This volume provides a fresh perspective on an incredibly important issue in Maya studies: market economies and marketplace identification in places where these two related topics have often been overlooked. Editor Eleanor King observes that Maya marketplaces have been hiding in plain sight, obscured by preconceived assumptions about Maya societies. Substantivist ideas, rising out of Karl Polanyi's old assertions against the development of premodern commercial markets, are still persistently applied to prehistoric societies, despite little hard evidence. The assembled authors of this volume aim to correct these outdated views, providing evidence for the existence of Classic Maya marketplaces while describing a combination of new and old methods for their identification. A key unifying theme of the case studies is the focus on the identification of marketplace locations within Classic Maya sites. The narrower location-based focus makes this volume particularly important, because this perspective has not been used in the many...

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