#teklanika

OBSIDIAN, MICROBLADES, BONES & MORE --  Students with the Alaska Summer Research Academy at UAF traveled to the Teklanika West archaeological site in Denali National Park and Preserve last week. Their excavations at this exciting Ice Age site uncovered several important materials.

University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN) archaeologist Sam Coffman, who conducted excavations at the site in 2009 for his Master's thesis in Anthropology at UAF, led this year's excavations with a team of archaeologists from the museum and the National Park Service. The cooperative project brings together the youth into culture camps to learn about archaeology and anthropology.

Eli Evans, an incoming freshman at Lathrop High School, said he was just looking for any artifact when he found a piece of obsidian, which he immediately recognized for its shiny black surface and sharp edges. Although he was prepped by the UA Museum of the North’s archaeology team, he also recognized the material from the popular game, Minecraft.

“Obsidian is a good thing to find,” he said. “Using x-ray technology you can see its chemical composition. That can tell you where the source of the material was initially formed.”

The popular ASRA seminar lets students visit some of the area’s most fascinating archaeological sites to learn more about these cultures. They used excavation and mapping tools such as trowels, total station, GPS technology, and field computers to document their finds. And then they take them back to the museum to prepare each discovery, label them, and enter the information into the database.

Collection Manager Scott Shirar said what the students found has the potential to help understand how humans lived at the site over thousands of years. He spent the afternoon cleaning up a bone discovered at the site. Since it was located deep in the earth, it may belong to an extinct species, such as a bison or elk.

He said once the artifact is prepared, it can be compared to the skeletons of other animals in the museum’s collection. “It was well preserved. It’s probably big enough to figure out what it belonged to. We can also take a sample and radiocarbon date it.”

UAMN Archaeology Curator Josh Reuther said museum and NPS archaeologists will return to the site in the coming weeks with the Murie Science and Learning Center and local youth.

Teklanika River, Denali National Park

During a 2007 archaeological survey of the park, my crew and I would hike from our base camp at the Teklanika River below to this spot on the ridge and beyond. We did this almost everyday for half a month. After a few days of this, I'd no longer feel that burning sensation in my calves. And by the end of our two weeks, we had gotten our uphill climb from camp to this point above the trees to 1 hour and 6 minutes.

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me