(2011c) The Technology of Maya Civilization

1 The Technology of Ancient Maya Civilization Geoffrey E. Braswell

Abstract

More than 30 years have passed since the First Maya Lithic Conference, and thus it is not surprising that the research goals and theoretical perspectives of our field have changed significantly. The chapters in this book reveal a new interest in understanding lithic artifacts not only as the products of social, political, and economic systems, but also as objects used by humans to reproduce, reshape, and change those systems. In other words, lithic systems are a technology of civilization. This introduction discusses the contributions to our volume from this perspective, and also contextualizes our work within the history of Maya lithic studies.

Several times each year, I am asked by Maya archaeologists and—especially—epigraphers: “Are you still ‘doing’ obsidian?” Occasionally, closer friends ask: “Why would anyone analyze lithic artifacts?” One not-so-subtle message behind these questions is: “If you want to advance your career, do something more important and study something less mundane.” A related subtext is that such colleagues consider chipped stone artifacts as something only slightly more significant than manos and metates or the ubiquitous jute (river snail) shell found at so many lowland sites. Such scholars are completely correct. Considered out of context, lithic artifacts are as uninteresting as broken pottery sherds, tumbled architectural blocks, peeling polychrome murals, or byzantine hieroglyphic squiggles. This book is not just about stone tools, nor is it limited to lithic technology. Instead it is about lithic systems as technology.1 By this I mean that stone artifacts are not only the products of economic, political, and social systems, but also helped create those systems. Our goal, therefore, is not only to discuss how the ancient Maya made their stone tools, but also to understand how lithic production, consumption, and exchange helped shape their society. Because of the coherent way that lithic systems both structured and were structured by society, they can be considered to be interactive technologies. Ancient stone tools were not conscious agents, but they were technological actants (Callon and Latour 1981; Callon and Law 1982) integral to the reproduction of the Maya social world. The Maya who used stone tools not only were aided in their tasks by those lithic objects, but also were constrained and ordered by the physical limitations of those tools (Chapter 5), by the social rules that limited access to raw material and the technology of production (Chapter 11), by the economic system that distributed the tools (Chapters 4, 8, and 10), and even by local

2 THE TECHNOLOGY OF MAYA CIVILIZATION

geology that made the production of some sorts of tools difficult or impossible (Chapters 6 and 7). When we consider, for example, the symbolic meaning ascribed to some stone artifacts, especially worked jade (Chapters 12 and 13), or the social role played by obsidian in redistributive economies (Chapters 4 and 8), or their role in marking political and cultural boundaries (Chapters 4 and 10), it is even easier to see how stone objects structured society. The ancient Maya physically, economi-cally, and socially shaped their world with stone tools. Anyone who studies the ancient Maya, therefore, should pay attention to lithic studies. The Past and Present of Maya Lithic Studies

The history of Maya lithic studies is partly summarized in Chapters 2 and 5. Elsewhere, I have written about this subject (Braswell 2004), and John Clark (2003b) has written an exhaustive review of obsidian studies in Mesoamerica. Nonetheless, it is important to contextualize our volume within the history of Maya lithic studies. The chapters in this book derive from the Third Maya Lithic Conference, and it is therefore fitting to use each of these conferences as a temporal dividing line for ordering and understanding the history of Maya lithic studies. The Appendix Stage Barrett (Chapter 5) describes the early days of Maya lithic studies. Before the First Maya Lithic Conference, many archaeological reports ignored lithic artifacts. If they described them at all, they were relegated to descriptive appendices or discussed in purely functional terms. A major problem of those days, one that persists to the present in a lot of “big-site” Maya archaeology, is that exca-vated dirt was not routinely and systematically screened. To make matters worse, lithic artifacts, especially debitage, often were deliberately discarded. The reason is simple and logical. For archaeo-logists working during the “Culture History period,” Mesoamerican lithic artifacts seemed particularly dull measures of form/space/time dynamics. They simply were not as useful as pottery or architecture for understanding chronology or interaction among sites, regions, and archaeologi-cal cultures. Given the goals of archaeologists working during the first sixty years of the last century, it is no surprise, then, that lithic artifacts often were banished to appendices or discussed only from a functionalist perspective. The Cartographic Stage The First Maya Lithic Conference (Hester and Hammond 1976), held in 1976 in Orange Walk Town, Belize was a truly revolutionary event. For me, that year marks a real watershed in Maya lithic studies (Braswell 2004). One of the highlights of the conference was Payson Sheets’ (1976) summary paper entitled “Islands of Lithic Knowledge amidst Seas of Ignorance in the Maya Area.” In nine short pages, Sheets presented what was known then about Maya lithic systems. To a certain extent, the rest of the very important volume resulting from that conference can be considered as a cartographic exercise. That is, it attempted to enlarge and make more precise the “maps” of the few islands that Sheets described, and also to add new islands to that world. This was cartography at its best and most exciting. To begin with, from 1976 to 1982 (i.e., the period between the first two Maya Lithic Conferences), the publication of articles related to Maya lithic artifacts—as well as the number of theses and dissertations—dramatically increased. During this six-year period, at least 42 such studies appeared, compared to only 12 for the previous twenty years (Clark 2003a:263-265). Another major advancement of this time was the belated introduction of Processual Archaeology to Maya lithic analysis. In general, Maya archaeologists had been some-what slow in adopting this approach to the past, but both the experimental and ethnoarchaeological

