PREHISTORY DEFROSTED

A narrow block of ice cut from the face of an ice patch reveals the multiple layers of preserved caribou dung hidden within. Radiocarbon dating of the dung provides the chronology for ice patch research.

A stunning collection of ancient organic artifacts has been recovered from melting ice patches in northwest Canada.

By Catherine Dold

Prehistory Defrosted

Student Robert Fox of Kwanlin Dun First Nation scans the ground looking for exposed hunting artifacts. The dark material on the rocks is preserved caribou dung.

The “smell of success” is how archaeologist Greg Hare describes the odor that wafts out of his ice patch research sites in Canada’s Yukon. “It’s a really pungent smell of decaying organics that hits you right in the back of your nose,” he says. “When you get that really strong smell there’s a good chance you’ll find some artifacts.”

The source of the odor? Not the artifacts Hare is finding, but the mountains of caribou dung that surround them. Yes, caribou poop. Hare and his colleagues are finding a rich cache of artifacts in a most unusual and unexpected place—a number of large ice fields that are melting each summer and revealing layer upon layer of ancient caribou poop, along with the tools of the people who hunted those caribou as far back as 7500 B.C.Preserved in ice for centuries, the emerging artifacts include much more than the usual assortment of stone tools. Hare and his colleagues are finding artifacts made of wood and sinew and leather, organic materials that normally decay quickly, and rarely, if ever, survive the ages to tell tales of past peoples.

“It’s a strong smell,” Hare says of the caribou dung These dart shaft fragments were aroma, “but it’s one recovered from an ice patch. The that we’ve all come shafts are often found in fragments. to appreciate. We The shaft segments in the foreground are go looking for the about 9,500 years old, the oldest smell.” Newly ex- artifacts found on an ice patch. posed and hence, aromatic, dung, he explains, often means newly exposed artifacts. The remarkable story of the ice patch discoveries started quite by accident one September day back in 1997. Gerald Kuzyk, a wildlife technician with the Yukon government, and his wife were out hunting when they stumbled across a large ice patch that sported mounds of caribou dung at its edge. Kuzyk knew that no caribou had been seen in that part of southwestern Yukon in almost 70 years, so back at the office he told another caribou biologist about his odd find. On a return visit to the site the men confirmed that yes, this was caribou dung in a most unexpected place. Even more unexpected, while walking along the edge of the ice, they found a small stick with what looked like string wrapped around it.

They showed the stick to Yukon Heritage Branch archaeologists. “We quickly determined that it wasn’t string, but finely made sinew, and underneath the sinew were fragments of a feather,” says Hare. Interesting, yes, but Hare’s first impression was that “it couldn’t be very old, because it’s made of wood and sinew.” And everyone knows those materials don’t survive the elements for very long.

Radiocarbon dating, however, revealed that the stick, a hunting tool, was some 5,000 years old. “That was a complete surprise to us,” says Hare. “That’s when we realized we had something important and very old at this ice patch.”

“It was very exciting, but at the same time we thought we were dealing with a very isolated situation,” Hare recalls. “The following year, 1998, we scraped together some money and did a bit of surveying. We found that it wasn’t just the one ice patch. We found a second patch with a very finely made stone projectile point lying at its edge.”

Then came the 1999 field season. “It was an unbelievable summer of discovery,” says Hare. “It was a very hot summer with significant melting in the alpine. Daily, there were new discoveries. Dozens and dozens of artifacts were coming into the lab here on a daily basis.” Now, after several summers of fieldwork (some of which had maddeningly little melting of ice), Hare and his colleagues have collected 146 artifacts from 18 different ice patches. Primarily hunting tools, the artifacts range from approximately 100 to 9,500 years old, and they are revealing a detailed portrait of hunting in southwestern Yukon.

Sitting at altitudes of 5,200 to 7,000 feet, the Yukon ice patches are found in rocky mountainous areas of little vegetation, often in a basin on the north side of a slope. The largest patch is about a half-mile long and 250 feet high, but none are large enough to flow, as glaciers do. In each patch, white layers of ice formed of thousands of years of winter snows alternate with dark layers of caribou dung, left behind during thousands of years of summer visits by the animals. The white and black layers of ice and dung don’t represent single years, like tree rings; instead, most are compacted “super layers” of many years of deposits. The largest of the ice patches have a hundred or so super layers. While Hare and the other scientists originally thought that the ice patches couldn’t possibly be more than a couple hundred years old, dating of base layers of dung shows that at least some of them are more

Archaeologist Greg Hare examines some of the largest darts recovered from melting alpine ice patches in southern Yukon. The average length of the throwing darts is about 78 inches. The longest dart (in the foreground) measures 88 inches. It was recovered in 14 segments over four different field seasons.

than 9,000 years old. Seventy-two such ancient ice patches, spread out over 15,000 square miles are now included in the Yukon Ice Patch Research Project.

