Obsidian Sourcing at the Tom Holcomb Site

Summary

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

Natural resource procurement has long served as a proxy by which archaeologists have sought to understand how prehistoric peoples utilized their landscapes. This project presents obsidian source and procurement data as a component of land use and mobility pattern research in the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico during the Late Archaic period by comparing obsidian source frequencies from the Tom Holcomb site (LA162023) in the Bootheel region of New Mexico to those of a previously analyzed assemblage from Cerro Juanaqueña (INAH Chih 366) in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. The Tom Holcomb site is located 80 km northwest of Cerro Juanaqueña and is postulated to be a hunter-gatherer base camp utilized between 930 BC and 225 AD. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the occupants of the Tom Holcomb site practiced agriculture. Cerro Juanaqueña is a major settlement that made substantial use of maize agriculture and was heavily occupied between 1300 BC and 1100 BC. The primary goals of this research are to identify and compare obsidian source frequencies at the Tom Holcomb site and Cerro Juanaqueña and to analyze these data within the context of mobility and land use patterns in the Southwest during the Late Archaic period.

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): 53871