Chipped Stone and Hot Rock Technology: A Late Archaic Example from the Upper Great Lakes

Summary

This study combines a detailed analysis of hot rock and chipped stone technologies in order to investigate behaviors related to subsistence and settlement strategies, domestic life, and knapping activities. This paper contributes to the research of Late Archaic lithic technology on Grand Island in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP). There, fire-cracked rocks (FCR) dominate the archaeological assemblage, yet relatively little is known of the roles that they played in the lives of the island's ancient inhabitants. This comprehensive analysis of over 40,000 lithics from six sites on the island will more than double the current number of c. 34,000 lithics analyzed in the entire UP from dated Late Archaic habitation and raw material extraction sites. The goal of the study is to contribute to a new appreciation of FCR beyond current approaches that are often limited to basic quantification or presence/absence reporting. With such massive quantities of the material available for analysis at many hunter-gatherer sites, the recontextualization of FCR may lead scholars to a better understanding of the ancient diets and the behaviors associated with food production and site formation processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage