Lithic Analysis: Obsidian (Other Keyword)
51-71 (71 Records)
Obsidian was a significant component of daily life in southern Italy during the Neolithic period (ca. 6000-3000 BC). Intensive surveys by Ammerman and colleagues in the 1970s identified a widespread presence of Neolithic obsidian in Calabria, generally thought to have come from the island of Lipari, mostly on the basis of its being the closest, along with general visual characteristics. While it was also thought possible to have small amounts of obsidian from the further away tiny island of...
A Preliminary Recontextualization of Lithic and Exchange Chronology of Coxcatlan Cave within the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, Coxcatlan Cave has drawn renewed attention for its early regional chronology and centralized location as a nexus point for interregional exchange. However, its importance for understanding shifting patterns of exchange and resource acquisition within the Valley of Tehuacan has yet to be explored. This research draws upon the data gathered...
Ready, aim, fire: darts, arrows, and pre-contact era fire use in the western Cascades (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Oregon, Indigenous oral histories and ethnohistories document the use of fire as an important part of the Indigenous subsistence system. Fire was used for plant tending, harvesting, and collecting, but also in hunting. Transitions in hunting technologies are often associated with significant changes in entire subsistence systems. For instance, the...
A Reassessment of Obsidian Procurement Networks on Guatemala's Pacific Slope (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Networks of long-distance exchange in quotidian commodities are essential aspects of prehistoric economies. On the Pacific Slope of Guatemala, there was no more important commodity than obsidian, which accounts for almost all cutting edges found in archaeological contexts. Obsidian sourcing studies on the Pacific Slope have been limited, relied on very...
Reconsideración de Las Fuentes de Aprovisionamiento de Obsidiana en el Oriente y Suroriente de Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A la luz de los nuevos datos sobre el uso y distribución de fuentes de obsidiana en el territorio hondureño, particularmente la evidencia relacionada con la explotación de la cantera de Güinope, en el departamento de El Paraíso en la región oriental del país. Se analiza y expone un debate sobre el abordaje de los estudios líticos en...
Reflecting on the History and Use of Rectangular Obsidian "Mirrors" from Central Mexico: Reinterpreting Old Museum Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights the relevance and potential of collections-based research through a case study of rectangular obsidian "mirrors" from Central Mexico, typically associated with the Aztec, housed at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). To date these highly polished obsidian objects are found exclusively in museum...
The Search for the Primary Source of Kings Canyon/La Poudre Pass Obsidian in Colorado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During field survey in 2011, archaeologists for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest discovered obsidian nodules contained in ancient alluvial gravels of the Miocene North Park formation in Jackson County, Colorado. The Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, analyzed this obsidian using ED-XRF and determined that it was...
Setting the Agenda for the Next Phase in Obsidian Studies in Aotearoa (New Zealand) (2019)
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. Studies of obsidian artifacts from sites across Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the 1960s-80s, were critical to identifying a major decrease in mobility, just prior to the onset of endemic warfare, marked by the construction of thousands of fortifications by the ancestors of Māori. Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm was...
¿Siluetas o excéntricos? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A partir del estudio del proceso de elaboración de siluetas o excéntricos bifaciales y monofaciales teotihuacanos de las fases Tlamimilolpa y Xolalpan, elaborados en el yacimiento de obsidiana verde de La Sierra de Las Navajas,...
Social and Physical Landscape of Lithic Procurement in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this research project is to better understand the role that societal organization, namely the institution of Spanish colonialism, played in shaping Jemez lithic procurement and reduction strategies across the Jemez Mountains from 1300-1700 AD. Previous work (Liebmann 2017) using X-ray florescence to source lithic debitage from 31 ancestral Jemez...
The Social Significance of Jemez Mountains Obsidian at Aztec Ruins National Monument (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studying the sources of obsidian in the American Southwest has provided valuable insights into both resource procurement and the social and political processes that underlie it. We report on a large sourcing study from Aztec Ruins National Monument, a Chacoan community significant both for its political history and for its multiple great houses....
