Archaeology Along the Tanana River in Interior Alaska
Alaska is a big place. The middle third of the state - itself the size of Texas - is bounded by the Brooks range in the North, and the Alaska range in the South. 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. By comparison, many fields of archaeology seem so played out that “novelties” are usually just reinterpretations of things that are already well known.
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.
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.
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.
Swan Point is a late Pleistocene site, and currently the oldest known 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, and also visited a nearby site, the Carpenter Site, where we 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.
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.
