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

Bibliographic Data

ID9339492
AuthorsJoan S Schneider (0000-0002-6906-717X, California Department of Parks and Recreation, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume12
Issue1
Pages1-31
Publication date2020-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCalifornia Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1947-461X • E-ISSN: 1947-4628
PublisherManey Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1947461x.2020.1721538
OpenAlexW3031607960
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited10

The 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

Archaeology · Debris · Geography · Investment (military · Meteorology · Mining engineering · Plucking · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Engineering · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

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