| Summary: | "With cultural remains dated unequivocally to 13,000 calendar years ago, Dry Creek assumed major importance upon its excavation and study by W. Roger Powers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The site was the first to conclusively demonstrate a human presence in eastern Beringia that could be dated to the same time as the Bering Land Bridge, thus offering reliable evidence of the migration route used in the peopling of the Americas during the late Pleistocene. Similarly, the Dry Creek site yielded the first proof that early human migrants to Alaska successfully hunted the now-extinct mega-mammals known to populate late Pleistocene North America. As Powers and his research team studied the site from 1973 through 1977, their work verified exciting initial expectations, unearthing evidence of a series of late Pleistocene cultural occupations within a well-stratified context. It became clear that Dry Creek's trove of chronologically constrained tools, cores, and debitage, along with its faunal remains, provided a 'tantalizing first glimpse' of Clovis-aged lithic technology in Beringia. Unfortunately, the research was never fully published outside of a series of short journal articles. Thus, its ongoing significance was never completely realized. W. Roger Powers passed away in 2003, and at the time of his death he was still intending to update and publish the work in book form. Now, thanks to generous funding from the National Science Foundation and others, Dry Creek: Archaeology and Paleoecology of a Late Pleistocene Alaskan Hunting Camp is finally ready to take its rightful place in the ongoing research into the peopling of the Americas. Containing not only the original research, this book also updates and reconsiders Dry Creek in light of more recent discoveries and analysis, placing Powers's pioneering original research in conversation with current directions in Beringian archaeology"--Back cover.
|
|---|
