Extracting Stone (Paperback)

"[T]he production quality of the volume is high... The volume will appeal to members of the public and will be useful to undergraduate students and beginning graduate students looking for an overview of quarry studies in North America. I can see this text being used in a lithic technology class. Its length (157 pages including bibliography) makes it accessible for students." – American Antiquity Vol. 91, Issue 1

This exciting new addition to the American Landscapes series provides an in-depth account of how flintknappers obtained and used stone based on archaeological, geological, landscape, and anthropological data. Featuring case studies from three key regions in North America, this book gives readers a comprehensive view of quarrying activities ranging from extracting the raw material to creating finished stone tools.

Quarry landscapes were some of the first large-scale land modification efforts among early peoples in the New World. The chronological time periods covered by quarrying activities show that most intensive use took place during parts of the Archaic and Woodland periods or between roughly 4000–1000 years ago when denser populations existed, but use began as early as the Paleoindian Period, about 13,000–9000 years ago, and ended in the Historic or Protohistoric periods, when colonists and Native Americans mined chert for gunflints and sharpening stones or abrasives. From the procurement systems approach common in the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists can now employ a landscape approach to quarry studies in tandem with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) computer mapping and digital analysis, Light and RADAR (LiDAR) airborne laser scanning for recording topography, or high resolution satellite imagery.

Authors Dowd and Trubitt show how sites functioned in a broad landscape context, which site locations or raw material types were preferred and why, what cultures were responsible for innovative or intensive quarry resource extraction, as well as how land use changed over time. Besides discussions of the way that industrialists used natural resources to change their technology by means of manufacture, trade, and exchange, examples are given of heritage sites that people can visit in the United States and Canada.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction to the archaeology of quarry landscapes
Chapter 2. William Henry Holmes’s contribution to the study of major North American stone quarries
Chapter 3. The role of landscape archaeology in understanding quarries
Chapter 4. Flint Mine Hill, New York
Chapter 5. “Spanish Diggings” and Arkansas Novaculite chert quarries in the Ouachita Mountains
Chapter 6. Obsidian Cliff, Wyoming
Chapter 7. Extracting stone in pre-Columbian North America
Appendix: Quarry sites that can be visited by the public
Bibliography

Anne S. Dowd earned her doctorate in anthropology with a specialization in archaeology from Brown University. She is Heritage Program Manager with the U.S. Forest Service. Her research interests include lithic technology, quarrying, raw material procurement, and cultural astronomy.

Mary Beth D. Trubitt received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Northwestern University. Professor Trubitt is currently the Station Archeologist for the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Henderson State University Research Station in Arkadelphia, where she also teaches. Her research interests include craft production and exchange of stone, marine shell, and pottery, and the development of complex societies in eastern North America.