Space, Time, and Climate in the North American Midcontinent: Settlement Patterns and Paleoclimatic Variability through the Mid- to Late Holocene

Summary

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

High-resolution paleoclimatic data have been increasingly utilized in archaeological research to investigate regional settlement patterns, periods of growth, stasis, and decline, and episodes social stress and resilience, among other subjects. Until recently, few databases have existed for the Eastern Woodlands of North America that enable researchers to examine these linkages over broad swaths of space and time. In this poster, we examine the Digital Index for North American Archaeology (DINAA) for the distribution of archaeological sites and Kelly and colleagues’ recently published radiocarbon dataset for the continental United States to investigate settlement patterns in the North American midcontinent during the mid- to late Holocene. We then compare these merged datasets with our 8,000-year-long paleoclimatic record from Martin Lake in LaGrange County, Indiana. The isotopic evidence for thermal stratification and precipitation sources from Martin Lake provides an understanding of hydroclimatic variability and warm-season duration from the Middle Archaic onward. In combining the radiocarbon, settlement, and isotopic datasets, we synthesize archaeological site distribution and climatic phenomena over time and contribute to the refinement of our current understanding of the temporal relationship between settlement patterns and paleoclimatic variability in the North American midcontinent.

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): 37295.0