Dating the Late Archaic at the Davidson Site (AhHk-54), Ontario

Abstract

A large series of 56 AMS dates are reported from the Davidson site, occupied during both the Broadpoint and Smallpoint Late Archaic. The focus is on documenting the occupation history of the site itself. The dates on various features often do not match superposition data or associations with diagnostics and provide a case study of the great potential for component mixing on such sites, which can go unrecognized without multiple dates from different materials. Despite that evidence, overall the kernel density function models show that the dates fall into two more-or-less distinctive groupings centered at circa 2250 cal BC and at circa 1150 cal BC, matching previous age estimates of the two main components and also suggesting an intriguing circa 300-year gap between those two intensive occupations. The analyses suggest charcoal dates overestimate age when compared to dates from nutshell by about 120 years and that the consistency of dates from particular feature clusters often indicates they represent an “integrated series of events.”