Daily life of the ancient Maya recorded on murals at Calakmul, Mexico

Abstract

Research into ancient societies frequently faces a major challenge in accessing the lives of those who made up the majority of their populations, since the available evidence so often concerns only the ruling elite. Our excavations at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico, have uncovered a ''painted pyramid:'' a structure decorated with murals depicting scenes of its inhabitants giving, receiving, and consuming diverse foods, as well as displaying and transporting other goods. Many are accompanied by hieroglyphic captions that describe the participants, and include spellings of key subsistence items. Collectively, they offer insights into the social mechanisms by which goods were circulated within major Maya centers.archaeology ͉ hieroglyphic writing ͉ nanoparticles

Ancient Maya Commerce : Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil

“…The writings of Bishop Diego de Landa and other ethnohistoric documents, such as the Motul and vienna dictionaries, confirm that craftspeople used plant fibers for a rich assortment of goods, or what Landa described as "an infinity of things, " during the contact period (Landa 1978:102). Baskets, mats, rope, hats, and nets are all well represented in the artistic corpus of the Classic period (Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, and Martin 2009;Clark and Houston 1998;Houston 2013;Mefford 1992;Taschek 1994). The central place of cordage products continues into the ethnographic present.…”

“…In markets that take place day after day in the same location, administrators or vendors might build durable stalls. This would result in architectural features such as the arcadelike stone buildings in the East Plaza of Tikal ( Jones 1996) or the rows of small buildings on the Chiik Nahb Acropolis at Calakmul (Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, and Martin 2009;Tokovinine and Beliaev 2013).…”

“…29M-97 in Folan's map) recovered spectacularly preserved murals depicting scenes of men and women giving, receiving, and consuming a variety of goods. Hieroglyphs close to each person read as labels-"tamale person, " "maize gruel person, " "clay vessel person, " "salt person, " "tobacco person" (Carrasco vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro 2012;Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, and Martin 2009;Martin 2012)-not unlike the way the Aztecs referred to sellers of goods at their markets. Such scenes have been interpreted as depicting feasts, but the location of the murals among architecture that resembles market stalls strengthens the argument that the scenes depict a marketplace.…”

“…II) and its palace (Str. III) lies what Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, and Martin (2009) refer to as the Chiik Nahb complex, a 2.5-ha space containing 68 buildings, most of which sit low to the ground, organized in rows running north/ south. Folan, Fletcher, and colleagues (2001:234) suggest that this complex may be a marketplace: the rows of low structures could be market stalls.…”

“…We do, however, believe that our findings at Chunchucmil join the results of other studies in forcing a revision not just of our understanding of ancient Maya economies, but of ancient Maya life as a whole. As work at sites such as Tikal ( Jones 1996( Jones , 2015, Motul de San José (Halperin et al 2009), Caracol Chase 2004:118-119, 2014), El Perú/Waka' (Eppich and Freidel 2015), Trinidad de Nosotros , Calakmul (Carrasco vargas, vásquez López, andMartin 2009), Buenavista (Cap 2015), Mayapán (Masson and Freidel 2012;Masson and Peraza Lope 2014;Terry et al 2015), Cobá , Maax Na , Chichén Itzá (Braswell and glascock 2002;Cobos and Winemiller 2001:289), Palenque (Barnhart 2007:115), Xunantunich (Keller 2010), Lubaantun (Hammond 1972b, but see West 2002, Ceibal (Bair 2010), Quiriguá ( Jones and Sharer 1986), and elsewhere reveals the importance of market-based exchange, our models of political economy and social organization must change in order to accommodate these revelations. To the extent that Maya economies were embedded in the rest of Maya life-and recent work shows that economies were embedded to a great extent (McAnany 2010;Wells 2006)-new findings in the economic domain demand new thinking about other domains, including politics, ritual, and identity.…”