Domestic workshops appear to have been organized as independent commerce undertaken by extended families, but the workshop of the Moon Pyramid precinct would have been overseen by state functionaries, and the finished weapons may have been stored in state armories. Within the city some obsidian workshops were located in apartment compounds where primarily utilitarian tools were fabricated, whereas at least one workshop was located near to the Moon Pyramid and specialised in the production of weapons (dart points and knives) as well as ceremonial items of the type that were deposited as consecratory offerings and exported as far away as certain Maya cities. Teotihuacan's soldiers were armed with obsidian-tipped darts, short spears thrown with an atlatl or spear-thrower, obsidian knives, and wooden clubs. Teotihuacan in central Mexico was at its height from 375 to 500 CE, and there, worked obsidian blades were used for various types of weapons and tools, as here explained by the historian D. As a cutting edge, obsidian was second to none, but it does have the fatal flaw of being easily shattered. Obsidian was often worked from a raw piece into a multi-faceted cone-like form from which multiple blades or shards could be easily split off. Clearly, there was a division in value and control between unworked obsidian and finished articles associated with power like elite jewellery and weapons. On the other hand, we know that at some contemporary sites in western Mexico (the Tequila valleys) obsidian jewellery was controlled by the ruling elite and that at neighbouring Tarascan sites, the production of obsidian blades was controlled by the state.
Trade was not always carried out by city-states or elites, craftworkers themselves sometimes arranged the procurement of unworked obsidian, as can be seen at sites like Xochicalco, which flourished between c. From these highland deposits, obsidian was transported via canoes along waterways to the wider region. Major deposits of Mesoamerican obsidian besides Pachuca came from the highlands of Jalisco (western central Mexico) and the highlands of Guatemala (El Chayal and San Luis Jilotepeque). Mesoamerican trade in obsidian, though, goes back much earlier than the Toltecs, with evidence it was exchanged in the second millennium BCE during the period often called the Early Formative.
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