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

(1992a) maintained that utilitarian craft specialization usually occurred in households
outside of royal jurisdiction. It apparently was not worth the time or effort of kings to
control secondary, utilitarian production systems (McAnany 1992a:232). This view
resembles that of Rice (1987:84) who argued that in Late Classic society “power rested in
the genealogies of rulers, not their administration of production and distribution of
utilitarian goods within their realm.” Obsidian may have been considered more of a
prestige good than chert (referred to below as microcrystalline quartz), but only because
of the ubiquity of chert sources throughout the Maya Lowlands (McAnany 1992b:93).
McAnany asserted that obsidian may have been traded as a prestige good under certain
circumstances, but, like other elite sumptuary goods, it was not the primary mover in the
political economy.
Drawing largely from a discussion of noncapitalist, class-stratified societies
(Giddens 1981), McAnany (1992b:86-87) made a distinction between economic wealth
derived from agriculture, and social power gained through genealogy. These two pillars
of ancient Maya society allowed kings to establish rule over the population by
legitimizing the primacy of their lineage, and by controlling arable land and the laborers
needed to work it. Hypothetically speaking, elites could have gained social power by
emphasizing blood-ties and control of esoteric religious knowledge, but did not have
economic wealth (e.g., no arable land), and vice versa. The tension between these two
forces accounts for much of the social structure and political history of the Classic Maya
(see McAnany [1995] for a full explanation of the importance of ancestor veneration as
an avenue to social power). In this model, however, there is little interest in the
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