THE TECHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT MAYA CIVILIZATION 3

perspectives afforded by Processual Archaeology appealed to Maya lithic analysts. Of particular importance was the influence of the avocational archaeologist and lithic experimenter Don Crabtree, who not only taught Mesoamerican lithic scholars how to make stone tools, but also—and perhaps more importantly—how to understand the technical details of ethnohistorical records (Tixier 2003:xiii). Several research themes emerged during this period, including: (1) the behavioral typology or chaîn opératoire approach to lithic production; (2) the experimental replication of stone tools, particularly obsidian blades; (3) the identification of occupational specialization; and (4) the assign-ment of obsidian artifacts to particular geological sources. The first three of these foci are related to the technology of lithic production, that is, to determining the way that stone tools were made, and inspiration for these technological studies often came directly from Crabtree. Lithic technology remains a strong focus in the study of stone tools, but it is fair to say that today it is viewed more as a means to understanding social and economic phenomena than as a descriptive goal of analysis. The identification of specialization, important even at this early stage in Maya lithic studies, was a clear attempt to expand the promise of the lithic technology approach to broader questions in anthropological archaeology. The Behavioral Stage The Second Maya Lithic Conference was held in San Antonio, Texas in 1982 (Hester and Shafer 1991), a year after two other important lithic conferences took place in Mexico City (Clark and Gaxiola 1989; Soto de Arechavaleta 1990). One impetus behind the Second Maya Lithic Confe-rence was to share the results of work conducted at Colha during the years since the Orange Walk Town meeting. Many of the chapters in the volume resulting from that conference focus on one or more of the sequential stages in the relationship between people and stone tools, and follow Michael Schiffer’s (1972) notion of the life history of an artifact, related to his larger concept of Behavioral Archaeology (Chapter 3). For this reason, I call this the “Behavioral Stage” of Maya lithic studies. Many of the same research interests that characterized the Cartographic Stage continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, scholars focused on production and exchange. The study of production was largely limited to specialists in lithic technology. Most studies of lithic exchange were conducted by those who analyzed obsidian by instrumental means or those who developed the Producer–Consumer model in northern Belize. Thanks to the Colha Project, many Maya lithic specialists became interested in the first stage in the life of a lithic artifact: material procurement (Chapters 5–7, 11, and 12). Other new areas of study include consumption (especially use-wear studies, Chapter 4), the rejuvenation of artifacts, and—particularly relevant to Schiffer’s model—discard behavior. This last topic was approached through ethnoarchaeology (Clark 1991b; Hayden and Cannon 1983). The Behavioral Approach to Maya lithic artifacts allowed them to be studied systemically, that is, we could view them as reflections and products of economic, political, and social systems. During the Behavioral Stage, the focus of many studies became the reconstruction of these systems using lithic data. The Producer–Consumer model from Colha is one such example, and the identification of specialized workshops—not so much as places, but as a mode of production—became an impor-tant goal of research. Maya lithic specialists became particularly interested in the distinctions between (and archaeological signatures of) independent, attached, and embedded specialization (Chapter 4). John Clark (1987; Clark and Lee 1984; see also Jackson and Love 1991) explicitly linked the origins of specialization to the development of political complexity, and hence, made Maya lithic studies of central importance to understanding political economy as process. We also became interested in how elites manipulated imported lithic resources and symbolically charged


