Experiments in Replicating Eccentric Workshop Debris

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Elaborate Maya eccentrics were made from two kinds of blanks: large pieces of tabular flint and large flakes harvested from thick, roundish nodules. Preforms from these blanks were made by direct or indirect percussion, probably with wooden tools that allowed for the removal of super-flat, wide, long flakes. I describe experiments of making obsidian eccentrics with tropical hardwood tools from different forms of blanks. One goal of the experiments was to determine whether different beginning forms would generate different kinds of flakes, or different relative percentages of flakes of different kinds. Tabular blanks require a preliminary step of converting squared edges into acute ones. The thinness of tabular pieces constrains how much additional thinning can occur. Blanks of thick flakes lack these constraints. I describe flake removed from blanks of different forms that may be debris diagnostic of the manufacture of large eccentrics and bifaces in an effort to establish debitage signatures of their production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23013