Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Miller, Darcy Shane

Committee Member

Peacock, Evan

Committee Member

Hardin, James W.

Committee Member

Greenlee, Diana M.

Committee Member

Parish, Ryan M.

Date of Degree

8-9-2019

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Applied Anthropology

Degree Name

Master of Arts

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

Abstract

Poverty Point is a monumental earthwork center dating to the Late Archaic Period (ca. 3700-3100 Cal BP). The site is well known for its diverse collection of foreign lithic materials indicative of a wide-ranging acquisition network. Among the extra-local items recovered from the site are lithic raw materials that were used for bifaces in the form of projectile points and/or knives (PP/Ks). Here, I determined the atomic and molecular composition of 847 bifaces from the Alexander Collection using Visible/Near-Infrared Reflectance (VNIR) and Fourier-Transform Infrared Reflectance (FTIR) spectroscopy. The combined wavelength spectra datasets were compared to a raw material database to determine the location of the parent formations from which the raw materials were obtained. The PP/K raw materials analyzed were sourced to outcrops stretching across the Southeast, Mid-South and Mid-West.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/14488

Comments

Poverty Point||Southeastern archaeology||VNIR spectroscopy||lithic sourcing||archaeometry

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