Radiocarbon Chronology-Building and Relational Histories in Iroquoian Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper summarizes work completed to date by the Dating Iroquoia project. Our aim has been to construct refined regional chronologies for select Northern Iroquoian community relocation sequences through radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modeling, including novel approaches for overcoming the ca. AD 1480–1610 plateau and reversal in the calibration curve. We have not sought to refine regional culture-histories so much as make them obsolete by dating specific village sites and reconstructing occupational histories of both communities and nascent confederacies. The development of enhanced archaeological chronologies has allowed us to re-plot events in ways that have shifted thinking about polity development and population movement in the region from models based on systems-based thinking to approaches that favor relational histories of social and political development. We discuss how new understandings of processes of internal and external conflict and the formation of Northern Iroquoian confederacies have emerged from the working out of refined radiocarbon chronologies. We also highlight the work that remains to be done and suggest future directions for chronology-building in the archaeology of northeastern North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32694