Posted on 02/19/2007 5:31:38 AM PST by TXnMA
I have discontinued routinely doing obsidian hydration dating studies, as have a few of my colleagues.
The results I have received have been somewhat screwy, and after nearly 30 years of comparing obsidian hydration against lots of radiocarbon dates, I decided some time ago to drop the obsidian hydration in most cases, and to do even more radiocarbon dating.
But then if you work in an area where obsidian's all you have, well that's a different story. You pays your dime and you takes your chances. (If only it was just a dime...)
I would expect that the most useful function might be in the detection of fakes -- or determining if a tool was retouched long after it was initially knapped...
(Note: all this speculation is from a guy who has spent most of his time with Central Texas [Edwards Plateau and Georgetown, etc.] cherts. Not much obsidian in these parts...)
Nice post.......
Monkey hammers
My guess is they came out of Al Franken's kitchen drawers...
Valid point -- and one which I addressed earlier in this thread.
I have serious doubts that people who never even developed soft-hammer percussion (much less who were stuck at the pebble-tool level indicated by this specimen) could have survived through this continent's ecological changes all the way to 14,000 - 13,000 BP. One would have expected them to have learned something about making stone tools in a million years or so...
And, I further doubt that such primitives could have made an inter-continental migration.
Most contemporary stone-age people have far more sophisticated lithic tools than the one shown. The only peoples (that I am aware of) whose technology has remained at such a basic level have adapted to a specific environment -- and have stayed put there. (The Kalahari Bushmen, for example...)
Thank you! I happened to be chairman of the Website Committee of the Texas Archeological Society when we elected to co-fund TARL in the development of the "TBH" ("Texas Beyond History") website.
I am pleased to say that Dr. Steve Black and the folks at TARL (UT's Texas Archeological Research Laboratory -- Texas' central repository for archeological materials and data) took that "seed" and grew it into a truly outstanding online resource.
IMHO, "TBH" is now one of the world's finest sources of archeological information. It really shines as a resource for teachers and students. And you should see what's in the works!
The results of an examination by a group of knowledgeable lithicists of the purported pre-Clovis Walker site in Minnesota has been posted by the Minnesota State Archeologist ... results: no human made artifacts:
http://www.osa.admin.state.mn.us/documents/The%20Walker%20Hill%20Site.pdf
The author took the Walker Site archaeologists to the woodshed big time!
A clear-cut example of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (Carl Sagan).
(Good post!)
That's disappointing. I thought we had something going here.
I got an error when trying to load it, perhaps an incompatibility with my version of Acrobat.
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