ANTHR206 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Strontium, Landscape Archaeology, Original Affluent Society
8 Mar 2018
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Societies today depend on trade: movement of material culture, provides information about social organization, subsistence, politics, ideologies, migration vs diffusion. Internal (within a society) and external (with other cultures: characterization, establishing where an item originated from. I(cid:373)porta(cid:374)t to re(cid:373)e(cid:373)(cid:271)er that artifa(cid:272)ts are (cid:374)ot al(cid:449)ays (cid:272)reated (cid:449)here they"re fou(cid:374)d. Identify physical traits and chemical composition: 3 basic steps in establishing trade. Identify if there was any trade/exchange: establish provenance (source, establish how it moved (diffusion, invention, migration) Identifying where an item originated (characterization: thin-section analysis, also called ceramic petrography, take a very thin slice of material, analyze under a microscope. Certain minerals will have certain appearances under light: can source pottery or stone, 2 assumptions, assuming the mineral reflects the geology of where it was made, assuming the raw materials were not transported over long distances, trace-element analysis. Looking at signatures of elements in a material: pxrf - portable x-ray fluorescence.
