We present two new Bayesian 14C models using IntCal20 that incorporate 17 new calibrated AMS ages for Early Bronze IV Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and Middle Bronze Age Tell el-Hayyat, located in the northern Jordan Valley, Jordan. These freshly augmented suites of carbonized seed dates now include 25 AMS dates from Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and 31 AMS dates from Tell el-Hayyat. The modeled founding date for Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj strengthens an emerging high chronology for Early Bronze IV starting by 2500 cal BC, while the end of its habitation by 2200 cal BC may exemplify a regional pattern of increasingly pervasive abandonment among late Early Bronze IV settlements in the Southern Levant. In turn, our modeled date for the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze Age transition at Tell el-Hayyat around 1900 cal BC pushes this interface about a century later than surmised traditionally, and its abandonment in Middle Bronze III marks an unexpectedly early end date before 1600 cal BC. These inferences, which coordinate Bayesian AMS models and typological ceramic sequences for Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and Tell el-Hayyat, contribute to an ongoing revision of Early and Middle Bronze Age Levantine chronologies and uncoupling of their attendant interpretive links between the Southern Levant and Egypt.

The Gaspereau Lake Reservoir Site Complex in Nova Scotia, Canada, yielded a large ceramic assemblage that permitted the first fine-grained analysis of ceramic change in the region at the Middle–Late Woodland Transition from ca. 1550 BP to ca. 1150 BP. The aim of this study was to refine the standard regional chronology first proposed by researchers J B Petersen and D Sanger. To do this, ceramics were directly dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), and the assemblage was categorized and analyzed to identify clusters of attributes. Ten AMS dates were acquired on carbonized food residue on the interiors of pottery and yielded the largest continuous ceramic sequence in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. This sequence was used to infer a change in manufacturing practices between the Middle (2150–1300 BP) and Late (1300–500 BP) Woodland periods and to propose five new subperiods between 1650 BP and 950 BP. Increasing incidence of coil breaks and temper percentage from the Middle to the Late Woodland were found to be chronologically sensitive. The analysis showed that, at Gaspereau Lake, a gradual shift from finely decorated and manufactured pottery to expediently made pottery suggests that pottery was made in larger numbers to support large-scale gatherings.