Geological Knowledge, CRM, and the Lithic Cultural Landscape of Eastern Oregon

Summary

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

From the impressive buttes and craters where it can be quarried to the shining black flakes speckled across vast sagebrush plains, obsidian and its procurement, use, and discard has defined the human experience of eastern Oregon’s landscape since time immemorial. Cultural resource management (CRM) practitioners must be proactive about documenting the tangible and intangible elements of eastern Oregon’s lithic cultural landscape. This preliminary research draws on published sourcing studies from both academic and “gray” literature to explore how obsidian is embedded within Indigenous social and spatial networks. Because it can be sourced to specific locations on the landscape, obsidian can bind together even distant sites and the people used them through their shared relationship to a particular place. We then consider the role of obsidian sources and associated lithic scatters in constructing an integrated cultural landscape and discuss potential challenges to managing and protecting them from potential impacts within the context of CRM.

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): 40151.0