during lower sea levels. The dark medium sand reflects updrift bluff erosion of a tephraeous maar eruption about 17,000 years ago. Sand supply is maintained by onshore transport during a five-month open water period from June to November. Although in the long-term, as established by geological 14C ages, over the last 4000 years, sand transport is onshore and progradational, in the short term, storms and transient current reversals lead to offshore transport and erosion of Espenberg beaches. Locally, beaches have witnessed significant width and depth reductions in the last five years; current reversals are also possibly more common. A variety of clastic additions are common on the beach; these include the bones of Pleistocene megafauna (mostly horse, bison or mammoth), modern and ancient shell valves. Drift wood is concentrated in the storm beach and within the mouths of surge channels that cross cut the beach ridges. The wood, mostly spruce (Picea spp. ) is transported from the forested Yukon River drainage; cottonwood and birch are rare. Current reversals, resulting from easterly winds, lead to beach erosion, and are often coupled with the deposition of starfish and of eel grass from the enclosed lagoon. Lying wholly within tundra, dune formation is furthered along the Espenberg beach by the winter drying of beach sand, onshore winds in late spring, and the dominance of sand-burial tolerant beach grass (Elymus spp.). High dunes correlate with heightened storm events during the Little Ice Age and contain evidence of shell beds emplaced during storm surges. Intense storms produced erosional truncations across the spit between 1000 BC and AD 200 and during the Little Ice Age. The beach featured lies about 1 km Northwest from the navigational light at the Cape and can be considered unaffected by human processes, since the National Park Service restricts the use of motor vehicles and the region is nearly uninhabited. The closest settlement is ca. 10 km away and consists only of several cabins used seasonally by Inupiat hunters and fishers. History Over 4,000 years of prehistory are revealed at Cape Espenberg, as documented by archaeological surveys since the 1950s when J.Louis Giddings visited the Cape. Research by the National Park Service has included survey by Jeanne Schaaf in 1986 and excavations led by Roger Harritt in 1988 and 1989. The Espenberg dunes contain small sites as well as extensive villages with dozens of house depressions. The cultural chronology of the