Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)
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.
Other Keywords
Chronology •
Woodland •
Dating Techniques: Radiometric •
Iroquoian •
contact period •
Trade and exchange •
Dating Techniques •
Ceramic Analysis •
Iroquois •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling
Geographic Keywords
North America: Northeast and Midatlantic •
Alberta (State / Territory) •
Yukon Territory (State / Territory) •
New Hampshire (State / Territory) •
Idaho (State / Territory) •
Maine (State / Territory) •
British Columbia (State / Territory) •
Wisconsin (State / Territory) •
Michigan (State / Territory) •
New Brunswick (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Major Implications of the Dating Iroquoia Project: Rethinking Coalescence, Conflict, and Early European Influences in the Lower Great Lakes Region (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper details the preliminary results of the Dating Iroquoia project and reviews some of the most significant implications of our revised radiocarbon chronology as they relate to current understandings of Iroquoian cultural development. First, a brief review of traditional approaches to...
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Radiocarbon and Historical Archaeology in Iroquoia: Bringing Near-Calendar Dating Precision to Iroquoian Chronology with Radiocarbon – Methods, Issues and Potential (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper outlines the aims and methods of the Dating Iroquoia project by which we propose to achieve calendar chronological precision from radiocarbon for Iroquoian sites at, or better than, the level of individual settlement spans – i.e. calendar resolution at the level of approximately one to two...
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Radiocarbon Dating the Iroquoian Occupation of Northern New York (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty new, high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates have been obtained on maize, faunal remains and ceramic residues from 18 pre-contact Iroquoian village sites in northern New York. These dates add significant new information to the chronology of the Iroquoian occupation of the region. Once thought to span AD...
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Struggling with Radiocarbon Dates at the Dawson Site in Downtown Montréal (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, construction work on Sherbrooke street in downtown Montréal has led to the discovery of late St. Lawrence Iroquoian remains that are part of the Dawson site, an Iroquoian village first discovered in 1859. Two years of excavations, in 2016 and 2017, provided new data representing a welcome addition...
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Telling Localized Indigenous Histories of Trade through AMS Dating and Bayesian Chronological Modeling in Southern Ontario, Canada (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late sixteenth-century chronology of Indigenous sites in Southern Ontario has, until recently, relied upon relative means such as ceramic seriation and trade good chronologies. Bayesian chronological modeling of high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates is increasingly being applied to sites believed to date to...
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Time, Space and Ceramic Attributes: The Ontario Iroquoian Case (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ontario Iroquoian chronology has been largely based on observed or inferred changes in the frequency of rim sherd types or attributes through time. Such observations include the increasing development of collars, decreasing complexity in collar motif, decreasing frequency of horizontals and changes to the...
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Timing the Circulation of Nonlocal Materials in Seneca- and Onondaga-Region Sites (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I evaluate newly acquired AMS radiocarbon dates for Seneca- and Onondaga-region sites, focusing on what these new dates can tell us about the regional exchange of non-local materials in the circa fourteenth- to seventeenth- century ancestral Haudenosaunee homeland (what is today central New...
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An Updated Radiocarbon Chronology of the Middle to Late Woodland Transition in Southern Ontario: Regional Variation in the Dynamics of Cultural Change (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle to Late Woodland transition in southern Ontario extends over approximately 500 years and encompasses several changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, ritual practices, and ceramic and lithic crafting traditions. The last major review of the radiocarbon chronology related to these changes...