Show me the money! Reassessing the "barter story" in the pre-Hispanic Maya marketplace Eleanor Harrison-Buck 2026, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

https://www.academia.edu/180820409/Show_me_the_money_Reassessing_the_barter_story_in_the_pre_Hispanic_Maya_marketplace I reassess the place of barter in the ancestral Maya economy and disentangle its evolutionary ties to money, departing from Graeber and others who suggest barter is contingent on the existence of monetized economies. Historical, linguistic, and ethnographic data on Mesoamerican and Andean barter markets highlight shared traits centered on a moral economy of mutual sacrifice and reciprocity where exchanges are valued based on personified labor and social consensus, not an objectified currency. Unlike monetary exchanges where the qualities of persons and things are separate, barter-based exchanges personify objects by conflating the subjective and objective criteria. This is illustrated in marketing titles depicted in the Aztec Florentine Codex and in the Classic Maya murals from Calakmul where the objects are never valued independently of the person who produced and sold them. A relational economy model derived from sociology (e.g., Zelizer, 2012) sheds light on this human-object conflation as a precondition of barter where the social is not “embedded” (Granovetter, 1990) but mutually constituted in the economic transaction. In this way, barter as a reciprocal economic arrangement can move beyond Polanyi's “great divide” and can be given the serious theoretical consideration it deserves in our reconstructions of the pre-Hispanic Maya marketplace.