A New Life In ThE New World
NED ROZELL
T
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here aren’t many places in Alaska like this—an arid shelf near the northern limit of boreal forest, featuring a stare-for-an-hour view of the meandering Tanana River. Thirty yards below, neon green islands of willow and spruce explode from the twisting gray braids of river bar. In the distance, white peaks of the Alaska Range rake the sky. Sage, here since the days of Beringia, perfumes the air as it does only on the state’s south-facing slopes. Most notable, there are no mosquitoes, which take shelter from the bluff ’s heat in the forest, 20 steps away. As a visitor to the Broken Mammoth site admires the view, the man who made his career here remarks on its enduring appeal. “The traditional Athabaskan name for this site is ‘place where one can see far,’” said David Yesner. “I can stand here and half close my eyes and see this as a grassland with elk and bison. It’s easy to imagine yourself as a Paleolithic hunter. “They liked this nice flat spot,” Yesner, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said. “We find hearth upon hearth, some of them 500 years apart. It suggests it was a nice place to camp. It’s still a nice place to camp.”
Yesner, good-humored and talkative, wearing a yellow shirt with a print of a saber-toothed cat, directed six students during the field school, which was sponsored by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Office of History and Archaeology. He camped in his motor home parked on a former section of paved highway above the site, which is near Fairbanks. His students slept in tents on the hillside above him. It was his ninth and final field school at this site, one of the oldest known human occupations in North America. Broken Mammoth, named for fragments of mammoth tusks found by state archaeologist Chuck Holmes in 1989, is helping researchers understand the first people who scrambled over the land bridge into a vast new world. Yesner is investigating this pre-Clovis site that’s yielded artifacts characteristic of what archaeologists call the Early Beringian Tradition or, in some cases, the Nenana Complex. These artifacts, which have been discovered at several sites in the Nenana Valley, are typified by, among other things, large blades and cobble tools that are 13,000 to 14,000 years old. Broken Mammoth’s excellent preservation of organic
winter • 2010-11
