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Speaker 1: Mike Couns is here. Archaeologist and paleontologists who I knew.
Speaker 1: You could probably tell me the exact date we met
Speaker 1: Mike from your little h Yeah, June twenty eighth, two
Speaker 1: thousand and six. There you have it. I'll never forget it.
Speaker 1: Archaeologist and paleontologists when we had If you go back
Speaker 1: to an episode episode three h six, um one of
Speaker 1: many affiliations of Mike Couns, University of Alaska and the BLM,
Speaker 1: and I knew the Bureau Land Management. I knew him
Speaker 1: in his Bureau of Land Management capacity when he was
Speaker 1: directing a bunch of archaeological work. And also like all
Speaker 1: aircraft in the Arctic in the National Patrol and Reserve Alaska,
Speaker 1: which if you read the news a lot, you're probably
Speaker 1: reading a little bit about that place lately. An episode
Speaker 1: three or six of this podcast. We had an episode
Speaker 1: called an Alder scholt Hellhole in which we interviewed some
Speaker 1: of Mike's colleagues. You know they're not here. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say this because we couldn't get Mike. Does that make
Speaker 1: you feel better? It was like getting the V. It
Speaker 1: was like having the VP. Like you're like the news
Speaker 1: and the President. K You're like, oh, I guess we'll
Speaker 1: take the VP. Like when you see the VP on
Speaker 1: the news. They couldn't get the president. So we had
Speaker 1: we had Mike. We had Dan and Pam doctor Pamela
Speaker 1: Groves and Daniel Mann. Dan Man. Yeah, we had him
Speaker 1: on and on that episode. Why couldn't you get Mike?
Speaker 1: That episode? Because Mike when the beginning, when when the
Speaker 1: COVID began, he said he's not gonna go anywhere until
Speaker 1: COVID ends, which turned into like a year's long thing.
Speaker 1: And then he's got all these other reasons why he
Speaker 1: doesn't want to go anywhere. He's kind of like he's
Speaker 1: kind of I don't know that. I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm getting the hermit. I get a hermit vibe off him. Yes,
Speaker 1: he likes to be in the Arctic. Um. So we
Speaker 1: had him on. I don't remember this, but apparently we
Speaker 1: called Mike cons the It's good We called him the
Speaker 1: Forrest Gump of archaeology, to which he took to which
Speaker 1: we have to do some clarifications. He had wrote it
Speaker 1: after that episode and said, yes, I did know this
Speaker 1: is a correspondent between him and Krinn. He said, yes,
Speaker 1: I did know that Pam and Dan had done an
Speaker 1: episode with Steve, and yes, I have listened to that episode.
Speaker 1: Comments about me by Dan, Pam and Steve made me
Speaker 1: sound like some benevolent, benabulous creature that wandered the north
Speaker 1: slope dolling out helicopters to researchers. I also found out
Speaker 1: that my old buddy David Meltzer has been on twice.
Speaker 1: I haven't yet listened to the Meltzer episodes. I don't
Speaker 1: suppose he told you that I started my archaeological career
Speaker 1: at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis Type site, while he was
Speaker 1: still in grade school. So uh so, Krin suggested that
Speaker 1: rather than calling him the Forrest Gump of archaeology, is
Speaker 1: the Godfather of archaeology or the og of archaeology, You're
Speaker 1: just like archaeology comma og people, people, people know you.
Speaker 1: Do you want to know what I was called when
Speaker 1: the last twenty years I was ad blm up in
Speaker 1: the patrol em Reserve. No, I do want to know, Okay,
Speaker 1: Meltzer I think coined this the MASSI a group of
Speaker 1: native group in in Africa. They're prestoral and the social
Speaker 1: standing and a wealth of any individual family is measured
Speaker 1: by the number of cattle they have, all right, So
Speaker 1: I think it was Meltzer decided that I had control
Speaker 1: of more helicopters on the north Slope than anybody else,
Speaker 1: and therefore I was the most important man on the
Speaker 1: north slope. And as I recall, I think it might
Speaker 1: have been somebody else christened to me the Emperor of
Speaker 1: the North and the King of the West. You know,
Speaker 1: I got it. As a first question, this is I'm
Speaker 1: bringing this one up first because then we're going to
Speaker 1: touch on a couple things that we're going very quickly
Speaker 1: get back. But I'm bringing this one up first because
Speaker 1: this one just as a free standing question. You told
Speaker 1: me a story. Well, first of I'll let you set
Speaker 1: the scene. I spent time and we'll get to this.
Speaker 1: I spent time with Mike cons and some other researchers
Speaker 1: in on the north slope of the Brooks Range, and
Speaker 1: we were surveying the ground for projectile points, and there
Speaker 1: was a bit of interest then in um looking for
Speaker 1: evidence remains interest with interest at the time of looking
Speaker 1: for evidence of you know who, possibly the first Americans
Speaker 1: right who had crossed the baring Land Bridge. You had
Speaker 1: once said to me, this is not the question. You
Speaker 1: had said to me something like ony, on June twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: the mosquitoes will be here. If that was a date
Speaker 1: on June twenty third. On June twenty second, there are
Speaker 1: no mosquitos. June twenty third, I go like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: mosquito on my arm and smack it. On June twenty four.
Speaker 1: Holy shit, it would we would have. We would eat
Speaker 1: in a wall tent at night, and the first thing
Speaker 1: you would do is going and bomb it, like bug
Speaker 1: bomb the wall tent. And I'm not joking. These guys
Speaker 1: would go in with a broom and a dust pan
Speaker 1: to sweep, and they would sweep up with legit dust
Speaker 1: pan of mosquitos and throw them out the door, and
Speaker 1: then you'd sit down and eat. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: beautiful place. You've never seen anything it's like maddening. It's
Speaker 1: daylight all the time. The sun just goes around over
Speaker 1: your head. They don't go by the activities are not
Speaker 1: governed by time of day. They're governed by wind speed.
Speaker 1: So three in the morning wind dies down. All right,
Speaker 1: it's you don't know what way is up, Mike? Did you?
Speaker 1: Did you have people that would get kind of squirrely
Speaker 1: up there because of those the biggest, the biggest problem.
Speaker 1: Most of our crews were composed of undergraduate or graduate
Speaker 1: archaeology students from various universities, and the thing that seemed
Speaker 1: to bother them the most was the eternal daylight. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and I and they said, well, how do you sleep?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just close my eyes and go
Speaker 1: to sleep. But most of them would like tie a
Speaker 1: T shirt around their eyes or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was the bigger The other thing is, and
Speaker 1: I'll interject this here. When I was talking with a
Speaker 1: prospective crew member on the phone, you know, like they
Speaker 1: lived in Maryland or you know, texar Cana or someplace,
Speaker 1: and I would one of the things I always told
Speaker 1: them was that you could have something happen to you
Speaker 1: where you are now. And because you have access to
Speaker 1: an ambulance in a hospital, it doesn't matter. It's something
Speaker 1: they could take care of. And fifteen minutes. If something
Speaker 1: happens to you out here, I'd be lucky to be
Speaker 1: able to get you out of here in twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: Even if I had the helicopter sitting on the ground
Speaker 1: and the weather was was, you know, on its ass,
Speaker 1: you couldn't go in. So just keep in mind that
Speaker 1: something as simple as almost a hangnail that can't do
Speaker 1: any damage to you. In civilization, you could die from
Speaker 1: up here, So consider that before you tell me if
Speaker 1: you really want to come up here. So let me
Speaker 1: ask you my freestanding question. Now, I've tried to tell
Speaker 1: this story dozens of times, but I don't know the details,
Speaker 1: so I don't know how to end the story. You
Speaker 1: told me something to the effect of that you were
Speaker 1: flying along in a helicopter with a pilot and you
Speaker 1: saw an Arctic fox run into the carcass of a
Speaker 1: beached whale. You advised your pilot to tap the whale
Speaker 1: with the landing gear of the helicopter, and how many
Speaker 1: foxes came out of the whale. Well, it wasn't quite
Speaker 1: like that. Okay, help me out. My colleague Dale Slaughter,
Speaker 1: who was with me when we found the MASA site
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, I was working on his site
Speaker 1: for his PhD dissertation at a place called the Sharrock
Speaker 1: up on the Arctic coast between Windwright and Piered Bay,
Speaker 1: and the California gray whale had washed up on the
Speaker 1: beach and so the Arctic foxes had drilled into it.
Speaker 1: How big is a California gray whale? Approximately, it's not
Speaker 1: one of the bigger whales, but it's it's probably, and
Speaker 1: it depends on the age, but let's say this, and
Speaker 1: was probably It was a matur one, all right, that's all.
Speaker 1: That's the best they can do, maybe twenty five feet long,
Speaker 1: something like that. So anyway, we had seen foxes go
Speaker 1: into it, and I just said, hey, let's go over
Speaker 1: and just bounce on this thing once and you know,
Speaker 1: let see what happened. And we did, and a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of foxes came running out of these out of
Speaker 1: the whale. You didn't count them, no, but there were
Speaker 1: there are a lot of probably at least a dozen.
Speaker 1: So I think when I tell it, I'd like to
Speaker 1: say that thirteen came out that you can you can
Speaker 1: tell that you can tell that story anyway you wont
Speaker 1: I have. I have no particular feeling of priority on it. Okay,
Speaker 1: I got one more. I got one more free standing question,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna get back into longer answer things.
Speaker 1: You told me one time, sitting there in our pile
Speaker 1: of mesquite dead mosquitos. You're telling me about going to
Speaker 1: some lake and how many casts in a row you
Speaker 1: caught Lake Trout m Yeah, every cast. That was when
Speaker 1: we were working on trans Alaska pipeline. It was in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four or fiveborn really yeah, Okay, So anyway,
Speaker 1: we um the surveyors and the archaeologists were out ahead
Speaker 1: of everybody on that project, on any project like that,
Speaker 1: because we had to clear the right away for the
Speaker 1: actual construction work. And if the surveyors had lay laid out,
Speaker 1: and then we'd be right behind them looking for archaeological
Speaker 1: sites because the regulation said you can't. You can't, you know,
Speaker 1: on federal property or on any project that has federal
Speaker 1: money in it. You can't destroy cultural history, all right,
Speaker 1: So we were right behind them and that and we're
Speaker 1: weight out in front of everything and that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that just the archaeologists and the surveyors, we
Speaker 1: were the only working group that could carry firearms because
Speaker 1: we're out there totally by ourselves, and you do run
Speaker 1: into grizzly bears pretty frequently. So it was one of
Speaker 1: these things we'll let the archaeologists and the surveyors. Well,
Speaker 1: basically we said we aren't going out there if we
Speaker 1: can't take our shotguns with it. So what was your question?
Speaker 1: You took You took some number of casts. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so rough didn't catch a lake tripe? Well that was
Speaker 1: it at Kellic Lake? Okay? Where where where I started
Speaker 1: digresses that almost everybody that ran the camp, like the
Speaker 1: kitchen help and a guy running the sewer treatment plan,
Speaker 1: and the guys in the small engine shop and etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: never got out of camp ever, all right, And I mean, well,
Speaker 1: you're having all these adventures and they come up to us,
Speaker 1: you know, and dinner at dinner time, and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: could you take my camera when you go out tomorrow
Speaker 1: morning and just circle camp once and take a couple
Speaker 1: of you know, aerial photos of camp, you know, so
Speaker 1: I can you know, take them home home with me,
Speaker 1: you know, when I go back on R and R
Speaker 1: and we and we'd say yeah, sure, you know, but
Speaker 1: we didn't always get exactly what they wanted. So we
Speaker 1: had a helicopter, and what the pipeline guys were doing
Speaker 1: with the big wheels in order to make sure that
Speaker 1: they had enough helicopters, they would offer contracts to the
Speaker 1: helicopter companies that said, we'll pay you for eighty hours
Speaker 1: a month, regardless of how much we fly. If we
Speaker 1: fly your ship ten hours, we'll still pay you for
Speaker 1: eighty and so everybody, yeah, man, I want to get
Speaker 1: one of those contracts. So I talked with the cap
Speaker 1: manager one night and I said, hey, can we do
Speaker 1: something about this. You know, these guys are stuck here
Speaker 1: all the time. I said, how about if our pilot
Speaker 1: says okay, he's okay with it, you know, because he's
Speaker 1: on his free time, and after dinner at night, two
Speaker 1: people can go with the pilot. He'll take them and
Speaker 1: they take their own pictures and get what they want.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we were also doing at
Speaker 1: the same time was taking people over to Akillic Lake.
Speaker 1: All right, we weren't supposed to do this, but we
Speaker 1: did to fishing a lot of good lake trout over there.
Speaker 1: I don't think I can go to jail now because
Speaker 1: that was, you know, forty five years ago. But at
Speaker 1: any rate, there was one time and I had a
Speaker 1: small crew over it at Killock Lake, which was about
Speaker 1: fifteen miles over the mountains from Galbreath Lake, which was
Speaker 1: where our headquarters with we had I think I had
Speaker 1: five guys in that crew, and then I brought about
Speaker 1: three more over and they were all fishing, and they
Speaker 1: all I mean, this didn't just happen every time, but
Speaker 1: at one moment everybody, they're nine people had a lake
Speaker 1: trout on. They're standing about maybe ten yards apart, and
Speaker 1: one of them thirty eight inches long and thirty three pounds. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a true story. Yep. I can't even name everybody
Speaker 1: that was there, but so there was no consecutive cast.
Speaker 1: He might have forgotten. Oh no, no, they were not
Speaker 1: everybody that what I just related. Only thing happened once.
Speaker 1: I mean when you had everybody. But there was never
Speaker 1: a time with everybody standing on shore where at least
Speaker 1: one or two or maybe three people had a fish on.
Speaker 1: I mean always, always, if all nine people cast out.
Speaker 1: At least two of them would get a fish on
Speaker 1: every time. So because nobody ever really fished there before.
Speaker 1: I got a question about something you said earlier in
Speaker 1: your story. How often would you be forced to reroute
Speaker 1: that pipeline because you found something like was it common
Speaker 1: or never? Did it never? And I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1: The regulations are bad in the sense that they never
Speaker 1: work the way they're supposed to work, and in or
Speaker 1: what we were supposed to do was protect any site
Speaker 1: that was eligible for inclusion on the National Register of
Speaker 1: Historic Places. It takes about two years after the nomination
Speaker 1: of a site to be included, to go through all
Speaker 1: the paperwork and everything else before it can be put
Speaker 1: on the register. Two years. We're out there building a pipeline, right,
Speaker 1: we can't wait two years for every time we find
Speaker 1: a site. So what the senior archaeologist, the guy that
Speaker 1: we worked for at the university decided was any site
Speaker 1: that we find within the CZW, which was construction zone
Speaker 1: with not the right of way, but the construction zone
Speaker 1: with which is wider than the right way because you
Speaker 1: have to have activities and sillary to the right away
Speaker 1: all the time. If it was in the CZW. And
Speaker 1: we found a site, we excavated it no differently than
Speaker 1: we'd excavate any site, but we'd excavate it totally. We'd
Speaker 1: have all the notes there, all the maps, everything else
Speaker 1: in a museum, so that if there was to be
Speaker 1: designation for inclusion on the annual Register, all the stuff
Speaker 1: was there and we didn't have to wait two years
Speaker 1: for it to happen and then say, Okay, you guys
Speaker 1: can now move another quarter mile because we found another site.
Speaker 1: That how many sites did you excavate? Two dozens? Dale
Speaker 1: and Dale Slaughter and I were in charge of the
Speaker 1: northernmost section of the pipeline that ran from a place
Speaker 1: called Linda Creek on the south side of the Continental
Speaker 1: Divide in the Brooks Range all the way to Prudo Bay,
Speaker 1: all right to the end of the It's about probably
Speaker 1: close to two hundred and fifty three hundred miles. I
Speaker 1: don't remember as long time ago, but I know that
Speaker 1: we excavated in that area. Let me put it this way.
Speaker 1: I know that we discovered more than two hundred archaeological
Speaker 1: sites within the cz W of the pipeline in that distance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we didn't. We didn't excavate them all, all right, Well
Speaker 1: you couldn't have. But that's about what we've found. What
Speaker 1: was that light being out ahead of that out ahead
Speaker 1: of that pipeline construction and you feel like he got
Speaker 1: like this, uh I forget like the geopolitics of it
Speaker 1: in the oil security, but you got like just this
Speaker 1: monster coming behind you. Just rotal till on the ground, man,
Speaker 1: and that thing's gonna be there and you canna be
Speaker 1: able to see it from outer space and it ain't
Speaker 1: ever going away. We were usually far enough ahead so
Speaker 1: that we didn't we didn't encounter we weren't working near
Speaker 1: a lot of the equipment. But I do have one
Speaker 1: picture where the engineers had decided they wanted to use
Speaker 1: one material site that was different than the one they
Speaker 1: had originally told us they were going to use. So
Speaker 1: we went and looked at that and we found a
Speaker 1: site there, and but it turned out that was the
Speaker 1: only material site that was located so it could be
Speaker 1: used on this one stretch of the road, and we
Speaker 1: literally I've got a picture I took from the helicopter
Speaker 1: of us on this stock of dirt and rocks sticking
Speaker 1: up in the air like this, and about six scrapers
Speaker 1: and five pushcats working all around us, and we're on
Speaker 1: this little stock sticking up in the air about fifteen
Speaker 1: twenty feet and these guys were mining all the stuff
Speaker 1: all on us. So that's the only time that something
Speaker 1: like that happened. Yeah, yeah, And what were you guys
Speaker 1: working on there? Well, there was an archaeological site that
Speaker 1: we had to excavate because they were gonna they were
Speaker 1: gonna take everything that was in that in that Okay,
Speaker 1: I gotta step back. And then most of the material,
Speaker 1: all of the material came from the local surroundings, from
Speaker 1: the you know, the countryside. Most of it came out
Speaker 1: of glacial deposits, ancient glacial glacial deposits. Because when the
Speaker 1: ice bladed, when it melted, when the glacier receded, all
Speaker 1: the junkeet had scooped up all along its course for
Speaker 1: thousands of years just stops right along with the ice.
Speaker 1: The ice melts out, and here's this big blob of
Speaker 1: rock and soil and everything else that just gets set
Speaker 1: down there. And it's big enough so it's actually a hill.
Speaker 1: You know, you can you can hike those. Sometimes you
Speaker 1: hike in on them. It's like you're on an elevated sidewalk.
Speaker 1: Well those are those are cames, okay, all right, which
Speaker 1: which is what I was describing, but their linear cames,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're small lateral moraines or eskers. But the
Speaker 1: whole point of this thing is that all that stuff
Speaker 1: was mined to make the road on that project, which
Speaker 1: most people don't realize. There's actually it was almost like
Speaker 1: two separate projects. There was the road that had to
Speaker 1: be built north of the Yukon River, all right, and
Speaker 1: then that road because the road had to be built
Speaker 1: before you could even begin to build the pipeline. So
Speaker 1: it was like two separate projects the project when we
Speaker 1: built the road, and once the road was all built,
Speaker 1: then we could start the project to build the pipeline.
Speaker 1: And the project that does the most environmental damage by
Speaker 1: far is the road, because you're mine and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: you're tearing up the country side, etc. Etc. So that's
Speaker 1: where the bulk of the of the concern is is
Speaker 1: on the road. Secondarily, after the project's done, still the
Speaker 1: road provides most of the impact to the surrounding ecology
Speaker 1: because that's where everybody's going up and down. Dust is
Speaker 1: going all over the place. The main concern on the
Speaker 1: pipeline at the time was that it would disrupt caribou
Speaker 1: migrations because caribou would never seen a pipe line, and
Speaker 1: so they're gonna you got this eight hundred mile pipe.
Speaker 1: Well I shouldn't say the pipeline is eight hundred miles long.
Speaker 1: But the part they were worried about was the first
Speaker 1: three hundred miles, okay, with the artic Cariboo heard, Western
Speaker 1: artic heard, and the porcupine heard. Like a lot of
Speaker 1: talk about would they go under it, would they cross it?
Speaker 1: Because they don't go understuff. Well, I got lots of
Speaker 1: pictures of caribou all nestled down in the shade of
Speaker 1: the pipeline taking a break. Okay, now, because that is
Speaker 1: is that like how people will tell you that the
Speaker 1: developments are great for muldier because sometimes there's a mulder
Speaker 1: in their yard. Well, we're laying next to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: go ahead, Yeah, Well there used to be a thousand there,
Speaker 1: now there's two. And yes, they're in your yard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Now that's there by mean that you're subdivisions a good mulderer.
Speaker 1: That's a little different, all right. What the concern was
Speaker 1: legitimate at first because this had never been done before,
Speaker 1: all right, and you got oh sure, yeah. I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to downplay the concern. The western caribou heard at
Speaker 1: that time was probably about two hundred and fifty thousand animals.
Speaker 1: Porcupine heard was probably even a little bigger. But if
Speaker 1: they couldn't migrate to their various seasonal locations, then I
Speaker 1: was going to have a tremendous impact on caribou. And
Speaker 1: at that time, more so than now, a lot of
Speaker 1: the native communities still relied very, very heavily on the
Speaker 1: environment to provide them with their food and so forth.
Speaker 1: And what it turned out to be was like anything else.
Speaker 1: I mean, wildlife biologists no knew this, but it had
Speaker 1: never been demonstrated with caribou. If if you give the
Speaker 1: animals enough time, they'll acclimate to almost anything, all right,
Speaker 1: as long as they don't associate any bad, harmful occurrence
Speaker 1: with whatever it is that's there, all right. So if
Speaker 1: the pipelines there and nobody's shooting at them and killing
Speaker 1: them and doing this or that to disturb them, sooner
Speaker 1: or later, they're gonna get used to it. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of them is gonna say, hey, Fred, you see
Speaker 1: that shade? There were two hundred miles from a tree.
Speaker 1: We got shade. Now, oh yeah, let's go wide down
Speaker 1: under it. And so is that why they initially not initially?
Speaker 1: Is that why they had the five mile buffer on
Speaker 1: either side for hunting. Yes, that's a simple answer. Yes,
Speaker 1: to make it not to not instill paranoia around that,
Speaker 1: not to not instill paranoia, but not to that road
Speaker 1: would provide access to hunt. In other words, it eliminates
Speaker 1: fair chase to a degree. All right, That's that's the
Speaker 1: basic thing. In other words, not eliminates, well, enforces a
Speaker 1: definition of it. Well yeah, yeah, but what I mean
Speaker 1: it eliminates the concept of fair chase. If you have
Speaker 1: these guys all lined up, you know, taking it easy someplace,
Speaker 1: and you get out of your veiling and go and
Speaker 1: blow away three of them, all right, that's not fair chase,
Speaker 1: all right? And almost all phishing game regulations anywhere are
Speaker 1: based on fair chase. In other words, you can't you
Speaker 1: can't have an edge that's unfair and will ecologically threaten
Speaker 1: the the herd or you know, the population and put
Speaker 1: it into some kind of danger or something. What's in
Speaker 1: your career, what's the most care but you ever saw
Speaker 1: at anyone given time. Well, you were out at Udicoc
Speaker 1: Udicot camp. Um, it was probably in It was fairly
Speaker 1: I'd say it's like two thousand nine or ten. We
Speaker 1: had a heard come through Udicoc heading east. They were
Speaker 1: about a quarter of a mile wide and about two
Speaker 1: and a half miles long. Mm, so there, I mean
Speaker 1: I never figured it out, but there had to be
Speaker 1: somewhere on the order of somewhere between thirty and forty
Speaker 1: thousand and Yeah. That's unbelievable. What time of year it
Speaker 1: was in the fall? No, I to take it back,
Speaker 1: It wasn't well, no, I was into fall for up there. Okay,
Speaker 1: late summer for here. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Uh. That's
Speaker 1: not far from the MASA site. Yeah, that place was,
Speaker 1: I mean that was a Uticac Uticoc. What's your guys camp?
Speaker 1: That was by that MAZA site Ivachech Okay, Yeah. The
Speaker 1: maze is six miles south of Ivotech. Udicoc is one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty miles west of Ivotech. Got it, So
Speaker 1: it's a long ways away. What were you doing? Explain
Speaker 1: when you were doing the day you found the MAZA
Speaker 1: site and what it was that you found. Um, well,
Speaker 1: Dale and I had gotten dropped off by the helicopter
Speaker 1: because what we were doing at the time, almost without exception,
Speaker 1: all of the wells we drilled on that project. And
Speaker 1: you got to remember, the Trolling Reserve is about the
Speaker 1: size of the state of Indiana. Okay. It's the single
Speaker 1: largest chunk of land managed by a single federal agency
Speaker 1: in the country. Okay. It's also, like, by various mathematical parameters,
Speaker 1: is the remotest place in America in terms of distance
Speaker 1: from road, distance from city, distance from this you're there's
Speaker 1: a sign at Ivotech, okay, and it says welcome to Ivotech.
Speaker 1: When you're here, you're still nowhere, all right, And it
Speaker 1: says like who however many people are there? You hang
Speaker 1: up little things? Population eight or three or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you walk. If you walked east from there, you would
Speaker 1: go hundreds of miles until you hit the pipeline. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll center it for you. Here's Ivotech. It's four hundred
Speaker 1: miles from the near yest city, Fairbanks, Okay. All right.
Speaker 1: It's two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest town,
Speaker 1: Barrow now known as a Yavic, And it is one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty miles sixty five miles from the nearest
Speaker 1: highway road, which is the Dalton Highway going to Pruda Bay,
Speaker 1: and it is ninety miles from the nearest Eskimo village,
Speaker 1: anactoic pass. So that gives you an idea of exactly
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. I mean, it's the middle of nowhere,
Speaker 1: but any rate to get back to me and Dale
Speaker 1: find in the Mesa. So we get dropped off. And
Speaker 1: the reason is we were digging a site near the
Speaker 1: proposed well site of Lisburne, and so they the guys
Speaker 1: come by and say, we want you to go out
Speaker 1: and look at this stuff because Lisburne, along with two
Speaker 1: other well sites, we're going to be what they called
Speaker 1: deep strat wells. They were going to be not excuse me,
Speaker 1: drive to find oil at all. They wanted to know
Speaker 1: what the subsurface strateigraphy was for a long way down
Speaker 1: that well at Lisburne with seventeen thousand feet, Damn, you're
Speaker 1: putting china on it. The well at Innigoc was nineteen
Speaker 1: thousand feet and the will At well at Tune the
Speaker 1: Lick was twenty one thousand feet. That drill it's got
Speaker 1: to come out hot, right, well, it's hot down there.
Speaker 1: We're only a little way under the story here. So
Speaker 1: all the other wells that we drilled up there over
Speaker 1: a three year period, we were looking for hydrocarbon resources.
Speaker 1: They were all done in the winter because in the
Speaker 1: winter you can make your airstrip, you can make your
Speaker 1: camp pad, you can make the drill pad, everything out
Speaker 1: of ice and snow. You go in there. You're only
Speaker 1: drilling between five and seven thousand feet on those things.
Speaker 1: You know, your rig up, spud the well, drill for
Speaker 1: six weeks, rig down, and you're gone. Everything melts, nothing left.
Speaker 1: No one ever touched the ground. Well, I mean not,
Speaker 1: that's not true. Literally, yea, it would look like that.
Speaker 1: But you build every single thing out of ice and snow,
Speaker 1: and you know, you put a if you got a lake.
Speaker 1: The idea was to have you start off with a
Speaker 1: small crew going out of Lonely. Lonely was the headquarters.
Speaker 1: It's an old new line station about ninety miles east
Speaker 1: of Barrow Dow line. That is the thing to make
Speaker 1: sure the Rooskies weren't coming, yeah, the distant early warning line.
Speaker 1: So what you do is you have this little overland
Speaker 1: crew go. You're walking a D seven cat, probably a
Speaker 1: seven ninety nine loader, um, a couple of tucker snow cats,
Speaker 1: maybe another dozer pulling a trailer full of stuff. You
Speaker 1: get these guys over there to where you're gonna build
Speaker 1: drill your well, all right, and hopefully there's a lake
Speaker 1: close enough. But if there isn't there almost always is,
Speaker 1: then you have to build one on the tundra. You
Speaker 1: build it out of ice. So this first ground crew
Speaker 1: gets over there and they'll build a little twin otter
Speaker 1: strip on a lake. Then you can start bringing more
Speaker 1: people in. You get enough people over there, then you
Speaker 1: can build a big five thousand foot herk strip on
Speaker 1: the ice or on a lake, or else building one
Speaker 1: on a tunder all right, then you start herking a
Speaker 1: rig in. In the meantime, there's a whole crew over
Speaker 1: there building the ice pad for the well, building the
Speaker 1: pad for the camp, and the guys start hrking in
Speaker 1: a rig. They rig up and they start drilling. So
Speaker 1: you have to have c one thirty hercules is making about.
Speaker 1: I can't remember how many trips, something like eighteen trips
Speaker 1: to get a TBA rig in there, which stands for
Speaker 1: transportable by anything, all right, just depends on how many
Speaker 1: chunks you want to break it down into. And that's
Speaker 1: how the whole thing worked. But with the wells at Innigac,
Speaker 1: Lisbon and Tuna Lake, you can't drill that deep in
Speaker 1: that amount of time. I can't. I mean, it took
Speaker 1: two years to drill those things. So everything has to
Speaker 1: be built just like it would be built if you
Speaker 1: were doing it in Wyoming, you know, in that petroleum
Speaker 1: reserve down there, as to all be built out of
Speaker 1: rocks and you know, sand and gravel and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So now we get back to Dale
Speaker 1: and me finding the MASA site. Right, you're you're you're
Speaker 1: surprised that I can keep track of this. It's just
Speaker 1: phenomenal man, all right. So anyway, Dale and I are
Speaker 1: out there because the engineers what's Dale's name, Slaughter? Dale Slaughter, Uh,
Speaker 1: he was up there when you were up there, when
Speaker 1: you were up at Utica. I was mixing him up
Speaker 1: with Dale. Was a Dale Guthrie that found Dale Guthrie.
Speaker 1: He found a lot of ship coming out of the
Speaker 1: perma frost, right like yeah, bison and yeah, yeah, mammoth.
Speaker 1: So any rate, the end engineer said, we need something
Speaker 1: to cap that runway at Lisburne because we have to
Speaker 1: have that five thousand foot herk strip there to be
Speaker 1: able to you know, put the well in, and we
Speaker 1: need some kind of really resistant rock. Well, all that
Speaker 1: rock in that whole general area. The rock that underlay
Speaker 1: is a huge area is referred to his country rock, okay.
Speaker 1: In other words, that's that's the rocks that's there, and
Speaker 1: da da da da da. That covers everything. It's still subsurface,
Speaker 1: but it's a uniform formation. But right around uh Lisburne, Uh,
Speaker 1: there were some igneous intrusions through that country rock. In
Speaker 1: other words, magma had come up, not volcanic, but hard rock,
Speaker 1: all right, and they'd surfaced up through the limestone country rock.
Speaker 1: And that stuff was hard. This gotta be Perkin Spencer
Speaker 1: right up Spencer and the don't you have a headset on?
Speaker 1: He's still interested and um so that what the engineers
Speaker 1: wanted to do was find a good location for that
Speaker 1: stuff and drill it and shoot it, run it through
Speaker 1: a crusher, and then the final lift on the airstrip
Speaker 1: would be that hard resistant rock. Well. So Dale and
Speaker 1: I are out there doing it because all of these
Speaker 1: things are upthrusts, you know, they're like maces or ridges
Speaker 1: or something like this. Um they're perfect for an archaeological encampment,
Speaker 1: for a for use by the you know, prehistoric people,
Speaker 1: because you're up high, you've got a great view, you
Speaker 1: can look around the area for a game. You're up
Speaker 1: high on the breeze. Bugs aren't going to be too bad.
Speaker 1: It's well drained. You're not gonna have to be slopping
Speaker 1: around and goosh all the time when it rains. And
Speaker 1: so almost always, and it was the same of those
Speaker 1: littler things like cames and came terraces and escers I
Speaker 1: was talking about a little while ago. That's where all
Speaker 1: the sites were, and those are the things that all
Speaker 1: the engineers wanted to you. So you can see there's
Speaker 1: you know, there's a problem at any rate. So Dale
Speaker 1: and I had been out there all day and it
Speaker 1: was one of those days where it was just lousy.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really raining. But you know, this was in
Speaker 1: I think early August, and it was probably twenty eight degrees,
Speaker 1: about ten knots of wind missed and I mean everything
Speaker 1: was wet. It was cold, you know, there was enough wind,
Speaker 1: so the chill factor was down probably about ten degrees
Speaker 1: from the actual ambient temperature just you know, and we've
Speaker 1: been out all day and we were cold. And so
Speaker 1: what we had done is we'd flown out all the
Speaker 1: way to right to the front edge of the Brooks
Speaker 1: Range where all these igneous in truces were, and we
Speaker 1: were working our way back towards where the well site
Speaker 1: was going to be. And so we'd been out there,
Speaker 1: and you work twelve hours a day, so we've been
Speaker 1: out there for by that time, about ten hours. We
Speaker 1: climbed up and down stuff. We'd probably watch eight seven
Speaker 1: eight miles and we came to this one spot and
Speaker 1: there was this beautiful ridge that was right between us
Speaker 1: and the rain, and we said, screw it, man, let's
Speaker 1: just sit out here and get out of the weather.
Speaker 1: And we're just gonna take it easy to well, you're
Speaker 1: the helicopter coming. And so we were quitting like forty
Speaker 1: five minutes earlier or some So we're sitting there and
Speaker 1: I looked in front of us, and I see what
Speaker 1: it's just absolutely per You can look on it. You
Speaker 1: could look on the cover of that thing, all right.
Speaker 1: That's the mason. That's what I see out there, all right,
Speaker 1: except I'm looking at it from the back side. I
Speaker 1: see that. I think sticks, Oh, I see that. You know,
Speaker 1: we're looking at it from the back side, because we
Speaker 1: were on the bricks range side of it, and anyway,
Speaker 1: looks like if you're watching a John Wayne Western and
Speaker 1: they always shoot him in that same spot where there's
Speaker 1: little sweet maces in the background. It's like that, but
Speaker 1: in the Arctic. So any rate, I said, man, that
Speaker 1: really looks good. I said, We've never looked at that.
Speaker 1: So I said, hey, I'm gonna walk across this little
Speaker 1: draw here and climb up there and see what's there.
Speaker 1: And Dale says, go ahead, I'm I'm staying here. I'm
Speaker 1: staying out of the wind. So I didn't. I climbed
Speaker 1: up there, and I came up on the on the
Speaker 1: windward side, which you know, was a prevailing wind, and
Speaker 1: it was fairly well desiccated. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: alien damage up there, erosion. They're blown off a lot
Speaker 1: of the vegetation, and so the mineral soil and the
Speaker 1: organic soil under the DA there's lots of exposures. So
Speaker 1: I'm walking along, I look looking down, I'm seeing flakes,
Speaker 1: you know, chirt flakes, the byproducts of making stone tools,
Speaker 1: and I'm looking. I say, well, I was right, you know,
Speaker 1: I figured there'd be something up here. And I'm walking.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, I said, projectile point lying there,
Speaker 1: it's broken. I look, man, geez, that looks I could
Speaker 1: be walking around in New Mexico or Colorado and see
Speaker 1: this thing. And I think it was a paleo and
Speaker 1: projectile point in other words, you know, terminal place to scene.
Speaker 1: And I thought, huh, well, you occasionally find those kinds
Speaker 1: of things, you know, they're just oddness like that. I
Speaker 1: took about another ten steps and I saw another one,
Speaker 1: and then I saw another one. They were all broken,
Speaker 1: but I could but they were the basal portions of them,
Speaker 1: which gives you a whole lot of information. And I
Speaker 1: found I said, so let's start looking at him. And
Speaker 1: they were dead ringers for Paleo Indian projectile plant points
Speaker 1: from the high plains of continental US. I mean, I
Speaker 1: could have got a basketfull of them and walked out
Speaker 1: and started casting them around in New Mexico and Texas
Speaker 1: and Oklahoma and Nebraska and Iowa, and nobody would have
Speaker 1: batted an eye when they found him. All right, Oh,
Speaker 1: there's another paleo Indian projectile point. So in the meantime,
Speaker 1: Dale's been watching me and he sees me all of
Speaker 1: a sudden start bending down, you know, getting up and
Speaker 1: walking on, bending down again, and he knew I'd found
Speaker 1: something big, and anybody's pissed off because he didn't go
Speaker 1: up there with me, so he can run across the thing.
Speaker 1: And he gets up there and he says, you probably
Speaker 1: found all the good stuff already, you know, And I said,
Speaker 1: now this, I mean there's you've been up there. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of area on top there. So in that
Speaker 1: small and then we hear blappappappap where here comes to
Speaker 1: our helicopter to pick us up. So any rate, I
Speaker 1: grabbed a few I marked marked where they where I'd
Speaker 1: picked him up, probably five or six of them, and
Speaker 1: stuck him in my back and I took him back
Speaker 1: to camp with me and nobody there there. For those
Speaker 1: of you who don't know when I first started out
Speaker 1: and how to be an archaeologist school, I was at
Speaker 1: Eastern New Mexico University, which is about a five minute
Speaker 1: drive from Blackwater Draw which is the Clovis type site.
Speaker 1: And that's where I cut my teeth in excuse me,
Speaker 1: an archaeology, so I knew Paleo Indian project And just
Speaker 1: to be clear for people who might not like understand,
Speaker 1: those things weren't supposed to be there, is that this
Speaker 1: stylistically occasionally in the Arctic and in the interior of Alaska,
Speaker 1: a point like that might be found in an isolated occurrence,
Speaker 1: all right, but no conglomeration, and nobody a lot of
Speaker 1: the somebody who might be up here working might publish
Speaker 1: a little article that said, and we found two projectial
Speaker 1: points that look very reminiscent of projectile points from New
Speaker 1: Mexico at terminal places. Do you mimmy laying out the
Speaker 1: great mystery? Real quick? What I want to lay out? This?
Speaker 1: What kind of what Brody's getting? Now? I'm gonna lay
Speaker 1: out the great mystery as quickly as possible. Do it? Okay.
Speaker 1: There's a long running debate about how long humans have
Speaker 1: been in the Western hemisphere, and there are changing fashions
Speaker 1: to explain how they arrived and how they came to be.
Speaker 1: For a while, there was an idea that they entered
Speaker 1: in through Alaska, were held up in Alaska for a
Speaker 1: long time, and then an ice free corridor opened up
Speaker 1: sort of between the eastern and western ice sheets, and
Speaker 1: humans emerged down to the Great Plains around Edmonton, Alberta.
Speaker 1: That sounds good. That idea was replaced by an idea
Speaker 1: that they came along the coasts. That's a good idea too.
Speaker 1: There is long ben For a long time people thought
Speaker 1: that Clovis were the Clovis people were the first Americans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now it's better understood that that Clovis was a sort
Speaker 1: of creation of some pre existing population of Americans. I'll
Speaker 1: say maybe to that. Maybe I'm not saying I agreed
Speaker 1: with you on everything so far, but that because you're you.
