Don’t Take it for Granite! Reestablishing the Geochemistry of Granite from the Maya Mountains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ancient Maya exploited three geochemically distinct granite sources from the Maya Mountains for a variety of ground stone tool and construction purposes. Previously, we sampled these sources and provided signature ranges of important elements that differentiate them. Here, we discuss recent field work that targeted the Hummingbird Ridge and Cockscomb Basin granite sources, for which our previous analyses identified some geochemical overlap. Additionally, we analyzed a new assemblage of Mountain Pine Ridge granite with accurate geolocations. This better constrained dataset has refined our understanding of granite source regions. In the presentation, we describe our field and lab methodology, which utilizes handheld x-ray fluorescence (XRF), and then we discuss two key findings. First, that the results are repeatable across units, underscoring the translatability of this kind of work for granite in other locations. Second, we then explore nuances identified between granite regions, and the meaning of higher rates of variation detected between the old and new sample sets and within source spheres.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52689