Obsidian is a natural glassy rock that was produced by volcanoes and used by pre-contact people across North America for making stone tools. Obsidian is the sharpest naturally occurring substance on earth, which made it ideal for making tools such as arrowheads and knives that were designed to slice animal flesh. Many obsidian tools have been found in Alberta despite the fact that there are no natural sources of it in the province. This means that obsidian was traded or carried into Alberta from long distances away. Research on obsidian tools at archaeological sites in Alberta has been conducted on a small scale since the late 1980’s. The current Alberta Obsidian Project (AOP) is the first large-scale attempt to analyse our province’s obsidian; it began in 2014 when a research plan was developed by members of the Archaeological Survey of Alberta, the Royal Alberta Museum, and the Center of Applied Isotope Studies (CAIS) at the University of Georgia. Read more
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