Obsidian Sourcing and Interaction Networks in the Tanzanian Pastoral Neolithic

Summary

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

Understanding mobility, interaction, and exchange is fundamental to reconstructing social dynamics during the early spread of food production throughout eastern Africa. Geochemical sourcing of obsidian artifacts provides one mechanism for exploring relationships among mobile pastoralists and between these groups and foragers and how those relationships changed over time. Previous studies have largely been limited to the Turkana Basin and Central Rift Valley of Kenya; in Tanzania, preliminary research has suggested that pastoralists obtained obsidian through long-distance exchange networks originating near Lake Naivasha. Here, we present a significantly expanded Tanzanian dataset, integrating multi-method obsidian geochemical characterization data from four labs on >70 artifacts from 12 Late Stone Age and Pastoral Neolithic sites throughout the northern Tanzanian Rift Valley. We analyze the variable exploitation of more and less distant obsidian sources, exploring the varying intensity and character of interaction within and between groups over time in this region.

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): 53325