50 YEARS OF OBSIDIAN SOURCING STUDIES: SUCCESSES, FAILURES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Obsidian sourcing is arguably the success story of archaeometry, with almost 50 years of methodological innovations enabling archaeologists in many regions of the world to provenance their raw materials with great precision. In the Old World, the early characterisation studies were developed as a means of reconstructing socio-economic systems, i.e. a contribution to archaeology’s ‘big questions’ rather than a focus on obsidian per se. While analytical developments ultimately enabled the major sources of the Aegean and Anatolia to be discriminated, critiques of the theoretical positions that underpinned the research’s original aims led to a broad retreat from using the sourcing data to address such large-scale questions. Subsequent research has often been in the form of small scale regional and/or site-specific studies, failing to live up to the discipline’s original lofty aims, with the greatest successes instead coming from those focused on sub-source analyses and instrumental techniques. The development of increasingly sophisticated means of integrating and analyzing spatially variable data (e.g. GIS), combined with an enlarged body of sourcing data, plus the development of more holistic means of characterisation via a chaîne opératoire framework, now enables – and calls for - a re-initiation of larger debates. This paper will focus on the use of obsidian sourcing as a proxy means to map community interaction and the flow of not only materials, but also the movement of people and ideas / socio-economic change.