Regional Economic Integration in the Coastal Maya Lowlands: The Lithic Assemblage Of Saktunha, Belize

Abstract

As a small Late-to-Terminal Classic island community specialized in the procurement of marine resources, the site of Saktunha in Northern Belize reflects the dynamics of regional and long-distance exchange along the coastal margins of the eastern Maya Lowlands. An analysis of the lithic assemblage from the site therefore pertains to questions of Maya socioeconomic complexity that are contentiously debated in current thought on ancient Mesoamenca. A significant amount of early stage reduction debris, chert cobble cores, and tool forms not known to have been exportedfrom well-documented inland centers of lithic craft specialization were noted among the tools and debitage recoveredfrom Saktunha. This finding raises a number of issues with prevailing theoretical models of Maya regional economy. The producer-consumer model, which dominates thought on lithic exchange on the eastern Maya Lowlands, suggests that communities located outside of the Northern Belize Chert-bearing Zone and without immediate access to local raw materials should be overwhelmingly dependent on the workshops of sites like Colha for their stone tool needs. The majority ofutilized chert implements recoveredfrom Saktunha to date are, in fact, locally knapped informal tools. The present study therefore concludes that the site was engaged in a low intensity trade for inland chert in addition to the more widely known exchange in formal tools.