The editors of this book have gathered together 12 case studies and a general introduction with the goal of discussing the different ways that ancient, historic and contemporary Maya people attribute value to material goods. The editors do not organise the chapters into sections but most of the case studies fall into two categories, each with five chapters. The first category focuses on people from Belize and northern Guatemala prior to Spanish contact, the second focuses on Yucatec Maya from the northern lowlands of Mexico from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The two remaining case studies (by Scott Fedick and by Tiffany Cain and Richard Leventhal) fall squarely into the latter category, given their focus on recent and contemporary times, but consider both Yucatec Maya as well as other Maya societies. The vast majority of the authors were trained as anthropological archaeologists.

In their introductory essay, Jennifer Mathews and Thomas Guderjan consider the ideas of Arjun Appadurai (The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1988), David Graeber (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave, 2001) and others but decline to advocate a single theory of value. Though value is a common keyword in the case studies, the authors use it in very different ways. The one point that recurs most often is that value can be reckoned not only as economic utility but also as cosmology, identity and power. The case studies also address quite varied topics, from artesanías (‘objects produced for and sold primarily to tourists’, p. 216, in the chapter by Mary Scott) to food inventories (Fedick), from neoliberal commodification of land (Cain and Leventhal) to the manufacturing steps of ancient flint bifaces (Joshua Kwoka). In the face of such variety, the editors believe that the role of these chapters is to provide a dynamic temporal view of the other keyword in the book's title, ‘things’, such as commodities, crafts, production sequences, inalienable goods, heritage and more. The hope is that by juxtaposing case studies from such a broad temporal scope, perspectives from the past and present can inform each other. Dean Arnold's chapter makes the most progress in this regard. Reflecting on his career of research on traditional pottery production in Ticul, Yucatan, from 1965 to 2008, Arnold provides abundant lessons for archaeologists attempting to explain changes in ancient ceramics.

Though the book as a whole does not produce a coordinated debate or a focused conceptual stance, Arnold's chapter shows that the book's strength is the richness of the case studies, several of which make for good dialogue when paired. For example, the chapters by Arnold and Brigitte Kovacevich both emphasise discrepancies in value of different production steps of a single good. Kovacevich argues that among the Late Classic (ad 600–900) Maya, producing crafts was seen as sacred, analogous to the creation of humans as seen in the Popol Vuh narrative. Yet the empirical data suggest that for jade-working and the production of polychrome pottery, there was more than one creator and the different kinds of labour entailed different kinds of value. At Cancuen, Guatemala, people living in modest houses performed the first stages of jade-work while palace artisans polished jade to its ideologically laden final form. Likewise, Arnold shows that in the production of contemporary pottery for tourists, the painters, who usually have no relation to the potters, add the most value to the final product and therefore profit much more than others involved in production.

The chapters by Guderjan and co-authors and by Heather McKillop and E. Cory Sills provide contrasting takes on ancient political economy. In the Classic period Blue Creek polity of northern Belize, Guderjan and co-authors document ditched fields extending across vast stretches of land, implying a labour-intensive process of surplus agricultural production. The rise of kingship at the same time as the beginnings of ditched fields suggests to Guderjan and co-authors that Blue Creek's royal family oversaw the agricultural work and extracted surplus for regional trade. Like Guderjan and co-authors, McKillop and Sills, focusing on salt, present data for extensive production in order to supply regional trade. Through survey and excavation of terrain that, due to sea level rise, is now about a half meter under water, they found over 105 salt-producing sites in a 16 km² area at Payne's Creek in southern Belize. In contrast to crop-harvesting near Blue Creek, McKillop and Sills argue that salt-harvesting was not centrally controlled. However, regarding ancient Maya salt trade in general, McKillop and Sills overlook research from Chunchucmil in the northern lowlands (Bruce H. Dahlin, ‘Ahead of its Time? The Remarkable Early Classic Maya Economy of Chunchucmil’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 9: 3 (2009), pp. 341–67).

The papers by Briana Bianco and co-authors and Eleanor Harrison-Buck pair well in that they both challenge conceptions of the value of specific goods. Bianco and co-authors argue that honey and beeswax were more valuable than once thought. Though harvesting honey from stingless bees represents a minuscule and shrinking portion of the contemporary honey market in Yucatan, it was part of trade, tribute and tax both before and after Spanish contact. Harrison-Buck poses a deeper challenge to orthodox views by arguing that the cacao bean among the ancient Maya should be seen not as a common marketplace currency but rather as a social currency used in marriage exchange. Harrison-Buck thus echoes, but does not cite, similar arguments to those made in Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville, 2011). The heady mix of iconography, epigraphy, ethnohistory, archaeology and theories of gender and material culture makes this chapter one of the most conceptually rewarding in the book.

The delightful chapters by Allan D. Meyers and by Mathews and John Gust naturally complement each other in that they both discuss agricultural production (henequen and sugar, respectively) in northern Yucatan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meyers argues that the layout of haciendas and the discrepancy between the housing of the master and the bondsmen were planned as mechanisms to naturalise the unequal social order that supported debt slavery and monoculture. On the periphery of the henequen zone, village layouts were less planned. Instead, Meyers’ painstaking fieldwork at Dolores Ake reveals subtle inequalities in workers’ housing – a fault line potentially exploitable by the master. Mathews and Gust report on fieldwork at San Antonio Xuxub, the estate on the north coast of Quintana Roo made famous by Paul Sullivan's book Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Among other things, Mathews and Gust touch on hierarchies among workers, workers’ possession of imported US goods, and the use of rum produced at Xuxub from cane sugar to entrap debt peons on the haciendas discussed by Meyers.

To reiterate, the contribution of this book is not at the macro-level of thing theory or concepts of value but rather at the micro- and meso-levels seen in the case studies. As a Maya archaeologist, I enjoyed each of the chapters. I believe that the broad temporal scope, covering the last 2,000 years, also offers something to Latin Americanists from disciplines beyond my own.