The Organization of Prismatic Blade Production at Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan, Central Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Systems of craft production and exchange in Mesoamerica are often correlated with the socio-political circumstances in which they formed, and such discussions are frequently applied to the organization of lithic industries, including the production of prismatic blades. Systems correlated with direct or centralized distribution networks are associated with reciprocity and redistribution, while decentralized devices are associated with more commercial mechanisms influenced by the forces of supply and demand. Other axes of variation are introduced to this model if elites or political agents in preindustrial economies sought to control or regulate commercial systems. In this paper we model elite and non-elite influence in the production and exchange of lithic goods by examining if relatively ‘faceless’ factors like commercial systems played key roles in mobilizing goods for exchange or consumption, or if factors oriented more towards reinforcing social relationships, such as reciprocity or redistribution, affected the production or consumption of lithic tools. We address this question using a dataset of roughly 19,000 lithic tools, flakes, and debitage recovered from Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan, Central Mexico (AD 1450-1521). We compare both public and private spaces, and also examine households of varying status to ascertain the organization of prismatic blade production in Prehispanic Tlaxcallan.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24047