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Long-Distance Movement of Goods in the Mesoamerican Formative and Classic

Author(s): Robert D. Drennan


Source: American Antiquity, Vol. 49, No. 1, (Jan., 1984), pp. 27-43
Published by: Society for American Archaeology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/280510
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LONG-DISTANCE MOVEMENT OF GOODS IN THE MESOAMERICAN
FORMATIVE AND CLASSIC

Robert D. Drennan

Many models for the development of complex societies in Mesoamerica have assigned a major role to the
economic importance of long-distance trade or exchange. Consideration of the distances between major centers
of the Formative and Classic indicates that basic foodstuffs could not have been profitably moved between them.
The evidence for the Early and Middle Formative indicates that long-distance movement of any material of which
we have evidence could not have had much economic importance. By Early Classic times higher population levels
make it possible to speak of long-distance movement of goods other than food staples on a scale that could have
had a significant impact on a complex society.

Some commodities found in Mesoamerica's Prehispanic archaeological record have long been
easy to recognize as distant from their points of origin (such as marine shell in the Mexican highlands),
and recent advances in chemical "fingerprinting" of sources of other materials (most notably ob-
sidian) have opened new possibilites for documenting movement of goods. Some studies (such as
those of Pires-Ferreira [ 1975] and Zeitlin [ 1982]) move beyond such documentation toward attempts
to reconstruct the changing patterns of organization of exchange. These efforts continually provide
more substance for the creation and testing of hypotheses concerning the role that exchange (and
other means of acquiring needed materials) plays in the processes of sociopolitical change. It has
been suggested that such a role became important as long ago as the Early Formative. The notorious
presence of objects in the "Olmec" style in many widely separated parts of Mesoamerica has been
attributed to an Olmec pochteca seeking out goods that were required at San Lorenzo or La Venta
(Coe 1965b: 122-123). In a related vein, it has been argued that the locations of sites with Olmec-
style objects can be explained by their importance in controlling crucial trade routes (e.g., Grove
1968; Grove et al. 1976). Hirth (1978a) has advanced the hypothesis that Chalcatzingo owes its
development as a major settlement to its role as a gateway community in such a trade network,
and Zeitlin (1978:204) attributes the growth of a large community at Laguna Zope in the Early
Formative to "a desire ... to take advantage of the growing long-distance demand for ornamental
shells." Pires-Ferreira and Flannery (1976:286) describe interregional movement of utilitarian and
nonutilitarian goods reaching "impressive proportions" in the Formative, and Flannery (1968:107-
108) has suggested that the underlyingthe function of highly visible movement of luxury items in
the Early Formative was to facilitate movement of foodstuffs which were of more direct ecological
significance.
Long-distance trade or exchange has also become pivotal in many models of the development of
the Classic period states. A number of studies have documented the extent of obsidian working at
Teotihuacan and suggested that the export of this commodity to other parts of Mesoamerica was
important in the development of that city (Charlton 1978; Millon 1970:1081-1082, 1973:45; Spence
1977). And the reverse has also been claimed; Teotihuacan is seen as an expansionistic state
motivated by the desire to acquire goods from distant regions (Parsons 1969:156; Parsons and Price
1971; Pasztory 1978:9-10). Many scholars find it easy to see by Teotihuacan times features docu-

Robert D. Drennan, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

American Antiquity, 49(1), 1984, pp. 27-43.


Copyright ? 1984 by the Society for American Archaeology

27
28 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

mented historically for Conquest period societies: "Raw materials, markets, exotic goods, and the
elimination of economic competition seem to have been the primary goals behind Aztec, Toltec,
and Teotihuacano military policy" (Diehl 1981:294). Sanders argues that the famous Teotihuacan
"presence" at Kaminaljuyfi is a result of Teotihuacfn's desire to monopolize control of obsidian
supplies for all of Mesoamerica (1973:353) and to control the trade in various commodities in the
Maya region for profit in the capitalistic sense (1977:407-408). Litvak King (1970) speaks of a pan-
Mesoamerican commercial network focused on a Teotihuacan whose very survival depended upon
the goods the network provided. The need to acquire certain materials from outside a resource-
deficient zone has been argued as being behind the development of Classic Maya society (Rathje
1971, 1972; Rathje et al. 1978); and Dahlin (1979) finds significance for the Classic Maya sequence
in his reconstruction that a group of mercantilistically oriented people migrated to the fringes of
the Pet&n in the Late Formative. For the Classic period there has been considerable interest in
exchange over shorter distances as well. Sanders has long advocated the importance to Teotihuacfn's
development of complex economic specialization and interdependence within the Central Mexican
Symbiotic Region (Sanders 1956, 1968; Sanders and Price 1968). Sanders and Webster (1978) have
investigated the effect of such a dynamic in the courses of development of other regions within
Mesoamerica as well. And Spencer (1982) sees the transition from chiefdom to state in the Valley
of Oaxaca as intimately involved with the forcible extraction of luxury goods from neighboring
regions.
This listing of studies is far from complete, but it serves to indicate the level of interest in exchange
and something of the variety of forms this interest has taken.
In this paper I am primarily concerned with the idea that moving goods, especially over long
distances, had direct economic importance in the courses of development of the complex societies
of Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Two fundamentally different kinds of roles have been assigned to long-
distance movement of goods by different models. The first kind I will refer to as the import role;
here the focus is on the need or desire of some group of people to acquire certain goods. The other
role, the mirror image of the first, is the export role-the opportunity to benefit by providing goods
needed or desired somewhere else. In either case, the importance of long-distance exchange is
economic. That is, it involves the organization of effort and the allocation of resources in order to
accomplish a particular objective-either to acquire something or to profit from someone else's
acquisition. The goods involved can be of any nature-purely utilitarian, ritual, or related to status.
But, for either their import or export to have a significant economic impact on a society, that activity
must require a nontrivial commitment of effort or resources. For example, the opportunity to produce
and export drumthwockets can hardly lead to the development of a large industrial center if two
people can produce all the drumthwockets it is possible to export. Similarly, the need to acquire
drumthwockets will have little impact on a complex society if a single part-time drumthwocket
merchant can acquire from elsewhere all the drumthwockets that can be consumed. This does not
deny other kinds of importance to long-distance exchange, for example in bolstering systems of
status (cf. Drennan 1976b), but here I focus on the contention that goods were moved in sufficient
quantities to be a direct economic concern of major importance.
Despite the interest of scholars in long-distance exchange in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, there has
been little systematic effort to reconstruct the quantities of various kinds of goods that might have
been moved in different periods. Here my goal is not to provide a thorough evaluation of any of
the models referred to above. Rather, I will attempt to provide some estimates based on archaeo-
logical evidence of what quantities of what goods were moved in certain periods. In the process it
will become clear that some popular models depend upon impossible postulates. Instead of trying
to cover all Prehispanic periods, I will focus on two separate time spans that are reasonably well
documented. The first, the Early and Middle Formative, will be treated in some detail; the second,
the Early Classic, in more cursory fashion. Emphasis will be on the Mexican (as opposed to the
Mayan) part of Mesoamerica.
Part of the basis for this article is a study of Prehispanic transport that appears elsewhere (Drennan
1983a). In that study I argue that 275 km is an absolute maximum distance for the profitable
transport of food staples overland, and that ordinarily such transport would be restricted to even
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 29

