April Adventures in New York

April was a busy month for the Dating Iroquoia team!

Samantha Sanft visited the New York State Museum to collect samples from multiple Onondaga sites. Those samples are in the process of being prepared for submission to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies (CAIS) at the University of Georgia the Centre for Isotope Research (CIO) at the University of Groningen. This work brings us very close to having all of the samples identified in our proposal collected.

 

New York State Museum

The team also presented the preliminary results of the project at the New York State Archaeological Association meetings. The paper contained some preliminary modelling from site sequences in Ontario and New York. Thus far the latest results are articulating very well with our pilot study. However, until we are confident that new dates will not alter those preliminary results we are not going to post them here. Altogether, the paper was met with a good response. The NYSAA meetings also gave us a chance to confer with other researchers who are interested in chronology-building in the northeast. Jim Bradley, an expert on Onondaga archaeology, helpfully offered to seek out samples from collections we were unaware of!

NYSAA meeting program

After the meetings, Jennifer Birch visited the archaeology collections at Syracuse University. Here, she was able to access collections from sites that were the basis of James A. Tuck’s research on the Onondaga for the project. This visit provided the opportunity to collect samples for the project as well as to examine some excellent examples of the “archaeology of archaeology” — in particular, the kinds of expedient containers artifacts may be stored in. In this case, cigar boxes and seed bags.

Syracuse University

Charcoal and ceramics

Seed packet artifact bags

Carbonized maize — our favorite kind of ecofact.

Finally, team members met at Cornell University for a day of updates and project planning before we all head off for summer fieldwork, dissertation research, and writing.

A windy day on Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, NY

The sample collection phase of our project is very nearly complete and we are looking forward to submitting the final set of samples for phase I of the project. Expect great things in fall 2018 as the first sets of formal modelling and interpretation come together!

Dating Iroquoia at the NYSAAs

Our team will be presenting preliminary results of our project at the NYSAA meetings in Syracuse, NY on Sunday April 29. If you will be at the meetings, drop by and say hello.

Sunday April 29, 8:40 am, Jennifer Birch, Sturt Manning, Samantha Sanft, and Megan Conger. High-Precision Radiocarbon Chronology of Iroquoian Occupations in New York and Ontario: Preliminary Results and Implications.

Sample Collection in New York, at RMSC

The Rochester Museum and Science Center (RMSC) is the repository for about half of the assemblages from the New York sites in our project. Thanks to the amazing staff at RMSC, who approved our request to conduct radiocarbon dating and consistently facilitated our research, we have finished collecting all of our samples from RMSC.

Samantha, a research assistant with our Cornell team, has been traveling to Rochester over the last few months to collect data for radiocarbon sample selection. After piecing together information from site maps, RMSC site files, primary artifact files, and field notes, Samantha selected samples that will provide the most amount of information for our project. During subsequent visits, she assessed the condition of the samples and made sure that enough organic material from these specific contexts would remain in RMSC collections for future archaeological projects. Lastly, Samantha made one last round of visits to Rochester in order to collect the samples and bring them back to Cornell for further analysis. After which point, the samples will be sent off to the lab for radiocarbon dating!

It was incredible seeing the massive amount of organics recovered from some of the sites (see the gallon-sized bag full of carbonized beans from the Alhart site, pictured below) and it was fascinating learning more about how past peoples lived. The Alhart beans were recovered from a rectangular underground storage pit. The pit housed two bark barrels full of beans surrounded by corn cobs and contained a wooden ladle sitting on top of one of the barrels of beans – how cool!

Next, Samantha will travel to Albany to visit the New York State Museum.