Current Research in Ohio Archaeology 2017 Kevin C. Nolan, Mark Seeman, and Mark A. Hill www.ohioarchaeology.org 1 New Dates on Scioto Hopewell Sites: A SCHoN Project Kevin C. Nolan, Mark Seeman, and Mark A. Hill As part of a larger project, Scale and Community in Hopewell Networks (SCHoN), we submitted a series of 19 dates from seven Scioto Valley Hopewell sites. The larger project focuses on attribute analysis and source identification of copper, ceramic, and lithic artifacts. Our first batch of dates begin to shake up previous narratives on the arc of Hopewell history. Here we present raw measurements and calibrated dates with minimal commentary. Future work will delve into the meaning of these and another batch of dates yet to be submitted. We submitted our dates to the CAIS laboratory at the University of Georgia for AMS analysis. We dated material from Ater (A3062), Harness (A7), Ginther (A1020), Tremper (A125), Brown’s Bottom #1 (BB), Lady’s Run (LR), and Balthaser (BH). The raw measurements their context and the material dated are presented in Table 1. The radiocarbon years range from 2160 BP to 1710 BP. All materials dated are expected to have a high degree of association with the event of interest with the possible exception of curated objects staying in circulation decades after they were originally made. Following the scoring system of Nolan (2012), these dates would all range between a score of 3.5 to 6.5. These are all above the take-at-face-value threshold of 3. It should be noted that bark was not considered in the original scheme and is here included in the small wood category when it may be more appropriate to place it in the same category as nuts and nutshell, or possibly the “plant” category, as it only represents a short period of growth. The median calibrated dates range from BC 220 to 340 AD (Table 2; Figure 1). Calibrated dates and ranges are rounded to the nearest 5 years to emphasize the real nature of the probabilistic precision. Several details are of particular note. First, at least one object (UG28060) included in the Harness Mound was hundreds of years earlier than every other sample dated. The other two dates from Harness overlap substantially at 1 sigma. A tantalizing clue is also provided by the sole date (thus far) from Tremper (UG28064). Despite Tremper often being considered stylistically the earliest Hopewell site in the Scioto Valley, our results show this site may date to the middle third of the Hopewell episode. The two main burials at Ater (Burial 50 and 51) may not be contemporaneous. There is substantial overlap in the ranges, but the central tendencies of the two are separated by 60 years (Table 2). The current evidence is not sufficient to definitively answer the question of contemporaneity; however, the answer to this question bears on the nature of the construction of the site, but also the nature of the society that built it. Rockhold, with its thick pottery and limited decoration of ceramics (Nolan et al. 2016, 2017) ranks as the lone first century AD site in the sample. Perhaps the most interesting thing revealed that is more fully discussed elsewhere (Pacheco et al. 2017), is the temporal relationships between Brown’s Bottom and Lady’s Run. Brown’s Bottom averages approximately 270 AD and Lady’s Run averages (excluding the obvious outlier of UG28072) 255 AD. There is an early component, possibly in the first century AD represented in the midden deposit near Lady’s Run structure 1 (UG28072). For the dates that we present here, the two largest structures on Brown’s Bottom (BB#1 structure and LR