Supervised by Dr. Jason Yaeger, Bernadette Cap will conduct archaeological investigations and analysis of artifacts and soil samples collected at the ancient Maya site of Buenavista del Cayo, Belize. Buenavista is a major center located in the upper Belize River valley near the present bank of the Mopan River. Work conducted by Joseph Ball and Jennifer Taschek has documented that the site was first occupied around 960 BC and grew in size and importance from AD 240-950 while serving as a local venue for regal-ritual and administrative activities geared towards large audiences. Ms. Cap's research will address the economic function of Buenavista by investigating one of the largest plaza spaces at the site to determine if it served as a marketplace.
A marketplace is a specific location where people agree to meet at pre-set times to exchange material goods. Because archaeologists cannot directly observe the actual action of exchange between individuals they look for material traces that reflect these exchanges, such as stalls with associated concentrations of material goods. Some researchers have begun to search for indications of marketplaces among the Maya but there still is no scholarly consensus as to whether marketplaces existed between AD 240 and 950 in the Maya lowlands. It is also unclear what their archaeological manifestations might be. Early marketplace research initially focused on lines of evidence such as architectural patterns to identify their existence and location but more recent studies have started to examine artifact and soil chemical patterns to make interpretations. This study attempts to refine the archaeological study of prehistoric marketplaces further by developing empirically testable correlates and using data recovery techniques focused on fine-grained analysis, including microartifacts (those less than 4 mm) and microstratigraphy, not used in previous marketplace studies.
The successful identification of an ancient Maya marketplace will permit an understanding of how marketplaces were spatially organized, including patterns of traffic flow, the types of goods exchanged, the spatial arrangement of vendors of different kinds of goods, and the degree of stability in organization over time. This new data will be important for the discovery of marketplaces at other Maya sites but will also contribute to the debate on the degree to which Maya economic systems were centralized. The presence of a marketplace at Buenavista would imply a more centralized exchange system and potentially more elite involvement in the distribution of goods, especially every-day goods, than assumed by most Maya scholars.
This project also will have several broader impacts beyond the scientific realm. First, the local Belizean community around Buenavista will benefit from this project through employment and training opportunities. Presentations made by the author within these communities and at the Belize Archaeological Conference, held annually in Belize and attended by local and foreign archaeologists, students and the general public, will help to build further understandings of Belize's ancient Maya past. The results of this research also will be disseminated to a wider audience through online publication of field reports, publications in journals, and presentations at professional conferences. Finally, this project will be working in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin archaeological field school, thus offering American undergraduates archaeological training and the opportunity to experience a different culture.
