McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In 2013, we began working at the McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes sites, located in the Tanana Flats area of central Alaska about 30 miles south of Fairbanks. Both sites contain multiple cultural components, representing human occupation from about 14,000 to 1000 BP. Preservation is excellent in these contexts with thousands of lithic artifacts, osseous materials, faunal remains, and paleoethnobotanical remains. In this poster symposium, we present current results of our interdisciplinary efforts, including stratigraphy, radiocarbon and IRSL chronology, site formation, soil micromorphology, lithic technological and raw material studies, zooarchaeological studies, paleoethnobotanical analyses, site-spatial analyses, and eDNA work.
Other Keywords
Paleoindian and Paleoamerican •
Lithic Analysis •
Geoarchaeology •
Landscape Archaeology •
arctic •
Beringia •
Material Culture and Technology •
Taphonomy and Site Formation •
Chronology •
Zooarchaeology
Geographic Keywords
Alberta (State / Territory) •
Yukon Territory (State / Territory) •
British Columbia (State / Territory) •
Alaska (State / Territory) •
Saskatchewan (State / Territory) •
Manitoba (State / Territory) •
Canada (Country) •
Northwest Territories (State / Territory) •
North America (Continent) •
North America: Arctic and Subarctic
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
-
Contributions of IRSL to the Issue of Initial Settlement in the New World: The Case of the McDonald Creek Archaeological Site (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The McDonald Creek archaeological site from central Alaska (USA) has been dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) in order to document the initial settlement in the New World. Eolian sediment samples (loess) from stratigraphic profiles have been systematically dated...
-
Geochemical Characterization and Raw Material Procurement at McDonald Creek, Alaska (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
-
Holocene Occupations of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The Tanana Basin of interior Alaska is at the center of efforts to identify late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites that better define regional occupation histories and provide insight into subarctic adaptation, technological organization, assemblage variability,...
-
Interpreting Technological Activities and Organization at McDonald Creek, Central Alaska, ca. 13,900 Calendar Years Ago (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Continuing excavations at the McDonald Creek site, located in the Tanana Flats south of the city of Fairbanks, have yielded a significant assemblage of stone artifacts. Most of these come from a late Pleistocene cultural layer dating to about 13,900 calendar years ago, but...
-
Micromorphological Analysis of Deposition, Pedogenesis, and Stratigraphic Integrity at the McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. Despite the fact that archaeologists have long turned to the Alaskan archaeological record to answer questions about the first Americans, little is certain about the peopling of Beringia. The poor preservation of faunal remains in many central Alaskan archaeological sites has...
-
New Archaeobotanical Data from the Late Pleistocene Occupations of McDonald Creek (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. What can archaeobotany tell us about past landscapes and human behavior at McDonald Creek during the Late Pleistocene? Since 2016, systematic charcoal and phytolith sampling has been performed at McDonald Creek with the following aims: (1) reconstruct the ligneous vegetation...
-
Preliminary Analysis of the Fauna from the McDonald Creek Site (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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 contains identifiable faunal remains from two primary climatic and cultural time periods: (1) a Younger-Dryas aged occupation, and (2) a pre-Clovis aged occupation dating to ca. 14,000 cal BP. The ca. 14,000 cal BP occupation contains most of the well-preserved...
-
A Preliminary Spatial Analysis of the Late Pleistocene Components at the McDonald Creek Site, Interior Alaska (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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. The McDonald Creek site (FAI-2043) is located about 30 miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska, in the Tanana Flats. Results of archaeological testing and excavations between 2013 and 2019 identified three distinct archaeological components, Components 1, 2, and 3 dating to about 13.8...
-
Spatial Arrangement of the Northern Archaic Component at the McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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 is a multicomponent campsite located in the central Tanana Valley south of Fairbanks, Alaska. In addition to late Pleistocene components, archaeological excavations at the site have uncovered a productive Northern Archaic occupation dating to the middle Holocene....
-
Stratigraphy and Radiocarbon Chronology at McDonald Creek: A Multicomponent Pleistocene-Holocene Site in Central Alaska (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...