Evaluating Material-Specific Responses to Heat Treatment in the Santa Barbara Channel Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We evaluate the process by which archaeologists have interpreted heat treatment of lithic raw materials in the Santa Barbara Channel region and present comparative examples of materials to work toward refinement of our understanding of production processes. Relatively little systematic work has been done, even though regional lithic materials are well-suited to improvement via heat-treatment. Current regional approaches to evaluating the use of heat to prepare raw materials for tool production rely on visual identification of heat damage and untested assumptions about the response of various material types to high temperatures. We selected a representative sample of non-archaeological raw materials from sources throughout the region often recovered in archaeological assemblages, from relatively high-quality cherts to silica-rich shales. We subjected the samples to both slow and fast heating to campfire temperatures to assess the local material factors that may have impacted heat treatment techniques. After treatment we evaluated each sample’s appearance by eye test, low-power, and high-power microscopy. On this basis we review the accuracy of field identifications and provide a comparison for understanding how archaeological examples of these materials do or do not reflect the production processes to which they were subjected.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24913