The State of Andean Obsidian Artifact Provenance: A Social Network Analysis (SNA)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Obsidian was both a common domestic good and a highly sought-after exotic material imbued with ideological significance in the past. In the south-central Andes of Peru and Bolivia, obsidian procurement and distribution greatly expanded during the Middle Horizon (CE 600–1000), contemporaneous with the expansionary states of Wari and Tiwanaku. This paper reviews the contribution of the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility (EAF) in the study of Andean obsidian provenance over the last two decades. Using pXRF and LA-ICP-MS, the EAF has generated hundreds of new data points on the movement of obsidian across disparate geographic zones and social boundaries. Here, Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used as an exploratory tool to investigate broad-scale patterning of obsidian procurement and distribution. Results are explored in relation to the social role of obsidian within the political and ritual economies of expansionary states and bottom-up exchange networks that linked disparate regions at this time. Trends within the obsidian “big data” are further analyzed considering geographic proximity to obsidian sources and GIS-modeled mobility routes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39251.0