North America - NW Coast/Alaska (Geographic Keyword)
251-275 (301 Records)
Explorations of human-environmental interactions in prehistoric Alaska tend to draw on biological, botanical and faunal data. Artefacts have often received much less attention beyond links to subsistence concerns and the gathering of additional paleoenvironmental information (e.g. wood and grass species). Pottery, in particular, has featured in such discussions only in regards to the processing of foodstuffs: both its suitability for particular cooking methods and the substances it may have...
A Source and an End: Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Peopling of Beringia (2017)
After nearly a century since confirming Pleistocene humans in North America, having taken a few misguided turns along the way, our discussions about First American origins remain focused on late glacial northeast Asia. While questions persist about exact timing and means, geographically, Beringia is central in terms of routes. Recent genetic literature describes a standstill or isolation when a series of distinct Native American lineages formed prior to movement south of the continental ice....
The Spatial Statistics of Owl Ridge: Identifying Activities and Camp Use (2017)
The Owl Ridge site, located in central Alaska’s Nenana Valley, is an excellent example of a stratified, three-component camp site. The three components span the late Pleistocene/early Holocene boundary with component 1 dating to 13,110-12,730 cal BP, component 2 dating to 12,580-11,310 cal BP, and component 3 dating to 11,400-10,710 cal BP. The presence of discretely dated and stratified components provides an ideal opportunity to identify local changes in land use, in the distribution of camp...
Specialization, Standardization, and Opportunism: A Design Theory Perspective on the Production of Cultural Necessities at Tse-whit-zen Village (2017)
Lithic artifacts recovered from the Tse-whit-zen village, a large settlement on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca inhabited for 2,800 years, assist in portraying the choices made by people for adapting to the surrounding environment through tool development. Analysis of the lithic assemblage is based on a design theory approach that addresses material selection and reductive manufacturing strategies to understand efficiency, expediency, and reliability in forming the end products. The...
A Squamish Nation/Coast Salish Sense of Time (2017)
The foundation of understanding time and the past lays in the realm of constructing cultural historical chronologies through the use of radiocarbon dating and the determination of temporally sensitive artifacts. Along the shores of the Salish Sea of the southern Northwest Coast of North America the long established cultural historical sequence has been questioned and critiqued for its utility in modern day archaeological frameworks. Yet, the foundation of many regional interpretations regarding...
A Statistical Analysis of the Spatial and Temporal Components of the Sunrise Ridge Borrow Pit Site (45PI408), Mt. Rainier, Washington (2016)
Understanding the change of artifact frequencies through time and across space at the Sunrise Ridge Borrow Pit site is essential to testing hypotheses about settlement and subsistence in the Pacific Northwest. Some problems associated with intra-site time-averaging were controlled with intensive chronological analysis and volumetric control of artifact bearing sediments. Initial differences in analyzed artifact frequencies reveal a decrease in technological diversity and an increase in...
Stemmed Points and ‘Expedient Stone Tools’: early post-glacial archaeology on the BC coast. (2017)
Over 35 years ago Al Bryan and Ruth Gruhn were promoting the concept of a very early ‘Stemmed Point Tradition’ associated with ‘simple’ flake and core tools. They saw this ‘Far West’ area construct as being of similar age to Clovis and possibly even older. Al and Ruth were keenly interested in the assemblages of stemmed points and ‘expedient stone tools’ recovered by Fedje and others from a series of sites in the Eastern Slopes region of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the 1980s, an interest...
Steppes Across the Land: Reconstructions of Steppe Bison Mobility Patterns in East-Central Alaska through Isotopic Analyses and Implications for Prehistoric Human Behavior (2016)
Steppe bison (Bison priscus) were an important species for interior Alaskan subsistence economies during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, but the locations of preferred bison habitat areas, seasonal movement patterns, responses to environmental change, and other behavioral factors remain largely unexplored in Alaskan archaeology. This study applies strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotopic analyses to 14 sequentially-sampled and AMS radiocarbon dated steppe bison teeth from two locales in...
