Isotopes & Curation: New Lessons Learned from Legacy Waterlogged Wooden Artifacts

Summary

A pilot study was conducted to test the feasibility of applying strontium isotope analysis to source the

origins of archaeological "canoe trees" tested to make pre-contact dugout canoes spanning some

5000 years. Many canoes collected decades ago from Florida’s lakes produced unexpected signatures.

These results raised further questions about the methods' feasibility and the impact of past preservation

approaches to the curation of waterlogged wooden artifacts. The anatomical nature of wood cells from

legacy samples along with modern proxies was analyzed and experiments indicate the highly hygroscopic

nature of wooden log boats/dugouts/canoe trees. New considerations regarding these "wooden sponges"

and the potential preservation/conservation for these unique waterlogged remains and the isotopic

research will be the focus of this presentation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22723