artifacts (such as chert and obsidian eccentrics) to reinforce social distinctions. During the Beha-vioral Stage, therefore, many of us became substantivists interested in how ancient lithic economy was embedded in political and social structure. An important outgrowth of Maya lithic studies—one that emerged during the Cartographic Stage and became particularly clear during the Behavioral Stage—is that our field is not especially captivated by typology or taxonomy. In contrast, essentialist arguments about how to classify and name pottery began during the Culture History period and do not seem to be abating. Maya lithic analysts do not generally rely on names and types as ways of comparing assemblages from different sites or regions. We are much more interested in the geological source from which an artifact came, the behavior that led to its production, the uses of a particular tool, and the comparison of metric and non-metric attributes. We try, like Hattula Moholy-Nagy (Chapter 3), to see the entirety of the use-life trajectory and not simply to name a “finished” product. The long-held belief that Maya lithic artifacts were not terribly useful for understanding form/space/time dynamics, therefore, has liberated the field from the Culture History approach that still looms large over Maya ceramic studies. A second reason that typological classification is less important to the lithic analyst is that Beha-vioral Archaeology has led us to appreciate the curation, resharpening, reshaping, and scavenging undergone by many lithic artifacts. These ancient behaviors often complicate attempts to model lithic production, use, and exchange. A macroblade could be converted into a large biface, reworked into a small stemmed biface, and finally reused as a bipolar core. To what single type should such an artifact be assigned? Our goal as analysts is not merely to define what type a lithic artifact is, but to understand all the stages of what it was during its life-use history. As long as this remains important to Maya lithic studies, we will always be concerned more with process than with static classification. Four other important changes occurred during the Behavioral Stage. First, by the late 1980s, Guatemala and Mexico became more open to archaeologists from other countries. In the case of Mexico, the political climate was considerably more welcoming to North American researchers than it had been in the 1970s. In Guatemala, the long-standing civil war began to die down, and large parts of the country—particularly the Petén—became safe again for investigation. Second, lithic studies became integral to most large archaeological projects. Thanks, to a great extent, to the work of Thomas Hester, Harry Shafer, Payson Sheets, and John Clark, Mayanists came to realize that lithic studies were an important part of archaeological research. Third, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a Golden Age in Maya studies, spurred on by the great public interest created by the translation of hieroglyphs and a surge in media coverage of our field. Finally, the establishment of archaeology programs at two universities in Guatemala greatly increased national interest in archaeology. Before the late 1970s, there were very few trained Guatemalan archaeologists. Since that time, hundreds of students from the Universidad de San Carlos and the Universidad del Valle have received their licenciatura degree in archaeology, and many have gone on to earn higher degrees. The four Guatemalan contributors to our volume all are direct beneficiaries of this important development. The Technology Stage The Third Maya Lithic Conference was held in 2007 in Guatemala City. Although papers written by noted senior scholars were presented, the actual participants in the event represent a new generation of Maya lithic scholars, none of whom were grown—let alone active archaeologists—at the time of the San Antonio meeting. An important result of this generational shift is that many of us feel comfortable mixing Culture History, Processual Archaeology, and Postprocessual theory into our work. Given that 25 years passed between the last two conferences, it is not surprising that new approaches to Maya lithic studies have emerged. My goal in this section is to describe the


