The Middle Tanana Valley in Alaska remains one of the most important regions of the continent for archaeological research. In The Gift of the Middle Tanana: Dene Pre-Colonial History in the Alaskan Interior, Gerad Smith explores the history, ethnography, and archaeological record of the Native people in this region during the late Holocene. Smith creates an interpretive framework informed by Alaskan Native traditions, focusing on traditional place names and the deep-play rituals of recipro...

Who were the first people who came to the land bridge joining northeastern Asia to Alaska and the northwest of North America? Where did they come from? How did they organize technology, especially in the context of settlement behavior?During the Pleistocene era, the people now known as Beringians dispersed across the varied landscapes of late-glacial northeast Asia and northwest North America.The twenty chapters gathered in this volume explore, in addition to the questions ...