Age of the O18 Site, Hawaiʻi

Seven new ¹⁴C age determinations on short-lived materials yield a sound evidential basis for the chronology of the O18 site on Oʻahu Island, Hawaiʻi, long thought to be an early settlement site. Calibration within a model-based, Bayesian framework indicates that the site was established in AD 1040–1219, some 260–459 years after the current estimate of first settlement, and abandoned in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Previously published age determinations are mostly too old, probably due to the `old wood’ effect. O18 appears to be the oldest site on the Waimānalo Plain, but earlier sites in Waimānalo likely exist inland of the plain.

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