Eastern Beringian Toolstone Procurement: Investigations of Fine-Grained Volcanics in the Nenana Valley, Interior Alaska.

Summary

Investigating prehistoric landscape use is significant in understanding adaptive strategies in the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. One way to begin to address landscape use is through lithic procurement and selection studies; these are significant in understanding prehistoric human behavior because procurement and selection behaviors shape toolkits, mobile strategies and settlement patterns. An initial step in addressing these problems is attempted through examining lithic artifacts from Dry Creek and Little Panguingue Creek, two Nenana Valley sites dating from the Late Pleistocene to Holocene containing artifacts produced on volcanic materials such as basalts, rhyolites and dacites. We can geochemically characterize these toolstones through portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis to explore toolstone use in the valley. This presentation reports preliminary results of my 2016 dissertation research and compares geochemical data from Nenana Valley sites (Dry Creek and Little Panguingue Creek) with geochemical signatures obtained from both primary outcrops and local alluvium sources to establish how local volcanic materials were utilized by prehistoric Alaskans in the Nenana Valley through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15701