Archaeological obsidian sourcing: Looking from the first 60 years to the next

Abstract

Obsidian sourcing (or provenancing) is the process by which obsidian artifacts are matched to the geological sources from which the raw material originated. Given that obsidian is a substance that has been used from the emergence of our genus to the 21st century, reconstructing the movement of obsidian artifacts has great relevance to a wide variety of research questions. Matching obsidian artifacts to their origins has been called “one of the success stories of archaeological science” as well as “one of the most productive and successful research programs of archaeological science” (Williams-Thorpe, 1995). Furthermore, it has been labeled as “a microcosm of the development of archaeological science” (Henderson, 2001), reflecting wider trends within archaeology. Identifying an artifact's source is only a proximate goal: the ultimate aim is to elucidate human behavior in the past. Since its inception during the 1960s, a variety of technological and methodological advances have been incorporated into obsidian sourcing research around the world. The focus here is not an overview of global obsidian sourcing articles. Instead, this paper is organized according to a set of familiar questions: What? When? Who? Where? How? Why? What next? The goal here is to address how obsidian sourcing has been, is now, and can be used to better understand our past, eventually moving from generating data to developing archaeological models and theories.