of Mauss, the renown (or notoriety) of producers or owners can cling to an item (Helms, 1993). As Annette Weiner (1992) famously observed, this can create the seeming “paradox of keeping-while-giving.” Gifts are “alive and personified” (Mauss, 1966: 10). Harrison-Buck and Freidel (Chapter 13; see also Harrison-Buck, 2021) make this point clearly in discussing marriage exchange and underlining the animate nature of non-human gifts. In Chapter 7, Kovacevich and Callaghan argue that the essence of artisans affixes itself to jade adornments. In cases where nobles and non-nobles contributed labor in different stages to the same piece, it may be the case that recipients of the finished ornament knew only the noble who endowed an ornament with esoteric knowledge in the final stages of production. Nevertheless, Kovacevich and Callaghan suggest that the work put in by non-nobles added to the jade’s esteem, vitality, and permanence. Melgar (Chapter 9) pursues similar themes with the rich historical and archaeological data from the Mexica Templo Mayor, exploring how the valued work of lapidary artists was intimately tied to their expertise and connections to ritual life. Chapter 10 by Levine and colleagues, however, serves as a critical reminder that communities of practice can participate in the creation of value from the “bottom up”—where producers are not specialized or ritually distinguished from other members of society. Cap and coauthors (Chapter 12) explore the impact of personal associations on value by examining how well consumers know producers of stone tools. In their case study from the Upper Belize River Valley, lithics were exchanged at marketplaces but could also have been traded in the domestic workshops where they were produced. Although stone tools were not unique enough to create brand loyalty, Cap and coauthors note other ways in which connections between producers and consumers may have affected value. They note that because final production steps sometimes took place in the marketplace, consumers at the market would have been able to observe producers in action and therefore assess their level

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of skill. They argue that deeper knowledge of the labor invested in a commodity can raise or lower the consumer’s estimation of the value of that commodity. They also note that if buyers regularly get tools from the same artisan, whether at marketplaces or workshops, social relations between consumers and producers may develop, therefore affecting sale prices. Cap and her coauthors’ study reminds us that even an exchange at a marketplace is not necessarily a “closed” exchange where a fair swap ends all commitments between buyer and seller (cf. Graeber, 2011: 220). Deep bonds can form between buyers and sellers, leading to informal discounts or freebies even in our own economy. The broader point of the paper by Cap and coauthors is the relationship between observation, knowledge, and value. For Cap and coauthors, value equates to price: the degree to which consumers can observe a producer, how well they know the producer, and knowledge about the quality or even performance characteristics of the finished goods affect what they pay. In other studies, knowledge equates to value not in terms of price but of power. Along these lines, Julia Hendon (2000: 45) argued that lower status households made their stored resources partially visible to others, whereas higher status households stored goods in ways that did not reciprocate knowledge about what they owned (cf. Lamoreaux St. Hilaire, 2022). Kovacevich and Callaghan (Chapter 7) take up Hendon’s point about the power of what is not seen, or, better yet, the un-knowable potential of what is not visible. They draw on Graeber (2001), who wrestles with the question of why beads are often used as money. The easy answer is that beads are portable, they do not decay, and their small size and roughly similar form makes them similar or at least easy to compare—what Graeber calls “commensurable” (see also Baron, Chapter 14, on tribute and Baron, 2018). The better answer, though, is that items adopted as currency around the world are often suitable as adornments (beads, after all, are items of adornment), and adornments ooze with value—we have all heard, for example that clothing makes the person. But things get tricky here because adornments have characteristics that diverge from currencies. Currencies, like bills and beads, are supposed to be interchangeable and non-specific (this dollar bill is the same as that dollar bill). Adornments, on the other hand, can be very specific, not just because a particular headdress might be identified with a particular office, social role, or identity (“a king who gives away his crown is a king no longer,”

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wrote Graeber [2001: 93]), but because items of adornment often accumulate and convey unique histories centered around who made them, who owned them, etc. (we return to this notion of history in the next section). Thus, Graeber fingers the paradox that while the value of early currencies resides in their linkage with adornment, the types of value expressed by currency and adornment are diametrically opposed. Currency is often hidden and represents a potential for action whereas adornment is on display and represents actions already undertaken (Graeber, 2001: 99, 114). Kovacevich and Callaghan find this polarity useful for understanding jade. Jade beads have been used as currency among the Maya and, as Kovacevich and Callaghan point out, they are often stored in ways that hide them. On the other hand, the very specific (singular enough to be identified in depictions) and historically freighted jade pendant at the core of Chapter 4, by Mallory Matsumoto, derives its value from display. Matsumoto’s chapter engages several ideas surrounding object biographies and itineraries, to which we now turn.

Biography, Itinerary, and Beyond If the identity of an artisan enhances the value of an object, as discussed above, the entanglements of the object after it is finished—who owned it, how it was used, where it went, etc.—do so as well. Arjun Appadurai (1986) and Igor Kopytoff (1986) opened this line of thought in their famous explorations of the relationship between commodities and gifts. We normally think of commodities as indistinct in the sense of raw materials that are interchangeable; this tumpline of lumber is essentially similar to any other tumpline of lumber. Likewise, we assume commodities carry relatively little of the identity or essence of their producers or previous owners. Appadurai encouraged us to move away from this approach. Instead of using the inherent characteristics of an object to classify it as a commodity, he argued that commodities are objects that are exchanged in a particular kind of way. Thus, “the question becomes not ‘What is a commodity?’ but rather ‘What sort of an exchange is commodity exchange?’” (Appadurai, 1986: 9)—to which Kopytoff (1986) added, in essence, “when is a commodity.” Appadurai (1986: 12– 13) concluded that gift exchange and commodity exchange are in fact not completely different, enabling him to talk about how a single item could be exchanged as a gift at certain times and a commodity at others. The

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study of movement in and out of the commodity state amounts to what he called a biographical approach. Items that tend to be more singular (an heirloom as opposed to a hard-boiled egg) tend to be more biographical. As part of this approach, Appadurai encouraged attention to an object’s total trajectory, including production, exchange, and consumption (see also Schiffer, 1972). Appadurai’s work invited many fruitful lines of inquiry (explorations of the social lives of things, of the cultural politics of non-Western art markets, etc.) but has been critiqued for viewing exchange in a way that prioritizes self-interested calculation (Graeber, 2001: 32–33). Others have reinvigorated the notion of object biographies by offering refinements. For example, Jody Joy (2009) points out that while the biography approach is linear, objects (like persons) have multiple relations extending in many directions (see also Bauer, 2019; Gillespie, 2015; Joyce, 2015). Furthermore, at any particular time, some relations are active and others are inactive. Thus, as time passes, objects move in and out of different sets of entanglements, creating disconnects that do not fit the linear narrative of a biography. Also, while a biography normally has a birth and a death, objects can experience multiple re-births as they move through cycles of production, use, modification, reuse, discard, rediscovery, museum display, scholarly publication, and so on. In Chapter 4, Matsumoto highlights this kind of complex itinerary. At the center of her work is a jade belt ornament first worn by K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II of Piedras Negras in the early eighth century CE and then worn by some of his royal successors but perhaps not all. The belt ornament then left Piedras Negras through unknown means and entered a very different life at Chichén Itzá, where it eventually settled among other offerings in the muck of the Sacred Cenote. The ornament found a new life once dredged from the cenote in the early twentieth century and brought to Harvard University where it acquired ever-new entanglements through the work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff and now Mallory Matsumoto, who provides an illustration of the object in her Chapter 4. Contemporary geopolitical controversies surrounding the Sacred Cenote objects (many believe they should be repatriated to Mexico) may mean that there are more stops in the itinerary. Yet Matsumoto’s treatment of the belt ornament exposes a shortcoming of the object itinerary approach. The belt ornament existed as a physical jade artifact but was also depicted in the garb of three different rulers and denoted in hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thus, violating

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the concept of an “itinerary,” the ornament appears in many places at the same time. Building on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, Matsumoto argues that the artifact derived its value not so much from its rare raw material or the labor to create it but from its circulation across time and space. This circulation includes not just its association with multiple generations of kings but also from representation and amplification across multiple media. The tribute discussed by Joanne Baron in Chapter 14 accrues value from a somewhat similar process. Textiles and cacao bundles were not just collected by rulers. They were shown being collected. While Baron recognizes that tribute most likely existed well before it was first depicted in seventh century CE tribute presentation scenes, depictions of tribute can in one sense create a meta-discourse on tribute, a “register.” Building on ideas from Asif Agha (2017), Baron defines a tribute register as the conduct and writing surrounding tribute. Using a large corpus of tribute presentation scenes, Baron detects intriguing patterns in the types of goods and beings present. For example, when captives are displayed alongside tribute, the tribute never consists of food or drink. If such transactions represent ransom payments between foes, Baron suggests that the presentation of food and drink was reserved for more friendly patron/ client interactions. This contrasts with the notion that exchanges of prisoners, marriage partners, prestige goods, and food were all part of a single continuum of gift exchange (cf. Harrison-Buck, 2021).

The Value of Context In addition to the way objects get entangled with people and representations in various media, value and meaning also derive from the broader assemblages of which objects are a part. In Chapter 2, Marilyn Masson shows how mundane objects such as sherds, chert flakes, and prismatic blade fragments take on symbolic value when combined with other objects. Specifically, at Caye Coco, Belize, a sherd can gain value as part of a collection of other items that complete the set of Maya directional colors. In Chapter 5, Millhauser and coauthors make a similar point in regard to an offering in a tomb at La Quemada, Zacatecas, Mexico. The offering consisted of a variety of items including several unremarkable obsidian flakes that may not have been valued in isolation. Millhauser and coauthors write that “the caching of obsidian with other objects

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made from different raw materials raises the possibility that some obsidian’s value was only realized in assemblage with other potent materials. Mesoamerican offerings often assembled materials that only had value in their completion—no single item could be part of a sacred exchange without the others present.” Value, in other words, “is less clearly about power or labor and perhaps about the proper combination and association of materials in a meaningful Mesoamerican world.” At Mayapan, Masson shows that Postclassic people placed ordinary artifacts in extraordinary contexts where they “outperform expectations based on their raw material quality, workmanship, and condition.” For example, at the Itzmal Ch’en group, an important ceremonial compound within Mayapan’s perimeter walls but beyond the monumental core, a worn-out chisel and a battered, partially smoothed pebble, both made of greenstone but not jade, were placed in caches containing censer sherds. Normally caches in such prominent ceremonial contexts contain jade. Since the Itzmal Ch’en group does not lack jade, they probably could have used jade if they chose to. Given their placement in the cache context, the shabby greenstones substitute for jade, acquiring the paradigmatic value of jade in a Saussurean sense but also some of the sacred values of jade as discussed by several Mayanists (Freidel et al., 2002; Kovacevich and Callaghan Chapter 8, this volume; Taube, 2005).

The Value of Artisans and Artistry Artisans create value through a variety of means: hard labor, skill, ability to integrate ancestral agents into the production process (see below), their status as, in some cases, renowned individuals whose identity imprints itself onto the finished product (see above), and more. Several chapters in this book highlight a slightly different angle: the way in which artisans themselves are a form of value. At Mayapan, Masson (Chapter 2) interprets an offering of masonry plastering tools as an expression of reverence toward the experts of this trade. In Chapter 14, Eleanor Harrison-Buck and David Freidel note, as others have before, two aspects of members of royalty and high-ranking noble families: (1) they are sometimes deployed strategically in marriage alliances, (2) they sometimes fill esteemed positions as crafters: painters, sculptors, etc. In the Rabinal Achí, a precolonial K’iche’ Maya drama still performed today (Tedlock, 2003), Harrison-Buck and Freidel highlight the connection

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between these two roles: men who marry a royal princess produce craft goods for the royal family. Harrison-Buck and Freidel envision these artisans and their products as a stream of social currency that rulers seek to acquire. As defined by David Graeber, social currencies are not the kind of money used in a commercial economy to acquire goods or accumulate wealth. Social currencies predate these kinds of commercial transactions and are not used to buy or sell at all. Rather, “they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers” (Graeber, 2001: 130). Social currencies take many forms (wampum, cattle, metal rods) around the world, with bridewealth being an example. Echoing that the exchange of human life is difficult to repay, HarrisonBuck and Freidel suggest that craft products as social currency are a continuing moral obligation due to the father-in-law. For the Classic period Maya, individual artists had such social currency that, uniquely in the precolonial Americas, some signed their names to their works. Indeed, artists may have had the flexibility to move between royal courts that were in conflict with one another (or were perhaps so valued that they were captured and put to work for their new masters) (Houston et al., 2021). As Ossa discusses in Chapter 11, archaeologists have long recognized that craft producers as attached specialists are an asset to political leaders. Yet, as Ossa describes, in some historical cases leaders bring producers to their cities not merely to hoard their output, but to make them available as resources for other urbanites. Whereas value in many other chapters hinges on the personification of objects, Ossa considers artisans as infrastructure, inviting the possibility that value can grow from the objectification of persons. Ossa sees specialists as soft infrastructure that leaders attempt to provide as an urban service (compared with Smith et al., 2016). In her case study from the Lower Papaloapan Basin of southeastern Veracruz, Ossa finds an increase in crafting from Classic to Postclassic yet many of these craft households were not strongly attached to Sauce, the main Postclassic political center. These specialists were well off and represented an important part of the vitality of small Postclassic states.

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Broadening Value Several chapters in this book broaden our perspectives on value. Labor is intrinsically relational but labor as traditionally understood—a human transforming the world through time and energy—provides a rather narrow perspective on the process of production in Mesoamerica. And, as emphasized in several of the chapters mentioned above (Matsumoto, Kovacevich and Callaghan, Masson, Millhauser et al., Levine et al., Melgar), many other processes beyond production add value. But even within production, it has recently become clear that we need to broaden the set of actors involved. For example, Harrison-Buck and Freidel emphasize in Chapter 13 that crafting is not just a human pursuit but one to which metahuman power (magic) contributes, specifically the presence of the creator gods. In other words, “economic transactions and spiritual enchantment (magic) go hand-in-hand.” This point grows from several ethnohistoric and ethnographic studies that show that successful hunting (Brown & Emery, 2008), stone tool making (Hruby, 2007), farming (Redfield & Villa Rojas, 1962: 127), and other activities require the collaboration of other than human beings. In Chapter 14, Baron suggests that the presence of God D in Maya tribute scenes grounds such exchanges in mythological stories, providing supernatural justifications and explanations for tribute payments. Dues that appear to be paid between the human leaders of kingdoms might perhaps involve additional parties, such as a kingdom’s patron deities. More broadly, such payments may have been modeled on founding covenants (Monaghan, 2000) and primordial debts (Graeber, 2011: 55–65) with gods and goddesses of creation. In Chapter 3, De Lucia broadens the realm of agents that work together in production. She makes this point from the perspective of Amerindian ontologies, in which the cut that differentiates humans from animals and other entities does not exist (see also Viveiros de Castro, 1998: 471). De Lucia quotes Robin Kimmerer, an ecologist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, who notes that in many North American indigenous perspectives, crops, prey, and other “natural” materials are “nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit, and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it.” De Lucia pursues the point that the people of the Basin of Mexico saw relations with nonhumans as forms of gratitude

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and reciprocity. Landscapes, tools, and less concrete beings played important roles in production, meriting reverence and thanks. Building on previous interpretations, De Lucia views offerings at the Templo Mayor as discourses of gratitude. Similarly, the production of landscape and the creation of value from it that Golden explores in Chapter 8 requires the engagement of humans and other than human agents in mutually transformative action. Hutson’s chapter broadens value by insisting that there are multiple standards of value within any particular society and therefore multiple pathways toward a good life. Though trite, this line of thinking serves as a corrective to uni-dimensional understandings of wealth and inequality and pervades noble prize winner Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. In the Maya area, households at Tikal can be understood without reference to multiple standards of value: data tidily fit a hierarchical model in which households that rank highly on one variable (investment in architecture) also rank highly on other variables (such as diversity of possessions). Yet different households at Chunchucmil and along the Ucí/ Cansahcab causeway dedicated themselves to different pursuits, resulting in a heterarchical pattern. For example, households with more obsidian do not have more of everything else. In other words, obsidian was not a proxy for general levels of well-being. “Better-off” households did not automatically have more obsidian. Instead, some households simply valued it differently than others. In Chapter 6, Hruby echoes this point. He shows that settlements aligned with Copan, such as Rio Amarillo, had access to Ixtepeque obsidian blades. Other hinterland sites that lack affiliation with Copan missed out on obsidian, using chert flake core technology instead. Yet stone tool makers at site 29, located close to Rio Amarillo, had ample access to obsidian but, like sites not part of the Ixtepeque obsidian distribution network, used flake technology instead of blade technology, resulting in much larger obsidian artifacts than at Rio Amarillo. Hruby concludes that the people of site 29 and Rio Amarillo had different ways of valuing obsidian. In Chapter 15, Murakami treads some of the same theoretical ground, noting that studies of inequality that rely too heavily (or uncritically) on Gini coefficients tend to reduce or even disregard household variation. Authors in this book also expand our notions of value by reporting cases in which ancient behavior does not align with common expectations. For example, in Chapter 6, Hruby presents a reasonable expectation with regard to obsidian blades: peripheral sites with less access to obsidian

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must make their blades last longer, thus squeezing more use out of them before discarding. We would therefore expect higher use-wear on obsidian blades from peripheral sites. Yet his data from Peten sites do not meet this expectation. In Chapter 7, Millhauser and coauthors’ data on obsidian also buck common expectations. The distribution of obsidian in the Malpaso Valley of Zacatecas follows a traditional political economy script to some degree: like many scarce but valuable resources that come from afar (over 100 km away in the case of the Malpaso Valley), control of distribution could have been used as a source of power. Indeed, Millhauser and coauthors show that obsidian was more commonly found at the regional capital, La Quemada, than at peripheral sites. Yet within La Quemada, there was little evidence that obsidian was valuable enough to be controlled. Most obsidian took the form of small, expediently produced flakes. In fact, there appears to be little indication of social or economic distinction either among households within La Quemada or between households at La Quemada and those at peripheral sites.

