Color Matters: The Selection and Use of Lithic Raw Materials in Viking Age and Medieval Iceland

Summary

As our abilities to source stone tools increase, our questions become ever more sophisticated as our methodologies reach deeper into the elemental and isotopic levels and an ever-broadening range of statistical analyses. Yet we also recognize that lithic raw materials were selected by their past users for entirely different reasons. A wide range of approaches have been used to explore the roles of proximity, accessibility, mechanical qualities, and exchange relationships, among others, in determining how and why the stone tools and debitage we recover were initially acquired and accumulated in the sites we excavate.

However, relatively few analyses take the actual color of lithic raw materials seriously into account. Color is often regarded as a secondary accident of a raw material's chemical composition or physical structure rather than as the primary reason for its original acquisition and use. This paper will explore case studies from domestic and sacral contexts in Viking Age and Medieval Iceland to argue that selection for color may sometimes have been the primary reason for acquiring and accumulating lithic raw materials for utilitarian use, for specific roles in ritual settings, and even in manuscript preparation. Color was therefore also a key determinant of quarry/source selection.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Chert Sourcing Case Studies Part II: Landscape Distribution and Prehistoric Societies.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage