AMS Radiocarbon Dating from the Neolithic of Eastern Ukraine Casts Doubts on Existing Chronologies

Abstract

The Seversky Donets River (Northern Donets) basin in eastern Ukraine and the Lower Don River valley in Russia were inhabited by populations that have been considered to be one of the earliest pottery-using cultures in Europe. The early pottery sites are all located on riverbanks and contain middens with many mollusk shells and fish bones. This suggests the intense exploitation of freshwater resources. The accuracy of radiocarbon dates obtained from these locations is of crucial importance for understanding the development of new technologies, diversification of the food consumed and its preparation strategies, as well as the degree of sedentism in this region, associated with the beginnings of pottery-making technology. The chronology of Neolithic sites in this region, however, was developed on the basis of 14C dates commonly obtained through the dating of freshwater mollusk shells, pottery with mollusk shell temper, or organic residue on pottery shards. Such samples are potentially affected by the freshwater reservoir effect, raising concerns about the accuracy of those dates. This paper presents accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C dates from a small pilot study from sites in eastern Ukraine in order to test for the presence of the reservoir effect in this region. The AMS 14C dates presented in this paper challenge the 14C chronology based on mollusk shell or organic residue, which appears to generate much older dates than those on wood charcoal or terrestrial animal bone.

A lack of freshwater reservoir effects in human radiocarbon dates in the Eneolithic to Iron Age in the Minusinsk Basin

“…The majority of FRE research has focussed on Europe (Cook et al 2001(Cook et al , 2002Fischer and Heinemeier 2003;Olsen et al 2010;Keaveney and Reimer 2012;Lougheed et al 2013;Fernandes et al 2014;Meadows et al 2016) and North America (Ingram and Southon 1996;Goodfriend and Flessa 1997;Culleton 2006), and only recently has the importance of freshwater reservoir effects been highlighted for Russia and the Eurasian steppe zone, including the upper Lena River and Lake Baikal region (Nomokonova et al 2013;Schulting et al 2014Schulting et al , 2015, Caspian steppes and lower Don River (Shishlina et al 2007(Shishlina et al , 2009(Shishlina et al , 2012(Shishlina et al , 2014Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al 2015), middle and lower reaches of the Dnieper River (Lillie et al 2009), NorthEastern Kazakhstan (Svyatko et al 2015), Sertejka River in Smolensk Oblast (Kulkova et al 2015) and Kubenskoye Lake in Vologda Oblast (Wood et al 2013). The main finding from this research is that freshwater reservoir effects are extremely variable geographically (spanning from zero to several thousand years), and that when dealing with archaeological human remains Beach population thought to be affected by a FRE must be examined individually^ (Wood et al 2013, p. 163).…”

The Køkkenmødding of Eastern Ukraine

“…However, this part of the settlement was not investigated further. Radiocarbon dates on bone and wooden charcoal have allowed the creation of a chronology for the site, beginning in the 6 th millennium BC (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, Lillie, Telizhenko 2015). This concurs with the dating of charcoal associated with the pottery shard from the earlier Starobilsk-I excavation.…”

“…4.3). Radiocarbon dating of the site indicates that Novoselivka-III is ISSN 2519-4542 № 10, 2018 one of the latest Neolithic settlements in Eastern Ukraine (6297±34 BP / 5342-5213 cal BC) (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute 2012; Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, Lillie, Telizhenko 2015).…”

New insights into the neolithisation process in southwest Europe according to spatial density analysis from calibrated radiocarbon dates

“…The number of dates used to draw maps, the number of sites with dating in different regions and the average standard deviation (Ascough et al 2005), and although a correction factor can be applied, a considerable variation still exists (Soares and Dias 2006). We should also highlight some problems related to bone samples: more specifically, whether or not particular methods of ultrafiltration are used to control the quality of the collagen (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al 2015;Wood 2015), as well as problems related to the use of bones affected by fire, similar to the old wood effect (Olsen et al 2013). Finally, dates of domestic samples are not without problems, in particular those associated with distinguishing some domestic species (animal or plant) from their wild counterparts: although the application of protein analysis (Martins et al 2015) seems to be a valid method for solving this problem in the near future.…”