Current perspectives on the Pleistocene archaeology of eastern Beringia

Abstract

Most recent summaries of eastern Beringian (Alaska and Yukon) archaeology present the Nenana complex, beginning 11,500–12,000 14C yr B.P., as the beginning of the regional archaeological record. Either explicitly or tacitly, these summaries dismiss or ignore a body of older putative evidence of human occupation that may span the late Wisconsin stade and even extend into part of the mid-Wisconsin interstade. This paper summarizes the interpretive problems surrounding the older findings, bringing together data that have accumulated over a period of two decades, in the hope that a coherent presentation will encourage more careful appraisals of the materials. The paper concludes with a family of testable hypotheses concerning the beginnings of human occupation in eastern Beringia. The hypothesis that people were present during the mid-Wisconsin interstade has not yet been falsified.