Archaeologists have long looked north to Alaska while researching the Pleistocene peopling of North America, as it is a logical path for foraging populations expanding east out of Asia along interior and/or coastal pathways. Ironically, it was not until the 1970s that Alaska yielded an archaeological site containing stratified cultural deposits dating to this early age. As such, this edited volume on the Dry Creek site is of historical importance in documenting this notable breakthrough.

W. Roger Powers, then professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, excavated Dry Creek between 1973 and 1977. The site, located near the Nenana River valley in south-central Alaska, revealed two Pleistocene-age components in well-stratified loess deposits. Several short publications summarized knowledge about the site in the 1970s and 1980s; however, a final report had never been published. The earlier occupation (component I), labeled the Nenana complex, was thought to be contemporaneous with the Clovis complex from the mid-continent based on a single radiocarbon date. The presence of bifacial, nonfluted projectile points and the absence of microblade technology were seen by Powers as a distinct tradition from a second component documented at the Dry Creek site. This component (II), located stratigraphically higher in the excavated column, was identified as the Denali complex and contained both bifacial projectile points and microblade technology.

The importance of Dry Creek cannot be understated, as Powers's work set off a gold rush of additional excavations in the Nenana River valley and surrounding valleys over the subsequent decades. Today, south-central Alaska contains some of the most important examples of late Pleistocene archaeology on the continent, and researchers continue to debate the prehistoric cultural connections between eastern and western Beringia, connections to the lower continent, and the causes of technological variation within Pleistocene tool kits.

Powers and colleagues assembled most of the present report in the mid-1980s; however, Powers passed away in 2003, and this final report was never published during his lifetime. Given the importance of the site data, Ted Goebel led the effort to assemble this manuscript, in some cases re-photographing plates from the 1983 report. The present volume is the result of that effort. Seven chapters and one appendix are authored by Powers, R. Dale Guthrie, and John F. Hoffecker. The chapters describe the history of work at the site, its geology, its lithic technology, the site structure of the occupation floors, and the paleoecology of the site and its importance to eastern Beringian archaeology. The majority of the report has not been updated to contend with present-day arguments or references, but this is hardly an issue given the importance of publishing the primary data as described by Powers and colleagues. The volume is beautifully illustrated, with color illustrations of stone tools, the site stratigraphy, and distributional maps of artifact frequencies.

Whereas the publication of this volume is certainly warranted for its historical importance, I think that Part 2 of the monograph (nearly 25% of the total number of pages) demonstrates the lasting importance of the site. Here, Kelly E. Graf and her coauthors describe their renewed excavations of Dry Creek in 2011. While some of this work was already published in 2015 (Graf et al., American Antiquity 80:671–694), this present chapter offers a much more detailed overview. Specifically, the authors address whether the Nenana and Denali components (I and II, respectively) were stratigraphically and chronologically distinct or, instead, were simply misinterpreted by Powers's team and were actually the result of mixed deposits. Geoarchaeological studies of site sedimentology, micromorphology, and soil geochemistry were coupled with new radiocarbon dates to confirm the stratigraphic separation of the components. Analysis of the lithic technology and faunal remains also suggests differences between the two early components, again supporting the interpretations presented by Powers and colleagues earlier in the volume. Goebel and Hoffecker follow in the final chapter, placing Dry Creek into a broader context of what researchers have learned since Dry Creek was first excavated more than 40 years ago.

The volume is of obvious appeal to Alaska and Beringian archaeologists, as well as Paleoindian archaeologists interested in lithic technology and similarities of Paleoindian archaeology in Alaska and in the lower latitudes of North America. Goebel, Graf, and colleagues are to be commended for resurrecting this unpublished manuscript so that Dry Creek can be properly evaluated and cited by new generations of researchers.