almost every family here needs a metate, but metates tend to last and last.a housewife may replace a worn and broken one only once in her lifetime. so the market for metates is limited. it has not been a good day for filomeno. he did not sell one metate or even a mano. others did better. but still, only three metates left the market on the backs of new owners. sanders thinks that like their modern counterparts in mexico, the copan metateros were also farmers. filomeno does not have enough land to be a full-time farmer, but in ancient copan, there was ample land, but of poor quality. the land at petapilla would barely sustain the family working it, so making metates part-time to supplement what they could grow made economic sense. sanders and his team have now found evidence that other farmers around copan were also engaged in part-time manufacturing in specializations like lime making, pottery and woodworking. these part-time specializations are for sanders a sign that the economy of copan was taking the first steps toward complexity. sharing the sun with anc