The Porcupine Tail Site Complex and the Concentration of the Archaeological Record on Isolated Hills of Interior Alaska

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeological record in any landscape tends to be differentially concentrated on specific landforms, because such landforms favor both the recurrence of human activities over successive periods of time and the postdepositional preservation of their material traces. In this paper we present results from recent excavations at two neighboring sites (Hollembaek’s Hill and North Gerstle Point, which we collectively term the Porcupine Tail [nuun che’] site complex after the Dene name for the landform) and discuss how they are representative of elevated and isolated landforms of interior Alaska. Both sites have yielded, in limited excavation windows, numerous archaeological components whose number nears that of stable surfaces (paleosols), and which generally contain the entire regional archaeological sequence. We argue that this concentration of the archaeological record relates to the geomorphic and geographic characteristics of the landforms and is representative, if perhaps more marked, of many of the interior Alaska sites. We further discuss the ways in which our vision of the archaeological record may reflect, or alternatively distort, the actual settlement and mobility patterns of past interior Alaska people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35771.0