Broken and Crazed: Quantifying FCR Beyond the Descriptive

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.

Experiments quantifying the thermal curved-fragment (TCF) model (Cutts et al. 2019) unsurprisingly yielded considerable numbers of fire-cracked rocks (FCR; yet not strictly conforming to TCF definitions). Many exhibited characteristics commonly described in FCR—e.g., broken, cracked, crazed, crenated, crenulated, pocked, pot-lidded, discolored, blackened, reddened, whitened—among other descriptive, yet often unquantified, terminology. Pursuant to advancing the archaeology of fire, other notable fragment forms were detailed during TCF experiments, to be analyzed subsequently. Presented here is another potentially quantifiable thermal curvilinear fragment form, consistently displaying “pyramidal” or “caltrop” shape(s). These—dare we suggest—pyromidal forms typically show four points and sides, with two or more sides being concave/curvilinear. While recognizing that experienced archaeologists can often cursorily “determine” FCR in the field, it stands to reason that such “gut” identifications may not be as-yet scientifically quantified; the archaeology of fire is benefited via such reconciliation. Being extremely difficult to produce during stone knapping processes, these caltrop-shaped fragments are not uncommon in FCR assemblages. Like TCFs, these pyromids are created in hot, long-duration, ground-level fires on flakes, points, and debitage manufactured in anthropogenic knapping activities.

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): 36127.0