Placing radiocarbon dating at the center of collective archaeological practice

ABSTRACT

Radiocarbon analysis is a common tool used to obtain the absolute ages of materials from archaeological contexts. This method underlies the basis of most archaeological chronologies across the globe, allowing us to better understand the temporality of past events. However, in the American Southeast, research by a small number of academic archaeologists who are interested in specific kinds of sites, time periods, and research questions drive radiocarbon dating efforts. This creates an uneven distribution of chronological and temporal frameworks that limits our interpretation of human behavior across time and space. In this report, we argue that if archaeologists want to control for time in the same way that we control for space in our interpretations of the archaeological record, radiocarbon dating must be practiced using a standardized methodology in all realms of archaeological practice – cultural resource management, academia, museums, and government agencies. To do this, archaeologists need to (1) better date individual sites and groups of related sites and (2) build an aggregate data set that more accurately reflects the reality of human behavior across time. We argue that cultural resource management, specifically, can play a key role in helping put radiocarbon analysis at the center of archaeological practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Radiocarbon dating
• chronology building
• cultural resource management

Acknowledgments

This paper was conceived and constructed as part of a graduate seminar on the archaeology of time held at the Laboratory of Archaeology at the University of Georgia and with input from the CRM sector. We thank those peoples and descendant communities whose pasts we are fortunate to study and the researchers and professionals whose work, past and present, inspired the analysis and commentary presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All raw data will be available upon request. Supplemental information will be archived in the University of Georgia’s Laboratory of Archaeology Lab Series. Radiocarbon dates are archived with 14Card: https://www.canadianarchaeology.ca.