Video
Out of Ice- An Archaeology of Climate Change in North America and Beyond
Transcript
Karen: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to ArcheoThursday. My name is Karen Mudar, and I’m your host. I’m an archeologist in the NPS Washington Archeology Program, which is sponsoring this series. This fall and winter, we are exploring the Anthropocene and climate change in archeology, and I hope that you’ll join me for a wonderfully diverse set of presentations focusing on the anthropogenic environment and archeology. Tell your colleagues about them, too. We’ve got plenty of seats for these presentations. I circulated a tentative schedule of speakers, which is still evolving, and I’ll send out revisions as more information is available.
Last week, we heard a very interesting talk by William Ruddiman, who set the stage for other discussions about climate change. Using an impressive amount of data, he argued that human populations initiated the Anthropocene Era with the domestication of wet rice and cattle, both of which created significant amounts of methane. I, myself, thought that his comparisons of the characteristics of different interglacial periods were particularly interesting. He compared the atmospheric composition as well as aspects of the Earth’s orbit and concluded that our present interglacial is most similar to the one that occurred 800,000 years ago. With this as a baseline, you could see that the deviations of the current interglacial period were even more pronounced. A more detailed examination of his thesis is available in his book “Plows, Plagues and Petroleum,” which I’ve just started reading, but it looks like a really good read.
Next week, we’re going to look at sea level rise in archeology. Shelby Anderson at Portland State University is going to talk to us about her research project in Northwest Alaska. Anderson will discuss how new data on past settlement patterns and social networks in Northwest Alaska can be used to evaluate and refine existing models of late Holocene human environment interaction in the Arctic and to inform contemporary climate change research in the North. Ongoing efforts to assess and mitigate the impact of rapid climate change on Arctic archeological sites will also be discussed. I know that this is a very important topic, especially for Alaska. Of course, the climate change and impact on the west coast at the end of the Pleistocene, the end of the last glacial period, is also a very current topic of research at the moment and has implications for migration into the New World.
This week, however, we’re taking a look at the effects of climate change on ice patches and glaciers. I have the pleasure of introducing Craig Lee at the University of Colorado. He’s been a great supporter of NPS archeology; and besides working on several projects in national parks, which he will talk about today, he’s contributed papers on his work to NPS journals such as Park Science and to “Projects in Parks’ Report” for the Aarcheology Program website. If you want to learn more about his work after his presentation, you can either contact me or contact him, and we can send you links.
In addition to his work at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Craig has worked for federal and state agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He’s directed field projects in Alaska, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming and advocates for the nascent field of ice patch archeology through professional papers at conferences and in journals. He’s a member of the Glacial National Park Cultural Resources Management Group with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and the Blackfeet Nation, as well as the University of Wyoming and University of Arizona. Today, he’ll talk about ice patch archeology and some of his findings.
Our national parks are refuges for our cultural heritage, and they’re also ideal research contexts for learning about interactions between climate, ecosystems, and human beings. When the climate warms up like today, high mountain temperatures go from cold to mild, and lowland animals track habitats upslope for food and habitat, and people track these important resources upslope also. When remains of lowland plants and animals are preserved in ice patches, they offer perishable traces of ancient, climatic-warming episodes.
As I was saying earlier to Craig, Jim Dixon is one of the first people that I’m aware of to champion ice patch archeology. Since then, people like Craig and his colleagues have developed methodologies and strategies to give us access to totally new sources of data that enable us to glimpse the organic portion of the archeological record. It’s really a wonderful thing when we can actually see the wooden component of weaponry, or the baskets, or the clothing of people who are long gone and develop a more accurate understanding of their culture.
I’m very pleased to be able to welcome Craig today, so thanks for being with us.
Craig: Absolutely! Welcome, and thank you so much for the invitation, and thank you to all of the colleagues that have taken the time to call in this afternoon to listen.
I can see, Karen, it looks like you’ve switched the slides over, so I’m looking at my lead-off title slide. Hopefully, that’s a full-screen image for everybody else. Unless you tell me otherwise, I’m just going to go for it.
Karen: I think everything is set.
Craig: Okay. All righty.
The talk’s a variation on a theme, and it’s a play on words, of course. I’ve gone with “Withering Snow and Ice in the Alpine” and so forth and so on, but this is going with “Out of Ice” today, “An Archaeology of Climate Change in North America and Beyond.” What I’m hoping to do today is not only do a quick review of the nature of ice patch archeology, or as colleagues in Europe sometimes to refer to it, “glacial archeology.” That can lead to a little bit of confusion, but I want to talk about that and then talk about some of the processes that are affecting … driving the changes that we’re seeing in particularly the mountainous regions here in the Lower 48, Montana and Wyoming, Idaho, in particular; and then share a little bit bigger perspective on it, because it is really a global phenomena. It’s not just restricted at all to the areas I just mentioned.
Without doubt, it’s always significant and important for me to provide some recognition for the wonderful suite of agencies and entities and even individuals, including a colleague, Weber Greiser, at the bottom, who have really taken this research to heart and have wanted to see it happen as much as is feasible. It’s no mistake that the Forest Service is actually listed up on top there. I think going all the way back into about 2004-2005, when we kicked this off in the Greater Yellowstone region, at least, it was the national forests and particularly Halsey and La Pointe, and a colleague, Mike Bergstrom, on the Custer National Forest, that were early champions of this; but in close succession, colleagues on the Gallatin and Shoshone National Forest; and, of course, Bridger-Teton now have come on to involvement with it.
One other entity that I’m going to talk about a lot today that I think has a tremendous amount of potential for future work in not only the Greater Yellowstone area, but also in just other alpine places where we have permanent snow and ice is the group called the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, which is specific to the Yellowstone region, the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee; but there are entities like that at the Crown of the Continent, which is a glacier over in Olympic National Park area. For instance, those types of cross-boundary organizations, which is what the GYCC is, where they work to facilitate research on cross-boundary issues, things that transcend just Grand Teton National Park, or Yellowstone National Park as well as the surrounding forests, issues that are appearing in all of those locations. I’m definitely thankful to them, and we’ll talk about that a little bit going on here.
