The North Pacific Coastal Migration Hypothesis: New Insights from the Northwest Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A transitory island archipelago along the southern coast of Beringia existed ca. 30,000-8,000 BP and may have facilitated human dispersals to the Americas from NE Asia. However, opportunities for human dispersals southward from the Gulf of Alaska along the Northwest Coast (NWC) of North America were constrained by the extent of glacial ice during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This may have restricted opportunities for human dispersal southward along the coast to two intervals, or “pulses”: (1) prior to the LGM ca. 30-21,000 BP and {2) following the LGM ca. 18-14,000 BP. Evidence from the northern NWC demonstrates that the first human occupation did not originate from the microblade traditions of interior eastern Beringia. It developed independently on the NWC from the fusion of a resident coastal non-microblade using population and people from interior Canada following deglaciation of the Canada’s Stikine Plateau ca.12,500-10,700 cal BP. Older NWC sites, paleoenvironmental evidence, isotope, aDNA, and artifact analyses indicate that the NWC was first occupied sometime prior to ca. 14,000 cap BP by an early maritime archeological tradition emphasizing the production of organic artifacts using flake, percussion, and abrading tools and occasionally stemmed and foliate bifaces for large mammal hunting.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51618