A Revised Chronology for the Emergence and Expansion of Late Woodland Villages along the North Shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and Evidence for a Rapid Increase in Fortified Settlements in the Thirteenth Century AD.

In this paper, we present a revised chronology for the appearance and development of village communities dating to the first part of the Late Woodland across the north shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario (Ontario, Canada). Our work is based on a sample of existing and newly obtained accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates from Late Woodland sites dating before AD 1450. We have examined these within a Bayesian modelling framework to provide a more precise understanding of the timing and pace of cultural change, with a focus on the changes in settlement size and organization structure. Our results emphasize the longevity and adaptive success of low-level food production among communities along the Grand River in the first phase of the Late Woodland. We also show that the transition to palisaded villages and fortified towns was not a slow four-century-long process that conventional dating implied. Instead, these changes unfolded over 150 years, exhibiting a more rapid transition than has previously been recognized, concentrated in the thirteenth century AD. These results are interpreted within the context of the growing value of intra-community cohesion alongside evidence for inter-community conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]