SAS Webinar

Saturday, July 10, 2021

2:00 p.m.

“The Potential of Obsidian Hydration Dating for Titicaca Basin Archaeology”

by Luis A. Flores-Blanco, PhD student at UC Davis

Description of presentation

A projectile point chronology for the South-Central Andes currently provides some chronological control for dating sites in the region (Klink and Aldenderfer 2005), however, flakes, many of them of obsidian, are the most common type of lithic material recovered from the surface of Archaic and Formative period sites in the Titicaca Basin, Central-South Andes. Obsidian hydration dating (OHD) can be used to date them and thus help to know the temporality of the sites, and obsidian is a very frequent material. Despite the OHD has been used in some Andean regions (e.g., Eerkens et al. 2008; Tripcevich et al. 2012, Bell 1977), it is not currently used in that region because a calibration curve does not yet exist. Luis’ immediate goal has been achieved, he has learned this technique, acquired the appropriate equipment installed in Peru to obtain the samples, and has been able to identify the hydration bands in a small obsidian sample of the Titicaca Basin. From these preliminary results, he will show the great potential that the use of OHD has for Andean archaeology and that continuing with the construction of an OHD calibration curve in the Titicaca Basin is feasible.

Luis A. Flores-Blanco, a Peruvian archaeologist is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Davis. He received a Masters in Prehistoric Archaeology at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain after receiving a Bachelor of Archaeology at the University of San Marcos in Peru. He has been a productive scholar publishing peer-reviewed articles and editing volumes on Peruvian archaeology. He has been co-director and director of archaeological excavations at Puno and Lima, Peru. Before joining the Anthropology PhD Program he was director of a research center at the UNESCO world heritage site of Chavín. In his current studies, Luis is attempting to understand emergent social complexity in the South-Central Andes and proposes to develop an obsidian hydration curve for his study region. His dissertation is titled “The roots of the social inequality in Peru’s Lake Titicaca Basin 4000 Years Ago”.