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chapter 14 The Chipped Stone Artifacts of Cerén Payson Sheets Introduction Because Cerén was merely a village, we would expect it to have been rather far down in the chipped stone manufacturing and distribution system of the Zapotitán Valley. That Classic Period system was revealed by a regional surface survey of the 546 km2 Zapotitán Valley in central-western El Salvador (Black 1983; Sheets 1983). The research found dense Late Classic Period populations functioning within a multi-tier settlement system ranging from large primary and secondary regional centers to large villages with ritual construction, to smaller villages, to tiny hamlets and isolated residences. The lithic artifacts found in the survey and testing closely re- flected that hierarchy, with villages quite consistently receiving most of their chipped stone implements already manufactured and doing only some resharpening. Cerén’s lithics are generally consistent with the villages in that research. The recent ground-penetrating radar research concurs, indicating that Cerén probably was a village of 100–200 people (Conyers 1995a). What the Cerén site provides that the regional survey could not is an unusual opportunity to understand how people in a southern Mesoamerican village used, curated, and disposed of their chipped stone implements during the Classic Period. Two structures had no chipped stone artifacts whatsoever : the public building and the sweat bath. Each household had a relatively standard set of chipped stone implements, and both of the religious buildings had chipped stone tools that differed from the household tools in specific and important ways. Although the obsidian implements in the households and the two religious buildings were a part of coreblade technology, there was a marked difference between household and religious structures in terms of their conditions, storage contexts, and uses. Cerén Chipped Stone The overwhelming majority of Cerén chipped stone implements were made of obsidian. The strict conservation ethic that guides research prohibits destructive analyses for sourcing or other purposes, but visual inspection shows a high similarity between the obsidian of these implements and obsidian from the Ixtepeque source 75 km to the northwest, particularly the slightly brownish hue to the gray color and highly lustrous nature mentioned by Aoyama et al. (1999: 241). All obsidian chemically sourced from the nearby Cambio site came from Ixtepeque (Michel, Asaro, and Stross 1983), indicating the likelihood that most, if not all, Cerén obsidian came from Ixtepeque. The paucity of manufacturing wastage in the site indicates that little chipped stone manufacture took place within the Cerén village. That is consonant with the valley survey finding of little chipped stone manufacturing debris in villages, probably because villages were too small to support a specialist with the technical skills required by core-blade technology (Sheets 1983), combined with an apparent low use and discard rate for blades. Evidently itinerant specialists did not visit Cerén and make macroblades and prismatic blades there. If a resident or visiting knapper had done significant manufacture at 140 payson sheets Cerén, we would expect to find evidence of it in the form of exhausted cores, core rejuvenation, or perhaps macrocore-shaping debitage, but we do not. Rather, Cerenians probably traveled to larger settlements and exchanged their surplus commodities in order to obtain obsidian implements. The most likely settlement for that exchange probably was San Andrés, only 5 km to the south, but secondary regional centers were not much farther. If Cerenians had choices, they could have had effects on exchanges , and therefore they were not the passive recipients of elite-controlled economies. Cerenians apparently would resharpen their own scrapers and occasionally retouch other implements, as evidenced by the occasional waste flake from these activities that has been found at the site. To date, a total of sixty-two chipped stone artifacts have been excavated from the Cerén site that were in a systemic context (Table 14.1). Only two items were in their use locations (andesite flake smoother and macroblade fragment mounted in floor). All others were in temporary or long-term storage. Not surprisingly, no obsidian has yet been found in the civic complex or at the sweat bath. All sixty-two implements were found in households and the two religious buildings. Of that total, fortyeight are prismatic blades, eight are macroblades, four are scrapers, one is an andesite flake ceramic smoother, and one is a jasper flake core converted into a hammerstone. In addition to the systemic context chipped stone...

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