Mission: Is possible - Rock Nation
August 17, 2020
As the saying in Pride and Prejudice goes, “What are men to rocks and mountains?” (Austen, 2006) Bones and flesh perish with time, while durable lithic tools await to retell our ancestors’ stories. This blog post aims to briefly discuss some of the lithic findings from the Vedi Fortress Archaeological Site, excavated during the 2019 summer field season in Armenia.
According to Knudson & Price (2018), archaeologists value stone tools commonly found in excavations, as our ancestors have a long history (3.3 million years) utilizing them. They made stone tools by flaking. This is where small pieces of the rock are removed deliberately by either hitting a hammer on the lithic to discard pieces of flakes (percussion flaking) or by pushing a sharp tool along the edge of the rock to discard longer flakes (pressure flaking). Devoting such hard work is all to meet the needs of survival, e.g. butchery, woodworking, hideworking.
Various methods have been developed to study these important lithics, for instance, reconstructing broken pieces to form a complete tool (refitting) and examining the tool’s degree of destruction and refinement (microwear analysis). Knowing the typology of stone tools is also crucial for researchers to organize lithic findings and extract characteristics of stone tools from the same period or culture (Knudson & Price, 2018).
The lithics chosen for this blog were located in trench N.38.478130.4419430, from the Late Bronze to Iron Age site Vedi Fortress (1500-500 BC). They were chosen among other types of findings (e.g. bones, ceramics), since their post-Stone Age importance is not always explored in depth (Purschwitz, 2018). As illustrated in figure 1, many of the excavated stone tools have a glassy surface, which reflects light quite well. They are transparent, with some darker bands. In contrast, the larger one in the center is entirely black. Judging from the overall colour and texture, these tools are probably made of a volcanic glass, obsidian. Magma deep in the ground rises to the Earth’s surface as a volcano erupts, resulting in lava cooling quickly to form extrusive igneous rocks. Due to such rapid cooling, it has significant curved cleavages on the surface (conchoidal fractures). Therefore, our ancestors were able to take advantage of their sharpness in creating useful tools. In addition, the lithics’ dark colours are due to the presence of microscopic magnetite (Fe3O4) crystals (Blatter, 2019). Unsurprisingly, common usage of obsidian tools is highly related to the geography of Armenia. Located between the colliding Eurasian plate and Arabic plate, it is one of the most active volcanic zones in the world (Harutyunyan & Tovmasyan, 2013) with 450 volcanic domes found scattered along a distance of 300 km (Cherry, Faro & Minc, 2010).
Similar lithics were discovered at nearby sites, including the highly-elevated Karmir Sar in northwest of Armenia. Here, more dated obsidian tools such as arrowheads and bladelets (Purschwitz, 2018) dated from the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age, were uncovered. In an earlier study, Cherry et al. (2010) undertook extensive research of the obsidian sources in the Syunik region, the southern part of the country. This revealed the sourcing of obsidian flakes and blade-cores from Greater Sevkar, Satanakar-1, Bazenk, as examples.
References
Austen, J. (2006). Pride and prejudice. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Blatter, D. (2019 December). Obsidian. Access Science. https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.463600
Cherry, J. F., Faro, E. Z., & Minc, L. (2010). Field Survey and Geochemical Characterization of the Southern Armenian Obsidian Sources. Journal of Field Archaeology, 35(2), 147- 163. https://doi.org/10.1179/009346910x12707321520639
Harutyunyan, F., & Tovmasyan, A. (2013). Active Faults and Piculiarites of Seismicity and Fault Behavior of the Territory of Armenia.
Price, T. D., & Knudson, K. J. (2018). Principles of archaeology. London: Thames & Hudson.
Purschwitz, C. (2018). Chalcolithic and Middle Bronze Age obsidian industries at Karmir Sar: A mountain view on the lithic economies of the Southern Caucasus. Journal of Lithic Studies, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.2218/jls.2520
This page has paths:
- Armenia 2020 Peter Cobb