Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With the increasing accessibility of AMS radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modeling, archaeologists working in Northeastern North America have increasingly shifted focus toward testing long-held understandings about the timing and tempo of the profound cultural changes enacted by Iroquoian and other Woodland-period societies. This session brings together scholars whose work aims to revise chronological understandings of socio-cultural change, migration, and exchange throughout the northeast in the Precolumbian and contact periods. Members of Dating Iroquoia, a multi-year, NSF-funded project, present in detail the methodology, results, and implications of more than 200 new AMS dates on six community relocation sequences in Southern Ontario and New York State. Participants are specifically asked to consider the impact of these new radiocarbon-based chronologies on current understandings of sociocultural transformation in the study region as it relates to processes of settlement aggregation and community coalescence; inter- and intra-group conflict; the formation of ethnohistorically-known nations and confederacies; and interaction and exchange between Indigenous peoples and between Indigenous groups and Europeans. This session intentionally bridges American and Canadian research traditions, as well as prehistoric and historic archaeologies, to arrive at new, absolute chronologies that permit enhanced understandings of the lived experience of cultural change in the northeastern woodlands.