Speaker 1: When you have a couple sites from thirteen four thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, what are the odds that you found the
Speaker 1: first place someone dropped something? Right, they're very bad. So
Speaker 1: a lot of mystery about where did these cultures develop
Speaker 1: and where they came And because it was first found
Speaker 1: in the high plains, this idea emerged. And they agree
Speaker 1: with this or not, this idea emerged that these cultures
Speaker 1: developed there. So to see these traveled there, yeah, so
Speaker 1: to see these diagnostic points of what might have been
Speaker 1: the first Americans to enter the New World. Maybe you're
Speaker 1: looking at the ship they dropped thousands of years before
Speaker 1: anybody made their way down. For a long time, the
Speaker 1: oldest site in the New World was in Chile monte Verde.
Speaker 1: But there's some now now. The snake rivers beat it.
Speaker 1: Some of those sites over there in Idaho are a
Speaker 1: little no the salmon. Is it? The salmon or the snake?
Speaker 1: Where that? Okay, let you take it away. I want
Speaker 1: one more sense, Give one more sense. Yeah if if
Speaker 1: if linguistically genetically okay, it's well established that the first
Speaker 1: Americans came from Siberia in Asia, and your oldest site
Speaker 1: is in far South America. There is a lot of
Speaker 1: shit between Siberia and South America in which people drop shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a number of ways they could have gotten there,
Speaker 1: but no one's found it. So we can find something
Speaker 1: really old Alaska. You could for a moment hold out
Speaker 1: hope that maybe these were the first people's stuff who
Speaker 1: ever stepped foot, and theoretically that stuff would be older Oka,
Speaker 1: the oldest stuff, the oldest stuff in the New World,
Speaker 1: by definition, has to be in Alaska. Correct, Yes, that's
Speaker 1: totally correct. Believe in UFOs or you believe in the
Speaker 1: salutary and hypothesis. Let's don't start talking Dennis Stafford stuff
Speaker 1: to me, all right. Jeez, I couldn't believe when when
Speaker 1: Dennis got wrapped around the axle on that one. Anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: you're sort of yes and no, all right, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: little expert there. Well it doesn't matter. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of experts suit or yes and no. Okay, So anyway,
Speaker 1: let me finish my Masis story, and I don't go
Speaker 1: back to this. Okay, Well no, but yeah, because he's
Speaker 1: he's the one interrupted you. Yeah, he said, well, why
Speaker 1: does that matter? All right? So what I'm gonna say
Speaker 1: is that I still, even though I had all this
Speaker 1: experience with Clovis and Paleo Indians and the High Plains
Speaker 1: and the Lano Esticado, I still wish wanted somebody to
Speaker 1: corroborate this agree with me when I brought this stuff
Speaker 1: into camp. But nobody up in Alaska had ever worked
Speaker 1: with any Paleo Indian stuff because there wasn't any Paleo
Speaker 1: Indian stuff in Alaska, all right. And all the folks
Speaker 1: we had working for us at the time, we're from Alaska,
Speaker 1: or there's probably a couple that weren't, but had never
Speaker 1: had any Paleoindian experience except from one girl citizen Well
Speaker 1: was from North Dakota and when she was a junior,
Speaker 1: I think it wherever she was going to school in
Speaker 1: North Dakota State or something like this. She worked under
Speaker 1: Surrey crew and that's in Paleo Indian country down there.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you find old stuff, that's what you're
Speaker 1: going to find. And so I asked Susan, I said, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: what do you think? And she said that looks just
Speaker 1: like Paleo Indian stuff. I didn't I didn't prime her
Speaker 1: or anything. I just said what do you think of this?
Speaker 1: And that's the first words out of her mouth. And
Speaker 1: then I said, hallelujah, all right because that confirmed for
Speaker 1: me that I was absolutely right. So any rate, we
Speaker 1: then well immediately said to the engineers, not doing this.
Speaker 1: And then the site we were already excavating, we had
Speaker 1: found some other stuff that was really important, and we said, uh,
Speaker 1: you're not doing this. So they ended up getting a
Speaker 1: special permit from the core engineers to actually mine gravel
Speaker 1: out of oh Tuck Creek near the airstrip there to
Speaker 1: use as the overlayment the final lift on the runway.
Speaker 1: Because all the preferred materials were burdened by archaeological sites
Speaker 1: and um, so that's that's how the mason was found
Speaker 1: and how it survived. Give a couple, because there's so
Speaker 1: many other things I want to touch on. Give a couple. UM,
Speaker 1: give a recap with a significant stuff like what want
Speaker 1: to be in the dates, the abundance, what were they
Speaker 1: doing up there? Most except for fairly recent prehistoric sites,
Speaker 1: and these would be residential sites, all right, You like villages, Um,
Speaker 1: you don't get a lot of horse fires remnants of fires,
Speaker 1: and that's what you want to date most. That's what
Speaker 1: you if you have your druthers, that's what you want
Speaker 1: to date. Are those remnants of those fires, the charcoal
Speaker 1: and those fires. You have to have an organic substance. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't date you can't date a rock. But if
Speaker 1: you're dating these these these camp fires, right or cooking fires,
Speaker 1: you're you know, you're dating something that people did. This
Speaker 1: isn't you know, a wildfire remnant or you know, a
Speaker 1: lightning strike or something. This is people fires, all right,
Speaker 1: So you're dating what they did and what the date
Speaker 1: you get back is going to be related pretty directly
Speaker 1: to them, to their occupation of that spot at that time.
Speaker 1: But the Mason was not a habitation site. It was
Speaker 1: a game hunting lookout. And well, what was taking place
Speaker 1: there was the guys, mostly guys, were up there on top,
Speaker 1: sitting around these little fires, warming fires, you know, keeping
Speaker 1: an eye out there. You can see for miles from
Speaker 1: up there, as you know, keeping a lookout for game.
Speaker 1: And they're working on their hunting equipment, their work, you know,
Speaker 1: taking to busted projectile points out of the out of
Speaker 1: the half and putting new ones in. They what they
Speaker 1: did was even the ones that they could resharpen when
Speaker 1: they broke on a hunting expedition, if enough of it
Speaker 1: was sticking out of the half, they just resharpen it
Speaker 1: real quickly and a half. So you find a lot
Speaker 1: of these stubby things that were thrown away. You can
Speaker 1: see the point is made exactly right up until just
Speaker 1: about here, and then all of a sudden it goes
Speaker 1: like that, and you say, wait a minute, it's been
Speaker 1: very sharpened, all right. But once they got to a
Speaker 1: place like the Mesa where they could do work on
Speaker 1: their stuff, they threw them away all right and made
Speaker 1: new ones and put them in. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: that place was used so much. And I'm grasping at
Speaker 1: a number here, but it'll be close, or it'll say
Speaker 1: right in that the book I left you, we found
Speaker 1: pretty damn near fifty camps fires up there. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you took most, if you took all of
Speaker 1: the Paleo Indian camp fires that have been found in
Speaker 1: all the Paleo Indian sites in New Mexico and Colorado,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't total fifty. So I mean, this was like,
Speaker 1: Holy God, I can't believe that. Now. We didn't know
Speaker 1: this right away. We didn't know until we started excavating.
Speaker 1: There fifty horrors that we can date. Every one of
Speaker 1: these horrors has flint, you know, chips thrown into it,
Speaker 1: you know, from when they were working on things. Some
Speaker 1: of the times they just pulled an old, busted point
Speaker 1: out at the end of the thing and just tossed
Speaker 1: it into the fire. And so a lot of these
Speaker 1: these projectile points, broken projectile points have potland fractures on them.
Speaker 1: And a potland fracture occurs when you heat chirt to
Speaker 1: a certain point, all right, it'll fracture like this because
Speaker 1: chirt and flint's the same way. Has a physical property
Speaker 1: called conchoidal fracture. That's what allows you to make to
Speaker 1: flake them because you you know that that you whack it,
Speaker 1: and that flake is going to come over off of there.
Speaker 1: You'll know how it comes all you. Ever remember when
Speaker 1: you're a kid and you shot the window with your
Speaker 1: BB gun, Sure made a little hole in front and
Speaker 1: this cone shaped thing behind it. Now, when I shot
Speaker 1: Joe Suki's windshield with the Daisy red Rider. All right,
Speaker 1: but you know what I'm talking You know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about, right, all right? That cone shaped thing, Well,
Speaker 1: that glass is cryptocrystalline, just like shirt or flint or obsidian,
Speaker 1: and has the property of conchoidal fracture. It's controllable. It
Speaker 1: depends on the angle you hit it at, how hard
Speaker 1: you hit it, what you hit it with, whether it's
Speaker 1: soft hammer or hard hammer. And once you get to
Speaker 1: know how to do this, you can make any damn
Speaker 1: thing you want out of stone. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: make any shape you want, all right, That's how it works.
Speaker 1: And so when you heat these things up to a
Speaker 1: certain point, it'll pop a flake off and it'll pot
Speaker 1: and that conchoidal fracture principle works the same way so
Speaker 1: you'll get these rounded pitch shape, you know, holes, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe the size of your thumbnail or some depending on
Speaker 1: how big the piece of shirt was. In the surface
Speaker 1: of the thing. The only way they can get there
Speaker 1: like that is by heat. It's a heat fracture. And
Speaker 1: so even if, for example, that hearth over the years,
Speaker 1: it all blew away, all the charcoal blew away, everything
Speaker 1: blew away, but the heat fracture projectile point didn't blow
Speaker 1: away because it was too heavy. And so you've excavated
Speaker 1: ten thousand years later and scooping it up there, and
Speaker 1: you pick it up and you see that conchoidal fracture
Speaker 1: right in the middle of it there. You know that
Speaker 1: it had to be heat fractured, and that means it
Speaker 1: had to be definitely associated with some kind of heat.
Speaker 1: And if there's no evidence for wildfire or grass fire
Speaker 1: or anything else in the sub soil of the site
Speaker 1: you're digging, there's only one answer. It got done that
Speaker 1: way because it ended up in the campfire. So there's
Speaker 1: all these interpretive things that have to go along with
Speaker 1: all of this, and you got to do archaeology for
Speaker 1: quite a while before you pick up on all this
Speaker 1: stuff and archaeologists are the first forensic scientists, all right,
Speaker 1: but instead of their clues being six hours old, they're
Speaker 1: six thousand years old. And so back in the old
Speaker 1: days for example, in fact, at the beginning of my career,
Speaker 1: it was still happening. Forensic police worker never hadn't been developed.
