Analyzing Ancient Ground Stone Tool with a Modern Toolkit: A Summer Lab Project

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing the Past: Studying Ancient Ground Stone Toolkits Using Modern Technology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The discovery and archaeological excavation of the Hell Gap National Historic Landmark, north of Guernsey, Wyoming provided archaeologists with a breadth of knowledge of North American cultures, ranging from Folsom to Archaic. One set of artifacts recovered from the site is an ancient ground stone tool kit which has been curated at the University of Wyoming (UW) in the Hell Gap Lab under the oversight of Dr. Marcel Kornfeld. The tool kit is on loan to Dr. Elizabeth Lynch and Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) as a teaching collection. Our hybrid in person and remote team of graduate, undergraduate, and recently graduated students has begun to utilize modern methodologies of photogrammetry, microscopy, and 3D modeling to examine these tools. The goal of this research is to create and maintain a sustainable data set to be stored in the digital archives at the Hell Gap lab to be available for further residue analysis. This paper describes the experience of the overall lab project challenges and successes and presents additional questions for consideration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Digitizing the Past: Studying Ancient Ground Stone Toolkits Using Modern Technology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51576