Classic Maya Provincial Politics: Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands

12. Integration and Interdependence: The Domestic Chipped-Stone Economy of the Xunantunich Polity

c h a p t e r 1 2 Integration and Interdependence The Domestic Chipped-Stone Economy of the Xunantunich Polity Jon C. VandenBosch, Lisa J. LeCount, and Jason Yaeger since social compleXity and elite authority are founded on the productive base formed by commoner households, it is incumbent that we have a better understanding of the economic principles by which that base was organized. Rather than consider the relationships between elites and commoners, here we focus on the relationships that bind commoner households to one another and horizontally integrate the commoner segment of ancient society. To measure integration, household chipped-stone assemblages are utilized to determine the degree to which households were differentiated and to identify the spatial scale at which rural households interacted. According to Olivier de Montmollin (1989a:17), understanding the degree to which groups are socially integrated involves determining the degree to which groups are interdependent. Finding inspiration in Émile Durkheim’s concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity, he suggests that groups with highly redundant domestic economies and limited craft specializations are less connected to larger social groups and political institutions than those whose economic ties are more complexly organized . The basic assumption is that specialization and exchange promote not only economic interdependence but social and political integration as well. Taking this model one step further, de Montmollin (1989a:25) associates low degrees of interdependency with segmentary polities and high degrees of differentiation with more unitary polities. Although we agree with de Montmollin that increased economic differentiation should be a defining characteristic of more centralized political arrangements, we take a less hierarchical approach by assuming that Integration and Interdependence 273 no single organizing principle is applicable to all commoner households, especially when economic relations are viewed at different scalar levels. That is to say, economic relations among households within a settlement zone may be quite different from those among households located in different settlement zones. Further, relations between hinterland and urban households may be different still. All these relations have real, and quite varied, political implications for individual commoner households. What we are discussing is, at best, considered in the literature as independent specialization that takes place in the household (Clark and Parry 1990:298). What we know about domestic production among many modern agriculturalists is that villages are composed of economically undifferentiated and largely self-sufficient farmers (VandenBosch 1999:56). On the surface , there appear to be no specialists, but some people do participate more actively in the village economy than others by exchanging surplus goods. Because the scale and intensity of production (sensu Costin 1991) is expected to be low, we are reluctant to utilize the term “specialization.” Furthermore, our interest is less about the parameters of production than about economic relationships between commoner households. Thus, we prefer the expression “economic differentiation,” defined as some households producing goods in excess of their own needs for use or consumption by others. Our use of the expression is similar to Richard Blanton and colleagues’ (1993:17) concept of horizontal differentiation in the sense that we are looking at how households of equal rank function and interact economically. Documenting variations in the economic organization within the lowest strata of ancient Maya society has not been a major research priority (cf. Gonlin 1994; Sheets 2000; Webster and Gonlin 1988; also Douglass 2002). When economic differentiation among commoners has been identified in the past several years, such differences are frequently attributed to patchy resource distributions that result in economically specialized zones or communities (Ford 1991; McAnany 1989; Shafer and Hester 1983). We propose that when archaeologists observe variability in the organization of domestic economies, we should ask not only whether such variability indicates economic differentiation among households, but also whether it implies economic interdependence. Were households integrated with one another or were they autonomous? Did local authorities at the community or polity level influence the means by which households were economically integrated? Or was the coordination of household economies orchestrated 274 vandenbosch, lecount, and yaeger among commoner households themselves, without influence from either local or regional authorities? The identification of the scales at which household economies were organized can provide crucial clues about the reach of political authority and the bases upon which that authority is founded. To determine the nature and strength of economic interdependence among commoner households, Jon VandenBosch (1999) focused primarily on the chipped-stone economy. For him, the term “lithic economy” refers to...