I just clicked to change slides. There we go. This is the core of the talk today. We’re talking about these permanent snow and ice patches, these things that are smaller than glaciers that don’t build up so much mass that they begin to flow and act like conveyors that move things from an area where they are accreting snow, accumulating snow, building up and then flushing it out down below. Instead, ice patches are these much smaller, not ephemeral, but more gracile in some respects. They don’t have a lot of energy in them, because they’re not flowing down a hillside and, consequently, things that become entrapped in them can last and persist for a very long period of time. By contrast, this is just a good shot of some glacial ice actually taken on a project with Jim Dixon in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in probably 2003 or 2004. This is a shot out of the window of a helicopter at some big ice that’s flowing down a mountainside. The take-home from it is just that this is something that is moving and that is actively sculpting and shaping. The flow is so powerful that it just chowzes up the rock and substrate, that it’s flowing over and as well is mashing up things that become incorporated in it. Just very significance difference from something like these ice patches, which have a much calmer experience in the world.
This is a cutaway of a schematic, basically. I’m showing you an edge-on view of a hypothetical ice patch. This is based on one that is a known ice patch. It shows you a couple key features that I want you to note now and then to come back to. One of them is that the ice patch is relatively thin. There’s not a scale there, but it’s not something that’s thickened in particular, so it doesn’t build up, again, that mass like a glacier does and start to flow down a hillside. The other element is that it’s likely dead frozen. The ones that contain the paleontological material, or the paleobiological material are the ones that can contain archeological material,
they don’t melt out from the bottom, so there’s not a conveyor aspect where things that are incorporated on the surface … I do believe I have a pointer here. The things that are incorporated on the surface aren’t transported through this ice over time to accrete down here on the bottom on some sort of a melt horizon. Most likely, if any kind of melting occurs, it’s surface melt from this area, or on one of these older melt horizons that is represented by these black lines. As that kind of melt occurs, you might get material that washes off the face of the ice patch and then can come out and be exposed here on the ground surface.
The black lines represent lag deposits. They represent old melt horizons and something that over the last several years with colleagues working in Glacier National Park, including Bob Kelly and the other folks that Karen mentioned, but then also in the Greater Yellowstone area, we’ve been successful at coring into these ice patches, and I’ll show you a few pictures of what some of those lags look like. In the process of doing that coring, when you’re standing out there on a nice, warm, sunny day, you discover that, even though you have a melt surface that appears … Let’s say a black, organic lag where all of the particulate matter that has collected in these white, snowy areas melts out and settles onto a surface, forms a lag. When it does form that lag, that lag tends to insulate the material underneath it. Even though it’s black and seemingly picking up more sun, it protects the underlying snow and ice from the warmer and drying winds. Consequently, I think that’s why you actually have this profile that develops where you have these different, stacked-up layers that occur. We’ll come back to that.
In order to make this story have any cohesion and sense, we’ve got to talk about why we’re getting the remains of material culture in the form of artifacts as well as the remains of animals and plants, and that’s the draw of the ice patches. It certainly can be a draw in and of themselves for humans wanting to come to these areas for water and moisture and so forth, but they also are a real obvious draw for animals. It’s something that I’ve seen everywhere from Alaska to Glacier down into Yellowstone and even parts further south, including Rocky Mountain National Park. You have animals that are drawn to these locations either to escape biting insects, or in search of moisture, or just a desire to want to cool their feet, maybe the minerals that are exposed in association with, maybe, just habit.
You can see, based on this photo from colleague Tom Andrews, that in the further north, Northwest Territories, at least, that the migrations of animals to these locations are not just represented by one-offs where you have 1 or 2 animals that make it to these locations in a random way. These deeply incised trails that you’re looking at, that takes a substantial number of caribou to be going to this particular location year in and year out. Then when they do this, the animals carry in their guts a whole packet of fertilizer with them, which you see in this halo of organic material which is, by and large, feces from the animals that they’ve brought with them to this snow and ice patch area and left. One of the neat things that happens then is you get a feedback where you actually start to have this enriched biome where right below here, you’re getting an admixture of the nice fertilizer in association with runoff. It’s kind of hard to see in the picture, but maybe you can pick out that it’s actually greened up quite a bit. In this previous image, this is late, late, late season. A lot of the rest of the high country has started to wither and dry up, but right here below this particular ice patch you get a very nice, lush oasis of sorts.
If the animals are behaving in this way, in a very predictable sort of way, it’s not at all surprising that humans, who are entirely in tune with this natural environment -and also there’s plenty of social reasons why folks would be going to the high country as well- you can see a scenario in which people would have some understanding of the animal behavior and be able to target them in these particular locations. This is an image that comes courtesy of colleagues working in Glacier National Park. It was put together by Antoine Sandoval, who is Pend Oreille and also Navajo, if I’m not mistaken. Then my colleague, David Rockwell, who’s developing a dynamite website for the Glacier National Park Ice Patch Project, has animated it; but because that is an html thing, it’s something that will be posted online. There’s a nice probably 2- to 3-minute-long animation that follows this group of stylized hunters in the background, hunting this herd of elk. I couldn’t run it through this presentation today, but in the near future when that website goes live, hopefully very early in 2015, I would encourage you all to seek it out and find it. Another cool element of that website is that there’s a clearinghouse of sorts where we’ve got a worldwide map that has links to the published documentation that exists on ice patch projects the world over.
The take-home from this schematic that you’re looking at now is that you can see, again, a group of game animals congregated on this ice patch and then evidence in the snow there, buried in a cross-section, a profile of the edge-on ice patch where these tools have been lost or left after butchery and so forth has occurred.
Karen already noted that one of the things that’s unique about ice patches is the presence of this organic material, not only the organic material in terms of the remains of the plants and animals, but also the material culture of the artifacts that were left there by the humans who were visiting these locations as well. Most archeological sites are comprised of chipped stone. 90 percent of the archeological evidence, if not more, is comprised of these types of inorganic materials. They don’t, in some respects … Archeologists are wonderful. We’ve done a wonderful job of being able to interpret trade and exchange patterns, those types of things, based on the chipped stone as well as mechanics of how things were produced, as well as stylistic differences and how those types of things changed with time, the ebb and flow of their geographic expression. We use all of that type of stuff to describe in some ways the demography of groups that were using particular types of tools. That should be familiar to a lot of us on the phone who are experienced with archeology, but in the ice patch context you have this uniquely preservative environment that not only retains that bit of chipped stone, but it also has this usually invisible bit of material culture.
