Archaeological Dig Perplexes

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Archaeological dig perplexes

TRAPPER CREEK: Team from Nevada didn't discover what it had been expecting.

 

By ZAZ HOLLANDER

Anchorage Daily News

 

 

 

 

TRAPPER CREEK -- Sitting in a mosquito-infested camp just off the Parks Highway a few weeks ago, archaeologist Brian Wygal was happily baffled.

 

 

Last summer, the University of Nevada, Reno, instructor made two intriguing finds in the Trapper Creek area while working with a Matanuska-Susitna Borough crew. The teams discovered sharp, stone blades and other tools at twin sites perched on knolls about five miles apart, one overlooking Trapper Creek, the other the Susitna River. They dated the sites at about 7,000 years old, one of the earliest found in the Susitna Valley and among the earliest in all of Southcentral.

 

The researchers figure these early foragers cruised the area looking for game -- maybe caribou or bison or Pleistocene elk -- and refurbishing their stone tool kits before quickly moving on.

 

Glacial ice sheets disappeared between 10,000 and about 7,000 years ago. It's possible the people who left tools at each site were the first to venture into the area, the archaeologists say.

 

Fascinated, Wygal came back again this summer, this time armed with 17 archaeology field-study students from all over the country and accompanied by his wife and fellow archeologist, Katie Krasinski. He expected to learn even more about the important discoveries near Trapper Creek.

 

Instead, Wygal now knows less.

 

"We didn't find what we expected to find," he said.

 

Among hundreds of potential artifacts unearthed in about five weeks of work, the student-powered crew excavated a heavy, nearly foot-long club of a rock apparently chipped to sharpen its edges, perhaps used for woodworking or smashing large bones.

 

What kind of backpacker lugs such a heavy tool around? And just who were these people, anyway?

 

"It was totally unexpected ... because it's so large," Wygal said, hefting the thing in his hand. "They're still hunter-gatherers, they're still moving."

 

The team had guessed that the people at the sites migrated from the Interior. But some tools found at the sites are not linked to early people known to frequent the area, Wygal said. "We really have no idea if this fits into anything that we know about."

 

Archaeological sites pepper the Valley, buried pockets of the past exposed by new subdivisions, road widening or commercial development. Just two weeks ago, the borough staged a small archaeological salvage operation.

 

The company shipping wood chips and other commodities at Point MacKenzie -- NPI LLC, involved in a joint-venture with the borough -- decided to level a known site, so two borough archaeologists and the field-study students spent part of a day bagging small stone chips and charcoal to catalog the 1,200-year-old fish camp before it became a gravel storage area.

 

A link exists between the early settlers of the area and modern Knik tribal members. The Dena'ina are thought to have been the first people who came into the Cook Inlet area from the north. The Dena'ina established trade routes to the east and the Interior with Athabascans over the next few millennia, said Jack Alcorn, executive director of the Knik Tribal Council. The Athabascans and Dena'ina interbred. The Knik are Dena'ina Athabascan Indians.

 

Asked about Wygal's puzzle over the tools found at Trapper Creek and the tools he expected to find, Alcorn offered his own theory: Technology such as tools commonly traveled the trading routes even if people didn't.

 

"It's a common misconception ... that when they run across these things, that means people had migrated," he said. "We're now discovering it's the technology that travels. They had established substantial trading routes. They were trading."

 

The tribal council works with a coalition that includes the borough as well as the University of Alaska and Knikatnu Inc. tribal corporation on excavations that involve remains or cemeteries, Alcorn said. He wasn't familiar with the Trapper Creek dig but said he supported the "borough's integrity" at such projects.

 

There are well over 1,000 known sites in the borough. But the Trapper Creek discovery and the resulting attention from Wygal and others was exciting, said Fran Seager-Boss, the borough archaeologist. "I think it's good for the borough too to have that kind of exposure," she said.

 

A $30,000 Coastal Zone Management Act grant secured by the borough got the project going last year. This year, the borough, the University of Nevada and the Alaska Humanities Forum are providing funding. Wygal also applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation.

 

The archaeology field school students left the state within the last few weeks after five weeks of camping in Trapper Creek at a field near a homesteader's cabin. During the day, they hiked to various field sites where they mined the ground for hints from the buried past.

 

The field study crew, working with Wygal and borough staff archaeologist Dan Stone, discovered about 600 stone chips that will go back to Reno for analysis. Some will turn out to be rocks, others artifacts.

 

The artifacts will spend a year in Nevada, then return to Alaska. The borough is hoping to exhibit some at borough hall on Dahlia Avenue in Palmer, Seager-Boss said. Eventually, she hopes, the Alaska Museum of Natural History in Eagle River will serve as a repository, but a number of details need to be sorted out first.

 

Wygal will spend the next year analyzing the artifacts and trying to piece together the puzzles he discovered at the Trapper Creek dig.

 

Not that he minds.

 

"It is a mystery. I'm surprised ... but that's how it always works," he said. "You don't know what is in the ground until you can get to it."