Sourcing in archaeology is identifying where a particular resource occurs naturally. When possible, humans select living sites where available resources are abundant, including plants and animals for food, wood for building houses and fires, stone for making tools and buildings, clay for making pottery, and all kinds of materials that make living possible.
However, not all materials used by people in the past were readily available to them; some materials had to be obtained from quite long distances away. Archaeologists call these long-distance resources 'exotic' or 'non-local'. For example, Baltic amber was an exotic material prized throughout Europe, but found only in certain locations.
Exotic Material Sourcing
Exotic materials made it to users through long-distance trade, or through their own quarrying or gathering activities. Sourcing, finding out where the raw material of an exotic came from, tells us how far people traveled to obtain that resource, or alternatively, how far a given material was transported through trade.
The most common sourcing in archaeological studies is lithic sourcing, in which the geochemical makeup of different types of stone, particularly obsidian, is compared to that of known quarry sites. More recently, stable isotope analysis has been used to source all kinds of materials, include people themselves.
Selected Sources
Claassen, Cheryl P. and Samuella Sigmann 1993 Sourcing Busycon artifacts of the eastern United States. American Antiquity 58(2):333-347.
Erlandson, Jon M., J. D. Robertson, and Christophe Descantes 1999 Geochemical analysis of eight red ochres from western North America. American Antiquity 64(3):517-526.
Simon, Arleyn W. and James H. Burton 1998 Anthropological interpretations from archaeological ceramic studies: An introduction. Journal of Anthropological Research 54(4):435-446.
