Regional Patterns in Lithic Procurement and Production in the Middle Usumacinta

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle Usumacinta River was a politically fragmented and contested region during the Classic Maya period, with neighboring polities vying for territory, prestige, and wealth. Recent archaeological and epigraphic work is continuing to delineate the shifting borders and alliances of this time period, with the goal of understanding the complex sociopolitical relationships and mechanisms through which certain polities came to dominate others. Within such studies, a persistent question has concerned the economic consequences of living in such a politically and militarily contested area. Did political boundaries limit the flow of goods and raw materials? Did borders lead to the emergence of different technologies or traditions of production? Could residents of one polity access goods from a rival’s, in some cases only a few dozen kilometers away? To address these questions, this paper presents the results of lithic analysis of stone goods from the sites of Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan, Lacanja-Tzeltal, and Palenque. I analyze these goods in respect to where raw materials are coming from, the production technologies used in crafting, and kinds of goods produced. In doing so, I find distinct differences between each site that I argue reflect fragmentation of the region’s economic networks along political lines.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36179.0