shorter distances. This maximum distance is equivalent to a maximum transport cost of 256 days'
labor per metric ton. Also in that study I derive estimates of transport costs for Prehispanic Me-
soamerica which serve as the basis for the tables of transport costs between centers in this article.
Rather than waste space here by reiterating the derivation of these figures, I simply refer the interested
reader to Drennan 1983a. One further implication of that article pursued here in some detail is that
luxury and ritual items (characteristically used at fairly low rates) and low-bulk utilitarian goods
(like obsidian) might provide the basis for long-distance movement of goods on an economically
important scale if population levels were high enough to require the movement of such goods in
significant quantities.
One final introductory comment is necessary before turning to the Formative period. For an
article on the archaeology of long-distance movement of goods, this paper makes extraordinarily
scant reference to that old archaeological standby, the trade sherd. I have pretty much ignored
evidence concerning long-distance movement of ceramics for two reasons. First, long-distance
movement of ceramics is not likely to have had much economic importance. Pottery is bulky, heavy,
highly breakable, and made of materials available throughout Mesoamerica-all unlikely charac-
teristics for a good moved long distances in much quantity. Documentation for the Late Postclassic,
a time of highly elaborated systems for long-distance movement of goods, does not give much
importance to pottery in such systems (Drennan 1983a). Second, a serious problem in evaluating
the archaeological evidence for long-distance movement of ceramics is the lack of comparability in
the data concerning it from different regions. While studies of chemical and petrographic composition
of pottery clays have shown some encouraging results (e.g., Sotomayor and Castillo Tejero 1963
and Harbottle et al. n.d.), the principal criteria usually relied upon for identifying imported pottery
are stylistic. (See, for example, MacNeish et al. [1970] for a particularly thorough-going effort of
this sort.) One problem with such an approach is that it provides results that are not comparable
from one project to another; different investigators simply have different intuitively derived stan-
dards for identifying trade sherds on stylistic grounds. Ultimately more serious, however, is the
problem that such an approach is logically incapable of distinguishing between imported ceramics
and skillful local imitations, since it requires the assumption that stylistic similarities of a certain
degree of closeness automatically mean importation, not local imitation. Thus, although stylistic
similarities in ceramics are frequently useful in establishing the mere fact of contact of some un-
specified nature, I am unwilling to predicate much discussion of long-distance movement of goods
on such evidence.

THE EARLY AND MIDDLE FORMATIVE


For the Early and Middle Formative it is the Olmec horizon that has inspired most work concerning
movement of goods over fairly long distances. Table 1 gives the transport costs between some of
the principal settlements of the Early and Middle Formative. The table contains some anachronisms
since no distinction has been made between sites occupied during only the Early Formative, sites
occupied during only the Middle Formative, and sites occupied through both parts of the period.
The transport costs are calculated in days per ton, or the number of days of labor required to move

Table 1. TransportCosts (dayslton)between Earlyand Middle FormativeCenters.

From: To: San Chalcat- San Jose Laguna


Lorenzo La Venta Tlatilco zingo Mogote Zope
San Lorenzo - 27 362 343 238 128
La Venta 36 - 359 340 274 164
Tlatilco 331 318 - 116 312 455
Chalcatzingo 312 300 116 - 285 428
San Jose Mogote 212 239 312 285 - 143
Laguna Zope 104 131 468 441 156 -
30 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

Figure 1. Early and Middle Formative period routes.

one metric ton from one center to the other along routes shown in Figure 1. These routes were
determined from topographic maps on the basis of practicality. Level terrain was followed wherever
possible without drastically increasing the distance covered. Rivers and coasts where water transport
seemed feasible were used wherever possible. The most generous possible assumptions were made
about which rivers were navigable by dugout and for what distances. For each route, distances were
measured in four categories: overland travel, downstream water travel, upstream water travel, and
water travel with no current. The resulting distances were multiplied by the transport costs for each
category determined by Drennan (1 983a), and the sum of the four costs appears in the appropriate
cell in Table 1. Since the assumptions upon which the table is based were made intentionally on
the generous side, the costs given in it must be taken as minimal estimates.
As noted above, a figure of 256 days per ton (Drennan 1983a) is adopted as the absolute maximum
cost for profitable transport of food staples. Thus centers separated by transport costs greater than
about 256 days per ton would seem to be too far apart for there to be any question of transporting
food staples from one to the other profitably. Inspection of Table 1 reveals that this is indeed the
case for many pairs of centers. Since San Lorenzo and La Venta seem not to have been contem-
poraneous, the possibility of moving food between them has little relevance, but Laguna Zope would
have been close enough to either. Laguna Zope and the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Valley of Morelos
and the Basin of Mexico are two other possible pairs. The values for Oaxaca and the Gulf Coast
centers are below the cutoff point, but close enough to it that one should be very cautious about
accepting movement of food between them since these estimates represent minimal transport costs.
While some pairs of Olmec horizon centers, then, are close enough for food to be moved between
them, it is nevertheless clear that the Olmec horizon cannot be discussed as a complete or com-
prehensive network of sites exchanging basic food staples. Such a direct ecological rationale for the
existence of interregional relations in the Early and Middle Formative simply will not work. Move-
ment of certain kinds of foods with high contents of nutrients needed in small quantities and relatively
unavailable in some regions might be important, but such a model has not been suggested.
Nevertheless, we can document the interregional movement of some kinds of goods. In such cases
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 31