One of the things that I continue to find fascinating is the prevalence of foreshafts. We don’t often talk about foreshafts when we’re having discussions with chipped stone tools and even chipped stone projectile points. We will have no problem alluding to the fact that there may have been hafted to a foreshaft and then hafted to a main shaft, but one of the things that I find continually interesting, remarkable, is that a lot of the tools that we find that do relate to hunting, at least, are these foreshafts. I think that is a wonderful bit of insight into the care and cognition that Native peoples and indigenous peoples, peoples from just a more ancient time period in general, how they interacted with their world, not in a cautious way like there was some trepidation about it, but in a way in which they were actively working to maximize their return and maximize their success in how they were applying the technology that they were using in these environments.
You also see … You’re opened up again not only with being able to study things like the chipped stone and its point of origin and the morphology of it, but you’re also able then to look at how it’s hafted: for instance, the types of materials that it’s hafted in. There’s no mistaking it, actually, when you start looking at the patterns that … the raw materials that are used in the manufacture of the foreshafts or the manufacture of the main shafts, the types of sinew that’s used to lash the tools together, maybe the types of fletching that’re used to slow down darts and arrows. It’s just remarkable to see that there’s a great deal of thought and care that goes into the selection of those materials.
Then one thing that I always think is quite fun and exciting is that you get this little bit of insight based on good ethnographic work that’s been conducted primarily in Alaska and northern North America. We have these non-decorative elements where they tend to be just a marking of sorts, of lines, basically. We believe that those are most likely ownership marks, so it’s a way to claim or mark a particular tool and suggest that it belongs to either an individual or even, potentially, to a group. That’s something that we don’t often get to see or talk about when we’re just looking at things like the chipped stone artifacts. The organic materials provide some additional context for the inorganic elements.
This talk in particular is a mixed bag, because I have colleagues at INSTAAR that at some points in time have said, “The reason the people like the ice patch work is that it’s a little bit safer.” It comes across as a silver lining to global warming, and it’s not all doom and gloom. I used to try to spin my talk as a result of some of those conversations to say, “Think of all the material that’s been lost.” It is true. We have lost, and are losing actively, a lot of material in association with melting ice patches, because it’s simply physically impossible, given the temporal and fiscal constraints that are on us, to get to these locations.
By the same token, I’ve had other colleagues who’ve said, “Everybody could use a little bit of good news. Go ahead and to refer to it as a silver lining.” On the one hand, we see this amazing swath of material culture that we wouldn’t find in any other context; and, yet, we do have to realize it’s a result of a resource that’s vanishing, and it’s symptomatic. The ice patches are just one part. As the ice patches retreat in the face of climate change, that can happen as a result of more precipitation coming in the form of rain, or warmer snows, less cool temperatures in the early wintertime so you don’t get a penetration of a winter cold wave freezing down the ice core and the subsequent snowfall coming on top of them and insulating that. There’re a variety of processes at play there.
One of the things we see in the archeological record is that this is not something that’s just affecting the last hundred years’ worth of snow, or the last thousand years’ worth of snow. What you’re looking at in this particular slide is a shot of a foreshaft that has melted out of an ice patch, this ice patch here that’s actually been covered by some early-season snow. That brilliant white color is early-season snow, but you can see the old ice core that’s exposed there underneath the magic red dot. You can see here out under the clear, blue sky in this runoff channel, a foreshaft. The thing that’s amazing about that is that it’s a 10,400-year-old foreshaft. It’s the oldest wooden foreshaft known from anywhere in North America by several thousand years, and here it is totally and completely exposed in an environment that is not conducive to its long-term preservation. It was trapped in the snow and ice for a very long period of time, and it’s only here in the last several years that that ice has undergone a wholesale change and dumped out a piece of material that was incorporated for the last 10 millennia onto the ground surface.
This is what it looks like in a kind of more artsy photo. I had a professional photographer by the name of Tara Hornem who took these photos. You can see again marks on it. Here’re some ownership marks. These are three, parallel marks on this side; and there’s three, parallel marks mirrored on the other side. The marks appear to exist in the more gracile part of this foreshaft, the projectile point would’ve been hafted here at this end. If this foreshaft was successful at finding its mark and lodged into the side of an animal, if the animal was successful with, maybe, not dying right away and starting to run off, if this particular foreshaft broke off and separated from its main shaft, where it was attached using this conical base, the thought is that that area with the ownership mark on it would’ve remained inside of the animal.
We have a couple of scenarios for how a long foreshaft like that might work. I might point out that, again, it was exciting to some of my archeologist colleagues that we found this; because not only is it about 2,000, 3,000 years older than the next-oldest foreshaft, it’s literally about twice as long as the next-oldest foreshaft. The obvious point to make there is that when you get back this far in time, you don’t have a large sample of artifacts to draw comparisons from. At this point in time, that’s the only one that we’ve found that’s of that age. We put together, with the help of a colleague, Bill McConnell, a couple of scenarios in which a foreshaft of that length might operate. You see here a reconstruction of this foreshaft. This one is made out of birch. It’s got a projectile point of appropriate age hafted to it. The one that was recovered in the archeological sense did not have a projectile point with it. Then Bill made a long main shaft, and then he also made a short shaftment here as well, and we put both … This is another foreshaft of the same measurements, dimensions and manufacture. We put both sets of these things together.
Here’s a picture of Bill with the longest system that we put together. Actually, both of them work quite well. Both of them, I would say arguably work equally well; but in terms of actual practicality of use if you’re carrying them both in a quiver, it’s far easier to carry two long units together. You’re not scrabbling around trying to find a short shaftment in the bottom of a bigger bag that can contain foreshafts. That was a wonderful it of insight from Bill.
Again, I think this type of organic material lends itself to these reconstructions, not that they can’t be done with just the chipped stone artifacts, but they also are … When you have the organic material to work from and you have a question that arises about whether something was being used with, for instance, an arrow or a dart, as in the case of some Canadian colleagues who are working in Yukon Territory, you’re actually able to directly observe the hafting mechanism for how the piece of weaponry was either knocked to a bowstring or placed on the dimple of an simple dart.
