North American Archaeologist

This research focuses on the geochemistry and archaeological exploitation of fine-grained volcanic (FGV) lithic sources in eastern Idaho. By combining energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF) characterization of these sources with a discussion of their exploitation at 27 precontact archaeological sites, this paper provides one of the few overviews of these important resources. The geological context of each source is discussed, and the XRF results are used to classify the volcanic rock types, in turn demonstrating how these sources can be distinguished based on their elemental signatures. Moving forward, our hope is that the current study can contribute to the reconstruction of lithic procurement strategies and associated conveyance zones for FGV that can add nuance to the wide range of existing studies focused on obsidian.

Excavations of the historical burial ground of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia yielded approximately 400 individual burials, the majority of coffins from which were severely degraded. Documentation of coffin construction in colonial and post-colonial America is scarce. One adult coffin from the site, preserved in remarkable condition, was selected for detailed examination to address this gap. Careful disassembly, as part of a structural conservation treatment, facilitated the study of carpentry techniques employed in the coffin's design, as well as the recording of comprehensive measurements of its dimensions. One key carpentry technique, kerf bending, found in multiple locations across the coffin, represents ingenuity on the part of its maker and may be a feature of eighteenth-century American coffin design more common than previously thought.

The fate of Labrador's Point Revenge complex has been a subject of educated speculation amongst archaeologists working in Labrador for fifty years. The understanding of the relationship between this archaeological culture and ethnographically known Indigenous populations such as the Beothuk and Innu has also had an interesting history and has been considered a settled matter by some archaeologists for the past three decades. In this paper we examine three hypotheses on the fate of the Point Revenge complex as laid out in the literature, and we test them against archaeological data, relying on the locations of known archaeological sites and the presence or absence of diagnostic stone tools. The results suggest that the people of the Point Revenge complex did not disappear from the archaeological record in the early colonial period, but instead they returned to the island of Newfoundland in the early sixteenth century rather than migrating to the interior of Labrador. Our research provides additional support for a long-recognized relationship between the Point Revenge and contemporaneous archaeological cultures on the Island of Newfoundland and the Quebec North Shore and between these cultures and the historically known Beothuk of Newfoundland.