Submerged Paleolandscapes Offshore Alaska: Modelling Site Potential and Archaeological Preservation

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.

The story of the peopling of the New World is firmly centered on the waters surrounding present-day Alaska, and specifically the land bridge that connected North America and Asia during periods of lower sea-level. Despite the importance of this submerged landscape, totaling over 1.3 billion acres, the present day Outer Continental Shelf along Alaska is largely unexplored. Recognizing the potential for the occurrence and preservation of submerged paleolandscapes and archaeological sites, the authors developed a model of Alaska’s submerged paleolandscapes. The work was done as part of a larger scope, conducted under contract to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. In this paper, the authors will describe the construction of the model, including the data sets used, and present the initial results relative to the larger scope of the contracted study, which generally included mapping discrete sites and providing survey recommendations for future studies.

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): 51620