Sourcing studies of lithic industries have often failed to acknowledge the social benefits of such trade for utilitarian objects that are also locally available with presumably lower acquisition costs. With few exceptions, stone tools have been ignored in the discussion. Various studies in the past have utilized a costly signaling model to understand the importance of foreign goods. The presence of domestic core production and the role of craft learning are then contextualized within the regional economy centered on the nearby city of Cantona. This, coupled with evidence from experimental core replication and ethnographic examples, suggests that these miniature cores represent the detritus of craft learning. Miniaturized polyhedral cores were found along side standard-sized macrocores and polyhedral cores, and all stages of core reduction debitage at a large, domestic core manufacturing site. The presence of novice obsidian core production was identified in a domestic habitation context at the Zaragoza-Oyameles obsidian source area in eastern Puebla, Mexico. However, ethnographic and ethnohistoric examples repeatedly indicate that children played a number of roles in household economies. The role of novices, which often are children, in domestic craft production and the replication of crafting knowledge is a topic that is often ignored in archaeological discussions of domestic economies.
The techno-morphological characteristics of the lithic sample gathered in test units shows that production was mainly geared towards the normalized manufacture of large dome-shaped scraper-plane preforms, which were traded within the entire region. Topographic depressions correspond to open extraction pits alongside areas reserved for debitage. They are located on a lava flow identified as dacitic from a petrographic and chemical viewpoint. The fieldwork with methodical Global Positioning System (GPS) and total station surveying brought to light numerous zones of lithic waste accumulation, some of which extend over several hectares. Dacite was central to an integrated production system for the large-scale manufacture of normalized knapped tools, which operated in the same way as at major obsidian deposits in Mesoamerica. In this paper, we examine from the quarry-workshop perspective how dacite was a crucial resource for the economy of pre-Tarascan and Tarascan societies from the Early Classic period to the Postclassic period (350–1450 CE). The extensive dacite quarry-workshops of Las Lajitas and La Tronconera in Northern Michoacán represent thus an unprecedented discovery. In the highlands of Mesoamerica, knapped tools from the latter raw materials are generally perceived to stem from local resources from which they were procured by simple surface collection.
As a result, other volcanic rocks such as basalt, andesite, or dacite have received much less attention. Due to its sheer abundance and informative potential, Mesoamerican archaeology tends to focus on obsidian as a mineral resource.
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