Suppose you're in a Mayan city in AD50. Will you see stalls selling things like you would in an old world city? If "yes" what sort of things would you see being sold, and how would you pay for them?

The short answer is maybe.

50 AD is in the Preclassic period for the Maya, which when compared to the Classic and Postclassic periods, we know very little of. There is very strong evidence for markets and a market economy in the Postclassic period. Dahlin et al (2007) cite a few words in Maya which might have some antiquity to them stretching to the Classic period. K’iwik or kiuik can be translated to “market”, “fair”, or “where one buys or sells”. Pplom means “professional merchants” and ah’ pplom means “traveling merchants" (Barrera Vasquez 1980:405). The Maya in the Postclassic also have a merchant deity called Ek Chuah, which may have evolved from the Classic Maya deity known as God L (Taube 1992: 79-88). Then there are historical accounts of Maya traders traveling up and down the coast and into the Caribbean to conduct trade. But that’s the Postclassic and you’re asking about the Preclassic and archaeologists are not quite sure if the Classic period had markets. Let me explain why.

Market economies are extremely difficult to identify. Most of the goods being traded are either organic goods like food, wood, and clothing which just do not preserve well in the hot and humid Maya environment or non-exotic and non-luxury goods inorganic goods which could be better explained with other forms of economic exchange like direct consumption by the producer, balanced or generalized reciprocity, or redistribution. And in the Classic period, written and artistic evidence points more towards a non-market economy in which distribution was probably the norm. Exotic and luxury goods are disproportionately in the hands of elites. There is a distinct lack of places in cities which could be considered market areas like arcades or small simple foundations arrayed in such a way to suggest a market area with stalls.

That being said, Dahlin et al do believe they discovered a market at the site of Chunchucmil mentioned by sophrosyne. Chunchucmil is located in the northwestern portion of the Yucatan peninsula near the second largest salt pan fields in the Maya region. The city is large, it is one of the largest Classic period cities in northern Yucatan and it is located in an area with very thin soil that is prone to flooding. The city has a distinct lack of prominent and centralized religious and elite buildings. Instead, the city is dotted with elite compounds whose most ornate decorated elements are withheld from public view along with smaller and not as imposing pyramids. There is a space at Chunchucmil which Dahlin et al believe to be a market space for a variety of reasons. The space lacks the typical diagnostic characteristics of a plaza which would have been used for ceremonies and the elite. There are small arrangements of stone that are kind of arranged in rows. The space also is where several sacbe or sacbeob, “white road”, converge within the city. These “white roads” were raised and plastered roads which connected settlements together and facilitated trade and movement of people. Around this space is a platform, but it’s not ornate and not very distinguishable from other platforms. With such a large population and low carrying capacity, Dahlin et al believe that Chunchucmil almost needed a market in which to supply the city with food with salt perhaps being a medium of exchange.

With these lines of evidence, Dahlin et al tested the soil from this space, along with soil samples within the city and controlled samples taken from outside the city, to determine phosphorous levels. If the people of Chunchucmil were trading organic material, there would be higher levels of phosphorous in the space than compared to other parts of the city and outside the city. What they found is that within areas in the space there are higher than normal levels of phosphorous, but the levels are not the same throughout. To explain this, they looked towards a modern market in Antigua, Guatemala. There they recorded where the stalls were, what activities were taking place, and took soil samples from each of these areas to compare with their Chunchucmil samples. What they found in the Antigua market is that there is a food preparation area, a vegetable and fruit sales area, an area with mixed use pathways, and an area in which readymade food was sold. Comparing those values with their values from Chunchucmil, they believe the concentrations of phosphorous align with a similar sort of distribution.

But Chunchucmil is one case in a unique city which cannot be adequately applied to the entirety of the Classic Maya or even Preclassic Maya world. So Masson and Freidel (2012) took things one step closer in trying to determine if the Classic Maya had markets. They compared consumption of different materials and craft specialization between the Postclassic northern Yucatan city of Mayapan and the Classic Lowland city of Tikal. The materials they looked at were obsidian, fancy pottery, and shells and they go into a lot of detail about it, which I will not bore you with. What they argued is that even with part time craft surplus production at the household level was enough to create complex systems of regional market exchange in the Classic period. Cities are not self-sufficient and in order to survive they needed to tap into these regional markets. These markets would have provided solutions for periodic resource shortages and heterogeneous resource distributions in the Maya area over the long term and would have, in fact, contributed to the stability of elite political control perhaps more so than intra-regional luxury good trading.

So what we have is a maybe for the Classic period and an unknown for the Preclassic. If it turns out that the Classic period did have markets than it is reasonable to guess that the Preclassic might also have had markets. But in order to confirm markets for both periods, much more work is needed especially for the Preclassic period.

But what would they have used for exchange? In the Postclassic Mesoamerican world the normal things for exchange was cacao, cotton mantles of a set length, width, quality, and material, and salt. As I mentioned above, Chunchucmil was probably one of the largest producers of salt in the Maya world and since people need salt they would have had a great source of wealth in order to trade for goods. In fact, Chunchucmil, despite not having a large religious or elite presence, has a lot of exotic goods like jade and obsidian for the "middle" class.

Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo, et al. "Diccionario Maya Cordemex: Maya-Español." Español-Maya, Ediciones Cordemex, Mérida, Mexico (1980).
Dahlin, Bruce H., et al. "In search of an ancient Maya market." Latin American Antiquity (2007): 363-384.
Masson, Marilyn A., and David A. Freidel. "An argument for Classic era Maya market exchange." Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31.4 (2012): 455-484
Taube, Karl Andreas. "The major gods of ancient Yucatan." Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 32 (1992): i-160.