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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 . Accessed: 15/06/2011 14:07
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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 obsidian) 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 Olmecstyle 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 (1968:107the 108) has suggested that the underlying 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

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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 panMesoamerican 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 resourcedeficient 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 longdistance 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 archaeological 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

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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 Mesoamerica 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 characteristics 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 standards 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 unspecified 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: San Lorenzo La Venta Tlatilco Chalcatzingo San Jose Mogote Laguna Zope To: San Lorenzo 36 331 312 212 104 Chalcatzingo 343 340 116 285 441 San Jose Mogote 238 274 312 285 156 Laguna Zope 128 164 455 428 143 -

La Venta 27 318 300 239 131

Tlatilco 362 359 116 312 468

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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 contemporaneous, 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 comprehensive 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. Movement 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

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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 longdistance transport. In such cases, estimates of the quantity of goods moved and the effort required the to move and/or produceh 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 comparison with most Mesoamerican cherts, a small weight of obsidian yields a large amount of exceedingly 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

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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 accumulation 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 ethnographic 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 personyear'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 represented 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.

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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 (Kowalewski 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. Nevertheless, 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

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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 communication) of 1,850 people during the Middle Formative Rosario phase. Clearly, even a very large

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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 of objects described and illustrated in of 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 the locations when the center line excavations are excluded,excavations, 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

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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 movement 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): generaluse, and low-valuegoods-in the [T]hecontrolof productionand distributionof high-consumption, case of Mesoamerica,local regionalproduction-is much more likely to have played a significantrole in tradenetwork[Sanders1978:273]. than the kind of goods moved along the long-distance social stratification 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 description 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 Teotihuacan 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 (1980:5556) 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 Alban 312 348 333 574

From. Teotihuacan Xochicalco Monte Alban Kaminaljuy6 Tikal

TO:

Teotihuacan 140 312 607 576

Xochicalco 140 348 621 590

Kaminaljuy6 658 672 320 298

Tikal 596 610 618 285 -

Drennan]

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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 1973:41obsidian produced by Teotihuacan. Discussions of 42). If so, they might have been dealin 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

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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 estimatedperhaps 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 Kaminaljuyu 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

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tto traders at Kaminaljuyf to deposit their profit 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 jade pendant can be used or 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 fulltime 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 movement 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

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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 for the Early Classic. Nevertheless, a heavy burden of proof model. This burden includes demonstrating the movement of evidence is obvious, as well as finding evidence of other kinds seems to be textiles. realistic to entertain such possibilities is still left on the proposer of such a sufficient quantities of goods for which of goods, the most likely one of which

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. REFERENCES CITED

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Sanders, William T., and Joseph W. Michels (editors) 1977 Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyfi: A Study in Prehistoric Culture Contact. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park. Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley 1979 The Basin of Mexico: Ecologial Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. Academic Press, New York. Sanders, William T., and Barbara J. Price 1968 Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization. Random House, New York. Sanders, William T., and David Webster 1978 Unilinealism, Multilinealism, and the Evolution of Complex Societies. In Social Archeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, edited by Charles L. Redman, Mary Jane Berman, Edward V. Curtin, William T. Langhorne, Jr., Nina M. Versaggi, and Jeffery C. Wanser, pp. 249-302. Academic Press, New York. Sotomayor, Alfredo, and Noemi Castillo Tejero 1963 Estudio petrogrdfico de la cerdmica "Anaranjado Delgado." Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Departamento de Prehistoria, Publicaciones, No. 12. Spence, Michael W. 1977 Teotihuacan y el intercambio de obsidiana en Mesoamerica. In Los Procesos de cambio (en Mesoamerica y areas circunvecinas): XV Mesa Redonda, pp. 293-300. Sociedad Mexicana de Antropologia and Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Gto., Mexico. 1981 Obsidian Production and the State in Teotihuacin. American Antiquity 46:769-788. Spencer, Charles S. 1982 The Cuicatldn Canada and Monte Albdn. A Study of Primary State Formation. Academic Press, New York. Spores, Ronald 1972 An Archaeological Settlement Survey of the Nochixtldn Valley, Oaxaca. Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology, No. 1. Nashville. Whalen, Michael E. 1981 Excavations at Santo Domingo Tomaltepec: Evolution of a Formative Community in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 12. Ann Arbor. Winter, Marcus C. 1972 Tierras Largas: A Formative Community in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson. 1981 La Obsidiana en Oaxaca prehispanica. Paper presented at the Symposium "La Obsidiana en Mesoamerica," Centro Regional de Hidalgo, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. Winter, Marcus C., and Jane W. Pires-Ferreira 1976 Distribution of Obsidian among Households in Two Oaxacan Villages. In The Early Mesoamerican Village, edited by Kent V. Flannery, pp. 306-311. Academic Press, New York. Zeitlin, Robert N. 1978 Long-Distance Exchange and the Growth of a Regional Center on the Southern Isthmus ofTehuantepec, Mexico. In Prehistoric Coastal Adaptations: The Economy and Ecology of Maritime Middle America, edited by Barbara L. Stark and Barbara Voorhies, pp. 183-210. Academic Press, New York. 1982 Toward a More Comprehensive Model of Interregional Commodity Distribution: Political Variables and Prehistoric Obsidian Procurement in Mesoamerica. American Antiquity 47:260-275. Zeitlin, Robert N., and Ray C. Heimbuch 1978 Trace Element Analysis and the Archaeological Study of Obsidian Procurement in Precolumbian Mesoamerica. In Lithics and Subsistence: The Analysis of Stone Tool Use in Prehistoric Economies, edited by Dave D. Davis, pp. 117-159. Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology, No. 20. Nashville. 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 Particular," will appear in 1984 in the American Anthropologist as "Long-distance Transport Costs in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica."