Trade and Exchange of Obsidian from Historic Ritual Sites in Southwest Ethiopia

Summary

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

Nearly 400 obsidian artifacts from a dozen sites in southwestern Ethiopia were analyzed to address source selection for ritual activities. This involved the Gamo ethnic group at historic sites dating to the seventeenth– nineteenth centuries, where men are hide-workers of all materials. Another site, the Mota Cave, dates back to 4500 BP and provides a comparative case prior to the development of caste groups. Overall, the results for these ritual contexts are compared with our earlier study of more than 300 obsidian artifacts from residential contexts at sites in the same region. These analyses were conducted within the National Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, using a nondestructive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, the Bruker Tracer 5g. The instrument used provides calibrated data specifically for obsidian, for elements including Fe, Rb, Sr, Y, Zr, and Nb. These results are comparable with other sourcing studies, which use a variety of analytical methods. The distance between these sites and geological obsidian sources such as Baantu suggests there may have been trade with other historic ethnic groups, rather than direct access over such long distances. Our scientific analyses of obsidian artifacts thus provides important information about the socioeconomic practices of the caste system in Ethiopia.

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): 53924