Sourcing South African Silcretes Using Minimally Destructive LA-ICP-MS

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and whether people from different sites were accessing the same raw materials but can be challenging in heterogeneous materials. We used LA-ICP-MS to characterize the geochemical composition of silcrete samples taken from multiple outcrops in South Africa to address questions of raw material source access for silcrete for late Pleistocene sites in the southern Cape. Silcrete, a terrestrial sedimentary rock, is rare along the southern coast of South Africa and becomes more common inland at higher elevations. The discrete outcrops of silcrete and its relatively low frequency on the landscape provides an opportunity for geochemical proveniencing. Our results from this pilot study assess the suitability of LA-ICP-MS for proveniencing silcrete. This technique is micro-destructive which is important for applying this method to museum collections. Future research will include analyzing silcrete artifacts from Nelson Bay Cave, South Africa to determine how many different silcrete sources people occupying the site were accessing.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51207