Modeling Fort Ancient: Legacy Data and Pathways to Improving Chronology in Late Precolonial Kentucky

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.

Ceramic- and lithic-based phase-level chronologies, built on assumptions of gradual change over time, have traditionally comprised the foundation of archaeological reconstructions. Recent reevaluations of long-standing regional chronologies, often based on pre-AMS radiocarbon dates and the presence or absence of presumed “index fossil” artifacts, can be made considerably more accurate, as well as more sensitive to changes across short spans of time, through expanded, problem-oriented AMS dating programs. In the Middle Ohio River Valley, Fort Ancient chronologies suffer from poor radiocarbon hygiene, a limited number of dates, and uneven geographic representation. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of an effort to refine the southwestern Fort Ancient chronology using a combination of legacy dates and Bayesian chronological modeling. Our results demonstrate that Fort Ancient chronologies are in need of revision, primarily through the creation of an expanded, modern radiocarbon dataset. We additionally discuss the results of associated simulated models to identify the chronometric data that will be required going forward that will be needed to examine the underlying social processes at play in the rapid social transformations that were occurring throughout the Eastern Woodlands during the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32847