Sourcing Chert Artifacts with pXRF
My geoheritage research program in the Heritage and Museum Sciences Program at the Museum of Texas Tech University involves trying new methods to source chert lithic artifacts more easily, to better understand how geodiversity influenced past hunter-gatherers.
I found an interesting new chapter by Khori Newlander in the 2023 book Sourcing Archeological Lithic Assemblages, called: “The Promise and Challenge of Sourcing Chert Artifacts in the North American Great Basin”
Newlander’s research uses pXRF technology to source chert artifacts in the Great Basin region of the United States.
I was especially interested in these findings of the paper.
“Additionally, visible properties can be used to narrow down the range of potential sources of a chert artifact (Luedtke 1992; Milne et al. 2009)” p.76
Newlander is essentially using the minimum analytical nodule analysis method to make initial groups to help with the pXRF analysis.
“We repeatedly found that simple statistical analyses of these chemical data allowed us to effectively discriminate sources of macroscopically similar cherts in eastern Nevada.”p. 76
Using simple statistics for sourcing studies is unusual, and normally researchers use more complex multivariate statistics such as…
