With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Ted Goebel, along with his colleagues Drs. Kelly Graf and Michael Waters, investigate a new prehistoric archaeological site near Serpentine Hot Springs, Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Alaska. This site is thought to contain fluted spear points in a buried context preliminarily radiocarbon dated to about 12,000 calendar years ago. As such, the Serpentine Hot Springs site represents the first site known to date to the Ice Age on the Bering Land Bridge, and it represents the first site in Alaska where fluted points have been recovered from a datable context. In temperate North America, early fluted points assigned to the Clovis complex represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of humans in North America. Through their research at Serpentine Hot Springs, Goebel's team addresses the following research questions: Are fluted points in Alaska earlier than, the same age, or younger than Clovis fluted points in temperate North America? Do they represent the diffusion of technology or migration of people from the Bering Land Bridge area south to temperate North America during pre-Clovis times, or do they represent back-diffusion or back-migration from the south to north in post-Clovis times? To address these questions, Goebel's team is conducting a block excavation of the site, to recover additional charcoal samples from preserved features and to increase the sizes of artifact and faunal assemblages, facilitating detailed technological and subsistence analyses and comparisons with other early sites in Beringia.
This research project will contribute to the knowledge of some of the earliest people in North America, and help understand how people of that time may have interacted. It also offers an opportunity for archaeologists to work with and teach contemporary Native Alaskan groups of western Alaska about the early history of their region, it offers an important research experience to a young female scientist, and it provides information about how humans adapted to rapidly warming climate during the late Ice Age.
About 12,000 years ago, a small group of hunters arrived on a windy bluff overlooking the rocky knolls and valley of Serpentine Hot Springs, Alaska. They may have stopped to watch for caribou herds travelling across the open terrain, to maintain their hunting equipment, or to rest and survey the surrounding territory. In 2005, artifacts were found on the exposed ground surface of the bluff and buried below the surface. With funding from the National Science Foundation (Arctic Social Sciences Program), in 2009-2011 archaeologists from of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University, visited the site with a crew of students, conducted surface mapping and artifact collection, testing, and archaeological excavation. The landscape was different during the Ice Age—drier and colder with more lichens and fewer shrubs and bushes, and inhabited not only by caribou and musk-oxen, but also larger mammals such as steppe bison and woolly mammoth. While we do not know exactly who Serpentine’s early hunters were or where they were going, from the NSF-sponsored research we now know that they built a fire or two, processed food, and prepared stone tools, because behind them they left the remains of hearths, burnt bone, and stone flakes. These artifacts were buried by wind-blown silt and by mud and rock washed down from nearby slopes, and preserved in place until the present day. They were discovered in 2005 by archaeologists from the National Park Service and are now being studied as the Serpentine Hot Springs fluted-point archaeological site. The Serpentine fluted-point site has been dated by collecting charcoal from the remains of three hearths that were uncovered during excavation. The heaths appeared as buried concentrations of wood charcoal, burnt animal bone, and small stone flakes. Using radiocarbon techniques, the charcoal turned out to date to about 12,000 years ago. The artifacts found within and near the hearths can be associated with these dates. They include four fragments of fluted spear points, a stone artifact form typical of Paleoindian cultures of the late Ice Age elsewhere in North America. The bones are highly fragmented but appear to represent caribou or a similar-sized ungulate. Nearly 1,000 articles have been collected from the site, including approximately 600 animal bone fragments, 40 pieces of charcoal, 16 bifacial stone tools, ten microblades, 15 bladelets, and 300 flakes (stone waste created during the shaping and re-sharpening of stone tools). Most important were six fragments of fluted points (two from the surface of the site, four from the excavation). Fluted points are specialized weapons that were likely hafted to the tips of spear shafts rather than arrows. They were created through careful shaping of a large piece of stone into a long, symmetrical form with a pointed tip and a concave base. To prepare the artifact for hafting to a shaft, long narrow "channel" flakes were removed from the base to create a "flute" down the midline of each face of the point. Numerous channel flakes have been found among the Serpentine Hot Springs artifacts. The presence of 12,000-year-old fluted points at Serpentine has potential to change our understanding of early human migration in North America. Lowered sea levels during the last Ice Age exposed dry land between Asia and the Americas, creating the Bering Land Bridge. The first humans to arrive in America came from Asia across the land bridge, but when and how they spread throughout the New World is still a mystery. The fluted points from Serpentine resemble fluted points from temperate America dating to 13,000-12,500 years ago. It was previously thought that these early fluted points spread from Alaska, being carried southwards through Canada as the great ice sheets of the late Ice Age receded. But the fluted points at Serpentine are not old enough to fit this theory. Instead, fluting technology may have originated in the southern United States among people who had arrived earlier, perhaps by boat along the south coast of Beringia. Now it would seem that fluted points were brought northwards as glaciers melted and early peoples explored the newly opened territory of western Canada. Additional research at other archaeological sites in Alaska and Canada will be needed, however, to confirm these interpretations. Research at Serpentine was funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Shared Beringia Heritage Program of the National Park Service, National Geographic Society, and the Elfrieda Frank Foundation (New York). The project was an international effort, with scientists from Russia and the United States participating. In addition, the field and laboratory components of the project provided important training experiences for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as local high school students from the nearby Native Alaskan village of Shishmaref.
