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c h a p t e r 8 Elite Craft Production of Stone Drills and Slate at Group D, Xunantunich Jennifer B. Braswell the natural world contributes a variety of plastic materials that can be used to create an object imagined in the mind of the artisan. Chert is among the most versatile materials available to make tools, and it also leaves evidence valuable to the archaeologist who seeks to understand both the craftsperson and craft production. Although behavioral typologies (Sheets 1975) can reveal the ways in which tools are created, we seldom find residential contexts where we can document the complete reduction sequence for a stone tool. In this chapter, I document evidence for the manufacture, use, and discard of chert-stone drills in the Late Classic period at Group D, the residential compound of an elite residential group southeast of Xunantunich’s monumental core. The drills may have been part of an engraving tool kit to produce artifacts of slate, shell, or some perishable material like wood. This study describes the manufacturing details for a chert tool that has been found widely but that has not been studied from a technological perspective—the drill. This chapter calls attention to the possibility of slate engraving at Group D and to the frequency of this material at other places in the Xunantunich hinterlands. Close study of the contexts from which Group D’s drills and slate were recovered and comparison with other craft traditions in Mesoamerica suggest that crafting at Group D was a household-level specialization. These Xunantunich data are the first documented slate-production locus reported in the Maya area. Their analysis suggests that our current models about the relationship of crafting to social status—models that posit that luxury items are created by high-status people attached to the royal court and utilitarian items are made by nonelite producers in the hinterlands—may not be entirely accurate. Although clearly tied to Group A and the site’s rulers, Group D’s residents have a spatial location 162 Jennifer b. braswell and connections with Group A that suggest a certain level of autonomy and political authority. Slate production may not have been carried out by the paramount household in Group D, but it was likely to have been controlled by this important subroyal elite household, symbolized by the Central Platform Complex dominating the cluster (see fig. 8.1). Evidence for the manufacture, use, and discard of stone drills by Group D elite suggests two things about the provincial polity of Xunantunich in the Late Classic Hats’ Chaak phase. First, it suggests that the residents of Group D were not engaged in the same production systems as the agricultural populace was (chapters 11 and 12), and they were likely not part of those relationships of interdependence. This pattern raises the question of the integration of the Xunantunich elite with the rest of the members of the polity. Second, it suggests that Group D craft output was small. Engraved slate objects and pyrite mirror fragments appear in small amounts at hinterland sites such as the minor centers at Chaa Creek and the residential complexes at San Lorenzo. Therefore, craft production at Group D was not a significant element in a wealth-financing arrangement that bound settlers, anchored agricultural laborers, or bound clients to patrons. Instead, the practice of craft, the very act of production, was possibly a tool used to enculturate noble children in this provincial center. Some ethnographic studies demonstrate the ways in which craft producers are socially and economically marginalized (D. Arnold 1985). In contrast, Takeshi Inomata’s (2001) discussion of craft production illustrates how some kinds of crafting could have legitimized privileged status in Classic Maya society. The literature on crafting sets out different models (Foias 2002; Inomata 2001) on the roles of crafting in maintaining political order at different scales (interpolity and intrapolity) and the related issue of the place of Maya craftspeople in society. The producers of the stone drills at Group D do not fit either model. I suggest that they were poorly integrated with the agricultural populace of the Belize Valley region and elite networks of the central lowlands. Group D: An Elite Residential Group Group D is a large, group-focused patio cluster located approximately 100 m southeast of Group A at the terminus of Sacbe I (see fig. 8.2). Thirteen structures, a limestone quarry, and two chultuns serve as the residence of [52.14.126.74] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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