Magnetic Properties of Obsidians from the Southwestern U.S

Geochemical signatures of Southwestern U.S. obsidians have been intensively studied, in part to use as a provenance method for archaeological obsidians (Shackley, 2005). We have examined magnetic properties of unoriented samples from 10 geologic obsidian sources in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Five samples from each source were used, and each sample was cut into two specimens. Magnetic susceptibilities of all 100 specimens were measured on a susceptometer at F&M; alternating field demagnetizations of all 100 specimens were done on a cryogenic magnetometer at the BGC; and hysteresis curves, back-field IRMs, and thermomagnetic curves were done for nine specimens on a VFTB at LMU. The overall mean and interquartile range for susceptibilities of all 100 specimens are 56 and 9-85 x10-8 m3/kg. The overall mean and interquartile range for the NRM of all 100 specimens are 3.4 and 0.40-8.5 x10-4 A m2/kg. Variability within source groups is considerably smaller, so that a scatter plot of NRM against susceptibility (Figure 1) shows that several of the sites can be discriminated based on these two properties. AF demagnetization shows that in the large majority of cases a characteristic magnetic direction is isolated by 150 mT peak field. The overall mean and interquartile range for the median destructive fields for all 100 specimens are 96 and 52-117 mT. For the nine specimens used to measure hysteresis curves, seven of these plot in the middle of the pseudosingle domain field on a Day plot, while the other two plot on the boundary between the pseudosingle and the multidomain fields. All of these samples have a Curie temperature component just below 580°C. Eight of these nine samples have a low-temperature Curie temperature component lower than 200°C. We plan to further examine this component using low temperatures, and to consider statistical discrimination of these different sources using multivariate statistics applied to these various properties.