Searching for Submerged Salmon Streams

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beringia is central (both physically and theoretically) to most out-of-Asia theories for how humans first came to the Americas. Understanding the chronology of the peopling of the Americas is complicated by the fact that roughly two million km2 of Beringia (an area larger than the modern US state of Alaska) was submerged over the course of the late Pleistocene and Holocene. Because of the vast areas involved, and extreme difficulty of underwater excavation, a simplified strategy for identifying key landform types could be useful for locating submerged sites. Identifying potential salmon-bearing streams using GIS analysis is proposed as a single-factor modeling strategy. Studies of the distribution of genetic diversity among modern salmon populations indicate that the fish were present in Beringia (as well as refugia along the Pacific Northwest coast). Salmon are a vital source of marine-derived nutrients and enhance the productivity of landscapes in which they spawn, in addition to serving as an attractive and reliable magnet resource for human populations. Accurate regional-level drainage models are not currently possible with available data, but smaller-scale modeling could prove fruitful.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39376.0