Speaker 1: And when the police, the local police department, and run
Speaker 1: into something that we're talking that was sort of inexplicable,
Speaker 1: is some kind of a clue they knew, but they
Speaker 1: didn't know what, they call up the local university and
Speaker 1: have archaeologists go down to look at it to see
Speaker 1: what they could tell them. After archaeologists were doing that
Speaker 1: for him for a while, somebody came up to the idea, Hey,
Speaker 1: why didn't we just train our own guys to think
Speaker 1: that way and do that stuff, so we don't get
Speaker 1: to do that anymore. But the beginning of my career
Speaker 1: I got asked to do a couple of things like that,
Speaker 1: and it was really neat. It was interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: to kind of get out of the contexts of archaeology
Speaker 1: and use those same skills too, you know, answer a
Speaker 1: different question. Is it possible that those uh folks up
Speaker 1: there we're watching for mammoth's or does it not line
Speaker 1: up time wise? The old estate from the MESA calendar
Speaker 1: year date is thirteen thousand and six hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: years ago. There's another one that's eleven thousand, two hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. In terms of our all the paleontological work
Speaker 1: that we did up there that Pam Dan and I didn't,
Speaker 1: I wasn't directly well, I was directly involved in it
Speaker 1: because I was funding it. But we did not find
Speaker 1: any mammoth remains that were that recent. I think the
Speaker 1: most recent mammoths we found was about maybe fifteen or sixteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what game do you think that they were looking at? Then? Caribou,
Speaker 1: dire wolves, deer, bison. But I wouldn't be after dire wolves.
Speaker 1: But no dire wolves ever existed in uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the North America, in the western hemisphere. There were no
Speaker 1: dire wolves over here. That's like a tribute question. Wrong,
Speaker 1: that's embarrassing. Fields um Cariboo had been around forever, all right,
Speaker 1: Uh Bison, bison priscus. Uh, there was never any modern
Speaker 1: bison up here, at least not as far as there's
Speaker 1: a real there's there's sort of this developmental transition with bison.
Speaker 1: Bison priscus was the was the place to see bison,
Speaker 1: the rootstock, all right. There was never any evolution of
Speaker 1: bison in the Arctic like there was down in the
Speaker 1: in North America. All right, there are bison priscus down there,
Speaker 1: but there's also bison ladder frons, bison oxenden talas, and
Speaker 1: bison antiquis. All of those evolved out of bison priscus
Speaker 1: down there. But up in Alaska in the Arctic, that
Speaker 1: that progression of evolution never happened. It was always bison priscus.
Speaker 1: And when were they still on the ground at that point, Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: there were Our most recent bison was ten thousand years horse.
Speaker 1: There was probably there were probably still some horses around
Speaker 1: and that was a big game game at well, you
Speaker 1: think they are hunting bears. No, they we don't have
Speaker 1: any evidence of them. There are two kinds of bears.
Speaker 1: There are short faced bears and there are grizzly bears.
Speaker 1: Same grizzly bear we have today. There were lions, the
Speaker 1: European cave lion pantera. That was over here, all right,
Speaker 1: Um spilea, pan spilea, Thank you whoever sent that to me.
Speaker 1: And they were predators are in such small numbers and
Speaker 1: compared to herbivores. The other thing is anybody nobody's going
Speaker 1: to go out after a lion with a piece of
Speaker 1: flint on the end of a stick that's this long,
Speaker 1: all right? Um, the same for the bears. So we
Speaker 1: don't have any evidence of those kinds of place to
Speaker 1: see megafauna from archaeological sites in Alaska. What was your question, Spencer?
Speaker 1: Can I argue with you for a second. I googled
Speaker 1: it while we were sitting here, says in North America,
Speaker 1: dire wolves have been found as far north as Alaska
Speaker 1: and down into southern Mexico National Park Services. Then how
Speaker 1: far does Alaska go down? And how far is that more?
Speaker 1: He's talking about the Arctic? No, sure, I didn't say that.
Speaker 1: I was just asking if they've ever been found there.
Speaker 1: We've never found dire wolves and part of Alaska that
Speaker 1: I've worked in, and I still would take issue with
Speaker 1: the Park Service on dire wolves being Now, so this
Speaker 1: this tattoo right here, and now I was referring to
Speaker 1: his tattoosdence hold on this tattoo thousand years old. We'll
Speaker 1: come around that that is the cattle brand for the
Speaker 1: original owners of the Librea tarpet and when I was there,
Speaker 1: I was it was one of the things that moved
Speaker 1: me so much was seeing it was like a hundred
Speaker 1: dire wolve skulls that they have extracted from the Librea tarpets.
Speaker 1: That's that was the inspiration from my skull wall hit
Speaker 1: me like a diamond. That's where I went with beautiful.
Speaker 1: My first day with my wife was a tarts. So anyway,
Speaker 1: what are they extracting? Then? If they're not dire wolves,
Speaker 1: I should I should actually back step. There are none
Speaker 1: in Alaska. To my National Park Services, there are all right,
Speaker 1: I have to say. Since I didn't work in that area,
Speaker 1: I don't know. But I was of the opinion since
Speaker 1: I had never read anything about that, that there were
Speaker 1: dire wolves in the Western hemisphere. So that's my answer.
Speaker 1: But I don't know everything is you're finding out. I
Speaker 1: want to move on to polar bears. Yeah, ask him
Speaker 1: a question about the points? Yeah, man, is there any
Speaker 1: way to infer This is Yanni, Papa Yanni, this is Yanni.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Ah. What percentage of these people that were
Speaker 1: there hunting making these points? What percentage of them had
Speaker 1: the skills to make the point or is that just
Speaker 1: every single one of them unknown, every single one of them.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think you asked them. I'm gonna jump
Speaker 1: away forward thousands of years to escam Okay, if you're
Speaker 1: living out in the middle of Arctic Alaska, and we'll
Speaker 1: say especially in the wintertime, but it could be where
Speaker 1: it's dark all the time, you can't see anything or
Speaker 1: very little. I mean when I say it's dark all
Speaker 1: the time, it gets to be twilight, but that's about
Speaker 1: the best it gets for a long time, especially if
Speaker 1: you're north of seventy degrees latitude. The winter encampments were
Speaker 1: small because there weren't enough resources for a family, and
Speaker 1: the families were small as well to be able to
Speaker 1: survive through the winter. If you had more than two
Speaker 1: or three families living in the same place, I mean,
Speaker 1: you'd use up a big wool patch for your firewood fast. Okay.
Speaker 1: So if the men have to leave to go out, honey,
Speaker 1: you try and always camp someplace where there's a reliable
Speaker 1: food resource. That's why most of these winter encampments occur
Speaker 1: on the shores of a big lake that has a
Speaker 1: reliable fish resource in it. So you can at least
Speaker 1: get fished through the ice. Also, hopefully caribou migrate through
Speaker 1: there in the fall and by this lake, so you
Speaker 1: also have a cariboo resource. But if the cariboo don't
Speaker 1: show up, you've always got that lake with a fish
Speaker 1: resource that you can get through. So Dad goes off
Speaker 1: to do something with say two or three of the
Speaker 1: other men, and that maybe all of it were in
Speaker 1: that encampment, go off, do a little honey. That leaves
Speaker 1: the women there all by themselves. Now commonly what they
Speaker 1: would do would be set little snares for ptarmigan and
Speaker 1: other smaller critters like that, But there's no guarantee you're
Speaker 1: going to get them. What if the guys don't come
Speaker 1: back or don't come back for a long while, or
Speaker 1: vice verse of what if the guys go out, they
Speaker 1: ripped their parka and they're in any woman there to
Speaker 1: sew it up. Every single adult Eskimo could do every
Speaker 1: single thing there was to do to be able to live.
Speaker 1: The men may not have been the greatest seamstresses in
Speaker 1: the in the world, but I guarantee you they could
Speaker 1: fix anything that ripped or tour or anything else. They
Speaker 1: could do anything that women could do except to have
Speaker 1: a baby, of course. But and the women, they could
Speaker 1: make a projectile point, they could make a you know,
Speaker 1: lester point. They had to be able to because there's
Speaker 1: no way they're going to survive if you didn't. So,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, that evidence is transferable as far back
Speaker 1: as you want to go in the Arctic. If you
Speaker 1: want to go up five thousand years, ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand years adults, every adult could do everything you
Speaker 1: needed to do to be able to stay alone. Was
Speaker 1: the chart that they were using really abundant up there?
Speaker 1: Did they have to source it from some far away place?
Speaker 1: Everybody that I ever had up there, like Tony Baker
Speaker 1: was one of the first ones to make that. He
Speaker 1: hadn't been up there the first time he came up
Speaker 1: to work with me. He hadn't been up there ten minutes,
Speaker 1: and he didn't before. He said, I can't believe the
Speaker 1: chirt up there. It's everywhere. He said, if this was
Speaker 1: done in New Mexico, they wouldn't have thrown that stuff away,
Speaker 1: you know, the big waist flakes and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And I said, I know, Tony, That's where I went
Speaker 1: to school in New Mexico. The reason is is because
Speaker 1: chert in the Arctic, especially within the petroleum reserve, because
Speaker 1: it's a sediment rock, it forms that way. It is
Speaker 1: totally ubiquitous. It is everywhere. You can find it in
Speaker 1: every gravel source, you can find it in every stream bed,
Speaker 1: you can find it everywhere. Anybody that I ever brought
Speaker 1: up that was already an archaeologist from you know, down south,
Speaker 1: would say, I can't believe this. God, this stuff is
Speaker 1: laying it well, you know, I mean they'd pick up
Speaker 1: five big pieces and say, you'd never find this on
Speaker 1: an archaeological site down there. They use this stuff because
Speaker 1: there's chunks is big. You know, you could have made
Speaker 1: three projectile points out of it. But the stuff is
Speaker 1: like growing on every tree up there. So people just
Speaker 1: took the best, just used what they wanted, didn't worry about.