theoretical underpinnings of this new stage in Maya lithic studies. The following section explores how the contributions to this volume can be understood in terms of technology and actor-network theory. By the middle of the 1990s, many Maya lithic specialists began to focus less on lithic technology and more on lithic artifacts as part of an interactive network of creative behavior, that is, as objects in a technology of civilization. Put another way, stone tools not only reflect systemic structure (which shapes and confines the behavior studied by Behavioral Archaeology), but—in conjunction with the people who use the tools—also reproduce, modify, and create that structure. I call this new phase in Maya lithic studies the “Technology Stage” in part as a reference to Foucault’s (1986) notion of the “Technology of the Self,” and in part as a way to draw attention to a very different and new way of using the concept of technology in lithic studies. The transition to this perspective has been gradual, largely subconscious, and mirrors greater developments in anthropological archaeology. Lithic specialists are among the most empirically grounded archaeologists, so it is surprising to think that a new stage in our discipline can be linked to poststructural and postprocessual critique. The gradual emergence of the Technology Stage began in the late 1980s with the disenchantment that many scholars felt with an archaeology that tended to consider humans as little more than responders to environmental, social, and political factors. World Systems Theory and other core-periphery paradigms gained some adherents in the 1990s, in part because they ascribed agency to dominant actors in the core. But at the same time, people in the periphery of world systems were largely viewed as passive victims. For a few years in the late 1990s, some Maya archaeologists flirted with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but his version of agency seemed too limited. Anthony Giddens’ (1986) notion of structuration and the recursive nature of actions, which are both constrained by and yet reproduce structure, holds more promise, as perhaps do certain aspects of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law’s notion of actor-network theory (Callon and Latour 1981; Callon and Law 1982; Latour 2005; Law 1992). Actor-network theory considers relationships that are both material and conceptual in nature. It argues that all elements in an interactive network (humans, stone tools, technology, social classes, etc.) are structurally equivalent. Such elements are called “actants.” A goal of actor-network theory is detailed description so as to understand real political, technological, and social systems. It does not reject the notion that reality—past or present—exists, as some extreme postmodernist and postprocessual thinkers have done, nor does it deny the importance of the empirical method to understanding such realities. Bruno Latour in particular stresses “generalized symmetry,” that distinctions between human subjects and other actants are problematic and should be de-emphasized (see Latour 2005:76). A key criticism of actor-network theory, therefore, is that it ascribes agency to non-human objects. It is important to note, however, that proponents of actor-network theory do not use the word “agency” in quite the same way as some other social theorists. They do not imply that objects have intentionality or even that intentionality is necessary to agency. I differ with Latour and reject the notion that objects have agency. But, in keeping with generalized symmetry, I also reject the notion that humans possess agency. Instead, I argue that agency emerges when a human actant relates with another subject or an object within a network. My point is that agency exists only in the interaction between subjects, objects, and ideas. Removed from a network containing people, stone tools cannot change structure. Removed from a network containing technology, ideas, and other people, an individual cannot affect society. But humans can create agency when they use a tool or interact with an idea, a social construct, nature, or other humans. For me, therefore, agency is expressed in the relationships among subjects, objects, and ideas, but it resides in none of those things. It is not merely the capacity to make choices. It is also action in the world through interaction.

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Not one of the chapters in this volume explicitly employs either my new definition of technology or the notion of actor-network theory. Nevertheless, many of the chapters in this book can be understood in terms of actor-network theory and this new definition of technology as a recursive way to create society. A key point in many chapters is that humans and stone tools in concert reshape economic, social, political, and ideological structure. Here I will consider the contributions to our volume from an actor-network perspective. I will emphasize how lithic tools, ornaments, and even debitage served to foment, reproduce, and mold the structure of ancient Maya civilization, and, at the same time, were shaped and limited by that structure. The Technology of Civilization, Actor-Network Theory, and Contributions to this Volume

Most of the papers resulting from the Third Maya Lithic Conference focus on political economy, specifically the relations between natural resources, producers, consumers, and stone artifacts. In all of our case studies, it is impossible to separate neatly economic and political concerns. The Producer–Consumer model (Chapter 2), as described for Colha (Figure 1.1), forms an actor network. In this network, lithic producers, consumers, and stone tools were actants. Interactions among people consisted of both the commercial and ceremonial exchange of Colha chert artifacts. When McAnany (1991:276) writes that we must now seek to understand “the extent to which the form of exchange was politically controlled or manipulated,” she is asking us to study how the relationship between producers, consumers, and Colha chert artifacts functioned to express agency, and is describing the Colha lithic system (consisting of the network of all these actants and their relationships) as a technology of Maya civilization. Chapter 2 also contains a section on the sym-bolic use of lithic artifacts. Such artifacts, of course, do not have any inherent meaning. A particular material–semiotic association between people, a system of meaning, and stone artifacts relates all three actants together. Through ritual performance, these actants together expressed agency, created social distance, and could give elites power. In Chapter 3, Moholy-Nagy adopts an almost pure Behavioral Stage approach to Maya stone tools. She does not discuss how Maya lithic artifacts shaped society, but instead seems to view them as expressions of underlying social, political, and economic structure. That is, lithic artifacts are material expressions of behavior produced by a system, but do not necessarily play a role in reproducing that system. Nevertheless, Moholy-Nagy discusses how, after the middle of the Early Classic period, the Tikal elite were able to procure all the chert they needed to build their monumental structures, as well as all the chert and obsidian they required for both quotidian and ceremonial purposes. In other words, she explicitly relates chipped stone artifacts to the built environment and to ritual performance, and therefore relates them to the agentive program that the stone artifacts helped express. The great structures of Tikal and objects used by elites in theatrical ritual display reinforced status and amplified social distinctions. Even debitage, deposited in large quantities above and within burial chambers, expressed this agentive purpose. At Tikal, therefore, lithic artifacts were not merely physical expressions of structural rules. Instead, both stone tools and refuse played important roles in the reproduction and reshaping of social structure. Kazuo Aoyama (Chapter 4) presents a detailed analysis of political-economic networks. In his discussion of the Copán region, he emphasizes how access to prismatic blade cores was carefully administered by the elite, and how their power and prestige was, in part, created and maintained through that control. In the neighboring La Entrada region, local elites built Maya-style platforms, erected a Maya stela, and used Maya-style obsidian tools made from cores obtained from Copán. On a smaller scale, the elite in the southern portion of La Entrada administered the distribution of Ixtepeque obsidian in a manner similar to that of their counterparts at Copán. In the northern


