Elemental differences: Geochemical identification of aboriginal silcrete sources in the Arcadia Valley, eastern Australia

Cochrane, Grant W.G.; Webb, John A.; Doelman, Trudy; Habgood, Phillip J.

doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.11.032

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…One resolution is to use proxies that bear directly on occurrences of movement, where objects form patterns in artifact assemblage composition as they move across a landscape, regardless of their actual function (Clarkson 2008; Close 2000). For stone artifacts, this includes using geochemical sourcing to calculate distances between an artifact and its raw material source (e.g., Cochrane et al 2017; Nash et al 2016), refitting studies that reconnect the products of stone artifact reduction sequences back into original wholes (e.g., Close 2000; Spry 2014), and techniques that use geometric attributes of artifacts to determine the presence or absence of expected reduction products within an assemblage (e.g., Douglass et al 2008; Lin et al 2016; Phillipps and Holdaway 2016). Each of these has its own advantages, but all measure archaeological patterns that are sensitive to the movement of the constituent objects.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Relationships Between Space, Movement, and Lithic Geometric Attributes

2018

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Evidence for changes in human mobility is fundamental to interpretations of transitions in human socioeconomic organization. Showing changes in mobility requires both archaeological proxies that are sensitive to movement and a clear understanding of how different mobility configurations influence their patterning. This study uses computer simulation to explore how different combinations of reduction, selection, transport, and discard of stone artifacts generate patterning in the “cortex ratio,” a geometric proxy used to demonstrate movement at the assemblage level. A case study from western New South Wales, Australia, shows how cortex ratios are used to make inferences about movement. Results of the exploratory simulation show that redundancy in movement between discards reduces variability in cortex ratios, while mean assemblage values can be attributed to the relative proportions of artifacts carried into and out of the assemblages. These results suggest that raw material availability is a potentially crucial factor in determining what kinds of mobility are visible in assemblages, whereby different access to raw material can shift the balance of import and export of stone in an otherwise undirected movement configuration. These findings are used to contextualize distributions of cortex ratios from the raw material–rich study area, prompting suggestions for further fieldwork.

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confidence: 99%

Modeling Relationships Between Space, Movement, and Lithic Geometric Attributes

2018

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“…Frankel and Webb, 2012;Frahm, 2013;Frahm and Doonan, 2013;Frahm et al, 2016;Tykot, 2016), including in investigations of silcrete/sarsen (e.g. Cochrane et al, 2017;Nash et al, 2020;Nash et al, 2021a). In this study, we use pXRF to provide: (i) an initial geochemical characterisation of a sample set of sarsen debitage from the three trenches, to determine the extent of compositional variability within and between each assemblage, and within an individual large sarsen block; and (ii) a dataset to compare against the pXRF results from sarsen uprights and lintels at Stonehenge reported in Nash et al (2020).…”

Section: Pxrf Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Local and Exotic Sources of Sarsen Debitage at Stonehenge Revealed by Geochemical Provenancing

Ciborowski,

Nash,

Darvill

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…These formations have been shown to exhibit distinctive and regionally variable heavy mineral assemblages [e.g., (30)]. By inference from silcrete provenancing studies in southern Africa (20,21) and Australia (31), this should mean that the remaining sarsens in different areas will exhibit different inherited heavy mineral assemblages and, hence, different chemistries.…”

Section: Comparison Of the Chemistry Of Stone 58 With Potential Sourc...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge

et al. 2020

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The sources of the stone used to construct Stonehenge around 2500 BCE have been debated for over four centuries. The smaller “bluestones” near the center of the monument have been traced to Wales, but the origins of the sarsen (silcrete) megaliths that form the primary architecture of Stonehenge remain unknown. Here, we use geochemical data to show that 50 of the 52 sarsens at the monument share a consistent chemistry and, by inference, originated from a common source area. We then compare the geochemical signature of a core extracted from Stone 58 at Stonehenge with equivalent data for sarsens from across southern Britain. From this, we identify West Woods, Wiltshire, 25 km north of Stonehenge, as the most probable source area for the majority of sarsens at the monument.

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Elemental differences: Geochemical identification of aboriginal silcrete sources in the Arcadia Valley, eastern Australia

Cited by 9 publications

References 38 publications

Modeling Relationships Between Space, Movement, and Lithic Geometric Attributes

Modeling Relationships Between Space, Movement, and Lithic Geometric Attributes

Local and Exotic Sources of Sarsen Debitage at Stonehenge Revealed by Geochemical Provenancing

Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge

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