Refinement of the Chronostratigraphy and Age of Pit Features at the Cooper's Ferry Site, Idaho

Summary

The Cooper’s Ferry site, which is located on an alluvial terrace at the confluence of Rock Creek and the Salmon River in Idaho, contains a stratified sequence of Western Stemmed Tradition archaeological components within alluvial and aeolian sediments. Excavations have revealed large quantities of lithic artifacts and numerous cultural features, including several storage pits. Recent excavations have encountered artifacts and faunal materials from intact deposits located beneath the late Pleistocene-aged Rock Creek paleosol. Because these lower deposits have not produced enough datable organic materials, we will be using single grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to establish a chronostratigraphic framework for the site’s earliest archaeological components. OSL dating will also be used to evaluate the timing of a single cultural pit feature’s construction and use, in order to evaluate whether it contains multiple episodes of superimposed pit construction. We expect that OSL dating of sediment within the pit will establish the age of pit usage and that the feature post-dates the surrounding sediments, confirming that it is a pit. We also expect that OSL equivalent dose (De) distributions in alluvial sediments will be less scattered than the sediment within the pit, which we expect to have widely scattered De distributions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17599