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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hoferitza.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. n 1864, a factory in Briare, France, began producing Prosser Molded beads for African and North American trade. The beads were made using a novel process combining milk as a binding agent to powdered feldspar, calcium fluoride, silica sand, and coloring elements to create a paste that was pressed into molds, then fired in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Meyer. Marcie Venter. Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 20 years a growing assemblage of Aztec-style ceramics, specifically Texcoco Molded censers and molds, has been recovered from sites throughout the northeastern Tochtepec province of the Triple Alliance Empire. In this presentation, we examine the chemical compositions using pXRF, paste recipes, and decorative attributes and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Ignacio Macias Quintero.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the contacts process between sedentary farmers and nomadic groups who inhabited the Mesoamerican Northern Frontier, before the XVI Century. Archaeological previous research suggested that villages standing on the northern mesoamerican...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Halperin. Jose Luis Garrido Lopez. Miriam Salas. Jean Baptiste LeMoine.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya archaeological site of Ucanal is located in Peten, Guatemala, close to the contemporary border with Belize. In Pre-Columbian times, the site also sat at the borders of some of the largest political centers, such as Caracol (Belize) and Naranjo (Peten, Guatemala)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick.

Procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials loom large in discussions of prehistoric economies. Over the past three decades surface survey and excavations in and around the Late Classic polity of Cotzumalguapa revealed the presence of several obsidian dumps, the result of a large-scale lithic industry. These deposits contain production debitage from most phases of blade-core reduction but no nodules and relatively very little cortex, suggesting that obsidian came into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare Bedford. David Robinson.

The composition of background substrate, overpainted layers and admixtures can influence the data acquired from portable instrumentation at rock art sites. An understanding of the extent and impact of this influence is crucial when comparing in situ rock art pigments with potential source materials. This study uses an experimental process to assess the impact of factors such as a pigment thickness, overpainting, and addition of organic binders on the readings acquired using portable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Watts.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are numerous megaliths on the islands of Indonesia, including the island of Flores where their constructions date to 2500-1000 BCE. Some of the stones that comprise these megaliths have been trafficked to other countries in recent years. In the early 2000s an Iowa City collector purchased a set of 50 of these standing stones from a location or locations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Mentzer. Ivo Verheijen. Britt Starkovich. Jordi Serangeli. Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When conducting micro-X-ray fluorescence (µXRF) analyses of archaeological and geological materials, diffraction peaks, which are produced by crystalline materials, are typically unwanted and methods are devised to minimize their impact on the sample spectrum. Here, we explore the intentional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Riley Murrin.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent rise in the availability of literature on the topic soil chemical analysis has inspired growing interest in evaluating soils at archaeological sites to gain a more detailed picture of the lives and culture of the people that once lived there. Through soil analysis, we can better define areas once used for residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Doherty. Ted Goebel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic technological organization studies and geochemical analyses provide a useful way for archaeologists to examine prehistoric forager mobility. In the Great Basin, these methods, when applied to assemblages from multi-component sites, have revealed diachronic changes in lithic raw material procurement patterns between the Paleoindian and Early Archaic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thegn Ladefoged. Dion O'Neale. Alex Jorgensen. Christopher Stevenson. Mark McCoy.

The Polynesian colonists who settled New Zealand touched off the creation of a type of society not found in remote Oceania. Over the span of several centuries relatively autonomous village-based groups transformed into larger territorial hapū lineages, which later formed even larger geo-political iwi associations. A social network analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of obsidian artefacts, an important stone resource that was used for a variety of tools, evaluates where and when new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztatlán tradition constituted the primary economic and cultural development during the Early/Middle Postclassic (AD 900-1350) in west Mexico. Though politically decentralized, this culture was rooted on the Pacific coastal plain and featured vast trade networks. Located 100 km inland, the Etzatlán Basin is the westernmost lake basin in the Jalisco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Véronique Bélisle. Hubert Quispe-Bustamante. Allison Davis. Carlos Delgado González. Matthew Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) in the Central Andes was a time of important changes due to the expansion of the Wari and Tiwanaku states. Many scholars have argued that these polities, the Wari in particular, had a major economic impact on local communities, including the disruption of regional exchange networks and the reorientation of long-distance trade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins. Deborah Nichols. Ethan August.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian, a volcanic glass, was widely used in Mesoamerica for cutting tools, weapons, jewelry, and ritual objects since the Paleoindian period (ca. 9000 BC). Because its sources have unique chemical signatures, obsidian provides a durable and measurable index of interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson. Daron Duke. Jennifer DeGraffenried. Bruce Kaiser.

