Collaborative Research: What is the Nenana Complex? New Excavations at the Late-Pleistocene Owl Ridge Site, Central Alaska

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Archaeologists have long looked to Beringia, the region encompassing Alaska and far northeastern Siberia, for clues about the origins of the first Americans and spread of humans into the Arctic. The traditional view holds that humans first migrated from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering Land Bridge, a land mass that connected Asia to America during glacial episodes of the Ice Age. Beringia, however, has not yet revealed a clear archaeological predecessor to Clovis, the earliest indisputable archaeological culture in North America dating to about 13,000 years ago. Instead Beringian sites contain an altogether different and highly varied set of stone-artifact assemblages. Explaining this archaeological variability is a topic of much debate in Beringian archaeology today. The archaeological differences either resulted from the presence of at least two distinct early Beringian populations or from one population that used site locations differently. Another issue has been tying human settlement in Beringia to dramatically fluctuating climatic conditions that characterized the region at the end of the Ice Age. With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Kelly Graf and her colleagues will conduct archaeological excavations of the Owl Ridge site, located near Denali National Park, central Alaska. Their work in 2009-2010 will provide evidence needed to explain early Beringian archaeological variability and tie human adaptation to fluctuating climatic conditions. Test excavations at Owl Ridge have already yielded three separate archaeological components that date to terminal Ice Age times, between 13,500 and 8,000 years ago. Full-scale excavations of the Owl Ridge site will be conducted during 2009-2010 to determine the character of each of the site's artifact assemblages, investigate aspects of human technological and settlement change, and consider how these past human behaviors relate to climate and environmental change at the end of the Ice Age. The results of this study will help to answer some of the most compelling questions in peopling of the Americas studies today. What is the meaning of artifact variability in early Beringia? How did Ice Age environments condition human settlement of Beringia's landscapes? When and how did humans spread from the Bering Land Bridge area to the Americas? The project will provide invaluable learning experiences for both graduate and undergraduate students and further our understanding of the behavioral evolution of humans in the far north, specifically in the context of significant climatic and environmental fluctuation at the end of the Ice Age, 14,000-7,000 years ago. Therefore, the proposed study will lead to greater appreciation of the human experience in harsh arctic environments and the impacts of global climate change on small-scale human societies.