Targeting Coastal Plains Chert in the Wacissa Quarry Cluster, Northwest Florida, USA: A LIDAR-Based Geomorphic Model for Locating Chert Quarries

Summary

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

Although archaeological research in northwest Florida has yielded a rich assemblage of stone tools produced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers, little research has been undertaken to quantitatively define and describe the variable chert resources from which these tools were made. This paper presents the framework for a new geomorphic model for locating terrestrial and inundated chert quarries in northwest Florida using terrestrial LIDAR and underwater pedestrian survey. In environments with limited topographic variability, erosional relics of chert formation are easily exploited by LIDAR, and high-definition elevation models can be used to inform field survey strategies both terrestrially and underwater. This model also allows for the implementation of systematic and geographically-representative sampling strategies. The Wacissa chert quarry cluster in northwest Florida has historically been undersampled, presenting an ideal case study for testing the effectiveness of this model in an archaeologically-relevant environment. Regional chert-formation processes will be discussed and compared to their known geomorphic corollaries to determine which LIDAR anomalies warrant survey, and the results of ground-truthing this model will also be discussed. Newly-sampled quarries will be compared to the existing body of local raw-material data to assess the effectiveness of this model for describing chert variability and abundance.

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): 25767