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

avoids the problem of how to characterize the various statuses of households at ancient
Piedras Negras, and I do not try to accomplish this feat here.
McAnany (1992b:88) also used a very narrow definition of political economy that
she briefly defined as the “appropriation of a stimulated surplus or corvee labor,” which
is inherently connected to a two-class system. I prefer a broader definition that
characterizes the political economy as those aspects of the economy for which laws and
regulatory policies are recorded or written. The political economy, then, describes all
economic activities that have an effect on political organization and power. This
perspective allows the researcher to move beyond discerning who had land and who did
not, and attempts to look at the structure of intra-site political, social, and economic
relationships. Since a goal of this research is to study social organization, then a two-class
structure and a narrowly defined political economy do not offer many avenues to
understand the complexity of occupational specialties and the many roles of ideology in
society.
McAnany (1995) argued that her model of social power and economic wealth
successfully integrates the social, political, and economic elements of society, but the
social element of the equation remains under-theorized. I envision, and also discuss in
Section 2.4, rather two basic organizational principles in the Classic Maya center. One is
based on kinship (e.g., ancestor reification, blood ties, and fictive kin relations) and is
clearly elaborated by McAnany (1995) as a means to social power, and the other based on
occupation, which would overlap her bi-partite characterization of the political economy
(i.e., social power and economic wealth). The occupational aspect of social organization
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