Matthew T Boulanger

• Ph.D.
• Research Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University

It has long been argued that specialized big-game-hunting Paleoindians were responsible for the extinction of three dozen large-bodied mammalian genera in North America. In northeastern North America, the overkill hypothesis cannot be tested on the basis of associations of Paleoindian artifacts and remains of extinct mammals because no unequivocal...

This chapter presents a brief overview of the recycling of data as it pertains to compositional analyses of archaeological ceramic artifacts. Although data recycling has been central to archaeology in general, and ceramic-composition studies in particular, the development of microcomputers with large storage capacities and of the World Wide Web hav...

We present obsidian sourcing data from Pot Creek Pueblo (LA 260), one of the northernmost Puebloan settlements in the Northern Rio Grande, occupied from at least 1260 ce until ca. 1320 ce when much of the pueblo was burned and the site was depopulated. Although the occupation of Pot Creek Pueblo was short, it occurred during a pivotal period in the...

From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of t...

Analysis of artifacts collected by the late Helen G. Blumenschein (HGB) provides a region-wide database for obsidian use between the Middle – Late Archaic and the Talpa phase in the Taos area of northern New Mexico, approximately 3000 B.C.E. to 1300 C.E. Using GIS to associate these artifacts with site locations from HGB’s records and the current s...

Indigenous groups often encounter significant challenges when asserting ancestral claims and cultural affiliations based on oral histories, particularly in the USA where such narratives have historically been undervalued. Although ancient DNA offers a tool to complement traditional knowledge and address gaps in oral history, longstanding disregard...

The peopling process of North and South America started in Northeast Asia and was a cultural evolutionary event. An evolutionary approach to archaeology, however, begins with detailed description of assemblages. The Uptar site, Russia, played a prominent role in debates about New World colonization, due to the presence of a “fluted” bifacially flak...

Red chert attributed to the Munsungun Lake Formation, Maine, USA is common in late Pleistocene fluted‐point‐period archaeological sites located throughout the New England states and Quebec, appearing more frequently than any other material type in the region. Despite the assumed association between red Munsungun chert and fluted‐point‐period sites,...

Eighteen LBA II pottery vessels from a recent salvage excavation on the edge of Tel Qashish (van den Brink, Segal, and ‘Ad 2012; Segal, ‘Ad, and van den Brink ch. 25, this volume) were subjected to neutron activation analysis (NAA). Sixteen analyzed vessels were found in a cultic cave repository (Area B), while two vessels, found on the tell, were...

Th e earliest well-documented human occupation of North America is recognized archaeologically by the widespread presence of bifacially worked projectile points with prominent channels-fl utes-driven upward from their bases on one or both sides. Th ese fl uted points are one of the preem-inent "index fossils" (sensu Lyman and O'Brien 2006) in Ameri...

The Mielke site (33SH26) is a multicomponent locality in western Ohio, in an upland portion of the state that forms a drainage divide between the Great Lakes and Ohio River watersheds. The site possesses a prominent Clovis component that we describe here and assessed via test excavations, geochemical sourcing, technological descriptions, geometric...

This article reports the identification of the Sayrosa Source, a minor geologic source of volcanic glass referred to Rare Type-3 obsidian in the 1977 pilot study by Burger and Asaro. Located only 25 km northeast of the major Alca-1 deposit, this source was exploited in prehispanic times despite the relatively small size of its nodules. Occasional f...

Seeman, Morris, and Summers misrepresent or misunderstand the arguments we have made, as well as their own previous work. Here, we correct these inaccuracies. We also reiterate our support for hypothesis-driven and evidence-based research.

Several flaked-stone crescents from the northern Great Basin were recently identified within the James M. Collins artifact collection held in the Archaeological Research Collections, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University. These artifacts are morphologically and technologically consistent with other pre-Columbian crescents report...

The Nelson stone tool cache was discovered in 2008 in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The cache does not include any diagnostic materials, and independent age control is unavailable. Although aspects of its 164 bifaces are suggestive of a Clovis affiliation – including the occasional occurrence of unmistakable flute scars – nearly all are in the early- to mid-...

The Antelope Springs Folsom locality is located near Trout Creek Pass, which connects South Park, a high elevation basin in the Rocky Mountains, with the headwaters region of the Arkansas River. The pass is also the source of an eponymous jasper that dominates the small, surface collection of Folsom points, preforms, tools, and debitage we report o...

