Contributions of IRSL to the Issue of Initial Settlement in the New World: The Case of the McDonald Creek Archaeological Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The McDonald Creek archaeological site from central Alaska (USA) has been dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) in order to document the initial settlement in the New World. Eolian sediment samples (loess) from stratigraphic profiles have been systematically dated using this method and have been compared to the radiocarbon ages of the different human occupations present at the site. The interpreted geochronology suggests an initial human occupation of the area at the end of the Upper Pleistocene, which is in good agreement with the regional archaeological framework. A measurement protocol for the luminescence dating method with infrared stimulation (IRSL) has been developed to obtain accurate and reliable results for the minerals extracted from these late glacial loess sediments. The LPH-IRSL (low temperature preheat IRSL) protocol thus allows in this case the establishment of a detailed geochronological framework for the Central Alaska region. A relationship can be made between the eolian sedimentation rates and the territorial habitability patterns of the early human groups present in central Alaska. This relationship is implicitly relating paleoenvironments to regional climate changes, since loess accumulation rates can be directly correlated with the glacial history of the region, especially with the fluctuating position of the ice margin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32935