Crystalline minerals such as fluorite have been recovered from numerous prehistoric sites in the Midcontinent yet little research had previously been conducted concerning who used it and what they used it for. Ethnohistorical accounts inform us that crystalline minerals were of importance to American Indians during the Historic Period. These accounts are used to provide a basis for exploring the possible significance of fluorite to prehistoric peoples living near outcrops located along the lower Ohio River valley. In this thesis I analyze mainly prehistoric fluorite personal adornment items as well as similar items made from other locally available raw materials such as cannel coal and clay to gain an understanding of the importance of this colorful crystalline mineral to prehistoric inhabitants of the midcontinent.

During the 9th and 10th centuries large amounts of Islamic coins arrived in Scandinavia. Most of them were used as silver in a bullion-economy and were often fragmented because of this. However, their use was not limited to only economic purposes because we see large amounts of pendants made of these coins. By suspending a coin with a loop or only a hole you transform it into something completely different, something that has a new meaning. This new meaning is the focus of this thesis and by analysing graves where Islamic coin pendants were deposited, we can conclude how they were thought of and used. In this thesis I conclude that Islamic coin-pendants were used as status objects during the Viking-age, by both elite and non-elite people in Uppland. The Islamic inscriptions on the coins were most likely not understood and probably only seen as symbols and patterns similarly to other European coin-pendants.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The Antler and Sonoma orogenies occurred along the southwest-trending passive Pacific margin of North America during the Paleozoic concluding with the accretion of the McCloud Arc. A southeast-trending sinistral transform fault truncated the continental margin in the Permian, becoming a locus for initiation of an east-dipping subduction zone creating the Sierran magmatic arc. Constrained in age between two early Triassic tuff layers, the volcanic clasts in the breccia of Frog Lakes represent one of the earliest records of mafic magmatism in the eastern Sierra Nevada. Tholeiitic rock clasts found in the breccia of Frog Lakes in the Saddlebag Lake pendant in the east central Sierra Nevada range in composition from 48% to 63% SiO2. Boninites produced by early volcanism of subduction initiation by spontaneous nucleation at the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc are more depleted in trace element concentrations than the clasts while andesites from the northern volcanic zone of the Andes produced on crust 50 km thick have similar levels of enrichment and provide a better geochemical modern analogue. Textural analysis of the breccia of Frog Lakes suggest a subaqueous environment of deposition from a mature magmatic arc built on continental crust > 50 km thick during the Triassic. The monzodiorites of Saddlebag and Odell Lakes are temporal intrusive equivalents of the breccia of Frog Lakes and zircon geochemistry indicates a magmatic arc petrogenesis.