Impact of Paleoclimate Variation on the Settlement History of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau through the Use of Summed Radiocarbon Probability Distributions

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.

Settlement histories of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau have been compiled through the record of riverine villages of the Columbia and Fraser Rivers and their many tributaries. Columbia-Fraser Plateau chronologies have seldom been revisited in the years since their publications in syntheses of the 1980s–1990s. Our analysis of these records uses summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates and GIS, which allow for a more detailed picture of past settlement activities. SPDs have become the preferred technique for analyzing aggregate radiocarbon dates to determine change in the distribution that are “real” and not artifacts of sampling strategies. GIS, along with radiocarbon dates, documents the change in spatial distribution of villages over time, indicating the establishment, abandonment, and return to villages. Comparison of SPDs with paleoclimate records indicates a correlation between cool periods and the greater intensity of house occupation. Low points in the distributions may indicate periods, which coincide with warmer climatic conditions and may represent relocation from riverine to upland villages. Notable low points in riverine occupation occurred between 4100– 3700 cal BP and 2100–1500 cal BP. Revisiting these chronologies with modern analytical strategies paired with ever-more-detailed paleoclimate models allows for a better understanding of the settlement history of the Columbia-Fraser Plateau.

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): 32796