The entry of humans into the western hemisphere is one of the most important, compelling, and debated realms of research in the field of archaeology. Obviously relevant to human evolution and cultural…

The entry of humans into the western hemisphere is one of the most important, compelling, and debated realms of research in the field of archaeology. Obviously relevant to human evolution and cultural change, IT can also be argued that no event has so greatly influenced long-term climate change. Climatic fluctuations alternately opened and closed the door from the old world to the new world. Human occupation wrought great environmental change in the western hemisphere, which forms 28% of the earth s landmass. While fully modern humans inhabited the old world for at least the past 60,000 years, and the direct ancestors of fully modern humans for millions of years before that, dates for humans in the new world before 15,000 B.P. Are greeted with great skepticism by archaeologists. Recent climate research suggests that entry along the west coast of the continent was possible earlier than the route through the laurentide ICE-free corridor, which had been thought by most archaeologists to have been the only plausible route since at least the 1930S (goebel, ET AL., 2008). This is consistent with findings at the paisley cave in oregon that offer near conclusive evidence for human presence a millennia before the ICE-free corridor opened (jenkins, personal communication, 2011). Humans coming south along the west coast used an assemblage of tools called western-stemmed, SAN dieguito, and several other terms. IT is different from tools associated with humans thought to have followed large game south through the laurentide corridor. Many archaeologists have suggested that finely made projectile points made by this latter group, called clovis, were especially designed to hunt the mammoth, mastodon, camel, long-horned bison, and other magafauna that became extinct within a few thousand years after the appearance of the clovis culture. Some have argued that this suggests that humans had altered the ecology of the new world dramatically soon after arrival. The research proposed here will focus on the mojave desert, a region where archaeological research suggests that human groups converged as they entered the new world via the two most likely routes. The mojave desert provides an excellent laboratory in which both geology and the human past can be studied. Dearth of vegetation makes IT possible to ascertain landforms that greatly influenced human use of the region. Many of these have been altered dramatically over the millennia, yet NASA technology offers the means by which to collect data with which to accurately model the ancient pluvial lakes and streams that first attracted human populations. Shorelines as they were during periods when humans were most likely to have arrived have been obscured over millennia. We can discover, map, and model these with the use of data collected by NASA aerial and satellite remote sensing devices. Also, the primary research area for this work is an ideal environment to further test capability of imaging radar of different wavelengths and polarizations to 1) penetrate arid soils of differing granularity, and 2) characterize exposed and near surface landforms revealed by radar and other remote sensing data. SAR data over much of the study area has already been collected by airsar, uavsar, and alos-palsar platforms. Radar data in hand includes p-, l-, c-band multipolarization SAR. Additionally, visible and near infra-red imaging data from satellite systems such as landsat, spot, aster, and airborne imaging spectroscopy from aviris exists from much of the area. Furthermore, because the area is very near NASA dryden, from which the recently commissioned uavsar is flown, IT will also be feasible to collect quad-POL p-band data. These various data sets will also provide environmental information, and joint image and field analysis will characterize shorelines of pluvial lakes detected by SAR and vnir images.