Integrating Low- and High-Precision Chronologies in North American Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many archaeologists have questioned the value of using aggregated radiocarbon ages as a proxy measure of past human population growth. Most of these criticisms revolve around the lack of precision in these aggregated approaches. Higher-precision Bayesian approaches have often been presented as a better alternative. However, Bayesian approaches have their own limitations, especially when it comes to theory building and research design. This presentation proposes a new multi-scalar theory of human population growth that relies on the integration of low- and high-precision chronologies. We present two different case studies illustrating how high-precision Bayesian chronologies confirm low-precision summed probability distribution approaches. We propose that Bayesian approaches will be most valuable for theory building and hypothesis testing when they are integrated with aggregated, coarse-grained chronologies. We pay tribute to Bob Kelly’s vital role in making this future possible.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37902.0