| Summary: | This is a dissertation improvement grant award. Under the supervision of Dr. Ted Goebel, Mr. John Blong will conduct his doctoral research in the central Alaska Range, undertaking a study of human use of upland landscapes from earliest colonization to less than 1,000 years ago. The primary focus of this project is to explain the timing, environmental context, and nature of human colonization of the uplands, and to explore how the environment and use of upland landscapes changed throughout prehistory. This project will be the first comprehensive study of human upland adaptations in central Alaska. There are several models describing human use of the uplands, but there has been no focused exploration of upland settlement and land-use strategies. The study area for conducting this research is the upper Susitna River basin, where a pilot study resulted in the location of 19 new archaeological sites, two of which have been radiocarbon dated, with cultural components spanning the early through late Holocene. Five specific objectives drive this research: (1) to establish the paleoenvironmental history, and (2) record of human occupation of upland landscapes of the upper Susitna River basin, (3) to reconstruct lithic technological activities carried out over time in the uplands of the central Alaska Range basin, from initial colonization to less than 1,000 years ago, (4) to interpret technological-organization strategies carried out in the uplands of the central Alaska Range, especially as they relate to subsistence/settlement organization, and (5) to put the upper Susitna basin study area in the greater context of the prehistoric record of central Alaska. To address these objectives, the proposed research will include reconstruction of the paleoenvironmental context of human activity through pollen coring and analysis, archaeological survey and testing, and lithic analysis of assemblages recovered from fieldwork and from eight previously known archaeological sites in the central Alaska Range.
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