PROVISIONING THE CEREN HOUSEHOLD

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.