gems, jade, pyroxene jade, fei cui, Mesoamerica, Guatemala, Mexico, Aztec, Olmec

An understanding of the organization of production and exchange of goods such as jade, shell, obsidian, chert, and textiles has proven to be quite challenging for Maya scholars. The answers to questions of who produced these items (i.e., elites or commoners, men or women), how they were transported and exchanged across the landscape, what routes were taken, and who consumed these objects still elude us to a great degree. Part of the problem may be due to the highly variable nature of classic Maya polities, as well as changes in economic systems through time, but another contributing factor to these debates has been the traditional focus on elite contexts to the exclusion of commoner households (i.e., Robin 2003). This situation is beginning to be remedied, and new research is revealing an even more complicated picture than what was expected in many cases. The production and exchange of jade artifacts highlight intertwined relationships between the status of the crafters, the location of the centers near valuable resources and trade routes, political ties and alliances, and also the power of elites and nonelites over their political and economic destinies. once argued to be the sole province of the classic Maya elite, jade has been shown to have been crafted by commoners as well. its exchange patterns are equally as confounding, possibly not restricted to spheres of elite exchange and maybe even traded in markets. commoners not only created jade artifacts, but also they may have consumed them in some forms. The entangled nature of the production and exchange of jade reflects the intricacies of the classic Maya economic system as a whole and can provide a window into these economic patterns. For this reason, I will focus here on how jade was produced and consumed during the classic period, with an emphasis on evidence from the site of Cancuen, Guatemala (Figure 10.1).