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

technologies and materials can lead to more refined models of lithic economies. In many
cases debitage resulting from the production of bifacial and core-derived artifacts is
reduced to a single category of “debitage” in studies that focus on large Maya centers
(e.g., Coe 1959; Moholy Nagy 1991, 1997; Willey 1972). Notable exceptions to this
pattern include studies from northern Belize (e.g., Masson 2001), where debitage deposits
are large, intact, and more systematically recorded (see Mallory 1984; Moholy-Nagy
1997 for a discussion). From a socio-cultural perspective, the analytical homogenization
of chipped-stone artifacts has the effect of erasing a variety of ancient behaviors and
denying the attribution of agency to the ancient craft producers. In this study I pay
attention to subtle changes in production techniques through time. For example, the
obsidian eccentrics at Piedras Negras shift from notched flake morphology to bifacially
reduced, exhausted blade-cores over time. This observation has implications for
understanding the economic parameters of obsidian eccentric production, but also social
issues of style and symbolic content.
Small lithic samples, relative to Kaminaljuyú, Tikal, Colhá, and other sites, and a
lack of production dumps at the site do not allow for a statistical analysis of product
output for the ancient city of Piedras Negras. Instead, the location of unused flakes and
production debitage is used to determine likely locales of lithic production per ceramic
phase, a method similar to that created by Moholy-Nagy (1997) for Tikal. In addition, I
also use the content of Piedras Negras caches, which were deposited in the most
politically significant areas of the site, to understand the role of the ruling elite in the
economic consumption of chipped stone. Exhausted obsidian blade-cores, biface-thinning
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