Getting It Right for the Wrong Reasons: Using ED-XRF to Characterize Red Munsungun Chert

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Artifacts made of high-quality red chert appear regularly in terminal Pleistocene fluted point period sites throughout New England. Although archaeologists in the region often attribute this material to the Munsungun Lake geologic formation of northern Maine, no large-scale effort had been made to evaluate these visual identifications through geochemical techniques. To address this situation in 2013 I employed a laboratory-based ED-XRF instrument to analyze over 200 artifacts from 24 fluted point sites located throughout New England. These analyses indicated that virtually all red chert artifacts in this analytical assemblage arose from one or two closely related, but as yet unidentified, outcrops. Subsequent geoarchaeological prospection and analyses have supported the results of the original study. While the findings of the original study appear sound, I believe these positive results came not from rigorous sampling design and thoughtful selection of analytical methods but rather from the specific geologic characteristics of Munsungun Lake “chert.” In this presentation I will discuss why Munsungun chert proved amenable to sourcing via ED-XRF to illustrate how geology came to the rescue of my original study and how, in this case, my research design was more lucky than good.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32277