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

consciously associated with power relations. World views and technological elaboration
could have led to the creation of the eccentric forms of the early Late Classic.
Competition between craft producers increased after the reign of Ruler 4, however, and
craft ideologies may have been raised into discursive consciousness, typified by the
contrast between contested orthodoxic and heterodoxic dispositions. In other words,
mythological charter and ritualized production may have begun as a doxic reality, but the
intensified political nature of Classic Maya polities provoked obsidian workers to reify
symbolically potent aspects of their practice.
In the case of Piedras Negras, politics, as well as economic and demographic
factors, played a role in the heightened competition during the end of the Late Classic
period. Although the ruling family attempted to bring the ever-increasing number of
specialists into public rituals, the internal competition between individuals may have
already begun to destabilize the social organization of the center. The attribution of
mythological legitimacy to local craftspeople may have led to the unintended
consequence of endowed craft producers who ultimately detracted, through their own
control of esoteric production knowledge, from the perceived political and religious
supremacy of the royal ajaw. This is not to say that royal sequestering of chipped-stone
goods and the practice of chipped-stone production were always contested acts of
conscious, machiavellian posturing. Instead, at certain moments of political change,
members of some craft oficios attempted to demonstrate to the royal family that their
product, and the esoteric production knowledge needed to produce them, was the
necessary for some public rituals. However, near the time of the collapse of the center the
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