Big Data for Late Mississippian Depopulation: A View of Vacant Quarter Chronologies from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past decade, the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) has expanded to include entries on over 100,000 radiocarbon dates from the lower 48 states, serving as a freely accessible database that can help reassess big picture questions involving archaeological chronology. In this paper, we use data from CARD to contextualize the timing and tempo of the Vacant Quarter depopulation in the Eastern Woodlands, which impacted Mississippian (AD 1000–1700) polities centered in the confluence of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee Rivers in the AD 1400s–1500s. We have also obtained 133 new radiocarbon measurements from archaeological samples that robustly date Late Mississippian polities in two of the Vacant Quarter subregions: the Upper Tombigbee River and the Middle Cumberland Region. We use chronological hygiene considerations to evaluate the quality of the legacy radiocarbon data on CARD and Bayesian chronological modeling of this data to assess the timing of Late Mississippian sites within the Vacant Quarter. Through considering data compiled on CARD and newly obtained radiocarbon data for addressing a big picture question, we provide a larger commentary on the utility of legacy data compilations in chronologically driven archaeological research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35752.0