Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies

8: Regional and Local Market Systems in Aztec-Period Morelos

161 Ancient market systems are regional in scope. Whether they take the form of isolated solar market systems or complex interlocking systems (C. Smith 1974, 1976a), market systems integrate regions economically. Ethnographers and historians have found that large regional peasant market systems—the kind Carol Smith described as complex interlocking marketing systems—are typically composed of two hierarchical levels with distinct spatial expressions. The smaller level, which I call the local system, usually consists of a weekly market that serves a town and its hinterland. In China, G. William Skinner (1964) has called this the “standard marketing community,” and in many parts of Mesoamerica the local system consists of a central town (municipio or cabecera) and its rural dependents (sujetos). These local systems then form parts of a larger regional market system based in a major urban center. For example, in Mexico the Valley of Oaxaca regional market system in the twentieth century comprised a number of smaller local systems that corresponded to municipios (Cook and Diskin, eds. 1976; Malinowski and de la Fuente 1982). The distinction between local and regional systems in a complex market system is important for understanding peasant economies and social organization, but archaeologists have had trouble distinguishing these levels in ancient societies. Regional survey projects employing systematic surface collections of artifacts often cover areas of sufficient size to model the different levels of market systems, but the typological composition of surface collections may not provide the chronological and spatial resolution to address this issue. By applying chemical provenance methods to survey Michael E. Smith Chapter Eight Regional and Local Market Systems in Aztec-Period Morelos MichAeL e. SMith 162 collections, however, archaeologists have made headway in distinguishing local and regional systems in the Aztec-period Basin of Mexico (Garraty 2007; Minc 2006). Excavation data typically have greater chronological and contextual control than surface collections, but in most areas too few sites have been excavated to reconstruct regional exchange systems from excavated data. In the Mexican state of Morelos, however , a number of Aztec-period sites (Middle and Late Postclassic periods) have been excavated by U.S. and Mexican archaeologists. I have analyzed the ceramic collections from nine of these sites (M. E. Smith 2010) and used these data to reconstruct the local and regional levels of market systems and their changes through time within the Aztec period (ca. AD 1100–1520). The full ceramic data and an abbreviated version of the spatial analysis are presented elsewhere (M. E. Smith 2010). Ethnohistoric sources describe the importance of markets, merchants, and commercial exchange in Postclassic Morelos, and the documentary information is strengthened by a number of archaeological studies of ceramic and obsidian exchange (see the next section). These data, however, provide little information on the spatial extent or organization of the market systems. In this chapter I employ several kinds of ceramic data to generate a series of schematic maps of the likely spatial extent of regional market systems. My argument is based on analogy with ethnographic work on peasant market systems in which local and regional systems have different material culture expressions. This chapter builds on recent conceptual and methodological advances in the archaeological analysis of past economies (e.g., Earle 2002; Feinman and Nicholas, eds. 2004; Hirth 1996, 1998; M. E. Smith 2004; see also Garraty, Chapter 1). The fine-grained analysis of ceramic distributions, coupled with relatively detailed ceramic chronologies in Postclassic Morelos (Hare and Smith 1996; M. E. Smith 2010; M. E. Smith and Doershuk 1991), permit the analysis of changing spatial and economic dynamics of market systems within the Aztec period. Postclassic Economy and sociEty in morElos The modern Mexican state of Morelos is located in the Central Mexican highlands, separatedfromtheBasinofMexicotothenorthbytheAjuscomountainrange(Figure 8.1a).1 The elevation of Morelos is 1,000 meters lower than the Basin of Mexico, and the environmental differences between the two regions provided a major stimulus to exchange throughout the prehispanic past (Sanders 1956). Like the Basin of Mexico, Morelos was settled by Nahuatl speakers claiming an origin in Aztlan. These peoples arrived in the Early Aztec period (ca. AD 1100–1300), a time of population growth and the founding of cities and dynasties. City-states (altepetl in Nahuatl) spread across the landscape of Morelos, the Basin of Mexico, and other parts of Central Mexico. Early Aztec polities engaged in an active program of exchange in both the Basin of Mexico (Minc 2006; Minc, Hodge, and Blackman 1994) and Morelos and also warred with one another. [18...