Barbara E. Luedtke
Recently of the Department of Anthropology 
University of Massachusetts/ Boston 

Paper delivered April 11, 1996, as part of forum on 
"Chaos or Congruence? Regional Lithic Data Bases in North America", 
at annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in New 
Orleans, LA. (Amended slightly 12/11/96) 

Abstract

Lithic sources have been a topic of archaeological interest in New England for over 100 years, but at this point we have not
drawn together information about quarries, material characteristics, and geochemistry into a coherent data base. Furthermore, regional archaeologists have just begun to discuss a host of issues such as the structure of a regional data base, the level of detail
that should be included, "quality control" for data to be entered, and how to provide access to the data base. This
presentation will introduce the forum, summarize progress thus far for New England, and outline other issues that need to be
addressed by those of us committed to the development of comprehensive and congruent lithic data bases.
 

The Lithic Thin-Sectioning Project at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (link to full text)

This web essay is based on the paper "The Creation of a Petrographic Thin-Section Library of Materials Recovered from Archaeological Sites on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation" presented at the Geological Society of America Northeastern Section Meeting, Westin Hotel, Providence, RI, March, 1999. 

Abstract

The Archaeology Department of the Pequot Museum and research Center has begun to assemble a petrographic thin-section reference library of stone materials recovered from sites excavated over the past fifteen years on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, as well as bedrock materials common in Northeastern archaeological sites. This introduction begins by summarizing the lithic raw material data as it currently exists based on the visual inspection of artifacts. While certain patterns are evident in this data, there are a number of reasons why one must be suspicious of any conclusions drawn from them. This is followed by a discussion of the three-part goals of the lithic thin-section library effort. These are to identify materials to rock-type, to identify potential sources of rock types found at Mashantucket, and finally, to assess diachronic changes in lithic material use at Mashantucket and explain this within the framework of dynamic prehistoric social and settlement systems. This final goal is the crux of the effort to produce the comparative thin-section library. Because of this I will spend a short time discussing ways in which knowledge of rock sources and paths of movement can aid the reconstruction of past settlement and exchange systems. I will also discuss a number of difficulties underlying such reconstructions. I hope to make clear that rock identification and sourcing provide important information, but for that information to be imbued with meaning, it must be combined with standard macroscopic methods of lithic analysis.