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

study is but one more building block towards a broader understanding of the Maya area
as a whole.
A focus on practice, symbolism, ideology, and technology can broaden our
understanding of what value, demand, and preference structure may have looked like for
certain areas of the Maya Lowlands (see Section 2.3). In many cases “control” is simply
too vague of a word, and with the plethora of data now available from the Maya
Lowlands it is possible to reconstruct previously un-hypothesized elements of the
economy. At Piedras Negras, kings were definitely interested in “utilitarian” economy,
but in what ways, and to what extent they influenced the production and distribution of
various kinds of goods is another matter (see Chapters 6 and 7).
Given the possible liminal status of chipped-stone producers in the Maya
Lowlands, as both elite craft specialists and as utilitarian producers, the recently
postulated importance of ideology in elite craft specialization requires us to investigate
the role of ideas in Maya craft-specialization (e.g., McAnany 1992b; Reents-Budet 1998;
Inomata 2001). By liminal status I mean that chipped-stone producers, the materials they
used, and the objects they produced all crosscut status boundaries. The fact that nonroyal
residential groups feature production evidence of utilitarian and ceremonial items,
consumed by royals and nonroyals alike, indicates that their social roles were
multifaceted 3 . Another part of this study tests the idea that some aspects of chipped-stone
production were ideologically loaded and that some chipped-stone producers controlled
esoteric production knowledge (see Chapter 1). Esoteric production knowledge 4 , as I use
it here, describes the local reduction-techniques and strategies for the manufacture of
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