Abstract

Located in a rather inaccessible and isolated corner of the Ogilvie Mountains, the Poulton Station site, named after its discoverer, was first located in 1978 and tentatively identified at the time as an extensive chert quarry site, the first of its kind ever found in northern Yukon. In the summer of 1998, a brief re-examination of the site was carried out for the purpose of clarifying this hypothesised «quarry » status, and determining whether or not it was in need of further investigation. In this paper we shall present some of the results of this brief visit, with emphasis on the discovery at the site of a series of lithic elements that are technologically diagnostic of the Late Pleistocene Nenana Complex. Dating back to the early half of the 11th millennium BP, and defined on the basis of assemblages recovered primarily from South Central Alaska, the latter has been viewed by many, over the last few years, as representing the best dated and most archaeologically coherent demonstration of the « earliest » human presence in eastern Beringia, as well as the best and only Beringian link in the Palaeoindian continuum that led to the emergence of Clovis. The discovery of a similar type of manifestation in the north-western Ogilvie Mountains, about 400 kilometres from its eponymous area, together with evidence from other northern Yukon sites, provides us with the means to attempt a critical reassessment of this overly simplistic, Alaska-centred model, and this especially with respect to some of its bio-geographical, chronological, and palaeoenvironmental premises.