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Ethnoarchaeological research, which gained great popularity in the second half of the 20th century, has become a new full-fledged source for a variety of socio-economic reconstructions in archaeology, including when characterizing the features of industrial complexes. Developments that combine experimental traceological analysis of tools and ethnographic data play an important role in modeling ancient technologies, especially when ethnographic artifacts are a direct continuation of archaeological traditions, both in terms of their manufacturing method and specific purpose. In this regard, the study of stone knives from the Ekven burial ground of the 1st millennium AD is of great interest, discovered in Chukotka. These products have retained their specific form from antiquity to the present day. The presence in the archaeological and ethnographic collections of these items in varying degrees of processing and use (from blanks to tools with a completely recycled or redesigned working blade) made it possible not only to describe the chain of basic technological operations of their manufacture from the primary processing of raw materials, shaping, processing of the working and edge parts, mounts in the handle, but also to install the tools involved in this production process. The data obtained were verified using experimental work, which confirmed the invariability of the technology for processing slate raw materials and manufacturing archaeological and ethnographic man’s knives from it.

Due to the marine reservoir effect, radiocarbon dates of marine samples require a correction. Marine reservoir effects, however, may vary among different marine species within a given body of water. Factors such as diet, feeding depth and migratory behaviour all affect the 14 C date of a marine organism. Moreover, there is often significant variation within single marine species. Whilst the careful consideration of the Δ R values of a single marine species in a given location is important, so too is the full range of Δ R values within an ecosystem. This paper illustrates this point, using a sample pairing method to estimate the reservoir effects in 17 marine samples, of eight different species, from the archaeological site of Ekven (Eastern Chukotka, Siberia). An OxCal model is used to assess the strength of these estimates. The marine reservoir effects of samples passing the model range from Δ R (Marine20) = 136 ± 41-Δ R  = 460 ± 40. Marine reservoir effect estimates of these samples and other published samples are used to explore variability in the wider Bering Strait region. The archaeological implications of this variability are also discussed. The calibrating of 14 C dates from human bone collagen, for example, could be improved by applying a dietary relevant marine reservoir effect correction. For humans from the site of Ekven, a Δ R (Marine20) correction of 289 ± 124 years or reservoir age correction of 842 ± 123 years is suggested., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

The New World Arctic, the last region of the Americas to be populated by humans, has a relatively well-researched archaeology, but an understanding of its genetic history is lacking. We present genome-wide sequence data from ancient and present-day humans from Greenland, Arctic Canada, Alaska, Aleutian Islands, and Siberia. We show that Paleo-Eskimos (~3000 BCE to 1300 CE) represent a migration pulse into the Americas independent of both Native American and Inuit expansions. Furthermore, the genetic continuity characterizing the Paleo-Eskimo period was interrupted by the arrival of a new population, representing the ancestors of present-day Inuit, with evidence of past gene flow between these lineages. Despite periodic abandonment of major Arctic regions, a single Paleo-Eskimo metapopulation likely survived in near-isolation for more than 4000 years, only to vanish around 700 years ago., (Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)