In 2014, the television show America Unearthed (A & E Networks)( featured an episode discussing evidence for pre-Columbian contact between Polynesia and continental North and South America. Included in this "evidence" was a large spearpoint, allegedly found on the island of Maui. The show's host argues that the spearpoint is made on obsidian from c...

In 2011, the University of Toledo, Ohio, transferred five Clovis fluted points to the Department of Archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for permanent curation. Here, following several similar previous efforts, we describe these five Late Pleistocene artifacts with technological descriptions, illustrations, morphometrics, and micr...

This study examines small-scale household ceramic production at the site of Xaltocan, Mexico, to understand the organization of household ceramic production prior to the development of the Aztec Empire. We examine utilitarian vessels and serving wares from an Early Postclassic ( a.d. 900–1200) domestic context using neutron activation analysis (NAA...

This study presents preliminary results of petrographic and X-ray fluorescence analyses of cut stone blocks used for urban construction at Teotihuacan, the capital of a regional state in Central Mexico (ca. AD 150–650). Cut stone blocks were concentrated in the civic-ceremonial core of the city and were probably prestigious architectural elements d...

Stone was a critical resource for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Archaeologists, therefore, have long argued that these groups would actively have sought out stone of 'high quality'. Although the defining of quality can be a complicated endeavour, researchers in recent years have suggested that stone with fewer impurities would be preferred for tool...

Boulanger, M.T. and Lattanzi, G.D. “AMS radiocarbon date for the Mount Hermon stag moose (Cervalces scotti).” The Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey 71–73: 3–8, 2018.

Five flaked stone artifacts from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene periods of North America were discovered by a collector in Christian County, Kentucky. These artifacts include a Clovis projectile point, a Cumberland preform, a biface, a prismatic blade core, and a St. Charles projectile point base. All specimens were made from material macr...

During the Pleistocene Peopling of North America, the use of stone outcrops for forager gatherings would have provided Clovis colonizing hunter-gatherers with several advantages beyond that of toolstone procurement. Stone outcrops would have been predictable and immovable places on an emerging map of a landscape for a thinly scattered colonizing po...

The Paleoindian record of eastern North America has long been characterized as exhibiting a remarkable variety of uted- and non- uted projectile-point forms. The temporal, spatial, and cultural signi cance of this variety remains poorly understood owing to a sparse radiocarbon record as well as to inconsistencies in nomenclature and traits used to...

The transition from the atlatl to the bow and arrow happened numerous times in prehistory, and it often accompanied changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization. Recent work relying on longitudinal scores from recreational archery and atlatl competitions suggests that changes in socio-political complexity and labor organization aros...

Este libro constituye una primera recopilación de técnicas arqueométricas elementales, moleculares, de datación y de prospección, además de casos de estudio originales en los cuales la utilización de estos análisis contribuyó con resultados enriquecedores y significativos a la interpretación arqueológica de variadas dimensiones materiales y cultura...

Description and microwear analysis of Clovis artifacts on a glacially-deposited secondary chert source near the Hartley Mastodon discovery, Columbiana County, Northeastern Ohio, U.S.A. a b s t r a c t Five Clovis lithic artifacts were found in a plowed farm field just north of an unnamed tributary of the Mahoning River, Columbiana County, Northeast...

The Abbott Farm National Historic Landmark is one of the more significant Woodland period sites in the Northeast. Numerous Hopewellian cultural traits (copper artifacts, cremated burials, exotic cherts, and mica) have been identified at the site. Numerous potential geological sources for the mica artifacts exist in the Mid-Atlantic region. We explo...

Five Clovis lithic artifacts were found in a plowed farm field just north of an unnamed tributary of the Mahoning River, Columbiana County, Northeast Ohio, approximately 700 m northeast of the Hartley Mastodon discovery. These artifacts include the base of a Clovis fluted projectile point, a preform base with a prepared fluting “nipple”, a large fl...

Bulletin of the International Association for Obsidian Studies 58:24-37

A Clovis fluted projectile point preform was discovered in 2006 from a freshly plowed farm field northwest of Wauseon in Fulton County, Ohio. We present here observations of the specimen's flake-scar patterning and production, geometric morphometrics, microwear, as well as visual raw material identifications and straight-line and least-cost stone s...

