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

Pennsylvania that yielded an important artifact sample, which was also reanalyzed for
this study. The sample collected by the University of Pennsylvania consists mostly of
cache and burial objects because the focus of their excavation was on the royal palace
and temples. It appears that obsidian and microcrystalline-quartz artifacts from general
excavations were not usually saved because very few, except for a few obsidian blades
and chert bifaces, remain in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología e
Historia de Guatemala and the University Museum in Philadelphia. Previous studies of
this material provide a point of departure for the present one.
William Coe (1959) systematically compiled and created typologies for the
obsidian and chert artifacts of Piedras Negras collected by University of Pennsylvania.
However, Coe did not have the benefit of witnessing and recording the excavation of
these objects in the 1930s. Instead, the original contexts of the materials were
reconstructed from field notes. Those notes lack contextual information because of the
limited recorded methods of the day, which often did not include detailed illustration and
photography of the cache objects in situ. Information necessary for an in depth analysis
of caches and cache goods includes: (1) position of each object in the cache; (2) the
location of each object in relation to other objects in the cache; (3) mapping multiple
layers of cache objects in the same deposit; and (4) multiple drawings and photographs of
each layer of the cache as it is excavated. This contextual information is useful for
interpreting the symbolism of the cache deposit, as well as understanding the often
complicated and sequential deposition of the cache goods. All of these data might have
helped Coe date the deposits more precisely. His project was also hindered by a fire that
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