A Change of Hearth: Stages of Production in Hot-Rock Technology at a Late Woodland Rockshelter

Summary

This paper applies the chaîne opératoire analytical framework to hearth maintenance behavior. There are distinct phases of production involved in creating and maintaining a hearth, as new hearthstones are introduced, exhausted, and discarded. These stages may be identified through spatial distribution of new and exhausted hearthstones. The authors argue that these stages may also be identified geochemically. We use pXRF to compare a series of experimental burnings to those from a hearth feature from the Late Woodland component of a multicomponent rockshelter. Group membership analysis had some success in distinguishing between stages of burning. When combined with spatial analysis, the distribution of new and exhausted rocks supported our hypothesis that the northern periphery of the hearth was disturbed by a previous excavation and distributed in its backdirt atop the original hearth feature.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20400