Early Woodland Settlement and Mound Building in the Upper Tensas Basin, Northeast Louisiana

Chronological Hygiene and Bayesian Modeling of Poverty Point Sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, circa 4200 to 3200 cal BP

“…The KDE_Plot is visually striking and is the best way to summarize relatively simple chronologies. The Start boundary for Poverty Point SITE Model 4 is distinctly earlier than the Start boundary for Model 5 Poverty Point SITE Earthwork TPQ, indicating that earthwork construction likely started well after the site was initially occupied, as was hypothesized by Kidder and coauthors (2009). This result pushes back at the long-standing assumption that earthwork building was a continuous process at Poverty Point, starting from the beginning of site use and extending to the end.…”

“…Some researchers do screen dates using chronological hygiene. For example, Connolly (2006:10) excluded dates with errors greater than 100 years, whereas Kidder and coauthors (2009:Table 10), Gibson (2019:36), and Greenlee (2012:97–101, Table A1) filtered dates based on a mix of date integrity, context evaluation, and exclusion because of large standard errors (see also US Department of the Interior 2013:34–35, Table 7.1).…”

“…Connolly (2006:Table 1) dates the Poverty Point site occupation from approximately 1700 to 1100 BC, whereas a recent discussion of site chronology in support of the site's World Heritage List nomination argues that Poverty Point was “constructed and occupied around 3700–3100 BP” and that earthwork “construction appears to have been ongoing throughout the entire period of occupation at the site” (US Department of the Interior 2013:30, 65, Figure 2.46). Kidder and coauthors (2009:187) claim that the Poverty Point site was occupied from 3615 to 3165 cal BP. Contemporary texts follow these ideas and suggest that the site occupation lasted for 500–600 years (Anderson and Sassaman 2012:Table 1.1; Pauketat and Sassaman 2020:312, Table 9.1).…”

“…Median dates show that mounds and rings were under construction coterminously for nearly 500 years, the mounds for 460 years, from circa 1628 to 1170 B.C., and the rings for 440 years, from circa 1627 to 1187 B.C.” Ortmann (2010) suggests that the mounds were built and used from 1750 to 970 cal BC. Kidder and colleagues (2009), however, argue that the ridges and mounds only were built and used after around 3400 cal BP and that the site occupation ended with a rapid abandonment soon after 3200 cal BP.…”

Contemplating the history and future of radiocarbon dating in the American Southeast

“…Archaeologists in the southeastern United States (and other regions of North America [see Bayliss 2015;Hamilton and Krus 2017]) have been slow to adapt Bayesian chronological modeling methods (although there are some slightly earlier uses [Buck and Bard 2007;Kennett and Culleton 2012;Kennett et al 2011;Kidder 2006;Kidder et al 2009Kidder et al , 2010McNutt et al 2012]). Instead, they have chosen to use legacy culturehistoric chronologies and often statistically ill-informed interpretations of chronological data.…”