Concluding Thoughts A volume called “Realizing Value in Mesoamerica” may seem like it calls for a singular outcome—a eureka realization and resolution to one of the great anthropological questions. The editors and authors of this book can’t claim such a thing, of course. “Value” continues to defy attempts to formulate a grand unified theory in Mesoamerican archaeology, or in the broader social sciences. Nonetheless, the authors of these chapters have convincingly pursued the threads of the concept and practice of value in innovative ways. Working with data that includes rich material culture and, in some cases, historical and ethnographic work, the participants have come to striking new realizations about value. Some of these might have been envisioned by David Graeber and some most certainly couldn’t have been. We hope that this volume will serve as an introduction to value in Mesoamerica (see also Mathews & Guderjan, 2017) not just for those of us who live and work there, but also for students and scholars working in other regions of the world. And more importantly, that it will perhaps offer starting points for future research that will lead us further along the path to understanding value in all its rich, sometimes contradictory, guises.

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Acknowledgements The genesis of this book dates to 2017, when Marilyn Masson enlisted the help of the editors, Hutson and Golden, in organizing a 2018 SAA session on Graeber’s other masterpiece in economic anthropology, Debt: the First 5,000 Years (2011). Since that 2018 session, the focus shifted from debt to value. We nevertheless acknowledge an intellectual debt to those who participated in the 2018 session—Rob Rosenswig, Jennifer Burrell, Alexander Tokovinine, and John Chuchiak. We also thank Ken Hirth, one of the series editors, for his encouragement and guidance in the production of this book.

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PART I

Approaches to Value

CHAPTER 2

Postclassic Maya Things and Their Entanglements Marilyn A. Masson

The contexts and qualities of certain Postclassic Maya artifacts cross the boundaries of dichotomous categories into which they are often classified by archaeologists, such as sacred or mundane, luxury or quotidian, or ornamental or monetary. It is this fluid boundary that I address in this chapter, framed by the movement, use, and presumed value of ordinary and extraordinary things, deposited in various ordinary and extraordinary contexts. Even the most ordinary of household objects, the lithic flake, occasionally crossed over, by human design, into contexts of ritual purpose and significance. Whether scattered over graves or as components of caches, flakes (for example) assume importance when recognized as key elements of ritual action (e.g., Hruby, this volume; Johnson & Martindale, 2020; Potter, 2004: 33, 35). For the Postclassic Maya period, I explore ways that things were deemed valuable in different social and ritual contexts, and I highlight that valuable things existed (as for other

M. A. Masson (B) Department of Anthropology, University at Albany SUNY, Albany, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. R. Hutson and C. Golden (eds.), Realizing Value in Mesoamerica, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4_2

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societies) within a relational matrix that both tied them to and distinguished them from other things and personages. While I focus on objects, it is clear that their value was deeply entangled with action, performance, and the dynamic process of social reproduction. This chapter considers similar concepts to those addressed elsewhere in this volume by HarrisonBuck and Freidel, Kovacevich and Callaghan, Matsumoto, and Millhauser et al. and in terms of the multiple or changing facets of value that things may assume in different social contexts. David Graeber, in his book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Own Dreams (2001: 1–2), begins by acknowledging that the definition of value has varied in anthropological literature, including, for example: 1. concepts representing what humans should desire (things to possess or qualities to embody), 2. value in the economic sense of things of worth that are measurable in the cost (or the sacrifices) that people will offer to obtain them, and 3. a linguistic usage referring to meaningful differences. Nuancing these concepts, Graeber points out that what humans actually want and what they should want do not necessarily coincide. The economic value scale is, in his view, subjective in a cultural context. Understanding the value of objects, he argues, is one of the more useful applications of linguistic models that differentiate objects and their values from other objects and their place within a larger system (Graeber, 2001: 14). Things (and values in general) exist in hierarchies; even concepts representing binary oppositions are ranked (Graeber, 2001: 15). Yet understanding how one thing is “better” or “more desirable” (valued more) than another is not straightforward, and at least for social personae, he notes that inversions are possible. For things, archaeologists have devised useful metrics of value based on workmanship or material quality (e.g., Feinman et al., 1981), but see Graeber (2001: 55) for a critique of “man hour” indices of value. Artifacts falling on the lower end of the scale may be attributed greater importance than their worth according to these measures, an argument also addressed by Milhauser and colleagues in their chapter of this book. The attractiveness of certain categories of raw materials and objects made from them is sometimes due to the flexibility

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with which they become entangled in seemingly contrastive contexts of interaction. The use of beads is one such example in that they may express esteemed social value or serve as generic objects in economic exchanges (Graeber, 2001: 92; Kovacevich and Callaghan, this volume).

Gradations of Value The concept of gradations of value is not new. Things exist in complex categorical systems assigned by them to humans. Some objects accrue greater value from histories linked to their owners, although such histories can be fleeting. An object’s history (or lack of it) represents one way of distinguishing it from others based on their similarities and differences, according to Graeber (2001: 41–42). As framed by Lesure, objects in general circulation have a greater degree of alienability compared to their more inalienable counterparts. He states, “An item’s alienability can be thought of as the degree to which it moves freely in exchange without developing a life history or memory trace that favors either its being kept at all costs or its eventual return to an original owner” (Lesure, 1999: 31). Actions pertaining to production, use, and curation contribute to determining an artifact’s position in a gradation of value, based on raw material quality, workmanship, function, and histories attributed to individual objects. Exceptions exist when artifacts hold different degrees of alienability irrespective of their seemingly qualitative position in a hierarchy of workmanship (Lesure, 1999: 25–26, 34). Richard Lesure (1999: 26) demonstrated the gradation of value in the relationships of fine jades and more ordinary greenstone (nonjade) axes in Formative Mesoamerica. Brigitte Kovacevich and Michael Callaghan (2014, 2019, this volume) and David Freidel and Kent Reilly (2010) further develop the analysis of “gradations of value” in greenstone artifacts of the Maya area and their significance. Certain marine shell objects, greenstone beads, and Postclassic copper artifacts, especially those that served as general purpose monies at Contact, also vary in form from elaborate to simple, with those on the higher end representing treasured elite objects and those on the lower end available for ornamental or commercial use (Freidel et al., 2017: 40– 47; Masson & Freidel, 2012: 459). Specific marine shell ornaments like shell tinklers made of Oliva or Prunum species, bivalve pendants (especially Spondylus ), and shell beads were worn by high-ranking persons

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and also served as general purpose monies in Postclassic and Contact (or earlier) period market exchange (Tozzer, 1941: Note 418). Tinklers, shell beads, and bivalve pendants were distinctive from the wider array of other shell working trajectories in Maya space and time pertaining to nonmonetary artifacts (Freidel et al., 2017). These three distinctive classes of shell artifacts fit the expected criteria of broad standardization over time and space, limited evidence for their manufacture at ordinary houselots (even those engaged in working other shell taxa), and limited places of origin along the Yucatecan coasts. Recognizing shell general purpose monies is made difficult by the plethora of ethnographic case studies among nonstate societies where shell monies were restricted to special purposes, not useful for acquiring ordinary things available for exchange. Freidel et al. (2017) observe that the notched and perforated Oliva (and Prunum) shells represented abbreviated modifications (of eyes and mouths) of more elaborate versions portraying a Death God skull, illustrating the principle of gradation of value from treasured possessions to objects in common circulation. Similar arguments have been made regarding the value and relationships of pseudoglyphs and legible Maya hieroglyphic texts on Classic period Maya ceramic vessels (Carrasco, 2013: 148; Jackson, 2020: 622–623). The value that objects accrue, cross-culturally, is regularly linked to the affairs of the state via symbolic loads attributed to them in mythology, belief, and insignia marking rulers and nobles. Graeber (2001: 88), drawing on Turner (1979), considers that the “ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is.” The likely involvement of Maya governing elites in assigning value to things and stimulating the desire to consume them has been addressed by Pyburn (2008: 269), who emphasizes that this is a dynamically changing process. The fact that Classic period Maya kings and Postclassic gods wore belts, collars, skirts, or pendants of Oliva shells (among other marine shell objects), contributed to their valuation process (Freidel et al., 2017). Desire is a complicated concept to study in archaeology and anthropology (Graeber, 2001: 258), yet it seems logical that elite display of items such as fine greenstone celts (Freidel & Reilly, 2010) affected the desire or expectations of ordinary households seeking to possess smaller, more broadly available greenstone versions (e.g., Sheets, 2000: 228). Aside from the argument for money, the gradation of value concept works for other categories of goods, as has long been known for ceramic

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vessels (e.g., Culbert, 2003: 67–68), for the often mundane artifactual class of lithic flakes, and many other types of objects. Chert and chalcedony assemblages at Mayapan offer an example of a gradation of quality and presumed value (Fig. 2.1). Weathered, patinated chert flakes, cores, and bifaces made up the majority of non-obsidian lithics at domestic contexts of lesser means on the outskirts of the city. In contrast, high proportions of translucent, colorful (non-patinated) chalcedonies are present at high-status residences next to the monumental center (Kohut, 2010).

Fig. 2.1 At Mayapan, translucent, higher quality chalcedony raw materials used for tools and flakes concentrate at high-status contexts (left), whereas commoner domestic contexts (right) had greater proportions of weathered, patinated material, as illustrated by these narrow, pointed bifacial tools

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Below, I provide examples of Postclassic period objects of value that vary according to context and inferred meaning. These cases illustrate ordinary things found in extraordinary contexts, and the reverse, extraordinary things found in ordinary contexts, as well as contexts with an interesting mix of valuables. Extraordinary contexts refer to offerings at high-status contexts such as public architecture or elite residences, whereas ordinary contexts refer to commoner residential settings or small hinterland sites distant from Mayapan.

Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Contexts In caches and offerings, some artifacts outperform expectations based on their raw material quality, workmanship, and condition, raising interesting and important questions about the histories they embodied. Even if they were not imbued with social histories of any import, simple objects were capable of serving as symbols of enduring importance. The idea that the people who created these caches and offerings placed modest objects in them because they could not afford flashier items (e.g., Pollock, 1962: 16) is not compelling in the examples presented here. As other authors in this book point out, the value of a thing is relational, that is, given meaning according to the social context of its use and circulation (Harrison-Buck and Freidel, Hruby, Kovacevich and Callaghan, Matsumoto, and Millhauser and colleagues, this volume). Three examples illustrate this principle: a termination ritual and an altar offering, both at the Itzmal Ch’en group at Mayapan and an altar cache at Caye Coco, Belize. The Itzmal Ch’en ceremonial group is located two kilometers east of the Mayapan’s monumental center. A termination ritual took place at two buildings of this group in the late 1300s, a temple and a colonnaded hall (Masson et al., 2020). The interior floors of both structures and the plaza spaces at the base of the temple were strewn with concentrations of thousands of effigy censer sherds representing at least 15 different vessels. The censers had been smashed and their fragments mixed with one another before deposition into 44 concentrations, as indicated by the refitting of pieces from different clusters of sherds. For each structure, a central concentration of broken censer sherds had one greenstone object (Fig. 2.2). Both were heavily used or worn. One was chisel-like, perhaps a repurposed fragment of what was once a greenstone celt. The other was a piece of battered and partially smoothed greenstone raw material. Neither were of jade.

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Fig. 2.2 A worn greenstone chisel (top left) and piece of raw material (top right) accompanied central concentrations of broken effigy censers, part of termination rites at two buildings of a ceremonial group (Itzmal Ch’en) at Mayapan; photos on the bottom row illustrate more finely made jade objects at the group’s temple

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Patrons of Mayapan’s elite palaces and public buildings had access to many fine artifacts, as illustrated by jade objects from the Itzmal Ch’en temple (Fig. 2.2), including a pendant made in the form of an Oliva shell. Most caches at altars in monumental center buildings held at least one jade bead as well as a shell bead, and often, a copper bell (e.g., Shook, 1954: Fig. 2j; Smith & Ruppert, 1956: Fig. 8i, j). Yet for the Itzmal Ch’en termination rituals, these worn greenstone objects were chosen. These pieces seem to have filled the ritual prescriptions for jade/ greenstone offerings in place elsewhere at the site, and perhaps held special status related to their histories of use. Similarly, at the site of Caye Coco, Belize, a cache within an altar of an elite residence employed a red-slipped sherd, a greenstone (serpentine) ax, an obsidian blade, and a yellow chert flake. Along with the white color of the cache vessel, Maya directional colors were represented by this assemblage (Fig. 2.3). The cache vessel was in the form of a stucco turtle sculpture with a cavity in its back that contained the other artifacts. Postclassic turtle sculptures were associated with Postclassic K’atun ritual celebrations (e.g., Masson, 2000; Rice, 2004: 67). All artifacts within the turtle cavity were widely distributed at domestic contexts across Caye Coco; flakes, sherds, and obsidian blades were particularly ubiquitous. However, they assumed symbolic status in this context. Similar observations are made for obsidian in this book’s chapter by Millhauser and colleagues. Representational sets of things in Maya art or ritual offerings are regularly identified, especially with respect to foundational aspects of sustenance. The well-known associations of corn, the maize god, and jade celts framed Maya rulers in the metaphors of agricultural bounty (Freidel & Reilly, 2010). Sometimes the inclusion of objects in ritual offerings is more literal than metaphorical. For example, the contents of an altar offering in the upper room of Mayapan’s Itzmal Ch’en Temple included items representing corn and turkeys, two of the most important staple foods for the city’s populace (Masson & Peraza Lope, 2008). A turkey sculpture and a piece of painted ceramic maize foliage from an effigy censer headdress represented these staples (Fig. 2.3). Additional objects in the offering, for which meanings are unclear, were a bifacial stone knife and a worn (Mama Red) ceramic sherd. Patron gods may have been associated with this offering, given that fragments of two seated, enthroned effigy censers (a female and a male) were recovered nearby, over the benches and floors of this room of the temple (Masson et al.,

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Fig. 2.3 Altar offerings at the Mayapan Itzmal Ch’en temple (top) and at an elite residence at Caye Coco, Belize (bottom) illustrate the symbolic importance of ordinary or fragmented artifacts in a ritual context

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2020). Maize production, as well as the role of women in preparing corn foods, was celebrated at the site by a large sculpture featuring a woman grinding at a metate at the base of the east staircase of Mayapan’s principal pyramid, the Temple of K’ukulk’an (Peraza Lope & Masson, 2014a: 81, Fig. 2.13). Production of exquisite (and restricted) craft goods and other highly skilled pursuits were also valued at Mayapan, attested to by offerings and burials within or next to the monumental center. These findings parallel those in recent scholarship where the producers and processes creating important valuables were accorded a special, and perhaps sacred status (Inomata, 2001; Harrison-Buck and Freidel, this volume; Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2014, this volume). Honored professions at Mayapan likely included masons employed in building and plastering the floors and exteriors of public buildings and sculptors who made altar statues and anthropomorphic columns of stucco. An offering next to a colonnaded hall featured masonry plastering tools (Peraza Lope & Masson, 2014b: 126). Notably, this cache assemblage combines production tools with extraordinary things (a conch shell trumpet), restricted goods (two jade beads), and ordinary things in general circulation (a deer bone awl, lithic flakes, and a chert knife). The city’s monumental center buildings, especially colonnaded halls, were hubs of productive activity geared toward ritual events that were likely hosted in a rotation by governing elite patrons of the halls. Archaeological evidence of craft activities and food preparation is reflected at the halls by weaving tools, grinding stones, cooking and storage ceramic vessels, and faunal remains (Masson & Peraza Lope, 2014; Peraza Lope & Masson, 2014b: 122). The importance of onsite ritual preparations at Mayapan further alludes to the symbolic importance of the production process as part of ceremonial events. Graeber (2001: 46–47) emphasizes the role of action and its generative powers with respect to value. Value, in this sense, is created by the importance that people (and others) attach to their actions, which may include but would not be limited to the amount of labor invested in creating objects (or performances). Burials of artisans at Mayapan further illuminate the esteem conferred on productive action in the creation of symbolically charged objects.

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Mortuary Offerings, Social Identity, and Intermingled Categories of Value Mortuary contexts represent conjunctions for the enactment and affirmation of multiple social identities including those of the deceased, their immediate family, and other invited or obligated parties. Burial events are rites of passage, and like other such rites, may call for gifts laden with symbolic importance, especially for persons of social rank. Graeber’s book (2001) reviews a vast anthropological literature concerning ways that social reproduction is embedded in gifting and exchange. Personal identities become entangled with things in interesting ways that affect value and are played out in gifting and related practices (Graeber, 2001: 211). Illustrations of these principles are explored elsewhere in this book in chapters by Harrison-Buck and Freidel, Kovacevich and Callaghan, and Matsumoto. The contents of three graves at Mayapan demonstrate different expressions of value tied to personhood, particularly for items likely ceremoniously gifted to the interred during their lifetime or at their funeral, such as jade beads or copper bells, shell pendants, figurines, or an effigy urn. Some of these items may have been received by attendees or the deceased at public events, which were curated and placed in the grave. Different sets of grave offerings, those of attached craft producers, included tools, debris, or other materials related to their trades, indicating the centrality of occupational specialization for social identity. The findings at Mayapan add to examples of ordinary and extraordinary artifacts deposited in ritual contexts discussed by Kovacevich and Callaghan and Millhauser et al. (this volume). The association of personal history objects with rites of passage and the social status of age grades, explored below for a Mayapan grave, is a line of inquiry further explored (for the Classic period) in chapters by Harrison-Buck and Freidel and Kovacevich and Callaghan. Two examples of burials of attached specialists at modest dwellings at Mayapan had grave goods related to their occupation. The first example is from a dwelling (Q-40) where effigy censers, figurines, copper objects, and other crafts were made under the supervision of an elite residential group (Q-41). The attached status of Q-40 is evident in that it was located within the same houselot boundary wall as the palatial platform of Q-41, at ground level next to the platform’s base (Masson et al., 2016: Fig. 7). Accompanying a cist burial of two persons at this house were the following items: a partial ceramic vessel, a figurine, a bell, a chunk

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of clay pigment, and a ground stone plastering tool (Delgado Kú et al., 2021); the latter would have been used for preparing stucco coating of effigy censers prior to applying paint. A second example is the grave of a resident metallurgist at House Q-92, located adjacent to Temple Q95 in the monumental center. Family members at Q-92 likely served as guardians for the temple and as artisans in service to the temple’s patrons. One individual at this house was buried with a ceramic vessel containing metallurgical bell casting by-products (Delgado Kú et al., 2021; Paris & Peraza Lope, 2013). Figurines (but not effigy censers) were also made at House Q-92 (Peraza Lope et al., 2022: 13), although this craft is not reflected in its mortuary assemblage. The residential features in both cases were modest and resembled the majority of commoner dwellings that, unlike Houses Q-40 and Q-92, were not located within a palatial compound or the monumental center. Livelihoods at Q-40 and Q-92 involved the production of extraordinary goods, imbued with magical and sacred properties at Mayapan (Hosler, 1994; Peraza Lope et al., 2022). Yet the grave accompaniments of Q-40 were not extraordinary. There were no finished effigy censers placed in the grave like those routinely made at the house, although a single bell and a small bird figurine were included. Nor, at Q-92, were elaborately finished metal objects (or figurines) included in the burial. Importantly, these grave goods celebrate extraordinary pursuits with objects associated with crafting, but stop short by excluding fine finished products like those found in elite graves. The grave inclusions reiterate the lower status of these individuals relative to their elite patrons. Relatively humble housing further signaled the position of these artisans in the site’s status hierarchy. Nonetheless, producers of such important artifacts received significantly greater mortuary offerings than commoners living elsewhere in the city, including producers of ordinary goods. Burial features at Mayapan vary considerably according to location, grave type, and artifact accompaniments. The meaning of many objects is evasive, such as the occasional inclusion of deer bones (tools or unmodified), with no other grave goods (Masson et al., 2014: 254–257). Other grave goods may be interpreted based on ethnohistorical analogy. A commoner burial at Mayapan House L-28, for example, contained the remains of a young adolescent, probably female, who was interred with a Spondylus shell pendant placed in the pelvic region. This ornament matches descriptions of those worn by females prior to reaching marriageable age at Spanish Contact; young boys wore a single shell bead tied

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to their forehead signifying similar status (Landa, 1941: 102). Spondylus (and similar bivalve) pendants and shell beads thus served multiple functions for Mayapan society (if our argument for monetary units holds true), including as markers of subadult status. In addition to the young adolescent burial just described, we see that younger children, prior to adolescence, were also buried with bivalve pendants, as in the elite context of House Q-39. The occupation-related accompaniments of the Q-40 grave contrast with those of a tomb found at a neighboring house, Q-39, a stone’s throw away over a houselot wall separating it from the artisan house of Q-40 and the elite compound Q-41. Residents of Q-39 were probably relatives of the palatial elites of Group Q-41. The remains of a 4.5-year-old child, one of several interments in the Q-39 family tomb, received one of the richest sets of grave goods yet recovered at Mayapan, including two miniature slipped vessels (a footed bowl and a jar), an effigy urn, 39 copper objects (including one effigy bell, many other bells, tweezers, a coiled finger ring, and copper sheets), deer antlers, a miniature ceramic mask, human and animal figurine heads, 40 shell beads, two bivalve pendants, and shell ring (Delgado Kú et al., 2021). Of interest here is the mixture of objects representing different aspects of value, from the extraordinary fine metal objects and the urn to the worn and broken figurine fragments (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). Copper rings, tweezers, and effigy jewelry were luxury goods at Mayapan with distributions concentrated at elite burial contexts, and the effigy urn is finely made and unique for the site. These exalted valuables, rare and of the finest workmanship, conferred the status and means of the family and the deceased to attendees of the funeral, as is commonly inferred for rich mortuary contexts. Some metal artifacts were clearly possessions of the child, including the copper and shell rings that were too small for adult hands. The bivalve pendants, including one made of Spondylus, were also likely possessions of the child, signifying their age (Fig. 2.5). The urn was probably made by the artisans next door at Q-40. This piece may have been specially commissioned or gifted for the burial; the lack of wear or erosion suggests it was not used prior to placement in the grave. While luxury (restricted) goods are expected in a high-status grave, the worn, personal objects of lesser workmanship merit further discussion. Kohut (2011) contextualizes the grave offerings of children at Mayapan in terms of socialization, arguing that figurines, for example, were more than just toys. Her argument ties well to our own interpretations of

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Fig. 2.4 An upper-status child burial at Mayapan House Q-40 was accompanied by a unique urn effigy vessel (top left) and numerous metal and shell artifacts, including the tweezers (top right), small metal and shell rings (bottom left), and monkey effigy bell (bottom right)

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Fig. 2.5 A perforated miniature mask (top left), three female figurine head fragments, three animal figurine fragments, and two bivalve pendants accompanied an upper-status child burial at House Q-40, Mayapan

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female human figurines at the city, which seem to represent ideal types. The limited distribution of figurines at Mayapan suggests to us that their manufacture and use were tied to festive ceremonies at the site center (where they were made and distributed in great numbers); only rarely were they kept and curated as mementos in ordinary domestic settings (Peraza Lope et al., 2022). The Q-39 grave has two worn female figurine heads and the headdress portion of a probable third, along with three broken heads of animal figurines, including two birds, and one mammal, perhaps a dog. An additional miniature effigy human face mask, with two drill holes, is complete (Fig. 2.5). Were the broken figurines owned by the child before death? Alternatively, did attendees of the mortuary ceremony possess and gift them to the deceased? It is difficult to determine ownership in the case of the Q-39 tomb figurines, but these fragments clearly retained value as objects embodying personal histories. Tiesler and Cecilia Lozada (2018: 1–2), reviewing a body of theoretical works on the topic, observe that the human head, corporeally or in artistic form, “expresses socioculturally sanctioned ideals, standards, prohibitions, and taboos” that served in the Pre-Hispanic Americas as a metaphor for the person (the self). For this reason, figurine heads may have retained the symbolic power of whole figurines, even after broken, meriting their conservation and enduring importance as grave offerings. The urn, a seated male, simply clothed, seems to project the promise of youth; few iconographic embellishments are present, obscuring the identity of the entity portrayed. The meaning of the animal figurines is also elusive. They could have been possessions of the child, but the paucity of such artifacts in ordinary commoner settings (and nonelite child graves) makes this unlikely. Snake and bird figurines decorated the headdresses of female and male goddesses and personages in the Postclassic Maya codices (Masson & Peraza Lope, 2012), and priests used serpent staffs (also shown in codices) while attending childhood rites of passage and other occasions (Duncan & Vail, 2018: 22–23). White cloth headgear was worn by children for adolescent rites of passage (Duncan & Vail, 2018: 23), into which bird or serpent figurines could have been sewn. The child in the Q-39 grave was not old enough to have undertaken puberty rites. One can speculate that figurines were among the gifts given at birth or other rites of early childhood, or alternatively, were gifts of treasured mementos (from public ceremonies) of other persons attending the burial. In any case, they represent worn, broken objects that bore enduring symbolic value.

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Extraordinary Things in Ordinary Contexts Far from Mayapan, at the hinterland Postclassic island settlement of Laguna de On, Belize, a chipped stone K’awiil (God K) scepter was recovered (Fig. 2.6), just 10 cm below the surface next to a small building with a low stone wall foundation that would have had pole walls and a thatched roof. K’awiil scepters were key components of the regalia of rulership in Classic Maya society (Grube, 2001) and were not made in the Postclassic period (at least not of stone). Such an artifact would not be expected at Laguna de On, a small hamlet centered on an island that is only 175 m long by 30 m wide (Masson, 2000: Fig. 4.3). Including the lagoon shore settlement, fewer than 300 persons likely lived at this locality. The most parsimonious explanation for this find is that residents or visitors to Laguna de On had acquired it from a Classic period context, perhaps a tomb. The tomb may have been reopened or encountered while quarrying earlier features for construction fill. This island site, amidst a beautiful inland lagoon, became a pilgrimage destination where Lacandon style censer offerings were left during the Colonial period (Gann, 1927: 54; Masson, 2000: 98); the God K flint may have alternatively arrived in this period. Visitation and deposition of ritual offerings at earlier Maya sites by descendant peoples in the Colonial period was a common practice across the lowlands (e.g., Kurnick, 2019: 62–63; Lorenzen, 2003; Palka, 2005: 116, 262). Heirloom objects were commonly revered in the Maya area (Joyce, 2000: 203). For example, in a Classic period tomb at Cozumel and in a household altar shrine at Postclassic Mayapan, heirloom Olmec portable objects of jade and basalt (respectively) were placed into features that postdated them by many centuries (e.g., Phillips, 1979: Fig. 21; Proskouriakoff, 1962: 352, Fig. 25; Smith & Ruppert, 1953). Similarly, an Early Classic vessel was deposited by Colonial Maya builders in the altar of a church at Tancah (Miller & Farriss, 1979: 233–234), and Classic period stelae were reused in prominent constructed features at Postclassic Tulum (Lothrop, 1924: 42–46). The Laguna de On God K flint was not a literal heirloom, in a strict sense of direct inheritance, but it would have been clearly recognized as an insignia of sacred authority from the Classic period past. God K was a central deity associated with the Postclassic K’atun calendrical cycle (Rice, 2012). In this cycle, participating lords and towns were geopolitically integrated by sharing rotating burdens (and honors) of hosting

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Fig. 2.6 A Classic period K’awiil (God K) effigy scepter was reused as an offering at the Postclassic site of Laguna de On, Belize

religious celebrations timed with temporal intervals. The God K object may have resonated with those who recovered it precisely because of the deity’s continued importance during the Postclassic. It may have been adopted as an heirloom, becoming an object of reimagined history. The K’awiil scepter would have tied local descendant people at Laguna de On to the past (whether fictitiously or not). Memory objects and the histories associated with them were often reinterpreted as part of ongoing performances underscoring and negotiating social relationships (Hendon, 2000: 49–50). It is probable Laguna de On area residents had oral histories with mythical elements, as for many Mesoamerican peoples at Contact. Such histories would have tied them to landscape features, including abandoned monumental centers. In a longstanding, related practice, mortuary

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features stood as enduring markers of genealogies of place, tying ancestors to their descendants and to the places they called home (McAnany, 1995). Periodic ritual engagement with sacralized burial localities and shrines, for example, as McAnany reports for K’axob, would have evoked memories, perhaps prompted the recounting of oral histories, and affirmed relationships to the past. Objects like the God K flint, likely recovered in the explorations of Postclassic peoples in an offering or tomb of a nearby Classic period site, potentially served as the centerpiece for proclamations, presentations, or conversations concerning historical threads linking past and present legacies.

Discussion This chapter considers concepts and categories of artifact values in various contexts at Postclassic sites, pursuing several threads of inquiry. First, artifacts were situated along gradations of valuation based on quality, but artifacts potentially outperform simple expectations based on their inferred position on such continua (see also Hruby, Millhauser et al., this volume). Ordinary things occur in extraordinary contexts and the reverse. These patterns are explained by the complexity of concepts of value attributed to things, especially relational webs that tie extraordinary things to their simpler counterparts. These crossovers reflect a high level of articulation for Postclassic period Maya economies in which political and household (social) spheres were bound to one another, as were Mayapan’s political and ritual economies (Masson & Peraza Lope, 2014). Contextual changes in artifact meaning and value are demonstrated in the case of childhood shell ornaments potentially serving as symbols of innocent age grade statuses. In other circumstances, Spondylus pendants, along with white and red shell beads and tinklers, served differently as general purpose monies in the commercial realm. An important aspect of graded objects is whether they have generic or specific (historical) status, which may or may not pertain to object quality, workmanship, or preservation (Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2019; Lesure, 1999: 30). Entanglement of social, ritual, and economic production is illustrated by occupational identity objects in artisan graves. As illustrated here, attached craftspersons were honored for professions involving the creation of effigy ceramics (censers and figurines), and copper objects that were featured centrally at monumental ceremonies, performances, and life cycle events. For parallels in artisan status during the Classic period, see

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Harrison-Buck and Freidel (this volume), Inomata (2001), and Kovacevich and Callaghan (2014). Work trajectories of other (unattached) crafters at the city created goods of lower or middling value (stone tools, shell artifacts) for exchange and for a variety of purposes (Masson et al., 2016). Such goods were themselves networked into hierarchies of worth and occasionally earned a place in a burial or cache assemblage, as for the flakes (or sherds) in Mayapan’s mason’s cache and the offerings at Temple Itzmal Ch’en and Caye Coco. Quotidian food staples for Mayapan such as turkey and corn (and corn food production) also attained recognition in offerings and public sculpture at the city. Anthropological research frames the conceptualization of value as deeply embedded in the performative aspect of social relationships and their ongoing engagement with objects representing dynamically shifting aspects of history, memory, and belief. Turner (2007: 99) observes that the construct of self, or the social skin (expressed in adornment) draws both on social ideals of beauty as well as its opposite, hierarchical relations of dominance in terms of interpersonal inequality. Patterns of scalar replication are recognized by Turner (1977: 59–60) and analyzed anew by Graeber (2001: 81–82), who states that objects may assume the status of miniature representations of creative action that they represent. This argument suggests that royal regalia was linked to “microcosms of systems of production” that may be writ large or small (Graeber, 2001: 82). Perhaps the best Maya area illustration of Graeber’s observations about royal objects representing microcosms of production is the jade celt, linked to kings, corn, and the maize god for Olmec and Maya regimes. Jade celts served as currencies of political authority, according to Freidel and Reilly (2010, see also Harrison-Buck and Freidel, this volume). Scalar replication is a concept that is closely related to gradations of value, whereby simpler versions of a feature, institution, or thing stand in for or emulate those writ large. For example, household dedication caches are understood in an interpretive framework that links them to the dedication offerings of monumental buildings (Freidel et al., 1993: 127). The household ritual replicates, on a smaller scale, a practice conducted in a larger public arena. Similarly, grooved and notched Oliva shells replicate, in an abbreviated form, those carved as death heads, illustrating a continuum of elaboration that often correlated with scalar differences in the contexts of their use. At Mayapan, certain figurines represent smaller (scaled down) versions of important entities portrayed in elaborate effigy

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censers (Peraza Lope et al., 2022), and perhaps, figurine heads served as further abbreviated representations. The many facets of the concept of value for Postclassic Maya examples (and elsewhere) are entangled in the practice of exchanges. While my colleagues and I have previously focused on those of the marketplace, the multiple forms of gifting merit greater examination, including funerary and cache contexts. Some gifts create obligations, yet some counter-gifts, like market exchanges, relieve and “free” one from those obligations (Graeber, 2001: 219). Other forms of gifts are binding, as for inalienables, marriage exchanges, and additional settings embedded deeply in social relationships (Harrison-Buck and Freidel, this volume). Some gifts, like heirlooms with names and histories, may represent pieces of oneself (Graeber, 2001: 93, after Mauss 1925 [1990]). Such objects are interesting to explore archaeologically, particularly in mortuary settings in which adornments, so intimately associated with corporeal personages and social identity, potentially exemplify personhood. Julia Hendon (2000: 46–47) argues that small things, like jade beads, may acquire the status of heirlooms, although she notes that most beads would not. Lesure (1999: 34–35) makes the same claim for certain greenstone objects. The status of objects like beads may shift in different temporal and spatial contexts (Graeber, 2001: 92; Inomata, 2014; Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2019, this volume). Highly valued historical pieces also have variable qualities of temporality. Christina Halperin (n.d.) distinguishes the time frames in which different royal objects functioned, with perishable feather capes associated with the lifetimes of individual rulers in contrast to objects existing in monumental (intergenerational) time, like specific jades (and God K scepters). Matsumoto (this volume) frames Maya jades as “chronotropic” in that they were folded into temporal and spatial constructs, embodying enduring concepts and symbols from the past, while also interacting with the present context in which they were being used. Dynastic objects served as tokens in the sense of Graeber’s (2001: 76) discussion of how things come to embody value, unlike things simply serving as a means by which value is measured (drawing on the works of Turner, 1979, see also Freidel et al., 2017). He provides the example of an Ankole king’s stool, which, like the jades Halperin discusses (see also Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2014), were emblems of the office of rulership, playing “a key role in the continual creation of the mystique of office” (Graeber, 2001: 213). Certain objects may go beyond embodying

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value and become treated as the origins of the values themselves (Graeber, 2001: 76). Graeber (2001: 224) argues that only rarely does an object obtain the highest status of incommensurability to the extent that mystified origins of value shift to the object itself. Likewise, actions (not just objects), specifically, were “material performances” that could attain creative and generative status (Graeber, 2001: 82). In an interesting case in Maya history, persons embodied things, such as walking tribute bundle personages in the performative context of the Bonampak murals (McAnany, 2010: 309). Hendon asserts that burials and caches (or even storehouses) represent events and facilities for creating social memory, writ upon human bodies (ornamented, live, or deceased), objects, or places (Hendon, 2000: 49). Of interest here is Hendon’s observation that caches and burials bind memories to places, removing objects from circulation yet keeping inalienables well stored (Hendon, 2000: 47–48; see also McAnany, 1995). Human bones, in this context, also become stored inalienable possessions (Novotny, 2014). As Hendon discusses, knowledge is a privilege of social groups and occupational specialists alike, and it may be guarded or shared, or stored or transferred into objects. Remembering, discussing, and imagining (or reimagining) such histories, whether objects are kept or buried from view, is couched in action (Hendon, 2000: 50). Figurines, found mostly in monumental and funerary contexts at Mayapan, were likely instrumental in marking the life cycles of individuals (and other key, community ceremonies) in Classic and Postclassic period Maya society (Halperin, 2017: 532–535; Peraza Lope et al., 2022). The placement of worn figurine heads in burials like that of the child at Mayapan House Q-39 would have symbolized the placement of a memory object of personal history into the grave, although it is difficult to identify ownership (whether the deceased or living relatives). The (mostly) monumental settings of figurine production and use at Mayapan also imply that, as for earlier periods (Halperin, 2017: 532), their manufacture and distribution accompanied cycles and celebrations of the calendrical time. In this sense, figurines were mementos tying persons to performances and events at key places and moments in the monumental landscape (Halperin, 2014: 112, 119). As for shell pendants or beads, they may also have symbolized and commemorated life stages or transitions for children. Like grave offerings, adornment links living corporeal beings with objects that represent these people’s value to

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society, whether wealth, beauty, occupation, age, sex, or class (Turner, 2007: 93, 95, 100–101).

