Radiocarbon and Artifactual Evidence for Early 17th Century A.D. Dutch Activity at the Site of Fort Orange, Albany, New York, USA

Manning, Sturt W.; Huey, Paul R.; Lucas, Michael T.; Hart, John P.

doi:10.1080/00934690.2021.1883318

Cited by 1 publication

(4 citation statements)

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“…The relatively refined and high-resolution definition of time for the sites focused on in this study highlight that the presence or absence of initial and limited quantities of European trade goods often cannot be used satisfactorily to define chronology [62][63][64][65]69]. Where there are extensive, replicated, and plural connections with European goods and typologies, then the radiocarbon-based analysis offers a date range that is compatible with the historical information.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 96%

“…In such circumstances, where no in-built age can be explained in terms of the sample (e.g., random wood charcoal or organic residue from a ceramic vessel), then it is possible that there was previous human activity at the locus-indeed, multiple uses of suitable, even strategic, loci through time have been observed or suggested in other work in the region (e.g. [39,69]). It is notable that the modelled Intervals show good agreement between the calculated Posterior versus the Prior assumptions in each case-suggesting that the data do support and conform with the ethnographic and archaeological assessments of typical village occupation length.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, two methods, ideally combined, have been transformational, enabling a revolution in temporal resolution for archaeological sites in the region: (i) 14 C dating fixed time series of specific tree-rings, even from wood samples preserving short tree-ring sequences (<50 rings), and placing these into calendar time via correlation against the 14 C calibration curve (so-called 14 C 'wiggle-matching' [66,67]); and (ii) integration of prior archaeological or ethnohistoric information about stratigraphic and temporal relationships within a site's history and the temporal constraints on the likely overall maximum duration of such village sites, to greatly constrain and refine 14 C dating using Bayesian methods (e.g. [62,68,69]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The name refers to the association with the Kanien'keha ´꞉ka, or Mohawk Nation, one of the original Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy [25,29,70]. This Mohawk region is also then associated with the area occupied, after initial exploration in 1609, by the Dutch (from 1614 until it passed into British hands in 1664) [11,12,69]. Archaeological excavations in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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

2021

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The timeframe of Indigenous settlements in Northeast North America in the 15th-17th 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-15th to earlier 17th 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 15th through early 17th 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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