Radiocarbon chronologies, coastal erosion, and archaeological visibility in the Quoddy Region, far northeastern North America

Around the world, coastal erosion is one of the greatest threats to the archaeological record. Understanding the patterns of erosion’s effects on the archaeological record is therefore crucial to interpreting apparent gaps in the archaeological record. One way to understand how erosion has affected particular eras may be to consider radiocarbon datasets to explore what periods are lost from the record and if that destruction occurred before the proliferation of radiocarbon dating. Moreover, considering calibrated radiocarbon dates may illuminate preserved eras that are obscured by technological continuity or stratigraphic position. In this paper, we use a radiocarbon dataset from the Quoddy Region, a biogeographically defined coastal area on the Canada-United States border in far northeastern North America to explore two periods that have been interpreted as gaps in the region’s archaeological record: the Archaic period (9500–3000 cal BP) and the Protohistoric period (550–350 cal BP). We find that by the time radiocarbon dating became routine, Archaic period occupations had already been eroded away, and that between the 1960 s and 2000 s, evidence from the Early Maritime Woodland period (3000–2200 cal BP) was similarly lost. However, calibrated radiocarbon dates from the Quoddy Region suggest that Protohistoric period components have been identified but not comprehensively distinguished from Late Maritime Woodland period (1300–550 cal BP) components.