Tag: California

Any archaeologist who has excavated has encountered traces of burrowing animals, usually in the form of filled burrows visible as differences in the color or consistency of the sediment. While working in California during the latter half of the 1970s, I became curious about how all that burrowing may have affected the archaeological record. No one I asked seemed to know much about the critters or the nature of their impacts on the sites we were investigating. Burrowing rodents are quite common in California, and pocket gophers or ground squirrels were actively burrowing in virtually every site at which I worked. At the same time, I was taking classes in geology at San Jose State University and beginning to explore the interfaces between geology and archaeology, an area that would shortly come to be called geoarchaeology. I was mostly working on using soil chemistry to identify the uses or functions of different areas in archaeological sites and deposits. However, I took a course on soil ecology and learned that there was quite a bit known about the habits of animals that live in the soil including burrowing mammals.

EXPLORING FUNCTIONAL VARIATION IN FIRE-ALTERED ROCKS

Christopher Pierce

Paper presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

Atlanta, Georgia 1989

Fire-altered rocks, as the name implies, are rocks that show signs of alteration resulting from exposure to extreme heat. These rocks are often referred to as "fire-cracked rocks" by archaeologists because cracking is a common and readily distinguishable form of alteration. The archaeological record in many areas of the world contains great quantities of fire-altered rocks and these rocks were recognized early on as artifacts. However, the lack of stylistic attributes of most fire-altered rocks lead, understandably, to their neglect by archaeologists devoted to working out culture histories. More recently, a growing concern with functional or analogous variation has lead some archaeologist, primarily in the past decade, to look more closely at fire-altered rocks as a source of information about the past (e.g., Ericson 1972; McDowell-Loudan 1983; Pierce 1982, 1988; Roll 1982; Thoms 1986; Van Dyke, et al 1980). Although these studies have served to increase the awareness of the potential of fire-altered rock studies in some areas, in general, archaeologists continue to ignore these artifacts. Consequently, we still know exceedingly little about the nature and significance of variation in fire-altered rocks.