Sourcing Rapa Nui mata‘a from the collections of Bishop Museum using non-destructive pXRF

Summary

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 obsidians predominanantly from Orito, one of the four geological sources on the island. This study demonstrates how non-destructive analyses of museum collections can contribute to our understanding of obsidian procurement and production on Rapa Nui.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Exotic, Lustrous, and Colorful: Obsidian in Symbol, Society, and Ceremony

Keywords

Spatial Coverage