A subset of 28 artifacts were then subjected to an elemental analysis method common at the time that involved grinding them into powder.įrahm and coauthor Christina M. The initial analyses were based largely on the artifacts' appearance, specifically their color when held up to sunlight. MacCurdy Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale. The artifacts were collected in the 1960s during multiple excavations of the two sites led by Frank Hole, the C.J. The new analysis, combined with computer modeling, indicates that there were intensifying connections among Neolithic people, suggesting the presence of a greater number of settlements between the source volcanoes and the two sites where the artifacts were unearthed thousands of years later, Frahm said. "Rather, our analysis shows that they were acquiring obsidian from an increasingly diverse number of geological sources over time - a trend that was impossible to detect with the technology and methods available 50 years ago." ![]() "It wasn't a simple pattern of people obtaining obsidian from one source and then shifting to the next," said Ellery Frahm, an archaeological scientist in the Department of Anthropology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the study's lead author. This new elemental analysis showed the obsidian came from seven distinct sources, including Nemrut Dağ, in present-day Turkey and Armenia, which is as far as about 1,000 miles on foot from the excavation sites. Original analyses performed shortly after the artifacts were discovered had suggested people first acquired the obsidian - volcanic glass - from Nemrut Dağ, a now dormant volcano in Eastern Turkey, and then relied on an unknown second source for the material. ![]() ![]() The artifacts were unearthed more than 50 years ago at Ali Kosh and Chagha Sefid, sites on Iran's Deh Luran Plain that yielded important archaeological discoveries from the Neolithic Era - the period beginning about 12,000 years ago when people began farming, domesticating animals, and establishing permanent settlements. 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to apply state-of-the-art analytical tools to a collection of 2,100 obsidian artifacts housed at the Yale Peabody Museum.
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