Abstract
Value is an emergent quality—the ever-shifting outcome of the human experience and sense of scarcity, memory, capacity to exchange, relationships of power, and engagements with physical and political landscapes. Over the course of the first millennium AD, communities in the Maya lowlands experienced political collapse, the foundation of dynastic kingdoms, explosive conflicts, the expansive growth of populations, the radical transformation of wetlands and forests into intensive agricultural systems, all followed by political and demographic splintering. The apparent categorical persistence of value that archaeologists typically attribute to materials like polychrome pottery, greenstone finery, and more defies those shifting landscapes and their impacts on human engagement with and experience of value. This chapter seeks an approach that accommodates the static realities of archaeological data without denying the dynamic relationships of value to the experience of landscapes.
