Micromorphological Analysis of Deposition, Pedogenesis, and Stratigraphic Integrity at the McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska

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.

Despite the fact that archaeologists have long turned to the Alaskan archaeological record to answer questions about the first Americans, little is certain about the peopling of Beringia. The poor preservation of faunal remains in many central Alaskan archaeological sites has made understanding the variability of lithic assemblages and, by extension, the behavior of early Beringian populations difficult. The McDonald Creek site, a multicomponent site containing at least two late Pleistocene assemblages including lithic artifacts, faunal, and macrobotanical remains in a primary context, may shed new light on the relationship between the inhabitants of the site and their changing environment over the course of the late Quaternary. This study uses soil micromorphology to characterize the depositional and pedogenic processes that have led to the development of the sediment package at McDonald Creek, as well as to assess the extent to which periglacial processes and solifluction may have disturbed the integrity of the archaeological record at the site. This new understanding of soil development helps to establish the sequence of paleoenvironmental changes at the site since the late glacial period and will help to contextualize the technological, subsistence, and settlement records at McDonald Creek.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32308