Prehistoric Foragers in the Central Alaska Range

Summary

Upland landscapes in the central Alaska Range play an important role in understanding prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement organization, subsistence activities, and lithic assemblage variability in interior Alaska. Previous research hypothesizes that late Pleistocene and early Holocene seasonal upland hunting conditioned lithic assemblages in the interior, and that seasonally available upland resources grew in importance through the middle and late Holocene, as interior foragers shifted to a logistically organized settlement system. To further evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted fieldwork in the upland upper Susitna River basin, central Alaska Range, to add to our knowledge of prehistoric forager activity in the understudied uplands of interior Alaska. This study utilizes paleoecological and geoarchaeological data from the Susitna study area to provide the ecological context for prehistoric upland landscape use. This study also incorporates site structure, faunal and lithic assemblage data from the study area to evaluate settlement organization and lithic assemblage variability in interior Alaska. This paper present the results of these analyses, focusing on understanding how foragers utilized upland landscapes from earliest colonization through the late Holocene, and the influence that ecological change and volcanism had on landscape use in the uplands of the central Alaska Range.

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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