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

McAnany 1989). Resharpening or reworking techniques may have been disconnected
from a body of common knowledge about proper tool form, or template, commanded by
chipped-stone producers in a given region or political center. The validity of this
proposition is strengthened by the idea that consumer and producer households existed
anciently, and that chipped-stone producers were not ubiquitous throughout the site.
However, an assumption is made that producers within the city were in communication
with each other, and that knowledge was shared among chipped-stone producers. Given
the uniformity of lithic forms at Piedras Negras and other sites during the Classic period,
this may have been a likely scenario.
Function is not a factor in type designations in this study. Although suites of
material, technological, and morphological traits often correlate with a particular function
(e.g., a thick, laurel leaf biface as pick or chisel), use-wear studies are better equipped to
answer specific questions of function. Furthermore, use-wear studies may not reveal the
“primary function” of a tool, especially if secondary use-wear obliterates earlier patterns.
Thus, this typology acknowledges that the primary function of a small, stemmed biface
was to pierce things as a projectile point, but it does not impose that function on its type
name. In the following typology neither function nor time period figure into type
nomenclature, and morphological and technological characteristics are used binomially as
type designations.
Ultimately, the proposed typology attempts to avoid large numbers of type names
by disregarding possible morphological variation caused by use and reworking (see
Flenniken and Raymond [1986], and Flenniken and Wilke [1989] for discussion). Rovner
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