As popular crime television shows portray, the chemical makeup of a piece of evidence is full of helpful clues that can be used to solve a puzzle. The same is true in archeology. USU anthropology and geology researchers Bonnie Pitblado and Carol Dehler are devising methods to characterize the chemical makeup of outcrops of quartzite, a rock type used prehistorically to make tools.

Two techniques for analyzing chemical makeup show particular promise and will allow the researchers to create a database of chemical fingerprints for quartzite sources in the Gunnison Basin, Colorado, where Pitblado has excavated a half-dozen 12,000-8,000 year-old sites. These sites, the remnants of North America’s most ancient residents, have yielded thousands of quartzite artifacts that can be fingerprinted and then matched to geologic sources in the newly developed database.  Making such matches will allow Pitblado and Dehler to reconstruct the movement of the first Americans by tracking the movement of their stone tools.