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1. EVALUATING THE TIMING OF EARLY VILLAGE DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK: MORE DATES FROM CLASSIC NEW YORK SITES

   https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2024.10  

   Birch, Jennifer; Manning, Sturt W; Hart, John P; Lorentzen, Brita (February 2024, Radiocarbon)

   ABSTRACT Five sites in present-day New York have played important roles in archaeological narratives surrounding the development of settled village life in northeastern North America. Excavated in the mid-twentieth century, the Roundtop, Maxon-Derby, Sackett or Canandaigua, Bates, and Kelso sites include evidence related to the transition from semisedentary settlement-subsistence patterns during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries AD to those associated with fifteenth century and later settled Iroquoian villagers. Radiocarbon dates for each site were obtained early in the development of the method and again following the transition to AMS dating. Here, we present new or recently-published dates for these sites, combined with reliable existing dates in Bayesian models, including in some cases short tree-ring sequenced wiggle-matches on wood charcoal. Our results clarify the timing of each site’s occupation(s), revealing both continuity and discontinuity in the development of longhouse dwellings, sedentism, and the repeated re-use of some site locations over hundreds of years. 

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2. Resolving Indigenous village occupations and social history across the long century of European permanent settlement in Northeastern North America: The Mohawk River Valley ~1450-1635 CE

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258555  

   Manning, Sturt W.; Lorentzen, Brita; Hart, John P. (October 2021, PLOS ONE)

   Biehl, Peter F. (Ed.)

   The timeframe of Indigenous settlements in Northeast North America in the 15 th -17 th centuries CE has until very recently been largely described in terms of European material culture and history. An independent chronology was usually absent. Radiocarbon dating has recently begun to change this conventional model radically. The challenge, if an alternative, independent timeframe and history is to be created, is to articulate a high-resolution chronology appropriate and comparable with the lived histories of the Indigenous village settlements of the period. Improving substantially on previous initial work, we report here high-resolution defined chronologies for the three most extensively excavated and iconic ancestral Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) village sites in New York (Smith-Pagerie, Klock and Garoga), and a fourth early historic Indigenous site, Brigg’s Run, and re-assess the wider chronology of the Mohawk River Valley in the mid-15 th to earlier 17 th centuries. This new chronology confirms initial suggestions from radiocarbon that a wholesale reappraisal of past assumptions is necessary, since our dates conflict completely with past dates and the previously presumed temporal order of these three iconic sites. In turn, a wider reassessment of northeastern North American early history and re-interpretation of Atlantic connectivities in the later 15 th through early 17 th centuries is required. Our new closely defined date ranges are achieved employing detailed archival analysis of excavation records to establish the contextual history for radiocarbon-dated samples from each site, tree-ring defined short time series from wood charcoal samples fitted against the radiocarbon calibration curve (‘wiggle-matching’), and Bayesian chronological modelling for each of the individual sites integrating all available prior knowledge and radiocarbon dating probabilities. We define (our preferred model) most likely (68.3% highest posterior density) village occupation ranges for Smith-Pagerie of ~1478–1498, Klock of ~1499–1521, Garoga of ~1550–1582, and Brigg’s Run of ~1619–1632. 

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3. UPDATING THE CLASSIC NEW YORK LAMOKA LAKE AND SCACCIA SITES: REFINED CHRONOLOGIES THROUGH AMS DATING AND BAYESIAN MODELING

   https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2023.37  

   Hart, John P; Birch, Jennifer; Manning, Sturt W; Lorentzen, Brita (June 2023, Radiocarbon)

   ABSTRACT The Lamoka Lake and Scaccia sites in present-day New York have played important roles in the development of archaeology in New York, and in the case of Lamoka Lake, in eastern North America. Lamoka Lake is the type site for the “Archaic” period in eastern North American culture history and the “Late Archaic” “Lamoka phase” in New York culture history. The Scaccia site is the largest “Early Woodland” “Meadowood phase” site in New York and has the earliest evidence for pottery and agriculture crop use in the state. Lamoka Lake has been dated to 2500 BC based on a series of solid carbon and gas-proportional counting radiometric dates on bulk wood charcoal obtained in the 1950s and 1960s. Scaccia has been dated to 870 BC based on a single uncalibrated radiometric date obtained on bulk charcoal in the early 1970s. As a result, the ages of these important sites need to be refined. New AMS dates and Bayesian analyses presented here place Lamoka Lake at 2962–2902 BC (68.3% highest posterior density [hpd])) and Scaccia at 1049–838 BC (68.3% hpd). 

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4. The Technological and Chronological Implication of 14C Concentrations in Carbon Samples Extracted from Mongolian Cast Iron Artifacts

   https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2019.4  

   Park, J S; Honeychurch, W; Chunag, A (June 2019, Radiocarbon)

   ABSTRACT Cast iron objects recovered primarily in eastern Mongolia, spanning the Xiongnu through the Early Historic periods (ca. 3rd BC–AD 17th century), were examined for their radiocarbon ( 14 C) concentration and microstructure. Most of the samples examined were found to have originated from charcoal-based smelting with a few exceptions that were made using a mineral coal-based technique. A comparison of 14 C dates with dates derived from artifact typology allowed the charcoal-smelted objects to be classified into two groups, based on whether the radiometric and typological periodization are in agreement or not. In addition, those with differing 14 C and typological dates can be divided into two subgroups with and without evidence for a melt treatment applied after original casting. These conflicting dating results are confusing and would seem to provoke skepticism about the use of 14 C measurements for dating iron artifacts. We demonstrate however that 14 C analysis, when combined with metallographic examination and other lines of chronological evidence, can clarify the history of a given iron object and its multiple users, often separated in time by more than a millennium. 

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5. Insights into Intragroup Variation in Precontact Paleodiet: A Middle Period Example from San Mateo County

   Goring, Daniel; Eerkens, Jelmer W; Canzonieri, Chris; Zwierlein, Irenne; Zimmer, Michelle; Bartelink, Eric J. (November 2020, Proceedings of the Society for California Archaeology)

   null (Ed.)

   This article reports new carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope data for 10 individuals on the San Francisco Peninsula from CA-SMA-78 (Hamilton Mound 20; n = 6), CA-SMA-160 (Hiller Mound; n = 3), and a previously unrecorded site in downtown San Mateo (n = 1). We also report seven new bone collagen accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates, three from CA-SMA-78 that fall during the Early-Middle Transition and early Middle Period (ca. 2,400 and 1,700 cal BP), three from CA-SMA-160 that fall during the late Middle and Middle-Late Transition periods (ca. 1,080 and 770 cal BP), and one from the unrecorded site that falls during the Late Middle Period (ca. 1,260 cal BP). Dietary isotopes show a bimodal pattern, with most individuals (n = 8) consuming a mixed marine-terrestrial diet and two a terrestrial-dominant diet (n = 2). We propose two hypotheses to explain this variation, the first suggesting independent family-level hunting and gathering territories combined with little intra-group sharing of food, and the second suggesting exogamous marriage patterns with people migrating from regions to the south. Future isotopic research could provide support for one (or both) of these hypotheses. 

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