Sunday, June 20, 2021

Underwater archaeology team finds ancient obsidian flakes 2,000 miles from quarry

 



“An underwater archaeologist from The University of Texas at Arlington is part of a research team studying 9,000-year-old stone tool artifacts discovered in Lake Huron that originated from an obsidian quarry more than 2,000 miles away in central Oregon.

The obsidian flakes from the underwater archaeological site represent the oldest and farthest east confirmed specimens of western obsidian ever found in the continental United States.

 “In this case, these tiny obsidian artifacts reveal social connections across North America 9,000 years ago,” said Ashley Lemke, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at UT Arlington. “The artifacts found below the Great Lakes come from a geological source in Oregon, 4,000 kilometers away—making it one of the longest distances recorded for obsidian artifacts anywhere in the world.”

The find in Lake Huron is part of a broader study to understand the social and economic organization of caribou hunters at the end of the last ice age. Water levels were much lower then; scientists have found, for example, ancient sites like stone walls and hunting blinds that are now 100 feet underwater.


“This particular find is really exciting because it shows how important underwater archaeology is,” Lemke said. “The preservation of ancient underwater sites is unparalleled on land, and these places have given us a great opportunity to learn more about past peoples.”

https://www.uta.edu/news/news-releases/2021/06/15/lemke-lake-huron

Citation: O’Shea JM, Lemke AK, Nash BS, Sonnenburg EP, Ferguson JR, Nyers AJ, et al. (2021) Central Oregon obsidian from a submerged early Holocene archaeological site beneath Lake Huron. PLoS ONE 16(5): e0250840.

 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250840

 

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1 comment :

  1. Curtiss Hoffman9:11 AM

    The claim that this is the furthest east finding of western obsidian artifactds and flakes is unwarranted. Obsidian tools and flakes have been found - admittedly in very small quantities - at numerous sites on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. -- much further east than Michigan! A team of researchers from the Middle Atlantic, led by Carolyn Dillian and Chas. Bello, have been researching this for about the last 20 years, and they have found (using trace-element analysis) that the obsidian sources of these artifacts are very variable, ranging from British Columbia to northwestern Mexico. An article on this by these authors, as well as M. Steven Shackley, appeared in the 2007 issue of Archaeology of Eastern North America, under the title "Crossing the Delaware: Documenting Super-Long Distance Obsidian Exchange in the Mid-Atlantic." This only documents sources in the U.S. portion of the Rockies, and it only includes findspots in New Jersey and New York State. But the research is ongoing. Two obsidian artifacts in the Robbins Museum of Archaeology were sent to Dillian and Bello's lab about 10 years ago, which confirmed that they were from California sources, I believe.

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