Ice Age Peoples of North America: Environments, Origins, and Adaptations of the First Americans

This volume provides an up-to-date summary of important new discoveries from Northeast Asia and North America that are changing perceptions about the origin of the First Americans. Even though the peopling of the Americas has been the focus of scientific investigations for more than half a century, there is still no definitive evidence that will allow specialists to say when the First Americans initially arrived or who they were. The nineteen papers collected here provide regional archaeological syntheses and address such topics as ice marginal dynamics, the impact of plant nutrients in glacial margins, and periglacial ecology of large mammals. The concluding chapter discusses conceptual frameworks used to explain the peopling of the Americas. This volume provides an up-to-date summary of important new discoveries earlier than ten thousand years old from Northeast Asia and North America that are changing our perceptions about the origin of the First Americans. It offers a detailed compendium of late-Pleistocene Paleoamerican archaeological records that can serve as a foundation of existing knowledge in this field and for creating the next generation of models that seek to explain the peopling of the Americas.