Late Pleistocene Forager Adaptations at the Gateway to the New World

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. William Andrefsky, Mr. Jeff Rasic will conduct research for his doctoral dissertation. He will analyze excavated lithic collections from ten sites in northwestern Alaska that date to between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. With support from the National Science Foundation Mr. Rasic will develop two additional data sets. He will conduct excavations at the Caribou Crossing site and will geochemically characterize chert artifacts from several sites. Preliminary research at the Caribou Crossing site demonstrates that it has good spatial integrity, a rich artifact assemblage, and good potential for recovery of radiocarbon samples. Stone tools and the debris resulting from their modification are all that remain of these early hunter-gatherer's camps and are thus an important basis for understanding how they lived. Technological, functional and raw material source analyses of these artifacts aim to understand how raw materials were procured, how tools were manufactured and used, and how they were transported across the landscape. A primary goal of the study is to increase understanding of the behavioral and ecological factors that conditioned variation among stone tool assemblages, and in turn, to learn about the behavioral strategies used by some of the earliest inhabitants of northwestern Alaska. Arctic Alaska is a key region in many scenarios describing the initial settlement of the New World, but the Alaskan archaeological record remains difficult to incorporate into these arguments since few sites are reliably dated beyond 10,000 years ago, and the lifeways of these people are poorly known. This research is important for several reasons. It will generate and disseminate information in the form of stone tool assemblage descriptions, radiocarbon dates, and chert provenance data from a series of early Alaskan sites. Models of human adaptive strategies derived from this study will facilitate comparisons among early hunter-gatherers in the New World and Siberia and illuminate the processes by which the Americas were settled. It will also shed light on the diversity of adaptations known for hunter-gatherer societies both past and present and assist in the training of a promising young scientist.