Note: You can watch Dr. Monteleone’s entire presentation on the SHI YouTube Channel, and find learn more on the NOAA project page called “Our Submerged Past.”
Archaeology is an easily misunderstood science. Indiana Jones didn’t really do academia any favors.
Indy: This should be in a museum!
Sure. Artifacts are an important part of the human story, but there is an even bigger story that archeologists in the Americas are still teasing out. Humanity did not originate on this continent. Everyone came from somewhere else.
“When push comes to shove, the question I’m trying to answer is: How and when did people migrate to the Americas? When did this happen?” asks Dr. Kelly Monteleone, an archeologist and a professor at the University of Calgary. Like many in her field, she’s come to understand that the earliest attempts by researchers to put together a theory of migration to the Americas were incomplete, or just incorrect. It involved nomadic hunters coming from Asia, on foot, in pursuit of megafauna like wooly mammoths.
Eh… maybe, but probably not.
“And then I have a strange feeling most of you were taught about people walking across the Bering Land Bridge and down the ice free corridor when you were in school,” said Monteleone. “I’m hoping one day that that’s not a true statement, and that I can say to a room that you weren’t taught people walked through an ice-free corridor.”
Monteleone calls that ice-free corridor a “deglaciation corridor,” and the timing when it appeared doesn’t fit the latest models of the populating of the Americas.
Over the last three decades, the Coastal Migration theory has emerged to compete with the Bering Land Bridge. Even today, Alaska’s oldest cultures are maritime, and the coastal environment is hospitable to life of all kinds.
Monteleone thinks the answer to Coastal Migration is here.
“And that’s where Southeast Alaska becomes so important,” she said, “because we then become this perfect location to identify where people were walking or migrating using boats, vessels of some kind, along the coast.”
Southeast Alaska is the perfect location, but for one problem: The coastline has changed dramatically in many places, due to a combination of rising sea level and glacial rebound. A lot of what Monteleone hopes to find is underwater.
Beginning in 2021, Monteleone worked around the west coast of Prince of Wales Island, where other evidence of coastal migration has been found in the limestone caves prevalent in the region.
Monteleone mapped potential cave sites with an underwater ROV, or remotely-operated vehicle – and examined other archeological evidence of human activity.
One site in particular in Shakan Bay – which she first found in 2010 while working on her dissertation – she believes is a fish trap.
“You kind of see some stacked rocks in a semicircular structure,” she said, referring to a slide in her presentation. “This is 11,400 years old on the ocean floor at 52meters.”
Monteleone’s examination of these areas is far more than visual. Divers on her team take core samples of the sediments, and they’re typically rich in pollen from terrestrial plants like spruce and hemlock trees. The samples also turn up material known as “micro debitage.”
“So whenever you use a stone tool or you sharpen a stone tool, little flakes like break off, and they’re very small,” she explained. “II’m working with stuff that’s less than a millimeter or around a millimeter and smaller in size.”
Kelly Monteleone’s project was funded by NOAA Ocean Exploration. She’s applying for additional funding to continue her research, and to continue combing the sea floor in Southeast Alaska looking for evidence of the earliest human migration into North America.
