Introduction

Stephen Weiner's book, Microarchaeology: Beyond the Visible Archaeological Record, is the inspiration for my title. Weiner’s premise is that many of the most informative properties of the archaeological record are inaccessible to our senses and require instrumental assistance in order to be perceived or measured. This "microscopic record" includes microscopic artifacts as well as properties of macro-remains that are only observable microscopically. Weiner points out, following the physicist Feynman, that this microscopic record is vast, since there are seven orders of magnitude between the millimeter scale and the scale of atoms. Informative measurements on this sub-visible (but vast) record can be made via microscopy, infrared (IR) spectroscopy, elemental analysis, x-ray diffraction, isotopic analysis, residue analysis, DNA analysis, and other techniques.

My main purpose in starting this blog is to have a place to post notes and news about archaeological research I will be doing on the Pacific coast of Chiapas Mexico, a region also known as Soconusco, over the next several years. The project is a bit different from many archaeology projects in that it will emphasize instrumental measurements both in the field and in the lab to eliminate the need for invasive archaeological sampling. In the field, I'll use ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry to identify anomalies for sampling. I'll take subsurface soil samples with a split-core sampler, and then use x-ray fluorescence to characterize vertical and horizontal geochemical variation. The portable-XRF will be configured to optimize for phosphorus, which is a good indicator of high organics, like middens, and calcium, which is a good indicator of wood ash, such as would be produced by kitchen fires, pottery firing, and so on.  

I'll write more about the purposes of the project and the various analyses planned later on. Ultimately, I'll be posting geophysical survey imagery, photos, and other kinds of raw data.