The Millennium before Clovis in Alaska

Summary

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 Beringia was the "homeland" of the first Americans, and (2) presenting new archaeological evidence of humans in Alaska 1000+ years before the time of Clovis.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Taphonomy to Human Ecology: Papers in Honor of Gary Haynes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage