IAOS Obsidian Bibliography

Take your pick - click on the link to download

The IAOS Interdisciplinary Obsidian Bibliography is available in two different versions:

  1. BIBLIOGRAPHY.HTML: The bibliography was last updated on 8/11/97 and is clearly showing its age. At the present time, the contents of the bibliography are almost identical to 1993 DOS release - our efforts these days are aimed at the Obsidian Source Catalog.

  2. BIBLIO.EXE: This is a zipped, self-extracting version of the file above (about 250K). To use the HTML file, download the bibliography to your hard drive, type BIBLIO, then to unzip, and open the file (INTRO.HTM) with your Web browser (look in the File menu of your browser). If you are online when you are viewing the file, the external links will be active although the internal links might not work.

To search the bibliography with your Web browser, look in the Edit menu (in Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Exlorer) for the Find or Find in Page option. By searching for text strings (authors, dates, journal titles, keywords embedded in titles, etc.), you will be able to rapidly comb the bibliography file for a matching string.
The obsidian bibliography contained in the html and zip files available through this page is distributed by the International Association for Obsidian Studies for use by members and other persons interested in obsidian research. The bibliography may be freely copied and distributed. Do what you will with printouts of the bibliography, although we would appreciate your leaving our credits intact. This obsidian bibliography represents a fairly comprehensive and very interdisciplinary sampling of the available obsidian-related literature through about 1993. We focused our search on published materials, a liberal selection of government agency reports, Master's theses, Ph.D. dissertations, and references caught in keyword searches of many online university library catalogs and the GeoRef and National Technical Information Services (NTIS) databases.

The references are primarily concerned with:

  1. Obsidian hydration dating
  2. Obsidian characterization ("sourcing") research
  3. Lithic technology and obsidian
  4. Ethnographic data concerning the procurement and utilization of obsidian
  5. Geological, petrographic, or petrological studies involving obsidian
  6. Physical chemistry of glass reactions
  7. Geologic descriptions (or sometimes even mere mentions) of obsidian sources
To a much lesser degree, references were also included for some of the non-obsidian natural glasses (pitchstone, tektites, Libyan Desert Glass, and combustion or contact metamorphism glasses).

Although we have tried to be comprehensive, the overall literature coverage is admittedly biased towards the Far Western United States, particularly when it comes to the "gray" literature that is endemic in archaeology.

Unabbreviated names for all references are used whenever the full name of the citation is known. In some cases, particularly in the non-English literature, abbreviations are used for publications for which we have incomplete knowledge. For many of these references, further information is available in the GeoRef and NTIS databases.

Although much of the literature that we examined was in English, we have also included many non-English references. As non-speakers of most of these other languages, we offer our apologies in advance for misspellings and mangled grammar in the latter references. When English translations of the titles are available, they appear in brackets immediately preceding the original language title. Numerous references were also included in the bibliography without review because of their apparent relationship to obsidian, either through keywords embedded in the title or because of available keyword descriptors included in reference databases.

Addresses and affiliations for the authors have also changed:

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Last Updated: 01/02/2006
International Association for Obsidian Studies