Obsidian craft production at Teotihuacan: A view from Tlajinga 17

Summary

In 1986 John Clark published a seminal article that questioned the scale of obsidian craft production at Teotihuacan as reconstructed by the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP). Clark argued that many of the areas identified as obsidian workshops from surface materials were concentrations of production refuse deposited as fill and eroding out of residential and public architecture. Excavations by the Projecto Arqueologico Teotihuacan-Tlajinga (PATT) in 2013 explored the stratigraphic relationships in Tlajinga 17, a domestic apartment compound in the southern portion of the city where the TMP had identified the presence of a small obsidian workshop. This paper evaluates the subsurface contextual associations of obsidian production debris with the residential architecture to determine if surface indications of obsidian production represent in situ craft activity. The excavations provide the first empirical attempt to evaluate the accuracy of TMP model of obsidian craft production and what it implies about the organization of the city’s ancient urban economy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Rise and Decline of Teotihuacan: Urbanism, Daily Life, and Regional Relations through Time

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