ABSTRACT
Several times each year, I am asked by Maya archaeologists: “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 signicant 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
geology that made the production of some sorts of tools difcult 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, economically, 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 tting 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 excavated 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 archaeologists 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 archaeological cultures. Given the goals of archaeologists working during the rst 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 rst 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 somewhat slow in adopting this approach to the past, but both the experimental and ethnoarchaeological
perspectives afforded by Processual Archaeology appealed to Maya lithic analysts. Of particular importance was the inuence of the avocational archaeologist and lithic experimenter Don Crabtree, who not only taught Mesoamerican lithic scholars how to make stone tools, but alsoand 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 identication of occupational specialization; and (4) the assignment of obsidian artifacts to particular geological sources. The rst 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 identication 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 Conference 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 rst 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 reections 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 identication of specialized workshops-not so much as places, but as a mode of production-became an important 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 Behavioral 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 eld 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 “nished” product. The long-held belief that Maya lithic artifacts were not terribly useful for understanding form/space/time dynamics, therefore, has liberated the eld from the Culture History approach that still looms large over Maya ceramic studies. A second reason that typological classication is less important to the lithic analyst is that Behavioral 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 nally reused as a bipolar core. To what single type should such an artifact be assigned? Our goal as analysts is not merely to dene 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 classication. 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 eld. 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 beneciaries 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 reect systemic structure (which shapes and connes 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 irted 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 actornetwork 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.
