Archaeological News

Discovering prehistoric human remains in Interior Alaska is exceedingly rare, thanks to acidic soil in the region. So when three bodies — an adult, young adult and child, all male — were discovered in McGrath in early October, it was an unusual find. On Thursday, that unique find became even more so with the revelation that the bodies are likely more than 500 years old.

The remains were discovered in the village on Oct. 3 as a crew cleared a lot as part of an erosion control project along the Kuskokwim River — which runs near the community of about 350 people situated 220 miles northwest of Anchorage — stumbled across a human skull poking out from the freshly-cleared land.

Despite some in the community’s hopes that the remains might be those of a village elder who went missing about 30 years ago, Alaska State Troopers and an archaeologist concluded the remains were far too old to be the same person. Just how old was more of a surprise. Read more.

ST. MATTHEW ISLAND — “Oh look, another tooth,” said Dennis Griffin, dressed in raingear and caked with wet soil.

Griffin, the state archaeologist with Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office, has traveled to one of the least-walked hillsides in Alaska to search for evidence of his species. On a tundra rise with a gorgeous view of Hall Island and a nice panorama of St. Matthew Island, he has today found a fox tooth in a decaying jaw, chips of rock where someone made tools, pottery, a plate-size anvil stone and a yellowed walrus tusk cut with deep grooves.

“I’m very glad I extended this plot,” Griffin says.

In two days of digging into a square depression on soft ground near where someone long ago dragged the 20-foot jawbone of a whale, Griffin has unearthed what Native people who probably lived on this lonely island around the time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock left behind. Read more.

When and how did the first people arrive in the Americas?

For many decades, archaeologists have agreed on an explanation known as the Clovis model. The theory holds that about 13,500 years ago, bands of big-game hunters in Asia followed their prey across an exposed ribbon of land linking Siberia and Alaska and found themselves on a vast, unexplored continent. The route back was later blocked by rising sea levels that swamped the land bridge. Those pioneers were the first Americans.

The theory is based largely on the discovery in 1929 of distinctive stone tools, including sophisticated spear points, near Clovis, N.M. The same kinds of spear points were later identified at sites across North America. After radiocarbon dating was developed in 1949, scholars found that the age of these “Clovis sites” coincided with the appearance at the end of the last ice age of an ice-free corridor of tundra leading down from what is now Alberta and British Columbia to the American Midwest. Read more.

CAMBRIDGE — Around 1860 near Kodiak Island off the south coast of Alaska, an Alutiiq warrior built a streamlined kayak by stretching and sewing the hides of five female sea lions around a sophisticated wooden frame.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A guide known for taking clients to the wildest reaches of Alaska has been charged with helping a man smuggle a 10,000-year-old mammoth fossil out of the state.

Karen Jettmar, director of Equinox Wilderness Expeditions and the author of “The Alaska River Guide,” was indicted Dec. 16 on charges of conspiracy and removing paleontological resource from federal land.

The charges came after a Bureau of Land Management investigation showed a mammoth tusk estimated to be worth $4,000 was removed from public lands near the Kokolik River in Northwest Alaska during a June 2007 guided trip.

Jettmar’s client, who is described in the indictment as a co-conspirator but not named, took the mammoth fossil to Pennsylvania, investigators say.

Alaska is a desirable destination for paleontologists, archaeologists and other prehistoric artifact sleuths. The state has more than 15,000 archaeological sites. Read more.

A large collection of archaeological artifacts has returned to Alaska, nearly 60 years after the items were excavated near Point Barrow. The Birnirk collection represents a phase of prehistoric Eskimo culture dating back to 500 A.D.

“This collection has tremendous research significance,” said Jeff Rasic, acting curator of archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. “The Birnirk site is the ‘type site’ for the Birnirk culture, which occupies a key juncture in the branches of Eskimo prehistory and the first decidedly Eskimo phase of cultural development seen on the Alaska mainland.”

The collection was excavated in the early 1950s by a group of Harvard graduate students headed by Wilbert Carter. They completed a three-season program of archaeological work with the support of the Arctic Research Laboratory, established in Barrow by the Office of Naval Research. The collection is owned by the U.S. Navy and was housed for decades at the Harvard Peabody Museum. Read more.

FAIRBANKS — A collection of ancient Eskimo artifacts from Point Barrow has returned to Alaska after being discovered in the 1950s.

The Birnirk collection includes 26,000 items from a site dating back to about 500 A.D. Excavated by Harvard graduate students led by Wilbert Carter, the collection was housed at the Harvard Peabody Museum for decades. It is owned by the U.S. Navy and has returned to Alaska to the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

Acting Curator of Archaeology Jeff Rasic said the collection presents all sorts of potential for the university.

“This collection has tremendous research significance,” he said in a university press release.

Rasic said the Birnirk culture was during a time between Eskimo prehistory and the first Eskimo cultural development. Read more.

A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.

The artifact consists of two parts — a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.

Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said.

“I was totally astonished,” said Hoffecker. “The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years.” Read more.