Postglacial Human and Environmental Landscapes of Northeastern Alberta: An analysis of a late Holocene sediment record from Sharkbite Lake, Alberta

• Author / Creator

  Poletto, Christina Livia

• Sharkbite Lake lies in northeastern Alberta’s lower Athabasca River Valley, within which lies the modern boundaries of the Mineable Oil Sands Region (MOSR). Much of the palaeoecological research to date has addressed the establishment of the Boreal Forest; however, the late Holocene palaeoenvironment in the Athabasca River valley has not been studied in detail. Sharkbite Lake’s record fills this gap in knowledge, and aids in the understanding the archaeological history. Archaeological investigations since the 1970s have resulted in the discovery of thousands of sites relating to almost 10,000 years of human occupation in the lower Athabasca River Valley. Nonetheless, the archaeological record is usually limited to stone tools situated in poorly stratified sites, often lacking independent chronologic control. With this limited record, the analysis of supplementary records like lake sediment cores becomes valuable in framing past and future CRM work and the human history in the region. This project analyzed a sediment core from Sharkbite Lake with a basal date of 3,320 rcyBP—the only high-resolution palaeoenvironmental record covering this interval in the Athabasca River valley—to help reconstruct local scale environmental changes as they relate to First Nations ancestors living in the Boreal Forest. The resulting pollen, microcharcoal, and botanical analyses of Sharkbite Lake help demonstrate how the ecological history adds to the narrative of the archaeological record. To address this relationship, all radiocarbon dates from the area were assessed. Sharkbite Lake’s palaeoenvironmental record was compared with five dated archaeological sites in order to demonstrate the environmental background within which First Nation communities in the region lived and interacted.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Sharkbite Lake, Alberta
  • palaeoenvironments
  • radiocarbon dating
  • lower Athabasca River Valley
  • pollen core
  • landscape use
  • First Nations
  • Boreal Forest
  • fire
  • Holocene
  • archaeology
  • northeastern Alberta

• Graduation date

  Spring 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-1ryf-q437

• License

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