Archeologists search for ‘needle in the proverbial haystack’ at site in agricultural area south of Delta
Archeologists excavating an ancient pit house near Delta Junction say the artifacts they’ve found have helped them understand more about the people who lived in the area over the past 14,000 years -- and their possible canine companions.
The archeologists have been excavating prehistoric dwellings around the eastern Interior for decades. And artifacts found at a more recently discovered site about 25 miles south of Delta Junction are filling in some gaps in their understanding of the ancient peoples who lived there.
“Yeah, so this is the Hollembaek Hill site," says François Lanoë, an archeologist with the University of Arizona who’s also affiliated with University of Alaska Fairbanks. “We’ve been excavating there for about 10 years,” he said.
Lanoë and a dozen or so others have for the past few weeks been carefully excavating the site, located on land owned by longtime local farmer Scott Hollembaek. He says they’ve determined that, “we have about 2 meters of sediment sitting on top of the bedrock.”
Lanoë says members of the crew had excavated down to that level in one portion of the dwelling, which he called a “house-pit.” He says it likely had a dome-style roof made of willows, spruce bark and animal hides.
They brought buckets of powdery, excavated soil to Annika Mayer, a field technician with the University of Alaska Museum of the North. She was pouring the soil through a wire screen and sifting out shards of bone or chipped stone that shed light on the people who inhabited the place 8,000 or 9,000 years ago.
'Even really, really, really tiny things can be significant'
“This screen kind of allows us to look for the needle in the proverbial haystack,” said Mayer, who works out in the field at archaeological sites during summers, helping search for artifacts.
“And so, we can find tiny little pieces, even this small,” she said, holding a pea-sized object she found. “And so, that’s pretty cool – even really, really, really tiny things can be significant.”
Back in the semi-excavated pit, Lanoë points to a brown bone about the size of a tennis ball.
“They left a little bit of their trash behind,” he said, referring to the people who lived in the dwelling. “You can probably see the vertebra sitting on the ground … it’s probably an elk – wapiti elk.”
Lanoë says similar finds at other archeological sites around the area suggest wapiti was an important part of the inhabitants’ diet until about 5,000 years ago. He says the members of the Hollembaek Hill crew found evidence that fish also were consumed at the site, located about a half mile from the Tanana River and some five miles from Healy Lake.
“We actually find a lot of fish here,” he said, “and that's pretty unusual for these kind of sites. Usually fish bones are very fragile and they don't preserve very well.”
Inhabitants may have fed fish to canines
Bones found around the dwelling indicate the inhabitants ate salmon, whitefish, burbot and pike. Lanoë says the crew also found evidence that dogs or wolves lived around the site. And he says chemical analysis of their bones suggests the inhabitants were feeding fish to the canines.
“They seem to have eaten a lot of salmon, which would be unusual for wolves in this area,” he said. “So, we’re thinking they may be dogs, for that reason. Which is unusual. We don’t really have evidence of dogs 8,000 years ago in the Interior of Alaska.”
The site is one of the oldest discovered in Alaska. The most ancient is Swan Point, located about 50 miles north on Shaw Creek flats. That’s where archeologist Gerad Smith discovered an 1,800-year-old set of children’s footprints.
He says the excavation on Hollembaek Hill suggests it also was regularly occupied, probably because of the availability of food in the area.
“So this tells us that people might be coming back here every year or so during a specific season,” says Smith, who earned his Ph.D. at UAF and is now an archeologist with University of Alaska Anchorage, working on the project for the Museum of the North.
'Very, very unique' structure
“There may have been a time where people actually came back after a few decades and dug a brand-new house into that old house,” he said. “It kind of looks like two houses superimposed over the top of each other.”
Smith says the dwelling was built with construction methods similar to those used at other sites. But he’s still trying to figure out why the one on Hollembaek Hill has what appear to be tunnels.
“It’s very, very unique,” Smith said. “We haven’t seen anything like this for this time period 8,000 years ago.”
He says the discoveries confirm what Alaska Native elders have long said about their forebears.
“Like the local people have been telling us, they're the same people that have been here since the Ice Age,” Smith said. “Yeah, these are Dené ancestors in place 8,000 years ago. And it's just another line of evidence backing up that important traditional history.”