Collaborating with multiple XRF instruments enables larger than normal datasets to be analyzed in a short period. The portability of instruments is important to analysts working together in one location as groups of specimens can be analyzed simultaneously. However, certain protocols must be followed so there are no discrepancies among instruments. We present our project’s methodological controls, such as shared source library and calibration, and preliminary results. The study consists of over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Gore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Beringian record is critical to understanding human dispersals and adaptive behaviors of the earliest peoples in the Americas. Late Pleistocene and Holocene peoples subsisted on a dynamic and changing landscape that undoubtedly influenced technological organization, including toolstone procurement and selection patterns. The interior Alaskan record is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Pascali. John Dudgeon. Kateea Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many tool-quality obsidian sources can be found across the Snake River Plain (SRP) in southern Idaho and adjacent geologic areas. This material was widely used in prehistory, with some artifacts discovered as far away as the Ohio River Valley. In order to better understand the selection and use of regional obsidian sources, we undertook experiments to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John K. Millhauser. Kristin De Lucia. Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría.

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In central Mexico, where obsidian was the primary tool stone used by Indigenous peoples, one can get a good sense of sources by separating green obsidian (from Pachuca) from gray obsidian (from Otumba, Ucareo, and several other sources). Compositional analysis can further clarify the gray sources....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Davis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Salinas La Blanca, located within the coastal estuary of the Soconusco region of Guatemala, was occupied from the Early to Middle Formative periods. This was a period of considerable cultural change, as Olmec influence on the Pacific Coast waned and regional centers developed more centralized power. This paper presents the results of a chemical compositional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Gore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of Eastern Beringia is critical to understanding human dispersal into the Americas and the settling-in processes of the First Americans and their descendants. Investigating prehistoric landscape use and provisioning behaviors is significant in answering questions related to adaptive behaviors of prehistoric Beringians. We can begin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole George.

The relationship between concave base and Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points in the Great Basin is not well-understood. They may represent sequential Late Pleistocene technologies, coeval technologies used by different ethnolinguistic populations, or different components within the same toolkits. To explore the latter possibility, I collected geochemical sourcing data for both types of artifacts recovered from three adjacent valleys in southeastern Oregon: (1) Warner Valley; (2)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Furlong.

This is an abstract from the "New Research into the Old Cordilleran" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raw material sourcing of crystalline volcanic rock (CVR) artifacts through geochemical analysis has a decades long history in Olympic Peninsula archaeological research and is an important aspect of site interpretation. Recent archaeological investigations at three Olcott sites by Archaeological and Historical Services, EWU as a part of Washington...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Jonassen.

This is an abstract from the "Expanding Our Understanding of the Mojave Desert: Emerging Research and New Perspectives on Old Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study geochemically documents the conveyance of felsite from quarries in the Soda Mountains adjacent to pluvial Lake Mojave, California to the archaeological sites along its terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene (TP/EH) shorelines. Prior research suggests Paleoindians conveyed tool...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Gore.

This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around 14,000 years ago, modern humans dispersed into eastern Beringia. McDonald Creek, located in the Tanana Valley, central Alaska, is a significant part of characterizing this dispersal as one of the earliest known sites in eastern Beringia. This site posesses three cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chad Rankle. Sachiko Sakai. Alondra Garcia. Enadina Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first excavation of the pithouse structure site was conducted during the summer of 2018 in Mt. Trumbull as a part of settlement pattern investigation in this area. A long trench excavation conducted at the center of a depression observed in this site revealed a large pithouse floor in the limestone bedrock. The profile of...