In Alaska’s Brooks Range, artefacts of ancient hunter-gatherers are being exposed by climate change
Swiss archeologist Noah Steuri recently completed field work in inland Alaska and with his team, he found prehistoric stone tools near melting ice patches. As the rapid melting of ice and permafrost exposes new archeological sites but also makes it urgent to locate and research them.
To an archeologist, an ice patch can be a veritable treasure trove.
Ice patches form at high altitudes from snow that does not melt during summer and then slowly turns to ice. Unlike glaciers, the patches do not move at all, meaning that items stored in them can remain locked in ice for centuries and even millennia. The famous Ötzi the Iceman, for instance, was found in just such an unmoving ice patch in the Dolomites in 1991.
It was with this knowledge in mind that Swiss archaeologist Noah Steuri from the University of Bern and a group of colleagues traveled to Alaska’s Brooks Mountains this summer. They were searching for traces of ancient human societies in this largely unexplored area.
“In the Arctic, more is usually known about the Archaeology of the coastal regions, while less research has been conducted in the inland,” Noah Steuri told Polar Journal AG.
“This means that in the Brooks Range, which is far removed from the Arctic coast and very remote, there are lots of interesting discoveries to be made. And since people who live there now still rely largely on hunting caribou, the study of their ways can help us understanding more about how ancient people survived there for millennia,” he said.
Stone tools and a promising site
During their recent fieldwork Steuri and his colleagues did make some interesting discoveries in and around the ice patches they found.
Sites like these, as Steuri knew from previous research in Norway, are known to attract caribou who move to the ice patches to escape the vast swathes of mosquitos that plague the Arctic in the summer. This, in turn, often leads to increased chances of human activity.
More discoveries were made at a plateau on the Atigun river, where severe erosion (likely also due to melting permafrost) indicated the presence of an ancient campsite.
“At this site, we were lucky to find some flint chips that were already lying on the surface, so we did some test excavations and found some fantastic tools like points and blades,” Steuri said.
Charcoal, that was found next to these tools, was sampled and sent to a lab for radiocarbon dating, and Noah Steuri is still waiting for the results. Without their analysis, the age of such flint tools are difficult to precisely determine, since they are known to have changed little over thousands of years.
But after consulting with experts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he expects that the findings could prove “very interesting”.
“The first recorded Euro-American contact with people in the Brooks Range was around 1885, so until then they were still hunting with bows and arrows, while people on the coast had already been in contact with whalers and Russians almost a century before. That’s why it’s super interesting to conduct research in this area,” he said.
For this reason, too, Noah Steuri hopes that he will manage to return to the site to look for more signs of these ancient Arctic hunters. His first year of the project was funded by the Swiss Polar Institute, but to go back more funding is needed, he said.
Climate change exposes old objects
It is not only the promise of new discoveries that makes Steuri eager to return to the Brooks Range. Another concern makes the issue pressing.
Because with climate change ice that has been frozen for millennia is now suddenly melting. This process unfreezes a lot of archaeologically interesting objects, which could at first be seen as a positive effect were it not for one problem: some of the materials will deteriorate rapidly once they are exposed to the elements.
“There is an urge to do this Arctic research now before these items are corroded and lost. The wood of arrows and bows for instance needs to be collected quite quickly before they decay,” Steuri said.
He knows this problem from his home country of Switzerland, too, where suddenly very old objects can be found in the high mountains.
“We have some projects to sensitize all the hikers to the possibility of making archeological discoveries. If they find a piece of wood that is very high up, for instance, it must have gotten there somehow,” he said.
Help from indigenous community
Before their surveys of the Brooks Range, Steuri and his colleagues spent two days with the local Nunamiut community at Anaktuvuk Pass. The community consists of only around 300 people, and their way of life helped the archeologists understand the type of culture they were searching for.
“This community is known as the last nomadic people of North America and they only finally settled down in the 1950s. So, some of the elders we spoke to could still remember growing up in tents and huts,” Steuri said.
“While we were speaking with them we overheard some Nunamiut women discussing where good spots for picking berries were at that time. It was fascinating to get a glimpse of that culture, which must have been very similar for millennia,” he said.
The Nunamiut even contributed specific knowledge to the research project.
To get ideas of where it might be fruitful to look for archaeological sites Steuri and his colleagues used the locals’ descriptions of how they organized their hunts, how they chose campsites, and how they chose spots to overwinter when they were still nomadic.
Happily, this knowledge helped to discover a site with many stone tools, and if the radiocarbon dating results of charcoal from the same excavation layers show them to be as ancient as the experts in Fairbanks suspect, then Steuri hopes to return for further field campaigns to learn even more about the prehistory of the Brooks Range.
Because, although Steuri is reluctant to discuss it, the Brooks Range might hold a key to one of archeology’s biggest mysteries: the peopling of the Americas. For a long time, the Clovis First model held that people first arrived in America around 13,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have cast big doubts over that theory.
“That would be the really big leap archaeologically if we can contribute knowledge to how or when people got to America, but we have to be realistic and wait for the results to come back. Of course, it would be a dream to contribute to that,” he said.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
More on the topic:
