DDRIG: Soil-Stratigraphy and Landscape Evolution in Subarctic Lowlands: A Paleoenvironmental Framework for Human Colonization and Occupation of Eastern Beringia

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support the research of graduate student Jennifer Kielhofer to recreate the prehistoric landscape of eastern Beringia approximately 14,000 years ago. Beringia is the area between Alaska and Russia that is currently covered by the Bering Sea, but 14,000 years ago was dry land, prior to the rise in sealevel that occurred when the massive North American Ice Sheets melted. Understanding what the landscape looked like at this time will give us insights into the early human migrations across this landscape that occurred during this time period. Knowing this will give scientists and interested members of the public a better understanding of what resources were available for these early migrants to exploit for food, shelter, and clothing. How difficult the landscape was to traverse and how long this would take. These are questions important to answer in order to have a full picture of how the ancestors of contemporary Native American peoples migrated to North America. The proposed research uses buried soils as indicators of landscape evolution within lowland terrestrial settings of subarctic central Alaska. This work provides a paleoenvironmental framework for human colonization of eastern Beringia ~14,000 to 8,000 calibrated years before present (cal. B.P.). Using the "soil catena" approach, this project explores the relationship between past soil formation and climatic variability on various temporal and spatial scales. Buried soils are generally associated with early archaeological occupations in central Alaska, so it is critical to understand the environmental factors that influenced soil formation and the archaeological record. Many studies assert a link between global-scale millennial climatic variability and past soil formation in the study region, but more recent research argues that local disturbance cycles may have had a significant impact on soil formation. This project hypothesizes that both broader scale climatic change and local disturbance cycles influenced soil formation, and aims to develop a high-resolution micromorphological (soil petrographic) dataset to test this hypothesis. Major research objectives are to: 1) develop a highresolution record of landscape evolution, based on changes in past soil development across an elevational transect in the study catchment, 2) augment terrestrial paleoenvironmental records and compare them directly to archaeological datasets, and finally, 3) assess potential environmental impacts on human ecology and land use in lowland subarctic settings.