DDRIG: High Latitude Adaptations and Geoarchaeology at the Little John site, Yukon Territory, Canada

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This award supports a dissertation project to conduct excavation, sampling and lithic, geoarchaeological, chronological, and paleoenvironmental analysis of materials from the Little John site in Yukon, Canada. The site is important as a stratified, Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene site with archaeological assemblages relating to the so-called Nenana/Chindadn (without microblades) and Denali (microblades) complexes. The site includes a locus with stratigraphic separation of paleosols and holds promise for evaluating the proposition that these two complexes are culturally distinct (presumably implying unrelated populations) and/or functionally distinct (i.e., relating to technological evolution or seasonal tool kit changes) as has been argued variously from other sites in central Alaska. The co-PI (Ph.D. student) will help supervise the excavation and lead the analyses to evaluate whether the assemblage types are stratigraphically and chronologically distinct and whether they correlate with paleoenvironmental change. These correlations presumably will yield insights to help clarify the long-standing debate about the significance of these assemblages in the archaeology of Eastern Beringia.