The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In 2004, the Field Museum (FM) established the Elemental Analysis Facility (EAF), dedicated to studying ancient materials to advance the research on trade and exchange of archaeologists working at this institution and to collaborate with scholars around the country and beyond. The EAF housed minimally destructive and completely non-destructive analytical techniques, including laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF). These instruments are used to investigate FM objects and other artifacts that are part of research conducted by a variety of collaborating institutions. Several avenues of research have been developed over the years, including the circulation of obsidian in Mesoamerica and South America, the provenance of various stones of cultural importance, the exchange of ceramics in Peru, and the trade of glass beads in different parts of the world. During the life of the EAF, large databases have been built, offering comparative data that could be used to address complex questions related to ancient societies. The presentations in this session will present different projects conducted with the help of the EAF.
Other Keywords
Trade and exchange •
Archaeometry & Materials Analysis •
Archaeometry & Materials Analysis: Glass Analysis •
Craft Production •
network analysis •
Iron Age •
Andes: Middle Horizon •
Aztec •
Trade •
Material Culture
Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) •
Republic of Peru (Country) •
Republic of Panama (Country) •
Republic of Colombia (Country) •
Netherlands Antilles (Country) •
Aruba (Country) •
Republic of Ecuador (Country) •
Republic of Chile (Country) •
South America (Continent) •
South America: Andes
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)
- Documents (14)
-
Applying Glass Bead Chemistry to Examine Wendat Village Intrasite Organization (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Glass bead compositions and typologies from late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Wendat villages in Ontario have been used to examine chronological differences and regional exchange networks; these artifacts may also be useful for investigating patterns of interaction and...
-
Carnelian Beads from the Site of Kish, Iraq: Differentiating Indus and Non-Indus Carnelian Beads Using Technological, Morphological, and Chemical Analysis (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Carnelian beads from the site of Kish, Iraq, include a wide range of bead types, including locally produced short cylindrical beads and long biconical beads that are thought to have been produced in the Indus region of South Asia. Beads from different excavation contexts can...
-
Establishing the Elemental Analysis Facility: Reflections on 20 Years of Research (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum has advanced research projects in archaeological chemistry to study research on trade and exchange, examine craft production, and assess the nature of archaeological...
-
Folsom Hunter-Gatherers May Have Ignored Local Raw Material Sources (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The Adair-Steadman Folsom site (41FS2) functioned as a lithic workshop and campsite between 10,800 and 10,300 RCYBP and is situated ~5 km away from an Edwards chert quarry (41FS12) in the Southern Plains. This research aims to determine potential sources of Edwards chert...
-
From Mesopotamia to Taiwan: Early Plant Ash Glass in the South China Sea (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Plant ash glass was common around the South China Sea from the eighth century CE onward. While this “late” plant ash glass was mostly found in the form of vessel fragments of Islamic origin, “early” plant ash glass appeared before the mid-first millennium CE, predominantly in...
-
A New Paradigm for South Asian Glasses: Mineral Soda Alumina Revisited (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum has been at the forefront of global research into distinctive South Asian glasses, technically termed “Mineral Soda Alumina” glasses. In celebration of 20 years of field-defining research, this paper presents the results of a...
-
New Perspectives on Precolonial Trade in Eastern Africa (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Discrepancies are emerging between historical and archaeological perspectives on the nature, scale, and chronology of precolonial and caravan exchange networks in the eastern African interior. For example, the caravan trade is thought to have emerged as coastal interests...
-
Palace Pottery Production on Cerro Baúl: The Particularity of Paste Recipes (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Decorated ceramic vessels carried meaningful symbols and were an important element of the Wari Empire's political economy. Wari, a powerful early Andean state, expanded sometime near the middle of the first millennium and pioneered institutions that were refined and deployed...
-
Return to Aztlan: Aztec Pachuca Green Obsidian in Maya Sites at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Archaeology at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, recovered large amounts of green obsidian from mines at Pachuca, Hidalgo, which were managed by Mexica-Aztecs in Late Postclassic times (ca. 1300–1520 CE). Excavations in coeval Maya habitation sites at Mensabak recovered obsidian...
-
Seventeenth-Century Clay Industries at ca. 1670 Charles Towne, Charleston, South Carolina (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The restoration of Charles II to the English throne created a flourishment of economic growth, philosophical change, and a new focus on scientific experimentation in the English empire. The Carolina colony was founded in 1670 with the intent to create an ordered and profitable...
-
The State of Andean Obsidian Artifact Provenance: A Social Network Analysis (SNA) (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Obsidian was both a common domestic good and a highly sought-after exotic material imbued with ideological significance in the past. In the south-central Andes of Peru and Bolivia, obsidian procurement and distribution greatly expanded during the Middle Horizon (CE 600–1000),...
-
A Trading Post or Craftspeople’s Village? A Ceramic Perspective of the Blihun Hanben Site in Eastern Taiwan (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The Blihun Hanben (BHB) site in ancient Taiwan, dated between 2,000 and 1,200 years ago, contained a wide range of remains that indicate an iron crafting settlement. The excavation yielded over 9,000 kg of ceramics from two cultural layers, indicating a prolonged period of...
-
Twenty Years of Mesoamerican Obsidian Research at the EAF (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
Two Decades (Almost) of Regional Clay Surveys by the EAF: Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. An early and ongoing goal of the EAF was to not only generate compositional data on archaeological artifacts but also to build comprehensive collections and elemental databases of natural materials that had potentially been used to manufacture craft objects. To date, EAF...