Finding the workshop was a stroke of luck: Brent Woodfill, an archaeologist at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, learned about it from friends in Cobán, Guatemala, who were doing construction on their property. A few months later, Woodfill and colleagues excavated the site, called Aragón, and surveyed it with a drone. Although the workshop was destroyed by the construction, archaeologists were able to recover more than 400 fragments of figurines and the molds for making them (above), as well as thousands of ceramic pieces-more than at any other known Mayan workshop.
These figurines played a key role in Mayan politics and economics; it's thought that leaders gave them to allies and subjects to strengthen and publicize important relationships. The Aragón workshop was likely active from about 750 C.E. to 900 C.E., long before archaeologists thought there was an important city in the region. It also appears to have survived and even thrived, as nearby cities such as Cancuén succumbed to political turmoil that unleashed a 3-century-long "collapse" around the Mayan world. That means Aragón could hold important clues about how political and economic power transformed over that long-and sometimes painful-transition.
doi:10.1126/science.aax7463
This is just an example of what the Cs and Laura talk about regarding the difference between information and knowledge. The author here asserts that these items "in fact" played a key role, but then changes language, admitting it's not know "as fact," but presumed to have been used for such a purpose.
What we have here is information, but little factual knowledge of what the items were used for. And the assumptions seem largely based on what a more modern society might do with such things.
It's jarring to see this language in reporting. It seems to be incredibly common, especially in reporting around the sciences. I have gained no real knowledge from this article; simply information.