Les pierres à moudre du site d’Ucanal, Guatemala : provenance des matériaux dans les basses-terres mayas de la période Classique
This thesis examines groundstone artifacts found at the archaeological site of Ucanal, in Petén, Guatemala. These stone tools consist primarily of manos and metates, tools which were indispensable to all Maya households since they were used to process corn into flour, one of the basic staples of the Maya diet. This thesis documents the typological, stylistic, technological, and raw material characteristics of a sample of 156 groundstone tools dating from the Late Preclassic to Terminal Classic periods (ca. 300 BC – AD 1000). In addition, a more focused chemical composition study of the granite and quartzite groundstone tools was conducted using a portable X-ray fluorescence machine (pXRF) in order to test the reliability of the pXRF for identifying provenience sources and, if possible, to identify different exchange networks between Ucanal and other regions of the Maya area. Groundstone raw materials were also assessed by archaeological context in order to identify if elite, middle-status, and commoner households at the site of Ucanal had access to different raw materials sources and thereby participated in different economic exchange networks. The results of this chemical composition study reveal that the site of Ucanal had access to three sources of granites from the Maya Mountains in Belize. Although the results from the quartzite samples are too preliminary to identify specific source locations, they reveal that the majority of the quartzite tools had a similar chemical composition. Contextual analyses reveal that different types of households did not have significantly different access to non-local groundstone raw materials, and therefore the exchange of groundstone tools may have occurred through market exchange. Finally, access to non-local groundstone tools did not decline over the course of the Late Classic (ca. 600-830 AD) to Terminal Classic (ca. 830-1000 AD) periods, indicating that the site continued to engage in long-distance exchanges despite political crises that were experienced more broadly in the Southern Maya Lowlands during the Terminal Classic period.
pXRF Ucanal Granites Groundstone Sourcing Maya Mountains Maya Lowlands