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

Lowlands, such as medium- and small-sized, stemmed bifaces are rare at Piedras Negras.
In fact, many of the stemmed bifaces at Piedras Negras appear to be the result of post-
breakage reworking. Another trend related to the lack of stem morphology at Piedras
Negras is the absence of tangs on stemmed bifaces. Most other lowland sites feature
tangs on local bifaces at one time or another. Nevertheless, tanged bifaces of all sizes are
present in caches from throughout Piedras Negras. In this case the Piedras Negras Maya
may have been emphasizing tanged bifaces as a marker of foreign affiliation at the royal
level, because they are not part of local hafting traditions and technologies.
Very few Preclassic and Postclassic forms were found at Piedras Negras. This
pattern corresponds to the small ceramic samples (i.e., small populations) from these time
periods. However, a small sample of non-Classic artifacts were discovered, including the
small side-notched celtiform uniface marking Postclassic trends, and also a finely made
large celtiform biface, thin example that probably dates to the Preclassic. Similar to the
lithic sample from the Pasión region, no tranchet celts were found at Piedras Negras,
indicating that materials, tools, and production knowledge were not traded from the chert-
bearing zone of northern Belize. The lack of readily identifiable “honey brown” Belizean
cherts suggests that eastern chert trade-networks did not extend to the Middle Usumacinta
region. Of all the studied areas of the Maya Lowlands, the tool types and technologies
used at Piedras Negras most resemble those from Tikal and the Central Petén Lakes
region. Furthermore, microcrystalline quartz and obsidian eccentrics at Tikal closely
resemble those from Piedras Negras, and are less similar to eccentrics from the Pasión
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