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The Analysis of Chipped Stone Artifacts in Southern Mesoamerica: An Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Payson D. Sheets
Payson D. Sheets*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Detailed analyses of ancient stone tools, or lithic analyses, were performed by archaeologists as early as the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, the Near East, and North America. However, it was not until the past thirty years that lithic analysis became a standard part of prehistoric research in Mesoamerica. The reasons for this belated beginning involve the dominant humanities-art history orientation toward much of Mesoamerican archaeology prior to the 1960s; the extraordinary richness, complexity, and accessibility of other cultural components (particularly architecture, hieroglyphics, ceramics, and sculpture); and the lack of quantitative dating techniques. The paucity of reliable dating techniques until quite recently led archaeologists into elaborate attempts to date the past by using a variety of subjective ordering techniques. It is therefore not surprising that, prior to the last ten years, most Mesoamerican lithic analyses had as their major objective the isolation of chronologically significant classes. These were discovered and defined at both the typological and the attribute (or modal) level of classification.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , 1977 , pp. 139 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the following scholars for their time and effort in answering my query for lithic information sent out in January 1975: Gordon R. Willey, Claude F. Baudez, R. E. W. Adams, Paul Katz, Newell Wright, Jay Johnson, Arlene V. Miller, Nicholas M. Hellmuth, Irwin Rovner, Tom Hester, Joe Michels, Richard W. Magnus, and E. Wyllys Andrews V. I am indebted to Robin Torrence for sending a copy of the Cabrol and Coutier (1932) article. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Dallas.

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