Was the Elaborate Chert Eccentric from San Andres, El Salvador, made by the Rosalila Copan "El Maestro"?

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.

Many decades ago Stanley Boggs discovered a particularly elaborate chert eccentric from San Andres, El Salvador, yet he never published the find. Here we compare it to the set of more elaborate eccentrics manufactured by "El Maestro" for the Rosalila cache at Copan. The similarities in morphology, symbology, and manufacturing techniques are so similar that I posit they all were made by the same person. The San Andres eccentric is so fragile that I believe it must have been manufactured at San Andres, shortly before being cached. So it was the craftsperson who traveled, not the finished artifact. Rather, the craftsperson must have carried the eccentric in blank or roughout form, along with manufacturing tools, to San Andres. That craftsperson's home might have been Copan, or some other Maya city. This supports the "itinerant craftperson" model that is often posited but generally has little direct evidence.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22949