Milling Implement Manufacturing at the Ironwood Quarry, Riverside County, California

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Ironwood Quarry is one of a series of milling implement quarries in the Palo Verde Mountains Quarry District of southern California. This quarry presents a unique circumstance where most manufacturing locations are segregated and can be individually identified. The low-density of the general debris of quarrying and preliminary shaping of preforms for milling implements thus facilitates understanding of individual manufacturing episodes. Data collected from the quarry allowed preliminary analyses of frequencies and distributions of milling implement manufacturing activities associated with pestle, milling platform (metate), and perhaps handstone (mano) production. Manufacturing failures left at the quarry demonstrate that it was much more difficult to produce a stone pestle than a metate. The labor investment in making common household tools suggests that a high value was placed on these tools by local cultural groups. These data have implications for other milling implement quarry landscapes where a high density of debris from multiple episodes of manufacture over time is more difficult to understand.