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

the thoroughness of publication and artifact illustration. However, technological issues
continued to be of little interest in artifact typologies until Sheets (1975), Shafer and
Hester (1983), Rovner (1975), and others began to focus on how chipped-stone artifacts
were made.
Sheets (1975) isolated the important aspects of what a technological typology
should be, and set guidelines for what could be done with lithics, lithic analysis, and
archaeological theory. He (1975:1) laid out eight possible areas of inquiry that could be
addressed with artifact typologies. His main assertions were that (1) an analyst should
have a question or problem in mind before a typology is constructed; and that (2) the
typology must be consistent throughout. He used the term behavioral to describe the
particular typology he had created for blade-core reduction, because each piece of
debitage represented a specific behavior carried out by the blade producer. Since the
structure of the typology was more useful for categorizing specific kinds of debitage than
previous typologies, other lithic analysts used it for their artifact assemblages (see Clark
and Lee 1979). In 1983 Clark and Bryant (1997) revised the typology, renaming it a
technological typology, because every behavioral trait and specific mistake was not
considered in its nomenclature. This revision of the Sheets typology is still commonly
used today 13 , and aside from some regional variations (Hintzman 2000), most
Mesoamerican lithic analysts accept the basic flake, blade, and core types presented by
Clark and Bryant (1997:Figure 4.1). The reason for the prominence of this typology is
that it has logical and nominal consistency. The terms used to describe artifacts are a
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