Holocene Occupations of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District

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 Tanana Basin of interior Alaska is at the center of efforts to identify late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites that better define regional occupation histories and provide insight into subarctic adaptation, technological organization, assemblage variability, mobility, and landscape use through time. The Blair Lakes Archaeological District is located in the Tanana Flats and encompasses the Blair Lakes and the associated terrace systems in a lowland basin north of the Alaska Range, between the Tanana and Nenana River valleys. Multiyear survey and excavation projects have confirmed five distinct Holocene occupations along the lake shore. These occupations began ~9,500 years ago and continued through the historic homesteading period. Additionally, these projects documented and collected a large assemblage of submerged artifacts from a near-shore underwater context and identified site-distribution and assemblage-variability patterns highlighting differential landscape use for foragers in the early, middle, and late Holocene, presented here through geomorphological profiles, artifact assemblages, and radiocarbon dates from six archaeological sites that ultimately contribute to the redefinition of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District. These results demonstrate the archaeological significance of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District and bolster our understanding of Holocene technological variability, site distribution, mobility, and occupations of understudied landscapes in interior Alaska.

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): 32551