“I've been havin' some hard travelin'. . .”: Using the “Evolutionary Chain” Concept in a Dynamical Approach of Silicites

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.

Studies about characterization and sourcing of the various siliceous materials (flint, chert, silcrete, and hydrothermal silicite) used by prehistoric foragers became progressively routine. However, simply locating the stratigraphic origin of a rock is insufficient as it may have been collected from varied formations, some being sometimes located very remotely from the primary source. These secondary sources may be characterized using the concept of evolutionary chain in a dynamical, multiscale, and multiproxy process taking in account the mineralogical, chemical, and physical transformations undergone by the raw material, a “memory” that was previously undervalued. A type of raw siliceous is now understood as a population composed of different subtypes that characterize the range of primary and secondary sources from which they originated before they were collected and also integrate their aspects after they were used and discarded by humans. Our analysis method uses three grid-charts (petrography, occurrence, and taphonomy), grouped in a database developed under Microsoft Access and MySQL. This database helps to answer questions about siliceous raw materials definition and description encountered by archaeologists. Thanks to Woody Guthrie, 1964.

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

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32936