Description
Elite Craft Producers, Artists, and Warriors at Aguateca uses the excavation data from twelve structures and more than a few use areas to investigate artistic and craft production activities by elite women and men and warriors in Classic Maya society. Specifically, Aoyama makes a speciality of detailed use-wear analysis of stone tools by employing high-power microscopy to address production, warfare, and the domestic and ritual lives of the Maya. He provides descriptions and discussion of over ten thousand lithic artifacts from the Aguateca site, which was once a center of both utilitarian and luxury goods.
Based on this research, Aoyama proposes that Classic Maya elite women and men artists and craft producers played more than one social and economic roles, such as scribes and warriors, in addition to having administrative, diplomatic, ritualistic, and domestic duties. This view implies a more flexible and integrated system of Classic Maya elite participation in craft production than is regularly proposed.