ABSTRACT: Bluefish Cave I: A Late Pleistocene Eastern Beringian cave deposit in the northern Yukon.

CGRG Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology
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This paper is presented as an assessment report on the archaeological and paleoecological potential of a series of small cave and rock-shelter deposits located along the upper-middle course of the Bluefish River, northern Yukon Territory. It is based on the results of a preliminary investigation carried out during the 1978 Northern Yukon Research Programme field-season and deals primarily with data obtained from Bluefish Cave I, the largest of these features. Our work at Bluefish Cave I has obviously resulted in accumulation of directly useable or potential information that goes well beyond the limits of our initial goals. We have at hand a late Pleistocene deposit, of a kind never encountered before in the northern Yukon, and containing traces of cultural activities which on the basis of a broad range of paleoenvironmental information can be tentatively dated from arount 13,000 years ago to around l0,000 years ago. If the cultural evidence belonging to the later part of the sequence may be tentatively assigned to a Diuktai continuum, the earlier one remains anonymous and can only be taken as indicative of a human presence in the Porcupine River basin after the end of the last glacial maximum. This greatly reduces the length of an apparent regional cultural hiatus and can be taken as suggestive that human populations were technologically capable of coping with near-glacial environmental contitions that ceased to exist around or shortly after that time. It also implies that these or other eastern Beringian groups could very well have been present sometime earlier, during the coldest phases of the glacial maximum, and it leaves ample room for future speculative exercises concerning the relationships that may have existed between those populations and those that were to manifest themselves around 12,000 years ago to the south of the continental ice sheet, as well as with the much earlier Beringian interstadial populations. (Excerpts)

Bibliography of Canadian Geomorphology