Santander, February 19th-22nd 2008 - Aranzadi

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ZHANNA ANTIPUSHINA
We reconstruct palaeoenvironmental conditions,
based on analysis of shell remains from
archaeological sites at Adak Island, Aleutian
Islands. They were excavated by members of the
Western Aleutian Archaeological and
Palaeobiological Project (WAAPP), lead by D.L.
West (University of Kansas).
We investigated two shell middens. One shell
midden ADK-171 is situated on the eastern coast
of the Clam lagoon (51°55’32’’ N, 176°33’37’’ E),
the second shell midden ADK-009 – on the south
coast of the Sweeper Cove (51°51’10’’ N,
176°38’18’’ E) (Fig. 1).
2. MATERIALS AND METHODS
The excavation areas in both sites were 1m 2
and were excavated according to recognizable
stratigraphic layers no thicker than 10 cm
(Dinesman et al. 1999, Causey et al. 2005). Material
was screened or sorted by hand. We used radiocarbon
dating of fish bone collagen calibrated with
OxCal 3.10. The dates obtained from the marine
animal remains turned out to be a hundred years
earlier because of the reservoir effect, so we used
the calibration curve Marine04 (Reimer and Reimer
2001, Hughen et al. 2004) and the regional correction
ΔR for the southern part of the Bering sea
(Stuiver and Braziunas 1993).
We used the number of identified specimens
(NISP) for quantification of chitons. For bivalves the
number of umbo was counted (MNI). For gastropods,
MNI was determined by the presence of
>50% of the shell (Grayson 1984, Mason et al.
1998, Claassen 2000, Glassow 2000, Mason et al.
2000, Bird et al. 2002, Dinesman and Savinetsky
2003, Antipushina 2008).
The samples were identified to the lowest taxonomical
level possible using the reference collections
housed at the Zoological Museum MSU,
Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS and
Zoological Institute RAS.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The ADK-171 profile included a cultural layer
and several natural layers. The total depth of this
profile was 2.7 m, and the cultural layer in this
profile was 100 to 140 cm deep. Three radiocarbon
dates show that the cultural layers were formed
at the end of the 6 th millennium cal BC
(6141±123 yr BP, IEMAE-1281; 6172±192 yr BP,
Figure 1. Map of investigation area.
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