portion of the valley, however, a clear boundary to this system—marking the spatial extension of the Ixtepeque blade core actor-network—can be seen. Thus, Aoyama’s study not only seeks to understand the role played by Ixtepeque obsidian cores in perpetuating social structure, but also maps the boundaries of that social, political, and economic network. Aoyama explores many more aspects of actor networks in his discussion of lithic artifacts at Aguateca. In many ways, stone tools played important roles in the structuring of the self and society. Maya elite were artisans who made and used such tools in activities such as scribal painting, shell working, and stone carving. Artifacts created by these artisans, in turn, were manipulated by the elite in ways that reinforced and increased status distinctions. Without an adequate supply of stone tools, then, it might not have been possible for the Maya elite to engage in this agentive strategy. Moreover, the Maya elite also were warriors who used stone tools as weapons. Finally, lithic tools were used by both men and women, and hence, helped construct notions of gender as well as status. Lithic tools, therefore, played very important roles in the technology of Maya elite social structure, and, we can easily imagine, in the technology of other aspects of political, economic, and social structure. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 consider, among very many other things, the role of geological outcrops of material as natural actants. In particular, the authors of these chapters each explore the nature of scarcity. Jason Barrett provides evidence that, in the area around the Dumbell Bajo of northwestern Belize, high-quality chert was a limited resource. By the Late Classic period, this resource was exhausted. As a result, inhabitants of the region used poorer-quality materials for producing their own tools, and had to change the way they built their structures. As Barrett (Chapter 5) writes: “architectural evidence suggests that lithic resource depletion was associated with and accompanied by social changes that altered entrenched cultural traditions.” That is, a natural actant—high-quality chert—was central to the reproduction of Classic Maya culture. When that natural actant became scarce because of human depletion, the fabric of society had to change. Nicholas Hearth and Scott Fedick (Chapter 6) and Bruce Dahlin et al. (Chapter 7) tackle an even more extreme case of resource scarcity: the complete lack of “tool-quality” chert in portions of the northern Maya lowlands, and an accompanying dearth of recovered tools from sites in those regions. The authors of both contributions provide alternative hypotheses to explain the apparent lack of stone tools, but all clearly favor the possibility that many tools at these sites were made of silicified limestone, and that these tools have weathered to the point where they are now difficult or impossible to identify. It is certainly the case that silicified limestone could serve many of the same purposes as chert. But it is also true that the natural properties of the two materials are quite different. In many ways, the architecture of sites like T’isil (northern Quintana Roo) and Chun-chucmil (western Yucatán) is quite different from that of cities in other parts of the Maya lowlands. It may be that lacking high-quality chert, the inhabitants of these places chose to invest energy differently, especially in the realms of public architecture and carved monuments, than did the elite of other Maya cities. The plans of cities such as T’isil and Chunchucmil, therefore, were shaped by the natural actant of available resources. Compared to sites where chert was readily available, very different agentive strategies must have developed in the Chert-Free Zone as ways of shaping social structure. Maya society, economy, and political structure in the Chert-Free Zone all could have been very different from that of the Petén, and we should look for ways that these differences were expressed. In Chapter 8, José Crasborn adopts a long-time perspective on obsidian procurement, produc-tion, and exchange at Tak’alik Ab’aj. In this case study, he emphasizes the opposite of scarcity. Abundant obsidian was obtained from two geological sources: El Chayal and San Martín Jilo-tepeque. For Tak’alik Ab’aj, we should think of polyhedral cores made of obsidian not as a single actant, but as two geologically distinct technological actants with which the elite and commoners of


