Idaho's Radiocarbon Record and the Challenges of Chronometric Hygiene

Summary

Idaho’s position as a hub adjoining several culture areas gives its radiocarbon chronology more than local interest. The record of late Pleistocene and Holocene radiometric dates extends back more than fifty years and includes at least 800 known or reported assays, not all of which are on file at the Archaeological Survey of Idaho. As of mid-2014 more than 650 dates were available from 184 sites distributed across all ten of the Level 3 ecoregions intercepted by the state’s border. Not surprisingly, here as elsewhere, issues of chronometric hygiene haunt interpretation and contribute to debates and uncertainties concerning initial colonization, the emergence of the storage-anchored "winter village pattern," the arrival of bow-and-arrow technology, the appearance and spread of pottery, and, more generally, the accurate establishment of occupation timing throughout the state. This paper reviews the sample, and offers a preliminary scoring system combining sample type, measurement method, and the age and precision of the measurement to gauge the relevance of the dates to events of interest in Idaho prehistory.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Solving Archaeological Research Problems in Rocky Mountain and Plains Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage