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

found at Piedras Negras, indicating that bipolar reduction was reserved for the
manufacture of blanks used in the obsidian eccentric industries.
3.2.1.1: The role of use-wear in the study. The existence of use-wear on debitage can
confuse the identification of production loci, since certain types of debitage could have
been moved or traded outside of the household group where they were originally
manufactured. However, Moholy-Nagy has (1997) suggested that the existence of certain
kinds of debitage in a dated context can provide good evidence for production activity by
a given household at a particular time. Thus, flakes without use-wear, and other unused
types of debitage, which traditionally were not transformed into tools, are used as
primary evidence of production location somewhere within the general vicinity of a
residential group (Hayden and Cannon 1983). Heavily used microcrystalline-quartz
debitage, for example, is discounted as production evidence because biface reduction-
flakes were important cutting and scraping tools to producers and nonproducers alike.
Nevertheless, the existence of unused debitage, possibly in conjunction with used flakes,
aids in identifying production locales.
I divided use-wear by the degree of use, be it cutting or scraping, into very soft,
soft, medium, hard, and very hard categories. I then gave each group a numerical value of
0-5. For example, a flake that was used on two sides as cut-medium and scrape-hard
received a flake-use total of 7. A flake that was not used received a zero flake-use score.
In selecting flakes as production evidence, I only used debitage with a flake-use total of 2
or less for obsidian and 4 or less for microcrystalline quartzes, but excluded flakes that
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