Abstract
The Classic-period households of the Ceren village in
the southeastern periphery of the Maya area provisioned
themselves by one of three different economies. (1) Household
members produced many items for intrahousehold use, including
architecture, food, and some artifacts, with no input from
outside. (2) Each household produced some commodity in
excess of what they needed for their internal consumption,
by means of part-time specialization, and they used this
for exchange with other households within the village or
nearby. This is termed the horizontal or village economy.
The commodities included craft items such as groundstone
tools and painted gourds as well as agricultural specialities
such as agave for fiber. (3) Each household obtained distant
exotic items, such as obsidian tools, jade axes, and polychrome
serving ceramics, by exchanging their household surplus
commodities in elite centers. In this paper, this is called
the vertical economy. The choices available to commoner
households in negotiating economic transactions in various
elite centers gave them economic power and could have the
effect of constraining the elite in setting exchange equivalencies.
This is quite different from the view from the top of the
pyramid which generally depicts commoners as the exploited
class at the bottom of a powerful political and economic
hierarchy.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Geography, Planning and Development
Cited by
81 articles.
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