Douglas D. Anderson

Cave archaeology in Southeast Asia

Archaeological research in caves and rockshelters has been the major source of data about cultural developments in Southeast Asia during late Pleistocene and early Holocene times. Despite the numerous cave excavations in nearly every Southeast Asian country over the last 100 years, however, the earliest general archaeological schemes were ironically based on rather cursory findings from poorly dated open air sites. In recent years ongoing excavations and analyses of archaeological materials from caves and rockshelters have finally come into their own, and newer interpretations have superseded some of the more speculative aspects of the earlier archaeological schemes. During Late Pleistocene times, caves were used only as brief campsites, often selected for their inaccessibility; in the early Holocene Epoch they were frequently used as dwelling sites; in the middle Holocene time the more accessible caves and rockshelters were often used as burial sites. One site, the Lang Rongrien Rockshelter, southwestern Thailand, serves as a case study for pointing out problems encountered in cave and rockshelter excavations in Southeast Asia. This 3500–>43000-year-old site is also used as the basis for exploring some more general issues concerning the lifeways of late Pleistocene Homo sapiens in the region and possibilities of preagricultural rainforest adaptation of their early Holocene descendants.

Frozen: The Potential and Pitfalls of Ground-Penetrating Radar for Archaeology in the Alaskan Arctic

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) offers many advantages for assessing archaeological potential in frozen and partially frozen contexts in high latitude and alpine regions. These settings pose several challenges for GPR, including extreme velocity changes at the interface of frozen and active layers, cryogenic patterns resulting in anomalies that can easily be mistaken for cultural features, and the difficulty in accessing sites and deploying equipment in remote settings. In this study we discuss some of these challenges while highlighting the potential for this method by describing recent successful investigations with GPR in the region. We draw on cases from Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Kobuk Valley National Park, and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. The sites required small aircraft accessibility with light equipment loads and minimal personnel. The substrates we investigate include coastal saturated active layer over permafrost, interior well-drained active layer over permafrost, a frozen thermo-karst lake, and an alpine ice patch. These examples demonstrate that GPR is effective at mapping semi-subterranean house remains in several contexts, including houses with no surface manifestation. GPR is also shown to be effective at mapping anomalies from the skeletal remains of a late Pleistocene mammoth frozen in ice. The potential for using GPR in ice and snow patch archaeology, an area of increasing interest with global environmental change exposing new material each year, is also demonstrated.

Northern Archaic Tradition Forty Years Later: Comments

Forty years have passed since the existence of Northern Archaic (NAT), a cultural tradition in northwestern Alaska distinct from Arctic traditions such as Arctic Small Tool (AST) was proposed. The usefulness and even reality of NAT as originally conceived is revisited here to see if the concept continues to have merit or if it should be abandoned altogether. Originally, NAT was thought to represent an expansion of culture northward during middle Holocene times from the more temperate and sub-arctic regions of the continent into forest/tundra-edge habitats of northwestern North America. Although evidence for the tradition came from numerous sites in Alaska and the Southwest Yukon, the concept was fully developed from findings at Onion Portage. Although the sequence demonstrated a change over time from side-notched to lanceolate points, there was a total absence of a microblade industry throughout the entire 2,000 years. Recent findings of notched points associated with microblades in other northern Alaskan sites have demonstrated a far more complex prehistory in the region than originally thought. Discussion of the “notched point” problem stresses the idea that side-notching alone need not indicate a distinct cultural tradition.