Neutron activation analysis was conducted on Late Bronze IIA pottery from Tarsus-Gözlükule and compared with archival data from contemporary sites in Cilicia and Cyprus. The results provide a model for the organization of pottery production at Tarsus-Gözlükule when the settlement was under the rule of the Hittite Empire. It is proposed that multipl...

Study of northwest Alaskan ceramic production and distribution patterns has the potential to provide new evidence of coastal hunter-gatherer mobility and social interaction in the late pre-contact period. This research is directed at characterizing potential clay sources and linking ceramic groups to raw-material source areas through instrumental n...

Ronald Mason's hypothesis from the 1960s that the southeastern United States possesses greater Paleoindian projectile-point diversity than other regions is regularly cited, and often assumed to be true, but in fact has never been quantitatively tested. Even if valid, however, the evolutionary meaning of this diversity is contested. Point diversity...

We present results of petrographic analysis of a sample of pottery from Fort Hill, a fortified village in southwestern New Hampshire built and occupied by a group of Native Americans between Autumn of 1663 and Spring of 1664. Our analyses reveal a surprising degree of variability in ceramic fabrics and in ceramic production techniques relative to t...

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombi...

Proponents of a Solutrean colonization of the New World, and a pre-LGM occupation of North America's Mid-Atlantic region, cite as evidence a bifacially flaked, bi-pointed stone blade allegedly dredged from the continental shelf by the crew of the vessel Cinmar, along with portions of a mastodon skeleton later directly dated to 22,760 ± 90 RCYBP. Ho...

Northeastern North America has produced an incredible number of late Pleistocene faunal remains; however, many of these were discovered and excavated prior to the development of radiocarbon dating. Moreover, many of the 14C dates that do exist for such specimens were assayed prior to the development of purified collagen extraction methods, were per...

As part of ongoing efforts to refine ceramic-provenance methodology, we examine the universality of freshwater mussel shell chemistry as reported in an earlier study. We find that samples of prehistoric shell from several locations in eastern North America are chemically distinct from the modern sample of shell from Missouri that was previously use...

Recently, advocates of an “older-than-Clovis” occupation of eastern North America have suggested that bi-pointed leaf-shaped lanceolate stone bifaces provide definitive evidence of human culture on the eastern seaboard prior to the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM). This argument hinges on two observations: First, that points of this form are exceedingly...

North American fluted stone projectile points occur over a relatively short time span, ca. 13,300–11,900 calBP, referred to as the Early Paleoindian period. One long-standing topic in Paleoindian archaeology is whether variation in the points is the result of drift or adaptation to regional environments. Studies have returned apparently conflicting...

Archaeological reconnaissance in the Blue Mountains in 2013 resulted in the discovery of five artificial circular arrangements of local stones. Subsequent examination of satellite photographs of the area revealed two more rings. Ethnographic and archaeological records provide few clues as to the origins and functions of these rings. Local informant...

Across Atlantic ice: the origin of America's Clovis culture (Stanford & Bradley 2012) is the latest iteration of a controversial proposal that North America was first colonised by people from Europe rather than from East Asia, as most researchers accept. The authors, Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, argue that Solutrean groups from southern Franc...

The comments of Stanford and Bradley (above) do not address our criticisms and obfuscate the topic at hand with irrelevant data (e.g. the south-to-north movement of fluted points through the Ice Free Corridor), nonexistent data (e.g. ‘under the water’ or ‘destroyed sites’), and questionable data (e.g. Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill are by no means wid...

Avocational archaeologists surface collected an obsidian tool identified as a graver in 1979 from the Twin Birds Site (16CD118) in Cross Lake near Shreveport, LA. An article in the LAS newsletter in 1984 announced this as the first documented prehistoric obsidian artifact in Louisiana. The article also reported the results of a "trace element analy...

Anthropology has always had as one of its goals the explanation of human cultural diversity across space and through time. Over the past several decades, there has been a growing appreciation among anthropologists and other social scientists that the phylogenetic approaches which biologists have developed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationshi...

ontamination of ceramic specimens resulting from sample-preparation techniques has the ability to confound efforts of chemical characterization. Primary contamination, identified by significant concentrations of one or more elements, is easily identified. Secondary contamination, resulting from undetected elements influencing detected elements, is...