Long ago, Hare explains, caribou probably flocked to these ice patches to escape the summer heat and bugs. The hunters followed them, and with a variety of projectile systems, killed them for food. The hunters then did their primary processing of the meat there on the ice. They didn’t stay overnight, however; there are no signs of shelters or food caches, and all of the ice patch sites are within a few hours’ walk of known campsites.

“There has always been a tradition of fall hunting in these areas,” says Hare. “But what we’ve seen here, this phenomenon of caribou on ice being such an attraction for hunters, is a revelation. It was almost like going to the supermarket to get your meat.” Inevitably, the hunters left some of their tools behind on the ice. Like the annual dung deposits, the tools were quickly frozen in place and thus preserved for centuries. Now, as the ice patches melt and shrink in size, revealing wide rings of caribou poop at their edges, the tools that the hunters left are at last emerging. Having been frozen for all that time, they suffered little or no decay.

“If we find them quickly after they melt out,” says Hare, “it’s like finding an artifact that was made only last year. The wood has been remarkably well preserved through time.” Further preserving such ancient pieces in the lab, he says, really hasn’t been difficult at all. “Things are wet when we find them. We bring them into the lab, put them in freezers and monitor the moisture content as they slowly freeze dry. It takes maybe six months to get to non-saturated wood.”

Each summer, Hare and the others monitor a few ice

fields that are close to their offices in Whitehorse, watching for signs of melting. Sometime in July, they’ll fly around the perimeter of those ice patches, taking measurements to track melting. If they are indeed melting, they’ll helicopter a crew into some of the 72 ice patches they’ve identified as having deposits of caribou dung, focusing first on those that have already disgorged artifacts. Once on the ground, the crew simply walks around the newly melted areas, looking for items. The artifacts they have collected so far present a remarkably precise history of hunting in southwestern Yukon. The oldest artifacts are representative of the “throwing dart” (atlatl or spear throwing) hunting method. They’ve found more Wildlife technician Loralee Laberge examines one of a series of ancient stone hunting blinds over- than 40 complete and partial wooden looking a nearby ice patch. Caribou may have been driven from the ice patch towards the blinds dart shafts, some of them composed of where they were intercepted by hunters armed with throwing darts or arrows. two pieces of wood spliced together and fastened with sinew. They’ve also found more than a dozen projectile points, most made of stone, that seem to fit into the slots found at the ends of the dart shafts. Two of the points, in fact, were found still attached to shafts. The hunters relied on this hunting technology for at least 8,000 years, says Hare—radiocarbon dates of the pieces range from 9,500 to 1,200 years ago. Around A.D. 700, however, the hunters made an abrupt shift into a new hunting method. The bow and arrow made its first appearance, and within just two generations it completely replaced throwing darts. Thirty artifacts of bow and arrow technology have been found at the ice patches, including a dozen complete arrow shafts, 17 arrow points made of antler (some still attached to shafts), and three pieces of a bow. They date from 1,300 years old, a bit older than the newest throwing dart artifact, to as little as 100 years old. Such clearly delineated transitions in technology are rarely seen in archaeological records, notes Hare. Indeed, the ice patch artifacts provide the best evidence ever seen in North America of the shift to bow and arrow technology, he says. Also noteworthy is the clear shift at the same time from stone points to points made exclusively of antlers. A number of other items have also been found at the ice patches: many animal remains, a small leather object with a drawstring, dated to A.D. 600, and a carved wooden stick, dated to A.D. 800. The leather object and the stick are remarkable in that, like the wooden hunting tools, they are organic and had they not been frozen, they would have deteriorated long ago. “We are dealing with almost a whole new data set,” Hare says of their ice patch findings. “Typically we work with stone tools. All of a sudden we have the opportunity

to look at the organic components of hunting technology. It’s really quite a remarkable opportunity.”

Many of the artifacts were found by members of the local First Nation groups (Canada’s term for Native Americans), the likely descendents of those ancient hunters. The ice patches are located in the territories of six different First Nations, and those groups have been involved in the research from the beginning. Every research crew that explores an ice patch includes a First Nation representative, for example, and several First Nation students each year attend a summer science camp that introduces them to the ice patch research and the scientists.

“The science camps expose youths to science going on in their traditional territories,” explains Sheila Greer, an archaeologist who works for the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. “The ice patches are an ideal opportunity— it’s incredible science, right in their backyard. It directly informs them about their history and culture. It provides that emotional link, a hook to get youth interested.”