Couple of points to be made further about the ownership marks. It allows for some added bit of exploration and excitement to think about what was transpiring in the past. One of the take-homes for me is just that the projectile points that we’re -and I am enamored of them as well -are not necessarily indicative of the person who made them. What we may have is good evidence that projectile points were - and we’ll see this ethnographically in more modern time periods where items that could be traded and exchanged, or could be manufactured by craft specialist people that had the greater aptitude for making it as opposed to somebody like myself who’s absolutely miserable at knapping - at any rate, you then would have another reason why you would … or method for why and how you would mark your tools, for instance, through something like these ownership marks.
Getting back to that Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee and the fact that this is in the Yellowstone area this research has been … is and continues to benefit from this super-level look at it, the ice patches are very testy, and they don’t much conform to, for instance, political boundaries. This beautiful, textbook ice patch that you’re looking at … you see there’s a big one in the center of the picture … is literally bisected by the boundary line between Yellowstone National Park and Bridger-Teton National Forest, and I think it’s definitely a testament to the colleagues on the Bridger-Teton National Forest team, [inaudible 00:30:50] Jean Shane and J.P. Schubert, as well as the archeologists in Yellowstone National Park, Staffan Peterson and Tobin Roop, that they’ve looked at this phenomenon, the ice patch phenomenon, as something that isn’t going to conform very well to the political boundaries, and they’re something that we should instead look at sort of at a geographic level, so in a particular land form, for instance. This is a very positive take-home, and I’ll show you some of the things that came out of the survey in 2013.
I suspect … I don’t know if my colleague Staffan is on the phone or not. He might be getting sick of seeing me trot this picture out of him, but this is Staffan sitting right here at the edge of a retreating ice patch and then resting right there in this muck, this collapsed area where the ice has pulled back. Here’s a wonderful foreshaft again. Unfortunately, the sinew and the projectile point that had been potentially attached down here at this end has disappeared; but you’ve got a nice, conical base on it. It’s very hard to see in this picture; but you have two, oblique, parallel ownership marks right there at the base of this short foreshaft and, again, a remarkable, organic artifact to be lying exposed on the surface under the clear, blue sky.
It’s a very real concern is, subsequent, this thing could become waterlogged. A subsequent snowfall comes in and buries it, the pressure of the snow on it will cause it to bend and cause it to warp. You can sort of see how it’s starting to paste itself onto the surface of this rock, and then that repeated wet-dry that happens. There was a bloody cold and windy, rainy day when we were up here, but you can imagine that there are plenty of sunny and high-UV days that happen out here in the alpine. Those types of changes are not good. No conservator in the world would advise that for the care and treatment of a 2900-year-old artifact. We’re doing our level best to find these such materials and bring them back so that they can be studied then and then, obviously, shared with all of the audiences that are interested. I’m going to get to that in a second as well.
This is just an example of something that we have no idea what it is. It’s a spatulate piece of wood that … At first glance, I thought it might have been charcoal on there. There’s been some suggestion that it may actually be staining. It could have been hafted in some way, and that could be a residue. That staining could be a remnant of the hafting process and hafting material. It’s not a modern piece of material. It’s 1500 years old, definitely shaped and sculptured by people; but, again, it opens up a new window into interpreting the past and interpreting material culture that we don’t usually have access to in this time range, particularly in a context where it was functioning. We have every reason to suspect that this tool, which is only about … oh, I don’t know … 5 meters from the edge of the melting ice patch, so this tool, it’s only about 50 centimeters away from the edge of the melting ice patch, we believe that they’re in the systemic context in which they were functioning. Actually, that’s a great way to put it. They’re not in a cache-like context. They’re not in an area where they were being retooled, for instance, in a cave or in a shelter-type situation where they would’ve been employed in some other location. This is presumably in the throes of their use life.
Again, to get back to the audiences who and why would this material be of interest to, who … to whom this material is, perhaps, the greatest interest and significance. Without doubt, I think something that’s been brought home to me based on the work that I was able to conduct in Alaska with Dr. Jim Dixon and then also with absolutely esteemed colleagues in Glacier National Park, including tribal partners with the Federated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, as well as with the Blackfeet Nation is that it’s a heritage resource that is not lost on … and the significance is not lost on the Native folks whose ancestors made these tools. I think, actually, some of the most telling phrasing comes from Mr. Francis Auld, who’s a Kootenai cultural specialist. He’s adamant that in the protection of these archeological materials, the significance in them lies not in curating them and creating large stockpiles and reserves of the past cultural materials, but in how those cultural materials can be used to keep the living culture going. How can they be used to help sustain the language and help sustain the youth and help foster an interest and a pride in the living people, not in a retrospective, backward-looking way, but in a very forward-looking way. That lesson is not lost on me in the slightest, although I assure you that I can’t express it as articulately as he can.
In the face of these concerns, we’ve got a loss of tribal heritage occurring, a loss of archeological heritage occurring; and it’s occurring on federal lands and is probably like hearing coals to Newcastle to say this to the group of folks on the phone, but there’s literally no snow and ice that exists on private land in the lower 48 in the conterminous United States. Consequently, all snow and ice that contains this archeological material is protected, which is a wonderful thing, and it should be and is a concern for all of the land managers that have responsibility for the care of these resources. A lot of this work is happening in park contexts. It’s happening in wilderness contexts. It’s happening in environments where you don’t have the lion’s share of the archeological work occurring in North America, because this is not compliance-driven. There’s no oil and gas fields that are being proposed for these wilderness areas, or put in in Glacier National Park; but the agencies have seen it as a part of their [NHPA Section] 110 responsibilities that they’re able to put some resources towards identifying these locations. They realize that it’s something that needs to happen, and it needs to happen in the near term.
I’m taking a slide from a colleague, Greg Peterson, here just to demonstrate why and how this concern … what the gravity of this issue is. You can see … This “SWE” means “snow water equivalent,” and we have a 500-year mean that’s reconstructed based on old tree rings as well as a 100-year mean that’s based on old tree rings. We can see a wild departure that starts to occur in 1980 on into 2000. There’s a reason this is truncated here about 2005, 2007, and that is because the signal -You basically kind of have a running average, and you have to smooth it relative to some data points before and afterwards so we don’t have it running right up to the modern day. The take-home is that we’ve had a net decrease in the volume of snow and ice, the snow water equivalent that’s coming into these alpine areas. Consequently, we’re having these ice patches hemorrhaging mass that they’ve been building up for, in some instances, the last several millennia and disgorging artifacts.
