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Holocene Human Occupation of the Central Alaska Peninsula

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2018

Loukas Barton ,
Scott Shirar  and
James W Jordan
Loukas Barton*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 230 South Bouquet Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260USA
Scott Shirar
Affiliation:
University of Alaska Museum of the North, Archaeology Department, 907 Yukon Drive, Fairbanks, AK 99775USA
James W Jordan
Affiliation:
Department of Environmental Studies, Antioch University New England, Keene, NH 03431USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The Alaska Peninsula is a landscape defined by volcanic, tectonic, and glacial processes, and life throughout is conditioned on the interactions among them. During the middle Holocene (ca. 4100–3600 yr ago), intense caldera-forming eruptions of the Aniakchak and Veniaminof volcanoes changed the shape of the central portion of the Peninsula dramatically, and had significant and perhaps devastating impacts on both terrestrial and marine biota. Here we evaluate the severity of these impacts by tracking human settlement patterns using 75 unique radiocarbon (14C) age determinations on buried cultural features from the central Alaska Peninsula. Coastal regions were re-colonized within a few hundred years while river systems most proximate to the volcanoes were uninhabited for up to 1500 years following the most severe eruptions. Patterns of human settlement may also document previously unrecorded landscape change throughout the region, and further contribute to our understanding of post-volcanic ecological succession.

Keywords

Alaskaecological successionhuman settlementvolcanism
Type
Research Article
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 367 - 382
Copyright
© 2018 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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