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

Abstract

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.

Second Intermediate Period date for the Thera (Santorini) eruption and historical implications

“…Indigenous sites with strong, well-replicated, connections with European trade goods and their date ranges, or association with historically attested episodes (like Samuel de Champlain spending a winter at a site), yield compatible 14 C dated calendar age ranges, whereas some sites lacking well-replicated connections and conventionally dated according only to various assumptions and interpretations may yield 14 C dated ranges that challenge these past assumptions and interpretations and so call for a revised chronology (e.g. [192][193][194][195]).…”

The Monongahela tradition in “real time”: Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates

“… Assessments of when European metals and glass beads enter the region, including compositional analysis of cuprous artifacts to determine North American or European source [ 74 , 89 ]. Based on analyses in Northern Iroquoia [ 15 , 54 , 56 , 57 , 74 ], the adoption of European items may be different than currently thought. Test as a formal hypotheses suppositions linking climate change such the Little Ice Age [ 62 , 64 , 65 ] and/or drought [ 68 ] to changes in regional settlement patterns, correlating a robust chronology to contemporary climatic reconstructions (e.g., [ 90 , 91 ].…”

A CENTENNIAL AMBIGUITY: THE CHALLENGE OF RESOLVING THE DATE OF THE JEAN-BAPTISTE LAINÉ (MANTLE), ONTARIO, SITE—AROUND AD 1500 OR AD 1600?—AND THE CASE FOR WOOD-CHARCOAL AS A TERMINUS POST QUEM

“…Typically, this means a wiggle-match ca. 50 years in length given the properties of the calibration curve in the last millennium, although even shorter tree-ring sequences linked to specific contexts within a site history can nonetheless be informative (Manning et al 2020;Manning et al 2021). An example in the time period of interest is the Warminster, Ontario, site (Manning et al 2018a.…”

“…Indeed, it has become clear that material culture cannot be used arbitrarily as a comprehensive guide to past community/ethnic identification and thus does not provide a refined temporal measure for settlement ordering in northeastern North A Centennial Ambiguity 281 America (e.g., Gaudreau and Lesage 2016;Birch and Lesage 2020). A caveat should therefore apply to previous work relying solely on such inference-based assumptions pending independent confirmation (e.g., Manning et al 2021).…”

“…However, do we continue to regard the accepted inferred Draper-Spang-Mantle (J-BL) settlement sequence (Birch and Williamson 2013) as secure? Times and thinking continue to change and (hopefully) improve: the 14 Cled rethink of this period in northeastern North America, in particular, has led to critical re-assessment of a number of past assumptions and theoretical constructs (e.g., Birch 2020;Birch et al 2021;Manning et al , 2021. In particular, recent work based on both social network analysis and 14 C has now strongly questioned several past assumptions concerning inferred linear site sequences/order relationships, and in turn the nature and extent of population circulation and movement between villages in different sequences (e.g., Manning and Hart 2019;Birch and Lesage 2020;Hart 2020;Birch and Hart 2021;Manning et al 2021).…”