we know that this movement of goods was not only feasible but worth the costs to the people who
accomplished it. As Table 1 makes clear, the value of goods (in at least the Marxist sense of quantity
of labor input) in Prehispanic Mesoamerica increases quite sharply with the distance over which
they must be transported. Whether the need for the goods can be expressed easily in terms of human
labor or not, goods moved long distances were very valuable per unit weight. In the case of primarily
utilitarian goods, then, those imported over long distances would have to be much superior to locally
available substitutes in at least one of two ways. First, imports might be of much better quality than
local materials; and, second, imports might be required in very small quantities. This is a more
general phrasing of the principle underlying the statement above that food items providing nutrients
required in small amounts and difficult to obtain in certain regions are likely candidates for long-
distance transport. In such cases, estimates of the quantity of goods moved and the effort required
to move and/or produceh the benefits of such movement so directly as
in the case of basic staples, since the benefits are not so easily expressed in the same energetic terms
in which transport costs can be calculated; but such estimates can help us to evaluate the overall
social, political, and economic importance of such activities.
Of the commodities moved fairly long distances in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, obsidian is clearly
the easiest to deal with because of the relatively large number of geochemical studies determining
the sources of archaeologically recovered obsidian tools (e.g., Charlton et al. 1978; Cobean et al.
1971; Pires-Ferreira 1975; Zeitlin and Heimbuch 1978). The Formative evidence indicates that,
despite the long distances it was sometimes transported, obsidian was primarily a utilitarian, rather
than a luxury good in Formative Mesoamerica. It occurs principally in the form of utilitarian artifacts.
Large quantities of nondescript obsidian chips are reported for the Early Formative on the Chiapas
Coast, where it has been suggested that they were used in manioc graters (Davis 1975; Lowe 1975:
10). In the highlands both flakes and prismatic blades were common by the Middle Formative, and
both show ample evidence of copious use. Virtually no excavated context yielding much chipped
stone lacks obsidian. For sites where evidence is available concerning the distributions of various
kinds of material, there is no clear and consistent association between high frequencies of obsidian
and high status. Some high status contexts have unusually high frequencies of obsidan, others low
frequencies; the same is true of low status contexts (e.g., Drennan 1976a:88, 113; Whalen 1981:61,
73, 85). Procurement of obsidian during the Formative does seem to have been organized and
controlled by elites (Pires-Ferreira 1975:31-35; Winter and Pires-Ferreira 1976), but its use was
not primarily as a luxury good.
Obsidian fulfills both qualifications for being moved long distances mentioned above. By com-
parison with most Mesoamerican cherts, a small weight of obsidian yields a large amount of ex-
ceedingly fine cutting edge. Thus it does its work much better than locally available materials and
is needed in relatively small quantity. Since obsidian is the best documented material being moved
farthest in the greatest quantity in the Early and Middle Formative, it is often cited first in discussions
of exchange's importance to societies of the period. It would, then, be interesting and enlightening
to estimate the amount of obsidian that was transported on various routes as a way of evaluating
the economic significance of this activity.
Clearly the first step in an attempt to accomplish such a goal is to estimate the amount of obsidian
being used in some place or places. There are not very many Early and Middle Formative sites for
which the necessary information is available, and most of those are in Oaxaca. Thus the Valley of
Oaxaca will provide the trial case for this estimate. The Middle Formative village site of Fabrica
San Jose in the Valley of Oaxaca was excavated with a series of test pits systematically placed across
the site, as well as several expanded excavations (Drennan 1976a). If we treat this as a random
excavated sample of the site, we can estimate that the Middle Formative deposits at Fabrica San
Jose contain 19.2 kg of obsidian (with a standard error of the estimate of 4.2 kg). Since the excavation
design was not, in fact, a random sample, it is impossible to determine the precise probabilities of
error in this estimate. Nevertheless, the principal source of bias concerning us here is certainly the
concentration of expanded excavations in deep deposits that produced many artifacts. The result
of this bias will be a tendency to inflate the estimate. Thus 19.2 kg can be safely taken as a maximal
estimate of the amount of Middle Formative obsidian at Fabrica San Jose. The population of
32 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

Fabrica San Jos&has been estimated (Drennan 1976a:82, 109, 133) at 15 during the Early Guadalupe
phase (of 150 years' duration), at 55 during the Late Guadalupe phase (of 150 years' duration), and
at 65 during the Rosario phase (of 100 years' duration), for a total of 17,000 person-years of
occupation, all during the Middle Formative. Since 19.2 kg was a maximal estimate of obsidian
present in deposits for these phases, and since the preservability and use patterns of obsidian make
it very likely that almost all obsidian arriving at the site would ultimately be found in its deposits,
we can estimate that about 1.1 g of obsidian was arriving at Fabrica San Jose per person per year
during the Middle Formative.
Because there are so many difficult assumptions involved in making such calculations it will be
useful to take a different approach and compare the results. Instead of estimating the total amount
of obsidian and the total population, we can estimate the number of person-years of trash accu-
mulation that the excavated deposits represent. One route toward such an approximation is to
consider that the rate of pottery use in simple sedentary villages is constant. At least some ethno-
graphic data on this subject can be found. DeBoer (1974) has collected such data for several villages
on the edge of the Amazon Basin at the feet of the Peruvian Andes. His calculation of 4,374 ceramic
vessels produced in 50 years for a population of 34 people yields an estimate of 2.57 vessels per
person per year. Foster (1960) gives a set of figures for Tzintzuntzan which, although much closer
to the area we are investigating, is less comparable in terms of social complexity. Although Foster
restricts his calculations to "vessels in daily use" (a difficult datum to determine archaeologically),
he does give figures for virtually all the vessels in one kitchen (that of Otilia Zavala). Here the
average life of the 66 vessels he cites is about 6.5 years, within the general range of 4 to 5 years'
average life for vessels of unspecified type provided by another of Foster's informants, Concepci6n
Tzintzfun. Taking an average life for vessels of all types of 5 years, an average of 5 persons per
kitchen, and an average of 62.5 vessels per kitchen (the median of Foster's 50 to 75) results in a
figure of 2.08 vessels per person per year. Given the monumental sources of inaccuracy in these
estimates, this is undoubtedly much closer to DeBoer's figure than it has any right to be. Bearing
constantly in mind the roughness of the approximation, we can use 2.5 for the average number of
pots consumed (i.e., ultimately broken) per person per year. Based on no explicit study, but rather
on a considerable amount of handling of sherds from Fabrica San Jose and related sites, I will
estimate an average of 20 rim sherds in the archaeological deposits per vessel. The inaccuracy of
this estimate could, of course, be avoided by measuring the portion of a complete circle represented
by each rim sherd (Egloff 1973), but these data are not presently available. If each of the 2.5 vessels
consumed per person per year ends up as 20 rim sherds in the archaeological deposits, one person-
year's accumulation of trash is represented by each 50 rim sherds. At this rate the excavated Middle
Formative deposits at Fabrica San Jose represent 349 person-years of trash. Since this same trash
contained 184.68 g of obsidian, the rate of obsidian use can be estimated at 0.53 g per person per
year, or about half my earlier estimate. Since that earlier estimate was noted as containing a bias
tending to inflate it, this shows pretty good agreement for two calculations involving as much
guesswork as these do.
Winter has used the village site of Tierras Largas, only a few kilometers from Fabrica San Jose,
to estimate rates of obsidian use. His figures were obtained by summing the "weight of obsidian
found in deposits associated with household units . . . with the assumption that each deposit rep-
resented the trash accumulated during one year" (Winter 1981:18-19). Winter's (1981 :Table 4)
estimate for the Middle Formative Guadalupe phase agrees closely with the Fabrica San Jose
estimate. His Rosario phase (also Middle Formative) estimate is much larger, but he notes that it
was based on a very small sample. For the Early Formative Tierras Largas phase, before Fabrica
San Jose was occupied, Winter estimates a rate about 2.5 times that of the Middle Formative. Since
Winter's (1981:Table 2) own figures show that obsidian was a smaller proportion of the chipped
stone for this Early Formative phase than for the Middle Formative, this higher use estimate for
the Early Formative seems suspect. (Suspicions should, perhaps, focus on the validity of Winter's
assumption quoted above.) Here I will assume that Early Formative use rates were no higher than
Middle Formative ones, and use the larger estimate from Fabrica San Jose (1.1 g per person per
year) as a maximal estimate for the Early and Middle Formative.
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 33

Surface survey of the Valley of Oaxaca has recently been completed (Blanton et al. 1979:372;
Flannery et al. 1981:66), and preliminary estimates of total valley population are available (Ko-
walewski et al. 1982; S. Kowalewski, personal communication). The Early Formative peak was
1,950 in the San Jose phase, and the Middle Formative level was slightly lower. (The figures represent
the medians of maximum and minimum population estimates.) At a rate of 1.1 g per person per
year, then, some 2.1 kg of obsidian were imported to the entire valley annually at the San Jose
phase peak. Using the proportional representation of different sources provided by Pires-Ferreira
(1975:20) and the same kind of transport cost calculations represented in Table 1, I estimate that
transporting to the Valley of Oaxaca all the obsidian used there from various sources would have
required an average of about one-half day's labor per year for bearers at the Early Formative high
point of obsidian use. Certainly some risky assumptions have been made in arriving at this estimate,
but even if it is 1,000 times too low, I can still find work for only a pair of full-time bearers at the
most.
The Valley of Oaxaca held one of the very few concentrated populations during the Early and
Middle Formative, while much of the territory of the central and southern highlands of Mexico
seems to have been very sparsely occupied. By the Middle Formative, however, the Basin of Mexico
probably had a substantially larger population than did Oaxaca. This discrepancy may have reached
an order of magnitude by the end of the Middle Formative (Sanders et al. 1979:183). Providing
obsidian to this population, however, was not a long-distance effort, since obsidian was available
within the region. If other areas distant from obsidian sources used obsidian at rates at all similar
to those of Oaxaca, it is clear that the long-distance obsidian transport industry of Formative
Mesoamerica was not capable of employing more than a tiny handful of full-time people, if even
that. If, in contrast, obsidian transport was accomplished through the participation of many people,
the amount of time anyone devoted to it was miniscule. Here I have made no attempt to calculate
the effort required to produce obsidian tools or to quarry the raw material, but for the quantities
of obsidian used during the Early and Middle Formative, there is no need to try to do so-the
quantity is so small that it could not possibly matter.
Most of ther materials whose movement over long distances in the Formative can be
documented were luxury goods and/or of ritual use. Such items do not have a direct ecological or
economic impact in the same sense that basic food staples or strictly utilitarian items do. Never-
theless, acquiring such items is important, and some have argued that the organization of systems
for their production or procurement played an important developmental role. Luxury goods also
fulfill both conditions discussed above for long-distance transport of goods. By definition, luxury
goods are needed in relatively small quantities by societies; if they are present in excessive quantities
they cease to be luxury goods. Goods from far away, because of their scarcity and other properties
(see Drennan [1976b:357]), are often inherently suitable as luxury items. The high value placed on
luxury items additionally makes them worth the large expense of transport over long distances. In
addition, the distinction between luxury items and ritual artifacts may be difficult to draw definitively,
as a matter of principle (Drennan 1976b:355-359). Thus the two categories will be considered
together here.
One such ritual or luxury good is shell. Goods made of the shells of both marine and fresh water
mollusks are well-known artifacts from Early and Middle Formative sites. Such objects are usually
purely ornamental, and their use is clearly associated with high status. They are, for example,
frequently included as offerings with burials. Flannery (1976:335) notes the possible ritual use of
conch shell trumpets. Following the same procedures used above for obsidian, we can use the shell
recovered at the site of Fabrica San Jose (Drennan 1976a:223-232) to estimate the amount of shell
used annually in the Valley of Oaxaca. A total of 71 pieces of shell was recovered in Middle Formative
contexts, leading to an estimate of 7,500 pieces in all Middle Formative deposits at the site, with
a standard error of the estimate of 3,300. This is an average of 0.44 pieces per person per year,
subject to the same kind of upward bias as the earlier estimate of obsidian use. At the nearby village
site of Tierras Largas, where Winter excavated a larger proportion of the remains of a larger
community occupied over a longer period of time, 76 pieces of shell were encountered in Early and
Middle Formative deposits (Winter 1972:178-181). This indicates a lower rate of shell use than
34 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

