Ten years ago I would have been skeptical if someone had told me that
there would be an interest in reprinting Obsidian Studies in the Great
Basin. Regardless, the volume, originally published in a run of 400
copies in June 1984, has been out-of-print for more than five years, and
the Archaeological Research Facility has received
a steady stream of requests for it.
On reflection, the call to make Contribution 45 again available is, I think,
a tribute to the burgeoning interest in obsidian studies worldwide. In 1982,
when I organized the symposium at the 18th Great Basin Anthropological Conference
in Reno, Nevada at which most of the papers in this volume were first presented,
obsidian studies in western North America were scarcely a decade old. Although
pioneering work in obsidian characterization began during the middle 1960s,
little of that work reached a wider audience until several years later.
Because so much obsidian work has been completed in the Great Basin over
the past decade, it is easy to forget that until the early 1980s, only three
studies had been published specifically focusing on Great Basin obsidian
characterization (Jack and Carmichael 1969; Condie and Blaxland 1970; Nelson
and Holmes 1979), although somewhat greater attention had been devoted to
obsidian hydration (e.g. Michels 1969; Layton 1972a, b; 1973).
Over the last ten years archaeological research employing chemical characterization
and hydration rim measurement has increased by an order of magnitude; a
citation list of such studies would run several pages. However, since many
of the themes of contemporary obsidian studies have changed little during
this time, the research strategies applied, and general concerns voiced,
by the authors of papers in Contribution 45 are as appropriate today as
they were when they were first published.
Richard E. Hughes
Geochemical Research Laboratory
December 1, 1994
Condie, Kent C., and Alan B. Blaxland
1970 Sources of Obsidian in Hogup and Danger Caves. In C. Melvin Aikens, Hogup Cave. University of Utah Anthropological Papers 93:275-81.
Jack, R. N., and I. S. E. Carmichael
1969 The Chemical 'Fingerprinting' of Acid Volcanic Rocks. California Division of Mines and Geology, Special Paper 100:17-32.
Layton, Thomas N.
1972a Lithic Chronology in the Fort Rock Valley, Oregon: An Obsidian Hydration Study from Cougar Mountain Cave. Tebiwa 15:1-21.
1972b A 12,000 Year Obsidian Hydration Record of Occupation, Abandonment and Lithic Change from the Northwestern Great Basin. Tebiwa 15:22-28.
1973 Temporal Ordering of Surface Collected Obsidian Artifacts by Hydration Measurement. Archaeometry 15:129-32.
Michels, Joseph W.
1969 Testing Stratigraphy and Artifact Reuse through Obsidian Hydration Dating. American Antiquity 34:15-22.
Nelson, Fred W., and Richard D. Holmes
1979 Trace Element Analysis of Obsidian Sources and Artifacts from Western Utah. Antiquities Section Selected Papers 6 (15). Utah State Historical Society.