Speaker 1: The only time you might have an issue would be
Speaker 1: in the wintertime when you can't really access it too well.
Speaker 1: But people were probably making a supply, all right. They
Speaker 1: during the summer, you know, the good months, they'd make
Speaker 1: what we call preforms. They'd make a you know byface
Speaker 1: preform about like this, yeah, well not even that big,
Speaker 1: just you know, like about like this, and you could
Speaker 1: use then use that to make almost anything and anything,
Speaker 1: anything big and anything small. All right, the wate flakes,
Speaker 1: you could make them out on the waste flakes. So
Speaker 1: that would be the only the only instance where you
Speaker 1: just literally could not find. Now there are spots where
Speaker 1: there isn't any, but by and large, it's just everywhere.
Speaker 1: So you keep saying, make anything. The only thing I've
Speaker 1: seen or heard of is that there's points for projectiles.
Speaker 1: What else did they make? Scrapers, hide scrapers, knives not
Speaker 1: Usually those were made out of bone. Whatever. Anything to
Speaker 1: do with selling was pretty much made out of out
Speaker 1: of bone or antler. Well, no, what's that spoke? What's
Speaker 1: you guys are talking about? A spokeshaver? So a spokeshave
Speaker 1: Well that's different, I know, but I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: save myself. You didn't do a real good job, but
Speaker 1: I'll let it go any rate. So, um, there are
Speaker 1: things called burns. I mean, i'd have to go into
Speaker 1: a description gravers. Graver was like a Marlin spike. When
Speaker 1: guys are working on their equipment and they have to
Speaker 1: undo knots that they made to half your wrapping stuff
Speaker 1: in a half a knife or a projectable point. They
Speaker 1: have these little things called gravers which have these little
Speaker 1: pronks sticking out on them, and they're you're used just
Speaker 1: like sailors use a marlin spike. They're used to undo
Speaker 1: a knot, all right, so you can whatever that knot
Speaker 1: is holding in place, you can get it out or
Speaker 1: get it away. So there's all kinds of different things
Speaker 1: that projectile points were not the primary thing that we're made.
Speaker 1: These sort of semi formal tools that you just needed
Speaker 1: for everyday. Use things to slice hide with it, or
Speaker 1: slice made or make holes for sewing, or you know,
Speaker 1: all of this kind of stuff. So there's an all
Speaker 1: in the back of his head. Okay, go ahead, it'll
Speaker 1: be quick. It's a yes or no. Did they make
Speaker 1: any big stuff like hatchet heads or large spear points
Speaker 1: or it depends on where they were there at a time.
Speaker 1: There were warmer periods up there. I mean we find
Speaker 1: buried spruce stumps up there. Uh you know, but there
Speaker 1: are one hundred and fifty thousand years old when it
Speaker 1: was warmer up there. We find beaver chewed sticks, all right,
Speaker 1: But if you dated when it's gonna be over one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty five or over forty five thousand years old.
Speaker 1: So um, you know what, mostly when humans were there,
Speaker 1: there just wasn't anything that was big enough to require
Speaker 1: an axe or ads or and they didn't they didn't
Speaker 1: hollow out logs to make boats. They were all skin
Speaker 1: boats made on us. So what were they burning and
Speaker 1: the fires you guys were founding? Okay, will you know what? Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably something would need A big point would be a
Speaker 1: that what you're gonna say. I was gonna tell Brody's
Speaker 1: something interesting when I'm talking about the trees. How you'll
Speaker 1: find trees but then they're super old, you know, because
Speaker 1: like things constantly change when you're when you're looking, like
Speaker 1: when you get up around the northern tree line, like
Speaker 1: you're going up in the Brooks Range and you see, uh,
Speaker 1: what looks like you'll you'll see bands of trees. You know,
Speaker 1: at a point you'd be like, well, there's the last
Speaker 1: tree you were going to look at, and then there's
Speaker 1: gonna be no more trees to the north. In your head,
Speaker 1: you're like that tree is advancing. No, you think like
Speaker 1: a point like, oh, look at he's growing out, like
Speaker 1: he's heading a peer. Yeah, he's a survivor, right, you know,
Speaker 1: he's like hanging on man, like his buddies are all dead. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: you ready talking about polar bears. I recently, we've been
Speaker 1: we were wanting to talk about this long time ago.
Speaker 1: There was recently an article where a he's some kind
Speaker 1: of population ecologist or someone was discussing that his information
Speaker 1: about polar bear population dynamics was being labeled misinformation online. Oh,
Speaker 1: I know, because he was saying that polar bear numbers
Speaker 1: are strong and growing and a lot of the they
Speaker 1: have become an emblematic megafauna for climate change. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: a lot of they've become a poster boy for climate change.
Speaker 1: And the narrative is is that as climate change continues,
Speaker 1: we will lose the polar bear. The polar bear will
Speaker 1: be this emblematic loss of a charismatic species because of
Speaker 1: climate change, and many it annoys many climate change activists
Speaker 1: that they're not vanishing, and they get embarrassed by the
Speaker 1: fact that polar bear numbers are strong, and so by
Speaker 1: pointing out that polar bears are doing fine, you are
Speaker 1: you become accused of of misinformation. Not because it's misinformation,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's not helpful propaganda. Okay, you're talking
Speaker 1: about Lomberg, and we sent this to you to say,
Speaker 1: what do you think about all this? Yeah, okay, I
Speaker 1: can tell you. And I was given a very biased telling. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can tell you. Okay. Lomberg said, essentially, if polar
Speaker 1: bearers are on the way out, how come the population
Speaker 1: is four or five times as great as it was
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies. That's what he said.
Speaker 1: That was a and I know he knows this, but
Speaker 1: he's on the other side of the coin, Okay, in
Speaker 1: terms of climate change, like he has an ax to grind, well,
Speaker 1: he's grinding an axe. Because that is deliberately a disingenuous comment, okay.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna tell you why. Please. Back in the
Speaker 1: sixties and into the very very early seventies, there were
Speaker 1: basically no controls on recreational hunting of polar bears. The
Speaker 1: reason that the worldwide population was down to around four
Speaker 1: or five thousand was because of uncontrolled hunting, all right,
Speaker 1: trophy hunting. All the countries that had polar bears, in
Speaker 1: other words, had Arctic sea ice parts, you know, exposures
Speaker 1: on their countries got together and they said, we need
Speaker 1: to do something about this. This is in like I say,
Speaker 1: the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, and
Speaker 1: our kin and they did, and our country too, I
Speaker 1: guess you could call them. Landmark regulations were passed, the
Speaker 1: Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, and
Speaker 1: that those banned any commercial hunting polar bears in the
Speaker 1: United States. It's stopped as of nineteen seventy two, when
Speaker 1: those when that legislation seventy three seventy two, when that
Speaker 1: legislation was passed. Natives Alaska natives can do it for special,
Speaker 1: specific cultural reasons, all right, but there has to be
Speaker 1: I mean, it has to be a good reason, all right.
Speaker 1: So as a result of that, polar bear populations started growing.
Speaker 1: So why are polar bears on the Threatened and Endangered
Speaker 1: Species Act and a Marine Mammals Protection Act if the
Speaker 1: population is growing, Because it is. There's somewhere between probably
Speaker 1: ten and fourteen thousand polar bears now in that what
Speaker 1: thirty four year span of time. The reason that they
Speaker 1: are considered threatened or endangered has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: their population at all. It has to do with habitat loss,
Speaker 1: and as the temperatures warm, both in the atmosphere and
Speaker 1: in the seawater, sea ice diminishes, they're threatened and endangered
Speaker 1: because they aren't going to have any place to live.
Speaker 1: I can give you a personal, a personal example of
Speaker 1: that when we were remember we talked about earlier one
Speaker 1: of the deepest well on the north slope twenty one
Speaker 1: thousand feet well, we found a couple of archaeological sites
Speaker 1: where the engineers wanted to put the herk strip for
Speaker 1: the Tna Lick Well site. And we're right out near
Speaker 1: the coast, and so we were excavating those to get
Speaker 1: them out of the way so they could go ahead
Speaker 1: and build a HIRK trip. And we were looking right
Speaker 1: out at Icy Cape, all right. And Icy Cape is
Speaker 1: kind of you come up through the Bearing straight all right,
Speaker 1: going north. Then you want to turn to go to Barrow,
Speaker 1: all right, to go to Alaska and Art of Canada.
Speaker 1: So you turn east, turn right up there, you go
Speaker 1: around Icy Cape, and then you go right up the
Speaker 1: coast to Barrow and Barter Island, and you know, you
Speaker 1: get into the Canadian Arctic. But Icy Cape was named
Speaker 1: for a reason. It was icy what happened very frequently.
Speaker 1: There was that the sea ice never cleared out, lasted
Speaker 1: all summer long, and so there was no way to
Speaker 1: get around the corner to get into the rest of
Speaker 1: the Arctic to the east. You couldn't get through there.
Speaker 1: The sea ice stayed there all summer, you know, it
Speaker 1: was there all winner and it was there all summer.
Speaker 1: That didn't happen every single summer, but it happened relatively frequently.
Speaker 1: When they were trying to develop Prudeo Bay. There were
Speaker 1: summers where all this stuff's coming up from Seattle on
Speaker 1: these huge barges, these huge module camp units and everything.
Speaker 1: They sat off icy cape all summer long until the winter,
Speaker 1: see I started to grow and went back to Barrow.
Speaker 1: They couldn't get through. The last year that I know
Speaker 1: that that happened was when we were digging Tunelik in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, because we were there from I think
Speaker 1: we were there through most August. By the before the
Speaker 1: end of August, you're starting to have ice grow again. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that ice never went out. It was everybody turned around
Speaker 1: and went back down to Seattle. So that happened, and
Speaker 1: I could be wrong, all right. The reason I remember
Speaker 1: it so graphically is because I was there watching it.
Speaker 1: I wasn't there for that purpose, but we just you know,
Speaker 1: just remember it. I mean we could see look out
Speaker 1: every day. It wouldn't foggy and you could see it.
