Toolstone Papers in Honor of the Careers of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)
This session honors the careers of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones and the important contributions they have made to lithic studies. The session combines papers by former students, colleagues, and a discussion of their careers to address Beck and Jones’s impact on lithic analysis, particularly the study of lithic procurement, mobility patterns, geochemistry, reduction sequences, and technological organizational and evolutionary approaches to archaeology. While Beck and Jones’s work predominately focused on the Great Basin, their influence has reached beyond this geographic area, due to the transferable nature and broad applicability of their approaches to archaeology. They have had broad methodological and theoretical impacts on the field of archaeology, which session participants will address through discussions of research in a variety of geographic regions, temporal contexts, and to address a wide variety of thematic issues. These papers highlight the important contributions Beck and Jones have made to archaeology throughout their careers.
Other Keywords
Lithics •
Lithic Analysis •
Burned Bone •
Lithic Procurement •
Geophysics •
Exchange •
Use-Wear Analysis •
Lithic Material •
Forensic Archaeology •
Geochemistry
Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) •
United States of America (Country) •
USA (Country) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Utah (State / Territory) •
Nevada (State / Territory) •
California (State / Territory) •
North America - Great Basin •
Yukon Territory (State / Territory) •
Alberta (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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Beyond the Basin: Forensic Archaeology in Tennessee (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
As professors at Hamilton College, G. Tom Jones and Charlotte Beck taught their students how to engage in research and how to be effective instructors in the classroom. I have used these lessons to build a career in forensic anthropology. My long-term research at the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee has centered on establishing techniques to best examine burned bones and also on the application of geophysical methods to locate clandestine graves. This research has led...
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Early Holocene Leporid Processing at the LSP-1 Rockshelter, Oregon (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Human occupation of the Little Steamboat Point-1 (LSP-1) rockshelter in southcentral Oregon began ~9,600 cal BP. Artifacts recovered from the pre-Mazama deposits include a faunal assemblage comprised primarily of leporid remains and a lithic assemblage dominated by informal flake tools. I designed and conducted an experiment using replicated obsidian flake tools to identify leporid processing strategies employed by Early Holocene occupants. I performed hide, carcass, and meat processing tasks...
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Lithic Landscapes and Mobility from the Great Basin to the Salish Sea (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Beck and Jones’ approach to settlement patterns is useful beyond the small highly mobile groups of the Great Basin Paleoarchaic because they expertly model how to connect lithic artifacts with the lithic landscape: first, conduct a thorough investigation of toolstone sources; second, consider how people brought toolstone to sites and how that might be reflected in the reduction sequence; and third, examine the representation of the reduction sequence at many sites across the landscape. I have...
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Lithic Material Use in the Upper Yadkin River Valley and Its Implications for Southeastern Late Woodland Exchange Networks (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Mississippian and Piedmont Village Tradition (PVT) communities contemporaneously occupied the North Carolina and Virginia Piedmont and adjacent areas from AD 1100-1600. Discussions of trade and exchange, however, tend to focus on Mississippian political economies. Previous work at PVT sites has identified non-local lithic materials, some moving between Mississippian and PVT areas, suggesting a regional network that included both cultures. Our work focuses on the fourteenth-century Redtail site...
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Paleoindian Lithic Conveyance and Land-Use in the Northwestern Great Basin: A Summary of the Current Evidence (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
For more than a decade, the University of Nevada, Reno has conducted archaeological survey in the northwestern Great Basin, searching for Paleoindian sites under the auspices of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit (formerly the Sundance Archaeological Research Fund). Our work has identified a rich record of early occupation in southeastern Oregon and northwestern Nevada. Additionally, we have reanalyzed existing collections of Paleoindian artifacts from Last Supper Cave and Hanging...
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Patterns in the Transport of Tosawihi Chert to the Little Boulder Basin, Northern Nevada (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The Tosawihi chert quarries of northern Nevada have played a significant role in the development of hypotheses by Great Basin archaeologists about pre-contact procurement and transport of lithic raw materials. Here, such hypotheses are tested using data obtained from ongoing investigations in the nearby Little Boulder Basin. These investigations have resulted in the analysis of chipped stone assemblages from dozens of site loci, which consist primarily of Tosawihi chert and many of which can be...
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Prehistoric Mobility Patterns and Geochemistry of FGV Toolstones at Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village and the Upper Columbia River Area (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The work of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones dramatically advanced toolstone provenance studies from how to conduct field survey, to how to prepare samples for laboratory analysis. Building on their pioneering work, this paper details the beginning of our efforts in sourcing fine-grained volcanic (FGV) toolstones in the Upper Columbia River area of the interior Pacific Northwest. Handheld portable x-ray fluorescence (HHpXRF) instrumentation was used to non-destructively analyze the FGV...
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Social Function, Semiotic Meaning & Community Identity or Sometimes a Pot is not just a Pot (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The spread of ‘Palace Ware’, an 8th–7th century BCE drabware, across the Neo-Assyrian imperial landscape coincides with the annexation of territory and establishment of vassal states and buffer zones throughout the ancient Near East. Consequently, Palace Ware has been considered ‘imperial’ material culture and equated with imperial identity. This unilateral, top-down interpretation reduces material expression of complex interregional, intercultural interaction into either imposition or...
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Technological Organization Approaches to Lithic Analysis: Case Studies from the Late Classic Maya and Magdalenian Spain (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Technological organization approaches to studying lithic technology provide a framework through which to view relationships between people and their technology. Such approaches help us address a wide variety of subjects including mobility, access to raw materials, risk, and time and energy costs. We will address the impact of Beck and Jones’ research on organizational approaches to lithic technology, in particular on the study of mobility and resource acquisition using two case studies: Late...
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Using Sourcing Studies to Examine Paleoindian Lithic Technological and Socioeconomic Organization in the Great Basin (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In many regions of the world, archaeologists use sourcing studies to document patterns of toolstone procurement and conveyance that, in turn, inform their understanding of prehistoric lithic technological and socioeconomic organization. This is certainly true of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones’s research in eastern Nevada, where the sourcing of obsidian, andesite, and dacite artifacts has figured prominently in their study of Paleoindian lifeways. In this paper, I briefly reflect on Beck and...