Tracking Types of Stone

Tracking Types of Stone: XRF In Chapter 4, you read that “…the ability of good stone for knapping was an important consideration, one that caused Archaic peoples to keep quarries in mind as they moved from one harvesting location to another though the course of their seasonal movements (Daniel 2011)” (p.79). This feature can allow us to track the movement of populations or the evolution of trading networks through time by sourcing stone and other items (determining the location from which it came). One increasingly common technique used by archaeologists is X-ray fluorescence or XRF for short. This short video and webpage both explain the basic concept of XRF: Aspects of Archaeology: Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Aspects of Archaeology: Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence and http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/geochemsheets/techniques/XRF.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Handheld XRF units are now available, which makes determining the mineral composition of the an item quick and relatively easy. Of course, in order to match an item to a source, we must also have composition data from the possible sources. For example, if we want to track the trading of obsidian in Mesoamerica, we must have data on the various minerals found in each of the obsidian sources in the region, as well as the same data for each of the objects we are looking at. Large-scale studies and databases of such information are currently being compiled for certain regions of the world. Despite its limitations, XRF is becoming an increasingly important technology in our archaeological toolkit. What other information about a population do you think that we could obtain using XRF data?