Environmental Changes in Archaeologically Significant Sand Dunes in Subarctic Interior Alaska

Summary

Environmental changes, presently and prehistorically, are important factors which influence the expression of the archaeological record in subarctic sand dune environments. Current environmental changes (e.g., vegetation loss, shifts in aridity) affect preservation and associative contexts of the archaeological and paleoenvironmental records. Prehistoric environmental factors and post-depositional changes in these geological settings also played a role in how humans decided to use dune fields, as well as disturbance to the archaeological record, throughout different local and global climatological oscillations. This paper will present data collected from several archaeological and non-archaeological locations among dune fields located within the middle Tanana valley area of interior Alaska. Several stratigraphic records in this region indicate that environmental changes over the last 10,000 years have influenced both dunal landscapes and the site building processes through vegetation loss, sediment depletion, and other site disturbances. We discuss how our interpretations and reconstructions of local paleoenvironments and human behaviors are influenced, even distorted, by time and space scalar issues and geomorphic change within these types of subarctic dunal environments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage