Today is my last morning in Tulsa at SEAC 2017. I spent all day yesterday in the "Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast" symposium: 18 papers that included state-by-state updates of what we know and the data we have and treatments of topics such as megafauna in the Southeast, plant use by early foragers in the region, wet site archaeology in Florida, lithic technologies, etc. It was a marathon. 

My presentation with David Anderson was last in the lineup. I was tasked with an effort at a "big picture" demography paper. It was a lot to talk about in a short time (20 minutes) -- a difficult balancing act to discuss the dense data from such a large area and be able to explain how I tried to integrate it all into a geographical/chronological model that can be evaluated on a region-by-region basis. Anyway . . . the detail will be there in the publications that result from the endeavor.

I uploaded a pdf of my presentation here. Some of the details will change as we work through the process of refining the analysis and dividing the content into multiple papers. But you should be able to get a decent idea of what we were going for. 

I submitted the final grades for my class yesterday, so barring some kind of last minute disaster, my first academic year at South Carolina is done. I'm spending the last part of the week working on the radiocarbon compilation (which I'll need for my paper at SEAC in the fall), moving forward with analysis for a couple of publications I'm working on, and prepping to go in the field and then give a talk next week. My blog has been getting a lot of traffic related to the posts I wrote about the ethnographic megalithic societies of India and Indonesia last year (most of them should come up if you search on "megaliths").  I wish I had time to look at that stuff again right now, but I don't.

I wanted to post this histogram showing the distribution of the ~9,100 dates (intercepts) currently in the radiocarbon compilation (here's the map of the dates I made yesterday). There's a pretty clear trend of an increasing number of dates through time.  Part of that, I think, almost certainly reflects the emphasis that archaeology in the Eastern Woodlands places on the Woodland and Late Prehistoric/Mississippian societies that largely post-date 2000 RCYBP (and the fact that those societies tend to produce large sites with lots of datable deposits). But I think the chart below, as unrefined as it is, is probably also telling us something very basic about demographic change.  There's an inflection point in the number of dates toward the end of the Middle Archaic period (about 5500 RCYBP) that corresponds in time to when we see (generally) more intensively occupied sites, indicators of decreasing mobility, and increasing use of plants that are later domesticates. Yes, I'm saying intensification.

I think I've found a path forward that will let me extract morphometric data from the 3D models of Kirk points that I've been producing (I've got 41 models uploaded to Sketchfab so far, with a goal of 100 from Allendale County, South Carolina, to serve as the basis for a paper). I found a software package called Landmark (available here for free) that was developed at UC Davis for use with biological materials (i.e., irregularly shaped things).  It allows you to load in a 3D model, place markers and curves on the surface, and export the coordinates of the points for analysis.  I've spent the day learning how to use the software, and have generated a small data set of five points and four curves from ten of my Kirk point models.  The next step is to figure out how to go from the XYZ coordinates that the software exports into something that I can meaningfully analyze.  I don't think that the data analysis package I use (JMP) will do things like Procrustes analysis and, honestly, I've never attempted to analyze a 3D dataset and will need to do some reading to figure out how to start.  If any of my bioanthropology friends have done this sort of thing with morphometric data from skeletal remains and have some advice, I'm listening. Please do not tell me to learn how to use R.

I'm running late but I just produced this quick map and wanted to post it: the Eastern Woodlands radiocarbon compilation now has over 9000 dates with county-level provenience. And there are more on deck waiting to be included. Stay tuned.

At the risk of alienating the few friends I have, I'm going to admit that I find working with large datasets to be a rewarding pastime. I'm not sure why, but I feel like that there is something really satisfying about compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and finding and filling gaps in data. So I've gone from the "why doesn't this exist" stage about a month ago to now having a dataset of over 8000 radiocarbon dates pegged to county-level provenience. Here's the current map:

You'll notice that several areas have been filled in since last week's map.  Matt Boulanger sent me a large spreadsheet of dates from New England and the Northeast, most of which I've now incorporated (I still need to track down counties for some of the dates). Victor Thompson and Matthew Colvin sent me a spreadsheet of the Florida radiocarbon database assembled by Steve Dasovich and Glen Doran, so those dates are in the database now also.  I've begun going through the chapters of the 2009 Archaic Societies volume (edited by Thomas Emerson, Dale McElrath, and Anderw Fortier), which contain significant listings of Archaic Period dates from the Midcontinent.  I know of compilations from North Carolina and Mississippi - those will be coming up.

I've got a few dates from Ontario and Quebec, but I confess to being a bit mystified as to how the various administrative regions, counties, and census divisions of those provinces correspond to the provenience information I have for the dates and the GIS data I'm seeing in front of me. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were easy, but I will need to figure out what's going on in the other eastern provinces of Canada before I can display the data.

Assembling and formatting a bibliography to go along with this dataset will be an unholy nightmare. I'm going to need to get that done before I release the data in a usable form. Working on pulling all the citations together in one place and correctly referencing them in the database may be a good summer job for my daughter. As far as I know, she doesn't read my blog. Maybe that's for the best.

Update (5/4/2016): 9,129 dates and counting . . .

I've been working on compiling a database of radiocarbon dates from the Eastern Woodlands. While my interest in doing this is mainly driven by my own research goals (the driving force right now is my desire to be able to discuss the possible abandonment of portions of the Southeast at the end of the Early Archaic period in a symposium I'm pulling together for the 2016 SEAC meetings this fall), I know these data will be useful to others as well.

Here is a GIS map showing the counts by county of the first 4,870 dates that I've gotten plugged in:

I started with a spreadsheet sent to me by Shane Miller and combined it with data available online from PIDBA (both of those sources were focused on dates from early sites across the east), the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia Radiocarbon Database (Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc.), a list of Tennessee radiocarbon dates (Tennessee Archaeology Network), and A Comprehensive Radiocarbon Date Database from Archaeological Contexts on the Coastal Plain of Georgia by John A. Turck, and Victor Thompson. After combining these datasets into a single database (which took some effort), I did a sweep to eliminate redundancies and flag obvious errors. I added a column for county and linked that to a separate table of county names attached to UTM coordinates of the approximate center of the county. That lets me query the database to spit out a table containing a listing of dates and associated UTMs.  I imported that into GIS and then did a "join" to count the number of points per county. Voila.

There are still numerous errors and omissions in the database as it currently stands, which is why I'm not prepared to supply the raw data at this point. I've got many dates that are missing key pieces of information (error, site number, county, etc.), and the columns for references are a total mess at this point.  As I work through the process of cleaning all that up and trying to fill in blanks, I'll be adding new data. I know of some print publications that will help me fill in some of the large blank areas, and I suspect there are other online or electronic sources of data out there.  I've got the UTM coordinates for the counties in most of the Midwest and Southeast (I still haven't done Mississippi and Florida), but I haven't yet started on the tier of states immediately west of the Mississippi River (Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota) or the Northeast and New England.

I've started a new page to store links to online sources of radiocarbon data and references for published compilations. As I discussed briefly in this blog post, I'm interested in a assembling a pan-Eastern Woodlands radiocarbon dataset that can be used to evaluate the idea that there was an abandonment of the Southeast at the end of the Early Archaic period.

The page has links to several datasets (such as CARD and the files posted at PIDBA) that include dates from across the Eastern Woodlands. I've also started a section listing sources by state, which is the scale at which many compilations are created. Thanks to Stuart Fiedel for pointing me in the direction of several compilations from the Atlantic coast. I stumbled across data from the Georgia Coastal Plain, a Tennessee dataset, and a Louisiana database and have provided links to those.  

Conspicuously absent so far are compiled datasets from South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Presuming that a South Carolina dataset does not already exist, it seems that the responsibility for assembling one would logically be mine. I'm hoping some of you out there can let me know about datasets that will help fill in the gaps and perhaps update some of the older compilations.

At some point, I'll combine all the existing data together and make it all available. It shouldn't be that tough but it will take a little time. It will be a matter of creating a database with the necessary fields and then adding existing data either electronically (i.e., in cases where data are already available electronically) or manually.  The less manual data entry, the better.

​Please leave a comment here if you know of sources that I haven't yet included.