Doctoral Dissertation Research: Lithic Raw Material Procurement and Distribution

The differential development of economic systems between societies and the effect access to resources, distribution of goods, and subsequent wealth and power has on social systems are important discussions facing archaeology and the contemporary world. Throughout human history, the distribution and access to environmental resources has been an important stimulus for the development of different forms of economic systems, political institutions, and regional interaction.

This doctoral dissertation project builds on and contributes to such discussions by developing a strategy for understanding the procurement and distribution of a key economic resource. The project develops a multimethod and reproducible approach for lithic sourcing to elucidate variations in procurement, production, and distribution of lithics through diverse economic networks.

Being one of the most accessible and widely used lithic resources, chert products serve to provide a deeper understanding of the political and economic systems among all sectors of society. The methodological developments that this project provides opens the door to a wealth of new research projects involving lithic economies. This project produces a large and detailed computerized database of open-source geochemical and petrographic data.

The project examines the application of petrographic, geochemical, and computational methods to chert sourcing with the goal of creating a methodology for identifying and distinguishing between individual raw material sources. The ability to determine where lithic material was being procured and what exchange spheres they were operating within is one of the most fundamental and productive paths for studying the organization of prehistoric economy.

Provenance studies involving chert have largely been underutilized due to methodological challenges associated with sourcing siliceous material. The research combines micropaleontological, petrographic and Laser-Ablation Inductively-Coupled-Plasma Mass-Spectrometry data with Social Network Analysis to determine procurement and distribution patterns of chert resources.

Through geological survey and laboratory analysis, this project builds a reference collection of primary and secondary raw material potentially utilized and explore the integration of chert materials into discussions on community-based production, local exchange and social and economic divisions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.