Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Sea-Level History and Glacial Retreat Interpreted from Shell-Bearing Marine Deposits of Southeastern Alaska, USA

We leverage a data set of \u3e720 shell-bearing marine deposits throughout southeastern Alaska (USA) to develop updated relative sea-level curves that span the past ~14,000 yr. This data set includes site location, elevation, description when avail-able, and 436 14C ages, 45 of which are published here for the first time. Our sea-level curves suggest a peripheral forebulge developed west of the retreating Cordilleran Ice Sheet (CIS) margin between ca. 17,000 and 10,800 calibrated yr B.P. By 14,870 ± 630 to 12,820 ± 340 cal. yr B.P., CIS mar-gins had retreated from all of southeastern Alaska’s fjords, channels, and passages. At this time, isolated or stranded ice caps existed on the islands, with alpine or tidewater glaciers in many valleys. Paleoshorelines up to 25 m above sea level mark the maximum elevation of transgression in the southern portion of the study region, which was achieved by 11,000 ± 390 to 10,500 ± 420 cal. yr B.P. The presence of Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) and the abundance of charcoal in sediments that date between 11,000 ± 390 and 7630 ± 90 cal. yr B.P. suggest that both ocean and air temperatures in southeastern Alaska were relatively warm in the early Holocene. The sea-level and paleoenvironmental reconstruction presented here can inform future investigations into the glacial, volcanic, and archaeological history of southeastern Alaska

Contextualizing the development of coastal adaptations in postglacial Southeast Alaska

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2021The goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of human population expansions into unfamiliar environments, focusing on when and how humans adapted to the rich coastal landscape of Southeast Alaska. Investigation of the peopling of this region has been overshadowed by the broader narrative that the Americas may have been first colonized by a late Pleistocene coastal migration. Refinements to local sea-level and paleoecological chronologies help contextualize the dynamic landscape that these first inhabitants might have encountered, returning focus to the archaeology of Southeast Alaska itself. This research considers existing archaeological data within the theoretical framework of Human Behavioral Ecology, proposing new models to acknowledge the process of landscape learning. Landscape learning provides a mechanism for exploring human adaptation to unfamiliar landscapes, which in turn produces testable hypotheses based on the familiarity of colonizing human foragers with coastal environments. Systematic sourcing of obsidian microblade cores, ubiquitous in early Holocene sites, allows for a further assessment of landscape learning, alongside an evaluation of the relationship between local raw material constraints and technological organization. Though the oldest known archaeological sites in Southeast Alaska are firmly dated to between 10,500 and 10,000 cal BP, older occupations have been identified elsewhere on the Northwest Coast, and Tlingit and Haida oral histories record their presence on the landscape from Time Immemorial. Taken together, multiple lines of evidence point to an initial colonization of Southeast Alaska out of eastern Beringia, occurring prior to the occupation of the oldest known sites. By the early Holocene, foragers with a typical Northwest Coast diet were readily adapting to, but still in the process of learning, this complex coastal landscape. While these results challenge the long-established impression that the oldest known sites in the region represent a remnant population of maritime sea-mammal hunters descended from an earlier coastal migration into the Americas, this research highlights the opportunity to continue testing these hypotheses by targeting older, uplifted paleoshorelines.University of Alaska Museum of the North Geist Fund Grant, the Alaska Quaternary Center, the Harvey Fields Fellowship, AlaskaView Research scholarship, and the Tongass National Forest Geology Program of the U.S. Forest ServiceChapter 1: Quantifying marine reservoir effect variability along the Northwest Coast of North America -- Chapter 2: Human behavioral ecology, landscape learning, and the coastal colonization of the Americas -- Chapter 3: Obsidian source classification and defining "local" in early holocene Southeast Alaska -- General conclusion

Capsular complexes of nonpolar guests with octa amine host detected in the gas phase

Nanocapsules, made up of the deep cavitand octa amine and several guests, were prepared in aqueous acidic solution and were found to be stable in the gas phase as detected by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The observed gas phase host-guest complexes contained five positive charges and were associated with several acid molecules (HCI or HBr)