Dr. Charles Knight, of the University of Vermont, will conduct archaeological research to investigate how the extraction of an important, widely used raw material was organized and who may have benefited from the control over its extraction and processing at local and regional scales. Much like any system of resource extraction (e.g. oil and natural gas, minerals, precious gems) there is the opportunity for accumulating great wealth and power by controlling the production, distribution, and consumption of a highly sought after raw material. Obsidian, a widely used volcanic glass, was the principal material used for all cutting, scraping, and piercing tools for over three millennia throughout pre-Hispanic central Mexico. However, previous archaeological studies into obsidian political economies have focused on the systems of obsidian distribution and consumption, due to the types of sites investigated, ignoring the initial systems of extraction and production. As a result, the means by which resource distribution networks develop and how commodity production is connected to consuming populations is poorly understood. Likewise, the details of how economically and political centralized polities might gain from their control over such resources and the nature of that control have not been vigorously researched. Since raw material quarrying was common throughout the ancient world, the questions addressed in this study have universal applicability, while the methodology can be replicable across the globe in similar contexts.
Dr. Knight and his research team will examine whether obsidian extraction was the result of centralized control by a regional polity, or organized by local populations asserting their territorial rights to the land. Obsidian from the Zaragoza-Oyameles source in eastern Puebla, Mexico dominates chipped stone assemblages at sites throughout much of south eastern Mexico from ca. 400 B.C. to A.D. 1000, and is found in lesser amounts well beyond this region. The ancient, regional center of Cantona may have had its economic clout underwritten by its control over this obsidian source. However, the nature of that control has never been investigated or even modeled. The data collected by Knight and his team of archaeologists, osteologists and faunal experts from broad-scaled excavations at the Zaragoza-Oyameles obsidian quarries and associated habitation sites, will directly address the assumption of political and economic control. Utilizing the strengths of several disciplines, they will reconstruct who and how many were involved in obsidian extraction, the methods used to quarry the material, what types of tools were produced and in what quantity, and the nature and degree to which obsidian extraction and production benefited local inhabitants, as opposed to, and/or in addition to the Cantona elite. Since archaeological investigations of quarries are relatively rare, the interdisciplinary approaches developed here can be used universally as a template for future research and student training.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
