Assessing Settlement Dynamics in the San Juan Islands and Northwestern Washington, a Bayesian Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent developments in Bayesian approaches to radiocarbon dating have enabled reexaminations of questions of population dynamism in the Salish Sea. This study expands on Taylor et al. 2011 using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and an expanded data set of 538 radiocarbon dates from academic and cultural resource management literature. The expanded sample suggests that the patterns of population growth from 3200–2800 cal BP in coastal northwestern Washington, with an influx to the islands during 2600–2200 cal BP. A subsequent decrease in radiocarbon frequencies and large sites suggests shifts in use of the islands, followed by peak large-scale occupation from 650 to 300 cal BP. We compare marine and terrestrial dates to assess the robustness of these patterns. The impacts of erosion and other postdepositional processes on potential dating patterns are considered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32977