Exotic, Lustrous, and Colorful: Obsidian in Symbol, Society, and Ceremony

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Lopiparo.

Craft production in the Classic Maya world was often carried out within multi-household groups, whose shared practices were passed on from generation to generation and whose social identities were strongly tied to the products they created. Investigations of a residential zone at Chinikihá, a Classic Maya center in the Palenque region, recovered a quantity of obsidian artifacts and evidence for production that is unusual not just at the site, but across the region. Fine-grained excavations have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian.

Northern California contains multiple, geochemically distinct, high-quality obsidian sources that were quarried in prehistory. However, not all were exploited equally. Instead, selection patterns suggest that some obsidian sources were reserved for manufacture of specific types of objects, while others could be used for more routine tools. The geologic and cultural context of the obsidian source may offer explanations for why differential quarrying and use occurred. Glass Mountain in Siskiyou...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellery Frahm.

A central issue in palaeoanthropological research is understanding the cognitive and behavioral variability of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic hominins, including differences with respect to the modern humans who replaced them. Some scholars argue that these hominins had fundamentally different cognition and behavior than Homo sapiens, whereas others hold that their capabilities are essentially indistinguishable from those of modern humans. In obsidian-rich landscapes, artifact sourcing and lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodora Moutsiou.

Recent research has demonstrated the extensive use of obsidian throughout the Palaeolithic in all the areas where obsidian sources were available at the time. Further analysis revealed that obsidian covered a wide range of distances on the Palaeolithic landscape but in the majority of cases its movement was linked to long distances, i.e. ≥100 km. This surprising conclusion cannot be satisfactorily explained on purely functional terms. Obsidian’s physical properties could have been the primary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Freund. Robert Tykot. Andrea Vianello.

This study focuses on the long-term exploitation of obsidian in prehistoric Sicily and the factors that influenced the procurement and consumption of these raw materials from the sixth to second millennia B.C. A detailed study of 6,287 prehistoric artifacts from 43 sites shows that the vast majority of obsidian found in Sicily comes from a single Lipari subsource, with smaller quantities of Pantelleria obsidian found in the west. Despite differences in the color and physical properties of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Torrence.

Brilliant, shiny, translucent, black. On the surface, everything made from obsidian is inherently attractive. So why are some obsidian artifacts more highly valued than others? Using the example of obsidian use in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, properties that go beyond physical attributes are explored as potential factors in the creation of valuables: e.g., exoticism; ownership of resources; social links; symbolism; performance; staged production; specialist makers. SAA 2015 abstracts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Healey. Stuart Campbell.

Obsidian is a visually attractive material. Artefacts made of obsidian are regularly documented in early state contexts in the Near East (for example Atij, Gudeda, Mari, Ras Shamra, Atchana, Mozan) and its use for vase manufacture is well known at sites such as Acem, Kultepe, Atchana, Warka, Ur and so on. It is also used to make beads and other personal items (Ur, Assur and elsewhere). Less well known though, are the origins of the obsidian from which these objects are made. In our paper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rennie Horneman. Carl Lipo. Terry Hunt. Vincent Bonhomme.

Of the few resources available to prehistoric people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), obsidian was plentiful. Yet out of the countless surviving shaped obsidian artifacts that are found on the island, virtually all of them are of the same general class, the mata’a. Mata’a are flaked obsidian stemmed tools formed from a hard-hammer primary flake. As relatively simple stemmed obsidian tools with wide blades, their form is similar to artifacts known as mata’a found on other Polynesian islands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pip Rath.

Dazzling, large, highly retouched obsidian objects comprised part of the material world of prehistoric people from West New Britain, Papua New Guinea from sometime between ca 6300- to 3300 years ago BP. Beyond their role as valuables, the seemingly mundane practices of choosing and acquiring raw material together with the application of a sequence of actions on the material and knowledge used in making them were fundamental for creating and structuring social relations. A case study,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Brandt.

This paper builds upon previous research among craftspeople of Southwestern Ethiopia who still procure obsidian on a regular basis to manufacture scrapers for the production of leather products. Previous ethnoarchaeological studies of these male and female hide workers of multiple ethnicities have provided a wealth of information on the role of lithics in past and present societies, and have been especially important in helping to debunk the idea that men were largely, if not exclusively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson.

To the uninitiated, Maya "eccentrics" are vague archaeological labels applied to flaked obsidian objects placed in ritual caches during the Classic Period (AD 250-800). Although an unclear label of humanoid, deity, animal-like, or other shaped objects, lithics analysts have tried to define eccentrics based on technological attributes enabling comparisons between contexts, sites, and regions. Those studies that reconstruct a complex chaîne opératoire demonstrate many eccentrics had a dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Mulrooney. Andrew McAlister. Christopher M. Stevenson. Alexander E. Morrison.

On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four geological sources of rhyolitic obsidian were utilized to manufacture obsidian artifacts, including tanged implements known as mata‘a. In this study, a total of 332 mata‘a from the collections of Bishop Museum were analyzed using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF). Two analytical methods, Discriminant Function Analysis and Support Vector Machines Classification, were used to assign geographical provenance to these artifacts, which appear to be manufactured using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Holmberg.

Prominent, recent explorations of the role of sensory data in archaeology detail the linkages of bodily senses, material objects, and remembering or forgetting to invoke the ‘vast and secret museum of historical and sensory absence’ in analyses. In this paper, I examine the residues and associations of chthonic power and senses that can cling in social memory to volcanic materials. This serves as a query for why an entirely useful material was not in use in the Chiriqui culture area that spans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisa Lazzari. Marina Sprovieri.

The south-central Andes have a very rich record of long-distance circulation of things, animals, and people, the origins of which can be traced to the earliest hunting-gathering societies that occupied the territory ca 9600BP. We summarize the available information on obsidian circulation resulting from nearly three decades of research in the area, with a particular focus on the Calchaquí valleys area of north western Argentina (NWA) from early sedentary settlements until the Inca...