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165 9. Assemblage Variability in Beringia The Mesa Factor john f. hoffecker O ne decade into the twenty-first century, Beringia remains something of a Third World province for archaeologists. Researchers continue to struggle with the cultural chronology and other basic services . The reasons appear to be several. The general remoteness of most of the region—on both sides of the Bering Strait—and scarcity of major industrial development and infrastructure (i.e., highways, dams, pipelines, and other large-scale ground-disturbing activities) are obvious factors. Both the central plain and most of the Beringian coastline are under water and remain archaeologically invisible with current technology. But another hostile variable is the geomorphology and depositional environments of many areas, which include featureless lowland basins and windswept terraces and bedrock knobs—often littered with undatable lithic debris. Some sites are partially buried by a thin mantle of eolian sediment , yielding a mixture of artifacts from different time periods that are difficult to sort out and date. The Archaeological Stratigraphy of Beringia Despite the aforementioned impediments, Beringian archaeologists have made slow but steady progress during the past four decades constructing a cultural stratigraphy , based primarily on small concentrations of stratified sites in three locations: Ushki in central Kamchatka; the Tanana Basin (especially around Shaw Creek Flats); and sites in the Nenana Valley of the northern Alaska Range (Dikov 1977, 1979; Goebel et al. 2003; Hoffecker 2001; Holmes 2001; Powers and Hoffecker 1989; West 1996a) (figure 9.1). Although isolated sites in other places (e.g., Berelekh, Mesa) can sometimes be placed within the general scheme created by integration of the archaeological stratigraphy of the three locations, the combined sequence provides the core culture-stratigraphic framework for Beringia (figure 9.2). At each of the three locations, open-air sites with relatively deep eolian stratigraphy contain two or more occupation levels dating to the interval between roughly 15,000 cal BP and 11,000 cal BP, which spans the warm late glacial interstadial (15,000–12,800 cal BP), cold Younger Dryas interval (12,880–11,400 cal BP), and the beginning of the warm phase that follows the latter. The last of these is represented by a well-developed tundra soil that provides a soil-stratigraphic marker for the top of the sequence (Hoffecker and Elias 2007:163). Technically, Beringia terminates (i.e., the Bering Strait is inundated by rising sea levels) during the Younger Dryas and prior to the end of the sequence, which extends at least a thousand years into the post-Beringian epoch. At the base of the sequence is the Diuktai culture, derived from the Lena Basin in Siberia, which is represented only in the Tanana Basin (where it is dated to ca. 14,500– 13,500 cal BP). It is characterized by wedge-shaped microblade cores (Yubetsu technique), microblades, burins, and bifaces and probably reflects the manufacture and use of composite microblade-inset weaponry (Holmes 2001; Mochanov 1969, 1977; C. E. Holmes, personal communication , 2006). The Diuktai assemblages may be an archaeological proxy for the first population to occupy eastern Beringia and North America. They are associated with the hunting of Pleistocene megafauna (e.g., mammoth, horse), although they also exhibit a focus on small game and avifauna and their eastward spread seems to coincide with the shift to a mesic shrub tundra environment (and subsequent extinction of much of the Pleistocene fauna) (Yesner 2001). Above the Diuktai level lies a culture-stratigraphic zone that is represented at Ushki and the Nenana Valley. 166 John F. Hoffecker and sampling in explaining both the spatial and temporal variability that they represent (e.g., Meltzer 2001). A more cautious approach is to include all the assemblages in this temporal zone in the rather amorphous “Beringian tradition” (Holmes 2001; West 1981:xv, 1996b:549– 552), with the observation that they exhibit little similarity to contemporaneous industries outside Beringia and probably represent a regional development—perhaps reflecting the unique shrub tundra environment of the final late glacial in this part of the world (Hoffecker and Elias 2007:226–227). Although there appears to be an occupation hiatus in the Shaw Creek sequence during all or part of this temporal zone, the latter is represented in the Tanana Basin at Healy Lake and probably Chugwater (Cook 1996; Lively 1996). It dates to roughly 13,250–12,750 cal BP and is characterized by small bifacial points (including stemmed, teardrop-shaped, and triangular forms), end scrapers, and probably some microblades. Several different complexes...

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