Back to this Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, hey pooled resources from within the Yellowstone area and had a very large, very complex project run just here within the last year, year and-a-half where I examined 24,000 square miles, the 24,000 square miles that comprises a somewhat familiar blob that sits on top of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Within that, I examined all areas of snow and ice using remotely sensed imagery, and then I created some gradations, based on the characteristics of what those snow and ice patches looked like, as to whether they would contain archeological or paleobiological, or both, types of materials. There’s a startling number, there’s 456 prospective ice patches. In a good field year, I’m only able to get to maybe 10, and that’s an exceptional field year. There’s a huge issue with a large number of ice patches that are not being surveyed, that should be and could be being surveyed, and
one way to handle that is through aerial survey, aerial reconnaissance, and that’s something again where a really good collaborator, Chris Boyer, with Kestral Aviation, has put together a couple of really sweetheart deals where he’s gone out and done some aerial reconnaissance in the Greater Yellowstone area and also is preparing to do that in Glacier National Park once we get the right season.
This is a global phenomena. This is not just located here in Greater Yellowstone, or Glacier National Park, or Olympic National Park, or here in northwestern North America. There’s also ice patch material coming out in multiple locations, in Norway and Sweden. This map is somewhat out of date. To tell you the truth, as well as in Austria and Italy and Switzerland and even to a degree in South America. That’s a very general dot that I placed there. The take-homes are, though, that you have differences in how the snow and ice appears to be being used in some of these areas. For instance, in the Alps, in British Columbia, a lot of the ice patch or ice-associated material seems to be associated with travel corridors through mountain passes. South America, we actually seem to have ritual interments where people were going and taking materials to the high country, depositing them there, and then they’ve actually been subsequently covered with snow and ice; but now that snow and ice is melting and exposing them again.
I have permission from my colleague Albert Hafner to share some of these shots from an area that he’s working in Switzerland in the Kanton of Bern in an area called Schnidejoch, and it’s a good, representative example of what one of these passes looks like. Here’s a pass across one … from one valley into another valley near the head of two drainages. You can see graphically here how the snow conditions are changing from circa 2004 to 2009. Absolutely remarkable. This is old ice. This is not just last year’s snow that was melting off. This is a core of old ice that has subsequently been absolutely hammered, and the only remaining ice in 2009 is just this little pocket.
The types of materials that come out of it are just as amazing as what we find in North America. Here you have fragments of a bowl, or a container. This piece of wood here has a hole in it that could’ve no doubt fixed to a strap of some sort to facilitate carrying or suspension. You get other types of things associated with alpine hunting, of course [transport of materials across, out here you’ve got a birch bark bow case, which is just absolutely, again, phenomenal; not the type of thing that you find in your normal archeological site, and it gives you a whole other sweep of insights into the way that these bits of chipped stone, for instance, would’ve functioned. You can measure things, for instance, like not only the length of the bow string, but you can look at how it’s braided, how it’s coiled, how it’s corded. You can imagine what the … the strength is of it. You can imagine what the draw is of it based on the bow, based on the size of the bow. Then you can talk about delivery velocities for the projectile points. That’s a whole other level of analysis and interpretation that you don’t get when you’re just looking at the chipped stone and the projectile points.
A good shot of a arrow coming from Schnidejoch.
At Schnidejoch and then also in Norway, you have a different angle to this in that the Iron Age and the use of metal tools occurred sometime ago, maybe 4,000+ years ago. Consequently, some of this material that is metal can actually be identified using things like these metal detectors, and there’s a group of folks that … there’s not a … I find this absolutely amazing … that are dedicated to going and identifying, trying to find these locations not for personal gain or for personal benefit, but to want to increase the knowledge about the past, get the collection into the museum, have their names inscribed on the rolls of contributors to the museum and be making a very real and substantive and careful contribution. I find it amazing that my colleague Albert has said that in the Kanton of Bern , which is an area roughly the size of two of our counties out West here in Montana or even Colorado, you get 100 people working in the [Kanton of Bern dedicated to ice patch research. When you look at the number of folks that are dedicated to ice patch research in northwestern North America, where we have permanent snow and ice, you can really count them on two hands.
I think that that’s something that we need to continue to address and work at, is to instill an interest and the respect in this material culture that transcends just the people that would be interested in collecting it for their own personal gain, but make sure that they see a deep-seated respect for the Native folks whose ancestors made this material and then see a value in wanting to try to save it and preserve it so that we all collectively can learn from and respect our shared past as Native North Americans. That is, if you’re born here in North America.
This is an example of some of the metal materials that’ve been found there at Schnidejoch. These are nails, presumably boot nails; coinage.
Bouncing back to this Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee slide, 456 ice patches. If I’m lucky, I can get to 10 of them in a year. What’s desperately needed is an increase in the number of eyes looking, and these are eyes looking that need to be done … The looking needs to occur with the blessing and in full concert and support with the agency archeologists. I’ve really been dedicating myself to sharing this talk with as many professional archeologists as well as agency folks to try to build the critical mass, build a consortium of folks that have this interest to want to go out and pursue ice patch archeology here; but also anyplace that there’s permanent snow and ice here not only in the Lower 48, but also in Alaska. It’s desperately needed. We need more of it, and it thrills me to no end when there’s some independent field assessment, other groups going out and looking in these ice patch environments, trying to identify archeological materials.
Not the least of one of these groups is Dr. Larry Todd, with his GRSLE program, which is the Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology program, who just this past year went out. Also colleagues Bob Kelly and Rachel Reck took this picture, as well as Kyle Wright, who’s the archeologist on the Shoshone National Forest, to look in this million-plus-acre area to try to identify some archeology in association with ice patches. This past year was miserable in terms of the volume of snow and ice. There was a lot of snow and ice this last year, but we’re still going out and all of those flags … I would hope you guys will have picked up on it that’s in association with a big lithic scatter that’s up here in the high country above an area of ice patches.