Subsistence and Seasonality during the Thule Phase (ca. 1000 B.P. to contact era) at Point Spencer, Alaska (2017)
Intensification of marine resource use is well documented over the last 1000 years in northern Alaska, but the role of other resources in the subsistence economy is poorly understood. In order to better understand the full range of subsistence activities, and to reconstruct season of site occupation, we undertook analysis of faunal materials from several Thule Phase sites located on Point Spencer, Alaska. The subsistence remains from a large site near the tip of the peninsula (TEL-8) were found...
The Suquamish Tribe Approach to Incorporate Tribal Historic Preservation into School Curricula (2016)
The Suquamish Tribe of the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Western Washington promotes incorporation of tribal history, culture, and language into school curricula. Staff members in the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Program participate in curriculum development and make presentations in the North Kitsap School District and at the Suquamish Tribe’s own Chief Kitsap Academy Middle and High School. Tribal archaeologists contribute to the classroom experience in a variety of ways to bring...
Survey for stone wall fish weirs on the continental shelf near Haida Gwaii, British Columbia using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). (2015)
The search for early human occupation on drowned continental shelves is hampered by the low archaeological visibility of typical hunter-gatherer sites. Predictive modelling for site locations can produce polygons of potential, but these need to be tested both to evaluate the model and to recover material remains. Sampling of underwater predictive model potential polygons is difficult, expensive and usually low-return. However, some sites, such as stone-wall fish weirs, may be directly visible to...
Survey for Submerged Archeological Sites on the Continental Shelf of SE Alaska: Proof of Concept (2015)
Four seasons (2010-14) of underwater archaeological survey (NSF OPP -#0703980 and 1108367) on the continental shelf of SE Alaska demonstrates that survey for evidence of human habitation when sea level was lower is feasible. Real time ROV monitoring and video, hydrologic excavation, airlift sampling, and graduated screening can be reliably employed for sea floor sampling following multibeam, side-scan sonar, and sub-bottom profile surveys. Limiting dates for submerged landscape features and...
Sweet aDNA O'Mine: The Rise and Fall of Ice Sheets and the Arctic Peopling from Beringia (2016)
The peopling of the North American Arctic was made possible after the full retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet. The archaeological record supports multiple migrations beginning approximately 6,000 years BP, thousands of years after the initial colonization of the Americas. Modern Iñupiat/Inuit peoples are the descendants of a recent (~800 ybp) and rapid (<200 years) migration by the Neo-Eskimo Thule. The Thule brought with them specialized technological developments adapted for the exploitation...
Taking the temperature of the Arctic past: Extracting temperature and precipitation information from bacterial lipids deposited in faunal remains from Cape Krusenstern, Alaska (2016)
Throughout his career, J. Louis Giddings explored the roles of climate on maritime and terrestrial resources and human ingenuity in adapting technologies and social strategies to exploit those resources under changing conditions. At Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, Giddings’ teams identified sequential occupations based on changing maritime adaptations but had no analytical tools for directly inferring key climatic parameters during periods of the Cape's occupation. Recently, our research group...
A Tale of Two Villages: Exploring the Role of Villages with Massive Shell Accumulations as Anthropogenic Coastline Modifications in Prince Rupert Harbour (2017)
3D mapping, percussion coring, and radiocarbon dating are used to explore the geoarchaeology and chronology of two villages composed of massive shell deposits in the Prince Rupert Harbour. We map out accumulation and development of these sites through time and demonstrate that they are major anthropogenic coastline modifications, which, with dozens of other large villages in the area, form a substantial built environment. As well as providing well-drained terraformed terraces on which to build...
Taphonomic and taxonomic comparisons of bird and mammal remains from Tse-whit-zen (2015)
Birds are often relatively scarce in Northwest Coast shell middens in comparison to fish, mammal and shellfish. However, large numbers of bird bones have been recovered from Tse-whit-zen. In fact, bird bones are both more numerous and more identifiable than mammal bones at the site. In the largest house structure, 47% of the bird bones greater than ¼" in size were identified to taxon (79% of those were identified to element). In contrast, the mammal identifiability rate ranged from 7% to...
