Maya Political Economy: A Spatial, Temporal, and Contextual Analysis of Jade Deposits throughout the Southern Lowlands

Jade is a valuable tool for studying Maya political economy because it is not only geologically rare but socially and ritually significant. Control of jade acquisition, production, and distribution became a measure of the power, prestige, and authority of the increasingly competitive polity elites. However, there is no catalog of jade artifacts for the Maya region. Therefore, this study compiles jade data from eight Southern Lowland sites with well-documented collections, creating a publicly available catalog of 19,250 contextually secure jade artifacts. Many of the data fields present new typologies with normalized data, permitting regional analysis that previously had been impossible due to site-specific naming conventions. Since jade utilization is intricately linked to the Maya political economy, changes in utilization over time likely correlate to sociopolitical changes