Merchant guilds in ancient Mesoamerica and their origins

Drawing on historical sources and material culture, the article examines how professional merchant organizations—especially merchant guilds—used membership signifiers and venerated supernatural patrons. It argues that the Aztec pochteca satisfy core, cross-cultural criteria for a merchant guild, sharing organizational principles with Medieval/Renaissance European guilds. These criteria are then applied to earlier Mesoamerican contexts with limited written records. The study proposes that copper anthropomorphic face rings depicting merchant deities functioned as signifiers of professional merchants among Late Classic and Early Postclassic Maya in eastern Chiapas and highland Guatemala—often associated with elites—and that such signifiers later spread widely among merchants across Mesoamerica by the Late Postclassic.