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Canada / AB / DjOw-1 (Fletcher) / TO-1097
- Lab number
- TO-1097
- Material dated
- plant remains; restes de plantes
- Taxa dated
- Cyperaceae (25 seeds, 0.025 g)
- Locality
- north edge of Chin Coulee, 50 km south-southeast of Taber, Alberta
- Map sheet
- 72 E/12
- Submitter
- J.R. Vickers
- Date submitted
- January 5, 0098
- Normalized Age
- 9380 ± 110
- Significance
- geoarchaeology; géoarchéologie
- Stratigraphic component
- 1988 test
- Context
- 1988 test unit, 286 cm depth, in silty clay with plant macrofossils, about 36 cm below the base of the bison bone bed
- Comments
- DjOw-1, Fletcher: This Cody complex bison kill site was discovered 1963 by Armin Dyck after Mr. Fletcher had dug a borrow pit in which to water his cattle. Possibly due to the influence of cattle urine and excrement, the site has been extraordinally difficult to date by radiocarbon. The bones submitted for dating were somewhat permineralized, with manganese enrichment subsequently being demonstrated by neutron activation analysis (Wilson, et al. 1991: 130). Furthermore, the method of collagen extraction in use at the time employed the insoluble concentrate for radiocarbon dating, and this method was subsequently abandoned when it was realized that potential contaminants might remain in the samples at variable concentrations. The Fletcher site was restudied in 1987 and 1988, during which a sample of sedge seeds was isolated from silty clay that underlies the bone bed. An accelerator mass spectrometry date on the seeds appears to provide an acceptable limiting date on the age of the bison kill.