Updating the Late Pleistocene Record of the Willamette Valley, Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Near the end of the Pleistocene, 35 genera of mostly large mammals became extinct in North America, yet the cause of these extinctions remains debated. The Willamette Valley in western Oregon boasts a robust record of up to nine megafaunal taxa (*Mammuthus, Mammut, Equus, Paramylodon, Megalonyx, Camelops, Hemiauchenia, Castoroides, and cf. Aenocyon dirus*). A similarly rich regional archaeological record indicates humans and extinct fauna occupied the same landscape for at least 3,000 years, but there is only limited evidence of human-megafauna interaction. In this paper, we update the late Pleistocene record of extinct megafauna from Western Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We contribute new radiocarbon and stable isotopic data from previously un-sampled mammoth and ground sloth specimens. Further, we demonstrate that a newly recognized species of mastodon in western North America, *Mammut pacificus*, inhabited the Willamette Valley in the terminal Pleistocene and its timing overlapped the earliest known human occupation of the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35946.0