Obsidian Production and Consumption Practices at Matacanela

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Matacanela’s chipped stone assemblage overwhelmingly is dominated by nonlocal obsidian, including both products and by-products of multiple reductive technologies. Overarching temporal trends and classification of Matacanela’s obsidian assemblage have previously been discussed within the context of the site’s general settlement; however, this data has yet to be thoroughly recontextualized within the socio-economic milieu of the site. This paper focuses particularly on the dawn of the Late Classic period at Matacanela. The obsidian data from this period suggests that the people of Matacanela became more engaged in prismatic blade production, though to varying degrees across the site. I make the argument for localized obsidian craft specialization during the Late Classic period and situate this data within concurrent shifts in subsistence strategies and political alignment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24772