Late-Glacial Hunter-Gatherers in the Central Alaska Range and the Role of Upland Ecosystems in the Peopling of Alaska

ABSTRACT

This review details the late-glacial paleoecological and archaeological record of the Alaska Range Ecoregion (ARE), highlighting its role in late-glacial settlement systems. The ARE was continuously occupied throughout the late glacial primarily by small groups on seasonal logistical forays in a low-mobility land-use system, with evidence for a shift to a high-mobility system in the Younger Dryas and early Holocene at some sites. The earliest settlers of Alaska procured resources in the ARE and continued to do so throughout the late glacial. Long-distance transport of lithic material over hundreds of kilometers suggests that seasonal occupation of the ARE was just one facet of a wide-ranging, seasonally variable land-use strategy. These data provide an important counterpoint to studies suggesting that late-glacial settlement systems were focused in the lowlands, and indicate that the earliest settlers quickly mapped on to widely dispersed resources in lowland and upland settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Alaska
• late glacial
• upland archaeology
• lithic technological organization

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Archaeology Department of the University of Alaska Museum of the North for providing access to the Jay Creek Ridge, Carlo Creek, and Phipps collections for the photographs presented here. I would like to thank Josh Reuther for sharing the Jay Creek Ridge radiocarbon data with me, and I would also like to thank Sam Coffman and Jeff Rasic for providing me with unpublished obsidian-sourcing data from the Jay Creek Ridge collection. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, as well as the two anonymous reviewers that provided comments on the current manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

John C. Blong is an environmental archaeologist with a background in geoarchaeology, paleoecology, lithic technology, and paleoethnobotany. His research is focused in North America where he studies initial human settlement of Alaska and the Great Basin, hunter-gatherer landscape use, and human response to late Pleistocene and Holocene ecological change.

ORCID

John C. Blong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3868-807X

Additional information

Funding

The National Science Foundation (DDIG No. 1217575), Texas A&M University Department of Anthropology and College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University provided funding for travel to study collections.