Geographic, climatic, and archaeological data provide contextual information to complement theories on the emergence of monumental architecture and the development of prehistoric social complexity in Central Europe. Environmental, climatic and archaeological data are analyzed at a variety of scales. Spatial relationships between monumental and non-...

Anthropology has always had as one of its goals the explanation of human cultural diversity across space and through time. Over the past few years, there has been a growing appreciation among anthropologists that the approaches biologists have developed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of species are useful tools for building and expla...

After a 20-year hiatus (1955–1975) during which few archaeologists discussed fluoride dating, the method again received attention in the 1980s and 1990s when some argued for its validity. As a dating method, fluoride dating depends on the rate at which fluorine ions replace hydroxyl ions in osseous tissue. The rate of replacement is influenced by t...

Archaeologists have suggested that various methods of surface texturing, specifically those resulting in alternating ridges and grooves, affect the gripability of a ceramic vessel. Various methods of vessel texturing were applied to ceramic test tiles and evaluated using a tribometer outfitted with a malleable skinlike substrate. Nontextured (smoot...

Data recovery excavations at three sites near Amarillo, Texas, have yielded lithic assemblages dominated by Alibates and Tecovas materials. The visual distinction between these two southern Plains chert types partially overlaps in color, banding patterns, texture, and translucency. To help resolve this visual identification problem, samples from fi...

Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) was used to characterize the chemical composition of chert from a primary source in western North Dakota. Known as Sentinel Butte, this source is part of the Eocene-age White River Group (WRG), a widespread geological formation on the central and northern Plains. INAA results demonstrate that it is ch...

This research examines the evidence for prehistoric ceramic exchange networks over the last 2000 years in northwest Alaska through the use of neutron activation analysis of ceramic artifacts. Results from ceramic analysis on eight coastal and inland archaeological sites identified three source macrogroups and three associated subgroups. Clay source...

Results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of Middle and Late Woodland pottery (n = 313) and clay (n = 22) samples from northeastern Florida and southeastern Georgia are presented. Assemblages in this region include Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that preserves unique evidence of social interactions through the inimitable q...

The Central European Copper Age is characterized by the emergence of two distinctive archaeological site types: long mounds and wall-and-ditch enclosures (earthworks). Distinct though they may be, these two site types are expressions of a shared concept of monumentalism. Similar techniques of monument construction are evident in the laid-stone wall...

This thesis formulates a model for explaining stylistic, functional, and compositional diversity in ceramic artifacts produced during the contact period (A.D. 1590-1700) of northern New England. The seventeenth century saw dramatic increases in internecine warfare among New England's indigenous populations and with European colonists. Additionally,...

Approaches to ceramic analysis in northern New England have historically followed a normative approach to describing form and decoration. Further, these analyses have, with few exceptions, been limited to addressing ques-tions of culture history and chronology. Recent analysis of pottery from the Woodland and Contact periods as well as natural clay...

One hundred nineteen late Middle Woodland (ca. A.D. 200–900) sherds and 10 clay samples from the Lower/Middle Delaware Valley were analyzed by Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis. Principal components analysis resulted in the preliminary identification of 8 compositional groups. Two of these groups (n = 42) and Piedmont-derived clay samples (n...

Archaeological interest in sourcing obsidian artefacts has increased exponentially since Renfrew’s ground-breaking work with Aegean obsidian (Renfrew et al. 1965; Aspinall et al. 1972). Although Mediterranean obsidian has received the lion’s share of attention, sources in Central and Eastern Europe have recently become the focus of characterisation...

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/jca/current.htm

An obsidian biface reportedly found in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, is the only currently locatable obsidian artifact purported to have been found in Northern New England. As such, it may be evidence for prehistoric long-distance exchange, a product of modern- or historicperiod trade among artifact collectors, or it may be a modern repl...

Geochemical analysis provides archaeologists one method of understanding and explaining how stone quarries functioned in Native American resource-procurement and trade systems. Archaeologists in New England have not readily adopted such rigorous analytical methods; rather, most have preferred to combine visual criteria and personal knowledge to ide...

Throughout northeastern North America, stone tools and flakes are some of the most commonly encountered Native American artifact types. Strongly acidic soils and harsh freeze-thaw cycles have conspired to destroy the more-fragile artifacts useful for studying prehistoric cultures. The identification of stone sources is therefore an essential step i...