PHYSICAL, CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL MARKERS IN ARGENTINE ARCHAEOLOGY: THEORY, METHODS AND APPLICATIONS.

CECILIA MERCURI; FEDERICO RESTIFO

APPLICATION OF PHYSICO-CHEMICAL AND MACROSCOPIC METHODS TO LITHIC ARTIFACT STUDIES FROM ALERO CUEVAS SITE (SALTA, REPÚBLICA ARGENTINA): A COMPLEMENTARY APPROACH

BAR. International Series, Archaeopress

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2014; p. 27 - 39

Nowadays, obsidian is one the rocks mostly used to understand technological organization, availability and/ or accessibility of raw materials, group mobility and subsistence strategies. This rock presents a number of minor elements whose concentrations are specific to each formation or part of a geological formation, making it possible to assign a sample to a particular source. While a macroscopic characterization may be performed, not all archaeological assemblages have the same potential for distinction from particular sources. We explain and compare how a physical chemical method (XRF) and the macroscopic description works in terms of assessing the scope and limitations of its application to our lithic assemblage, which comes from two levels from the archaeological site Alero Cuevas (Santa Rosa de los Pastos Grandes, Puna of Salta), which presents a stratigraphic sequence that extends throughout the Holocene. Recovered lithic assemblages exhibit not only variety at the morphological level but also regarding the representation of different varieties of obsidian. This would suggest the existence of changes in the technological strategies and patterns of mobility (among others) over time.