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

tomb (Burial 10) and the tomb of Ruler 4 (Burial 13), reveal the importance of production
debitage, and perhaps the process of production, in royal burial practice.
In Burial 10 (Figure 7.25) a basket of biface-reduction flakes was placed in a side
niche of the tomb. Placed on top of this basket of hundreds of flakes were two bifaces,
one an axe perform and the other a fully finished celtiform axe. According to refit studies
(Figure 7.23) the flakes below the bifaces did not all result from the production of these
two bifaces. However, some refits were made with the preform biface (Figure 7.24)
indicating that the flakes were taken from the very production space in which the bifaces
were manufactured. Thus, it was not the specific flakes from those bifaces that were
symbolically significant, but rather it was the space and the content of that space in the
process of production that were significant to the burial offering. The symbolism of the
practice of production—flake-to-preform-to-finished product--was also a key element in
the offering. The deposition of debitage that marked all phases of biface manufacture
may symbolize the termination of a lifecycle or perhaps rebirth.
Burial 13 contained a scattered deposit of 253 nodule reduction and biface-
thinning flakes. The total number of flakes may have been greater than 253 since the
entire tomb was not excavated. They were not deposited over the entire tomb, but rather
over a number of ceramic vessels located in the northwest corner of the crypt. It is
unclear if the flakes were interred at the time of the original burial or when it was later
reentered during a fire ceremony (see Houston et al. 1998). Although some refits were
found among the flakes, it is unclear how the flakes were collected for the burial ritual.
The majority of the flakes represent early stages of nodule reduction and biface thinning,
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