the site interacted in different ways. During the Middle Preclassic period, the elite of Tak’alik Ab’aj probably redistributed obsidian, and consciously chose to keep within the polity more obsidian from El Chayal than from San Martín Jilotepeque. In contrast, more material from San Martín Jilotepeque was traded on to sites in the west that also participated in a pan-Mesoamerican interac-tion network. That is, material from two different sources was manipulated in different ways in order to shape the fabric of Tak’alik Ab’aj society and to reproduce political structure. The nature of this actor network changed over time with the collapse of the Olmec center of La Venta, the rise of Kaminaljuyu, and, during the Early Classic period, the migration of new peoples into the central highlands of Guatemala. Finally, Crasborn stresses that there was no increase in the quantity of bifacially worked weapons at Tak’alik Ab’aj during the Early Postclassic, which in turn suggests that the demise of the site was not violent. Thus, unlike at Aguateca, the agencies that emerged through the relationship between people and obsidian at Tak’alik Ab’aj did not change because of warfare. Oswaldo Chinchilla (Chapter 9) considers a deposit of obsidian debitage at the important Late and Terminal Classic city of Cotzumalhuapa. This deposit, or really, series of related deposits, developed over a period of centuries. They are located on a rocky promontory within view of the royal acropolis of El Baúl. Crude platforms are associated with the deposits, strongly suggesting that together they formed an obsidian workshop. Analysis of the materials recovered from this location indicates the production not only of prismatic blades, but especially of bifacially worked tools such as knives and projectile points. Other smaller obsidian deposits have been found within the city of Cotzumalhuapa, so it should not be argued that the rulers of the city controlled all aspects of obsidian production. But the proximity of the royal acropolis to this large deposit strongly implies that bifaces played an important role in the maintenance of social and political structure. It could be that: (1) elites residing in the acropolis were artisans, as at Aguateca; (2) an important facet of elite identity was manifested in warfare, also seen at Aguateca; or (3) bifaces produced under the control of the elite were exchanged with commoners in a way that created dependence and, at the same time, social distance. In all these cases, it is the relationship between the chipped stone artifacts produced in the workshop and the royal and elite residents of the El Baúl acropolis that reproduced social and political structure. In Chapter 10, Michael Glascock and I examine obsidian procurement and production at Calakmul. Much of this chapter describes specific production activities using the behavioral typology model introduced to Mesoamerican lithic studies by Sheets and elaborated by Clark. Put another way, most of our contribution can be understood in terms of the goals of the Cartographic and Behavioral Stages of Maya lithic studies. Our most important observation is that tools and debitage made of obsidian are quite scarce at Calakmul. In fact, much more jade (in terms of weight or count) has been found at the site than obsidian. Several conclusions can be drawn from this. First, given its rarity, it is rather unlikely that the elites of Calakmul manipulated social relations using obsidian in the way that Aoyama reports for Copán. More precisely, the scarcity of obsidian implies that such manipulation could not have played as large a role in the maintenance of social, political, or economic structure. Second, we argue that the scarcity of obsidian at Calakmul is related to the abundance of the material at Tikal. The economic system of Tikal was firmly bounded, and the elites who administered the distribution of obsidian within that kingdom did not generally allow it to be exchanged into the Calakmul kingdom. We suggest that the radius of this system was about 50 kilometers (i.e., equidistant between the two great cities), which is roughly the same distance observed by Aoyama for the administered distribution of Ixtepeque obsidian cores by Copán. In contrast to Aoyama, we propose that at both Tikal and Calakmul, obsidian may have been distributed through an administered market. That is, elites may have controlled where, how, how much, and who exchanged obsidian, but they did not necessarily pool and redistribute cores in the way suggested for the Copán kingdom. Given the size, complexity, and the great population of the


