Extracting Stone: The Archaeology of Quarry Landscapes [Paperback]

[T]he production quality of the volume is high... The volume will appeal to members of the public and will be useful to undergraduate students and beginning graduate students looking for an overview of quarry studies in North America. I can see this text being used in a lithic technology class. Its length (157 pages including bibliography) makes it accessible for students.  American Antiquity Vol. 91, Issue 1This exciting new addition to the American Landscapes series provides an in-depth account of how flintknappers obtained and used stone based on archaeological, geological, landscape, and anthropological data. Featuring case studies from three key regions in North America, this book gives readers a comprehensive view of quarrying activities ranging from extracting the raw material to creating finished stone tools.Quarry landscapes were some of the first large-scale land modification efforts among early peoples in the New World. The chronological time periods covered by quarrying activities show that most intensive use took place during parts of the Archaic and Woodland periods or between roughly 40001000 years ago when denser populations existed, but use began as early as the Paleoindian Period, about 13,0009000 years ago, and ended in the Historic or Protohistoric periods, when colonists and Native Americans mined chert for gunflints and sharpening stones or abrasives. From the procurement systems approach common in the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists can now employ a landscape approach to quarry studies in tandem with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) computer mapping and digital analysis, Light and RADAR (LiDAR) airborne laser scanning for recording topography, or high resolution satellite imagery.Authors Dowd and Trubitt show how sites functioned in a broad landscape context, which site locations or raw material types were preferred and why, what cultures were responsible for innovative or intensive quarry resource extraction, as well as how land use cl3Á