Marine Reservoir Effects in Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea Virginica) from Southwestern Florida, USA

ABSTRACT In southwestern Florida, USA, terraformed landscapes built almost entirely of oyster shells (Crassostrea virginica) reflect a unique pre-Columbian tradition of shell-built architecture. The ability to reliably date oyster shells is essential to identifying spatial, temporal, and functional relationships among shellworks sites, yet to date there has been no systematic attempt to quantify or correct for carbon reservoir effects in this region. Here we present 14 radiocarbon (14C) ages for 5 known-age, pre-bomb oyster shells collected between AD 1932–1948, as well as 6 14C ages for archaeological oyster/charcoal pairs from the Turner River Mound Complex, Everglades National Park. We report our current best estimate of ΔR = 92 ± 74 yr for Greater Southwest Florida, and ΔR = –15 ± 42 yr for the Turner River archaeological site. Future research should focus on paired archaeological specimens to obtain spatially and temporally relevant estimates of ΔR.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Radiocarbon: An International Journal of Cosmogenic Isotope Research

• Publication date

  2019-10-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/RDC.2019.25
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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