The Stone Bridge: Obsidian Circulation and the Friction of Persistent Frontiers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Jose Saramago’s classic "The Stone Raft", the Iberian peninsula breaks free from Europe to float unmoored into the Atlantic, etching into continental geology what David Anthony has termed a "persistent frontier": a fault line demarcating durable cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences. In the archaeology of Southwest Asia, stone has typically been understood, contrarily, as a resource that, as early as the Neolithic, was able to move through and across significant social, cultural, and economic zones with relative ease. Obsidian, in particular, looms large thanks both to Renfrew’s examinations of exchange patterns and to recent chemical characterization studies. What remains less clearly defined are the specific spheres of practice within sites that were linked by this stone bridge. Did all households participate in the same material flows or is there evidence of differential participation? Did some institutions nurture some network pathways over others? This paper will present the preliminary results of a pXRF geochemical characterization study of obsidians from residential, mortuary, and divinatory contexts at the Early and Late Bronze Age site of Gegharot in northwestern Armenia in order to assess stability and change in one site’s link to the stone bridge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23556