Measuring Past Networks of Cultural Transmission: The Haskett Projectile Point

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher’s ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time. This report utilizes spatial analysis software to measure the 3D morphometric variability between two samples of Haskett projectile points, one from the Haskett Locality in Idaho and one from the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah, in order to establish a range of 3D geometric morphometric (GM) variation, and deduce whether or not Far Western precontact peoples during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition shared a network of cultural transmission. Although this analysis found differences in blade curvature and bounding box measurements, a Procrustes analysis revealed significant internal 3D morphology. This similarity in 3D GM, along with evidence of obsidian sourcing from American Falls, Idaho, in the Old River Bed Delta in Utah, supports the interpretation that precontact peoples in these areas shared a network of cultural transmission.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology from Western North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36009.0