Raised Marine Predictive Model Advances Knowledge of Early Holocene Site Assemblages in Southern Southeast Alaska

Summary

In 2009, Carlson & Baichtal used the age and elevation of raised marine deposits left during the highest marine transgression to create a hypothetical early Holocene shoreline in the Alexander Archipelago of southern Southeast Alaska. Over the past seven years, archaeological surveys that employed this predictive model revealed over twenty new early Holocene sites. Our understanding of the Holocene island landscape has increased dramatically with the discovery of these sites in new geographical areas of the archipelago. The sites are directly upland of the ancient shoreline that dates from 9,300 to 7,000 RCYBP. They are characterized by dense lithic deposits in and around carbonaceous hearths that include microblades, microblade cores, small unifacial tools of curated materials, flake cores, large expedient unifacial flake tools, utilized flakes, and byproducts of bifacial tool production. Microblades and simple unifacial tools were modified in multiple ways to perform a variety of tasks. A small component of fauna includes burnt and calcined bones, worked sea mammal bones, marine shells, and fish and bird bones. These new sites expand on traditional characterizations of artifact assemblages and material types used for tool production during the early Holocene in Southeast Alaska.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeology of Stranded, Intertidal, and Submerged Shorelines on the Northwest Coast of North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16631