Thriving under the Killick Critical Gaze (KCG): Toward Taphonomically Informed Forensic Sedimentology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists and Indigenous and national governments agree on the need to address the wicked problem of heritage resource crime, but archaeologists have yet to deploy the full range of analytic tools at our disposal to assist in the investigation and prosecution of looting, vandalism, and grave robbing. “Dirt,” properly referenced as sediment, is tied to most archaeological resource crimes yet remains incompletely utilized in assessing links between crime scenes and looters, looting equipment, and looted objects. Our team is pursuing phased, context-sensitive binocular microscopy, trace-element analyses, petrography, and other analytic geoscience techniques. Results from initial applications of these techniques to sediment specimens from violated sites and background contexts on tribal trust (“reservation”) in Arizona are promising. Ever cognizant of the Killick Critical Gaze (KCG), and the Daubert standards courts use to assess scientific evidence, we are able to confirm that forensic sedimentology can provide courts with scientifically reliable, spatially scale-appropriate, taphonomically attuned, and juridically relevant attributions for sediment implicated in heritage resource crimes. Additional research is ongoing to refine divisions of labor and complementarity among analytic techniques, reduce the possibilities that specimens from different locations could produce analytically indistinguishable geochemical profiles, and improve the geographical precision of sediment source attributions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35839.0