TECHNOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE LATE HOLOCENE: RESULTS FROM THE CLEARVIEW SITE (XMH-1303).

Roughly 1500 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers left behind numerous tools and thousands of pieces of lithic production debris at the Clearview site, situated on a rise overlooking the middle Tanana Valley and the Alaska Range in central Alaska. This paper considers the spatial relationships between tool type, debitage production, and material to demonstrate the technological organization at this late Holocene occupation. The diverse assemblage considered here comprises several tools (projectile points, bifacial knives, end and side scrapers, expedient flake tools, burins, and microblades) and raw materials, including obsidian. A comprehensive analysis of this assemblage reveals that the site's occupants undertook a complex lithic reduction sequence focused on intermediate stages of bifacial reduction and late-stage microblade production. Generally, this assemblage appears to represent a residential camp of mobile foragers similar to those associated with the Northern Archaic tradition. The results presented here suggest that significant late Holocene behavioral shifts (e.g., increased subsistence specialization, decreased mobility, increased use of metal and bone tools) occurred after Clearview was occupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]