Exploring Toolstone Provisioning on the Nenana Valley Lithic Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Beringian record is critical to understanding human dispersals and adaptive behaviors of the earliest peoples in the Americas. Late Pleistocene and Holocene peoples subsisted on a dynamic and changing landscape that undoubtedly influenced technological organization, including toolstone procurement and selection patterns. The interior Alaskan record is rich in well-preserved lithic assemblages offering insight into these aspects of adaptive behavior. Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) is a useful geochemical technique used to explore toolstone procurement strategies in the lithic record, most used in sourcing obsidians. Non-obsidian volcanic toolstones (e.g., dacites, rhyolites, basalts, and andesites) are abundant in interior Alaskan assemblages yet understudied compared to obsidian. Geochemical analyses of these non-obsidian materials offer the potential to gain new insights into ancient toolstone provisioning behaviors. This poster presents results of my dissertation research synthesizing geochemical (pXRF) analyses of non-obsidian volcanic artifacts and geological samples, systematic regional raw material surveys, and lithic technological analyses collected from nineteen late Pleistocene and Holocene assemblages from the Nenana Valley, interior Alaska, providing a more nuanced look at late Pleistocene and Holocene toolstone provisioning patterns.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37361.0