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

information from new excavations is available. The strong point of the dating system
proposed by Coe is that it relies mostly on monuments with Long Count dates, and the
caches that were deposited directly below those monuments. Therefore, in this section
and the analysis section in Chapter 7, I note the difference between firmly dated caches
and those dated by architectural association. All of the recently excavated caches have
either good ceramic information or are deposited with Long Count monuments.
Lee and Hayden (1988) carried out the only other published work on lithics from
the Middle Usumacinta region based on the artifacts recovered from a cave near El Cayo.
The El Cayo sample is useful but small. The cave context makes it unclear if the chipped-
stone artifacts were in some way specially prepared for the cave deposit, or if they were
household items. One technological trait of the microcrystalline-quartz artifacts from El
Cayo was percussion blades made from blade cores (Lee and Hayden 1988). Although a
few microcrystalline-quartz blades and cores were found in general excavations at
Piedras Negras, their presence in two burials indicates that they may have had religious
significance. Further archaeological reconnaissance in the Middle Usumacinta region
may reveal more concrete technological and symbolic connections between sites and
their corresponding lithic traditions.
3.1.2: General Excavations and Interpretations of Piedras Negras History
Settlement at the place known anciently as yokib or “entranceway” began during
the Middle Preclassic (Child and Child 2001; Escobedo and Houston 2001; Forsyth and
Hruby 1997; Muñoz 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003; Stuart and Houston 1994). Preliminary
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