Looking through the Glass: How Large-Scale XRF Obsidian Sourcing Has Expanded Our View of Late Pre-Hispanic Regional Networks in the U.S. Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past three decades, the Geoarchaeological XRF Lab, founded and directed by Steve Shackley, has defined and established unique chemical fingerprints for nearly all of the obsidian sources used by Native Americans in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest. Sources and sub-source localities can be reliably identified using XRF spectroscopy, a precise and replicable analytical technique when properly utilized and standardized. XRF analysis is inexpensive allowing the sourcing of large sample sizes, especially considering Steve’s well-known generosity in reducing rates for underfunded archaeologists. This paper highlights one important contribution of Steve’s research: obsidian procurement and exchange during the late pre-Hispanic period (1300-1450 CE), when there was a dramatic increase in the use of this raw material. Over 10,000 obsidian artifacts from nearly 200 settlements dating to this interval have been sourced allowing us to reconstruct socioeconomic networks at a regional scale. We compare terrain-adjusted "catchment zones" for each widely used source with the dominant source utilized by each settlement from which we have data. This analysis allows for easy visualization of conformity and deviation from closest source use expectations. Catchment zones for underutilized sources are then removed for larger regional comparisons of primary use sources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23746