Indian Creek Revisited: The Use of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) Soil Analysis to Characterize Areas Without Artifacts

Summary

This paper reports on a preliminary study assessing the applicability for pXRF analysis of soils within a Pre-Columbian context. The data generated for this discussion comes from the site of Indian Creek, Antigua; an Amerindian site bound by a series of middens forming a concentric ring around the perimeter of the site. This settlement is the result of over 1300 years of continuous occupation, before it was abandoned just prior to contact in the New World. Aside from the excavations conducted by Irving Rouse along the outer middens, little research studying this ‘bounded’ space has been conducted in part due to the lack of artifacts in these areas. During the summer of 2012-2013 archaeological soils and samples were taken from this space and were characterized using multi-element soil pattern analysis. These findings were then compared to the archaeological record generating new datasets and discussions regarding the nature of human behavior and the soils capacity to characterize them.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Photons in the Field: New Approaches to the Use of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) in Archaeological Fieldwork   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage