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- Title
THE OLD WOOD CALIBRATION PROJECT AND COLORADO’S UTE PREHISTORY: A PROGRESS REPORT.
- Authors
BAKER, STEVEN G.; DEAN, JEFFREY S.; TOWNER, RONALD H.
- Abstract
The Old Wood Calibration Project (OWCP) formally commenced in 2004 as a collaborative effort between the Uncompahgre Valley Ute Project of Centuries Research, Inc. of Montrose, Colorado and the Laboratory of Tree- Ring Research at the University of Arizona. This progress report summarizes the objectives and methods of the ongoing OWCP and discusses how the project has scientifically demonstrated that there is a very significant “old wood effect” in the radiocarbon and tree-ring dating record of hearth fuel woods from archaeological sites in western Colorado. It also explains how this effect can commonly result in erroneous age determinations for archaeological events that are from a few hundred to several hundred years too early. The project has developed empiricallyderived correction factors for such determinations that are applicable to selected areas of western Colorado. This paper summarizes the initial findings of the OWCP and begins an examination of the gross radiocarbon record for the Ute occupation of western Colorado by application of minimum and maximum correction factors. While this examination is still ongoing, results to date lead the authors to hypothesize that there is little to no radiocarbon evidence which can at this time support a notion that the Ute speakers were present in western Colorado in any numbers for much if any of the purely prehistoric Canalla Phase of their archaeological tradition. It further considers how a notion of a long Ute presence in the region may have developed and displaced an earlier theory that Athapaskan speakers or another unidentified phylogenetic group(s) may have inhabited western Colorado after the disappearance of the Ancestral Puebloans and prior to the time that Ute speakers came to characterize the state’s Native American landscape.
- Subjects
UTE (North American people); RADIOCARBON dating; UNIVERSITY of Arizona; NATIVE American history
- Publication
Southwestern Lore, 2016, Vol 82, Issue 3, p12
- ISSN
0038-4844
- Publication type
Article