Speaker: Dr. Dorie Reents-Budet, Boston Museum of Fine ArtsThis talk employs distributional patterns of pottery, determined by archaeology, ceramic typology, artistic style and nuclear chemistry, to discern Classic Period (250-850 CE) economic interaction spheres among the Maya. The research points to the crucial role played by cotton production in the political economy of the Maya and throughout ancient Mesoamerica, the ceramic distributional patterns coinciding with configurations of alliance noted in other archaeological data.