Conclusions This chapter explores different material objects and their contexts that reflect some, but not all ways of understanding categories of value and their meaning in human societies presented in Graeber’s 2001 treatise. Here I have outlined the following Postclassic Maya patterns: (1) gradations of value and crossover patterns of poor quality things serving as symbols of finer objects or sacred concepts, (2) worn or broken objects placed in graves laden with the histories of personal identities (along with fine crafts), (3) the value attributed to producers and production of symbolically laden, ceremonial objects, and (4) the cooption of beautiful things from centuries past to be reimagined as historical objects in the present. None of these findings are remarkable in the sense that they are patterns that can be found in countless other archaeological studies within or beyond the Maya area. As Postclassic Maya society has too often been considered different from its “greater” Mesoamerican contemporaries or antecedents (Pollock, 1962), the productive comparison of parallels for this period with other times and places is, in the end, a “valuable” enterprise (Masson, 2021: 115–116). Acknowledgements Research at Mayapan has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany SUNY.

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CHAPTER 3

Considering Reciprocity and Gratitude in Postclassic Basin of Mexico Economies Kristin De Lucia

Introduction The Aztec (Mexica) Empire located in central Mexico (Fig. 3.1), is wellknown for having had an extensive market system, the largest and most elaborate in the Americas. On the surface, the market system of the Mexica might seem similar to modern market systems, with widespread marketplaces, merchants (Fig. 3.2), currencies, regulations, and the sale of all types of goods. As such, scholars have often approached the study of market systems in Postclassic central Mexico by applying rationalizing, self-maximizing Western economic models, where producers were motivated by profit and value was determined by supply and demand. Western models are ultimately embedded in a capitalist ideology, which is predicated on the extraction of materials (or things) from the earth for individual gain or profit. Yet, most peoples living in the Americas saw themselves as a part of, and connected to, a community that extended

K. De Lucia (B) Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. R. Hutson and C. Golden (eds.), Realizing Value in Mesoamerica, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4_3

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beyond humans, and the world as filled with beings (Astor-Aguilera and Harvey, 2019; Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 2004). The natural world was not a “resource” for exploitation, but rather a gift from the gods or Creator that required gratitude and reciprocity (George-Kanentiio, 2007: 395), often in the form of offerings (Vogt, 1998). In ancient Mesoamerica people attributed a life force, sometimes interpreted as a “soul,” to animals, crops, and other living things; as well as non-living things such as features of the landscape, houses, ritual objects, tools, and more (Astor-Aguilera, 2010; De Lucia, 2017; Harrison-Buck & Hendon, 2018; Hendon, 2018; Juarez, 2023; Monaghan, 1998; Stross, 1998; Viveiros de Castro, 2004; Vogt, 1998). Following Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), I ask whether buying, making, or selling a “who” would have meant something different than buying, making, or selling an “it”? If so, do we need to rethink our assumptions about the meaning and value of objects and the movement of goods in Postclassic Mexico? Can we assume that all objects that came from far away were treated as commodities, or that all objects held an economic exchange value? What other factors may have contributed to the movement and exchange of materials? Like several other authors in this volume (see Golden, Harrison-Buck and Friedel, Kovacevich and Callaghan; Millhauser et al.), my goal is to center indigenous perspectives, and in doing so, rethink how we might understand past economies. Kimmerer (2013), a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, argues that we can understand the world more fully when we integrate science with indigenous ways of knowing. She critiques Western thought for reducing plants and animals to objects, rather than subjects. When we utilize Indigenous ways of knowing, the natural world is not valued in dollars and cents but, rather, is considered a gift that requires reciprocity and gratitude (George-Kanentiio, 2007). Taking from the natural world is bound by rules, which Kimmerer refers to as the “Honorable Harvest,” that serve to minimize harm and ensure that there is enough to go around for both current and future generations (Kimmerer, 2013: 183). She outlines the rules of the Honorable Harvest which require that you: Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what has been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for

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Fig. 3.1 Map of the Basin of Mexico with key sites relevant to the text

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Fig. 3.2 Aztec merchants on the road (top) and selling their wares (below). Florentine Codex, Book IX: The Merchants, [Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana], World Digital Library, https:// hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/ wdl.10620

what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever. (Kimmerer, 2013: 183)

Rather than commodities or resources, the Honorable Harvest provides gifts (Kimmerer, 2013). The rules that bind the Honorable Harvest are so counter to a Western worldview that settlers in North America could not comprehend the idea of leaving perfectly good resources behind during a harvest and instead deemed Indigenous people to be lazy for leaving rice behind for animals, other people, and future production (Kimmerer, 2013: 181). While individual selfinterest and the maximization of personal gain are central to Western economies, Kimmerer (2013: 183) argues that the rules of the Honorable Harvest “are based on accountability to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds. The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are

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harvested as persons, non-human persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit, and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it.” North American indigenous economies are also accountable to future generations. Angela Ferguson, an Onondaga Nation Eel Clan member and supervisor of the Onondaga Nation Farm in a public lecture on tribal food sovereignty and the Haudenosaunee economy at Colgate University (November 17, 2022), noted that it is the seventh generation—the great-grandchildren of your great-grandchildren—that one must always prepare for. Economic decisions as described by Kimmerer and Ferguson are thus bound by accountability to others, including non-human communities and future generations. There are two main points that I want to make in this chapter. First, I want to suggest that the notion of gratitude, which is central to the Indigenous worldview throughout the Americas, has been largely ignored. For example, scholars have long assumed a tit-for-tat relationship between humans and deities that is analogous to barter and exchange, where humans provide offerings with an expectation of a return such as successful harvests or success in warfare. The more valuable the offering (i.e., human sacrifice), the greater the return for the individual or society. Such interpretations seem to derive from economic formalism based on modern market economies (Polanyi, 2001), that see human actions as self-interested calculations involving maximizing and rational decisionmaking strategies. David Graeber (2001: 29) notes that such Formalist approaches ultimately dismiss “the importance and integrity and good intentions in human affairs.” There is no doubt that Mexica ideology emphasized that gods must be satiated through offerings—daily life centered around an endless stream of ceremonies, rituals, and sacrifices that served to honor and placate deities (Carrasco, 1999; Sahagún 1950– 1982 [1575–1577]:Book 2; Read, 1998); but the assumption that every action was self-maximizing corresponds better with Western capitalism than with Indigenous ontologies. I suggest that offerings, at least at times, were expressions of gratitude and reciprocity (repayment for what has been given), rather than self-interested calculations. Further, as argued by Millhauser (2017: 273), debts to deities were not considered moral failings of humans but rather, “Nahua ethics emphasized reciprocity and balance as virtues…Lending and borrowing helped people to be resilient and maintain social ties. Paying small debts to gods or seeking their favor through sacrifices similarly maintained balance.” Thus, reciprocity was not

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just about payment for debts in the sense of an exchange but was a way to construct and maintain relationships between human and non-human communities. Second, I argue that we should be cautious about using our own constructs of value to make assumptions about the value of objects in the past. A functional approach to determine the value of artifacts (labor, materials, transportation costs, etc.) (Garraty, 2000; Smith, 1987) does not consider other factors that also influence value such as relationships, meanings and symbolic value, history of ownership (see Graeber, 2001), or the nature of the object itself. This problem is compounded when archaeologists use assumptions about the value of household possessions to determine household or individual wealth in domestic settings (Smith, 1987). Smith (1987: 319) argues that wealthier households tend to have a greater quantity, diversity, and origin of goods; however, this conclusion is based on ethnographic and historical examples that derive from modern global systems or Western economies. Hutson and Murakami (this volume) critique measures of identifying inequality in the archaeological record and highlight the problems with using material goods to infer inequality. Here, I argue that some items that are categorized as “high value” or “luxury goods,” may not have been accorded an exchange value or used to elevate the status of individuals; thus, we should be careful not to impose values onto objects that would not have existed in the past. In this chapter, I look at the offerings associated with the Templo Mayor at the center of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan. I argue that buried offerings were ritually charged, powerful items but may not have been “wealth” or “luxury” goods. In fact, they were likely not commodities or “objects of economic value” (Appadurai, 1986: 3). I suggest that these offerings were not merely appeals for favors but may have been expressions of reciprocity and gratitude. I do not argue that inequality did not exist in the past, or that elites did not accumulate material wealth visible in the archaeological record—historic descriptions of elaborate palaces and gardens of Aztec nobles make it clear that inequality could be extreme in the Postclassic central Mexico and was reflected through material goods (Anawalt, 1980; Evans, 2000, 2017; Rodríguez-Alegría, 2010; Smith & Hicks, 2017). However, we need to complicate our understanding of material markers beyond their economic value. Indigenous ontology could help to explain some of the difficulties that scholars have had trying to distinguish status differences among commoners and even

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between elites and commoners (Garraty, 2000; Smith, 1994). Perhaps, items that we consider markers of wealth were not markers of wealth at all or perhaps people were less concerned about distinguishing status using material goods than we are today. “Luxury” goods in the archaeological record may instead reflect a variety of different cultural practices, ritual ceremonies, beliefs, or preferences.

Value It can be tempting to look at the sprawling and well-organized network of marketplaces of Postclassic Mexico and draw parallels to modern market settings. In their discussion of Aztec markets and exchange, Hirth and Pillsbury (2013: 1), for example, suggest that “All economic models are fundamentally based on common concerns. If there was one point upon which Martin Luther, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith could agree, it was that material goods and their acquisition provided the strongest motivations and temptations in the everyday life of humans.” However, as highlighted by Karl Polanyi (2001; also see Graeber, 2001), those economic models were based on Western market systems which are historically situated and were created and maintained by the State through a complex system of institutions that did not exist in Postclassic Mexico. Further, the assumption that humans are innately predisposed to engage in individualistic, self-maximizing behavior and are naturally driven to acquire material goods has been critiqued by anthropologists (Graeber, 2001; Strathern, 1988). Further, in much of the modern world today, people want things because a capitalist culture has come to equate having certain objects with self-worth, individual identity, and because they are simply bombarded by thousands of ads each day that are specifically aimed at convincing people to desire things and, thus, spend money. However, in the past, people were surrounded by a world filled with humans and non-human beings, not advertisements; thus, they would have had a different relationship with objects that they bought and sold than we do today. The people of Postclassic Mexico, while they had a market system, nonetheless saw the world as filled with beings, rather than things, and did not have a culture based on individualism, which characterizes the economies theorized by Marx, Smith, and others. Scholars have summarized at length theories of value (see Murakami this volume, Hutson and Golden this volume; Crook, 2019; Graeber,

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2001; Appaduari, 1986), and my goal is not to repeat these discussions here, but rather to take into consideration factors that could help us to understand how people valued objects in Postclassic central Mexico. Archaeologists often assess the value of artifacts in the past using economic theories of value and determine items to have been more valued if they were imported from far away, were made from a rare or hard to access material, required a lot of time and skill to make, or were high quality (Garraty, 2000; Sempowski & Spence, 1994; Smith, 1987). Such objects sometimes referred to as “high value,” “luxury,” or “wealth goods” are thought to reflect the status of individuals or groups. However, the value of an object may change over time, and as noted by Appadurai (1986: 57), the difference between luxury and everyday commodities is “historically shifting.” The meaning of things may thus change over its life history, and they may “move in and out of the commodity state” (Appadurai, 1986: 13; Kopytoff, 1986). Moreover, as argued by Bailey (1998: 2), “value is not inherent in an [artifact] because it is made of a non-local material or because it required great effort in its production or, even, because it was exchanged for something else. Value is created, maintained and manipulated.” The meaning of an object may also change depending upon its context, its associated assemblage, whether or not it has been ritually charged or blessed, or how it is used (Pearson 1998). Further, there are many factors that might affect value—relationships, meaning, history of ownership, etcetera (Appadurai, 1986; Graeber, 2001; Strathern, 1988), which are more difficult to assess archaeologically. For example, modern teens are willing to pay a premium for sneakers that have a certain popular logo or that are worn by celebrities. Sneakers once worn by Michael Jordan himself, even if old and worn out, may sell for more than a brand-new pair. But objects are not equally valued by all people. The young Rarámuri (Tarahumara) Indigenous Ultramarathon runner Lorena Ramírez in the 2019 documentary, Lorena, Light-Footed Woman, tosses aside expensive sneakers that were gifted to her because she preferred to run marathons in her traditional sandals and clothing (Rulfo, 2019). For Lorena, the sneakers are worthless. These valuations of goods have little to do with labor investment, materials used, or quality of the product. The value of these goods often has more to do with the amount consumers are willing to pay for them, rather than the inherent qualities of the object or the cost of production (Appadurai, 1986). Appadurai (1986: 4), notes that it is the exchange itself that endows an object with an

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economic value, that there is no value inherent in the object. In sixteenthcentury colonial Mexico, for example, indigenous people preferred cacao beans over gold as a currency of exchange and regularly threw away metal coins to take them out of circulation (Rodríguez-Alegría, 2023). Coins found buried in a colonial house were interpreted by archaeologists as discard, to take them out of circulation, rather than as a horde for economic use (Rodríguez-Alegría, 2023: 33). As argued by RodríguezAlegría (2023: 52), “people use money with different goals in mind, some of which are economic and some of which have social aspects to them.” Weiner’s (1992) discussion of inalienable possessions highlights that not all objects that are highly coveted are commodities to be bought and sold. Inalienable possessions are inextricably linked to the social identity of the owner and typically do not circulate. Even if they are circulated, inalienable possessions are never detached from their original owners and histories, they are not bought and sold but rather temporarily shared (Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2013; Weiner, 1992). Barber and colleagues (2013: 39) observe that “unlike those alienable materials that may be bought or sold using a commodity form of valuation, inalienable possessions embody the overlapping histories of the individuals or groups that owned them.” It is keeping objects out of circulation that makes them most powerful and constitutes identity. In the case of inalienable possessions, it would be inaccurate to think of these items as goods with an attached exchange value. Understanding how objects in the past were valued is further complicated when we consider that to many Indigenous societies in the Americas, there was a lack of boundaries between people and their surrounding world, including both living and non-living things. Scholars are increasingly recognizing that indigenous worldviews include “larger than human communities” (Astor-Aguilera & Harvey, 2019: 2). Renewed interest in animism has helped archaeologists to understand that across many cultures in the Americas, non-humans can be persons and humans are part of communities that extend well beyond themselves; thus, allowing us to break down modern Western dualisms (Astor-Aguilera, 2010; Herva, 2009; Juarez, 2023; Ingold, 2006; Kovacevich and Callaghan, this volume; Harrison-Buck & Hendon, 2018; Monaghan, 1998; Pauketat, 2013; Watts, 2013). As noted by Harrison-Buck and Hendon (2018:19), “By viewing humans and other-than-humans as co-equal persons in the world, we recognize a greater diversity of conversive participants and are forced to reconsider our interpretive approaches to archaeology.” Hendon

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(2018), for example, emphasizes that in ancient Mesoamerica, various types of tools including pots, grinding implements, farming equipment, textiles, and weaving equipment could have personhood and agency; and she suggests that tools found in ritual caches, in particular, are likely to have been conferred personhood. Of course, we cannot assume that all peoples in the Americas had identical understandings of the world. However, as observed by Viveros de Castro (1998: 471), “if there is a virtually universal Amerindian notion, it is that of an original state of undifferentiation between humans and animals, described in mythology.” In central Mexico animals were interconnected to every aspect of life, including the days, weeks, and the months of the calendar; deities had animal “disguises” (Caso, 1958); and the earth itself was visualized as a great spiny monster or crocodile (cipactli) floating upon the primeval sea (Nicholson, 1971), among many other examples. Likewise, there is evidence that non-living things were recognized as beings in central Mexico. For example, Durán (1971: 431, emphasis added), describes how farmers and commoners performed a ceremony with agricultural tools and carrying equipment and that the “objects were revered and thanked for their help in the field and on the road.” People made offerings of food, pulque, and incense to these tools. There is no indication in his descriptions that the expressions of gratitude were accompanied by pleas or requests for favors. Further, among modern Nahua’s conception of the universe, as noted by Sandstrom (1991: 238), “everybody and everything is an aspect of a grand, single, and overriding unity. Separate beings and objects do not exist.” Thus, in Postclassic Mexico, as we see throughout Mesoamerica, humans were likely inextricably connected to the world around them, and the surrounding world was filed with beings who sacrificed themselves for human survival. In sum, modern capitalist systems are about the extraction of things (its), but if the world is understood as filled with beings rather than things, do we need to think about past economies differently? A “who” would not be simply a commodity. Similarly, a gift will hold a different meaning than a resource. So, what happens when the natural world and its ability to provide us with food is seen as a gift, humans are only one being among many, and people must be held accountable to future generations? Western ideas of value, which are predicated on the idea of profit and understanding high-value items as scarce, difficult to acquire, complicated to produce, or in high demand may not always be relevant to understanding prehispanic economies and people may have had very different

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understandings and relationships with market systems than we do in the modern world.

The Economy in the Postclassic Basin of Mexico The economy of Postclassic central Mexico has been described as highly commercialized (Hirth & Pillsbury, 2013: 1; Nichols, 2017: 34), as it had a complex and highly developed market system. Historic accounts of marketplace exchange, the existence of currencies, and the lack of large storage facilities all indicate that markets were central to the political economy of the Triple Alliance (Feinman & Garraty, 2010). Further, the presence of a wide diversity of imported items found archaeologically in both elite and commoner contexts suggests that these items were obtained through market exchange (rather than redistribution or elite gifting), as everyone had access to the same goods, regardless of social rank (Garraty, 2000; Rodríguez-Alegría, 2010; Smith et al., 2003). Markets were central to the economy and were responsible for the movement of goods throughout the empire (Berdan, 1985; Blanton, 1996; Garraty & Stark, 2010; Hicks, 1987; Smith, 2017). Historic accounts describe a great variety of commodities that could be found in urban marketplaces including luxury goods, everyday utilitarian items, and prepared foods that were in large part made and sold by commoners (Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, 2010: 207; Díaz del Castillo, 1996 [1575]: 215). Markets also provided various services such as lawyers, and certain goods such as cacao beans and cloth mantas functioned as currencies with established values (Blanton, 1996; Millhauser, 2017; Sahagún, 1950–1982 [1575–1577]:Book 9). For the people in the Postclassic Basin of Mexico, marketplaces were locations to barter and exchange goods, but they were also social and ritual spaces and were central to daily life. Markets each had their own gods and people traveled long distances to go to marketplaces to honor the gods (Durán, 1971). Durán (1971: 277) notes that there were prohibitions against trading outside of the marketplace and suggests that these prohibitions were largely in fear of offending the wrath of the gods. The economy in the Postclassic period was not a capitalist system, however. Land and labor were not commoditized (Smith, 2017) and lending money for profit does not seem to have been an occupation (Millhauser, 2017). Further, while the profit motive existed, “the level of investment and profit was far lower than in capitalist economies” and

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banking was absent (Smith, 2017: 46). Smith (2017: 46) sees the Aztec economy as less developed than the “more advanced commercial institutions” of early European economies. However, central Mexican marketplaces were often larger and more well regulated than their European counterparts, so much so that the first Europeans to arrive in Tenochtitlan were in awe of the marketplaces they encountered. Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1996 [1575]: 219) recounts that “some of the soldiers among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a market place and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged, they had never held before.” Thus, the differences between European and Mesoamerican economic systems are more likely because these were two fundamentally distinct types of economies, embedded in different cultural systems, rather than a lack of development or advancement. The Aztec state exacted tribute demands on peasants and nobles in the form of both labor and goods (Blanton, 1996). As noted by Berdan and colleagues (2017: 4), “Commoners provided the labor to construct the palaces of nobles, and their various payments in money, goods, and labor (taxes, tributes, and rents) supported nobles and allowed them to obtain their fancy goods.” However, the contribution of labor was expected, not paid for. Some scholars have argued that elites constructed an economic system to keep themselves in power by collecting tribute in the form of both labor and goods and through the control of luxury goods and the marketplace (Smith, 2017). However, others have suggested that nobles in Mesoamerican antiquity saw themselves as ritual specialists, holders of sacred knowledge, intermediators, and protectors, and that with their status came with great responsibility (Umberger, 2017). Umberger (2017) argues that nobles acquired unusual and rare objects so that they could be used by elites for the good of society. She (2017: 200) notes, “the sacred value of such items had precedence over their wealth value and…their manipulation was for the good of the whole society, for which the elites were responsible.” Similarly, Kovacevich and Callaghan (this volume) discuss how jade was powerful and had to be properly controlled and understood by those who wore it. There is no doubt that the Aztecs had an advanced market system that circulated a wide range of goods and services that had exchange values. However, we should be cautious in making assumptions that these systems were understood and utilized in the same way as capitalist economic systems. I am not arguing that Aztec economies were less

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advanced, did not seek to make a profit, or that people in the past were not capable of rational thought, but rather that people would have rationalized their actions differently and they may have had different goals and objectives than Western maximizing models would predict. After all, what many in the modern world consider to be “rational” economic behavior has led us to a point of unrestrained exploitation of the earth and the ecological crisis that we are in today, which one could argue hardly seems rational or advanced at all.

Gratitude and Reciprocity in Public Contexts Expressions of gratitude and reciprocity are omnipresent in ancient Mesoamerica in the form of ritual offerings. One of the most well-known examples in public contexts comes from the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan. Offerings at the Templo Mayor were interred during construction and renovation events, at times of crisis, during important celebrations, during the funeral rites of important figures, as well as other important moments (López Luján, 1994). Offerings or caches in Tenochtitlan are often interpreted as a form of ritual discourse with supernaturals designed to win favors, reap rewards, and secure the help of the deities; as well as mitigate sins and violations of social order (López Luján, 1994; Nagao, 1985). But these offerings could also have served as a way to establish connections and build relationships with ancestors and deities, maintain equilibrium, and express gratitude. Further, I argue that we should not think of the objects in offerings as luxury or wealth goods, even though they are often rare, finely crafted, and imported from far distances. In the main ceremonial precinct of Tenochtitlan, many offerings have been excavated from the Templo Mayor and the surrounding area (López Luján et al., 2014). Offerings from the Templo Mayor typically were not objects commonly recovered from ordinary contexts and almost all are associated with ritual symbolism (López Luján, 1994). For example, when ceramic vessels were recovered, they tended to be unusual or special vessel types such as funerary urns, effigy jars, or other elaborately decorated vessels (Heyden, 1983; López Luján, 1994; Nagao, 1985). Up to 80% of the offerings were imported from distant regions and provinces (López Luján, 1994; Matos Moctezuma, 1988). Many of the fabricated goods were of foreign origin such as masks, figurines, greenstone animal figures, urns, musical instruments, and sculptures. Mexica, or locally made objects, were mostly religious items, including masks, braziers, incense

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burners, and sacrificial knives (López Luján, 1994). Archaeologists have also recovered heirloom objects dating to earlier civilizations including Teotihuacan and the Olmecs (López Luján, 1994; Matos Moctezuma, 1988). Leonardo López Luján (1994) describes temple offerings as a type of ritual discourse with the supernatural, and in the case of the Templo Mayor, the communication is largely directed at the temple’s patron deities, Tlaloc, the god of water, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. There were offerings on both the Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli sides of the temple (López Luján, 1994: 111). Interestingly, although Huitzilopochtli is often considered the most important Mexica deity, “the great majority” of offerings were associated with Tlaloc (Matos Moctezuma, 1995: 74). Many of the objects in the offerings, such as shells, alligators, sawfish, clams, coral, molluscs, and so forth, are ocean and freshwater species (López Luján et al., 2014). Offering 126, for example, has over 3,000 marine molluscs, and numerous species that would be associated with both coasts of Mexico and beyond. López Luján and colleagues (2014: 35) observe that many of the species recovered from offerings are non-edible and therefore they are “attributed profound religious or cosmological significance” rather than signifying daily life. In addition to water symbolism, there were 42 sacrificed children in Offering 48, which is linked to ceremonies associated with Tlaloc to “assure abundant rain for the next agricultural cycle” (Lopez Lujan, 1994: 200). The offerings also contained sand from different origins including the Pacific and Gulf coasts of Mexico, as well as lakes and rivers (Heyden, 2002). Heyden (2002) interprets the sand as a way to invoke water imagery and the watery paradise of Tlalocan and emphasizes the central role of water in the cosmic model represented by the Templo Mayor. Lastly, Anthony Aveni and colleagues (1988) suggest that the Templo Mayor may have originally been oriented in reference to Mount Tlaloc, an important ceremonial center dedicated to Tlaloc. There were offerings associated with Huitzilopochtli in the Templo Mayor as well. For example, decapitated human skulls and human skull masks have been found in offerings that are associated with the temple of Huitzilopochtli (Ragsdale et al., 2016). Based on patterns of bioarchaeological data, Ragsdale and colleagues (2016), found that the skull masks from the Templo Mayor were made from older elite individuals, possibly kings captured in conquests, as suggested by an absence of dental disease or nutritional stress, while dental morphological traits suggest

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these individuals were similar to those found in known conquered towns. In contrast, they found that unmodified skulls represented a variety of age groups, with a higher degree of dental disease and nutritional stress and were not from conquered areas; thus, they may have been slaves or people captured in nearby flower wars (Ragsdale et al., 2016). The recent discovery of a canid decorated in jewels and gold may have been dedicated to Huitzilopochtli as well. It was buried in a stone box surrounded by flint knives. The stone box was covered with another layer of flint knives (López Luján et al., 2014). Interestingly, the canid was surrounded by ocean and freshwater animals, representing a dog immersed in water, which López Luján and colleagues (2014) argue represents the journey of the dead in the ninth level of the underworld. An offering of two golden eagles, associated with the sun, was found above the canid (López Luján et al., 2014), perhaps to represent all of the layers of the universe. Funerary deposits consisting of cremated remains were also associated with Huitzilopochtli. While the cremated remains are thought to have been high-status individuals, it is not clear if they were rulers, priests, members of the royal family, or warriors (López Luján, 1994: 237). Some scholars have argued that the dual pyramid structure of the Templo Mayor was a political strategy that the Mexica used to link their patron god, Huitzilopochtli, to Tlaloc, a god that was not only widely venerated but also goes back deep into antiquity (Hassig, 2001). Hassig (2001) argues that the Mexica placed a greater emphasis on Huitzilopochtli in the construction of the temple, which symbolically represents Coatepec and Huitzilopochtli’s origin myth (Matos Moctezuma, 1995). Further, the sacrifices on the temple’s peak reenacted the story of Huitzilopochtli’s birth on a regular basis (Matos Moctezuma, 1995). However, it is interesting that the most publicly visible aspects of the temple emphasize Huitzilopochtli, while the buried offerings are disproportionally gifted to Tlaloc. Buried offerings are often interpreted as gifts to the gods, meant to secure favors and benefits for humans where “the more abundant the gifts, the greater the expected reward…with sacrifices and offerings people ‘pay’ the divinities for their harvests, military success, health, rainfall, and so forth” (López Luján, 1994: 46). Scholars have also argued that the buried offerings may have held political and economic significance in public contexts, serving as a means to simultaneously display and hoard wealth and demonstrate political power (Nagao, 1985), as the enlargements of the Templo Mayor often coincided with political events such as

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expansions of the empire or kingly reigns (Hassig, 2001; López Luján, 1994, 1998; Umberger, 1996). López Luján (1994, 1998) argues that the expansions of the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan “glorified military expansion and served as an ideological justification for imperialist policy” (1994: 285). Many of the objects in offerings were obtained through tribute and consequently may demonstrate the power of the empire to extract luxury goods from distant tributaries. Beyond their political significance, the offerings associated with construction events at the Templo Mayor may have served to “endow the structure with permanent powers” and to provide permanent gifts to the gods (López Luján, 1994: 47). If the offerings were only intended to commemorate conquests and glorify the political and military power of the Triple Alliance, it is curious that offerings to Tlaloc, rather than the war god, predominate. In addition, many of the objects come from regions across Mesoamerica and beyond and were not from tributary provinces (Melgar, this volume). However, it is not surprising to find water symbolism associated with pyramids in central Mexico, as this practice has a deep tradition in Mesoamerica. Mountains and pyramids associated with caves as sources of water are regularly found in Mesoamerican imagery (Gillespie, 1993). Sahagún (1950–1982 [1575– 1577]:Book 11: 247), for example, notes that “mountains were only magic places, with earth, with rock on the surface….they were filled with water.” Thus, the sea-themed offerings to Tlaloc at the Templo Mayor, as well as the water imagery on the exterior of the temple, fit within a long tradition of ritual activity focused on water at pyramids. Thus, the expansions of the pyramid and the associated offerings are not merely a celebration of conquest or a plea for more success, but rather a way to communicate with the gods, a means to ensoul the pyramid, and a recreation of the cosmos at the center of Tenochtitlan (López Luján, 1994). Further, dedication rituals have been identified at earlier sites throughout much of Mesoamerica including Olmec sites (Coe and Diehl 1980), Maya sites (Freidel and Schele 1989; Mock 1998), Teotihuacan (Rubin de la Borbolla 1947) and beyond, suggesting that the Mexica were reenacting ancient traditions of symbolic meaning. The offerings of the Templo Mayor, thus, likely held multiple meanings depending upon the context of interment and we cannot separate ritual from political and economic functions. Building on the work of López Luján (1994) and others, I emphasize that we should also see these offerings as an act of gratitude; gratitude for

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that which has been taken and the successes that were achieved. Temples were places to offer gifts because they were access points to all of the realms of the universe. For the Mexica, the Templo Mayor “was the place where the vertical and the horizontal planes intersected, from which one could enter the celestial levels or the underworld. It was the center of the four directions of the universe, making it the navel and the fundamental center of Mexica cosmovision. It signified the nucleus of universal order” (Matos Moctezuma, 1995: 57). These gifts were not just a form of debt repayment or payment for future favors, but also expressions of gratitude for what has been given. Given that the objects recovered from offerings in the Templo Mayor are often unique, imported from far away, and/or made by highly skilled specialists, they would fall within archaeological definitions of “valuable” or “luxury” goods described earlier. However, I argue that these items would not have been considered commodities and thus should not be thought of as high “value” in an economic sense. As noted by Melgar (this volume), many of these objects are not found in other contexts, they are often made or obtained exclusively to be interred in offerings. Moreover, they were made by specialists who were more than just skilled—they were entrusted with sacred tasks, including recognizing when the ihyotl (breath) of the objects appeared, suggesting these items were indeed animated beings (Melgar, this volume). Kovacevich and Callaghan (this volume) similarly argue that stone such as jade as well as other crafted materials such as clay pots were animated objects that were “ensouled” during the crafting process (see also Reents-Budet, 1998). Further, the items in the Templo Mayor offerings may have held little significance on their own as any individual item would not have the same meaning if not in combination with the others (see also Millhauser et al., this volume). López Luján (1994) argues that the rituals, ceremonies, and organization of the offerings can be thought of as a language of communication. “Ritual ceremonies are actually discourses addressed to the supernatural, discourses that can be divided into elements similar to paragraphs, phrases, words, syllables, and phonemes…like parts of speech, the simplest ritual parts have no meaning in themselves. They only make sense when they are combined spatially and sequentially with other elements” (López Luján: 1994: 44, emphasis added). As noted earlier, many of the offerings in the Templo Mayor were raw materials, nonedible animals, or specialized ritual objects that typically did not circulate in the marketplace and were not used in contexts of display (López Luján,

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1994; López Luján et al., 2014). The objects associated with these offerings, while often referred to as “luxury” goods, were ritually charged powerful items. The uniqueness of these objects may suggest that they were not meant to be bought or sold or circulate in the market. Instead, they were part of ritual performances that were seen by few and quickly buried (removed from circulation) for perpetuity. Thus, the objects in these offerings would contain the power of those people, places, and beings from which they came. Locally made goods were ensouled by specialized craftspeople, face masks would have held the potency of powerful rulers, and items from past civilizations would have embodied the strength and wisdom of the ancestors. Objects gathered from across the empire and beyond, representing thousands of species from numerous watery contexts along with mundane sand, together recreated those watery environments in the Templo Mayor itself, making it a true water-mountain. As powerful, ensouled beings, I argue it would be inaccurate to think of the objects in offerings as luxury or high value goods, or even goods at all, but rather as gifts of gratitude that may, or may not, have served self-maximizing or political aims. Further, these items held special meaning when in the offering context, valued in the sense of being sacred objects, but not in terms of economic exchange.

Gratitude and Reciprocity in Household Contexts Ordinary people engaged in similar practices to those seen in the Templo Mayor by collecting ancient relics such as figurines from the ground (Brumfiel & Overholtzer, 2009), making offerings of unusual and mundane objects in household and non-household contexts (De Lucia, 2014, 2017), and reproducing pottery styles that they associated with previous civilizations (De Lucia, 2018). Similar to the Templo Mayor, in commoner households unique and unusual objects that might be considered luxury or valuable goods by archaeologists are often associated with offerings, burials, or other ritual contexts (De Lucia, 2014). For example, I have recovered offerings from houses in Xaltocan, Mexico, dating to the Early Postclassic through Middle Postclassic periods. In Casa Z, Structure 1, for example, offerings were associated with construction and termination events, burials, and walls (De Lucia, 2014). One offering contained two complete vessels including a patojo jar and a studded tripod bowl, one complete mano, three stone balls, a tortoise shell, and a long bone of a large mammal that had been sawed at one end (Fig. 3.3). The

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patojo jar and studded bowl are two uncommon vessel types for household contexts in Xaltocan at this time (these are the only ones I have ever recovered). The studded bowl had very thick black residue on the interior suggesting that it had been used for burning incense. The long bone and tortoise shell may have functioned as a drum. Another complete tortoise shell was found in association with another renovation event in the same structure, but not elsewhere. The significance of the three stone balls of basalt, tezontle, and quartz is unclear, however, they may have collectively held symbolic significance as each is a different color (gray, red, and white, respectively) and material. Pedro Ponce de Leon (1965: 129–130) notes that sixteenth-century Nahua farmers used “stones of an attractive color” in house dedication ceremonies. All of these objects, thus, were likely associated with ritual activity. The only mundane household object from the offering was the groundstone mano. However, as noted earlier, ordinary objects and tools may take on special meaning and may even be endowed with personhood, especially when interred in an offering (Hendon, 2018). The mano may have also been an heirloom or may have taken on special significance when combined with the other items. Similar types of caches have been recovered from all household excavations across the site (Brumfiel 2005, 2009). Offerings have also been recovered outside of houses such as from the lakebed (Morehart et al. 2012). In Mesoamerica, caches were commonly buried during house dedication ceremonies (López Luján, 1994, 1998; Stross, 1998; Vogt, 1998). Such ritual offerings served to compensate the earth for the use of materials taken during the construction process, to transform the house into a living entity or to provide it with a soul, to protect houses, and to symbolically recreate the universe through the construction of the house (López Luján, 1994; Stross, 1998; Vogt, 1998). According to Stross (1998), the Classic Maya used caches as “a way of animating the building by inserting a ‘heart’…that in all likelihood was ensouled and fed through blood sacrifice.” Modern Maya and Nahua dedication ceremonies overlap closely with Nahua dedication rites recorded in sixteenth-century documents (Durán, 1984; Ponce de León, 1965). In contrast, termination rituals upon abandonment were associated with death and may have involved the destruction of household objects and the removal of corner posts (Stross, 1998). Thus, caches recovered from Mesoamerican houses may have been largely associated with dedicatory events related to the lifecycle of the house, and offerings of gratitude to the earth. In sum, just as Aztec

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Fig. 3.3 Example of a household offering from Xaltocan Mexico. A cut long bone and a tortoise shell are not included in the photo (photograph by author)

elites buried offerings when temples were reconstructed, commoners also often buried rare and unusual objects when houses were constructed or renovated (De Lucia, 2017).

Conclusions The Aztecs had an elaborate market system that circulated a wide range of commodities but it was not a capitalist institution. The differences between Aztec economies and capitalist institutions were not due to a lack of development, sophistication, or inferiority. Rather, I argue that the Aztec market system was grounded in a different set of cultural understandings and values than recent capitalist cultures that have prioritized profit over our future well-being and the well-being of others. To conclude, I suggest that we should consider gratitude and reciprocity and the construction of social relationships with humans and non-human beings; rather than simply economic gain, self-interest, and profit; as guiding principles among the Mexica and Mexica economy, as

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they were among many other indigenous communities in the Americas. Even in elite contexts such as the Templo Mayor, ritual offerings can be seen as a means of expressing gratitude, similar to the rules of the Honorable Harvest, and not only as appeals to deities to bestow additional rewards. The uniqueness of the objects in offerings suggests they were not understood as commodities and may have held little exchange value. Instead, they derive meaning when used together in rituals and in communication with the other associated objects and may have been seen as non-human beings. Since the offerings were buried, this communication would have been directed at the supernatural (López Luján, 1994), rather than serving as displays of wealth or status. Finally, as others have argued (Wells & Davis-Salazar, 2007), the economy cannot be considered as separate from religious meaning as everything and everyone was seen as interconnected, and religious beliefs entered into all aspects of everyday life. In thinking about Aztec economies, I suggest a shift in perspective to consider the importance of objects in building social ties between humans as well as between humans and non-humans. Further, even the objective of economic exchanges may have been different from what maximizing models would expect. We cannot assume that commoners would have had an insatiable desire for material goods as is so common in the modern world. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Scott Hutson and Charles Golden for inviting me to participate in this volume and for their valuable feedback. This article has greatly benefited from conversations with Santiago Juarez, Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, John Millhauser, and Anthony Aveni, as well as all of the other contributors to this volume during the SAA meetings in 2023. My research at Xaltocan was conducted with the permission of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History and the support of the town of Xaltocan, the Arenas Ramírez family, the Casa de Cultura in Xaltocan, the Xaltocan delegados, and the many people in Xaltocan who worked on this project and others throughout the years. It was partially supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant [#7706] from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant [#0742249], and the Colgate University Research Council.

