Midden Accumulation Rates in Prince Rupert Harbour: New Applications for Percussion Coring

Summary

The monumentality of the anthropogenic landscape of the Prince Rupert Harbour region on north coastal British Columbia has long been recognized for the number, density, and size of the shell midden terraces containing villages dating to the last 5000 years. The scale of the region’s archaeological record makes regional assessments of the mode and tempo of shell-bearing site construction difficult. We report on a program of regional and site-specific percussion coring combined with 14C dating to evaluate patterns in accumulation rates of shell-bearing components in the anthropogenic terraces of major village sites. Specifically, we examine accumulation rates as measures of volume/year in the stratigraphic column. We compare these results against Bayesian modeling of 14C dates and other archaeological and historical indicators to assess major stanzas in settlement history in the region in terms of monumental site construction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Terraforming and Monumentality in Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Landscapes

Keywords

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