Anthropology Presentation - Our Submerged Past: Locating Submerged Archaeological Sites in Southeast Alaska

by Green & Gold News  |   

Join the Department of Anthropology, Monday, Feb. 27 in Beatrice McDonald Hall, Room 119 from 2:30-3:45 p.m. for a presentation by Kelly Monteleone on locating submerged archaeological sites in Southeast Alaska. 

Southeast Alaska, specifically the continental shelf and islands on the west side of Prince of Wales Island, had a drastic sea-level rise at the end of the Last Pleistocene/Early Holocene. There was up to 176 m of sea-level rise, from -165 m to 11 m, in approximately 7000 years: an enormous change in a relatively short time. Sea-level changes would have been both slow and punctuated and these dramatic changes would have affected how the people hunted, fish, gathered and lived.

This submerged coastline would have been the along the route for early peoples trekking to the Americas. This research develops and tests an archaeological land-use model designed to identify areas of high archeological potential on the continental shelf of Southeast Alaska, specifically the Alexander Archipelago. The Alexander Archipelago is an island chain located in the northern section of the Northwest Coast of North America (NWC).

A stone fish trap has been confirmed on the seafloor at 52 m (currently estimated to be 11,100 cal BP) and demonstrates that early land-use locations (archaeological sites) are preserved on the continental shelf, supporting the coastal migration or kelp highway hypothesis. The Shakan Bay trap may be one of the world’s oldest dated and confirmed weirs. Using two-eyed seeing, scientific reconstructions are paired with local and Indigenous knowledge keepers’ perspectives on these landscape changes. The transforming environmental and landscape reconstructions will elucidate the local environmental changes at specific locations and sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene.

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