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

thinning flake deposits in royal burials. The goal here is simply to reveal further symbolic
meanings associated with ritual deposits.
I devised a subjective grading system to rank various kinds of debitage as more or
less strong evidence for production activity in a given locale. I separated production
evidence into first-, second-, and third-degree groupings, with third-degree production
evidence representing the strongest evidence for production activity. The validity of these
groups are based on two main assumptions: (1) small and awkwardly shaped pieces of
debitage were not valuable trade items and, thus, were not traded from the place of their
creation; and (2) unused pieces of production debitage likely were not traded far from the
place of their manufacture. Since production debitage does not appear to have been
deposited in “dumps” around households, and likely was removed to other locations,
remnant production debitage on abandoned floors, in fill, and in middens remain the only
markers of production at Piedras Negras.
First–degree production evidence in microcrystalline quartzes include unused or
little-used biface-reduction flakes of early, middle, or late stage. Other biface-reduction
flakes, such as those removed to raise a margin and alternating flakes removed to
eliminate a square edge on the production blank, were included in the first-degree
production evidence category. Second-degree production evidence includes little-used
nodule-reduction flakes and hammerstone flakes. Nodule-reduction flakes indicate that
blanks for large- and medium-sized bifaces and unifaces were being produced and that
the residential group had access to those raw materials. Hammerstone flakes, which were
produced unintentionally through use of the hammerstone (Figure 3.4), also are
85