Searching Oregon’s Outer Continental Shelf for Submerged First Americans Sites: Theory, Methods, and Recent Discoveries

Summary

If the First Americans initially migrated into the New World from northeastern Asia along a coastal route, we should expect to find the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas in submerged sites along the northeastern Pacific Rim. Late Pleistocene-aged human coastal migrants would undoubtedly exploit high ecological productivity zones of ancient estuaries and bays that once existed along paleocoastal landscapes. A systematic approach to the discovery of First Americans coastal sites requires detailed knowledge of these paleocoastal landscapes and how they evolved since the last glacial maximum. To this end, we constructed a digital model of central Oregon’s paleocoastal landscape, which guides offshore exploration efforts. We present the results of recent geophysical cruises that reveal physical traces of modeled terrestrial stream networks and discuss potential archaeological targets that will be further explored through marine coring in 2018.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20285