52+ King system of local, regional, and long-distance trade, manifested in market places. While little is known about the latter, it is likely that the trade that took place within them was based mostly in barter rather than monetary or purely commercial transactions (Isaac 2013), as Las Casas (1958:353) attests for the highlands. Marketplaces were viewed as “houses” where things were sold, and vendors were thought of as “owners” of those “houses.” These vendors, as the variety of terms indicates, fit many differ- ent social categories (Shaw 2012). Even the highestranking ones, barring the Cocom whom we know was a trader, occupied a distinct and separate position from that of the ruling elite, as all vendors were required, like their highland Guatemalan counterparts, to pay a marketplace tax or trib- ute. The busin many different types of goods and services. As is true for all pre-modern esses they pursued were also wide-tanging, incorporating economies, the bulk of this economy was probably not commercially bas sd (Isaac 2013), but there are hints of a more widespread and entre- prencurial organization in the lowlands than scholars have hitherto identi- fied (sce also McAnany 2013 on this point). For cxample, we hear from Landa (Tozzer 1941:190) that some people in the Yucatin “pursue their fisheries on a very large seale, by which they cat and sell fish to all the country.” Some of them may have been simple fishermen—small- or even part-time occupational specialists, petty traders, or even target marketers. Tozzer (1941:190, fn. 995), however, comments specifically that “wealthy and important people evidently employed slavesin the fishing industry ac- cording to the Calkini Chronicle,” a practice that implies larger-scale and more organized production. This kind of entrepreneurship and the use of slaves in such a business further support the idea that all of Maya society was involved in trade in the Postclassic. ‘The question remaining is how far back into the Classic can this sys tem be projected in the lowlands? The difficulty of reconstructing the market system coupled with the theoretical bias against economics (King and Shaw, this vol.) has long overshadowed attempts to determine how far back in time the strong commercislization evident in the ethnohistoric documents extended. Indeed, several scholars continue to make the b ditional distinction between a largely non-commercialized Classic and a commercialized Postclassic (e.g., McAnany 2013). There are increasing indications, however, that an equally robust marketing system existed in earlier time periods. As discussed, Tokovinine and Beliaev (2013:172-173) and, more recently, Speal (2014) have identified a list of terms in vari- ous lowland Maya languages relating to buying, selling, bartering, trading, making a profit, paying, loaning, markets, and prices. Some words have