BYU research team's special methods find ancient Maya marketplace

Coaxing answers from 1500-year-old clues hidden in soil clumps, BYU environmental scientists identified a marketplace in an ancient Maya city, calling into question archaeologists' widely held belief that people of the era relied on rulers to tax and re-distribute goods, rather than trading them with one another.

As reported in the December issue of Latin American Antiquity, BYU professor of environmental science Richard Terry and his student team confirmed the location of a suspected marketplace on the Yucatan peninsula, giving Maya studies powerful new evidence for understanding the advanced civilization's economy.

Terry's specialty is analyzing soil from archaeological sites to find chemical traces that indicate what took place there. Such creative detective work is particularly useful in tropical areas, where 90 percent of inhabitants' possessions were made from organic material that has since decomposed.

"Looking at soil residues promises to open up the investigation of ancient Maya economic systems for the first time," said Bruce Dahlin, lead author on the new study and archaeologist with Shepherd University."It's the first way of confirming that an area that looks like a marketplace, is a marketplace."

In trying to determine if the Maya of the Classic era (about A.D. 300 to 900) had a market economy, scientists had found large, open areas within settlements of the period, but no indications of the areas' purposes. Terry's soil analysis revealed outlines of use clearly consistent with a modern-day open-air market in the region.

"These methods reveal intricate patterns of human behavior in what would ordinarily be invisible — the chemical residues left by trading, marketing, farming, and habitation," said Stephen Houston, a Maya scholar at Brown University not associated with the study. "[Terry] is at the forefront of developing and applying these methods in the New World."

Dahlin explained that he and other Maya archaeologists had recognized that many Maya cities appeared to have held more people than the regions' agricultural capacities could have supported. For years, researchers sought evidence of sophisticated farming or irrigation techniques to explain this. The idea of a market economy that facilitated the importing of food and other goods wasn't taken seriously, in part because it would be difficult to distinguish from most archaeologists' belief that the Maya elite had a tax and tribute system and effectively paid their underlings for loyalty by passing goods down the social ladder. But proof of the existence of a market would certainly prove a market economy.