The Organization of Chipped-Stone Economies at Piedras Negras ...

consequence of this perspective is that the socio-economic mechanism of interaction
between various players in Maya society is often overlooked or reduced to broad,
nonspecific terms.
Regarding the problem of royal control over utilitarian economies, it is proposed
here that neither of the above perspectives is entirely wrong, but rather, each case
illuminates local patterns in areas that had unique access to resources, political history,
social organization, and religious expression. It is possible that control of any economic
system could have changed through time, because many Classic Maya polities had
unstable political fortunes with very real effects on material expression (e.g., art,
architectural, and writing style). Ultimately, royals were interested in so-called utilitarian
economies, and probably what most Westerners would consider mundane natural
elements, but the degree to which they manipulated them was contextually dependent.
Some materials may have had more intrinsic value than others, but again, local conditions
influenced how a material was valued at any given time. This is not to say that the ruling
elites were the only factor in determining meaning and value of goods and producers.
Local conditions include forces outside of elite purview (e.g., nonelite religious beliefs
and large, openly accessible natural resources) and ultimately stem from a combination of
social and environmental factors that may not have been connected to the extant,
burgeoning, or declining realm of kingly power and influence. It is thus important to
reconstruct, as much as is possible, the history of relative value per site, before making
general statements about the role of any material type in Maya society (Mitchum 1981).
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