kingdom of Kaan, it would have been difficult for the royal family of Calakmul to control materials directly in this manner. Moreover, given the scarcity of obsidian, which at the same time was generally treated like a utilitarian commodity at Calakmul, it is difficult to see how redistributive behavior could have served to recreate social and political structure. A different sort of relationship existed between the actants of people and obsidian at Calakmul than within the Copán kingdom. During the Terminal Classic period, palaces (such as Structure III) and temples (such as Structure II) were sites of lithic production. Structure II was even converted into a combined palace-temple pyramid (Braswell et al. 2004). We do not know if lithic production took place at these locales during earlier times, but if so, debris was removed. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely to us that the great temple-pyramid Structure II was the site of much production until rooms were added to its principal façade during the Terminal Classic. A further change in the Terminal Classic was a rear-rangement of procurement networks. Sometime after about A.D. 800 (and probably closer to A.D. 900), significant quantities of obsidian from central Mexican sources were brought to the site. The Terminal Classic, therefore, saw dramatic realignments in the relationships between obsidian and the inhabitants of Calakmul, and those changes both reflected and contributed to the reshaping of inter-site relations and society. Edgar Suyuc examines the relationship between ancient settlements and obsidian outcrops in the El Chayal source area (Chapter 11). He notes that settlement in the region was never heavy, and that there is little reason to think that competition for control of this resource was fierce. He demonstrates, in fact, that many outcrops with artifact-quality obsidian do not seem to have been exploited in ancient times. It may be that certain portions of the source area were exploited by Kaminaljuyu, and other portions were used by people from different polities. Suyuc argues that Kaminaljuyu may not have needed to control the natural actant of the obsidian outcrops at El Chayal. Instead, it may have been knowledge of the technology of prismatic core and blade production that contributed to the creation of wealth and prestige at Kaminaljuyu. The next two chapters in our volume consider the extraction and production of jade artifacts, and the role such production played in forming Maya society. Karl Taube et al. (Chapter 12) document the extraction of blue-green jade and production of celtiform axe preforms in the middle Motagua region. A surprising result of their research is the chronology of this production, most of which seems to date to the Late Classic period. They stress that relatively little blue-green jade dating to the Classic period has been found in the Maya lowlands (most dates to the Middle Formative/Preclassic). Moreover, they argue that the specific ornamental form of the celtiform axe is not well documented for the Late Classic period. Taube et al. make clear that more work needs to be done in the region. Perhaps more chronological research will resolve this issue. Alternatively, it could be that preforms produced in the Río El Tambor region were destined not to become ornaments, but instead were pecked and ground into jadeite wedges and chisels. That is, they could have been preforms for precisely the same sorts of tools that Aoyama (Chapter 4) discusses for the “House of Axes” at Aguateca. Aoyama argues that such finished celts were used to carve stone stelae and other monuments, an activity that greatly increased during the Late Classic period. Again we can see how a technological actant helped the Maya shape their world. Taube et al. (Chapter 12) and Brigitte Kovacevich (Chapter 13) both stress that the initial shaping of jade preforms was conducted by people who did not occupy the highest status levels of Maya society. In Kovacevich’s terms, production of jade was segmented along social lines. In the Río El Tambor region, the inhabitants of the sites near where axe preforms were made did not have access to great quantities of imported goods and did not construct elaborate architecture. At Cancuen, early-stage jade producers lived in houses lacking stone walls and vaulted roofs, did not bury their dead in tombs, and did not possess stone sculpture, hieroglyphic inscriptions, or carved jade plaques. Nevertheless, these early-stage producers had access to jade beads and imported


pottery, and made ceremonial caches of raw jade. To Kovacevich, these early-stage producers were commoners whose status increased because of their involvement in the crafting of jade. In contrast, the possessors of fine jade artifacts were the same elites who conducted the final stages of produc-tion. Kovacevich argues that it was not jadeite itself that was subject to sumptuary laws, but instead it was the esoteric iconographic and hieroglyphic messages inscribed in the highest-quality finished artifacts. Thus, the relationship between people, jade as a material, the production of preforms, and the ideas encoded in the highest-quality jades not only reflected social and political structure (a Behavioral Stage view), but also helped form that structure, especially in the creation of a stratum of high-status commoners. The Future of Maya Lithic Studies

