A new piece in the online publication The Conversation written by CIAMS professor Sturt Manning details some of the innovative work done by the Dating Iroquoia Project to change our understanding of the dating of North American Indigenous history. The results of this work were published in the online journal PloS One in 2019.
Dr. Manning, who is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cornell, discusses the problematic assumptions of traditional archaeological methods for dating indiginous sites, which base their chronologies on the presence or absence of European trade goods such as metal or glass beads. Instead, the Dating Iroquoia Project uses statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates based on organic materials, such as maize, to create "an independent time frame for sites and past narratives".
The article full text can be accessed here.
