Publication Date:
2019-07-13
Description:
This study reports on the establishment of viable dates for several major cultural components at the Little Wood Creek site on the upper Hudson in Fort Edward, New York. The original excavation in the mid-1980s (Grossman et al. 1990) resulted in the identification of two major periods of occupation, a deeply buried Transitional period sequence of living floors, and closer to the surface, and separated by circa five feet of sterile alluvium, a series of Late Woodland period pits and features. Both are overlain by the discovery of the southern bastion of Revolutionary War-era Fort Edward. Ambiguities in the original bulk radiocarbon dating of the site left it in chronological limbo with widely divergent determinations for both prehistoric occupation periods. New AMS dates from 10 samples, four Transitional period and six Late Woodland period assays, both refined the absolute chronology of the site complex and clarified several major issues in the cultural and environmental history of the region. Together, these two sets of dates, combined with recent high resolution environmental sequences, provide sufficient resolution to correlate the newly defined periods of occupation with major events in the pollen and climate record of eastern New York State.
Keywords:
Social and Information Sciences (General); Instrumentation and Photography
Type:
GSFC-E-DAA-TN29552
,
Archaeology of Eastern North America (ISSN 0360-1021); 43; 173-197
Format:
text
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