American underwater archaeologists found unique stone artifacts to nine thousand years at the bottom of Lake Huron. The tools of labor were made of obsidian mined in a career remote from the place of findings by more than three thousand kilometers in Central Oregon. This does not fit the established picture of the distribution of obsidian artifacts in Decolumbovy America. The study published in the PLOS One magazine briefly describes the press release on Phys.org.
Researchers studied flooded 8-10 thousand years ago areas of relief, which were previously populated by plants, animals and people, and are now at the bottom of Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes of the United States and Canada. For archaeologists, this Paleolandshaft is an intact “record” of the Environment of the Late Pleistocene and Early Golocene, including ancient human parking lots. At a depth of 32 meters, between two hunting buildings, archaeologists have discovered two obsidian swells.
Among primitive people, Obsidian was considered valuable raw materials due to its ability to split into fragments with cutting edges, as well as appearance suitable for creating jewelry. Volcanic mineral was widely used and sold over most of the history of mankind, and the unique chemical signatures of stones from various fields allow archaeologists to trace the development in the ancient times of trade relations and social relations in regions such as the Arctic, East Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and Mexico.
In the US and Canada, the sources of obsidian are careers in the North-West USA, in the Rocky Mountains and east of them (up to the state of South Dakota), and in the south-west, in the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Interestingly, archaeological finds of obsidian artifacts east of the rocky mountains follow a clear chronological scheme. They were systematically used by the ancient Indians as an exotic product in the middle of the Woodland period (from 1000 to our era to 1000 years of our era), but earlier finds were sporadic and represented only by a small number of obsidian decisions. Usually they took place from oriental sources in Wyoming and New Mexico.
Taking into account this pattern, the opening of two obsidian deductors to the age of ten thousand years at the bottom of Lake Huron is unprecedented. Their source is the quarry is not east of the rocky mountains, but in the West, in the state of Orgeon, at a distance of approximately four thousand kilometers, which makes finding an ancient testimony of the presence of Western Obsidian in the continental part of the United States.
According to scientists, both samples arrived from Oregon to the Great Lakes area through a chain of hands, and not through direct access to the source of obsidian. This means that already at that time, a developed network of social contacts was present in the United States, stretching from the West to the East through fertile landscapes, liberated from the ice of the Pleistocene glaciation. However, it is impossible to say for sure whether obsidian fell to the north by chance or it was a regular phenomenon.