Obsidian Provenance Studies of Sites in Northern Utah

Author(s): Jeffrey Ferguson; James Allison

Year: 2015

Summary

Previous studies of obsidian from archaeological sites in Utah Valley and the Salt Lake Valley have used relatively small samples to document temporal shifts in obsidian procurement, with southern sources (especially Black Rock) dominating Fremont assemblages, while most post-Fremont obsidian comes from the Malad source to the north. Our greatly expanded XRF analysis of almost 4,000 obsidian artifacts from sites in Utah and Salt Lake Valleys confirms the temporal change noted by earlier researchers, but also shows site- and source-specific patterns of obsidian use, as well as variation in the frequency of different obsidian sources in tools, debitage, and micro-debitage.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

Cite this Record

Obsidian Provenance Studies of Sites in Northern Utah. Jeffrey Ferguson, James Allison. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397570)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Keywords

General
Obsidian Utah XRF

Geographic Keywords
North America - Great Basin

Spatial Coverage

min long: -122.761; min lat: 29.917 ; max long: -109.27; max lat: 42.553 ;