A central concept of actor-network theory is “translation,” the formation of the central portion of a network that is dedicated to its propagation. My introduction of both actor-network theory and a new vision of lithic artifacts as a technology of civilization has been an attempt at translation, to create awareness of and interest in Maya chipped stone artifacts not merely as byproducts of social, economic, and political structure, but as actants that, through their relationships with humans, helped create that structure. I am not arguing that stone tools possessed agency. Instead, my point is that agency exists only when subjects (people), objects (including stone tools), and ideas interact. Mayanists long ago came to the conclusion that lithic artifacts were not much use for meeting the goals of Culture History archaeology. That conclusion was not completely correct (see Chapters 2 and 10), but has proven to be generally all too true. Lithic technology studies of the Cartographic Stage revealed great similarities not only in the chipped stone tools made by the ancient Maya, but also in the way those artifacts were made. Moreover, although technological “signatures” of some particular traditions clearly do exist, use, curation, resharpening, and reshaping often make it quite difficult to observe these defining characteristics. During the Behavioral Stage, Maya lithic analysts became substantivist economic anthropologists. We viewed stone artifacts as ways of reconstructing economic systems based not only on commercialized exchange, but also on non-commercial beha-vior. Stone tools, ornaments, and debitage were perfect mirrors for studying such systems, because they were the passive products of those systems. We did not consider how those objects were used to actively recreate, shape, or modify structure. The economic approach of the Behavioral Stage, therefore, was essentially static even though it emerged from Processual Archaeology. During the Technological Stage, we have retained a strong interest in economic anthropology, but have acknowledged that the objects we study, when employed by people, not only reflect economic, political, and social systems, but also reproduce them and, potentially, can have a transformative effect on them. Many of the chapters in this volume, as I have tried to show, examine the recursive nature of the relationship between stone artifacts and the systems in which they were embedded. I strongly doubt that other lithic analysts or Maya archaeologists will employ the same theoreti-cal vocabulary that I use in this introduction, nor do I think it is necessary or advantageous to do so. But I believe that the basic notion expressed here—that stone tools were not just products resulting from the behavior of systems, but actually helped produce society—already permeates our field. Long after actor-network theory, agency, and other highfalutin theories du jour are discarded, Maya lithic analysts will continue to study the many surprising ways that something as mundane as chipped stone artifacts can shed light on families, activities, crafts, food ways, the organization of labor, gender, class identity, social institutions, interaction, political power, economic structure, ideology, ritual performance, and the many other topics raised by participants in the Third Maya Lithic Conference. Stone artifacts allow us to study macroregional systems, regions, sites, social strata, households, and even individuals.


I am looking forward to the Fourth Maya Lithic Conference, and hope I do not have to wait another quarter century for it. In the mean time, it is important to remember that stone artifacts were more than mute observers of the past. They also were important to its creation. Acknowledgments

The chapters in this volume were originally presented at the Third Maya Lithics Conference, held at the Museo Popol Vuh, Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in July, 2007. The conference was organized by Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos and Zachary X. Hruby, and it provided a forum for discussion of recent research on lithic industries across the Maya area. This scholarly meeting was possible thanks to support from the Board of Directors of the Museo Popol Vuh, presided by Estuardo Mata Castillo. We thank the board members, Max Holzheu, Ingrid Klanderud de Figue-roa, Coralia Anchisi de Rodríguez, and Jennifer Harley Keller. We also thank Giancarlo Ibargüen, President of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. The editors and contributors to this volume also offer our sincerest gratitude to Megan R. Pitcavage, graduate student in the Department of Anthro-pology, University of California, San Diego, for extensive help in compiling the bibliography and for redrafting most of the figures in our volume. I personally thank the authors of all the chapters for allowing me great liberties during the editing of this book. This has led to a more stylistically homogeneous, integrated, and theoretically unified work than otherwise would have been possible. Endnote

1. A “technique” is defined as a singular, atomized, and elemental way of accomplishing a specific task. It is nearly synonymous with “procedure.” Thus, hard-hammer percussion, indirect percussion, pecking, and grinding are all techniques. A “technology” is a set of related techniques that forms a practical way of accomplishing more complex tasks related to production, maintenance, or alteration. A technology, therefore, is: (1) comprised of techniques that are logically related; and (2) inherently creative in nature. Prismatic blade production is a technology because it entails (at the very least) the structured, systematic, and sequential employment of extraction, hard-hammer percussion, and pressure techniques in order to create prismatic blades. Generally, “technology” refers to a set of techniques related to the use of tools in crafts, art, science, or industry. I also use the word metaphorically to refer to systematic ways of creating, modifying, shaping, and reproducing structure. Finally, a “system” is a more general term applied to related and interacting entities. Systems can be ways of organizing or planning; the entities they contain may be real or abstract, but they must form an integrated whole. A technology, therefore, is a kind of system, but larger systems can be constructed from multiple technologies, objects, people, social expectations, ideology, land forms, and many other entities. A “lithic system” is the set of all elements (people, objects, and ideas) and actions related to the extraction, production, exchange, use, maintenance, and discard of stone tools. My fundamental argument is that lithic systems are not merely passive structures that react to stimuli by “behaving,” but also act in a creative way to maintain, recreate, and alter social, political, and economic structure. That is, a lithic system can be a technology of civilization.

(2011c) The Technology of Maya Civilization

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