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The Economy of Supply: Modeling Obsidian Procurement and Craft Provisioning at a Central Mexican Urban Center

This article examines the way that obsidian craftsmen at Xochicalco, Mexico obtained the raw material needed to produce prismatic blades at the site between A.D. 650 and 900. The paper models seven different forms of direct, indirect, and institutional procurement that craftsmen could have used to obtain this obsidian. These seven procurement models are evaluated using two types of information collected from four domestic workshops: (1) source analysis (NAA, PIXE) to identify where obsidian came from, and (2) technological analysis to determine the form in which obsidian entered workshops. The results indicate that Xochicalco craftsmen most likely were provisioned through itinerant craftsmen who periodically visited Xochicalco. Pressure cores nearing exhaustion were sold to Xochicalco craftsmen who rejuvenated them to produce additional prismatic blades using a hand-held blade removal technology. The results indicate that: (1) different forms of craft provisioning can be differentiated when multiple forms of data are incorporated into the distributional approach, (2) independent domestic craft specialists were the foundation for Mesoamerican economy and were individually responsible for the procurement of raw materials and the distribution of finished products, and (3) neither state institutions, nor the elite who directed them, were involved in the procurement of obsidian for craft specialists who produced valued tools.