Over the past 15 years, there has been a renewed interest in Maya economics, ancient and modern. For the ancient Maya, this research seems to have taken on many of the characteristics of a paradigm shift. New data has seriously challenged older theories with new interpretations leading to the formation of completely new theories. For the present Maya, research has focused on the syncretism of traditional cultures with globalized economies and the utility and morality of commodifying an ancient past. Scholars have published a good half-dozen major works on these subjects since 2000, detailing both modern ethnographies and novel archaeological perspectives. The latest book comes from the University of Arizona Press: The Value of Things: Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region, edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan. On the whole, the book is a mixed effort, with both hits and misses, but it does make an important contribution to understanding how the Maya economy functioned and functions.

The book is divided into 12 chapters, each addressing a different commodity. These are jade, agriculture, chert, salt, honey/wax, cacao, henequen, sugar/rum, land, ceramics, and cultural products for tourism. They are also grouped chronologically, the first half of the book addressing the precolumbian Maya before moving through the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The central focus of the text, stated in the introduction, is “how the value of commodities may have changed over the centuries and whether or not there is a consistency in the belief that objects not only have a financial value but are also imbued with life and symbolize the history of the piece” (13). Despite the stated emphasis on value and commodities, this book is all about production: who makes what and how and why they do it. The rest of the economy is rarely mentioned. The book should instead be titled The Production of Things.

This issue of “value” is one of the book's weaknesses. The editors never settle on a definition for the term, concluding that it may not be either useful or possible to have a single overarching theory. Each individual author is left to develop their own theoretical approach or not, with highly unpredictable, widely varying results. Some of the authors simply get lost in theory. Part of this comes from an overreliance on a single source, David Graeber's 2001 Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Dreams. A full third of the book cites him, almost exclusively. Graeber takes a quasi-Marxist approach to value, assuming that value is produced at the moment of creation, when a physical object takes its place within a social or symbolic system. This is far from a widely held view and one that is not accepted outside of certain circles within social anthropology. No one knows if “value” can be produced at all, symbolic systems notwithstanding, or if value comes into being along the curves of supply and demand.

Another weakness of the text is a general failure to integrate with wider scholarly literature. For instance, modern tourists purchase the work of artesanías to memorialize and authenticate their vacation. Why? What makes Maya culture so commercially attractive? Is it the presence and pressures of a globalized marketplace, as suggested by Walter Little? Is it a lucrative re-learning of ancient traditions from anthropological texts, as argued by Laurie Medina? Another example addresses the ancient past. Brigette Kovacevich assumes that the jade workshops of Classic cities served as workshops for master crafters adding inalienable labor to artistic masterpieces. However, recent scholars have convincingly argued that jade beads functioned as economic currency, not necessarily artistic social preciosities. If so, some workshops functioned less as artists’ studios and more like mints producing currency for the use of the state. As with modern currency, a degree of artistic skill is required but is largely incidental. This is not to pick on Kovacevich, whose work remains, as always, exemplary, but to point out the issues typical of the volume.

The two strongest chapters lack either problem. Thomas Guderjan and his colleagues’ chapter on intensive agriculture addresses the study of ancient ditched field systems of northern Belize, field systems capable of large-scale agricultural production. This was an agricultural system that far exceeded local needs, a system designed to grow and export large quantities of food. The second is Heather McKillop and Cory Sills's chapter on the ancient saltworks of southern Belize. There, again, local salt extraction occurred on a large scale, producing more salt than was locally required. Salt was exported. The large-scale production of food and salt hints at the scale of the Classic Maya economy, where population centers could draw upon wide-ranging and large-scale production for their needs. These two chapters do not address the thorny problem of value, likely as salt and food don't look like art to modern eyes. If one is producing staples at scale, it immediately begs the question of where they went, thus necessitating an interest in what other scholars have written about the wider economic interactions of the day. These chapters avoid the weakness of the volume's theory and well integrate recent economic literature.

The strengths of the volume are obvious. It bridges scholarship covering the ancient past to the modern present, presenting a wide-ranging continuum from 300 BC to AD 2017. This is impressive. It makes a set of connections that narrowly focused specialists often overlook. For example, how different were the Classic nobility of Blue Creek from the rapacious henequen plantation owners of nineteenth-century Yucatan? In those jade workshops, were there both inspired artists, artistas, and disinterested workers, artesanos? In linking ancient production with modern production, the volume draws connections that otherwise would be missed. The volume also opens a discussion on how exactly one studies “value.” Value, after all, is not something that can be excavated and mapped into place. It must be inferred from supporting evidence with an argument to explain it.

So, while this is something of a mixed review, the book itself makes a strong contribution to the study of ancient economies and culturally embedded modern ones. It makes immediate and obvious links between the two and opens a discussion about the study of “value,” artistic, economic, social, and moral. The Value of Things, if not a perfect book, certainly is a valuable one.