ABSTRACT
Obsidian, or volcanic glass, is found in the mountains of central and southern Mesoamerica. It does not occur naturally in the karstic Maya lowlands. For this reason, all obsidian at sites like Calakmul and Tikal was exchanged over great distances. Because of the costs of transportation and the fragility of the material, most obsidian was transported as cores or preforms rather than as whole nodules or as nished artifacts. Thus, only the nal stages of obsidian reduction sequences are commonly represented in collections from the Maya lowlands. Two important goals of the lithic analyst are: (1) to identify the exact forms in which obsidian was imported; and (2) to determine the particular production activities conducted at the site. Not all obsidian tools and ornaments are the same, and different reduction activities yield distinct nal products and debitage. For this reason, it is important to identify the specic lithic industries practiced at the site, that is, the complete packages of technology, behavior, intermediate products, and byproducts leading to the nal desired form. A third important objective is to understand the social and physical contexts of production. Did producers make tools and ornaments in their houses or in workshops? Were artifacts manufactured by specialists attached to or otherwise sponsored by the elites, by craftsmen who supplied all members of the community, by all individuals who used stone tools, or by a combination of craftsmen and non-specialized producers? Excavations at Calakmul (Figure 1.1) were conducted in three large pyramidal platforms (Structures I, II, and VII) and in a multi-room structure built on a lower platform (Structure III). These four structures are in the epicenter of the site and served as the homes, palaces, places of work, and
temples of the nobility, their families, and their retainers (Figure 10.1; Braswell et al. 2004). Because the obsidian collection comes from these elite contexts, it is difcult to test models concerning the economic structure of the city as a whole or the regional system. In this regard, our sample is similar to that from Tikal (Chapter 3). Moreover, much obsidian comes from mixed contexts (ll, fall, and slump) that do not necessarily reect patterns of production or consumption in these particular structures. For this reason, we focus our analysis on artifacts recovered from middens and primary oor contexts. Most excavated oor contexts at Calakmul date to a time near the end of the occupation of the city. Our discussion, therefore, considers obsidian procurement and production patterns during the Terminal Classic period, especially as they pertain to elite palace life. A total of 515 obsidian artifacts were collected during excavations of Structures I, II, III and VII. Of these, 451 were available for study. The analyzed sample has a mass of 895 g. If we consider the amount of soil and building stones excavated in the epicenter of this giant Maya city, as well as the quantity of ceramics and chert artifacts collected during excavations, the obsidian collection is minute. In fact, the quantity of jade found by the Proyecto Calakmul-whether measured in number of pieces or by weight-is considerably more than that of the recovered obsidian. The small size of the obsidian collection from Calakmul is, indeed, its most notable characteristic. In contrast, millions of obsidian artifacts have been excavated at Tikal (Moholy-Nagy 1994:72). Investigators of the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project found an estimated 230 kg of obsidian associated just with Burial 116 (Coe 1990:2:607, Figures 258-259). We will return to the wealth of obsidian at Tikal and other sites, and the comparative poverty of Calakmul.
