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Archaeological evidence indicates that the trade of prismatic blades in Mesoamerica began as early as the Archaic period (ca. 4000 b.c.) (Macneish et al. 1967:22; Neiderberger 1976). By the Early Formative period, prismatic blades were exchanged widely from central Mexico to the Olmec region (Cobean et al. 1971) and the Valley of Oaxaca (Parry 1987). However, it was not until the Late Formative period (400 b.c.--a.d. 100) that obsidian prismatic blade cores began to be traded extensively across the region. Archaeologists have typically considered the presence of prismatic blades and the absence of blade cores to constitute evidence for blade trade. A general consensus is that blade trading preceded the trade of cores by close to a millennium (Clark 1987; Clark and Lee 1984; Jackson and Love 1991). However, this issue has never been examined critically. To better address the issue, two important questions must be asked; (1) what does blade trade look like in the archaeological record, and (2) how can blade trade be distinguished from other potential distribution systems?
This paper examines how obsidian prismatic blades were exchanged throughout Formative period Mesoamerica using the distributional approach (Hirth 1998). The distributional approach reconstructs forms of exchange by examining the differential distribution of commodities (finished blades) and related production debris within contexts of economic consumption (Hirth 1998:454). Systematic comparison of obsidian blades and blade production by-products from sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, the Basin of Mexico, and Tlaxcala (Figure 1) provides a means of modeling how these different areas were provisioned during the Formative period. The information presented here suggests that obsidian blade trade may have taken several different forms.
Figure 1.
Map of sites discussed in text.
Three issues are addressed in the following discussion. First, how is blade trade identified in the archaeological record and was there more than one form of blade trade across Mesoamerica? Second, what behavioral models of obsidian production and exchange explain the distribution of prismatic blades during the Formative period? Finally, what do the actual data from the Formative period tell us about the distribution of obsidian blades? We begin with a discussion of blade trade and how it may produce differences in blade assemblages over space. We describe three distributional...