There’s other colleagues at the Jackson Hole Museum Mercill Archaeology Center. That’s Matt Stearn, Rebecca Sgouros also are hoping to be doing this. They actually have established multi-year permits with Grand Teton National Park and Caribou-Targhee National Forest to work at ice patch work. Then other field assessments that are coming through colleagues like Leif Anderson, who’s at INSTAAR. Leif is not an archeologist. Leif is a … if anything … He’s a glaciologist, geomorphologist and perhaps a little bit paleoclimatologist; but he was doing some high-altitudes transects and came across some of these organic lags melting out of ice patches, upon closer examination to see what was comprising the lags, identified that in this particular instance he had a huge … fancy term … being flattened for … the fancy term is “embricated” … for these smashed and flattened grasshoppers, basically demonstrating to himself and then also to me that you have a broader expression of these paleobiological materials in association with ice patches. I’ll come back to the grasshoppers in just a second.
Just in 2012 and in 2013, both in Glacier National Park and in the Yellowstone area, we had the opportunity to pursue some coring. This was with a very sweetheart deal from the University of Madison, Wisconsin ice drilling program. A hyper, super-dedicated guy by the name of Jay Kein, who was a operator with decades of experience drilling ice in Greenland and Antarctica. With some very sophisticated tools, we were able to go out and drill into some of these ice patches, and we found this structure. If you harken all the way back to that early slide where I showed you the lags that were preserved in the ice patches, we had a sense that those were there because you see them on the edge sometimes when the ice face melts. Here, well back from the edge of the ice, we were able to core into the ice and were identifying the areas where previous melt, previous snow at some point in time had melted back and then formed kind of an armor on the surface that was then subsequently covered by additional snow.
When we get those lags back and dry them, there’s a phenomenal amount … these are 1 centimeter square here in the foreground, but they fluff up, and it’s just a treasure trove of organic material. A lot of it is representative, again, of the digestive material that rode to these ice patches in the bellies of bison and sheep and elk. You can gain a tremendous amount of insight about proximate vegetation to these ice patches. As you know, the residency time of the material once it enters one end of the animal before it comes out the next end is only about 30 hours, so you have a sample, if you will, if you take an individual fecal pellet, of what the diet was like, let’s say, of a sheep 3,000 years ago. You also capture tons of insect remains. Here’s another set of grasshopper legs. These could be … They’re not inconsistent, at least with Rocky Mountain locusts.
That’s something that is not in anybody’s living memory today, a phenomena that they have a tremendous amount of experience with; but the historical records suggest that when Rocky Mountain locust plagues or when locusts swarmed … “Plague” is a negative term, I guess. When the grasshoppers morphed into the locust swarm and took to the Plains in great numbers, you actually had an equivalent amount of biomass in the form of insects to what you had in the largest swathes of bison. You had millions of bison on the plains. You had the same biomass tied up in locusts, and what would happen is these locusts and grasshoppers would get lofted by thunderstorms and other types of things up into the high atmosphere, and then they would, in some instances, settle down on glaciers and on ice patches, and they’d become too cold to take off. Then when the winter snows come in, they’d get buried, and there they stay until an archeologist-cum-ecologist in the form of me comes along and can take them into somebody like Mike Ivy, who’s a colleague at Montana State University, and get Mike all excited, saying, “Wow! I haven’t seen that,” and here we have them at 6,000 years old.
I’ll point out that the grasshoppers that are known from the grasshopper glaciers in Wyoming, in Wind River, for instance, or in the Crazy Mountains of Montana, or in the Absaroka Mountains, I think the oldest that Jeff Lockwood at University of Wyoming has ever identified was maybe 6-700 years old, and that’s because those are grasshoppers that are coming out of glaciers. Glaciers, as I said earlier, are conveyors; they flow. Consequently, the ice in them is never older than 5 or 600 years. That’s how long it takes the snow to fall at the top end of the glacier, be carried all the way through it and melt down at the bottom. Here, we’re getting a subset of these insects that actually survived for 6,000 years. Let me tell you, unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to date all of the insects that I would like. I had 8 lags from that particular ice patch, and I only had enough money for a bone radiocarbon date, which I did on one of those lags. I know that’s a terrible hard slide to see, but you can see here that there’s a huge number of insects, some quite small, but if you’re an entomologist, there’s a lot of discernible material there, as well as you’re getting the sedges and the grasses and things like charcoal, all of which are interpretable for the climate record.
I think one of the neatest climate records actually comes from the form of this preserved evidence of higher tree line when we had a warmer climate. You had a tree line that’s significantly higher than it is today. There’s a question that exists about whether the tree line was ubiquitous, meaning it was growing over the tops of a lot of these passes, for instance, or up onto these different plateau features; or, whether you had localized trees that were simply infilling some of these areas. I think there’s evidence to suggest that in some instances the tree line was everywhere; it was significantly higher, and then also in some instances that there was just infill in these areas. The bottom line is that, with the neoglacial advance roughly 5,000 years ago, you had a pretty dramatic cooling that came in and schmucked a lot of these trees and then proceeded to start to infill until some of these hollows and preserve what organic material had been living in them.
Here you have some examples of some large-timber trees, and I’ll call your attention to the really blown-apart, destroyed appearance to them out here, well away from the ice edge. These fragments of the trees out here have undergone numerous wet-dry cycles, been bombarded by UV, subsequent trampling by animals, but when you get up to the edge here where the trees are just now starting to be exposed by really recent melt, you find that they’re quite strong, quite hale. We cut some cookies … this was just two years ago …“cookies” is the technical term for these tree slabs … and brought them back out of the field on the backs of undergraduate students. This is Emily Mike. Another student that worked with me was Megan Fourney. Both students are in the undergraduate program at Montana State University. Then, sharing these with colleagues Greg Peterson and Dave McWethy … Greg is at the USGS, and Dave McWethy is at Montana State University … to try to do ring counts on them. If we’re successful at doing the ring counts … we’ve got six good slabs from just this one, particular location, as well as probably 100 samples of wood from other locations … we will hopefully be able to demonstrate some seasonal growth cycles that can be compared not only within this stand of trees, but also across a large part of the ecosystem.
