High Resolution Dating of the Hawley-Bell Collection

研究小组将从美国东部和中西部的纪念碑和村庄中确定建筑材料的年龄。大约在上个千年，密西西比河流域的大多数人开始住在村庄和城镇。这些社区的历史--其发展的原因和速度--是科学争论的焦点。在文字记录之前，对历史变迁的循证解释是考古数据的主要贡献，但科学需要过去物体和事件的准确和精确的日期。该项目将对大型博物馆收藏的木材进行放射性碳和树木年轮分析，由于最近的方法学发展，这些木材可以为复杂社会的发展问题提供独特的信息。长期以来，公众和专家都对密西西比河流域土著社会的历史感兴趣，特别是在该地区古老城镇中心建造大型金字塔土丘。这项研究将为其中一些纪念碑的建造提供有史以来最精确的日历日期，这些数据将有助于研究人口变化的重要性以及过去利用纪念碑来构建社会和政治关系。系统地应用基于树木年轮的方法，大大提高了对过去事件发生时间的认识，并使考古学的理论进步。这项研究将在美国东部和中西部大规模应用这些技术，并将产生高精度的日历日期的时间和克里思的纪念碑建设，村庄占领的持续时间，和文化属性的传播特征的“密西西比”社会。树木年轮收集的规模和背景的多样性意味着结果将代表密西西比文化历史精确性的重大改进。这将大大有助于该地区的考古学，并有助于延长千年树轮年表。总的来说，我们的研究结果将有助于发展基于事件的历史的纪念碑和文化变化的目标，在新兴的复杂society.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

The research team will determine the age of building material from monuments and villages in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. For roughly the last millennium, most people in the Mississippi River Basin began living in villages and towns. The histories of these communities – the reasons and rate of their development – are points of scientific debate. Evidence-based explanations for historical change prior to written records is a major contribution of archaeological data, but the science requires accurate and precise dates for objects and events in the past. This project will apply radiocarbon and tree-ring analysis to wood curated in a large museum collection that, due to recent methodological developments, can contribute unique information to questions surrounding the development of complex societies. Both the public and experts have long had an interest in the history of the indigenous societies of the Mississippi River Basin, particularly the construction of the large pyramid mounds at the center of ancient towns in the region. This study will contribute the most precise calendar dates ever obtained for the construction for some of these monuments, and the data will aid research on the importance of population change and the use of monuments to structure social and political relationships in the past. The systematic application of tree-ring based methods significantly improves knowledge on the timing of past events and enables theoretical advances in archaeology. This study will apply these techniques on a large scale in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. and will generate high precision calendar dates for the timing and tempo of monument construction, the duration of village occupation, and the spread of culture attributes characteristic of “Mississippian” society. The size of the tree ring collection and the diversity of contexts mean that the results would represent a major improvement in the precision of Mississippian culture history. This will contribute significantly to archaeology in the region and help extend millennial length tree-ring chronologies. Overall, our results will contribute to the goal of developing event-based histories of monumentality and culture change in emergent complex societies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.