Appearance of the bifacial stemmed points in Paleo-Sakhalin Hokkaido Kurile Peninsula (PSHK)

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 precise locations and mechanisms of the emergence of ancient North American populations, which developed from a mix of East Eurasian and Ancient North Eurasian groups around 25,000 years ago, followed by a period of isolation and subsequent migration to the Americas after approximately 21,000 years ago, remain unclear. Recent archaeological studies have highlighted the Paleo-Sakhalin-Hokkaido-Kurile Peninsula (PSHK), situated in the mid-latitudes of the western Pacific Rim, as a potential area where this population may have emerged. This hypothesis is supported by similarities in cultural patterns, particularly the morphology of bifacial stemmed points found in both Asia and North America. Although the occupational ages of forager sites in the PSHK region, equipped with bifacial stemmed points, securely fall within the Late Upper Paleolithic, they require further refinement in order to understand the precise duration of the technology and the ecological background. Bifacial stemmed point type is often, but not always, discovered in association with various microblade assemblages during the Late Upper Paleolithic. In this paper, I discuss the age of the Tachikawa point, a bifacial stemmed point type predominantly found in the PSHK, based on evidence from the Shirataki sites in eastern Hokkaido.

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): 51660