Lake Superior’s Relic Shorelines: Geochronological Dating of Archaic Sites in the Northern Lake Superior Basin

Summary

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

Since the end of the last major glaciation over 10,000 years ago, lake levels in the Lake Superior Basin have varied considerably. This variation caused the formation of relict shorelines that were left behind as water levels dropped. At around 6,600 years ago, the lake level began to rise in an event that took place over the next 700 years. This event marks the beginning of the Nipissing phase which varied over the next two thousand years, reaching its peak between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago. The tight geochronological component of these relict shorelines provides a unique opportunity to target and date archaeological sites found along their shores. This project works to reconstruct the Nipissing relict shoreline in the Thunder Bay region of Ontario, Canada by mapping strandlines and elevation estimates associated with the time frame using digital elevation models derived from the Ontario Classified Point Cloud data. The results of this mapping are then compared to the locations of suspected Archaic sites in the region to identify if these sites correlate to the Nipissing relict shoreline and test the potential use of this model for identifying archaeological targets for further investigation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39713.0