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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Brownstein. Betsy Kohut. George Bey III.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the use of portable X-Ray Fluorescence (p-XRF) spectrometers has become increasingly common to determine the geological sources of obsidian artifacts. This study used p-XRF to obtain trace elemental data for 354 obsidian artifacts from the sites of Huntichmul, Kiuic and Escalera Al Cielo in the Puuc region of the northern Maya lowlands. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Don Hann.

Cultural resources in wilderness areas can be difficult to manage due to a lack of dedicated funding and few undertakings which trigger survey through the National Historic Preservation Act. After a series of extensive wildfires in the 1990s the Malheur National Forest surveyed much of the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness Area using volunteers from the Forest Service's Passport In Time program. Crews documented several extensive obsidian dominated lithic scatter sites. The debitage and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Erlick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Projectile points are one of the few artifacts present on the surface of archaeological sites that may also serve as a diagnostic of the site’s relative age. A shift in the archaeological record can be seen through changes in projectile point technologies between the Late Archaic and the Historic periods in northwest Wyoming. The exact causes of these changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blaine Burgess. Jeffrey Ferguson. Shannon Fie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists attribute many possible connections between the Bajío and Basin of Mexico during the Formative through Postclassic periods. Elemental analysis of obsidian from the site of La Magdalena (Q-25) in the eastern Bajío region of Mexico both support and challenge different aspects of these connections. Excavations conducted by Beloit College in 1958...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Serena Webster. Andrew Somerville. Marion Forest.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian played an important social and economic role in ancient Mesoamerica. Because obsidian is a relatively homogenous material, chemical analyses can quantify its elemental concentrations and determine source locations of individual artifacts. This study investigates sources of obsidian procurement at the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan in central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Whelan.

Geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts has proven to be a useful analytical tool for the studies of trade and mobility in the archaeological record. However, it is difficult to distinguish lithic material acquired through exchange from material acquired directly from the source. Economic models of lithic reduction suggest that material procured for the purpose of exchange may be treated differently than material procured for personal consumption. I compare obsidian source profiles and lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Tripcevich. B. Lee Drake. Lisa Trever. Eric Kansa. Michael Glascock.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The open science movement is growing in archaeology, and raises fundamental questions about data and who it belongs to. In this talk, we outline a protocol for sharing data on obsidian sources to facilitate replicable research. While in obsidian sourcing a direct calibration is preferable (e.g., measuring source...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Thompson.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellery Frahm.

Portable XRF instruments have advanced considerably over the past decade, and many of their technical advancements are highly useful for the archaeological sciences, especially compared to fields like art conservation. The newest generation of detectors and their processing electronics, for example, make measurements significantly shorter, allowing characterization of much larger assemblages. Other advances, though, involve more than mere speed. Ruggedized instruments are dust-proof,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Kitchel. Heather Rockwell.

In the late seventies and early eighties Robson Bonnichsen identified and tested several fluted point occupation loci adjacent to chert deposits on Norway Bluff, Piscataquis County, Maine. Since that time various research projects have demonstrated the importance of chert from this region to the lithic economy of fluted point groups in northeastern North America. Despite these new insights little archaeological research has taken place in the Munsungun Lake region since Bonnichsen’s original...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Jamaldin.

The Fort Rock Basin’s (FRB) caves and rock shelters hold an important place in the history of Great Basin archaeology. Excavations at Fort Rock Cave by Luther Cressman in the late 1930’s led him to argue for a long-standing presence of humans in the region. The subsequent development of radiocarbon dating confirmed his ideas, providing firm evidence for a considerable human population in the FRB during the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene (TP/EH). Although most caves and rock shelters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariah Wade. Laure Dussubieux.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous analyses of glass sherds from the Cividade de Bagunte, Vila do Conde, Portugal, indicate those glass fragments might have been produced in the Syro-Palestinian region. This paper discusses the results of glass samples from several hillfort settlements and sites connected with the Roman town of Bracara Augusta, Braga, Portugal, analyzed using...

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 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...