There can be little doubt that the majority of the area through which the Arctic Small Tool horizon spread was unoccupied by human populations. This is particularly true of the Eastern Arctic, with the exception of the southern fringes where they may have come into contact with Archaic peoples near the ecotone between the tundra and the taiga. In the Western Arctic, it is apparent that there had been earlier human populations in many areas, but these later migrants appear to have occupied a previously unoccupied ecological niche. Geographically, they spread along the Arctic coasts until they had reached the maximum extent of seasonally frozen coasts, usually with adjacent tundra. While it may be that the rising sea level had flooded earlier evidence of such a coastal occupation arid that this habitat had not been unoccupied as it now appears, the present data support the inference that Arctic Small Tool populations were the first to accomplish a successful adaptation to these particular conditions in the American Arctic. For the present, I wish to focus on this coastal aspect of Arctic Small Tool peoples, ignoring (or not modeling) the expanded distribution of sites in interior Alaska which also occurred at this time.
Perhaps the most neglected aspect of archaeological research in the Arctic has been the within-site dimension of archaeological data. Few archaeologists have “attempted to see their material as remains left by social groups” (Anderson 1968:397) and fewer still have attempted to infer patterns of social organization and the within-site organization of activities. One measure of the degree to which Arctic archaeologists have failed to contribute to contemporary archaeological method and theory is the fact that the 37-page bibliography of Contemporary Archaeology: A Guide to Theory and Contributions recently edited by Mark Leone (1972) contains not one reference to Arctic archaeology. In part, this is because much of the contents of this collection of papers considers data from the southwestern United States and Mesoamerica, but it also demonstrates that Arctic archaeologists have contributed little to discussions of archaeological method and theory.In a recent chapter on the development of Arctic archaeology (Dekin 1973), I expressed optimism regarding the potential theoretical contributions of archaeology in the Arctic, but this will not occur without a renewed emphasis on precise excavation, analytic sophistication, and a revitalized sense of “problem.”
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