Geoarchaeology of the Bear Creek Paleoindian Site, King County, Washington: The Stratigraphic Framework

Summary

The Bear Creek site (45KI839) in Redmond, Washington, has yielded important information about Native American settlement, subsistence, and technology in the Puget Lowlands during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition (LPH). The depositional sequence within the site represents a well-preserved stratigraphic and archaeological record extending from the postglacial and early Holocene, and is characterized by several clearly expressed shifts in depositional environments. The high amount of lithological variability characteristic of deposits in glaciated terrains can result in difficult-to-interpret unit-to-unit heterogeneity if a strictly lithostratigraphic approach to the classification of depositional units is employed. In order to reduce place-to-place variability, and yet retain the capacity for detailed characterization of the depositional sequence in individual archaeological units as well as refer to major regional postglacial environmental shifts, we grouped facies types into discontinuity-bounded allostratigraphic units. This allowed us to correlate and compare deposits both vertically and laterally across the site within single depositional environments, including those that often produce heterogeneous sets of facies. We have organized our observations of the site stratigraphy utilizing a combination of data derived from distributions of lithofacies types, the geometry and character of the allostratigraphic bounding contacts, and most importantly, micromorphological analyses of both allostratigraphic and lithofacies contacts.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage