Professor Steven Shackley directs the Archaeological XRF Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He, and his graduate student colleagues use the laboratories x-ray fluorescence (XRF) facilities to train students in geoarchaeological science. The x-ray fluorescence spectrometer that the lab has been using for many years is near its service life end. Repairs have become all too frequent, and in order to continue this important research and student training in the physical sciences for archaeology, NSF will provide funding to replace the aging instrument. The new instrument will last decades and continue this non-destructive funding are archaeological artifacts.
Many of these geoarchaeological projects focus on the chemical compositional analysis of obsidian artifacts and determining the source of those artifacts. Shackley and his students through fieldwork at sources of obsidian throughout the North American Southwest have produced a database of obsidian sources that is used by researchers worldwide (see www.swxrflab.net/swobsrcs.htm). This is the most comprehensive obsidian source database in the world. The team typically analyzes thousands of artifacts each year from academic, private sector, and government agencies. The very real value of this energy-dispersive XRF analyses, is that it is completely non-destructive. In part because of this, many American Indian Nations have permitted analysis of artifacts that would be unavailable to other instrumental analyses that require destruction of all or part of the artifacts. .
There are a variety of student projects ongoing. Indeed, in the Spring semester of 2007, no less than 12 student projects are proceeding in the Berkeley lab. This includes an analysis of obsidian artifacts from East Coast museums, hoping to determine the long range trade in obsidian artifacts (the farthest eastern obsidian source is at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming). Obsidian was such a valuable stone material it was traded from sources in Nevada all the way to New Jersey in prehistory. Students are currently analyzing obsidian artifacts from Paleoindian sites (ca. 10,000-15,000 years old) in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, late period artifacts from Nebraska, obsidian from Costa Rican and Ethiopian sites (the latter are up to 1 million years old), pottery and porcelain fragments from historic sites on the Berkeley campus, and many more.
Broader impacts, are part and parcel of the labs work. The research group has and will continue to explain the ways in which humans have related to each other through trade and other forms of interaction from the earliest hominids to the historic period. Many of the students trained in the laboratory have gone on to continue the work all over the world, and particularly in the U.S.
