Description: During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Sometime prior to twelve thousand years ago, a grand procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. With its diverse large fauna, the peculiar Beringian environment appears to have encouraged these hunting peoples in the perfection of the skills that ultimately prepared them to settle and thrive in the empty continents of North and South America. Here they formed the bases for the immensely diversified populations "discovered" by Europeans ten thousand years later. A matter of consuming interest on both sides of the present-day Bering Strait, much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. In American Beginnings Frederick Hadleigh West has brought together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date information from both Russia and America. Over the past twenty-five years, extensive research has been carried out in Siberia and Alaska, painting a vivid picture of the nature of Beringia, its peoples, and their movements. The fifty-six contributors to this volume, all preeminent scholars of Beringia, draw on this wealth of archaeological and palaeoecological evidence to reconstruct the Beringian environment.

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