The Organization of Chipped-Stone Economies at Piedras Negras ...

eceived these scores from moderate to heavy use-wear on only one side of the flake. For
example, I removed flakes with “scrape-medium” on one side and “zero” use on the other
sides (3+0=3), which would fit numerically into the production evidence category, but
was in fact moderately used. Since the goal is to locate debitage that was not used, I
retained flakes and blades that were used “very softly” for obsidian and at least “softly”
for microcrystalline quartzes. I kept these pieces of debitage as production evidence
because of the possibility that light use-wear markings on both microcrystalline quartz
and obsidian debitage may have gotten there by some other means, not related to actual
tool use (e.g., by being tread upon or from contact with other objects). This ranking
system is crude, but the goal is not to gather detailed information about how tools were
used (cf. Aoyama 1998), but rather to determine the relative intensity with which the
debitage was used, and, of course, where the bulk of unused debitage was found at the
site.
3.2.1.2: Identifying production locales. Because no large-scale production dumps (as at
Colhá, see Shafer and Hester [1976]), or in situ workshops were found at Piedras Negras,
I use the frequency and distribution of the previously mentioned kinds of production
debitage in middens, fill, and special deposits. This method makes determining frequency
of production and total output of lithic goods questionable, so I do not attempt to
calculate these aspects of production here. I do, however, reconstruct minimum and
maximum numbers of finished artifacts for some debitage deposits, such as biface-
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