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GROUND PLATFORM PREPARATION AND THE “BANALIZATION” OF THE PRISMATIC BLADE IN WESTERN MESOAMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2009

Dan M. Healan
Dan M. Healan*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA
*
E-mail correspondence to: healan@tulane.edu
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Abstract

For much of their history, prismatic blades were a relatively scarce item whose restricted occurrence suggested they functioned as prestige or luxury items. Some time prior to the Postclassic period, however, they became a widespread, ubiquitous, and mundane commodity in Mesoamerica, as indicated by ethnohistorical accounts as well as archaeological evidence. This occurred around the same time that blademakers began to prepare core platforms by pecking and grinding, a labor intensive process whose advantages are presumed to have played the primary role. The specific causal relationships involved, however, appear to pertain less to factors of increased productivity on the part of individual blademakers than to those of skill, as suggested by comparisons between core/blade technology used in areas close to obsidian sources and those used at sites further removed from the sources.

Type
Special Section: New Directions in the Study of Mesoamerican Lithic Economy
Information
Ancient Mesoamerica , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 103 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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