Archaeological Recovery of Late Pleistocene Hair and Environmental DNA from 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.

Ancient hair and remnant plant DNA are important environmental proxies that preserve for millennia in specific archaeological contexts. However, recovery has been rare from late Pleistocene sites and more may be found if deliberately sought. Once discovered, singular hair fragments are not easily identified to taxa through comparative analyses and environmental DNA (eDNA) extraction can be complicated by factors of preservation or contamination. In this paper, we present our methods for the combined recovery of ancient hair specimens and eDNA from sediments to improve our understanding of late Pleistocene environments from the Holzman site along Shaw Creek in interior Alaska. The approach serves as a useful case study for learning more about local environmental changes.

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): 36581.0