White Hot Polymorphs of Quartz Minerals in Archaeological and Experimental Heating Contexts

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.

The potential range of behaviors represented in heating stone assemblages is enormous. This paper is an attempt to identify targets for hot rock sampling and analyses that can develop our understanding of ancient global technologies in a day-to-day context. Hot rocks are ubiquitous in archaeological assemblages, yet the implications of hot rocks gleaned through counts and weights are unsatisfactory. Furthermore, focusing on hot rocks in a single feature context ignores larger-scale human choices in maintaining and maximizing an ongoing necessity for daily living. Microscopic analyses of quartz minerals in hot rocks can help archaeologists determine function as far as heating capacity. Selection of materials and potential activities can then be interpolated through sampling hot rocks to determine a material type’s ability to perform desired heating tasks.

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): 35929.0