Radiocarbon (Other Keyword)
1-25 (49 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It may be a cliché to say that art is a form of symbolic behavior and modern cognition as old as humankind itself. In Europe, recurring evidence of body decoration and artistic expression is associated with the emergence of cultural innovations introduced by Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic. Thus far, the earliest manipulation of animal teeth to be...
611th Air Support Group Resources
Project metadata for resources within the 611th Air Support Group cultural heritage resources collection.
Absolute Chronology of the Early Formative Revisited: Bayesian Analysis, Radiocarbon Chronology, and the Emergence of Pottery in the Americas (2016)
In 1987, the author’s doctoral dissertation featured a comprehensive analysis of calibrated radiocarbon dates associated with the earliest ceramic complexes in the Americas towards a model for the emergence of sedentary lifeways. This resulted in a critical evaluation of James Ford’s posthumously published model for the Early Formative diffusion of pottery as well as other cultural features in a region extending from the Southeastern U.S. through Mesoamerica and the Isthmo-Colombian Area to the...
Analysis of XAD as a Pre-Treatment Method for Radiocarbon Dating Bone (2017)
The presence of exogenous organic carbon is a major concern when radiocarbon dating bone. A particular source of error and frustration in the field of radiocarbon dating has been the analysis of bone that has undergone humification. Humification occurs during burial and results from a combination of two distinct processes: Maillard reactions involving indigenous organic carbon, and the complexation of collagen with soil humic substances. Soil humic substances—composed of fulvic acids, humic...
Applications of Wiggle-Match Dating in North American Historical Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wiggle-match dating (WMD) of tree-ring sequences facilitates high-resolution radiocarbon dating in historical archaeology, a period notorious for an imprecise radiocarbon record. We demonstrate the application of WMD in historical archaeology with two case studies: (1) a cypress dugout logboat exhibiting a unique combination of European and Native American...
Assessing the effectiveness of XAD-2 resin as pre-treatment method for AMS 14C dating (2016)
The ability to generate accurate and reliable radiocarbon dates for bone is of great importance in archaeology. Radiocarbon measurements are routinely performed on hydrolyzed bone extract, which may contain exogenous organic matter. The presence of exogenous organic matter may then affect the accuracy of the estimated radiocarbon dates. Several pre-treatment methods have been previously developed to minimize contamination from exogenous sources of organic carbon. Here, we assess the...
A Bayesian Model-Based Comparison of Radiocarbon Chronologies for the Earliest Complex Societies in the Maya Lowlands (2017)
Sedentary agricultural villages, ceramic technology, and evidence for institutionalized socio-economic inequality first appeared in the Maya lowlands during the Preclassic Period (1200 cal BC – cal AD 300). The chronological details of these significant cultural developments between different regions of the lowlands remain unclear in many cases because of an emphasis on local ceramic typologies that are often difficult to correlate. We use a Bayesian framework to model high-resolution AMS 14C...
Building a Meaningful First Americans Radiocarbon Chronology (2015)
Chronology is key to understanding the story of the first Americans. Accurate and precise ages from sites are necessary to develop chronological relationships and overlaps among different Paleoindian complexes. Proper dating of any Paleoindian horizon requires an understanding of the geological context, geochemical environment and potential contamination factors, material and chemical fraction dated, number of ages obtained, and many other variables. Without understanding these factors of...
The Challenges and Prospects of Developing Radiocarbon "Big Data" for the Study of Prehistoric Demography (2017)
The use of large radiocarbon datasets has the potential to transform archaeology and its place in the social and natural sciences in the coming decades. Radiocarbon ‘big data’ enhances the unique contribution of archaeology to reconstruct human demography over vast spans of time. This move towards big data is confronted by some central challenges in archaeological method and theory, such as the use of legacy data of disparate quality and working over broad spatial and temporal scales. For some,...
Chemical and Radiocarbon Analyses of Paint Samples from Oxtotitlán (2016)
The prehistoric rock paintings in the Oxtotitlán site are thought to be among the earliest of Mexico and represent the beginning of the highly influential Mexican muralism tradition. The proposed antiquity of the murals is based primarily on stylistic interpretation of the motifs represented in the paintings. Our objective was to use radiocarbon analyses of organic matter in the paint and biofilms covering paint layers to provide more direct evidence as to the ages of the artifacts. Small paint...
The Contribution of Tree-Ring Studies to Archaeological Research in Northwestern Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite more than fifty years of excellent archaeological research in Northwestern Mesoamerica, progress has been impeded by a lack of precise chronological controls to understand site developments and pinpoint the direction of political influence and cultural change....
