The Powers Phase Project was a multiyear archaeological program undertaken in southeastern Missouri by the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The project focused on the occupation of a large Pleistocene-age terrace in the Little Black River Lowland-a large expanse of lowlying land just east of the Ozark Highland-between roughly A. D. 1250 and A. D. 1400. The largest site in the region is Powers Fort-a palisaded mound center that - ceived archaeological attention as early as the late nineteenth century. Archa- logical surveys conducted south of Powers Fort in the 1960s...

It is difficult for today's students of archaeology to imagine an era when chronometric dating methods were unavailable. However, even a casual perusal of the large body of literature that arose during the first half of the twentieth century reveals a battery of clever methods used to determine the relative ages of archaeological phenomena, often with considerable precision.
Stratigraphic excavation is perhaps the best known of the various relative-dating methods used by prehistorians. Although there are several techniques of using artifacts from superposed strata to measure time, these...