Reconstructing Settlement Histories using Simulations and Calibration of Radiocarbon Dates: An Example from a Plankhouse Village in Southwestern British Columbia, Canada

Summary

Documenting the formation, growth, and decline of individual settlements is critical to explaining the development of settled village life. Radiocarbon dating is often the best, and in our case only, chronometric tool for establishing these temporal dynamics. Here, we explore several approaches to reconstructing the temporality of settlement at the Dionisio Point site, a precontact plankhouse village in southwestern British Columbia. Two decades of research at this 1,500 year-old hunter-gatherer-fisher village has generated more than 30 radiocarbon dates, presenting a rare opportunity to investigate the timing, duration, and, most importantly, shape of the village occupation. We employ Monte-Carlo simulation of uncalibrated dates to evaluate which of several alternative probability distributions of datable events best fits the empirical data set. We compare the results of this procedure with the summed probability distribution of calibrated dates, and consider our results in light of more recent Bayesian approaches to chronology-building. Our results suggest that using multiple methodologies offers useful insights into the complex settlement histories we seek to understand.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Issues in Building Radiocarbon Chronologies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage