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

Aside from these speculative accounts of stone tools, microcrystalline quartz and
obsidian eccentrics remained the chipped-stone artifact of interest until the publication of
the Uaxactun artifact typology created by Kidder (1947).
According to most Mesoamerican lithic analysts, it was Alfred V. Kidder (1947)
who helped transform the way Mayanists classified, collected, and recorded lithic
artifacts. The extensive illustration and description of Maya stone tools excited
Mesoamerican scholars, and recording all artifacts from a site helped shift interest toward
the behavior of individuals. Kidder (1947), however, concretized a rather unhelpful,
preexisting dichotomy between utilitarian and ceremonial classes of artifacts as an
organizational scheme. This system was duly criticized by Irwin Rovner (1975), and also
Payson Sheets (1978:9-10), who pointed out that distinctions made between utilitarian
and ceremonial categories require an initial inference about function. The classification
scheme proposed by Kidder (1947) is based on function, or specifically, morphology and
function. The morpho-technological typology presented here does not presume to dictate
the function of a tool (e.g., chopping, stabbing, cutting, etc.), without systematic use-wear
analysis or replicative experimentation. Rovner and Lewenstein (1997:6) stated: “[a]ny
conclusions about function and cultural importance derived from such a classification are
tainted by circular reasoning: assumptions made for the initial classification wind up as
interpretations in the final analysis.” This concise and important point, however, is not
reflected in their own typologies and analysis.
Gordon Willey (1972) and William Coe (1959) continued to use the style of
classification created by Kidder (1947), and were able to make marked improvements on
138