Experimental Approaches to Understanding Variability in Fire-Modified Rock Fracture Patterns

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have frequently conducted rock firing experiments to better understand different fracture patterns in fire-modified rock (FMR). These experiments have had varying degrees of control and their results have been difficult to interpret. This paper considers why this is the case and suggests that rock fracture involves the interaction of too many variables to achieve unambiguous results without better experimental controls. Results of a series of experiments using a ceramic kiln to specifically examine how different cooling rates produce different FMR fracture patterns are discussed. These results provide an analytical framework for interpretation of fracture patterns in a series of FMR assemblages from multiple, functionally diverse Pacific Northwest archaeological sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36362.0