The Role of Edge Effects in Late Holocene Archaeological Radiocarbon Time Series

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many archaeological radiocarbon time-series throughout the world display a decline of radiocarbon date frequencies from ca. 900-600 cal BP. In this presentation we examine alternative hypotheses that may explain these trends. We analyze whether dramatic declines in radiocarbon date frequencies are due to biases such as i) favoring the use of relative dating using well-known diagnostic artifacts, ii) the use of directly dated historical documents, iii) imprecision in calibrated dates between 900 and 600 cal BP, or iv) whether social-ecological dynamics provide a more plausible explanation. This presentation develops a multiple-proxy method for the assessment of edge effects in archaeological radiocarbon time-series, and we attempt to apply causal methodologies to distinguish between potential edge effects and sharp declines generated by social-ecological processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23875