Dating the Berry Site in Western North Carolina: Problems, Prospects, Potential

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.

The Berry site, located in the upper Catawba River Valley of western North Carolina, is the location of the principal town of the Native American province and polity of Joara, and the location of the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish outpost of Cuenca and Fort San Juan. Archaeological finds from this site are critical to knowledge about precontact Indigenous peoples along the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and to understanding of Indigenous encounters and engagements with European explorers and colonists, including those associated with the Hernando de Soto (1539–1543) and Juan Pardo (1566–1568) entradas. At present, dates assigned to the Berry site in the aggregate and to discrete contexts at the site are based largely on Spanish written accounts, temporally diagnostic artifact types, stratigraphic associations, and a small number of radiocarbon dates from Berry site contexts that predate the arrival of the first Spanish colonial expeditions. This paper relates what we know about the chronology of the Berry site to dates for sites in surrounding areas, discusses contexts for which stratigraphic associations and clues from documentary sources are good candidates for radiocarbon dating of extant samples and analyses thereof, and outlines our current chronological model for this important site.

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): 52299