A Barrack, a Stone, and Families in Exile: A Case Study of Historic Obsidian Sourcing

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.

The sourcing of lithic raw material often challenges preconceived notions of the relationships between people, places, and objects for time periods prior to written records. But what of historic obsidian? What can sourcing reveal about the more recent past? This paper presents the case study of a most amazing historical mystery involving exile, incarceration, and the healing power of stone. In 2014, archaeologists on the High Plains of Colorado discovered a roughly shaped piece of obsidian in a most unlikely site, a WWII-era Japanese American internment camp, called Amache. XRF analysis by Fryxell winner Steven Shackley suggested the raw material likely derives from Glass Mountain, Siskiyou County, California. Glass Mountain rises above Tule Lake, another of the 10 primary camps where Japanese Americans were confined during of the war. This artifact’s journey to Colorado has sparked the imagination of those beyond the archaeological community. A former internee of a third camp and her grandchildren chose this artifact for inclusion in an exhibit of objects from Amache. In addition to presenting the XRF and archaeological data, this paper also explores how science can be translated into a public conversation about people, places, objects, and our shared, if troubled, past.

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): 23146