Archaeometry & Materials Analysis: XRF/pXRF (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman. Marvin Rowe.

Painted pebbles are the primary mobiliary art found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Previous studies of these artifacts have focused on stylistic variation of the imagery and interpretation of the role these artifacts played within Lower Pecos societies. The focus of this study is the use of portable X-ray fluorescence on Lower Pecos painted pebbles to conduct elemental analyses, providing insight into the chaîne opératoire of painted pebble production....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ligman. Tina Hart. Michael Terlep.

Although portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) has routinely been used successfully to identify the geochemical source of lithic materials across North America, comparatively few studies apply pXRF to compositional and geochemical sourcing studies of rock art pigments. Logan Simpson conducted exploratory in situ analyses using non-invasive pXRF to analyze the elemental composition of manufactured rock art pigments used to produce prehistoric pictographs at several rock art sites across the Great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milosz Giersz. Branden Rizzuto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Castillo de Huarmey, located on the north coast of Peru and dated to the Middle Horizon period (650-1050 CE), is widely known for an important discovery of the first undisturbed Wari royal mausoleum. With multiple burials, rich ceremonial offerings, and a wealth of grave goods, the assemblage embraces a diversity of artistic, iconographic, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar. Alexei Vranich. Dennis Ogburn.

This is an abstract from the "How Did the Inca Construct Cuzco?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The plan of Inca Cuzco is sometimes explained as following a unified design, which some historical accounts attribute to the 9th Inca leader, Pachacuti. While Cuzco was a planned settlement, it was constantly being reconstructed and altered to accommodate a growing Inca elite, to facilitate the needs of the emerging state and the priorities of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Branden Rizzuto. Justin Jennings.

This poster highlights emerging results of our ongoing study to further characterize the procurement networks and use strategies of obsidian sources in the south-central Andes during the Middle Horizon (600 CE – 1000 CE) and Late Intermediate Periods (1000 CE – 1476 CE). We present archaeometric analyses and provenience studies of excavated obsidian objects from the Middle Horizon – Late Intermediate site of Quilcapampa, located in the Valle de Siguas, Arequipa, Peru. In total, 70 objects were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Paris. Ashley Megan Williams. Gabriel Laló Jacinto.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of obsidian artifacts from the ancient Maya city of Tenam Puente. The site is located in the eastern Chiapas highlands, and was occupied from approximately AD 500 to 1100. We analyze a sample of 859 obsidian artifacts from the site’s monumental zone, which were excavated by the Proyecto Tenam Puente,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Skowronek. Brandi Reger. James Hinthorne. Juan Gonzalez.

The U.S.-Mexico border region along the Rio Grande River, separating the southernmost Texas counties (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Zapata) from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, is a strategic corridor for prehistoric human travel connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the interior of the continent. The area contains a history of human presence extending over 11,000 years, evidenced by a wealth of projectile points that have attracted collectors for decades. To understand prehistoric people’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zimmer-Dauphinee. Arlen Talaverano. Kevin Jara. Steven Wernke.

The choice of clay and pigment sources for ceramic production in the Andes has the potential to convey complex information about the resilience and persistence of Inca social structure in the Colca Valley throughout the imposition of Spanish imperialism. Prior to the Spanish invasion, ceramics in the Colca Valley were likely primarily produced by a handful of specialized communities which would have widely distributed their products. It is therefore expected that there would be a standardization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bronson Wistuk.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2017-2018, over 1,000 obsidian artifacts were excavated from the Patipampa sector of Huari, once the administrative capital of the Wari state. During the 2018 season, over 350 artifacts were analyzed via portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) and then fingerprinted to Andean obsidian sources when...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sachiko Sakai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first excavation study of the Virgin Puebloan structures at Mt. Trumbull in the Arizona Strip was recently conducted after more than 15 years of intense surface surveys. The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the settlement patterns and adaptive strategies among the small-scale farmers who lived in this marginal environment. The Zip...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Haynes. Megan Stueve. David Page. Lisa Cipolla.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Hunter Liggett (FHL), in the central coastal region of California, contains a prodigious rock art record composed primarily of hundreds of red, black, and white pictographs. Most people familiar with this rock art know of the National Register-listed La Cueva Pintada, a large cave with several hundred overlapping elements, but there are also other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Palka.

This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, recovered large amounts of green obsidian from mines at Pachuca, Hidalgo, which were managed by Mexica-Aztecs in Late Postclassic times (ca. 1300–1520 CE). Excavations in coeval Maya habitation sites at Mensabak recovered obsidian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Detlef Wilke. Aika Katharina Diesch. Joachim Lorenz.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of an extended ceramic settlement analysis with ten medieval find complexes in the lower Main depression, we studied Roman and late medieval to early modern pottery from Dieburg (district of Darmstadt), which is the only site with workshop wasters in the larger region. The Dieburg wares exhibit a characteristic anomaly of Ti, Nb, and Zr,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Di Naso. David Dove. Winston Hurst. William Lucius.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Montezuma Canyon, in extreme southeast Utah, was home to large populations during the Basketmaker III through PIII period (AD 500-1300). Potters located throughout this deeply-incised, 73 km long north-south running canyon, produced San Juan Redware pottery in abundance well-beyond the needs of the village. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tawny Tibbits. Marieka Brouwer Burg. Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Granite was a preferred raw material for ground stone tool production in many parts of the Maya Lowlands. However, granite outcrops are spatially restricted within the Maya Mountains of Belize, and access to this material was limited. The movement of raw and/or finished tools would have required various mechanisms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayna Lindquist.

This is an abstract from the "El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Formative period, prehispanic societies in southern Veracruz primarily relied on obsidian for numerous daily activities. However, as the geological sources of obsidian that were exploited occur in central Mexico and the Guatemalan and Honduran...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Tykot. Andrea Vianello.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tiny island of Palmarola, about 35 km south of Cape Circeo (between Rome and Naples, Italy), was an important source of obsidian during the Neolithic in the Central Mediterranean. While thought to have been a minor source, compared to Lipari and Sardinia, extensive artifact analyses in recent years of museum and other collections show that Palmarola...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Basalts and dolomites, associated with the Etendeka Large Igneous Province (ELIP), in northwestern Namibia, often make up the bulk of lithic raw materials present in archaeological assemblages from the region. Different igneous formations within the ELIP can readily be distinguished...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Koonce. Candace Sall. Brandi MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian tools and flakes are commonly examined in sourcing studies in areas with abundant volcanogenic deposits. Obsidian provenance research in the central Mesoamerican region has shown extensive networks of obsidian trade during the Formative and Classic periods. In this study, we used portable XRF to analyze a previously unstudied collection of over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takashi Sakaguchi. Satoshi Okamura.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this paper is to determine the source of grave stones for exploring the political economy among regional groups on the Ishikari Plain in the Late Jomon of central Hokkaido who created shuteibo (a type of communal cemetery characterized by a circular embankment). Our previous petrological analyses based on polarizing microscopical observation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tawny Tibbits.

The Maya site of Pacbitun in Belize has produced large amounts of granite ground stone tools, debitage, and debris. Determining provenance is integral to reconstructing the chaîne opératoire of ground stone tool production at the site. Portable X-Ray fluorescence (pXRF) is becoming widely used in the field for quick and accurate geochemical assessments. Most prior archaeological work has focused on fine-grained materials, rather than coarse-grained rocks like granite. This project used geologic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Jose Saramago’s classic "The Stone Raft", the Iberian peninsula breaks free from Europe to float unmoored into the Atlantic, etching into continental geology what David Anthony has termed a "persistent frontier": a fault line demarcating durable cultural, ethnic, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randy Haas. Eric Dillingham. Debbie Lundy. Nicolas Tripcevich. Mikayla Rosario.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have suggested that economies of scale gained from cooperative hunting fueled the evolution of human sociality. This model anticipates inflated levels of cooperation during group-hunting events in comparison to other contexts. To evaluate this prediction, we examine the provenance of 395 obsidian projectile points from the large communal hunting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Bergmann.

This is an abstract from the "From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chincha Valley was one of the most productive regions on the southern coast of Peru, yet little is known about the subsistence practices of the pre-Inca communities that existed in the inland valley of Chincha during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1476). The Chinchas formed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Rose.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the desert-steppe zone of southwestern Russia, mobile pastoralism served as the dominant mode of subsistence for much of its history. However, mobile pastoralism as a term refers to a diversity of practices, distinguished across multiple axes, the least of which is the mobile strategy itself. Pottery, as both an everyday object and a form of technology...