Traditional Knowledge and Lithic Resources

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dean Arnold.

Up until the tourist market and piped water forever changed the practice of making pottery in Ticul, potters’ raw materials came from sources in a unique socially-perceived and spatially-restricted landscape that served them well for at least a thousand years. Revealed by ethnographic research, potters’ traditional knowledge and utilization of these sources indicated that the unique sources of potters’ clay, palygorskite, and pottery temper were ancient and dated to the Terminal Classic Period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey.

In the Mid-Atlantic, steatite outcrops within the eastern talc belt, which runs from Alabama, through New England to Labrador. It is a porous, carvable stone with a mineralogical and chemical makeup that inhibits soil formation, resulting in scrub or barren landscapes that host rare grasses and wildflowers. In their natural state, these would be striking landscape features. While an array of items, such as plummets, bannerstones and pipes, were produced from steatite throughout pre-colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandi Lee MacDonald.

In coastal and interior British Columbia, ochre was a key component of local traditional knowledge among hunter-fisher-gatherer communities. Ochre pigment quarries are found in alpine, lowland, and alluvial geologic deposits, and each are uniquely storied locations that carry ideas about history, tradition, and place. The procurement, trade, and use of ochre from each of those locations is deliberate, and embedded within a complex set of ideas and decision-making. Provenance-based analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamín Ballester. Marcela Sepúlveda. Francisco Gallardo. Gloria Cabello. Estefanía Vidal.

The mineralogical richness of the Atacama Desert allowed for the development of an important set of mining-extracting and metallurgic, lapidaric and pigmental productive activities, which became significant activities in the sociocultural dynamics of desert dwellers. El Cóndor mine, an important hematite source located in the middle section of the Loa River, was exploited from the Formative Period (~A.D. 300) until Inka times (~A.D. 1500). In contrast to other mining sites in Atacama, El Cóndor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Cooney. Jenny Murray. Will Megarry.

In the Shetland islands off the north coast of Scotland there was major exploitation of a lithic source known as riebeckite felsite during the Neolithic period. This source provided the raw material for the majority of stone axes known from the archipelago and also for objects known as Shetland knives. At the source, North Roe, mainland Shetland intrusive dykes of felsite occur in granite. Integrated, multi-scalar survey and excavation by the North Roe Felsite Project has demonstrated that some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevan Edinborough. Peter Schauer. Andrew Bevan. Mike Parker-Pearson. Stephen Shennan.

What factors influenced non-agricultural production in prehistory? This has long been a topic of debate in prehistoric archaeology, because it relates to the question of whether people in prehistoric societies had ‘economic’ motivations and what those might have been. The paper presents the first results of the NEOMINE project, which is analyzing the evidence for stone quarrying and flint-mining and the factors affecting consumption of their products by Neolithic early farming communities in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Burke.

Northeastern North America contains numerous lithic sources that are found in a variety of geologic and geographic settings. These materials vary widely in their knapping quality, color, texture, translucency, and block/cobble size. Access to these sources can also vary greatly, from underwater to the top of mountains. Aboriginal traditional knowledge allowed people in the past to navigate and use these varied sources. I present data from ethnographic and ethnohistoric documents that provide an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne S. Dowd.

Obsidian and other lithic sources in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and nearby Montana or Idaho were used up until contact with Euroamericans and information from oral traditions, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, and toponymy provide data on the significance of certain raw material choices made by Native Americans such as the local Shoshone. Why did chipped stone weapons and tools persist even after new metal technologies were introduced? How did the choices of raw materials signal Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Julig.

Ancient quarry extraction locations on elevated bedrock outcrops continue to be used in the modern era for traditional activities such as constructing bent wooden sweat lodges and wooden shelters for fasting and meditation, which are built and maintained in modern times, over at least several decades. Other special "powerful" locations such as a cave in a Bar River Formation quartzite adjacent bluff are visited and used for spiritual activities by local First Nations members. As part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Kitchel.

Red Munsungun chert from northern Maine has long been recognized as an important lithic raw material during the fluted point period of New England. Building upon this observation, recent lithic sourcing efforts using visual and XRF geochemical techniques, have demonstrated that this material is virtually ubiquitous in fluted point sites from the region. This same study also shows that red Munsungun chert is transported over longer distances than other raw materials commonly used at this time....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Denton.

Traditionally, Waapushukaamikw (‘house of the hare’) was a sacred site for Cree and closely related Northern Algonquian people in subarctic Quebec. Its use as a place of prayer was noted in the early 18th century CE by Jesuit missionaries, and some elements of this tradition have continued to modern times. Waapushukamikw, known by archaeologists as the Colline Blanche, was also an important lithic source in subarctic Quebec, used for some 6,000 years. Artifacts of Mistassini quartzite from this...