2008 Joint Meeting of The Geological Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies with the Gulf Coast Section of SEPM

Paper No. 7
Presentation Time: 8:00 AM-6:00 PM

Sourcing Stone Used in Prehistoric Tool Production at La Piedra Pintada, Baja California Sur, Mexico


MCCABE, Janice M., MUROWCHICK, James and RAAB, L. Mark, Geosciences, University of Missouri - Kansas City, 5100 Rockhill Road, Room 420 Flarsheim Hall, Kansas City, MO 64110, akajmccabe@sbcglobal.net

Piedra Pintada is located in San Pablo Canyon, one of a series of major canyons that bisect the mountainous interior of the southern Baja California Peninsula, Mexico. Among the resources used by the canyon's prehistoric inhabitants were lithic materials suitable for the production of flaked stone tools. To help better define the spatial scale of resource procurement by the canyon's prehistoric population elemental analysis of samples collected from the dikes and selected stone tools was done by ICPMS (Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry). ICPMS was used because it can provide elemental “fingerprints” that distinguish between source materials and correlate specific stone tools with individual source material sites. Relative abundances of minor elements, including transition metals and rare earth elements can differ sufficiently between source rocks that the elemental ratios can be used to link a stone tool with its source material in many cases. Comparison of the elemental spectral from four stone tools with local dike rocks suggests that two of the four tools examined were manufactured from stone obtained from San Pablo Canyon.