The South Gap Site: A 9,000-Year-Old Submerged Hunting Site in Lake Huron with Far Reaching Connections

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The South Gap site is at a depth of 105 feet beneath Lake Huron on a submerged landscape referred to as the Alpena Amberly Ridge (AAR). Once exposed as dry land between 11,000 and 8000 cal BP, the AAR provided a causeway for migrating animals, such as caribou, to cross the Lake Huron basin. The landform also served as a natural bottleneck channeling animals to a predictable location where human hunters set up stone drive lines to facilitate a successful hunt. Sonar imaging of the site revels a series of three V-shaped hunting blinds spaced alongside a north and south running esker. Intriguingly, two obsidian flakes that source to central Oregon were found in between two of the stone blinds. The flakes are relatively small and represent refurbishment of a highly curated biface. That these flakes sourced more than 4,000 km from where they were found speaks to the complexity of and antiquity social networks from across the Great Lakes, Northern Plains, and the far West.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36577.0