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

Determining whether or not the royal family controlled lithic production,
however, is a difficult empirical endeavor, and one that cannot be demonstrated with the
present data. Instead, I reconstruct the possible exchange and production systems to infer
the social roles of producers and consumers alike. Hypothesis 3 is constructed to reveal
where production debitage was used, and by whom, through time. In contrast to the
common perception that production debitage is “waste” or refuse, this research explores
ways in which production debitage was valued and used in symbolically potent ways.
Hypothesis 4 further tests this idea by looking at specific ways in which technology and
ideology overlap in royal debitage deposits throughout the site.
3.2.1: Parameters of Analysis and Assumptions
Various lines of evidence have been used in the past to model the organization of
production and consumption in ancient Maya cities, usually with the intention of arguing
for or against royal control of lithic economies. Use-wear studies (Aldenderfer 1991),
production debitage (Fedick 1991), consumption-related debitage (McAnany 1989),
workshop dumps and debris (Masson 2001), and frequencies of lithic material in general
(Moholy-Nagy 1997) are among only some of the employed methods. Although I
collected all of these types of data for Piedras Negras, the focus of this study is on
production locations that are identified by frequencies of production debitage.
As mentioned previously, I shift the focus to artifact technology and context in
order to bring more specificity to discussions of royal control and types of specialized
production. It is not sufficient to state that since the majority of production occurred away
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