Characterization of Coastal Plain Cherts from Florida and Georgia using Petrography and ICP-MS: A Multimethod Approach for Ascribing Provenance to Stone Tools from Florida’s Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Methods and Applications to Chert Sourcing: Case Studies from Across the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological research on the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States has yielded a rich assemblage of stone tools produced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers, but little research has been undertaken to quantitatively define and describe the variable stone resources from which these tools were made. Past efforts to characterize cherts in Florida have been largely microscopically and macroscopically descriptive, focusing on the microfossil inclusions and petrographic features of a small number of sampled quarry sites. This paper presents the results of a multimethod approach to the characterization of cherts and silicified corals from northern Florida and southern Georgia using petrography, solution introduction inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), and laser ablation ICP-MS (LA-ICP-MS) on a chert comparative assemblage of over 1,200 samples from more than 100 discrete sources. These data are then compared to Clovis, Suwannee, and Bolen projectile points to infer past mobility patterns in late Pleistocene and early Holocene Florida. A multimethod approach is recommended for characterizing cherts and chert artifacts from the Coastal Plain of the lower Southeast, with an initial focus on identifying the parent formation of the cherts followed by more intensive petrographic and geochemical analyses to arrive at discrete provenance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Current Methods and Applications to Chert Sourcing: Case Studies from Across the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52227