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CHAPTER 4

Chronotopic Value: Objects and Meaning Through Mesoamerican Timespace Mallory E. Matsumoto

Building upon Nancy Munn’s (1986) (inter)action-based model, David Graeber (2001: xii) defines “value” as “the way in which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger, social totality—even if in many cases the totality in question exists primarily in the actor’s imagination.” Despite its almost overwhelming scope, this definition is useful (valuable?) for situating value as a social construct that lies more with people than with the things that they appraise (see Malinowski, 1978 [1922]; Mauss, 2002 [1925]). Although value tends to be materialized or otherwise made visible in society, “it is not the forms themselves that are the source of value” (Graeber, 2001: 47). Instead, value is often rooted in “specialized knowledge”—whether “craft skills” in production, awareness of appropriate use, or “connoisseurial knowledge” for appraisal—that the forms represent in social context (Ko, 2017: 160; see Baron, this volume). Value is, in other words, both what we humans

M. E. Matsumoto (B) Department of Religious Studies, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. R. Hutson and C. Golden (eds.), Realizing Value in Mesoamerica, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4_4

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make of things and what we do in our interactions with each other and the world around us (Crook, 2018: 2–3; Rasmussen, 2015: 4). Understanding how that meaning is made, interpreted, and transformed is at least as, if not more critical to any study of value than the valued thing itself. In interpreting value in Mesoamerican archaeology, this chapter approaches the social itinerary of things by attending less to the personalities who give them meaning than to the relational contexts in which they circulate. Underlying many archaeological characterizations of material “value” is a (sometimes implicit) assumption of some degree of relative scarcity or unavailability (see Harris, 2017: 687–688; Lesure, 1999: 23, 31; Sahlins, 2013: 187–188). Accordingly, an artifact’s value depends in part on its accessibility, which, when limited, may reinforce or even enhance its material qualities. This view also implies an artifact’s inalienability from the social identity of a patron or creator, no matter the hands through which it eventually passes (Mauss, 2002 [1925]; Weiner, 1992). In this view, “circulation can actually enhance an object’s value” through its “capacity to accumulate a history”—particularly in the case of an heirloom or other item transferred intergenerationally—and some “form of a pedigree of former owners” or creators (Graeber, 2001: 34). But value is inherently relational; its definition depends on comparison among multiple things and, in some cases, different iterations of one thing whose value is being assessed (e.g., Ko, 2017: 159; Wong, 2013: 148–184; see Harrison-Buck and Freidel, this volume). What makes money, that “absolutely generic” medium of exchange, valuable is its unequal distribution among holders and its “capacity to turn into any other thing,” whereby it becomes alienable from individual identity (Graeber, 1996: 20; see Agha, 2011). An overemphasis on scarceness proves self-contradictory by precluding the kinds of comparison and hierarchization that are essential to value judgments. Creation and reception of value, then, must entail some degree of replication or repetition, some citation of or reference to an abstract type of which the object in question is a token expression.

Timespace and Chronotopic Value in Archaeology Robust consideration of an artifact’s dynamic social and physical forms must address “the various acts of creation, consecration, use, appropriation, and so on, that make up its history” (Graeber, 1996: 20). But this

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and other traditional accounts of object itinerary assume that an “heirloom” is valued according to singular form and chronological linearity, emphasizing temporal over spatial context (Bauer, 2019: 338). In reality, a thing is located in time and space not only in relation to other things but in relation to other (self-)expressions, a phenomenon known as citationality. Through citation, one object evokes another that signifies the same abstract concept, “weav[ing] together different events into one complex act” and generating novelty through what superfically looks like mere repetition (Nakassis, 2013: 56). The thing transitions in and out of contexts by retaining some of its core significance and simultaneously acquiring new meaning(s) through “this play of indexicality and iconism, sameness and difference” (Nakassis, 2013: 57). These contexts interact even as they are layered atop each other, a process that Gavin Lucas (2021: 18) characterizes as “the conjunction of past and present in a single place or object.” Citationality helps us understand that an object’s history is not chronologically linear nor spatially singular; it conceptually links multiple actors, places, or moments even as it exists in the present (Bauer, 2019: 336; Joyce, 2015: 28). Here, I treat value as the result of a thing being enmeshed in space– time such that it may exist in several moments at once. To account for the non-linear nature of object histories, I refer to the temporal-spatially contextualized significance that an object accumulates as its chronotopic value, an intentional reference to the concept popularized by Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1981: 84). The literal Greek translation of “timespace” captures, in his words, the “density and concreteness of time markers…within well-delineated space,” grounding events by “concretizing representation” and “giving body” to the larger account (Bakhtin, 1981: 250). A key factor in defining literary genres, the chronotope underlies local production of meaning by sustaining “plot structure, characters or identities, and social and political worlds in which actions become dialogically meaningful” (Blommaert, 2015: 109). It is, in essence, their embedding in a timespace constellation that gives things, actors, and actions meaning. The concept of chronotope thus offers an incisive alternative to the catch-all “context” that we archaeologists so often cite but seldom bother to define (Blommaert, 2015). In exploring chronotopic value in Mesoamerican archaeology, I argue that concurrent layering or folding of an object in time and space generates value by situating it simultaneously in a privileged, multilayered past and in an interactive present. Chronotopic value does not only account for

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what makes an object distinctive. It also encompasses an object’s citational relationship to other tokens or events that have preceded, co-existed with, or will eventually succeed it. No thing exists in singular isolation; it is always referentially linked to others that overlap in timespace, including some with quite different histories (Nakassis, 2013: 626; see Lesure, 1999; Thomas, 1991). Nor does the present supersede the past in this assessment. As Dagmar Schäfer (2011: 84) has argued for seventeenthcentury China, a “rhetoric of the past” may offer a potent source of value defined by “continuation or revival,” whether co-eval with or at the expense of “progress or radical change.” By articulating an object with its citations—material artifact, iconographic representation, hieroglyphic denotation—chronotopic value reflects the complex reality that accessibility is not, in fact, about material resources or physical singularity alone. The privileged circulation that is often intrinsic to a thing’s value encompasses layers of chronotopic discourse that shape that value. Even if the thing is neither scarce nor singular in material form, it may be folded into assertions of diachronic continuity or synchronic representation and thus accrete value as a pearl does its nacreous coatings. Determining value requires making choices. I privilege depth over breadth by focusing on a single artifact whose history illustrates how we may interpret chronotopic value archaeologically. This case study represents a chronotopic take on the more traditional social itinerary of things by examining the circulation of a unique jade ornament through Classic Maya timespace. Sculpted in the round and inscribed with a hieroglyphic text, the piece was significant to several generations of dynastic kings at Piedras Negras in Peten, Guatemala, during the Late Classic period (600– 830 CE) by virtue of its precious, difficult-to-work source material. Yet I argue here that the material itself and its production were less significant for the artifact’s value as a symbol of dynastic identity and political continuity across generational time, physical medium, and geographic space. In essence, the ornament’s spatial movement and parallel, literal representations generated a multilayered chronotopic value that persisted long after the ornament had been retired from human use. This case, as deep as it is, provides only a brief glimpse of the range of chronotopic possibilities in archaeology. Applying the concept of chronotope to archaeological contexts has the intra-disciplinary benefit of promoting dialogue across anthropological subfields (see also Baron, this volume). But it is more than a collegial exercise. The chronotope offers a framework through which archaeologists and other scholars of material

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culture may more intentionally consider value as dialogical, articulating time and space, human and other-than-human relations, and object types and tokens across medium, space, and time. Cultural learning inherently entails a combination of copying and response, of imitative reproduction and creative modification of existing ways of doing (Urban, 2017). Since its coining by Bakhtin, the chronotope has been embedded in dialogical models of culture, a dialogue- or discourse-based framework that allows anthropologists to account for this relational interplay within current practice theory. Chronotopic value thus opens an archaeological consideration of “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin, 1981: 84; compare Golden, this volume).

The Jade Belt Ornament of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II It is both fitting and ironic that the discussion here centers on an artifact made of jade, a precious material across pre-colonial Mesoamerican cultures and a focus of archaeological studies of value in the region (see Kovacevich and Callaghan, this volume; Melgar, this volume; Stuart, 2006; Lesure, 1999). In addition to jade’s well-documented appreciation among the Classic Maya for its aesthetic and material properties (Houston, 2014: 126–133; Taube, 2005), the mineral has been especially insightful for archaeologists in the region because of its outstanding preservation in the humid subtropical lowlands and its limited intrasite distribution. As a result, jade has been critical to recent interpretations of value in craft production and in elite display and consumption (Andrieu et al., 2014; Kovacevich, 2017). Another boon is its restricted geological provenience: with the Motagua River Valley as its only proven source in Mesoamerica, jade offers a concrete proxy for elite trade, however opaque its precise trajectories (Bishop et al., 1993; Kovacevich & Callaghan, 2018). The chronotopic perspective put forth here promises to complement, not supplant, existing interpretations of the value of jade and other things in the Classic Maya world. At the risk of understating the mineral’s undeniable cultural importance, this chapter sets aside the question of how the raw material’s properties contribute to the value of an artifact won from it (for more on these dynamics, see Kovacevich and Callaghan, this volume). Instead, it concentrates on timespace’s role in meaning-making to suggest that the value of a thing, whether made from jade or any other

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material, hinges not only—in some cases, not even primarily—on its physical substance or on the embodied knowledge required to harvest, sculpt, and polish it into a glistening jewel. Its value is also contingent on “the inseparability of space and time” (Bakhtin, 1981: 84) that weaves the thing into its cultural-historical context so tightly that its significance may become dissociated from the original medium. The case study at hand is a finely carved jade ornament that was recovered from the Sacred Cenote in Chichen Itza, an important Postclassic (950–1697 CE) site in Mexico’s northern Yucatan peninsula (Fig. 4.1). Like many carved jades known from Classic Maya archaeology and iconography, it depicts an ancestral face and was most likely worn as a belt ornament (Houston & Stuart, 1998: 85; though see Halperin et al., 2018: 763). The artifact, which stands just 8.5 cm tall, almost certainly came from Piedras Negras, some 480 km southwest of Chichen Itza in the western Maya lowlands. Tatiana Proskouriakoff (2011 [1944]) identified its provenience based on two calendrical dates in the hieroglyphic inscription on its obverse, which she correlated with k’atun anniversaries, or twenty-year intervals, recorded on several Piedras Negras stelae. The ornament’s protagonist has since been identified as K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II (Ruler 3), who reigned from early 687 to late 729 (Martin & Grube, 2000: 145, 148). Most likely, the jade was commissioned shortly before and dedicated or finished on 9.13.7.13.1 (October 27, 699) to commemorate the king’s thirteenth year on the throne (Houston, 2010). The inscription also anticipates the one k’atun (twentieth) anniversary that the king would celebrate a few years later on 9.13.14.13.1 (September 20, 706) (Houston, 2010). The pedant’s identification with K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II is supported by the miniature face’s personalized features, including the prominent nose also featured in the king’s portrait on Stela 2 from Piedras Negras (Stuart & Graham, 2003: 21). The zoomorphic headdress also embodies two core onomastic elements of his identity (Fig. 4.1). With prominently delineated teeth encircling the forehead and the rounded, characteristically feline ears and nose, the headdress evokes K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s childhood name, chooj or kooj “puma” (Houston, 2010; Martin & Grube, 2000: 145). The hieroglyph for chooj shows a feline with a human, usually represented by the stylized logograph for winik “human, person,” in its open mouth (Zender, cited in Houston, 2009: 169). A more literal version denotes the same name on the jade head’s crown, with the puma’s upper jaw doubling as a headdress over the royal portrait (Proskouriakoff,

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Fig. 4.1 Jade pendant from Piedras Negras that was recovered from the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza: (a) front view; (b) side view; (c) reverse with hieroglyphic inscription. Gift of C. P. Bowditch, 1910. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 10-70-20/C6100

2011 [1944], Fig. 47.1). Similar visual references appear on Stela 2, with a chooj hieroglyph protruding dramatically above the ruler’s forehead, and on Stela 8, where a large feline seems to spring from his headdress (Stuart & Graham, 2003: 21, 43–44). At the same time, the prominent “water scrolls” at the back of the mouth and the striking rise of the central jawline on the headdress also evoke the ahk (“turtle”) component of the regnal name that K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II had inherited from his grandfather (Martin & Grube, 2000: 145; compare Houston, 2016b, Fig. 13.20a; Houston et al., 2006: 142, Fig. 4.4c–d). In these features, the jade effigy clearly mirrors the king’s life-size, turtle mouth-shaped headgear on Stela 6 or the open-mouthed ahk in his headdress on Stela 2, just above the chooj sign (Stuart & Graham, 2003: 21, 36). The artifact thus integrates his childhood and regnal identities into the effigy carving, transcending the temporal divide of the inauguration commemorated in the accompanying inscription, in which the ruler is named simply by his childhood moniker, chooj. By 699, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II and his primary wife, Ix K’atun Ajaw, had been on the throne for over ten years (Martin & Grube, 2000: 145). His kingdom was under pressure from expanding neighbors, and he would ultimately spend his four-decade reign fending off attacks from

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Palenque to the northwest, Yaxchilan just to the south, and more distant Tonina in the Chiapas highlands (Martin & Grube, 2000: 146). Yet the chronotopic value of his jade ornament derived from a deeper tradition of adornment within the local dynasty. Stela 25, dedicated in 608 (9.8.15.0.0), depicts then-king K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (Ruler 1), seated on a jaguar pelt-covered throne and wearing a beaded collar, whose trio of head-shaped pendants foreshadow in their form the belt piece that his namesake would commission some 90 years later. The intervening king, Itzam K’an Ahk III (Ruler 2), also wears a collar with three effigy pendants on Stela 34, dedicated in 652 (Maler, 1901: Pl. XXVII). Although the collar is beaded differently, its head-shaped ornaments are very similar to those worn by his father, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, and may have even been shared between the rulers. K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s commission may well have been inspired by finery worn by one or both of his immediate predecessors. He did, however, wear at least one other belt ornament before having his own carved. Stela 2, dedicated on February 18, 697 (9.13.5.0.0), shows the king scattering incense with a large effigy head on his middle (Morley, 1938: 140; Stuart & Graham, 2003: 21). The eroded contours of its headdress suggest an amphibian form, but the head’s downturned lips contrast with the neutral expression of the piece that the king commissioned a few years later (compare Fig. 4.1a). Important here, too, is the observation that one hole by which K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s ornament would have been attached to a garment or string was drilled postinscription, indicating that the hieroglyphs on the reverse were probably completed conterminously with the carved face (Proskouriakoff, 2011 [1944: 182). For K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II, the ornament literally embodied his sovereign claim to the throne. Its portrait face and hieroglyphic text memorialized a dynastic anniversary achieved and another projected—one that he would eventually surpass in his forty-odd years of reign at Piedras Negras. Although it would have been unusual for an “heirloom” to be worn by the ancestor whom it honored (Houston, 2010), iconographic evidence suggests that K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II did indeed use his commission before passing it to his successor. The clearest image survives on Stela 4 from 711 (9.14.0.0.0), where the middle-aged king wears a modest pendant at the center of his torso that closely resembles the jade retrieved from the Sacred Cenote (Fig. 4.2). Like Stela 2, Stela 4 was erected on the terrace below Str. J-4’s stairway, in front of the large West Group

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Plaza at the base of the acropolis (see Parris, Proskouriakoff, Stuart, and Graham, in Stuart & Graham, 2003: 8–9). This position would have made differences between dynastic outfits in the monumental portraits clearly apparent to viewers. K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II died in mid-to-late 729 and was interred soon thereafter in what archaeologists would later excavate as Burial 5. Even

Fig. 4.2 Bottom fragment of Stela 4 from Piedras Negras, showing K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II standing above two captives with a large belt ornament on his waist. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2004.29.7573

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if he had commissioned the ornament with his eventual heir in mind, he would not have known that heir’s identity at the time. His successor, Itzam K’an Ahk IV, was not born until November 701, two years after the dedication date recorded on the jade that he would eventually inherit (Martin & Grube, 2000: 148; Proskouriakoff, 1960: 458–459). Whether K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II had commissioned the jade piece with a different heir in mind—not an improbable scenario, given the uncertain parentage of Itzam K’an Ahk IV—or in the hope of a future one yet to be born, monuments from his own reign attest that the king intended the ornament to initially adorn his own body.

Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s Inheritance Itzam K’an Ahk IV (Ruler 4) ascended to the Piedras Negras throne on 9.14.18.3.13 (November 10, 729) and, apparently, inherited his predecessor’s ornament along with the dynastic title. The new king and his contemporaries would have remained acutely aware of the heirloom’s chronotopic value, which was defined not only by the prominent ancestral face that it featured but also by publicly visible images of the prior king wearing it, such as on Stela 10. Commemorating the period-ending date 9.15.10.0.0 (June 27, 741), the monument shows Itzam K’an Ahk IV atop a throne of “a neatly bound bundle of textiles” from which K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s jade ornament stares out at the viewer (Fig. 4.3; Houston, 2016a). As the centerpiece of the literal seat of the current ruler’s authority, the inherited pendant can be identified by its reptilian headdress and the two simple, circular earflares framing the human visage (compare Fig. 4.1b). These features clearly distinguish it from the larger, more elaborate ornament on the back of the large jaguar effigy behind the seated king, visible on the stela’s right narrow side (Stuart & Graham, 2003: 54–55). Dedicated just a few years later, Stela 40 reinforced Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s identification with the heirloom (Fig. 4.4). The upright stone monument at the base of the pyramid known as Str. J-3 documents a mortuary ritual in which Itzam K’an Ahk IV reopened and scattered incense into a tomb on 9.15.15.0.0 (June 4, 746) (Hammond, 1981; Houston et al., 2003: 127). He bends over the tomb’s occupant, a largerthan-life woman, most likely his mother, whose outstanding headdress evokes the visual culture of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico (Stone, 1989: 168) (Fig. 4.4b). Importantly, Stela 40 illustrates Itzam K’an Ahk IV

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Fig. 4.3 Bottom fragment of Stela 10 from Piedras Negras, showing Itzam K’an Ahk IV sitting on a throne affixed with a large belt ornament. Photograph by Teobert Maler (1895), Piedras Negras II / El Petén, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut/Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, CC-BY-NC

wearing a prominent belt ornament on his back that, aside from its exaggerated size, closely resembles K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s jade commission, down to the zoomorphic headdress and modest earspools (Carter et al., 2020: 4; compare Fig. 4.1a–b). Such monumental scenes fixed the jade jewel in a specific place and (past) time while simultaneously maintaining

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Fig. 4.4 Stela 40 from Piedras Negras, showing Itzam K’an Ahk IV wearing a large belt ornament on his back as he scatters incense into the open tomb of a female ancestor: (a) photo of carved scene; (b) detail of upper half. Gifts of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1958. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 58-34-20/ 68456.1 & 58-34-20/68459

its presence long after the artifact itself had changed hands or moved out of public view. The jade head’s citation on Stela 40 linked the sitting king, his mother, and his predecessor across the dynastic chronotope of Piedras Negras

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and directly situated the ornament in a lineage-based inheritance. Here, though, personal history may be important in interpreting the piece’s chronotopic value for the sitting king. Nothing in surviving inscriptions suggests an abnormal transition of power to Itzam K’an Ahk IV, and the deceased K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II was buried with an array of sumptuous goods appropriate to his political and social standing (Coe, 1959: 124–125; Martin & Grube, 2000: 147). Yet the “more secluded location” of the latter’s tomb, below the floor of a terrace in the acropolis leading to a modest range structure (Str. J-5) with no associated mortuary pyramid, is unusual and may not have been the originally intended resting place (Scherer, 2015: 185; see Houston et al., 2003: 127). Archaeological evidence also suggests that no reentry ritual was performed in K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s tomb, which had collapsed and been refilled in antiquity (Coe, 1959: 124; Houston et al., 2003: 131; Scherer, 2015: 185). K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II had himself reopened and burned incense in his father’s tomb, in addition to having the deceased “dance” in celebration of his son’s three-k’atun birthday (Fitzsimmons, 1998: 277). The inscription on Stela 8 does not clarify how Itzam K’an Ahk III, who by then had been absent for almost four decades, participated in the ritual, but it clearly attests to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s lifelong investment in grounding his political authority in ancestral and specifically patrilineal inheritance (Fitzsimmons, 1998: 277). Apparently, however, Itzam K’an Ahk IV did not consider his predecessor consequential for his own political identity and thus felt no obligation to consult with that ancestor during his reign. At the same time, there is no explicit epigraphic evidence that Itzam K’an Ahk IV was, in fact, the son of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II (Martin & Grube, 2000: 148). None of the former’s half-dozen surviving monuments records his paternal lineage. Historically, Classic Maya kings whose monumental parentage statements focus primarily or exclusively on their maternal ancestry rather than their patriline tended to have ascended to the throne after a break from the usual father-son dynastic succession (Grube, 1998: 125; Hewitt, 1999: 256; Marcus, 2001: 324). Itzam K’an Ahk IV may have inherited the throne based on his mother’s (potentially foreign) lineage after K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II died without a male heir (Martin & Grube, 2000: 148; Stone, 1989: 168). Or perhaps the new ruler was the former king’s biological son but not born of his favored wife, Ix K’atun Ajaw (Houston, 2016a; Martin & Grube, 2000: 147). The fact that Itzam K’an Ahk IV adopted the regnal name of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s predecessor and father, Itzam K’an Ahk III, and thus

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continued the local tradition of a king taking his grandfather’s name, speaks in favor of the latter scenario (Houston, 2016a; Martin & Grube, 2000: 147). So, too, does the highly public memorialization of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s ornament on Stela 40. The pairing here with a tomb reentry ritual for Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s mother may have been an explicit effort to integrate his dual parental inheritance rather than to exclude his father altogether. The former king is not mentioned in Stela 40’s hieroglyphic text, nor is he the immediate subject of the ritual that it records. But the monument cites K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II nonetheless; the former ruler’s jade visage, here rendered in limestone, accompanies his successor and probable son, Itzam K’an Ahk IV, as he venerates his other parent. Furthermore, it seems that Itzam K’an Ahk IV retained the belt ornament even as he interred with K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II another rich heirloom, a Spondylus shell mosaic cloak that dated back to at least the reign of Itzam K’an Ahk III (Houston et al., 2003: 131; Scherer, 2015: 63–64, 186). The king’s interest in the jade carved with his predecessor’s visage thus seems to have been intentional. If Itzam K’an Ahk IV continued to wear it after the dedication of Stela 40, viewers would have been able to appreciate for themselves the temporal and spatial adjacency of the ornament and its carved representation. That correspondence may have been enhanced by the contrasting materials from which they were made, limestone substituting in the still image for the much harder yet less accessible jade.

Heirloom Disruption: Ha’ K’in Xook and K’inich Yat Ahk III According to a retroactive reference on Piedras Negras Panel 3, Itzam K’an Ahk IV passed away on 9.16.6.11.17 (November 27, 757) and was interred in the pyramidal Str. O-13 just three days later (Escobedo, 2004: 277–278). His mortuary context, excavated by archaeologists as Burial 13, had been reentered in a late eighth-century ceremony documented on Panel 3 and subsequently backfilled (Scherer, 2015: 128; see Barrientos et al., 1997). But archaeological context and local iconography make it doubtful that the belt ornament was buried with Itzam K’an Ahk IV, whose accompanying artifacts included an heirloom shell pectoral (Houston et al., 2003: 131–132). Instead, the jade seems to have remained in the royal assemblage that was passed on to a least one, if not both, of his direct successors.

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Less is known about the two men who occupied the throne immediately after Itzam K’an Ahk IV, but at least one of them seems to have recognized and built upon the inherited piece’s chronotopic value. The first, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk III (Ruler 5), was probably not Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s intended heir and may have ascended to the throne as a replacement for a short-lived successor or uninstalled heir-apparent who had been captured by rival Yaxchilan (Martin & Grube, 2000: 151; Safronov, 2006, cited in Houston, 2016a). Just one image of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk III survives at Piedras Negras, on Stela 14, and what remains of it does not indicate any effigy ornament on his attire. Unfortunately, the texts on the two monuments attributed to his reign preserve few details about his rule (Martin & Grube, 2000: 151). Whether K’inich Yo’nal Ahk III used the belt ornament during his short-lived reign is unknown, but it was apparently passed on to the ruler who succeeded him and may have been the last at Piedras Negras to wear it. Ha’ K’in Xook (Ruler 6) probably took the throne in 767, after K’inich Yo’nal Ahk III had reigned for less than a decade (Martin & Grube, 2000: 151). Ha’ K’in Xook’s few surviving monuments suggest that his own rule was uneventful at best. He appears to have been the son of Itzam K’an Ahk IV and the brother of his immediate predecessor; thus, his rise departed from the usual pattern of filial succession even as it preserved his patriline’s claim to the throne (Houston et al., 2000: 107). Ha’ K’in Xook’s aberrant regnal name and murky epigraphic documentation further allude to an overt break from local dynastic tradition (Houston et al., 2000: 107). Retrospective references by his successor, K’inich Yat Ahk III (Ruler 7), even hint that Ha’ K’in Xook may have abdicated prior to his death in March 780 (Martin & Grube, 2000: 151). The abrupt conclusion to Ha’ K’in Xook’s reign and K’inich Yat Ahk III’s overt monumental emphasis on venerating the long-deceased Itzam K’an Ahk IV, not his two immediate predecessors, suggest that the former had inherited and presided over a politically unsettled Piedras Negras kingdom (Houston et al., 2000: 107; Martin & Grube, 2000: 151). The short-reigning Ha’ K’in Xook does, however, seem to have inherited from his father the effigy jade that had been passed down from K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II. Stela 13, dedicated at the base of Str. O-13 on 9.17.0.0.0 (January 21, 771), portrays Ha’ K’in Xook scattering incense to mark the k’atun period-ending with a large ornament at the center of his torso (Fig. 4.5). The anthropomorphic pendant closely resembles K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s commission, from the concentric earflares

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and zoomorphic headdress with water swirls flanking its mouth to the face’s flared nose and surrounding creases (compare Fig. 4.1a–b). Ha’ K’in Xook’s elaborate attire on Stela 13 firmly locates his regnal identity within the Piedras Negras dynasty even as a prominent shark (xook) element protruding from his headdress underscores his anomalous name. The accompanying inscription is badly eroded, but the placement of this and the later Stela 18 in front of Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s mortuary pyramid suggests that Ha’ K’in Xook claimed continuity with the multigenerational past that the heirloom represented. Interestingly, too, he perpetuated Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s legacy of orienting the pendant’s chronotopic value away from the king whose face it represented, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II, and directing it instead toward a dynastic legitimacy defined by Itzam K’an Ahk IV and remembered on the still-standing Stela 40. Yet Ha’ K’in Xook’s efforts went unrecognized by his successor, K’inich Yat Ahk III. Upon taking the throne in 781, over a year after Ha’ K’in Xook’s abdication—a delay long enough to suggest some contestation for power unmentioned in the epigraphic record—Piedras Negras’s last known ruler used hieroglyphic inscriptions, sculptural portraits, and ritual performance to style himself as a direct heir to Itzam K’an Ahk IV, eliding K’inich Yo’nal Ahk III and Ha’ K’in Xook except for a brief reference to the latter’s renunciation (Houston et al., 2000: 107; Scherer, 2015: 129, 180). K’inich Yat Ahk III would have been just seven years old when Itzam K’an Ahk IV died and, although descended from his patriline, was probably not his son (Houston et al., 2000: 106). Nonetheless, all the new king’s ritual activities, or at least those that he had documented in stone, centered on the early eighth-century king (Escobedo & Alvarado, 1998; Houston et al., 2000: 106–107). At the same time, despite vigorous claims to Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s inheritance, K’inich Yat Ahk III did not appropriate the jade heirloom that had been in the dynasty for over three-quarters of a century leading up to his accession ceremony. No surviving record of the ornament at Piedras Negras postdates Ha’ K’in Xook’s Stela 13. In fact, the one scene in which K’inich Yat Ahk III wears a prominent jewel on his torso, on Stela 12 from 795 (9.18.5.0.0), shows a miniature, full-bodied anthropomorphic ornament, complete with a necklace and loincloth, that clearly diverges from the facial portraits worn by his forebearers (Stuart & Graham, 2003: 60–61). The chronotopic significance of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s jade commission may have been too attached to its most recent

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Fig. 4.5 Stela 13 from Piedras Negras, showing Ha’ K’in Xook scattering incense with a large belt ornament on his waist. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2004.29.7561

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user for K’inich Yat Ahk III’s liking. In fact, Ha’ K’in Xook’s portrait with the pendant on Stela 13 probably was still standing below Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s mortuary pyramid (see Morley, 1938: 238). One possibility is that the pendant, which Itzam K’an Ahk IV had worn and was, in images on Stelae 4, 10, 13, and 40, still wearing when K’inich Yat Ahk III took the throne, could not be ritually “cleansed…of the legacy” of his less commendable successor as easily as the former king’s burial chamber, which K’inich Yat Ahk III purified with a fire ceremony (Scherer, 2015: 129). Or perhaps the jade piece was less disdained than devalued by K’inich Yat Ahk III, who preferred ritual and monumental rather than ornamental evocations of his chronotopic entanglements with Itzam K’an Ahk IV. What happened to the belt ornament, then, if it was not accepted by Piedras Negras’s last known king? Tomb reentry was an enduring tradition at the site; several royal and other elite burials appear to have been retroactively reopened and resealed during antiquity (Fitzsimmons, 2009: 145–155; Scherer, 2015: 128–129, 182–187), and one of them may well have been the initial resting place of the jade pendant. More specifically, the dynastic ornament could have been buried with Ha’ K’in Xook along with, Itzam K’an Ahk IV hoped, the dynastic vulnerability that its last wearer had signified. The location of Ha’ K’in Xook’s burial is asyet unknown, but Burial 10 is a reasonable candidate even without any known epigraphic references to its occupant (Houston et al., 2003: 131; Coe, 1959: 126–127). Its architecture and mortuary goods suggest a royal burial, but the deceased—whose remains were removed in antiquity—was less richly outfitted than either K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II or Itzam K’an Ahk IV (Houston et al., 2003: 130–131). Furthermore, the burial chamber’s wooden ceiling had apparently collapsed, and the space had been reentered centuries earlier and resealed but not backfilled, leaving open the possibility of future reentries (Coe, 1959: 127; Houston et al., 2003: 131).

Conclusions: Chronotopic Values of a Piedras Negras Dynastic Heirloom If the miniature effigy head of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II was indeed buried with a royal family member (Ha’ K’in Xook?), which seems likely, its subsequent exhumation would attest to the chronotopic value that the

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ornament retained and even accumulated through its removal from circulation among the living. The person(s) who retrieved the jade head was not, it seems, a mere looter after booty, given that the goods left behind in Burial 10 included other jadeite artifacts and several dozen beads of the same material (Coe, 1959: 127). Furthermore, the primary occupant’s remains were removed, presumably for reburial elsewhere, and a layer of powdery, white lime was scattered over the floor before the chamber was resealed (Coe, 1959: 127). The archaeological evidence thus suggests intentional reentry for a secondary mortuary ritual that relied on and reactivated collective or “social memory” of the deceased (Joyce, 2000: 206). And the jade head’s recovery—whether planned or impulsive—would have re-contextualized it in the reentry’s present, even as the artifact’s hieroglyphic and sculptural referents remained among the ancestors. We are unlikely to ever know when, why, or by whom the ornament was removed from Piedras Negras. Nor do we know through whose hands it passed before it was fragmented, burned, and surrendered to the waters of the Sacred Cenote in distant Chichen Itza (Joyce, 2000: 206). The sacrificer may well have had little to no knowledge of the jade’s history, the kingdom of Piedras Negras, or the three dynastic rulers who had worn the heirloom. But to those who were literate, the hieroglyphic inscription on its obverse would have clearly broadcasted its antiquity and dynastic associations. Others familiar with iconographic conventions could have recognized the puma and turtle features in the miniature headdress, even if they did not know the wearer’s identity. And for most, if not all, viewers, the jewel would have evoked a faraway past in which divine kings reigned outfitted in effigy belt ornaments and other sumptuous materials that, by the Postclassic period, were known only from images and stories of a bygone era (Houston, 2010). I have argued here that chronotopic value is generated through a thing’s circulation through timespace, often in multiple expressions. As a product of elite craftsmanship, the jade head had been shaped from its highly durable base material—itself imported from the Motagua Valley several hundred kilometers to the south—by a well-trained, presumably local carver for whom the piece was likely a royal commission. The lapidary-scribe’s work was the first intervention explicitly memorialized on the piece. By inscribing his name, ? Xook (“? Shark”), behind the miniature portrait’s chin, he laid a subtle, if unspecified claim to the object and its protagonist that, despite being hidden during actual usage, would

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long outlast his and his king’s human lifespans (Houston, 2016b: 413– 414, Fig. 13.20a; see Kovacevich, 2017). As finished jewelry, the piece attributed to and derived from a king’s body the meaning of dynastic hegemony and access to the precious resource of jade. That value, in turn, warranted the ornament’s iconographic representation in monumental limestone, a process that engaged artists and sculptors who may never have had access to the jade artifact in any other form. Classic Maya viewers of Stelae 4, 10, 13, and 40 would have perceived the citational relationship between the jade and its monumental representations as “two events…in different times…and in different places, but…indissolubly united in a single but complex event”; thus, Bakhtin (1981: 255) writes, “we perceive the fullness of the work in all its wholeness and indivisibility, but at the same time we understand the diversity of the elements that constitute it.” The effigy ornament’s chronotopic value arose from its circulation, both literal and figurative, through space and time and among multiple actors, via both physical exchange of the piece and production of and engagement with monumental images of it. Notably, too, citations of a thing may even achieve wider recognition or reception than the thing itself. As a result, chronotopic value may bind multiple objects or phenomena to each other and to citations of itself, in addition to actors, places, and moments. Yet the jade head’s chronotopic value was neither static nor unidimensional. For its original patron, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II, the ornament was inseparable from his dynastic power and longevity on the throne. His carved face and the hieroglyphic inscription very literally rooted its value in the timespace of his reign. Subsequently, Itzam K’an Ahk IV may have inherited the belt piece from his predecessor, but monumental representations of him suggest a reorientation of the ornament’s primary referent away from the former king to himself and his own understanding of dynastic inheritance. Ha’ K’in Xook, too, seems to have uniquely understood the artifact as not only a token of dynastic authority but in specific association with the deceased Itzam K’an Ahk IV. Yet his own successor did not ascribe the same chronotopic value to the ornament. Despite K’inich Yat Ahk III’s explicit monumental veneration of Itzam K’an Ahk IV, there is no indication that he ever wore the ornament that that very ancestor had once treasured. Finally, for the unknown person who offered the piece into the Sacred Cenote’s waters centuries later, its chronotopic value may well have stemmed from its origins in a timespace

