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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Crews. Emily Opack.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Wai‘ahukini Rockshelter (H8/50-Ha-B21-006), located near South Point on the Island of Hawai‘i, was initially investigated by K. P. Emory, W. Bonk, and Y. Sinoto in the 1950s. The collection has since been curated at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, HI....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yoshiyuki Iizuka.

This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On-site and laboratory geochemical analyses have been carried out on jade and jade-like artifacts including unfinished pieces in the mainland of Southeast Asia by p-XRF and SEM-EDS respectively. In Vietnam, the results from more than 100 analyses show that the lingling-Os and double animal-headed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liliana Janik.

This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a study of the clays used in the manufacture of ceramic figurines, or dogu, from the Jomon period of Japanese archaeology. Analyses of clays in dogu from sites in Niigata (eastern Honshu) and Okayama (western Honshu) using a handheld XRF machine will be discussed in the context of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Doherty.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the recent reporting of pre-Clovis-aged Western Stemmed components at archaeological sites in the Great Basin, there is renewed interest in the previously excavated Paleoindian assemblage from Smith Creek Cave. There, a stemmed-point component was originally dated to approximately 13,000 years ago. A thorough...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Piscitelli.

This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multi-elemental analytical techniques like X-Ray Fluorescence have been employed to determine the use of space through residues left behind from human activities. In addition, methodologies primarily used in other disciplines such as pollen analysis or micromorphology can illuminate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Ryan. Anna Prentiss.

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research uses obsidian data from a single site in the GYE to test existing land tenure and territoriality models based on the sourcing and subsequent movement of obsidian. While on a spectrum, existing studies have generally polarized between two major schools of thought. These perspectives diverge over whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael D. Glascock. Kylie Gannan. Thomas R. Hester.

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. In the late 1960s, Heizer and colleagues at UC-Berkeley began to use X-ray fluorescence to measure chemical fingerprints for obsidian artifacts from a number of sites in Mesoamerica. In their study of obsidian artifacts from the Olmec site of La Venta, they found that 93% of the artifacts were explained by five distinct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian. Emmanuel Ndiema. Purity Kiura.

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. Steve Shackley’s wide-reaching research includes X-ray fluorescence analyses of obsidian from East Africa. He and co-authors explored sources of obsidian from sites in Ethiopia, providing data that informed many later studies in a relatively unknown region for obsidian studies. Our work on obsidian from mid-Holocene...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Ayala. Cinthia M. Campos.

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Epiclassic, well known as a transitionary period, some emerging chiefdoms sought control of exchange networks and natural resources like obsidian. Specifically, in Western Mesoamerica, in Michoacán are two obsidian sources that had a local distribution across the Lake Chapala basin, the central mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fracción Mujular is a small domestic settlement located on the slopes of Cerro Bernal near the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Founded under the auspices of the Early Classic center of Los Horcones, Fracción Mujular was occupied for nearly one thousand years, persisting through the Collapse of Los Horcones and entering into a period of rapid expansion during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Johnson.

In the Middle Formative, Chalcatzingo was one of Highland Mexico’s dominant settlements. At its peak, Chalcatzingo had a well-developed obsidian blade technology and established lines of trade with the Gulf Coast. Chalcatzingo’s role in the exchange of obsidian in earlier periods is less well understood. This paper combines geochemical sourcing and technological analysis of an Early Formative obsidian assemblage from Chalcatzingo in order to elucidate this role. Geochemical sourcing enables a...

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 Jeffrey Rasic. Norman Easton. Christian Thomas. Robert Sattler.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of Eastern Beringia (Alaska and Yukon) plays an important role in understanding global human dispersals and settlement and is a proving ground for testing ideas about high-latitude hunter-gatherer land use, technology, and socioeconomic interaction. Obsidian provenance studies provide an excellent means...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Jorgeson. Matthew Boulanger.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present results of a large-scale geochemical sourcing study of obsidian artifacts from Picuris Pueblo. We compare those results to obsidian-sourcing data from other sites on the Taos Plateau and in the Rio Chama basin. At Picuris Pueblo, almost all obsidian artifacts were produced on Valles Rhyolite or Cerro Toledo...

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...