Early Humans on the Bering Land Bridge: A Proposal to Investigate the Fluted-Point Site at Serpentine Hot Springs, Alaska

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Ted Goebel, along with his colleagues Drs. Kelly Graf and Michael Waters, investigate a new prehistoric archaeological site near Serpentine Hot Springs, Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Alaska. This site is thought to contain fluted spear points in a buried context preliminarily radiocarbon dated to about 12,000 calendar years ago. As such, the Serpentine Hot Springs site represents the first site known to date to the Ice Age on the Bering Land Bridge, and it represents the first site in Alaska where fluted points have been recovered from a datable context. In temperate North America, early fluted points assigned to the Clovis complex represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of humans in North America. Through their research at Serpentine Hot Springs, Goebel's team addresses the following research questions: Are fluted points in Alaska earlier than, the same age, or younger than Clovis fluted points in temperate North America? Do they represent the diffusion of technology or migration of people from the Bering Land Bridge area south to temperate North America during pre-Clovis times, or do they represent back-diffusion or back-migration from the south to north in post-Clovis times? To address these questions, Goebel's team is conducting a block excavation of the site, to recover additional charcoal samples from preserved features and to increase the sizes of artifact and faunal assemblages, facilitating detailed technological and subsistence analyses and comparisons with other early sites in Beringia. This research project will contribute to the knowledge of some of the earliest people in North America, and help understand how people of that time may have interacted. It also offers an opportunity for archaeologists to work with and teach contemporary Native Alaskan groups of western Alaska about the early history of their region, it offers an important research experience to a young female scientist, and it provides information about how humans adapted to rapidly warming climate during the late Ice Age.