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

this technique is on transforming the very distal end and not necessarily the entire face of
the core (Figure 6.18). Although blades removed from the frontal working face tend not
to overshoot, the sides or edges of the core feature pronounced and acutely angle blade
scars that tend to guide the fracture plane of the following blade into an overshot
termination. An overshot at the edge not only causes loss of total core length, but also can
create the possibility of further overshot termination errors. Distal rejuvenation flakes
were often removed at a diagonal from the distal end, not to fix an error, but to remove
the curved end of the distal portion of the core (Figure 6.18 and 6.3). Thus, one possible
goal of distal modification is to reduce the chance of overshot. This sort of distal
modification also accounts for the reverse percussion rings at the distal ends of some
pressure blades. This observation remains hypothetical at this point, since there may have
been other, previously unrecognized, functional advantages to distal modification.
All of these rejuvenation procedures represent a dangerous point in the life of the
core, and their success determines whether it can be used in the further production of
blades. These types of debitage also are found in royal caches, along with exhausted
cores, first- and second-series blades, and extremely fine third-series blades, possibly
used for bloodletting (Clark and Bryant 1997:Figure 5). Blades and flakes also were
symbolically potent and reveal the importance of the production process in determining
the meaning of cache goods (Hruby 2002). All of these debitage types have been used to
categorize the lithic debitage from Piedras Negras.
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