Then something that just absolutely blows me away is it’s possible to actually measure isotopically the source of the water that was used, or absorbed, or taken up by the tree during those growth events; and we can tell where that water was coming from. We’ll actually be able to reconstruct some climate signals based on the sources of moisture, whether it’s coming in from the Pacific, or coming out of the north. My jaw drops every time I start thinking about that. I will tell you all of those trees at that particular site came in at between 4700 and 5,000 radiocarbon years, these BPs. Calibrated, you can add 700, roughly, years onto that, so you’re pushing 6,000. In some instances, we’ve got ice patches that are over … that have wood in them that is over 8,000 years old, so a phenomenal insight into this period when we have higher tree line.
I’m really done. I just have four points to take home for you, the take-homes for you, which is that: organic artifacts, again, are significant. It’s not a duplication of the archeological record that you get in other contexts. The organic artifacts really help, in my opinion, to interpret and understand the inorganic elements that comprise the bulk of the archeological record. I also think that it’s significant with regard to our very modern construct of this idea of wilderness - that the areas where all of this archeological material in the form of the ice patches and I’m not even beginning to mention the volume of archeological material that’s preserved in the alpine within the boundary systems like wilderness. In some ways, I think it’s even more shocking than you see out in areas that you would expect to be more habitable in the lower-elevation country and I think, in part, that’s because that modern construct of wilderness preserves that past evidence of trammeling that has occurred not just in the recent 1,000 years or several hundred years, but for many thousands of years. You see that based on the whole spread of index fossil projectile points that come out of these alpine environments.
I really do think that, because this ice patch research is so sexy, if you will, that it allows people to … It just gives them another talking point to think about what an intact ecosystem really is and to think about how humans are not to be excluded. They’re not acting in any way, shape or form in isolation or as independent elements, independent of the environment in which they’re living. They’re absolutely layered on top of the environment. The environment is layered on top of them. It’s just absolutely impossible to think about an ecosystem functioning, at least in the Greater Yellowstone area, in the absence of humans as an integral part. It doesn’t mean that I’m espousing for settling in a major way wilderness environment. I think wilderness environments are neat. They’re cool. They act as a nice parkland environment, but I think when we sell it and when we advertise it and as we conceptualize it and talk about it as responsible scientists, I think we need to definitely be paying full heed and cognition to the fact that those were peopled environments that were near and dear to countless generations of indigenous Americans.
The last point is, of course, that this ice patch record is finite. Some years, like this last year, we had a pretty major snow season. We had 150 to 200 percent of average, and the ice patches bulked up a little bit. I think that that’s noise. That’s inter-annual noise that occurs. The next take-home, the long-term trend, the climate scientists aren’t just making that up. We basically get ourselves … We buy a little bit of time when we have a big snow event like we had last year, but the take-home is that the subsequent years that are coming, more likely than not, we’re going to have more and bigger melt years. Identifying a way to be responsible and respond to this type of melting not just in the Yellowstone area, not just in the Glacier National Park area, not just in Rocky Mountain National Park where there’s been some real proactive steps taken; but in the surrounding wildernesses that are equally associated with these alpine areas that have the snow and ice, as well as the huge swaths of country that run up through Canada all the way into Alaska. It’s on our watch that these changes are occurring, and if we want to be able to hold our heads high 50 years from now, we definitely need to continue to act in the responsible and proactive way like we are now.
Thank you so much. I think I probably went for a full hour there. I apologize, and I’d dearly love to field any questions, if you have them. If you don’t want to share them with everybody, you’re always able to email me.
Karen: Thank you, Craig. That was fascinating. Do we have any questions or comments for Craig?
Craig: Everybody’s sound asleep.
Karen: I don’t think so! I’m happy to start. I have some questions and some comments. First of all, I was just astonished at the length of the foreshaft that you found, and I think we …
Craig: Yeah, 107 centimeters.
Karen: Wow! I think we use the ethnographic examples from Alaska often as our guide for reconstruction, and I think they have fairly short foreshafts in comparison to these. These are just amazingly long.
Craig: Yeah, and that one is exceptionally long, but we’ve got other foreshafts that are far more in line with the standard foreshaft length, whatever that means. The one in … with colleague Staffan Peterson, where he’s sitting there next to it, that’s a good, classic, nice, average size foreshaft; but, for instance, Greg Hare who’s one of the lead archeologists who’s worked so diligently up in the White Horse area of the Yukon Territory, they have a foreshaft up there that I do believe is about 65-60 centimeters long. Again, that’s substantially larger than the foreshafts that you get in Alaska, but it falls far shorter than that really long foreshaft.
Karen: Yeah.
Craig: The hope would be, obviously, that we could find additional or more materials that … You also have the joy of trying to explain or figure out maybe you have some special use occurring. It presumes prey species - I used to say it was bison in these particular areas, because the primary material that was being found by collectors, the average avocational paleontologists that were going out and looking at these ice patches while they were out kicking about the alpine, they were picking up on the presence of bison, so they reported a lot of bison to us. The reason they were picking up on the bison … This is actually going all the way back to the early 2000s in Colorado, of course, where the bison were locally extinct. They’d been extinct in Colorado since about 1876. At any rate, now when you really start to look at the paleontological and the types of animal remains that appear to have been killed as prey by humans, I think the lion’s share are actually sheep. Then the question you could ask is, “Are these somehow specialized tools for hunting sheep as opposed to hunting bison or other types of animals?” The simple, wonderful answer is, “We don’t know.” I love that! I love the “don’t know.” There’s more work to be done.
Karen: Talking about the artifacts that come out of the ice patches, how are they preserved when you take them back to the lab? Do you refreeze them?
Craig: That is the … If you can pull that off, that’s the absolute best way to do it. You get mixed context where you have things that can be wet and dry both. You have some pieces of wood that actually can form. As you can imagine, humans are wonderful at classifying things when you’ve created classifactory schemes for the saturation of artifacts, for wood, for how wet it is, basically. Some of these things, by definition, are absolutely saturated and incredibly punky , that basically have lost most of their internal structure, the ability to support the … The cell walls can no longer support themselves, and so when the moisture comes out of them, if it’s allowed to just dry on a shelf, for instance, the wood just explodes. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s kind of like the end of some of those trees looked, maybe. It just becomes disarticulated on all of the growth planes and the rings that are within the wood.
