Pre-Clovis Archaeology in the Frontiers of Research:Page-Ladson and the Importance of Submerged Sites to Understanding the First Americans

Summary

Dr. Gruhn has spent her career working in locations that most Paleoindian archaeologists consider to be inaccessible and difficult, maintaining that the story of the First Americans can best be found in well-preserved localities on the geographical and chronological frontiers. Our recent work at the Page-Ladson site in Florida fits well within the spirit of her investigations. Page-Ladson is an inundated terrestrial site with sediments containing lithic artifacts associated with a butchered mastodon radiocarbon dated to 14,450 years ago. Page-Ladson is more than a thousand years older than Clovis, and demonstrates that people were in the Southeast well before the opening of the ice-free corridor, providing indirect support for coastal colonization models. Further, this submerged cultural component is buried within a well-preserved Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene geological sequence spanning the period from 16,000-8,500 years ago that has provided proxy evidence for major climatic changes and the extinction of megafauna in the Southeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Alternative Perspectives on the Peopling of the New World: A Symposium in Honor of Ruth Gruhn, the "First Lady" of First Americans Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15182