that already estimated for Fabrica San Jos&.The six pieces of shell encountered in Early Formative
deposits at Santo Domingo Tomaltepec (Whalen 1981:Table 19), where some 4% of the Early
Formative site was excavated, indicate a much lower rate of shell usage. In an effort to make generous
estimates these lower rates will be disregarded.
Since shell was a luxury good, another issue becomes important to these calculations. The sites
upon which all the estimates have been based are relatively small village sites whose residents, while
varying somewhat in status, can be expected not to include the highest status members of the society,
who presumably lived primarily at larger centers such as San Jose Mogote. There is the risk, then,
that estimates of usage rates for luxury goods are depressed if such high status people are not included
in the basis for the estimates. While the data necessary to calculate shell usage rates for San Jose
Mogote are not yet available, the 142 pieces of shell reported by Pires-Ferreira (1975:Table 24)
from excavations of larger scale than those yielding 71 pieces at Fabrica San Jos& suggest quite
strongly that the estimate derived from small village sites is not substantially in error.
Thus I will use the highest estimate obtained above as a characterization of the Valley of Oaxaca
for the Early and Middle Formative. That estimate (of 0.44 pieces per person per year) translates
into a maximum rate of 858 pieces per year for the entire valley at the Early Formative population
peak. At the weights of pieces at Ffbrica San Jos&ethis would amount to about 1.1 kg of shell per
year. Pires-Ferreira (1975:Tables 20 and 21) finds that through the Early and Middle Formative
about 73% of the shell whose source can be determined originated in Pacific marine or estuary
locations. If all the shell coming from the Pacific to the Valley of Oaxaca came from the putative
shell-working center of Laguna Zope (Zeitlin 1978), this would amount to a peak of 626 pieces or
0.8 kg per year. Much of this shell was completely unmodified, and, of the remainder, very few
pieces would require any substantial amount of work. Making a wild guess that the collecting and
working of about five pieces of shell would require a day's work, I estimate that the production of
shell for the Valley of Oaxaca would have meant less than half-time work for one person at its Early
Formative peak. Transporting this shell to the Valley of Oaxaca would average out to far less than
one day's work a year. In addition, we have evidence that at least some of this shell was brought
to the Valley of Oaxaca in unfinished form and worked locally (Drennan 1976a: 106; Flannery and
Winter 1976:39), still further reducing the workload for "foreign" shell-working centers. Other
highland valleys would also, of course, have been potential customers for Laguna Zope shell, but
unless they were much heavier consumers than Oaxaca they could hardly have supported an industry
of much importance to a community of hundreds of people. Even by the end of the Middle Formative,
the demand created by the larger population of the Basin of Mexico would not be enough. Nor do
the major Formative centers of the Gulf Coast seem to have provided much demand. Soil conditions
at San Lorenzo and La Venta are, of course, not the most conducive to preservation of material
like shell, but the paltry two pieces of shell reported by Coe and Diehl (1980:292) must indicate
something about the rate at which that material was used at San Lorenzo. At La Venta, only an
occasional sting-ray spine or shark's tooth is reported from conditions in which bone at least
sometimes left detectable traces (Drucker 1952; Drucker et al. 1959).
Another material whose use as a luxury good is well documented is jadeite. Once again Ffbrica
San Jose provides us with a means of estimating its use in the Valley of Oaxaca. Here the rate of
use was maximally 0.23 g per person per year, including everything identified in the report (Drennan
1976a) as "greenstone," much of which is not actually jadeite. Since this material was heavily
concentrated in a few burials, the standard error of the estimate is larger than in earlier calculations
(0.20 g per person per year). As mentioned above, the lack of randomization in the selection of
excavation units at Ffbrica San Jose makes it impossible to assign probabilities accurately to this
standard error, but we can be alert to the possibility of greater error in this estimate than in ones
previously made. Jadeite's popularity as a luxury or ritual item seems to be largely confined to the
Middle Formative, since it is found only in small quantities at Early Formative sites-even at the
most impressive Early Formative center known, San Lorenzo (Coe and Diehl 1980:241-245). At
0.23 g per person per year, the Valley of Oaxaca's jadeite consumption would have reached a peak
of 0.4 kg per year for the population (Kowalewski et al. 1982; S. Kowalewski, personal commu-
nication) of 1,850 people during the Middle Formative Rosario phase. Clearly, even a very large
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 35

error in estimating the rate of use would not have reduced a large demand to such a low figure.
Once again, at these rates, even the Basin of Mexico's population at the end of the Middle Formative
would not have been using substantial amounts of jadeite.
The rate of jadeite consumption at the large center of La Venta is certainly the highest of which
we currently have evidence. Here jadeite was found in numerous offerings in and around the major
ceremonial structures at the site. I estimate from the sizes ofofobjects described and illustrated in
the reports (Drucker 1952; Drucker et al. 1959) that some 41 kg of material identified as "jade"
was recovered in the excavations of 1940, 1942-1943, and 1955. These excavations seem to have
included about 0.14% of the ceremonial precincts of the site (that is, areas where mounds or
monuments are known to occur). If the 41 kg recovered is 0.14% of the total amount at the site,
then that total would be about 29,285 kg. This is certainly a wild exaggeration, however, since, as
the excavators of the site note, the builders of La Venta showed a marked predilection for placing
offerings on the center line of the principal architectural complex. This entire center line was
excavated in the various campaigns, and, although the excavations along the center line account
for only 36% of the excavations, they yielded 96% of the jadeite recovered. If the center line
excavations are excluded, then some 0.09% of the ceremonial precinct was excavated and 1.8 kg of
jadeite was recovered. At this rate, there are some 2,000 kg of jadeite in the rest of the site, plus
the 39 kg recovered along the center line. Clearly this estimate is also a generous one, since even
when the center line excavations are excluded,excavations,
the locations of (in and around principal
structures, in positions symmetrical with those where offerings had already been encountered, etc.)
were clearly biased towards finding offerings. Nevertheless, in order to err on the generous side, I
will let this estimate stand. If 2,039 kg ofjadeite were brought to La Venta during its 400 years of
existence, the rate is 5.1 kg per year. Wherever this jadeite came from, it would only require the
departure of one fully loaded bearer about every sixth year. Even without calculating the effort
involved in the manufacture of objects from this jadeite, which might have been done at La Venta
or in the source region, it is clear that supplying jadeite to La Venta was not a major industry
employing hundreds or even scores of people. Of much greater significance at La Venta was the
acquisition of materials from closer sources in substantially larger quantities. For example, Heizer
(1961:44) calculates that there are 5,000 tons of serpentine at La Venta, and states that it came from
Niltepec on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Just the transport of this material over
this route would, according to the method of calculating used above, have required some six million
person-days of labor, counting only the one-way trip from the source to La Venta. Similarly, the
transport of large pieces of basalt for sculpture, presumably from the Tuxtlas mountains, would
have been a much larger effort than the acquisition ofjadeite. Both of these efforts, however, would
have involved transport on a shorter scale than this paper is really concerned with.
What are we to conclude, then, about an Olmec pochteca, about networks of sites controlling
trade routes plied by regular caravans of traders, about gateway communities funneling goods to
and from their regions via the long-distance exchange network, and about centers thriving on the
production of goods for export? Such notions simply evaporate in the face of a calculation of the
realities of long-distance movement of goods in the Early and Middle Formative. We have no
evidence of any good exported from any one place or imported to any one place over long distances
in large enough quantity to have provided an activity of true economic importance to any region
in the Early or Middle Formative. The Formative Mesoamerican long-distance commodities trader
could rival the Maytag repairman of commercials for loneliness. This discussion of Early and Middle
Formative long-distance exchange has focused on the possibilities for transporting food staples and
on the realities of moving other goods for which we have direct evidence. It has become almost a
ritual in discussions of exchange to speculate that many kinds of perishable goods were also moved
long distances, and that the materials of which we have direct evidence were only the tip of the
trade iceberg. This is, of course, entirely possible. It is also entirely possible that long-distance
movement of goods was accomplished by visitors from outer space. Voicing such speculations,
however, does not advance our knowledge until, first, someone articulates specific notions about
just what perishable goods might have been moving between what places, in what quantities, by
what mechanisms; and, second, someone takes such specific notions and figures out just what kind
36 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

of archaeological evidence would enable us to verify their accuracy. I will touch on the subject of
perishables again below.

THE EARLY CLASSIC


It is perhaps paradoxical that models advanced to deal with the much larger scale and more
complex societies of the Classic Period have placed relatively greater emphasis on movement of
goods at shorter range than is the case with the models of Early and Middle Formative societies
just discussed. This is perhaps most notably the case with Sanders's continued emphasis on move-
ment of goods within regions not more than 200 km or so across, dating from his early definition
of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region (Sanders 1956) through his more recent syntheses of
developments in the Basin of Mexico (Sanders 1981; Sanders et al. 1979):
[T]hecontrolof productionand distributionof high-consumption,generaluse, and low-valuegoods-in the
case of Mesoamerica,local regionalproduction-is much more likely to have played a significantrole in
social stratificationthan the kind of goods moved along the long-distancetradenetwork[Sanders1978:273].
The analysis by Drennan (1983a) confirms the feasibility of transport of goods in bulk throughout
a region of such size. Table 2 calculates transport costs between some Classic period centers by the
same methods used in Table 1 for the Formative. Routes used in Table 2 are illustrated in Figure
2. Like the routes illustrated in Figure 1, these are estimated least-cost routes, using water transport
wherever this is considered even remotely feasible. The one exception concerns the route between
Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu, in which case the least-cost route is from Teotihuacan via the Valley
of Oaxaca to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, then along the Pacific coast and inland to Kaminaljuyu.
Archaeological evidence, however, suggests the presence of a Teotihuacan transport route through
the Puebla-Tlaxcala Basin and along the Tehuacan Valley; the route then follows the Rio Papaloapan
toward the Gulf coast plain and the "Teotihuacan-influenced" site of Matacapan instead of turning
toward the Valley of Oaxaca through the Cuicatlan Cafiada. (See Coe [1965a:704-705] for a de-
scription of Matacapan and Drennan and Nowack [1977, 1983] for a preliminary discussion of the
evidence of Teotihuacan's presence in the upper drainage of the Papaloapan.) Since this Gulf coast
route seems to be the one used by Teotihuacan, the figures in Table 2 are based on it. The costs
along the more direct route are, in any event, only slightly lower than those used. The figures for
the Pacific coast route are used between Monte Alban and Kaminaljuyu since they are much lower
than the alternative inland route through Comitan (also illustrated in Figure 2), even though the
inland route seems to have been used in the Late Postclassic. Once again, a figure of 256 days per
ton is regarded as the maximum feasible cost for profitable transport of food staples. Hirth's (1978b)
and Hirth and Angulo Villasefor's (1981) contention that Teotihuacan took control of the Rio
Amatzinac drainage in Morelos for its agricultural production implies movement of bulk goods
between Morelos and the Basin of Mexico. The transport cost of 141 days per ton between Teoti-
huacan and Xochicalco shown in Table 2 is well within this estimated zone of feasibility. (The Rio
Amatzinac drainage is, in fact, even closer to Teotihuacan than is Xochicalco.) Marcus's (1980:55-
56) reconstruction of a militaristic empire centered at Monte Alban also involves a region of this
general size. All of the places Monte Alban may have conquered have transport costs to Monte

Table 2. Transport Costs (days/ton) between Some Classic Centers.

Monte
From. TO: Tikal
Teotihuacan Xochicalco Alban Kaminaljuy6
Teotihuacan - 140 312 658 596
Xochicalco 140 - 348 672 610
Monte Alban 312 348 - 320 618
607 621 333 - 285
Kaminaljuy6
Tikal 576 590 574 298 -
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 37

Figure2. Early Classic periodroutes.

Alban of less than 150 days per ton. Although Spencer (1982) has stressed the importance of the
movement of luxury goods within this region, it is clear that the region is small enough for the
movement of goods in bulk also to have been important. Since the principal concern of this paper
is with movement of goods over longer distances, I will leave aside further consideration of trade
on this scale.
The "Oaxaca barrio" at Teotihuacan (Millon 1973:41-42) and epigraphic evidence at Monte
Alban (Marcus 1980:56-59) provide clear evidence of contact between the two Early Classic centers.
Just what the residents of the Oaxaca barrio were doing at Teotihuacan remains something of a
mystery, although the suggestion has been made that they were resident traders (Millon 1973:41-
42). If so, they might have been dealin obsidian produced by Teotihuacan. Discussions of
obsidian working at Teotihuacan consistently suggest that the scale of this activity must indicate
the export of substantial quantities to distant regions (e.g., Spence 1977, 1981), and obsidian was
a principal export of the Basin of Mexico in the Late Postclassic (Sahagun 1950-1969, Book 9:22).
By Monte Alban llla when the Oaxaca barrio at Teotihuacan existed, the population of the Valley
of Oaxaca had reached much higher levels than those of the Formative. Kowalewski (Kowalewski
et al. 1982; S. Kowalewski, personal communication) gives a figure of about 115,000 as the median
of maximal and minimal estimates. If obsidian was used by this population at the same rate estimated
for the Middle Formative from Fabrica San Jose, the total obsidian demand for the Valley of Oaxaca
would have been 126.5 kg per year. Transporting this quantity of obsidian from Teotihuacan to
Monte Alban at the transport costs in Table 2 would still not mean full-time work for one bearer,
but there are several other variables that must be taken into account. One is that, although the
valley still held a major population concentration, the total number of people living in and around
the area probably dominated by Monte Alban in the Classic period was much larger. By this time
substantial populations also resided in other valleys, such as Nochixtlan (Spores 1972:175-182),
and the Cuicatlan Canfiada(Redmond 1981), where Early and Middle Formative populations had
been extremely limited. In addition, the mountainous zones between the valleys (Drennan 1983b;
Drennan and Vasquez Cruz 1975) now contained substantial numbers of communities. Thus Monte
38 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

Albfn might have ruled a region with a population several times that of the valley itself. A second
point is that obsidian consumption might have increased. Winter (1981 :Table 4) estimates obsidian
consumption rates for Monte Albfn I, II, and IIIb from his excavations on residential terraces at
Monte Albfn that are some four times greater than those estimated for Middle Formative Fabrica
San Jose. There exists the possibility, then, of obsidian consumption in the area dominated by
Monte Alban nearly an order of magnitude greater than the 125.6 kg per year already estimated-
perhaps something in excess of a metric ton per year. Transport of such a quantity from Teotihuacan
to Monte Albafn would still only require some 312 days of labor (or 624 if we allow for a return
trip transporting something else), which hardly seems a large enough flow of goods to call for the
presence of a resident colony of traders at Teotihuacan. This amount of obsidian, however, could
form a significant portion of activities of direct economic importance if other goods were involved
as well. (Note, however, that I have had to take the most generous possible estimate of each variable
to reach this figure.)
Some of the other possibilities for long-distance movement of goods for which we do have evidence
are materials already discussed for the Early and Middle Formative, such as shell and jadeite. Both
these materials continued to have important status and ritual uses during the Classic. Millon (1981:
227), for example, notes the importation of "huge quantities of shell" to Teotihuacafn. In part,
however, because of (1) the greater difficulty of gathering archaeological information about the larger
and more complex societies of the Classic, and (2) what appears to be an increasingly uneven
distribution of these materials in archaeological sites, it is very difficult to obtain the information
necessary to calculate rates of consumption of such materials. Since the use of such luxury and ritual
items is undoubtedly even more sensitive to changes in social and political organization than is the
use of utilitarian materials like obsidian, it is unwise to use the rates estimated for the Early and
Middle Formative. Rather than try to calculate Classic period rates despite the difficulties posed by
the nature of the Classic period data base, I will simply underscore the importance of collecting and
reporting data in such a way as to provide a basis for such estimates.
Considered from the perspective of Monte Albfn, then, obsidian import could not, by itself, have
comprised a long-distance trade system of true economic importance. If other kinds of goods were
being imported as well, at rates substantially greater than those of the Formative period, it might
be possible to build a model assigning some importance to long-distance movement of goods during
the Classic. (For some remarks concerning the possibilities for such other goods see below.) It
remains, of course, to be demonstrated that obsidian at Monte Albfn, or elsewhere in its probable
sphere of dominance, did, in fact, come from Teotihuacan in significant proportion. In fact, a few
scattered pieces of information are not terribly encouraging on this score. Winter (1981:Table 1)
reports results of source analysis of seven pieces of obsidian from Classic period deposits at Monte
Albfn and Huamelulpan of which only two could be traced to sources near Teotihuacfn. (The
souces of the other five pieces could not be identified.) For the Classic period at Laguna Zope, Zeitlin
and Heimbuch (1978:150) note the sharp decline in the importance of the Teotihuacfn and Pachuca
sources. Current obsidian source analysis being undertaken at the University of Pittsburgh (Drennan
1981) will, when complete, provide further information concerning sources of obsidian for the area
dominated by Monte Alban.
When viewed from the perspective of Teotihuacfn, however, Monte Alban becomes only one of
many possible obsidian customers. At least the distinctive green Pachuca obsidian, which provided
part of that worked at Teotihuacfn, is known to be widely distributed throughout Mesoamerica,
although data are as yet somewhat sparse for estimating total quantities moved. Indeed it is in areas
outside Monte Alban's sphere that the most striking evidence of Teotihuacfn's long-distance contacts
has long been known-at places like Matacapan (Coe 1965a:704-705) and Kaminaljuyf (Kidder et
al. 1946; Sanders and Michels 1977). The distance between Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu makes
the cost of transporting goods between them truly fearsome (Table 2), but it is clear that at least
some goods were so transported.
Even if, as Sanders (1973:353, 1977:407-408) suggests, Teotihuacan's reason for being at Ka-
minaljuyu was to control exchange in the Maya area for the profit of the mother city, substantial
movement of goods between the two centers is implied. Since it was not possible for Teotihuacan
Drennan] MOVEMENTOF GOODS 39