Yeah, what we try to do is you stop the moisture loss, if you can, right away; and we put the … We mount the artifact, or stabilize the artifact against a good archival material. One that we use a lot in the field is something called “Coreplast.” It’s a plastic board, so it doesn’t absorb water, and it doesn’t impart anything to the material. Then as soon as we get that out of the field, if it is something that’s saturated or waterlogged, we will put it in a freezer. Then you can allow ablation to occur, which is where you have the water basically going from an ice state straight to a gas state without having to go through a soggy, saturation phase; and you can control that based on how much of the artifact is exposed to the atmosphere in the freezer. We have some artifacts that clearly fall outside of the expertise or ability of the particular researcher, meaning me, but also colleagues that I’m working with. That’s where, again, having collaborators and colleagues like Jim Adovasio and Jeff Ellingsworth at Mercyhurst University, now, in Erie, Pennsylvania, have been absolutely wonderful in supporting us with some of the maintenance and care of some of the artifacts that are tremendously fragile.
Again, it kind of all comes down to resources. In the Yukon Territory or Northwest Territory, they have curatorial staff in some of these ice patch projects that are basically dedicated to that, to working on the conservation, and we’re here in the Lower 48, at least, working just within the parameters and the confines of what we have available; and we’re not walking around complaining about the glass being half-empty by any stretch. When something unusual comes up, we just figure out how to work with it.
Karen: It sounds like there’s quite a variety of approaches that you could use.
Craig: Yeah, but the take-home is to arrest the-do whatever you can to stop it from going from a wet state to a dry state rapidly. That’s the take-home. I know those of us … Assuming that there’s quite a few archeologists on the line, the training was, “Don’t put it in plastic,” when you were collecting, let’s say, bison bone, or antelope bone, or something like that in the field context. Actually, in this ice patch context, when something’s wet and you want to keep the moisture in, the take-home is, “Put it in plastic.”
Karen: Right, yeah.
Craig: I would also say you wrap in something that’s archival before you do it. Put in Tyvek or something.
Karen: Yes. Unless people have questions, I’m going to forge ahead with my own list. Would anyone else like to make a comment or ask a question?
Craig: I’m not done talking. I have one, last thing to say.
Karen: No, no. I’m not done either.
Craig: Let me say one thing.
Karen: Okay.
Craig: There’s a new journal that’s being published by Sage Press, and it’s called “The Journal of Glacial Archaeology.” The acronym is JOGA, “Journal of Glacial Archaeology,” and I do believe its first issue just came out last week. Those of you who are interested in this, that’s going to be an annual journal. There’ll be an issue per year, one per year, that comes out. I would encourage you to Google right now: Journal of Glacial Archaeology.
I’ve said my piece, and I will stop talking. Thank you so much again for coming.
Karen: Craig, do you have other contact information? If you want to give me the URL of the Yellowstone website that you mentioned during your talk, or if you want to give me the URL for the “Journal of Glacial Archaeology,” I’d be happy to add it to the text that is posted along with the webinar, when it’s posted.
Craig: I’ll send it to you. I can do that.
Karen: Okay. I have yet another question. I wanted you to go back and talk a little bit about the isotopic sources for water that was, I guess, nourishing the trees. Could you go back and talk about that a little bit? I didn’t completely understand it.
Craig: The oxygen 18 that is, for instance, specific to the source of water … It’s inherent. The volume of … I’m an archeologist, keep in mind, who plays ecologist and now is dabbling in climate science, so my good colleagues like Greg Peterson, again, and Dave McWethy would be the real experts on this. Without muddling it too much, if you, let’s say, are drawing up water out of the Aleutians or out of the North Pacific as opposed to the Central Pacific, the chemistry of that water actually is different. You can’t take a cupful of water from the Aleutian Islands outside of Alaska, let’s say, and it would not have identical chemistry to equatorial water, let’s say, off of Central America, so …
Karen: Wait a minute. Does it have to do with the oxygen isotopes?
Craig: Sure, yeah, that’s one isotope.
Karen: All right, so it’s not just salinity. It’s the oxygenation.
Craig: No, it’s got nothing to do with salinity.
Karen: Okay. I’m with you. Keep going.
Craig: If it follows, then, that you can determine the point of origin for some of this water, and if you can see changes in how that water is being incorporated in those tree rings, then you have a sense if you’ve got … You are actually scribing back at 5,000 years ago on a season-by-season basis, the point source for water, so are we getting an Aleutian-dominated water source, or are we getting a more Central Pacific-dominated water source? That is of interest for comparing to modern meteorological models. I’ve got to tell all of you, anybody that’s rolling their eyes out there, I’m not the expert on this; but I do believe that that’s how the scenario works. I think that’s something we have access to with these types of records.
Karen: This must having something to do with the prevalence of El Niño, or the periodicity of El Niños?
Craig: It could. Yeah, think about that. Let’s say these trees … That is not the biggest tree puck that we got. The biggest tree puck that we got was over a half meter across, and it could have 3-400 years’ worth of growth rings on it. You’re talking about not only decadal, but potentially centennial variability.
Karen: Wow.
Craig: Yeah, and they’re floating chronologies. Keep in mind we don’t have … The oldest dead wood that’s kicking around in the alpine, it’s pretty well-documented based on the work of Henry [Bunn 01:14:17] and Lisa Abromowicz’s work going back into the ‘90s. You have wood in the 1300- to 1400-year range, and actually there was a paper published not too long ago in the Holocene that describes some additional stands of this older alpine wood. Then you make a pretty big jump to go back and get into this neoglacial wood and then an even bigger jump to go all the way back to that 8,000-year-old wood that I was describing.
It is not all so beautifully well-preserved. For the purposes of a talk like this, I’ll trot out the prettiest pictures, right?
Karen: That’s fascinating.
Craig: Stay tuned. I think we’re coming to a head here, and in the next 6 to 8 months I think we will be getting some good manuscripts submitted. Then we’ve got a lot of stuff in progress. It’s always hard to find the time to push it through to the next stage, but I think we’re close.
Karen: Okay. We will. We’ll watch this development.
Does anybody else have comments or a question for Craig? I think that I’ve run through my list. I really appreciate your patience in answering my questions, and I thank you on behalf of the National Park Service archeologists for talking with us today.
Craig: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Description
Craig Lee, 11/13/2014
Duration
1 hour, 12 minutes, 36 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
11/13/2014
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