Obsidian, originating from the Rocky Mountains and the West, was an exotic exchange commodity in Eastern North America that was often deposited in elaborate caches and burials associated with Middle Woodland era Hopewell and later complexes. In earlier times, obsidian is found only rarely. In this paper we report two obsidian flakes recovered from a now submerged paleolandscape beneath Lake Huron that are conclusively attributed to the Wagontire obsidian source in central Oregon; a distance of more than 4,000 km. These specimens, dating to ~ 9,000 BP, represent the earliest and most distant reported occurrence of obsidian in eastern North America.
The long-running controversy over typological concept use in archaeological investigations hinges on whether such procedures introduce assumptions, and channel interpretations, in ways that can equate analytical groups with bounded cultural-historical units inappropriately. James A. Ford's writings, in reaction to the arguments of Albert Spaulding, have often been cited as the founding instance of this criticism. To illustrate his concerns, Ford drew a hypothetical village of houses and used these forms to make a number of assertions regarding the nature of artifact variability that, he felt, demonstrated inherent errors with Spaulding's artifact-analysis approach. However, despite the intense character of this controversy, both at the time and subsequently, no one appears to have tested, or confirmed, any of Ford's assertions objectively. Morphometric analyses of Ford's simulation demonstrates all published assertions of which we are aware regarding patterns of variation exhibited by these drawn artifact forms, published in the intervening 67 years, are either wholly or substantially incorrect. Both traditional and new pattern-recognition techniques allow for the identification of more fine-grained structure in artifact variation patterns than is possible using qualitative approaches. These findings argue strongly for a re-evaluation of the role of typology in archaeological research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.