tto profit
traders at Kaminaljuyf to deposit their Teotihuacan's numbered Swiss bank account, the
only way Teotihuacan could benefit from their efforts was for the traders to ship home something
desired at Teotihuacan. Michels (1979:173-179) has suggested that one such thing might have been
cacao, and he cites indirect evidence of cacao processing at Kaminaljuyf. Evidence of cacao at
Teotihuacan comes primarily from representations in ceramics and murals; Millon (1981:226) cites
several instances. Given the transport costs between Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan, cacao would
certainly have been a luxury good. It would simply not have been possible to transport enough of
it for it to have been in widespread use. Nevertheless, unlike most of the durable luxury goods
discussed above, cacao is highly consumable. That is, a shell ornament or jade pendant can be used
repeatedly, thus making it possible to get a good deal of mileage out of a relatively small quantity.
A cup of chocolate, on the other hand, can be drunk only once, so for cacao to be useful as a luxury
good a considerably larger quantity must be available. If only 1%of the Basin of Mexico's maximum
Classic period population of 250,000 (Sanders et al. 1979:183) consumed 1 kg of cacao annually
(which I estimate would not produce as much as a cup of chocolate per week), there would be full-
time work for a dozen or two bearers making round trips to Kaminaljuyuf to get the cacao. When
considered together with the effort of collecting the cacao somewhere near Kaminaljuyf for shipment
to Teotihuacan, this begins to sound like more than a negligible effort. If, in addition, cacao was
used as something like a medium of exchange (as it seems to have been in later times), then the
amount required would have been still greater.
The overwhelmingly important role of textiles in Aztec tribute collection suggests that much more
attention should be given to the potential for recovering evidence from earlier periods for this
particular category of perishable goods. Sanders and Price (1968:189-193) and Hirth (1978b:328)
have raised the possibility that cotton was provided to Teotihuacan by Morelos. If we take the Late
Postclassic as an inspiration, however, we should look much more systematically for evidence of
movement of textiles even over much longer distances and even when other fibers, such as maguey,
may be involved (Drennan 1983a). Current lack of evidence, however, precludes much discussion
of this subject for the Classic.
These examples show the combined effects that the substantial population growth of the Classic
period and changing patterns of resource utilization can have on the impact of long-distance move-
ment of goods. Not only would provision of non-negligible amounts of cacao to the Basin of Mexico
have been an effort of some potential significance, but the substantially increased populations of
the Maya area would have made the possibilities for profiting from the movement of goods in that
region much greater than would have been the case in the Formative. It can be noted parenthetically,
though, that it will require better documentation than is currently available concerning the movement
of such items as obsidian, salt, and metates within the Maya area before it is possible really to
evaluate Rathje's model for the emergence of Classic Maya society (Rathje 1971, 1972; Rathje et
al. 1978). Nevertheless, it is clear that, in some contrast to the situation reconstructed for the Early
and Middle Formative, models postulating a direct economic impact of long-distance exchange are
at least conceivably realistic for the Classic. We still need to find more evidence of cacao, textiles,
and other kinds of goods which might have been traded over long distances, but the quantities of
obsidian that might be involved at least give us encouragement to do so.

CONCLUSION
An examination of the transport costs between major centers of the Early and Middle Formative
and of the Early Classic shows that only a few pairs of such centers are close enough to each other
to make transport of food staples between them profitable. Such movement of foodstuffs, then,
could never have been the underlying rationale of the network of relationships between major centers
of either period. Goods which are more likely candidates for long-distance movement, such as an
assortment of luxury and ritual items or obsidian, have provided some direct archaeological evidence.
Examination of the evidence for the Early and Middle Formative and for the Early Classic makes
it clear that such goods did, indeed, figure importantly in long-distance movement of goods, a fact
which has often been noted before. A look at the documentary record for the Late Postclassic leads
40 AMERICANANTIQUITY [Vol. 49, No. 1, 1984

us to believe that this impression is not wholly the result of the vagaries of preservation in the
archaeological record (Drennan 1983a). On the other hand, calculating the amounts in which various
materials were used during the Early and Middle Formative indicates that long-distance movement
of such materials did not have much direct economic importance to either importing or exporting
regions because the quantities were simply too small. Note that this is not to say that the acquisition
of various materials was not important to the people involved, for social, political, or religious
reasons. Rather, it simply says that the import or export of such goods could not provide the major
economic stimulus to the development of the complex societies of the Formative that some models
have postulated. The demographic growth that had occurred by the Early Classic, together with the
possibility of changes in patterns of resource use, makes it possible for the first time in Mesoamerica
to speak of such direct economic importance for long-distance movement of goods. The consid-
erations raised in this paper do not provide any actual support for models involving this sort of
role for long-distance exchange, but they at least make it seem realistic to entertain such possibilities
for the Early Classic. Nevertheless, a heavy burden of proof is still left on the proposer of such a
model. This burden includes demonstrating the movement of sufficient quantities of goods for which
evidence is obvious, as well as finding evidence of other kinds of goods, the most likely one of which
seems to be textiles.

Acknowledgments. I thank Jeanne Ferrary Drennan for lending her skill in the use of language to the task
of making the message of this paper clearer.

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Editor's Note: The article referenced above as Drennan 1983a, "Long Distance Movement of
Goods in Prehispanic Mesoamerica: Transport Costs in General and the Late Postclassic in Par-
ticular," will appear in 1984 in the American Anthropologist as "Long-distance Transport Costs in
Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica."

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