Technological Complexities of the Peopling of Eastern Beringia (2017)
Alaska archaeologists continue to disagree on a unified culture history. The primary point of contention surrounds the presence or absence of microblade technology in central Alaska and the meaning of the Nenana and Denali complexes. While some interpret the former as a unique manifestation representing a separate migratory population, others disagree; and, the Denali complex has become a catchall category for a variety of artifact types leading to questions over its conceptual validity. This...
Terraforming, Monumentality and Long Term Practice in the Coast Salish World (2016)
The archaeological record of the southern Gulf Islands of coastal British Columbia provides evidence of deliberate and long-term construction of coastal landforms over the last 4500 years. Local landscapes were altered, modified and managed in the service of production, but the implications of such practices for the construction of place, of inequality, and of political networks are profound. I document the magnitude and extent of landscape construction spatially, focusing on quantifying...
Testing for Mass Processing in Archaeological Ungulate Remains (2017)
Archaeological applications of ethnographic models require that variables derived from the activities of living people be translated into archaeological terms. Enloe suggested that processing caribou (Rangifer tarandus) carcasses for food storage should be recognizable in patterns of bone fragmentation. He predicted that relatively uniform and large-sized bone fragments would result from mass processing for marrow as part of logistic collector subsistence strategies, compared with smaller and...
Three Phases of Initial Human Colonization in Southern Alaska (2015)
Once heavily glaciated during the Late Pleistocene, southern Alaska became ice-free just as the First Americans were entering the Bering Land Bridge. This makes the Susitna River in Southcentral Alaska a perfect laboratory for understanding how and why small-scale foraging societies spread throughout Beringia and ultimately the New World. While first explorers undoubtedly made decisions based on previous experience, initial occupants probably had different cultural expectations of their...
Timing the Introduction of Arrow Technologies in the Salish Sea (2015)
A substantial amount of recent literature has re-examined the applicability of dart-arrow indices for hafted chipped stone tools from archaeological assemblages ranging from the Columbia Plateau to Californian Coast. As yet, these approaches have not been employed to examine variation in Coast Salish lithic traditions. We critically apply Hildebrandt and King's (2012) recent-dart arrow index and also employ a discriminant function analysis (DFA) to a data set of chipped and ground stone points...
Tlingit "Streamscaping" as Landesque Capital Formation (2017)
The Tlingit heen sati ("stream master") was responsible for establishing and maintaining respectful relations with salmon as a trustee for his clan. The portfolio of obligations included both pragmatic duties controlling access and harvests and ritual responsibilities, such as greeting the arrival of salmon each year with welcoming ceremonies, practices anchored to the Salmon Boy mythic charter that identified the fundamental similarity of humans to salmon as persons. Another dimension of...
Tochak-McGrath Discovery: Three precontact individuals from the Upper Kuskokwim River, Alaska (2017)
Three precontact individuals inadvertently discovered in the village McGrath, Alaska provide a novel understanding of human history of the Upper Kuskokwim River region of Eastern Beringia. Collaboration between the McGrath Village Council, MTNT, Inc. and Tanana Chiefs Conference enabled a community research endeavor that has yielded a radiocarbon age estimate of c. 600-700 cal BP, isotopic dietary reconstruction suggesting a strong reliance on anadromous salmon, rare dental traits including a...
Toward Developing an Economic Model of Fish Rank for Late Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest Households (2017)
Considerable research has been conducted on archaeofaunal food remains as a proxy for consumer practices in Euro-American historical archaeology. Such research often incorporates price-driven meat rankings, in which the historical cost of a meat cut determines its rank. Archaeological fish remains also present an opportunity to examine how historical communities engaged with fish that could be acquired through subsistence practices, leisure activities, or market purchases. However, the...
Trace Elements in Archaeological Shells: Limits and Potential for Seasonality and Paleoclimate Studies (2016)
Stable oxygen isotope analysis of marine shells has increasingly become a common tool used to identify seasonality and reconstruct past sea surface temperatures (PSST). Oxygen isotope analysis of marine carbonates cannot, however, discriminate between freshwater fluxes and temperature changes as they both affect oxygen isotope ratios (18O/16O). The inability to discriminate the geochemical data can lead to ambiguous PSST and seasonality interpretations. Trace element ratios of Sr/Ca are...