Neolithic of the Northeast Asia and the Arctic Small Tool Tradition of the North America

Abstract

The origins of several northern cultures-Native peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic (Inuits, Chukchi, Koryaks, Aleuts) are associated by most researchers with the development and spread of Neolithic cultures in Northeast Asia. These Neolithic cultures later gave rise to the Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt) in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Neolithic cultures of Arctic and Subarctic Northeast Siberia (Yakutia, Chukotka and Kolyma regions) began their development during Mid-Holocene, approximately 6500-5500 years ago. Their basis are the Neolithic cultures of the Baikal Lake region, but as they formed they gained a unique character. Thus, in Yakutia, we can distinguish Syalakh, Belkachi, and Ymiyakhakh cultures, which later developed into the Neolithic cultures of Kolyma and Chukotka (Upper Kolyma, Ust-Belskaya, and Northern Chukotka). During the Neolithic, microblade technology continues to be used, and new shapes of bifacially flaked tools appear, which find analogies in the ASTt toolkits of the Arctic and Subarctic Zone of North America. In the Kolyma and Chukotka Neolithic complexes and in the ASTt complex in Alaska and Canada we find common tool types: small triangular points, rounded dorsally and ventrally retouched scrapers, beak-shaped combined tools, angular and multifaceted burins, end and side inset blades, gravers and adze with partially polished blades etc. Common traits of these cultures (traditions) formed, it appears, not only due to the direct spread of the Neolithic technologies and people into Alaska, but also due to the commonalities in the environmental and climatic zones of the Arctic and Subarctic which housed these cultures from the beginning of the second half of the Holocene.

Sourcing of obsidian artefacts from the Omolon River basin and the neighbouring region (north‐eastern Siberia): Prehistoric procurement from Kamchatkan and Chukotkan sources

“…The sites belong to different periods of prehistory (Table 1). In the absence of radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates from archaeological contexts in this region, we rely on the chronological information from neighbouring territories: the western part of the Kolyma River basin, Yakutia, Kamchatka and Chukotka (Dikov 2004;Alekseyev and Dyakonov 2009;Kiryak 2010;Mochanov 2009;Pitulko and Pavlova 2016; for summaries, see Kuzmin 2000Kuzmin , 2010Slobodin 2019). The compression of cultural materials from different periods into a single stratum because of the absence of simultaneous sedimentation (such as aeolian loess, for example) and cryogenic disturbance of deposits makes it impossible to separate artefacts belonging to repeated occupations.…”