Browsing by Author "Kristensen, Todd"
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Item Ice, mountains, and people: applying a multi-proxy approach to reveal changes in Alberta’s alpine ecosystems through ice patch research(2023) Tirlea, Diana; Kristensen, Todd; Osicki, Aaron; Jensen, Britta; Williams, Krista; Caners, Richard; Lumley, Lisa; Woywitka, RobinGlacial archaeology has grown and progressed rapidly in recent decades with technological innovations and shifting socio-political issues. However, research on ice patches in the Canadian Rocky Mountains is in its infancy. While Holocene glacial ice retreat, advance, and morphology are well studied in Canada, ice patches in general tend to be understudied because of their limited geomorphological impact on landscapes. This oversight is concerning as their isolated nature, lower elevation, and small mass make ice patches even more susceptible to climate change than glaciers. The importance of documenting these features is heightened by a persisting but tenuous biological importance to a range of modern species. The lack of flow in ice patches also makes them excellent archives of palaeoenvironmental and organic-based cultural materials, as layers of ice and preserved contents are not as distorted as they may be by flow in glaciers.Item Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene obsidian in Alberta and human dispersal into North America’s ice-free corridor(2023) Kristensen, Todd; Allan, Timothy E.; Ives, John W.; Woywitka, Robin; Yanicki, Gabriel; Rasic, Jeffrey T.We utilize pXRF to source the oldest obsidian artifacts in Alberta, Canada. The province lacks obsidian outcrops and hosts much of the late Pleistocene Ice-Free Corridor, the northern and southern ends of which are in proximity to obsidian outcrops in Yukon, Alaska, Idaho, and Wyoming. The early presence of these obsidians in Alberta informs models of human dispersion. Results point to an early establishment of relationships in the central Ice-Free Corridor that reached into Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Alberta appears to have been entered by people from the south who had ties to the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West. After biotic viability of a full Corridor, limited evidence suggests that northern people from Beringia may have trickled south and admixed with southern populations in the central Corridor region. Upon deglaciation of access routes through the Rocky Mountains, obsidian from western sources in British Columbia arrived relatively quickly in northern Alberta.