Cultural Radiocarbon Determinations of Kentucky (1981)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Cut-Marked Bone of Drought-Tolerant Extinct Megafauna Deposited with Traces of Fire, Human Foraging, and Introduced Animals in SW Madagascar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa and drought exacerbated the effects of predation. However, such explanations are difficult to test due to the scarcity of individual sites with unambiguous traces of humans, introduced taxa, and endemic megaherbivores. We excavated three coastal ponds in arid...
Dating a Tree Island: A Comparison between Faunal Bone, Shell, Pottery, and Coprolites (2017)
South Florida’s tree island hammocks are islands that were once completely surrounded by water and used as habitation areas from the Archaic period and beyond. Although many islands along the coast can be dated using marine shell, interior tree islands (such as those found on Seminole Tribe of Florida reservation lands) generally lack these artifacts making for a difficult dating strategy. This paper will focus on a comparison of dating material, including shell, pottery, faunal bone, and...
Demography, Heritage, and Archaeology: A View from Australia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a cautionary case study in heritage and archaeology from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which is undergoing a rapid transformation due to an unprecedented program of urban and regional development. Following the author’s previous work in...
Dendro-14C-Wiggle-Match Contributions to Northwestern Mesoamerican Chronology (2015)
This paper reports on the progress of the Dendro-14C wiggle-matching project begun in 2013. Initial work established the feasibility of the methods and availability of the data. This paper will report on the ways in which the data can aid in cultural interpretation in northwestern Mesoamerican regions. A focus will be on dating the construction of high status areas at the sites of La Quemada and Los Pilarillos in the Malpaso Valley, Zacatecas, and their chronological relationship to...
Determining local marine reservoir effect ΔR correction factors for Cuba (2017)
The atmosphere constantly produces radiocarbon, 14C, which dissolves in the oceans as carbon dioxide. Theoretically, radiocarbon concentrations are equilibrated between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. However, in some regions old seawater at the bottom of the oceans returns significantly older radiocarbon dates as water sinks down the water column, causing the isotopic decay of 14C to increase with depth. This creates a delay of ~200-500 years for the atmospheric carbon to be...
The Early Spread of Peaches (Prunus persica) across Spanish La Florida and their Importance for Modeling Archaeological Chronologies and Indigenous Networks (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Peaches were ubiquitous across eastern North America by the mid-seventeenth century, less than 100 years after the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, the earliest possible cultivation date for peaches in what is today the United States. As such, preserved or charred peach pits at archaeological sites, each with a built-in terminus post quem of c. 1565,...
Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production (2018)
In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...
Exploring Settlement and Mobility Pattern Changes Using Radiocarbon Databses (2015)
Using data from a newly constructed regional 14C database for the Early and Middle-Holocene on the northern Northwest Coast of North America, a combination of Bayesian models, summed probability distributions and spatial analyses are used to evaluate hypotheses regarding the nature and timing for the development of collector strategies on the northern coast. Research and taphonomic biases are accounted for by binning the radiocarbon data, and by applying a general linear model to the data set. I...
Exploring the Differences in Radiocarbon Ages of Seals and Caribou: A Case Study from Kotzebue Sound (2016)
J. Louis Giddings’ pioneering work in chronology building in Northwest Alaska laid the groundwork for this case study, where we explore differences between the radiocarbon ages of seals and caribou from Late Holocene archaeological sites in the Kotzebue Sound region. Samples were recovered from distinct cultural features like house floors and cache pits which date between 130 and 1600 BP, including two samples from a house excavated by Giddings in Kotzebue in 1941. Our comparisons of radiocarbon...
Frontier Networks Archaeological Project - Culture Contact in Mississippian west-Central Illinois
For thousands of years, demographic upheaval and migration have led to social settings where distinct human populations coexist. Communities pursue various types of interaction in these multiethnic contexts, ranging from the maintenance of ethnic distinctions through social and political pluralism to the adoption of traits as part of processes of ethnogenesis. This project seeks to examine changes in networks of social interaction, identity, and exchange following a migration process in a...
High-Precision Chronology Building at Coastal Sites on California’s Channel Islands (2013)
Using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) techniques and chronology building calibration software that incorporates Bayesian statistics, it is possible to establish high-precision chronologies for complex sites. This includes shell midden sites, which are common along coastlines in the United States and often contain multiple distinct strata. We present the example of SCRI-333, on the western end of Santa Cruz Island, California. At this site, we selected carbonized twig and marine shell...
A History of Convergences: Timescales, Temporalities, and Mississippian Beginnings (2015)
An early Mississippian world came about at and around Cahokia in the eleventh century CE owing to the convergences of people with other organisms, celestial objects, atmospheric conditions, landforms, and elements, each with their own distinctive temporalities and affects. Understanding those convergences historically entails grappling with timing and duration, and we offer a Bayesian reading of the latest radiocarbon datasets considered against the backdrop of the suspected periodicities of the...
Holloman Air Force Base Resources
Project metadata for resources within the Holloman Air Force Base cultural heritage resources collection.