Source Analysis of Cascade Points from the Connley Caves, Oregon (35LK50) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers commonly use X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to source lithic tools and their associated byproducts made on obsidian and fine-grained volcanic toolstone. The results of such studies can be used to reconstruct lithic conveyance patterns, which in turn can tell us about hunter-gatherer mobility, territoriality, and/or exchange. In this study, we report...
Sourcing Preceramic obsidian from Las Estacas, Morelos, and Yuzanu 36, Oaxaca (2018)
Understanding of long-distance exchange during the Mesoamerican Preceramic suffers from a limited range of materials whose source locations can be determined relative to later periods. Obsidian is one of the few materials that can provide evidence for long-distance exchange through geochemical analysis, although relatively few sourcing studies have been carried out on Preceramic obsidian. In this paper, we report recent pXRF results from obsidian recovered at two Preceramic sites: Las Estacas,...
The Symbolism and Technology of Classic Maya Tomb Debitage from El Peru-Waka (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian blades and related debitage from four elite tombs recently excavated at El Peru-Waka have the potential to answer the question of why and how the ancient Maya placed this material above, around, and sometimes within the...
Systematic Data Recovery at Archaeological Sites in the McIntyre Creek Valley, Whitehorse, Yukon (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Posters on the Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents on the preliminary findings of systematic data recovery excavations at several archaeological sites within the city of Whitehorse, Yukon. These sites tentatively include JeUs-42, JeUs-43, and JeUs-96. Excavations were undertaken by Stantec during the 2023 field season; one site was partially...
A Tale of Two Peripheries: Recent Excavations at Fracción Mujular, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
Fracción Mujular is a modest residential site located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Long known for the Central Mexican iconography found on its carved stelae, investigations conducted during the winter of 2017 represent the first excavations of the site. This paper presents the results of these excavations, as well as subsequent laboratory analysis. We now know that Fracción Mujular has a history that covers over one thousand years of occupation, from the Early Classic to the Late...
Temporal Changes in Obsidian Procurement Strategy during the Upper Paleolithic on Hokkaido (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstruction of obsidian procurement strategies based on systematic obsidian sourcing analysis in the Upper Paleolithic on Hokkaido will provides an important basis for examining several key issues of human evolutionary history, including how modern humans adapted to the cold, harsh environment of the north, and how these...
Through a Glass, Darkly: Shedding Light on Late Prehistoric Obsidian Conveyance and Apachean Ethnogenesis on the Western Great Plains of North America (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian was technologically and symbolically important to the prehistoric inhabitants of western North America, and analysis of the small but diverse obsidian assemblage from the Bayou Gulch site (5DA265) in Colorado suggests both uses were important to the site’s inhabitants toward the end of the Late Prehistoric Period (AD 1000-1540). Chemical analysis...
Twenty Years of Mesoamerican Obsidian Research at the EAF (2024)
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. Among the first materials compositionally analyzed at the EAF were obsidian objects from the Maya site of San José, Belize. Since then, we have analyzed tens of thousands of obsidian objects from Mesoamerica (primarily from the Valley of Oaxaca) as part of our study of the...
Using Technologically Diagnostic Debitage to Better Determine the Integrity of an Archaeological Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a cultural resource to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, it must meet specific criteria. For significant archaeological sites, this usually means the resources can produce data that address important questions about the past (i.e., National Register Criterion D). The integrity of design is of...
Western Stemmed Tradition Lithic Procurement Strategies at the Catnip Creek Delta, Locality, Guano Valley, Oregon: A Gravity Model Approach (2021)
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. Source provenance analyses have long featured prominently in Great Basin Paleoindian archaeology. Such research has primarily focused on reconstructing Paleoindian settlement/subsistence strategies, territoriality, and socioeconomic interactions by sourcing obsidian artifacts from sites and mapping their geographic...