Characterizing Red Chert from the Munsungun Lake and Normanskill Formations: Tool Stone Acquisition and Transport during the Fluted-Point-Period in Northeastern North America

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.

In northeastern North America (New England, southern Quebec, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces) red and mottled red and green chert from the Munsungun Lake formation northern Maine is associated with fluted-point-period occupations in the region. Various characterization methods including visual (macro and microscopic) inspection, X-Ray Diffraction, and X-Ray Fluorescence have supported this inference. These efforts were hindered however, by a lack of a known quarry location for mottled red and green chert outcrops within the Munsungun Lake formation. The identification of one such quarry in 2016 presented an opportunity to address this shortfall and better understand the internal visual and geochemical variability of this material though by some to be unique in the region. While these analyses are ongoing the (re)identification of red chert outcrops exhibiting evidence of quarrying activities within the Normanskill formation of eastern New York complicated conclusions drawn from the Munsungun Lake formation alone. Here we report the results of ongoing work to characterize visually similar red and mottled red and green cherts from both the Munsungun Lake and Normanskill formations using Neutron Activation Analysis and the implications of these analyses for understanding tool stone acquisition and transport during the fluted-point-period of the Northeast.

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): 52266