Stone Age midden deposition assessed by bivalve sclerochronology and radiocarbon wiggle-matching of Arctica islandica shell increments

Sclerochronology, the study of the skeletal diaries of mollusks and corals, is a high-resolution geochronological tool of versatile usage in archaeology and paleontology with increasingly growing opportunities. Much of the recent efforts have concentrated on building multi-centennial bivalve growth records using annually deposited increments in the Holocene shells, comparable to tree-ring chronologies. In the context of geoarchaeology, the hitherto unachieved potential includes the application of sclerochronology to reconstruct long-term settlement histories. Here we contribute to both of these critical issues by presenting the first multi-shell sclerochronology constrained by methods originally developed in tree-ring research, using anthropogenically deposited bivalve shells of Arctica islandica excavated from a Stone Age midden in North Norway. Our systematic chronological approach to shell growth histories lays the foundation for a multi-dimensional dating framework that interacts between the incremental, radioisotopic and stratigraphic evidence. We show how the crossdating within and between the single-shell records yields a 155-year multi-shell sclerochronology, supported by the ¹⁴C AMS dates, that demonstrates minimum midden accumulation of 82 years and a depositional rate of 0.3 cm/yr. Sclerochronology paves the way for radiocarbon wiggle-matching, which narrows the probabilistic 2-σ uncertainty range for the oldest and youngest ¹⁴C AMS dates to 3150–2980 and 3060–2890 BC, respectively. We attribute the spectral characteristics of the chronology primarily to the North Atlantic Oscillation, suggesting essentially similar influences of climate variability on the Stone Age culture and our own society.