Use-Wear and Residue Analyses of Flint Projectile Points from Sihó, Yucatán, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sihó, is a Maya city in the northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula, which had its apogee during Late and Terminal Classic Periods (ca. 600-900 A.D). Research developed in the last twenty years suggests that the settlement was the center of a royal dynasty and was inhabited by a complex and multistratified society. The horizontal excavations of eight residential units have revealed at least five socio-economic strata and different sorts of activities, such as farming, hunting, textile spinning and weaving, paper making and others. Group 5D16 is a secondary elite residential unit that provided obsidian and flint artifacts and debitage suggesting use, retouching, sharpening and recycling of several types of instruments. In this paper, we present the analyses of a collection of 86 flint projectile points with the aim of revealing their function. Through detailed microscopic observation of the traces left by use-wear, impacts, as well as the detection of residues, we infer how these points were used. This approach makes it possible to reconstruct aspects of the behavior and material culture of the society that produced them. The results obtained in this type of research provide valuable archaeological information, facilitating a better interpretation of the Maya site of Sihó.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53378