Challenging Colonial Biases in Archaeological Site Chronologies with Tree-Ring Radiocarbon Dating

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

American Archaeologists have frequently relied on Euro-American documents, accounts, and material goods to construct timelines for Indigenous sites in the Colonial and Contact eras. While the temporal precision of manufactured goods and written accounts are attractive to archaeologists, these sources may flatten the complexity of occupations and introduce bias in our reconstructions. We use case studies to highlight problems with inherited site chronologies based solely on non-Native records and illustrate how independent dating of archaeological structures can support the construction of hybrid and inclusive narratives. This paper argues that high-precision independent archaeological chronometry helps move past top-down Colonial perspectives on the archaeological record

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51253