Expanding the Chronology of a North Carolina Chiefly Landscape using AMS Radiocarbon Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent implementations of Bayesian chronological modeling of Indigenous North American archaeological sites have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach when encountering calibration plateaus and reversals, such as the series which spans the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries AD. High-precision dating of this time period is especially relevant to researchers of the North American Southeast, as this coincides with the initial interactions between Late Mississippian chiefdoms and late medieval Europeans. Southeastern American archaeologists who study this period have until recently favored other indirect dating techniques, including ethnohistoric data and the presence/absence of European-sourced materials. This can lead to a conflation of materiality and chronology, erasing Indigenous agency in the construction of history in the early modern world, simplifying the diverse stratagems employed by Indigenous polities. New high-precision AMS radiocarbon data, combined with Bayesian chronological modeling structured by Native materials, spaces, and ethnohistoric data, offer researchers an opportunity to create robust chronological models that push beyond these unfortunate settler-colonial constraints and Indigenous narratives in North American history. Through this method, this paper expands the historical narrative of the landscape of Joara and its neighbors, who dominated the political landscape of Western North Carolina before, during, and after early Spanish colonial attempts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50439