Greer explains that any science discussed at the camp always includes a western definition as well as a traditional First Nation perspective. “If we have a biologist at the camp talking about bear biology, we will also have a First Nation elder there talking about human relationships with bears.” Kids at the camp also visit ice patches and help look for artifacts, make replicas of the atlatl and bow and arrow hunting technologies, and conduct oral history interviews with First Nation elders about the traditional role of caribou.

“We’re not necessarily training future scientists,” notes Greer. “We’re training people who are comfortable with science.” The fact that many of the artifacts found are complete, recognizable tools also helps to capture the interest of First Nation people, says Hare. “They can directly identify with a lot of these artifacts. These are complete tools—arrows and feathers and sinew. It’s quite a bit different from looking at stone fragments and flakes.”

The ice patch discoveries are also proving a

boon to wildlife managers. The researchers have found the remains of more than 700 large and small animals on 35 different ice patches—caribou, birds, bison, moose, sheep, wapiti, and goat—some of them more than 8,500 years old. Studying those remains helps biologists to more fully understand long-term trends in wildlife populations, such as the current downward swing in caribou numbers.

Caribou were much more abundant in the area in the recent past, according to historical records and First Nation oral history, says Yukon caribou biologist Richard Farnell. In the near future, he adds, wildlife biologists might have to decide whether to intervene to boost the herd numbers or take a chance of letting them recover on their own. The caribou remains found in the ice are helping to reinforce the idea that this current decline is probably a natural ecological phenomenon, a trend that has persisted over hundreds of years, rather than a “modern” problem. In addition, information gleaned from the remains and the dung about diet and habitat usage may teach biologists about just how ancient caribou used the area, with lessons for managing the current herds. And genetic studies that compare ancient remains to current herds might help them to determine if the current herds contain any valuable genetic lines that should be preserved.

“If the current herds extirpate, will there be a big effect on the biodiversity of the species?” asks Farnell. “Should we spend lots of money to recover them, or just let them come back later on their own? This project really

This wooden artifact dates to approximately A.D. 800. It’s about nine inches long and has a square hole at one end. It may have been used as a very small throwing board or possibly a hunting device used to startle small game.

Many artifacts recovered from the ice patches are very well preserved. This arrow still retains its fletching, sinew, and antler projectile point. As with many of the artifacts, it was decorated with ochre paint. The arrows recovered from the ice patches all date within the past 1,200 to 1,300 years.

Different types of projectiles are shown here. At the top is a wooden dart foreshaft with hafted stone point. It is about 5,000 years old. The middle artifact is an 8,000-year-old bone point, slotted for use with microblades. The bottom artifact is a delicately carved arrow point made of caribou antler. It is about 350 years old.

helps us get our heads around natural processes. We’re learning that we live in a real dynamic world.”

The animal remains are also helping local people to understand more about the natural fluctuations of wildlife populations, says Farnell. People often want to see wildlife numbers held steady, he says, but that is not necessarily a natural state. The fact that the ice patches were previously used by many more caribou, as well as other species, is helping people to understand how populations expand and contract naturally.

Champagne and Aishihik First Nation archaeologist Sheila Greer (standing in the center) and other researchers address a group of Yukon First Nation students about ice patch research. CATHERINE DOLD’s article “This Very Old House” appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of American Archaeology. She has also written for the New York Times, Discover, and Smithsonian.

The treasures unearthed at the ice patches are

helping scientists to more fully understand the history of people and wildlife in the Yukon. But one question still looms: Why are the ice patches melting? No one is sure.

“At the beginning we thought it was global warming,” says Hare. “But after three to four years when nothing was melting, and the ice was increasing in size, we thought maybe there is another phenomenon at play.” Comparisons with historical photos show that, overall, the ice patches are smaller than they were 100 years ago. But within those years were periods of both melting and of growth. Indeed, there was also a warming trend some 5,000 and 6,000 years ago during which no new ice accumulated.

“We’re kind of sitting on the fence” on the global warming question, agrees Farnell. “The ice patches are dynamic. They were way bigger and are naturally decreasing. But on the other hand, why are we finding artifacts that are being exposed for the first time in 7,000 years? It might be a sign of rapid global warming. If we lose these ice patches altogether it’s got to be something that has seriously departed from the natural climatic variability of the last 7,000 years.”

And what might a continued warming trend mean for the future of the Ice Patch Research Project? “Some of these ice patches have been around for 9,000 years, so I don’t want to be alarmist and say they will be all be gone within ten years,” says Hare. “But we have to be ready to respond if it’s going to be a good melting year. It’s a tremendous opportunity we have here to look at areas of the past that really haven’t been explored in the same way before.”

There are likely to be many more sites out there as well, says Hare. “We’ve got all of northern British Columbia, northern Alberta, and the Northwest Territory that haven’t been looked at at all.”