The Dating Game

As the last post discussed, getting new dates is always exciting. Well, we just got seven more and they are interesting and raise more questions about the site. First, we have a date from the lowest level of the site that now pushes back the earliest occupation of the site to perhaps as early as 5600 years ago. We have another result that corresponds roughly to the other early date we got from the site, suggesting that some of the earliest occupants of the island lived at Stock Cove.

Some of the other new dates suggest a possible occupation hiatus, when the site was abandoned for over 1,000 years, and maybe as much as 2,000, although we need to run some more tests to confirm this. The next oldest date is from the early Groswater Paleoeskimo occupation of the site around 2700 years ago, which corresponds to some of the Groswater artifacts we found from that excavation level. The stratigraphy (levels) of the site suggest they occupied the site off an on for a few centuries and there does not seem to be a clear distinction between their use of the site and the later Dorset Paleoeskimo occupation, which raises some intriguing questions about the transitional period that we need to examine more closely. We have a few dates from when that transition is thought to have taken place around 2200-2000 years ago.

So, we have much to think about as we work out the details of the different peoples who lived at Stock Cove. I've attached a graph of the dates from last summer's field work.