Anthropology Spence Lecture: It's About Time

Event Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2017

It's about time: Radiocarbon modelling & the absolute chronology of Ontario's archaeological culture history

The Department of Anthropology Spence Lecture

Dr. James Conolly,
Department of Anthropology,
Trent University 

Wednesday, November 29– 2:30-4pm – SSC9420

The development of methods for the analysis of patterning in very large adiocarbon datasets has ushered in a third revolution in the absolute dating of the past. Although much of the focus has been on the use and manipulation of summed radiocarbon data as proxies for population history, pooled radiocarbon databases also have value for evaluating long-standing cultural historical systematics and the ways in which regional cultural variability is schematized.

In this presentation Conolloy describes the challenges of generating a clean database for Ontario's Indigenous archaeological record, and show how reconciling absolute date ranges with the existing culture historical scheme is more challenging than one might expect. This exercise provides opportunities for questioning some fundamental ideas about how we understand Ontario's cultural chronology and also how we think about the variation and change inherent in Ontario's archaeological record.

Supported by the Social Science Student Donation Fund

Anthropology Spence Lecture: It's About Time