The Giddings’ Legacy of Beach Ridge Archaeology in Alaska: A Proxy Record of Late Holocene Climate

Summary

Beach ridge archaeology developed as a relative-age archaeological survey method in the late 1950s within Kotzebue Sound. Giddings’ breakthrough collaboration with geologists David Hopkins and George Moore focused on Cape Krusenstern, defining 5,000 years of prehistory from the Denbigh complex to Thule tradition, dated mostly by reference to the type site at Onion Portage and 14C ages mostly on Old Whaling and Ipiutak and Thule occupations, but none on Norton or Denbigh. The onset of beach ridge deposition co-occurs with the stabilization of sea level ca. 5000 yrs BP. Abundant sources of mobile sand or gravel form beach ridges at depositional termini of long shore transport and are often ornamented by dunes, as at Cape Espenberg. Our geoarchaeological research since 1986 includes >300 14C ages to define coastal evolution, expanding the record from Norton Sound to Point Barrow, establishing that heightened storminess prevailed between 1200 and 1000 BC and AD 800 to 1200. Research at Cape Krusenstern validates some of Giddings’ original chronological inferences but provides a more detailed age model of the foreland’s evolution, especially in the older record and has refined the chronology of Norton and Thule occupations and produced firm ages on the Denbigh sequence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Envisioning and Re-envisioning Arctic Archaeology: The Enduring Legacies of J. Louis Giddings (1909-1964)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage