Establishing Lithic Site Profiles for Joshua Tree National Park

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations in Joshua Tree National Park, a history of arbitrary and inconsistent nomenclature for lithic materials has precluded any sort of landscape-level assemblage comparisons. To address this, I have assembled a dense catalog of all visually-distinct lithic raw materials and their relative frequencies at a variety of sites across the northwestern portion of the park. I propose that this reference will enable the systematic recordation of lithic assemblages in the future and eventually allow for the evaluation of these assemblages as part of a cultural continuum, rather than as isolated sites. Even the preliminary findings of my fieldwork are already highlighting sites with anomalous raw materials or ratios of materials, suggesting that these methods may aid park management in identifying sites with greater data potential or elevated management sensitivities

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39691.0