Huff Village Revisited: A New Radiocarbon Chronology for a Pivotal Time

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The large, heavily-fortified Huff village site in North Dakota is a quintessential Late Prehistoric plains village within the Middle Missouri region of the Northern Plains. Since the 1940s, attempts to establish Huff’s occupational history and absolute placement in time achieved only coarse-grained or inconclusive results, suggesting village occupations between AD 1300-1500. A new analysis including Bayesian modeling of 20 previous and 17 new radiocarbon assays established a high-resolution site chronology that constrains the occupation to only one or two generations during the mid-1400s. Based primarily on architectural and ceramic data, previous investigators suggest Huff marks the beginning of large-scale sociopolitical transitions in the region. These changes are characterized by regional population aggregations into heavily-fortified villages and intervillage competition underwritten by long-distance exchange and warfare. Some investigators also posit simultaneous shifts in social configurations eventually developed into the historic Mandan and Hidatsa clan structures observed by Catlin, Lowie, and Bowers in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, without an absolute site-level chronology, the exact tempo and timing of these society-wide transitions remained tentative. The new Huff village chronology suggests these processes began abruptly in the mid-1400s and evolved quickly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25367