A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Instrumental Techniques at Differentiating Outcrops of Edwards Plateau Chert at the Hyper-Local Scale

Summary

Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) has become a common tool in compositional studies of archaeological materials due to its quick analytical time and ever-increasing capability with new models and technology. Additionally, pXRF is also beginning to see widespread use for sourcing archaeological materials. This study compares pXRF with two other widely accepted analytical techniques, Laser Ablation – Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Instrument Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA). These techniques are compared and contrasted in order to determine the accuracy and precision of using pXRF to determine the composition of Edwards Plateau chert. As a case study, three unique chert outcrops only several hundred meters apart (hyper-local) at the Gault site (41BL323) in central Texas are tested with each of the techniques. The qualitative/quantitative differences of each instrumental technique on Edwards Plateau chert is assessed using the geochemical data retrieved. The geochemical data is evaluated with multivariate statistics in order to determine which instrumental technique is most effective at distinguishing between these three unique Edwards Plateau chert outcrops. This study also seeks to determine if any of the instrumental techniques can effectively separate out geochemical differences of Edwards Plateau chert outcrops at the hyper-local scale.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Case Studies in Chert Sourcing and Identification   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage