Out of the Cold: Archaeology on the Arctic Rim of North America

By Owen K. Mason and T. Max Friesen

The Arctic rim of North America presents one of the most daunting environments for humans. Cold and austere, it is lacking in plants but rich in marine mammals-primarily the ringed seal, walrus, and bowhead whale. In this book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series, the authors track the history of cultural innovations in the Arctic and Subarctic for the past 12,000 years, including the development of sophisticated architecture, watercraft, fur clothing, hunting technology, and worldviews. Climate change is linked to many of the successes and failures of its inhabitants; warming or cooling periods led to periods of resource abundance or collapse, and in several instances to long-distance migrations. At its western and eastern margins, the Arctic also experienced the impact of Asian and European world systems, from that of the Norse in the East to the Russians in the Bering Strait.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780932839565

Book preview

Out of the Cold

Archaeology on the Arctic Rim of North America

Owen K. Mason and T. Max Friesen

The SAA Press

Washington, DC

The Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC 20005

Copyright © 2017 by the Society for American Archaeology

All rights reserved. Published 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mason, Owen K., author. | Friesen, T. Max, 1961– co-author.

Title: Out of the cold : archaeology on the Arctic Rim of North America / Owen K. Mason and T. Max Friesen.

Description: Washington, DC : The SAA Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014669 (print) | LCCN 2017021623 (ebook) | ISBN 9780932839565 (ebook) | ISBN 9780932839558 (paperback : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Prehistoric peoples—Arctic regions | Arctic Peoples—Antiquities. | Arctic regions—Antiquities. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Arctic regions. | Social archaeology—Arctic regions.

Classification: LCC GN885 (ebook) | LCC GN885 .M37 2017 (print) | DDC 569.9—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014669

Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: The Twin Arctics of North America

Owen K. Mason and T. Max Friesen

2. Archaeology of the Western Arctic

Owen K. Mason

2.1. Arctic Mirages and Landscape Realities

2.2. Late Pleistocene Peopling of the Alaskan Interior and Its Holocene History

2.3. Settling the Alaska Coastal Rim: The North Pacific, the Aleutians, and the Origin of the Aleuts

2.4. Paleo-Inuit Migration and Athapaskan Origins: The Arctic Small Tool and the Late Northern Archaic Traditions

2.5. Whaling and Salmon Fishing in Southwest Alaska: The Last 3,000 Years from the Aleutians to the Yukon Delta

2.6. Bering Strait and North Alaska during the First Millennium AD: A Cosmos in Transformation

2.7. Emergence of Supiaaq Identity: The North Pacific World in Flux—The Kachemak Cult and the Koniag Takeover

2.8. Emergence of Inuit Identity: Thule and Late Prehistoric

3. Archaeology of the Eastern Arctic

T. Max Friesen

3.1. Inuit and Their Ancestors: Setting the Stage

3.2. Pioneers of the Eastern Arctic: Early Paleo-Inuit

3.3. Polar Life Perfected: Early and Middle Dorset

3.4. Twilight of the Tuniit: Late Dorset

3.5. Arrival of the Inuit: The Thule Period

3.6. From the Past to the Present: Development of Recent Inuit Societies

3.7. Eastern Arctic Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century

4. Conclusions: The Grand Themes of Arctic Prehistory

Owen K. Mason and T. Max Friesen

4.1. Migration versus In Situ Development

4.2. Linguistic and Genetic Continuity

4.3. Climate Change as a Forcing Mechanism in Prehistory

4.4. Catastrophic Tectonism as Ecological Drivers

4.5. Sudden Transformations as an Artifact of Preservation or of Past Archaeology

4.6. The Triumph of Human Ingenuity over a Harsh Environment

References

Index

Preface

Over the past three decades, we have spent many cold and insect-harried summers in the Arctic trenches. In fact, in 2011 we spent some time in the same trench at Cape Espenberg in Alaska, indulging our mutual interest in Thule origins. Over these years, we’ve thought about both the small idiosyncrasies and the big picture of this remarkable region’s long-term cultural record, and how all of its disparate parts fit together. While we can’t claim to have resolved every issue, we hope that the present volume will provide a useful entry point to this topic and are grateful to the Society for American Archaeology for giving us this chance.

This book has an odd structure, so it might be worth explaining how it came about. Originally, Owen Mason was approached by Ken Ames to write what Owen thought was to be a synthesis of Alaskan archaeology. He dutifully, if slowly, set about the task, only to learn a couple of years later that the intent was to provide coverage of the entire North American Arctic, rather than just Alaska. At this point, Owen and Max Friesen were embroiled in the complex task of coediting The Oxford Handbook of the Prehistoric Arctic, so perhaps it was inevitable that Max was asked to contribute the eastern portion of this present book. As it happened, the Handbook was well over the allowable page limit, so Max withdrew his overlong Eastern Arctic synthesis chapter from it. That chapter forms the nucleus of what eventually became chapter 3 in the present volume. Thus, as it happened, for the two primary chapters that provide the main content for this volume, each author had already more or less written them single-handedly. As a result, we’ve opted to keep them separate herein, but to collaborate on the introduction and conclusion to the volume as a whole.

We offer sincere thanks to all of our colleagues who have given up comfort and convenience to work across the Arctic and thereby produce the results we rely on here. More specifically, this volume has benefited greatly from input, in terms of information and/or illustrations, from Claire Alix, Shelby Anderson, Martin Appelt, Charles Arnold, Peter Dawson, Pierre Desrosiers, Don Dumond, Dennis Griffin, Bjarne Grønnow, John Hoffecker, Chuck Holmes, Susan Lofthouse, Karen McCullough, Robert McGhee, Ken Pratt, James Savelle, Peter Schledermann, Dale Slaughter, and Patricia Wells. Max would particularly like to thank Mike O’Rourke and Matt Walls for their great patience as he continually changed his mind about what should go where, and when, in the maps and culture chart they produced for chapter 3.

Finally, profound thanks are owed to the Inuit, Inuvialuit, Iñupiat, Yupik, and Aleut individuals and organizations that have supported us, worked with us, and allowed us to study their ancestors’ lives.

This book is dedicated to Don Dumond, intrepid fieldworker and pioneering synthesizer of Arctic archaeology.

1

Introduction:

The Twin Arctics of North America

OWEN K. MASON and T. MAX FRIESEN

The older people used to collect all kinds of things from the Tuniit houses. . . . I remember a time when some people were trying to dig out a bone that they found partly covered by moss in a Tuniit camp, when these people uncovered a rope out of seal which was obviously an old whip. It even had a handle, and this piece that was found was not yet rotted; the whip was short, but it was in good condition.

—Mary Evic (quoted in Bennett and Rowley 2004:149)

In this passage, Mary Evic, an Inuit elder living on Baffin Island, recounts the investigation of a campsite occupied by the Tuniit, an ancient people typically associated with what archaeologists call the Dorset culture. Her short description covers the same ground found in most archaeological reports about an artifact: its method of discovery, an interpretation of its function, an assessment of its preservation conditions, and its attribution to a particular culture. This quotation is a powerful reminder that the material record in the North American Arctic is a living thing. Northerners on a daily basis encounter heritage locales and landscapes; they serve as mnemonic devices and important contexts for passing historical information from generation to generation.

Of course, this same material record is also the subject of study for academic archaeologists who aim to reconstruct the long-term history of the peoples inhabiting the northern coasts of North America and the adjacent interior (Figure 1.1). This history is mainly that of the indirect and direct ancestors of modern Inuit, Inuvialuit, Iñupiat, Yupik, Alutiiq, and Aleut peoples. This book is an attempt to provide a detailed portrait of what we know about this region, from the earliest traces of human activities around 15,000 years ago to the dynamic indigenous societies of the contact period.

Image: Figure 1.1. The spiritual dimension is often lost in the archaeological record. Nineteenth-century Yupik masks collected from the Yukon Delta by Edward Nelson in the 1880s. The masks represent, from upper left: (1) the inua, or the spirit of a bird, employed in festivals related to successful hunting; (2), (3), and (4) tunghät, a spiritual personification often associated with evil intent (Nelson 1899:394, 403–404). Source: Nelson 1899:Plate XCIX.

Figure 1.1. The spiritual dimension is often lost in the archaeological record. Nineteenth-century Yupik masks collected from the Yukon Delta by Edward Nelson in the 1880s. The masks represent, from upper left: (1) the inua, or the spirit of a bird, employed in festivals related to successful hunting; (2), (3), and (4) tunghät, a spiritual personification often associated with evil intent (Nelson 1899:394, 403–404). Source: Nelson 1899:Plate XCIX.

In the global prehistory of humanity, the North American Arctic was among the last frontiers for modern human settlement; only remote Polynesia witnessed a later initial settlement. For Europeans, northern North America was the end of the world. A Mediterranean construct of Thule, an ethereal North of the midnight sun, persisted for centuries following the fourth-century BC voyage of the Greek Pytheas of Massalia (Nansen 1911). This was followed by the first northeastward voyages by adventurous monks or Norse herder-farmers to Iceland before Eric the Red skirted around Greenland in the tenth century AD and the English privateer Martin Frobisher coasted Baffin Island six centuries later (Nansen 1911). In parallel, from the 1550s, Russian fur traders and entrepreneurs were heading east along the North Asian Arctic of Siberia, culminating in the discovery of Bering Strait, then Alaska, in the 1640s. By the late nineteenth century the indigenous inhabitants of the North American Arctic, the Inuit, served as exemplars of Paleolithic hunters (Krupnik 2016), even viewed as steps on the evolutionary ladder for anthropologists like Franz Boas and Diamond Jenness. From the outset, the ethos and technology of the Inuit awed Europeans, who adopted fur clothing and traditional knowledge in pursuit of colonial aims, exemplified in the Fifth Thule Expedition of Danes Peter Freuchen and Knud Rasmussen, with the participation of archaeologist Therkel Mathiassen (Gulløv 2016a).

The recent history of the North American Arctic is one of the approach of outsiders, traders, explorers, and colonial states, but in other ways, very different historical trajectories spun out in its western and eastern regions, resulting from climate, geography, and proximity to other peoples who were fashioning their own histories. In contrast with the Norse penetration of the Eastern Arctic over a millennium ago, much of the Western and Central Arctic was spared the persistent presence of outsiders until well into the nineteenth century.

As far as defining the Arctic goes (Figure 1.2), it is the High Arctic of Canada that remains the stereotype: ice-covered seas alongside stark and barren glacier-scoured slopes. In the Western Arctic, Alaska, by cartographic position alone, is an unlikely Arctic entity—at its southern rim, the Aleutians are nearly at 50° north, far south of the Arctic Circle with its months-long summer day and winter night (for general background on the Arctic, see Nuttall and Callaghan 2000). But its treeless coastal landscape can approach that of the Eastern Arctic or even Greenland in character. Unappreciated by many is the fact that only about one-quarter of Alaska and a similar proportion of Siberia lie above the Arctic Circle. Nonetheless, in its depauperate flora and large-mammal–dominated biota, the western shores of Alaska do exhibit close resemblances to the true or High Arctic of Canada and Greenland. In large part, oceanographic and atmospheric processes lead to cooler temperatures far to the south in the Western Arctic. In winter, seasonal pack ice commonly extended, at least in the 1970s, into southwest Alaska, not far from the eastern Aleutian Islands—hence, well into the Low Arctic. The distribution of the keystone species, the ringed seal (Pusa hispida), defines nearly all of the Arctic zones, although walrus and whales are close contenders since both walrusing and whaling were practiced from Kodiak to Labrador.

Image: Figure 1.2. The location of the study area: the northern rim of North America from Alaska to Greenland, at left. Based on the sun’s position, the Arctic eco-zone lies north of the Arctic Circle, 66°33′ N latitude, and extends farther north in Canada and Greenland. In Alaska, climatic factors extend the Arctic biota and ecology, south to 50° N latitude—exemplified by the July mean 10°C isotherm. Due to wind and storminess, trees are absent in both the Aleutian Islands and most of the Kodiak archipelago, and seasonal sea ice often forms nearly to the eastern Aleutian chain. The interior subarctic of Alaska and Canada, though forested, experiences extreme cold, is largely underlain by permafrost, and has had strong interactions with Arctic peoples. Map modified by Owen Mason, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 1.2. The location of the study area: the northern rim of North America from Alaska to Greenland, at left. Based on the sun’s position, the Arctic eco-zone lies north of the Arctic Circle, 66°33′ N latitude, and extends farther north in Canada and Greenland. In Alaska, climatic factors extend the Arctic biota and ecology, south to 50° N latitude—exemplified by the July mean 10°C isotherm. Due to wind and storminess, trees are absent in both the Aleutian Islands and most of the Kodiak archipelago, and seasonal sea ice often forms nearly to the eastern Aleutian chain. The interior subarctic of Alaska and Canada, though forested, experiences extreme cold, is largely underlain by permafrost, and has had strong interactions with Arctic peoples. Map modified by Owen Mason, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Exposed, glacier-scoured bedrock is the hallmark of the Eastern Arctic—insular Canada and Greenland. While not lacking totally from the Western Arctic, bedrock is rarer, and instead Alaska has a number of extensive coastal plains, foremost on the Yukon Delta. Ironically, the role of exposed bedrock landscapes is stronger at the southern margins of Alaska; in a superficial sense, the Aleutians are a generally ice-free reciprocal of the Canadian Arctic. However, most of Alaska’s southern islands were subject to significant sea ice during much of the mid and late Holocene, with profound archaeological implications. Glaciers and ice fields are another commonality between southernmost Alaska and the High Arctic.

Though Arctic peoples were subject to many environmental constraints, sea ice conditions were most critical due to their close association with habitats and behaviors of the major Arctic prey species (Figure 1.3). The seasonal Arctic ice cover arises with myriad benefits for both sea mammals that follow the spring bloom of phytoplankton northward and the people who employ it as a platform to secure prey. Ice-obligate species include ringed seal, bearded seal, and a variety of whales, including gray, bowhead, and beluga. For sea mammal hunters, seals may be taken at breathing holes, along fracturing leads that open in the pack ice, and by under-ice nets. Open water offers hunting possibilities as well but requires sophisticated marine craft and varying levels of technical expertise. During colder periods, the expansion of sea ice southward converted the Subarctic into an Arctic environment (Nuttall and Callaghan 2000). The bounds of the ice cover are, of course, in considerable flux under the effects of global warming. As recently as the 1970s, seasonal pack ice was common on the southern Alaska Peninsula and even in the eastern Aleutians. In the North Pacific, Cook Inlet and even Shelikof Strait witnessed considerable pack ice in the early twentieth century, and still do so in a limited fashion even at present.

Image: Figures 1.3a and b. The reliance on the sea for life in the Arctic: (a) jiggling for tomcod on the ice in Norton Sound, Alaska, with a dog sled in the background; (b) the use of the atlatl in seal hunting in a kayak (Nelson 1899:Plate LIII, Figure 47).

Figures 1.3a and b. The reliance on the sea for life in the Arctic: (a) jiggling for tomcod on the ice in Norton Sound, Alaska, with a dog sled in the background; (b) the use of the atlatl in seal hunting in a kayak (Nelson 1899:Plate LIII, Figure 47).

Not typically associated with ice, although subject to its vicissitudes, salmon also acts as a critical species across the Western Arctic. Salmon are ice-avoiders whose collective legendary migratory flight to the sea represents an inverse adaptation to the seasonal ice. The eastern counterpart to salmon is the arctic char, a related anadromous species adapted to rivers and lakes in colder areas. Large downstream and upstream runs of arctic char sustained warm season aggregations on many rivers in the Eastern Arctic. Across almost the entire Western and Eastern Arctic, caribou was also a critical species, providing meat, fat, and raw materials for manufacturing; their skins were particularly critical for clothing production. The role of other fish, terrestrial mammal, and bird species, while in some manner secondary, was also crucial in the prehistory of the Arctic.

The most profound contrast between Western and Eastern Arctic regions of North America is that the Canadian Arctic is dominated by a crenulated archipelago bound together by solid streams of ice during most of the Holocene. Despite its maritime appearance on maps, its islands are in fact mountains rising from a plain of ice, and it is this sea ice that has exerted the most profound impacts on human life in the region. Sea ice has been a stable platform for travel and for hunting many marine species, as well as a habitat for ringed seals. Leads and polynyas (ocean areas that do not freeze over during the winter) that saw regularly recurring open water for most or all of the winter were magnets for marine mammals, birds, and fish, and therefore drew repeated human settlement.

In the west, a near mythic pathway defined the North American Arctic: the Bering Land Bridge that became the Bering Strait in the Holocene. The Bering Land Bridge is broadly defined as the continental platform between northeast Asia, Chukotka, and northwest North America, which was flooded during the lowered sea levels of the Pleistocene. Its modern incarnation, Bering Strait, is now an often treacherous, ice-clogged conduit that exchanges water between the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans.

Image: Figure 1.4. Nineteenth-century sod-covered semisubterranean house at Point Hope. The raised racks were an essential component of subsistence activities. Photo courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum, Kennedy Collection, catalog #1979.26.8.

Figure 1.4. Nineteenth-century sod-covered semisubterranean house at Point Hope. The raised racks were an essential component of subsistence activities. Photo courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum, Kennedy Collection, catalog #1979.26.8.

This book tells the remarkable story of the many different peoples for whom the Arctic was home, with an emphasis on those who adapted to the cold coasts (Figure 1.4) and adjacent interior. In it, we perpetuate the division into west and east, in large part because the two regions have quite distinct culture histories. The history of archaeological research within the two areas was also considerably different, although several colonial enterprises, primarily Danish, American, Canadian, and later Russian, were involved in the initiation of archaeology: in Greenland and northern Canada, with the expeditionary efforts of the Danes and Canadians, and in Bering Strait, with the purchase of antique objects by European and American whalers. In both areas, the first intensive archaeology started between 1910 and 1930, though Russian efforts largely were delayed until after World War II.

Over the past 5,000 years the general pattern was that for brief periods west and east were connected, to be followed by centuries during which each region saw unique and complex independent developments. This division results in part from the presence of an intermediate zone located east of the Mackenzie River delta in northwestern Canada that was relatively impoverished in resources, and therefore during many periods did not support the populations that could have formed a cultural bridge between west and east.

In the chapters that follow, we will trace the course of prehistory across the North American Arctic, commencing with the Western Arctic in chapter 2, since this region bears the earliest traces of human settlement and plays a central role in the peopling of the New World. The Western Arctic, due to its largely unglaciated landmass, had a head start over the Eastern Arctic, whose shorter prehistoric record is reviewed in chapter 3. Finally, some of the central themes that apply to the prehistory of both areas will be discussed in chapter 4.

2

Archaeology of the Western Arctic

OWEN K. MASON

At nearly 14,000 years old, the prehistory of the Western Arctic is almost three times as long as the 5,000 years of the Eastern Arctic and by virtue of its geologic history and its proximity to Northeast Asia, the most likely route of colonization of the Americas by modern humans. To comprehend these dual, often complementary prehistories, we must preface the discussion with the profound geomorphic and geologic constraints that underpin the human adventure into the austere and frozen northern regions. First, our journey requires consideration of the role of ice, geologic history, and the animal—sea mammal, land mammal, fish, and bird—resources essential for adaptation to the Arctic. As in any challenging and marginal environment, discussing the role of climate will be essential. Several issues bulk large: in particular the role of big-game hunting in the peopling of the New World, and then the development of maritime adaptations. In this chapter the discussion will track the late Pleistocene entry (ca. 12,000 BC) and fate of the big-game hunting colonists of the lost subcontinent of Beringia, then turn to the earliest coastal inhabitants of the Western Arctic in the Aleutians and southern Alaska. Following the development of maritime societies around 7,000 years ago, the narrative is one of the emergence and progress of the Inuit, Yupik, and Supiaaq peoples that occupy the coasts and near hinterlands today. As the story progresses, our attention will reflect on the increasing harvest of larger sea mammals and the complications that follow from the taking of walrus and whales.

Our narrative has the quality of a river, following in general early to later, but pausing and occasionally pursuing a back eddy to allow differing regions to add their contribution to the flow. Following the geomorphic and ecological preface (section 2.1), we open with the first peoples to enter the Western Arctic (section 2.2), concentrating on the interior of Alaska, where the oldest evidence is known. This story may be familiar to many archaeologists as that of big-game hunting societies who first thrived on a treeless tundra and then adapted to an encroaching forest around 5,000 years ago. Subsequently, we will review the earliest coastal occupations in the mid-Holocene from 7,000 to 4,000 years ago. To maintain the flow, we shift between north and south, tracing the cultural efforts to harness increasing amounts of protein and surplus, first by salmon fishing (section 2.5), then by the taking of walrus, and finally by whaling. In the course of the story we will witness the development and rise of modern peoples (sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8), reviewing the paleogenetic record where we can and assessing the role of climate in cultural development.

2.1. Arctic Mirages and Landscape Realities

Geographic and Oceanographic Forcing Conditions

The Western Arctic is an austere landscape dominated by months of sea ice coupled with inclement weather. It extends nearly to the Aleutian archipelago, as far south as 55˚ north latitude. The farthest south walrus haulout lies on Unimak Island in the easternmost Aleutian Chain (Fischbach et al. 2016), with walrus present even farther south during the Neoglacial, 4,200 years ago (Davis 2001). A further consideration is that, as on the Labrador coast on the other side of the continent, climatic parameters such as low July mean temperatures and high winds preclude the growth of standing trees and allow the development of permafrost. In its annual cycle of sea ice formation, the Western Arctic resembles Baffin Bay, with ice expanding and retreating over a front that spans 15 degrees of latitude and over 2,000 km, from Bristol Bay in the south to Point Barrow in the north. In the past, the ice cover in north Alaska was considerably more persistent than at present, at times prohibitively so. In early August 1778 sailing ships under Captain James Cook reached only as far as Icy Cape, which lies 300 km south of Barrow. For much of the nineteenth century, Barrow was icebound throughout the summer. Thus, the present weather of the Western Arctic is not a reliable guide to the past. Anthropogenic global change is altering the persistence and spatial extent of the seasonal ice cover. As recently as the late 1930s, ice so regularly clogged the northern Cook Inlet that Anchorage was not considered an ice-free port (U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey 1938), and perennial snowbanks were common on St. Lawrence Island mountains, with sea ice remaining into July, as described by Henry Collins (1937:13).

Low, tundra-covered plains dominate the nearly straight coasts of the Alaskan mainland from the Alaska Peninsula to Barrow. Two extensive coastal plains dominate: in the south, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and in the north, the even larger Arctic Coastal Plain that stretches in a triangle from the foothills of the Brooks Range to culminate at Point Barrow. The coastal plains, pockmarked with thaw lakes and cut by numerous rivers and creeks, represent a crucial region for two abundant migrating sets of species: birds (especially geese) and caribou, both of which use the seasonally lush terrain as breeding grounds. Polar bears also den near the sea on the Arctic Coastal Plain. Evidence for occupation of both coastal plains is sparse prior to the last 2,000 years, a datum whose significance is not yet certain: is it an artifact of adverse survey conditions in the wet landscape, or does it represent a reluctance of prehistoric peoples to settle in these areas?

Much of Arctic prehistory is coastal in nature, so that it is crucial to understand sea level history and the likelihood of finding coastal occupations at any instant in time. At the end of the Pleistocene, around 15,000 to 8,000 BC, continental glaciation led to a subtraction of water from the oceans, covering the Canadian Arctic but exposing the continental shelves around Alaska and Siberia. Thus, the two regions witnessed quite opposite geomorphic effects during the Pleistocene and afterward in the Holocene. Nearly all of Canada lay under several kilometers of glacial ice—a circumstance that compressed the bedrock and precluded any human settlement. As the continental ice melted with the warming of the Holocene, the seas rose, first rapidly and then slowing with the shoreline responding according to two controlling factors: isostasy and sediment supply.

Unlike the Canadian Arctic, the north and west coasts of Alaska were spared direct impact of glacial ice; Pleistocene glaciation was restricted to the higher mountains of Alaska and around the Gulf of Alaska (Clague et al. 2004). In only two areas were glaciers within 100 km of the coast: Seward Peninsula and the eastern Alaska Peninsula. As a consequence, most of the region lacks the characteristic High Arctic isostatically uplifted coastal landforms termed beach ridges, but that is not to say that it lacks a horizontal series of landforms related to coastal change. Recalling that even uplifted beach ridges formed in response to wave action, similar deposits did form in the Western Arctic. However, the time frame for beach ridge formation is less than half that of the Eastern Arctic due to a period lasting several millennia during which rapid sea level rise precluded the preservation of beach ridges in the west; the rate of rise was far faster than the rate of beach building. Only when that rate slowed around 5,000 years ago was it possible for dunes and beach ridges to survive alongside past shorelines (Figure 2.1). However, one complication does arise in the Western Arctic. Beach ridge addition, linked with less stormy conditions, can be erased or modified by periods of closely spaced large storms. While disadvantageous for archaeological site preservation, such change can provide proxy evidence of paleoclimatic change (Mason and Jordan 1993).

Image: Figure 2.1. Oblique view of the Cape Krusenstern beach ridge complex, toward north at the northwest margin of the complex. The beach ridges have prograded during the last 5,000 years, with the oldest landward. Source: National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/photogallery/akr/park/cakr/C4EB4D3C-1DD8-B71C-07AAE63F8524B16A/C4EB4D3C-1DD8-B71C-07AAE63F8524B16A.jpg).

Figure 2.1. Oblique view of the Cape Krusenstern beach ridge complex, toward north at the northwest margin of the complex. The beach ridges have prograded during the last 5,000 years, with the oldest landward. Source: National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/photogallery/akr/park/cakr/C4EB4D3C-1DD8-B71C-07AAE63F8524B16A/C4EB4D3C-1DD8-B71C-07AAE63F8524B16A.jpg).

Rocky coasts are relatively common on the Aleutians, the southern shores of the Alaska Peninsula, and in the Gulf of Alaska from the Kodiak archipelago to the Kenai Peninsula. Their frequency can be contrasted with the northern and western Alaskan coasts, where bedrock cliffs are concentrated in three areas: intermittently on the north shore of Bristol Bay, Cape Newenham in the southwest, and the southern coasts of the Seward Peninsula from Norton Sound to Cape Prince of Wales on Bering Strait (Figure 2.2). The shores of Bristol Bay differ substantially, with low tundra plains along its southern margin on Alaska Peninsula, while the north shore alternates between low mountains and wide estuaries and shallow embayments that proved attractive to marine mammal hunters. Especially critical are several islands: the Walrus Islands and adjacent Hagemeister Island. Barrier islands, mostly formed of sand and occasionally mobilized into low dunes, are extensive from Seward Peninsula to the Canadian border and along the northern Chukotka coast. Chukotka, in fact, alternates between extensive coastlines of shear bedrock and low barriers. Farther south, while bedrock dominates the eastern shore of the Alaska Peninsula, beach ridges and barriers are common on its low western shore (Shepard and Wanless 1971).

Image: Figure 2.2. NASA satellite image of the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and southern Arctic Ocean acquired May 7, 2000. The image was generated from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) band 2 (0.85 μm) at 250 m spatial resolution. Detailed structure and leads in the ice pack are apparent. Ice flow from the Bering Strait southward to the Bering Sea is seen in great detail; this flow is a winter phenomenon. In summer the currents generally flow south to north along the Alaska coast. The shorefast ice is attached to the land masses while the pack ice is free floating. Linear openings—ice leads—between ice floes are important entryways for marine mammal hunters. Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=657.

Figure 2.2. NASA satellite image of the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and southern Arctic Ocean acquired May 7, 2000. The image was generated from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) band 2 (0.85 μm) at 250 m spatial resolution. Detailed structure and leads in the ice pack are apparent. Ice flow from the Bering Strait southward to the Bering Sea is seen in great detail; this flow is a winter phenomenon. In summer the currents generally flow south to north along the Alaska coast. The shorefast ice is attached to the land masses while the pack ice is free floating. Linear openings—ice leads—between ice floes are important entryways for marine mammal hunters. Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=657.

The southwesternmost extension of Alaska, the narrow Alaska Peninsula, is the geologically active surface expression of the major tectonic plate boundary that divides the topography and its ecology of southern Alaska. To the west the Aleutian Island chain consists of drowned volcanic masses that divide the North Pacific from the Bering Sea. The Alaska Peninsula was constructed by prominent volcanic massifs and forms a portion of the circum-Pacific ring of fire, north of the plate boundary and its subsiding crust (Ruppert et al. 2007). Its several dozen active volcanoes crown the 2,000 km length of the Alaska Peninsula from near Anchorage and extend across nearly half of the Aleutian Islands. Many volcanoes have erupted, some catastrophically, over the course of the Holocene, minimally producing plumes of airborne ash marker beds useful in stratigraphic analyses and archaeological surveys. More important for prehistory were several huge caldera-forming events issued from the Okmok caldera about 9,000 and 3,500 years ago, from Mount Fisher in the early Holocene, and from the Aniakchak caldera around 4,000 years ago (Miller and Smith 1987). Earthquakes are another region-wide influence on both the ecology and human prehistory of south-central Alaska (Ruppert et al. 2007). Two zones have proved most susceptible to tectonic changes: the far Alaska Peninsula near Cold Bay, and the Kodiak to Prince William Sound zone that was catastrophically impacted by the 1964 Good Friday megaquake.

The Geography of the Western Arctic

Alaska’s arc of prehistory, matching its montane topography, is consumed with illusory superlatives. At the crossroads of continents, was it a boundless Ice Age savanna peopled by mammoth killers tied to the earliest Clovis big-game hunters in the New World? Did it unleash the earliest whalers and walrus hunters? Millennia later, its maritime islands produced the largest archaeological mounds