gems, jade, jadeite, fei cui, Mesoamerica, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mayans, Olmecs, Aztecs, archaeology, history, archaeogemology, Pre-Columbian jade; Costa Rica; Maya; exchange; iconography, lapidary

Survey and preliminary excavations at the Classic Maya centre of Cancuén have revealed its function as a gateway for goods moving from the Highlands to the Maya Lowlands. It is believed that Cancuén’s strategic location along the largest trade and communication route in western Petén (Figure 1) enabled the site’s royal dynasty to control the exchange of prestige goods between these two regions. Initial investigations identified evidence of trade in the form of exotic, non-perishable commodities such as jade, obsidian, and pyrite. These materials have been recovered from residential contexts, either as raw materials or in various stages of production. Areas devoted to the manufacture of prestige goods appear to have been concentrated in non-elite residences and occur alongside the production of utilitarian objects. These contexts have led to the formulation of several hypotheses concerning the nature of production and exchange at Cancuén: (1) members of the Cancuén elite controlled the production and exchange of prestige goods, while a parallel household economy produced utilitarian goods (Kearney 1996); (2) Cancuén’s strategic location allowed its inhabitants to participate in a centralized market system in which all households had access to certain materials or basic goods (Hirth 1998), while some residences specialized in producing objects for exchange (Sheets 2000); and (3) a growing population of “secondary elites” (Adams 1981), “intermediaries,” or azmen uinic, as defined by Chase and Chase (1992), began to specialize in production and exchange in order to accommodate the increasing size of the elite population.