GIS-Based Approaches to Obsidian Studies in Eastern Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Studies of obsidian transport during the Late Pleistocene of eastern Africa have been largely productive for reconstructing raw material procurement patterns and movement across landscapes. Due to a limited sample, however, these studies are often descriptive of particular sites and related explicitly to material provenance and transport distance, and little is known about the factors influencing procurement decisions. Archaeological and experimental studies from other contexts indicate that obsidians may have been preferentially selected for quality and/or symbolic properties. To study these relationships, quantitative geospatial methods have become common practice in other regions of the world but have yet to be fully utilized in eastern Africa. Using quantitative geospatial methods in conjunction with obsidian provenance data in later Middle and Late Pleistocene archaeological sites, we seek to answer questions such as the following: how do least-cost pathway distances generated in a GIS compare to commonly used straight-line distances? Preliminary results suggest some archaeological occurrences of obsidian movement over 50 km cannot be explained by proximity to source alone. The methods and results presented here are needed to build testable models to study obsidian selection preferences and landscape use in Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37348.0