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quite removed from the Postclassic northern lowlands, even if the precise character of those origins was no longer known. Chronotopic value is “ceaselessly emergent” (Bauer, 2019: 344) and changes according to one’s spatially and temporally grounded understanding of the valued thing. It is through this process of contextualized interpretation that “we incorporate [things] not only into the sphere of spatial and temporal existence but also into a semantic sphere. This process of assigning meaning also involves some assigning of value” (Bakhtin, 1981: 257). Value thus becomes “a historical product… handed down by a tradition about which there is a consensus in the judgment of some contemporary group…who, although unnamed by the term itself, are presumably the best judges of its historical authenticity and value” (Agha, 2003: 236). A thing’s spatial position, in contrast, tends to be subsumed within larger assumptions of formal uniqueness—a singular object can, by definition, only occupy one place at any given moment— or, if it is addressed, it is often considered only in relation to relevant actors or other things (e.g., Joyce, 2000: 203–207; Kovacevich, 2017). But space, as a setting for action, experience, or thought, is a critical parameter for assessing material value, and one that archaeologists are uniquely positioned to interpret. In the case presented here, the spatial component of the jade ornament’s chronotopic value is especially evident when considering where and to whom monumental renderings of it were displayed. The scene sculpted on Stela 40’s broad face, for instance, rooted the carved belt artifact not only in Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s personal biography but in the dynastic space of Str. J-3, a pyramid marking the south edge of the royal acropolis (see Parris, Proskouriakoff, Stuart, and Graham, in Stuart & Graham, 2003: 8–9). Stela 40 was discovered to the south of Str. J-3’s front (eastern) stairway on the slope of its second terrace, but details about its archaeological context are sparse (Escobedo, 1997; Morley, 1938: 200). Although it is difficult to know for how long the monument remained visible to passersby, the tomb reentry scene on the standing stela probably faced out away from the pyramid and was thus clearly visible to approaching visitors. Yet social and spatial constraints likely limited the pool of potential viewers. Just a few meters east of the Str. J-3’s front staircase stood a sweatbath (Str. N-1), which was constructed during Itzam K’an Ahk IV’s reign atop an earlier platform (Child, 2006: 294– 296; Satterthwaite, 2005 [1950]). That building and Str. J-3’s marginal position in the corner of the large West Group Plaza, at the foot of

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the acropolis, suggest that the pyramid probably was not a focal point for large-scale gatherings. Consequently, foot traffic along its base—and, by extension, in front of Stela 40—would have been considerably less than other major pyramids at Piedras Negras. Stela 40’s scene of dynastic veneration immortalized the ancestral meaning that Itzam K’an Ahk IV attributed to the jade pendant. But the monument’s contribution to the ornament’s chronotopic value would have varied in later years according to who interacted with the stela or maintained memory of the record that it contained. The jade head commissioned by K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II exemplifies citationality’s contribution to chronotopic value and the dialogical nature of cultural transmission. The ornament itself, as a dynastic possession, probably did not circulate widely in the Piedras Negras royal court. Nor, for practical reasons, did images of the ornament carved on monumental stone. But each king’s wearing of the ornament on his body, as well as records of such use sculpted into stone, maintained the jade’s social presence even when the artifact itself was out of sight. The pendant thus achieved an “enduring permanence” that, like the rulers who wore it, “effected the extraordinary trick of being in several places at the same time” (Houston & Stuart, 1998: 90). It acquired chronotopic value by “materializing time in space”—in other words, by making tangible a conceptual relationship with its visual representations—and displaying to local viewers the “abstract elements” or ideas associated with it (Bakhtin, 1981: 250). For the ornament’s wearers and those around them, its chronotopic value was sustained not only by its material form but by its “temporal-spatial expression[s]” that fixed it in the timespace of eighthcentury Piedras Negras (Bakhtin, 1981: 258). Sculptors’ inclusion of the belt ornament in monumental images of their kings suggests that for these members of the Piedras Negras dynasty, the jade carving’s chronotopic value was rooted not in precise replication or immediate physical access but in its generative, iterative citation through space and time. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Scott Hutson and Charles Golden for the opportunity to participate in this collaboration, to both editors and Stephen Houston for significant feedback on earlier drafts, and to Cynthia Mackey at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum for assistance with image permissions.

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PART II

Lithics and Land

CHAPTER 5

Assembling Value in Mesoamerica John K. Millhauser , Andrea Torvinen , Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza, Camilo Mireles Salcedo, and Ben A. Nelson

Introduction Value is one of those commonsense terms that seems easy to recognize but difficult to explain. What makes one thing more valuable than another? Is value intrinsic in objective qualities or is it subjective and dependent on particular social, cultural, and historical contexts? In the social sciences, it is axiomatic that value is social. It is not only socially defined, but also motivates social action and, through value, social relations are experienced, understood, and reproduced. The exchange of goods, knowledge, and labor are some of the main ways that value is realized.

J. K. Millhauser (B) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Torvinen Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. R. Hutson and C. Golden (eds.), Realizing Value in Mesoamerica, Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44168-4_5

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For archaeologists, who study value through the things that were made and exchanged, it is impossible to ignore the impact of Marx’s materialist theories of value. In his effort to expose the exploitation hidden behind commodity production and exchange in capitalism, Marx differentiated between the “use value” of materials (the qualities of foods to feed, of wood to burn) and the “exchange value” of commodities (based in the labor involved in creating them from materials) (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 126–138). Though steeped in the concerns of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, exchange value was soon recognized as a powerful tool to explain how reciprocal exchanges knit together the fabric of society (Mauss, 1990 [1925]; Simmel, 1900). Social ties, enacted and reinforced through gift exchange, became subjects of intense study in small-scale and egalitarian societies, large-scale complex societies, and everything in between (Appadurai, 1986; Graeber, 2001; Munn, 1992). In the neo-evolutionary approach that is common to archaeological research in Mesoamerica over the last half century, exchange value anchors many explanations of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of complex societies. However, a focus on exchange, and specifically the exchanges of valuables among important people, may be to the detriment of holistic and culturally inclusive understandings of value. Archaeologists’ focus on eye-catching objects, the “goodies” that grab our attention, may lead us to mistake what has been preserved in the archaeological record for what was valuable in the past. Similarly, our focus on the labor to produce goods may lead us to elevate the products as the only things of value and relegate the byproducts as waste, useful to archaeologists to reveal manufacturing processes but unlikely to have been valuable to people in the past. One person’s trash may sometimes be another person’s treasure, but archaeologists can define the wrong things as trash.

V. Y. H. Espinoza Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos, El Colegio de Michoacán, La Piedad, Michoacán, México C. M. Salcedo Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada B. A. Nelson School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

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Here, we suggest a different approach to value, still rooted in Marx’s insights about use value and exchange value, which can center Mesoamerican ways of knowing, being, and valuing over our own. This approach can also decenter humans as the only actors who participate in exchanges and instead envision acts of exchange with and among divine entities or sacred forces. It can expand the notion of exchange to include acts of sacrifice, destruction, dedication, and commemoration that generate and reinforce a broad set of social relations beyond the realm of interpersonal connections (see chapters by De Lucia, Harrison-Buck and Freidel, and Masson). And, it can highlight value created by the assemblage of appropriate things rather than the manufacture of specific items. We take a first step by introducing two puzzling examples of a presumably valued material—obsidian—that do not fit neatly into traditional explanations of value based on exchange in neo-evolutionary models (Fig. 5.1) (see chapters by Cap, Hruby, and Masson in this volume for additional thoughts on obsidian in Mesoamerican value systems). In the Malpaso Valley, Zacatecas, obsidian came from hundreds of kilometers away, but its presumed value based on costs of acquisition is not reflected in its distribution or treatment. Obsidian was widely consumed and primarily used in the form of expedient flakes, much in the same way as locally available stone. In the Tequila Valleys, Jalisco, high-quality obsidian was a stone’s throw away, but estimates of its value based on the scale of production facilities or the degree of skill involved in its transformation into useful (exchangeable) things show little correlation with social complexity, wealth inequality, or political control. Importantly, we make no claims of direct connections between the two cases that we consider. They are separated by time, space, and, most likely, language. Nevertheless, both shared in a broadly Mesoamerican set of traditions evident in architectural and cultural features, like the ball game; portable objects, such as obsidian and pottery; and technologies, such as, in the case of the Tequila Valleys, the production of prismatic blades and the use of comals for cooking. In what follows, we introduce a holistic approach to value that incorporates use value and exchange value into a single framework and that allows for a wider range of actors and activities to be involved in the processes of assembling value. This approach guides our interpretation of the incongruities of expected and observed value in the Malpaso Valley and the Tequila Valleys and shows how they can be resolved by asking what kinds of value obsidian enabled and for whom.

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Fig. 5.1 Map of northern Mesoamerica with sites, regions, and obsidian sources mentioned in the text. Digital elevation model and historic air photos provided courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Mexico

Modeling Mesoamerican Values When Marx differentiated “use value” from “exchange value” in his explanation of how the fetishization of commodities masks the social relations (and social exploitation) behind their production, he laid the foundation for a more expansive view of who participates in exchange and which relations are managed and reproduced through exchanges. Marx’s critique of capitalism matters less for our purposes than his insistence that some aspects of value are rooted in the physical world and biological necessity. Labour, then, as a creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself. (Marx 1976 [1867]: 133)

Because use value and exchange value are both derived from human labor, we could define use value in terms of labor by the self for the self

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and exchange value in terms of labor by the self for others. Appadurai implies the same idea when he defines commodities, which are the quintessential form of exchange value materialized, as any “thing intended for exchange” or “involving the production of use value for others ” (1986: 9, emphasis original). But, we would argue that if exchange value is created through labor and realized through the circulation of valued things among people, use value is also created through labor and realized in circulation—it is just that this circulation is between people and their environments, or as Marx put it, “the metabolism between humans and nature.” In this sense, the notion that non-human actors are part of the exchange relationships that create value is baked into Marx’s critique of capitalism. If we blur the lines between use value and exchange value, we may create space for an encompassing set of relations among people, the natural, and the supernatural. Indeed, Harrison-Buck and Freidel (this volume) draw a similar conclusion: the materialist orthodoxy of Marxist approaches can be reconciled with the supernatural. To the extent that these kinds of relationships informed the actions of humans in the physical world, they should be archaeologically observable. As noted throughout this volume, and especially in chapters by De Lucia, Harrison-Buck and Freidel, and Kovacevich and Callaghan, in many Mesoamerican belief systems, reciprocal relationships exist among natural and supernatural forces, divinities, and humans (see also Graulich, 1997; Hamann, 2002; Millhauser, 2017; Monaghan, 2000). Sacrifice, offerings, and other means of taking valuable goods out of circulation in the material world are often the means of exchange in these relationships. If these kinds of supernatural exchanges were sources of value in Mesoamerica, can we discuss them in terms that allow for broader comparisons based on generalizable motivations? Perhaps, but where do we look for these motives? A political economy perspective would emphasize how people produce valuable things to enable and maintain unequal access to wealth and power (Roseberry, 1989). A ritual economy perspective would emphasize how social and sacred obligations are realized through the production of value in the absence of durable inequality (Spielmann, 2002). These perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Taken together, they account for a wide range of social arrangements through which value was likely to have been materialized in Mesoamerica. However, both perspectives suffer from an emphasis on remarkable things—exotic and eye-catching materials, exquisitely crafted

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objects, monumental and ornate architecture, and extraordinary feasts and ceremonies—to the exclusion of ways of creating or recognizing value. Nevertheless, a deeper dive into political economy and ritual economy perspectives will help guide the synthesis that we propose. In models that emphasize political economy, value is measured in terms of power. Political economy models can accommodate a variety of structures and strategies to explain how political actors gain power. Exclusionary strategies emphasize the monopolization of power by individuals, small groups, and institutions (Blanton et al., 1996). They are often materially associated with surplus production that supports the acquisition and production of prestige goods made of exotic raw materials or through elaborate technological processes or the control of the large-scale production and distribution of staple goods (Brumfiel & Earle, 1987). In more corporate political strategies, power is shared across different groups and sectors of society in ways that inhibit, but do not prohibit, exclusionary strategies (Blanton et al., 1996). The revenue that supports more collective political institutions tends to come from internal sources, which in turn can support more collective forms of political organization (Levi, 1989). When citizens are the source of value that supports state institutions, they can enjoy considerable bargaining power. Where value comes from external sources, leaders have fewer obligations to their citizens and enjoy greater freedom to act in their own interests (Blanton & Fargher, 2008). Both exclusionary and corporate political strategies are predicated on a view of society that is human-centered, competitive, and antagonistic. Thus, strategies in a political economy, and the kinds of economic value they engender and depend upon, are either about actively promoting, or actively resisting, a monopoly of power. In this light, archaeologists may struggle to apply political economy models, even when expanded to corporate (and often collective) strategies, when investigating societies where such monopolies of power were difficult to achieve in a lasting way or where there is little evidence for unequal access to resources. Spielmann’s (2002, 2007, 2008) use of the ritual economy, or what she frames as a “ritual mode of production,” complements political economy models by explaining the intensive production of valuable things in the absence of inequality: The existing archaeological theory concerning [economic] intensification [in small-scale societies] has tended to privilege economic and political

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explanations and largely ignores social action and ritual performance as motivations for economic change... I argue that ceremonial feasting and the need for socially valued goods, which are critical for ritual performance and necessary for a variety of social transactions, create the demand that underwrites and sustains economic intensification in small-scale societies (Spielmann, 2002: 195)

Importantly, we note that Spielmann’s approach is distinct from that elaborated by Wells and Davis-Salazar (2007) and McAnany and Wells (2008) in the context of Mesoamerican societies. These other scholars frame ritual and economy as linked and irreducible into what Watanabe (2007) labels as the “ritual of the economy.” This ritual of the economy is a source of meaning and morals in which ritual pervades all economic activity. Harrison-Buck and Freidel (this volume) lean into the ritual of the economy in their treatment of the inextricability of the sacred from the profane among the upper echelons of Maya society. They raise concerns that archaeologists who emphasize the ritual economy as the “economics of ritual” risk applying the logic of profit-seeking where it does not belong. However, we believe that this risk is based in the social context under investigation more than the ritual economy approach itself. In Harrison-Buck and Freidel’s case, there is a significant risk of framing elite Maya crafters as merely competing for the limited resources of royal and cosmic patrons, but we also see how their relational approach mitigates this risk. In the Malpaso Valley and Tequila Valleys, the subjects of our study, the fact that hierarchy and inequality were muted mitigates the risk of misattributing motives in the ritual economy. Underlying all of these discussions of the bases of value is the notion that human beings (including archaeologists) share the capacity to recognize the qualities of places, materials, and objects that other human beings use to identify value. Blanton and colleagues observe that many prestige goods, which circulate as sources of wealth and evidence of power, are distinguished by their “intrinsic properties such as durability, texture, sheen, color, reflectivity, translucence, magnetic attractiveness, or tonality” (1996: 2, see also Helms, 1993). In a complementary approach to “sacred economies,” Renfrew (2001) emphasizes the importance of sacred places that draw attention and regulate access. Similar notions inform many of the other chapters in this volume (see especially Cap, Horowitz, and Yaeger; Harrison-Buck and Freidel; Hruby; Kovacevich and Callaghan; Masson).

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To reiterate, for the purposes of this study of Mesoamerican value and valuables, we have identified two schools of thought—political economy and ritual economy—which are necessary, but we suspect insufficient, to account for Mesoamerican value systems. Political economy approaches frame surplus production and valuables in the context of competition for power among people. Ritual economy approaches address the elaboration of social complexity (as seen in monumental construction, the circulation of goods over long distances, and specialized production) in the absence of centralized political authority. Here, we attempt to reconcile these schools of thought by imagining an array of relationships through which value could be realized and the associated material patterns by which past and present observers could recognize value. We move beyond traditional emphases on the visibility of specific materials, distinctive objects, and noteworthy places to include the assemblage and association of things that might otherwise be ignored in isolation. Obsidian and Value in the Malpaso Valley The Malpaso Valley, Zacatecas, in the high basin-and-range east of the Sierra Madre Occidental, was one among many locations where small polities flourished during the late Classic and Epiclassic (500–900 CE). It is best known for the monumental and fortified site of La Quemada, which overlooks the valley from a prominent ridge, over 100 km of causeways that connect hundreds of sites to La Quemada, and a mortuary tradition that involved the curation and display of human skulls and long bones (Nelson, 1995; Nelson & Martin, 2015; Nelson et al., 1992; Trombold, 1991). Originally imagined as an outpost of expansionist central Mexican powers, such as Teotihuacan and Tula, intent on exploiting the rich mineral resources of the region, chronological research at La Quemada and two smaller sites, Los Pilarillos and El Potrerito, demonstrates poor correlation with the height of power at either of these distant centers (López-Delgado et al., 2019; Nelson, 1997; Torvinen & Nelson, 2020; Turkon et al., 2018). The inhabitants of the Malpaso Valley, like others throughout the region, did participate in spheres of interaction that included core areas of Mesoamerica and through which people, goods, knowledge, and beliefs circulated (Jimenez, 2020). However, the current view of La Quemada and the Malpaso Valley is one of local origins and influential regional interactions (Jimenez, 2020; Nelson, 1995; Turkon, 2004).

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Systematic excavations on the residential terraces of La Quemada and at the smaller settlements of Los Pilarillos and El Potrerito yielded collections from which over 54,000 chipped stone artifacts have been analyzed. Rhyolite, chert, and basalt, which were all locally available, account for 96% of this collection (Table 5.1). Provisioning and production of these materials appear to have been decentralized and were probably practiced as intermittent activities within households and communities throughout the valley. At first glance, the obsidian in the collections has all of the hallmarks of value in a traditional political economy model. Obsidian is scarce. The 1,771 obsidian artifacts in the collection represent only 3% of the chipped stone artifacts analyzed. Obsidian took special effort to acquire. Given that the closest known source of obsidian was over 100 km away from the Malpaso Valley, it is surprising that any is present at all (Table 5.2). And, obsidian was unevenly distributed. Unlike other presumably valuable objects, such as shell beads, blue-green stones, and finely decorated ceramics, obsidian was far more commonly found at La Quemada than at hinterland sites. But despite these characteristics, the forms of obsidian artifacts and the contexts in which they were found indicate no particularly special significance for the material. Table 5.1 Counts of artifacts by raw material types in the chipped stone collections from the Malpaso Valley and Talleres 3 at Los Guachimontones Malpaso Valley

Tequila Valleys

Raw material

La Quemada

Los Pilarillos

El Potrerito

Total

Talleres 3

Basalt Cryptocrystalline Obsidian Rhyolite Other / Unidentified Total Basalt Cryptocrystalline Obsidian Rhyolite Other / Unidentified Total

614 2454 1703 34,833 159

625 999 99 9671 50

139 428 1 2451 13

1378 3881 1803 46,955 222

11 2 22,791 – 2

39,763 2% 6% 4% 88%