geochemical sourcing (Other Keyword)
1-4 (4 Records)
From 1985-88 the author conducted excavations at Talepakemalai (ECA) and other Lapita sites in the Mussau Islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, recovering an extensive assemblage of pottery, obsidian, lithics and manuports, and other materials. Efforts to geochemically characterize the diversity and trace the potential sources of ceramic clay and temper, as well as the obsidian and other lithic materials from Mussau have continued over three decades. Throughout this evolving research project...
An Overview of Vitrophyre Use in North Central Idaho: 12,000 Years of Rock Knockin’ on the Lochsa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in the 1990s defined the Clearwater River region of the southern Columbia Plateau as a unique cultural and archaeological entity, though it remains poorly understood. The Nez Perce have occupied this portion of north central Idaho since time immemorial. Excavations throughout ancestral Nez Perce country have revealed...
Sourcing Archaeological Textiles in the Northern Great Basin: Evaluation of Baseline Geochemical Data (2018)
Archaeological textiles are by nature ephemeral artifacts, leaving the development of analytical methodologies within the realm of culture history stylistic analysis until recently. Developments in geochemical sourcing methods have opened the window to new forms of analysis, including geographically sourcing the materials with which a textile is made. In particular, strontium isotope ratios with their long-term stability relating to archaeological time scales are well-suited for this type of...
Sourcing Rapa Nui mata‘a from the collections of Bishop Museum using non-destructive pXRF (2015)
On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four geological sources of rhyolitic obsidian were utilized to manufacture obsidian artifacts, including tanged implements known as mata‘a. In this study, a total of 332 mata‘a from the collections of Bishop Museum were analyzed using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF). Two analytical methods, Discriminant Function Analysis and Support Vector Machines Classification, were used to assign geographical provenance to these artifacts, which appear to be manufactured using...