Current Methods and Applications to Chert Sourcing: Case Studies from Across the Americas

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Current Methods and Applications to Chert Sourcing: Case Studies from Across the Americas" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chert artifacts remain one of the most common raw material types recovered from archaeological excavations and are a core line of evidence when reconstructing past interaction networks and economic systems. Due to the geochemical and petrographic heterogeneity of chert, raw material and artifacts have proven to be significantly more difficult to characterize than other material types. However, methodological and technological developments over the last two decades that focus on a multimethod approach have proven successful in characterizing chert from a number of different geographical areas. Techniques such as Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA), Laser-Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF), Reflectance Spectrometry, and petrographic analysis have all been successfully applied to chert sourcing. This session explores these techniques, applications, and the methodological developments that have been applied to chert sourcing research in recent years through a number of case studies from across the Americas.