Shelby H. Saberon and Dr. John E. Clark, Anthropology

The outcome of being accepted for this grant, and the ensuing study that resulted, has become the beginning of a massive research project which merits great interest not only to the author, but to the field of MesoAmerican archaeology in general. In addition, my research from this project has become the foundation for a masters thesis which I will complete in the next year. Dr. Clark predicts that at least three major publications will result from the project, and that my thesis will become the basis for stone tool analysis in MesoAmerican archaeology. This is because no analysis at this level or in this manner on MesoAmerican stone tools has ever been published.

For readers that are not familiar with archaeological technical terms, a brief background on this kind of research is necessary. As the tittle states, my research deals with a “lithic workshop”. Lithics are any stone items, and for archaeologists, lithics of interest are stone items that are associated with human activities of the past. The kind of lithics that I analyzed deal with the production of stone tools, and the stone debris that resulted from their malting. The data set that I analyzed from the Hacienda Metapec site consists of obsidian (a volcanic glasslike stone) tools and obsidian waste “chips”. Hacienda Metapec was an apartment complex where people once lived. This building was probably abandoned and later reused as a workshop were stone tool makers set up a work area to produce obsidian tools.

I approached the data set under the direction of Dr. John E. Clark. Clark is a world renowned lithic specialist, not only in the analysis of stone tools, but in replicating them. Upon initial investigation it appeared that we were dealing with a workshop that focused on the production of bifaces, which are often interpreted as being knives, or cutting implements. My goal from the beginning was to reconstruct the technology of this workshop, to outline the production sequence, to identify stone making activity areas at the site according to where they were located and what activity occurred at that spot, and to make ball park predictions of how many tools were produced at this site.

I approached these questions by organizing the data and performing a detailed analysis. The obsidian items from the site were collected and stored by the excavators in a manner that would give fairly good control of where the items were originally located on the site. I analyzed one of the densest layers in terms of sheer quantity of obsidian debris for a five meter square area. My analysis turned up fascinating results.

I first looked at the chips of obsidian that were removed in order to shape the stone tool. These were found by the tens of thousands on the site. Chips form a permanent record of the way the stone tools are produced. Chips are like fingerprints. They contain a permanent record of how the chip was removed from the stone. The negative of the chip is a scar left on the tool. Thus by inference we can even examine invisible tools via looking at their waste chips. I found that a very specific set of chip types comprised the data set. These chip types came from already made preforms, or blanks. A great deal of diagnostic stone debris results from making a tool preform from a solid piece of rock. None of this kind of debris was in the collection, which tells us that the initial manufacturing of blanks occurred somewhere else, probably at the Otumba obsidian quarry several miles away. In addition, the majority of the chips were the kind that are a result of making a specific kind of stone tool; a biface. So I was able to show that bifaces were the predominant product of this workshop.

Second, I examined broken bifaces that were discarded by the makers. The benefit of stone tools over other artifacts is that they leave a permanent record of errors when broken tool fragments are discarded as waste. Our collection contained over one thousand such discarded obsidian biface fragments. It is from these fragments that I was able to reconstruct the production sequence. Bifaces were broken and discarded at every stage of production. I outlined five major stages in the production of the target product, from blank to finished tool. When a biface was broken while being manufactured, the maker had to decide whether to discard both halves or to reshape one of the halves. Reworking of broken pieces is detectable by the trained eye. The resulting target product was eighteen technological varieties of what Teotihuacan archaeologists call the San Marcos point.

Finally, by experimentation I will be able to predict and approximate number of San Marcos knifes produced at the site (even though the majority of finished products left the site for trade, use, etc.). I can do this because we know that each tool began as a standardized blank. By replication of the finished products from start to finish I can analyze my own debris, by chip type, size, and weight. This general figure can then be applied to the number of chips from the site, by type, size, and weight. Using simple math I can then project a ball-park figure on the number of San Marcos bifaces produced. These experiments are currently underway.

This research was made possible because I was able to spend two months hands on with these materials in Mexico. These precious artifacts are not allowed to leave that country, so analysis needed to be conducted there. I believe that I was able to gather enough data in Mexico to continue the bulk of my research here in the states (for further results, look for publications by the author on this project in the next two to three years). Thank you ORCA for helping make this research possible.