Coastally Adapted: A Model for Eastern Coastal Paleoindian Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Love That Dirty Water: Submerged Landscapes and Precontact Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Predicting the cultural material typology of eastern coastal Paleoindians is a challenge due to sea-level rise since the LGM. In the Americas, archaeologists have identified only a handful of unequivocal coastal Paleoindian sites. The location of these sites are on the west coast of the Americas, where the sea-level rise was less invasive due to the steep coastal topography. However, not a single unequivocal coastal Paleoindian site has been identified on the Eastern continental shelf.

This research investigates Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites with coastal materials from regions around the world. These regions contain evidence of marine subsistence patterns spanning 150,000 years in settings similar in climate, submerged coastal plain profile, and subsistence resources along the Atlantic Coast.

I present here, a model utilizing these data and anthropological uniformitarianism of subsistence patterns, coastal mobility ranges, and lithic tool technology through time as the proximity to the sea changed due to fluctuating sea-levels.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Love That Dirty Water: Submerged Landscapes and Precontact Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 233