Using Non-destructive X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis to Investigate the Prehistoric Use and Distribution of Hornfels in Southern Quebec

Abstract

In the middle St. Lawrence Valley of southern Quebec, Canada, there is a lack of suitable raw material for making chipped stone tools. Throughout prehistory, aboriginal groups used different strategies to compensate for this deficiency such as regional movement of groups during seasonal subsistence cycles to visit quarries (Paleoindian period, 11,500–9,500 BP), long distance trade (Late Archaic and Early Woodland periods, 6,000–2,000 BP), or substituting stone with other materials like bone to make tools (Late Woodland period, 1,000–400 BP). Aboriginal people could also use local materials that were of lesser quality (e.g., quartz, shale, and hornfels). In southern Quebec, Cretaceous igneous intrusions created the Monteregian hills and through contact metamorphism converted the overlying Utica shale to hornfels. In 1993, archaeologists discovered a prehistoric hornfels workshop site on the northern flank of Mont Royal in the heart of Montreal (Ethnoscop 1998). This site is an extensive workshop for the bifacial reduction and transformation of hornfels associated directly with bedrock outcrops further up the hillside. Hornfels is found on at least 21 other prehistoric habitation sites in southern Quebec spanning 5,000 years from the Late Archaic to the Late Woodland period (Table 1). For this study we characterized samples from six of these sites.