Beringia (Other Keyword)
1-17 (17 Records)
In 2013 our team began a 3-year testing project to assess the research potential of the recently-discovered McDonald Creek archaeological site (FAI-2043). The site is located in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska south of Fairbanks. Site testing indicated a well-stratified and reasonably preserved multicomponent site situated in unconsolidated eolian sand and silt deposits atop an ancient alluvial landform. Three cultural components have been identified so far, dating to the early Allerød,...
Animal Resources and Technology in Eastern Beringia During the Late Pleistocene (2016)
Bone technology is often omitted from discussions about technological variability and functionality in eastern Beringia, where recovered organic artifacts are rare. However, based on discoveries in Northeastern Eurasia with good organic preservation, it can be surmised that bone technology was similarly important to Beringian hunter-gatherers during the Final Pleistocene. Here we present the results of faunal and spatial analyses of the site of Swan Point CZ4b, the oldest known archaeological...
Colonization of Northern North America: a view from Eastern Beringia (2016)
Recent investigations at multiple well-stratified multi-component sites in interior Eastern Beringia have provided important data on late Pleistocene technology, subsistence economy, and habitat use. Our review incorporates recent multidisciplinary work at Upward Sun River, Mead, and Swan Point. We summarize these data within human ecological perspectives and derive implications for the lifeways of early Beringians. We review the biogeography and early archaeological record for the Ice Free...
Eastern Beringian Toolstone Procurement: Investigations of Fine-Grained Volcanics in the Nenana Valley, Interior Alaska. (2017)
Investigating prehistoric landscape use is significant in understanding adaptive strategies in the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. One way to begin to address landscape use is through lithic procurement and selection studies; these are significant in understanding prehistoric human behavior because procurement and selection behaviors shape toolkits, mobile strategies and settlement patterns. An initial step in addressing these problems is attempted through examining lithic artifacts from...
Geochemical Characterization and Raw Material Procurement at McDonald Creek, Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around 14,000 years ago, modern humans dispersed into eastern Beringia. McDonald Creek, located in the Tanana Valley, central Alaska, is a significant part of characterizing this dispersal as one of the earliest known sites in eastern Beringia. This site posesses three cultural...
Human and Animal Dispersal in Beringia: Reconciling the Genetic and Archaeological Records (2016)
Peopling of the New World involved a dispersal process across Beringia that included both humans and animals. The archaeological record from eastern Beringia suggests a multiple-stage process of both pre- and post-Younger Dryas (YD) colonization from different regions of Northeast Asia, with the pre-YD colonization subdivisible into multiple waves. These archaeological manifestations can in turn be related to waves of terminal Pleistocene opportunistic entry into NE Asia itself, but can only be...
Human Land Use Strategies and Responses to Risk during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition in Eastern Beringia (2018)
Recent investigations in central Alaska at multiple scales (macro-regional, watershed, site cluster, intrasite) have revealed robust patterning among technological, faunal, and feature datasets. These responses are explored in the context of both regional environmental change associated with climatic oscillations between the Bolling-Allerod, Younger Dryas, and early Holocene chronozones as well as systemic change incorporating more logistical organization, shifts in diet breadth, and changes in...
Humans and carnivores at the Bluefish Cave II (northern Yukon): interpretation of the faunal remains (2015)
While research is still ongoing, the earliest date for the first modern humans in America is well accepted at 14,000 cal BP. Some archaeological sites propose a date prior to the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, however. This is the case of the Bluefish Caves which proposes a human presence in northern Yukon as early as 25,000 uncal BP. Here, approximately 18,000 bone specimens recovered from Cave II have been determined and examined under stereomicroscope. This zooarchaeological and taphonomic...
Investigations of late glacial occupations at the McDonald Creek site, central Alaska (2017)
In 2013 our team began testing the recently-discovered McDonald Creek archaeological site, located in the Tanana Flats, Central Alaska. To date we have excavated a total of 15 m2. The site contains evidence of a set of living floors dating to the Middle Holocene, Younger Dryas, and early Allerød. Our tests have revealed thousands of archaeological materials, including lithics and faunal and floral remains, associated with domestic features such as hearths and possible dwellings. We are analyzing...
Late Glacial Climate Change and the Dispersal of Humans to Beringia: An Ecological Model (2016)
New studies of ancient as well as modern human genomes suggest that the immediate ancestors of Native Americans began to disperse from greater northeast Asia to Beringia after the last glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 cal BP. These new data require us to reconsider the lengthy incubation period predicted by the Beringian standstill model as well as the place of the Yana RHS site in our understanding of the peopling of Alaska. In this paper, we review the climatic, paleoenvironmental, genomic...
Looking for Fish of the Right Age: Using GIS in Conjunction with Salmon Genetics to Identify Key Submerged Drainages (2017)
Geospatial analysis of Beringian bathymetric data provides powerful tools for formulating predictive modeling of submerged sites of Pleistocene age. With the acceptance of Pre-Clovis archaeological sites in the Americas (Jenkins et al., 2012), attention has shifted to alternative models of the peopling of the Americas. A Coastal Migration hypothesis has been proposed by Erlandson et al. (2013, 2015), however any evidence of such a route is now submerged. Ice free areas along the Pacific margin...
The Millennium before Clovis in Alaska (2015)
The early archaeological record of Beringia continues to be left out of most discussions of the peopling of the Americas, partly because of repeated discoveries of older-than-Clovis sites in temperate North America and Beringian archaeologists’ own admission that the early northern record looks very different from Clovis technologically. In this paper, I attempt to recast Beringia in a leading role by (1) reviewing new genetic studies of humans and their prey species positing that late-glacial...
New Dates and a Proposed Chronology for the Little John Site (KdVo-6), a Multi-Component Site in Eastern Beringia, Yukon Territory, Canada (2015)
New AMS radio-carbon dates derived from culturally modified bone and charred material in association with artifacts has expanded our appreciation of the antiquity and continuity of occupation at the Little John site, from the early Bolling-Allerod in the Late Pleistocene post-glacial period through the Early and Later Holocene. These new dates, combined with dates from other local sites on the Yukon – Alaska borderlands, allow us to identify a number of discrete chrono-zones at Little John that...
Obsidian Sourcing in Western Beringia (2016)
Chemical sourcing of obsidian artifacts serves an important role in understanding prehistoric patterns of mobility, trade, exchange, resource exploitation, and cultural interaction. In Alaska and adjacent areas of Canada, more than 8,000 obsidian artifacts and geologic source samples have been analyzed by various analytical techniques resulting in the identification of more than 50 chemically discrete obsidian groups throughout this vast area. In contrast to Alaska, comparatively little...
On the Trail of the Stemmed Point: A Circum-Pacific Perspective (2017)
Half a century ago, Alan Bryan proposed that two distinct early Paleoindian traditions occurred in North America—Clovis Fluted east of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin Stemmed in the far west—and that these co-traditions potentially represented different founding migrations from the Old World, with Great Basin Stemmed potentially being tied to a coastal north Pacific route. Much of the research that Ruth Gruhn and her partner Bryan conducted during the next several decades, certainly into the...
Stratigraphy and Radiocarbon Chronology at McDonald Creek: A Multicomponent Pleistocene-Holocene Site in Central Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. McDonald Creek, located in the Tanana Flats ~55 km south of Fairbanks, Alaska, rests on an isolated remnant of an ancient alluvial terrace of the Tanana River that hugs the southeast corner of a monadnock rising from the flats. While testing the site, we discovered a...
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...