Changes in production and distribution patterns of olivine-tempered ceramics in the Arizona Strip and adjacent areas

Summary

Artifact assemblages from the Arizona Strip and adjacent area are characterized by widely distributed ceramics tempered with olivine, a volcanic mineral. Sources of olivine lie in the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep, near the northwestern part of the Grand Canyon. The olivine-tempered ceramics were distributed mostly westward from Mt. Trumbull, up to 100 km to the lowland Virgin area in southern Nevada between A.D. 200 and 1350. Ultimately, the goal of this study is to understand why ceramic production and circulation patterns changed during the Ancestral Pueblo occupation of this marginal environmental area. To investigate this issue, fine grained study of change in ceramic production and distribution patterns, by controlling time and space without ambiguous assumptions is necessary. The use of 14C, however, is not the ideal option in this study, since the many sites in Mt. Trumbull were occupied by multiple generations with very limited 14C dates, in addition to ambiguity of applying 14C dating to the ceramics. Thus, in this study, compositional analysis using LA-ICP-MS was combined with optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. This paper will discuss how the use of clay resources changed over time based on the OSL dates of 113 ceramics with compositional data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Recent Applications of Luminescence Dating in Archaeology

Keywords

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