eastern Archaic

A non-technical summary of the work from 2006-2015 at the Davidson Late Archaic site, Ontario (2500-1000 BC) is provided. In Part I (published separately) the site setting and methods use to investigate the site and its setting was provided. In Part II (published here) the nature of the Broad Point and Small Point Archaic use of the site is summarized.

A large series of 56 AMS dates are reported from the Davidson site, occupied during both the “Broadpoint” and “Smallpoint” Late Archaic. The focus is on documenting the occupation history of the site itself. The dates on various features often do not match superposition data or associations with diagnostics and provide a case study of the great potential for component mixing on such sites that can go unrecognized without multiple dates on different materials. Despite that evidence, kernel density function models show that overall the dates fall into two more or less distinctive groupings centered at ca. 2250 cal BC, and the 1150 cal BC, matching previous age estimates of the two main components and also suggest an intriguing ca. 300 year gap between those two intensive occupations. The analyses suggest charcoal dates are overestimating the age versus nutshell by about 120 years and that the consistency of dates from particular feature clusters often indicate they represent “integrated series of events.”  The DOI is correct (despite what the link says). The paper is more easily available for free download at: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/mcja/article/46/2/157/294028/Dating-the-Late-Archaic-at-the-Davidson-Site-AhHk

Bissett, TG
In review  Re-Interpreting Western Tennessee’s Shell Mound Archaic: An Alternative Approach to Sampling and Dating New Deal-era Shell Mound Collections. In New Deal Archaeology in the Tennessee Valley: 1933 - 1942, edited by David Dye, pp. 111 - 133.  University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

This paper presents the modeling the drying process of shell mould layering process for the ceramic shell mould fabrication process. As this process involves the repeated drying of the different wetted/saturated layers, therefore modeling of this phenomena involve a sequent approach to tackle the whole development of shell mould layering process. In this work an Ab-Initia approach was selected as the best simulation technique to map the drying mechanism. Saturation or moisture content was selected as the best parameter that will represent the drying of layering process. Using FEM with quadrilateral shape mapping of several interested points were selected to predict the moisture/saturation movement during the drying of shell layering stages. Standard drying time with 2 hours and early drying time were chosen to measure the moisture movement as layer added to the previous dried coated shell or layers. This complex mechanism of drying and penetration layering shell were then numerically solve with fully implicit backward time stepping scheme. Hopefully, this model and can be used to measure the complex movement of the main parameter i.e saturation/temperature in the drying process of multilayer system which is sometimes impossible directly measured under experimental technique