Sebastian Wetherbee
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"Of dead kingdoms I recall the soul, sitting amid their ruins." ~Nathaniel Parker Willis 

Archaeology Along the Tanana River in Interior Alaska

7/28/2021

 
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A 1x1 meter unit dug down to bedrock
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A typical landscape in the Alaskan interior
Alaska is a big place. The central valley is bounded by the Brooks range in the North, and the Alaska range is the South. Were it an independent state, it would itself be larger than any other U.S. state, bar the remainder of Alaska. With a population of only ~113,000 people most of it is empty forest or tundra. For such a large region as the Alaskan interior, it's quite suprising to learn how little we know about its prehistory, especially beyond the late pleistocene (which tends to receive a disproportionate degree of study from archaeologists). For much of the holocene, we know next to nothing about settlement patterns, household architecture, social organization, or other elements of Native Alaskan life. There isn't even an agreed upon chronology for much of Alaska's history. One period, the Northern Archaic, spans 3-5 thousand years depending on who you ask, and can be summed up in a single sentence: Notched points and caribou hunting. Realizing how little we understand made working there this summer especially exciting. Many fields of archaeology seem so played out that novelties are usually just reinterpretations of things that are already well known. 
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The Northern Archaic tradition represents one of the vaguest archaeological complexes out there
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Knife blade from the Carpenter Site
I worked at four sites, all near the Tanana River, a major tributary of the Yukon, stretching almost a thousand kilometers through an endless sea of green. These were multicomponent sites where we conducted exploratory excavations, with a possibility of finding evidence for occupations stretching from 14,000 years ago to the last few hundred years. 
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Heading by canoe to the Bachner Site on the far side of Quartz Lake
The Bachner Site overlooks Quartz Lake, a popular fishing spot for locals. In our excavations, we managed to get about fifty centimeters deep excavating four square meters. We found more than 700 artifacts, and only managed to get through something between the top third, and top quarter of the site's stratigraphy. We found copious amounts of animal bone, stone tools, and debitage, along with some curiosities like an ochre crayon, hammerstones, and snail shells. The site turned out to be much more productive than expected. Auger tests revealed high artifact densities across a wide area, with the most productive levels about 20cm deeper than the point we got to in our three weeks at the site. It has a lot of potential to teach us more about how people lived in the Alaskan interior, and especially to show us how they used rivers and lakes as important centers for human activity. Whoever lived near Quartz Lake seems to have exploited a wide variety of food resources, including fish, avifauna, small mammals, and large ungulates. People were trading exotic tool stones from hundreds of kilometers away, and there seems to be evidence for substantial use of the site during multiple time periods including the Late Pleistocene.
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View of Delta Creek
The second site I worked at is one called Nidhaay'na. Nidhaay'na sits at the edge of a high bluff, overlooking Delta Creek, a large tributary feeding into the Tanana River. This site was very inaccessible, and we had to get dropped off by helicopter to reach the site. Working at the site was less exhausting than moving around camp, with piles of dead trees and a thick understory trying to trip us at every opportunity.We excavated more than 2 meters of soil, all the way down to bedrock, and found comparatively little. We did find bone, and stone tools, but in very low densities after the crazy amount of artifacts that came out of the Bachner Site. Most of what we found belonged to the Early Holocene and Late Pleistocene, between 12,000-7,000 years ago. One of the most challenging elements of this site was the poor quality of bone preservation. Most bones had the consistency of wet tissue, and scraping one with a trowel would obliterate whatever was left of it. With the site location I could imagine it being an ephemeral hunting camp, with a perfect view of the river running along the valley floor, with caribou occasional picking their way along the banks. 
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Our ground penetrating radar rig in action
Swan Point is a late Pleistocene site, and one of the oldest sites in Alaska. It has produced some pretty incredible artifacts, and evidence for human exploitation of now extinct Pleistocene megafauna. We conducted ground penetrating radar survey there, as well as at another late Pleistocene site, the Carpenter Site, where we also did some limited excavations. Despite more than 50 years of research, Pleistocene archaeology in the region is still in a nascent state, mainly because of its remoteness. Much of the Bering land bridge is now submerged under the Bering sea, and those areas that are above sea level in northern Russia, Alaska, and northwestern Canada are for the most part inaccessible except by helicopter or small boat. Deeply buried Paleolithic sites often occur in frozen contexts and under dense boreal forest or shrub-tundra vegetation, making their discovery very unlikely. Most of the sites in the Tanana River valley seem to be clustered near Delta Junction, where the few researchers working in the area have had a string of good luck finding sites according to a pretty well established survey paradigm. 
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Mammoth tusk!
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A cool photo of the spiraled nasal conchae of musk-ox, designed to help heat air as it is breathed
Alaska offers some incredible opportunities for archaeological research, with a chance at meaningful contributions to a spotty understanding of its prehistory. I'm hoping to come back next year to do continue to gain experience in Alaskan archaeology. 

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    However many nations live in the world today, however many countless people, they all had but one dawn." ~Anonymous, Popul Vuh
    Every step you take has already been taken. Every story has already been told. The land is not newly discovered, so old with legends you might mistake them for rocks." ~Craig Childs
    The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause." ~Henri Bergson
    Archaeologists may not always see the trees, but we capture the forest with great clarity" ~Robert Kelly
    The past is never dead; it's not even past." ~William Faulkner
    No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.” ~Douglas Preston
    If you go into a museum and look at antiquities collected there, you can be sure that the vast bulk of them were found not in buildings but in graves." ~Leonard Woolley
    Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” ~Robert Macfarlane
    We always stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them." ~David Anthony
    That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away." ~Heraclitus
    ​Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society." ~David Lewis-Williams
    Opened are the double doors of the horizon. Unlocked are its bolts." ~Utterance 220 of the Pyramid of Unas
    If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." ~Rudyard Kipling
    The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains." ~John Muir
    The ecological thinker is haunted by the consequences of time." ~Garrett Hardin
    Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world." ~Iain McGillchrist
    The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril." ~Niall Ferguson
    Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are." ~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
    We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared." ~Alfred Russel Wallace
    Humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." ~Sebastian Junger
    Except in geographical scale, tribal warfare could be and often was total war in every modern sense. Like states and empires, smaller societies can make a desolation and call it peace." ~Lawrence Keeley
    The first people were aware of the signs and signals of the natural world. Their artifacts were projectiles, blades, and ivory sewing needles, either used on animal products, or made from them, or used to procure them. The world around them was a cycle of animals of all sizes, from voles and falcons to some of the largest mammals seen in human evolution." ~Craig Childs
    The number of herbivores sets a cap on the number of carnivores that can live in a region. Of course, adding an additional predator of fairly large body size, like a modern human, would produce repercussions that would ripple though all the other predators in the area and their prey." ~Pat Shipman
    When viewed globally, near-time extinctions took place episodically, in a pattern not correlated with climatic change or any known factor other than the spread of our species." ~Paul S. Martin
    However splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature." 
    ​~Edward O. Wilson
    Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion- and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings." 
    ​~Jordan B. Peterson
    I have seen yesterday. I know tomorrow."
    ~ Engraving on
    the wall of Tutankhamun's tomb. 
    We are fire creatures from an ice age." ~Stephen Pyne
    Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified." ~Edward Abbey
    Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go." ~H. Rider Haggard 
    One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be- though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain- because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone." ~ Oswald Spengler
    All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance."
    ~Edward Gibbon
    In the long paleontological perspective, we humans must be considered invasive in any locale except Africa." ~Pat Shipman
    Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy." ~Richard Francis Burton
    Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its own lifespan and brings about its corruption." ~Ibn Khaldun
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." ~Gustav Mahler
    As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind." ~The Epic of Gilgamesh
    There is a cave in the mind." 
    ~David Lewis-Williams
    Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come." ~Joseph Campbell 
    I feel again a spark of that ancient flame." ~ Virgil
    Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it therefore not to be an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning." ~Clifford Geertz
    In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." ~Carl Jung 
    Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids." ~Arab proverb
    Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land." ~Hiram Bingham
    You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things- to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals." ~Edmund Hillary
    Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going into the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity."  ~John Muir
    ​To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’." ~Lain McGillchrist
    The Sphinx will always have to be looked after." 
    ~Zahi Hawass
    Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and 30 years I could build a bigger one."
    ~Werner Herzog
    Civilizations exist by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
    ~Will Durant
    When at last we anchored in the harbor, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless"
    ~T.E. Lawrence
    The best prophet of the future is the past."
    ​~Lord Byron
    An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can get. The older she gets the more interested he is in her."
    ​~Agatha Christie
    Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been."
    ​~Jim Bishop
    What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain."
    ~Victor Hugo
    I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist." 
    ​~Thor Heyerdahl
    Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. "~Joseph Campbell
    In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds."
    ​~Thor Heyerdahl
    Always my soul hungered for less than it had"
    ​~ T.E. Lawrence
    History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs, and wooden shoes coming up." 
    ~Voltaire
    Back home, I'm always focusing on something happening in the future. On expeditions, time stops, and you become like a stone age man, acting on instincts and knowing you are part of the universe."
    ​~Borge Ousland
    Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies." ~Robert Sapolsky 
    The Land is not old. It only changes, becoming one thing and the next. We are the ones who ascribe age, the brevity of our lives demanding a beginning, middle, and end."
    ​~Craig Childs
    Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."
    ​~C.S. Lewis
    The only thing that belongs to us is the time."
    ​~Seneca
    To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way." ~Steven Rinella 
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