Copyright by Micaela Nerio Obledo 2011 - The University of Texas ...

Buttles (2002 citing Hayden 1998: 11) notes, “practical technologies are the
solutions to practical problems of survival and comfort” while prestige technologies
are a means “to solve a social problem or accomplish a social task such as attracting
productive mates and allies or bonding members of social groups together via
displays of success.” A primary component in the manifestation of prestige
technologies is the availability of surplus labor (Buttles 2002: 38). As discussed in
Chapter 5 below, the commandeering of a community’s extremely finite surplus
labor resource for the creation of items representative of elevated status would
have been a right or privilege bestowed to those individuals operating as part of the
site elite. These individuals would have possessed the social power to command the
population in such a manner and would also have been privileged with the
economic ability to obtain the exotic materials from which these goods were often
manufactured as well as to warrant their ownership of the items after their creation.
Hayden (1998:33) advises that prestige technologies are not fixed and the
possibility exists for their eventual transformation into practical technologies. This
process is in fact seen in the transition from the favoring of shell to obsidian as a
material marker of status by adult males during the shift from the Middle to Late
Preclassic, as discussed below in Chapters 5, 6, and 9.
Note that the author has marked spouted vessels, vases, and cylindrical
vessels as possible prestige goods, given that they deviate from the expected
practical forms of dishes, bowls, tecomates, etc. Vessels with ‘kill holes’, a cross
motif and those that are used as head covers, placed over the cranium of a decedent,
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