Dissertation Research: Dating and Analysis of the Moorehead Tradition

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Anderson Under the direction of Dr. Douglas Anderson, Mr. Brian Robinson will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will obtain radiocarbon dates on materials associated with 33 Moorehead burial tradition sites from coastal locations in Maine. While the existence of this tradition has been known for many years and it has been determined that sites range from ca. 8,500 to 3,700 B.P. most individual occurrences are very poorly dated. Mr. Robinson has discovered that materials at many of these sites include small amounts of charcoal; therefore the AMS technique will allow their age to be determined. The Moorehead tradition is known for its elaborate red ocher human burials which are grouped into clearly defined cemeteries. Archaeologists have focussed attention on this phenomenon because such a degree of elaboration is rare among hunters and gathers and suggests complex levels of social organization among this Archaic period people. Mr. Robinson believes that he can use the geographical distribution of cemeteries and their relationships both to each other and to important natural resources to reconstruct both social and ecological aspects of this tradition and to determine how these changed over time. However to conduct such an analysis it is necessary to obtain chronological control over individual sites and this research will accomplish this. This work is important for several reasons. It will increase our understanding of how peoples at a simple level of cultural organization adapted to their social and natural environment. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and will assist in the training of a promising young scientist.