Early Human Occupation at Healy Lake: A Study of Lithic Technological Organization at the Linda’s Point and Healy Lake Village Sites

Summary

Under the collective organization of the Healy Lake Working Group, renewed investigations into the prehistory of the Healy Lake region over the past five years have allowed for new insights into terminal Pleistocene human activity in the Alaskan interior. This paper reports the detailed assessment of curated materials from the Village site, originally excavated in the 1960s and 1970s. Using original field notes, drawings, and photographs, the lowest component was stratigraphically separated from Holocene occupations, and found to correlate closely with the Chindadn occupation originally proposed by John Cook, with some exceptions. Lithic reduction patterns seen in the debitage, tools, and bifaces are comparable to recently excavated data from the nearby Linda’s Point site, and reflect patterns of mobility, raw material usage, and lithic technologies throughout their 13,000-13,500 year history of occupation.

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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