Radiocarbon Dates from 38FA608 Published in "Legacy"

12/14/2017

I wrote a short article for the December 2017 edition of Legacy (Vol. 21, No. 2, available here) about the radiocarbon dates from 38FA608. I wanted to make the dates available (in a way that they can be cited) sooner rather than later. I'll probably wait until after the next season of fieldwork to produce a more formal, peer-reviewed article about the site.

As pointed out by Stuart Fiedel in the comments on my initial blog post about these dates, the date from 38FA608 is apparently only the second radiocarbon date associated with Guilford points. This is despite the fact that the distribution of Guilford stretches from southern Maryland to northern Georgia. Gunn and Foss (1992) reported the first date of 5350 +/- 60 from a Guilford feature at the Copperhead Hollow site (38CT58) in Chesterfield County, South Carolina. The scarcity of Guilford dates presumably reflects the rarity of intact deposits that date to this time period. It is clear that Zone 7 of 38FA608 has the potential to provide significant new information about the late Middle Archaic in the Carolina Piedmont in particular and in the Eastern Woodlands in general.

Season 2 of the field school will be starting up in late January. Watch this space.

5 Comments

Jim

12/14/2017 07:32:35 pm

So, 4000 to 5000 BC ? And only the second dated find, that's amazing.
Are you going to have to sell some critters to finance carbon dating ?

Stuart Fiedel

12/16/2017 10:34:48 am

Maybe abrupt climate change (drier) ca. 6100 cal BP: (from a CRM context I wrote several years ago):
As the Southeast was farther from the ice sheet, the onset of the Hypsithermal may have started somewhat earlier than in the Northeast. It has generally been assumed that the Hypsithermal or Altithermal (ca. 9000-5000 cal BP) was a warm and dry period in the Southeast, as it was in the Midwest. However, the pollen sequence from a peat core at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, indicates a climate that was both warmer and wetter than present in the Early Holocene (Goman and Leigh 2004). In the period from 9000 to 6100 cal BP, there were high percentages of gum and oak pollen but low percentages of pine. The high percentage of gum is also seen in cores of this period from the Georgia Coastal Plain (Goman and Leigh 2004; Watts 1980). Other hardwoods were also present in the Fort Bragg core (maple, basswood [Tilia Americana], walnut, sweet gum), although their pollen spores are not numerous. Overbank flooding of the Little River was frequent (five floods per 1,000 years) in contrast to the much reduced frequency after 6100 cal BP (only one flood per 1,000 years). Goman and Leigh suggest that the Bermuda High shifted north and east of its present position between 9000 and 6000 cal BP, changing atmospheric circulation and generating frequent tropical storms responsible for the observed flooding episodes. Gum pollen fell off abruptly between 6000 and 5000 cal BP. Oak pollen also decreased, while pine pollen increased sharply. The same abrupt transition to pine-dominated forest is seen in other pollen sequences from the Carolinas (e.g., Frey 1953 and Whitehead 1972). The transition was seemingly time-transgressive and regionally variable; at Clear Pond in northeastern South Carolina, pine seems to have become dominant much earlier than elsewhere, circa 9000 cal BP (Watts et al. 1996). The oak to pine transition may be indicative of rainfall changes caused by a southward shift of the Bermuda High between 6000 and 5000 cal BP.

E.P. Grondine

12/18/2017 08:59:48 am

Ah yes, thanks. Archaeology as it should be done, and a breath of fresh air from North Carolina. Perhaps you can explain the importance of the lamellae to Andy. he has a nice clean wall, but...

Stuart Fiedel

12/18/2017 02:45:09 pm

Andy is correct about the lamellae. They are illuvial in origin and don't directly indicate flood episodes or precipitation. In fact, they remind me of those I saw in Mike Johnson's excavations at Cactus Hill.

Stuart Fiedel

12/19/2017 10:35:35 am

See these:

http://www.argonaut.arizona.edu/articles/holliday_rawling2006.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/perron/www/files/Perron-1999-CactusHill.pdf
(see pp. 82 -87 particularly for explanation of lamellae)

Radiocarbon Dates from 38FA608 Published in "Legacy"

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