Speaker 1: So what happens to these polar bears when that stops happening?
Speaker 1: All right? I mean that's just an example. That's just
Speaker 1: a place where you could see it, all right. It
Speaker 1: was easy to see. Well, if they don't have that
Speaker 1: sea ice exploit, it's going to get to a point
Speaker 1: sooner or later where their numbers are going to start dropping.
Speaker 1: There's just no way around it. As early as two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, a couple of my USTs colleagues had
Speaker 1: some weather cams set up and drew Point, which is
Speaker 1: about maybe fifteen miles west of Lonely. And when Frank
Speaker 1: went out to check the cameras in the summer, there's
Speaker 1: this polar bearer sow and two cubs on land and
Speaker 1: so this camera the camera's right on the edge of
Speaker 1: the of the Arctic Ocean right and in the background
Speaker 1: you can see the entire Arctic Ocean as far as
Speaker 1: you can see, not a spec of ice anywhere. And
Speaker 1: one of the cubs. In fact, I got a picture
Speaker 1: right here. I could show you one of the cubs.
Speaker 1: If you look at it is all dirty, brownish kind
Speaker 1: of because he's been down in the crevices of the
Speaker 1: front where the land is breaking off because of storm surges,
Speaker 1: because of climate change, because of the melting ice lenses,
Speaker 1: because of the climate change. He's down there groveling around
Speaker 1: looking for stuff to eat. And those polar bears are
Speaker 1: stuck there until the winter sea ice come. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're there from the time the sea ice seasonally disappears.
Speaker 1: If they're not on the ice, all right, If they're
Speaker 1: on if they're on the inside limit of the pressure ridges,
Speaker 1: all right, they form and they don't get out of
Speaker 1: there fast, just like that mom and her two kids.
Speaker 1: They're on land untill it's till winter comes again. And
Speaker 1: in most cases they're going to have a really hard
Speaker 1: time surviving because they're not terrestrially adapted in terms of hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean the things they eat your seals, basically.
Speaker 1: And that's why that statement by Lomberg is so disingenuous
Speaker 1: because it has nothing to do with the population numbers.
Speaker 1: It has the fact to do with We already know
Speaker 1: that these guys are on the downhill slide because pretty
Speaker 1: soon they aren't going to have what they need to survive.
Speaker 1: And that's it. What's your take on, um, what are
Speaker 1: your feelings about the Ambler Road? Whereas there's there's two
Speaker 1: there's two things about the Ambler Road. Ye tell people
Speaker 1: what it is to the State of Alaska wants to
Speaker 1: build the road. They want to build the road so
Speaker 1: that they can open the Ambler area for exploration and
Speaker 1: possible mining. Mining companies huge amounts precious metals. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you looked at it's like absurd amounts of precis The
Speaker 1: point is that the oil companies, after they discovered the
Speaker 1: biggest oil deposit in North America in Prudeo Bay, they
Speaker 1: built their own damn road, all right. The state didn't
Speaker 1: go into up to their ears in debt or beyond
Speaker 1: building a road to entice them. The oil companies knew
Speaker 1: that stuff was up there. I don't know they footed
Speaker 1: the bill for the road. Hell yeah, yeah. Now the government,
Speaker 1: the federal government, which most of that road goes through
Speaker 1: at least north of the Yukon River, all right, they
Speaker 1: gave them. They were selling them material from the material sites,
Speaker 1: you know, from these glacial things I was talking about.
Speaker 1: They were selling that stuff to him for I like
Speaker 1: about fifty cents a yard. If anybody here's ever bought gravel,
Speaker 1: you know, it sells for a hell a lot more
Speaker 1: than fifty cents a yard. And so the federal government
Speaker 1: was given him a break on it. But I mean
Speaker 1: they were still getting something out of all right. The
Speaker 1: state of Alaska wants to do that too. In the
Speaker 1: oil companies didn't need any enticement. They knew there was
Speaker 1: enough resource up there that they could build that they built.
Speaker 1: As I recall, they built that road predicated on the
Speaker 1: fact that oil at twenty dollars a barrel would pay
Speaker 1: for it an X number of years could have made
Speaker 1: that road in diamonds. And now, I mean there's other
Speaker 1: economics involved, but I mean, now, as a general you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so like it would have been worth it at twenty
Speaker 1: but they're still pulling oil. They were pulling the oil
Speaker 1: when it was one hundred dollars, all right. They figured
Speaker 1: the lifetime of the Trans Alaska Pipeline would be twenty years.
Speaker 1: It's into its fortieth year or now, all right. Now,
Speaker 1: granted they do decent maintenance on it, but they figured
Speaker 1: it'd be a goner after about twenty years, and it isn't.
Speaker 1: All right, they're still good Conical Phillips is just in
Speaker 1: the process of developing developing their willow prospect up in
Speaker 1: the patrolling reserve. They're going to drill one hundred two
Speaker 1: hundred wells off of five five locations at their approval
Speaker 1: of the Biden administration. Yeah, and it's all gonna go
Speaker 1: down the pipeline. So the point is that the state
Speaker 1: of Alaska wants to build this road so that the
Speaker 1: mineral companies will go in there and develop that area. Well,
Speaker 1: if the prospects are so great, how come to mineral
Speaker 1: companies aren't going in there to do it themselves, just
Speaker 1: like the oil companies did on the pipeline. That's the question,
Speaker 1: all right, But you have to have an attitude about it,
Speaker 1: the goals beyond what makes economic sense. As a person
Speaker 1: who spent their life in the Arctic, well, what I'm
Speaker 1: saying is, I'm not a lot of people aren't necessarily
Speaker 1: strong environmentalists, but they wonder why that same formula doesn't
Speaker 1: work for the mining companies that work for the oil
Speaker 1: company it's why should my state go to the trouble
Speaker 1: of building this road. In the expense of building this road,
Speaker 1: it's like betting on the come all right, and it
Speaker 1: probably would pay off, I would say that, But why
Speaker 1: should you give the guys a free reign, a free ride?
Speaker 1: Use your damn money. That's what you got it for.
Speaker 1: If you think it's so great, build a road, We'll
Speaker 1: give you permits, federal government will give you. Probably Park
Speaker 1: Service is still pout about it, but BLM would probably
Speaker 1: issue all the necessary permits. But if you want that
Speaker 1: and there's so much money to be made, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be afraid or reluctant to build the road yourself. I
Speaker 1: think that's what a lot of people think. So got
Speaker 1: you got that. You got that aspect of it, which
Speaker 1: which wasn't an aspect of the trans Alaska Pipeline road
Speaker 1: all right. The other aspect is that a road, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, is about it that has the greatest
Speaker 1: potential to create harm to the environment any other thing
Speaker 1: that would be associated with that prospect? Was that even
Speaker 1: on your radar when they were building the road up
Speaker 1: to Prudeo Bay, Like, was that like even a concern
Speaker 1: at that time that that the road would environmentally like damaging. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to say it was a huge concern,
Speaker 1: but it was a concern that was addressed by both
Speaker 1: the state, and it's a huge concern for the Ambler
Speaker 1: Road now. Yeah, well, because first of all, you got
Speaker 1: to cross Park Service land. That's one thing gates of
Speaker 1: the Arctic Um and that's pretty much a big no
Speaker 1: no nationwide. It's just like trying to drill for oil
Speaker 1: and the National art and the Artic Wildlife refuge Um.
Speaker 1: And uh so there's there's that aspect of it that
Speaker 1: people don't like as well. And I think that in
Speaker 1: the native the native community. I don't want to go
Speaker 1: into that too far, but I'm sure there is a
Speaker 1: lot of most of the local residential Native community that
Speaker 1: would be along that road is very probably not in
Speaker 1: favor of I don't know. I didn't go to any
Speaker 1: of the meetings because I'm an old XBLM guy and
Speaker 1: I've got all this experience and everything else, and I
Speaker 1: didn't want to go to any of those meetings and
Speaker 1: stand up and make some kind of a statement. And
Speaker 1: because I felt like it was somewhat it would be
Speaker 1: somewhat unfair and bias of me to do something like that,
Speaker 1: because I don't think any there was anybody there that
Speaker 1: could argue me off my stance, whatever it was, because
Speaker 1: I got too much experience. You're ready change topics again.
Speaker 1: I want to change topics again. Okay? Can we back
Speaker 1: up real quick? When you introduced the polar bear idea,
Speaker 1: you said that you have a bias. What was the bias?
Speaker 1: I was putting my stance in a biased form, expressing
Speaker 1: the l You were the author who wrote that. But
Speaker 1: I've heard that, I've heard of that viewpoint expressed by
Speaker 1: many people who don't want to be bothered by the
Speaker 1: inconveniences of climate issues and others. And I was I
Speaker 1: was laying out an expression of how it's how that
Speaker 1: is spun. Got it? Uh? When I met you long
Speaker 1: long ago, last time I saw you, twenty before I
Speaker 1: even came close to having kids, you were all excited,
Speaker 1: You're all worked up about some beads you had found.
Speaker 1: Oh well we didn't yes, and no, all right, we
Speaker 1: didn't find the original beads. Okay, okay, all right. This
Speaker 1: is a site called Punyak Point typically probably since we
Speaker 1: can use Ivatuk as a reference we have been. If
Speaker 1: you were at Ivatuk and you flew southwest in a helicopter,
Speaker 1: you could be at Tivolik Lake and Punyak Point in
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. In the nineteen fifties, there was an archaeologist
Speaker 1: by the name of Bill Irving who is getting his
Speaker 1: PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and his dad was
Speaker 1: a biologist and had been associated with the University of
Speaker 1: Alaska for a number of years and was doing some
Speaker 1: biologic surveys in that general area with his Eskimo assistant,
Speaker 1: Simon Penniak, and round a Tivolik Lake. They found in
Speaker 1: the process of their biological investigations, they found I think
Speaker 1: something like thirteen or fourteen archaeological sites. One of them
Speaker 1: was huge. It covered about from let's say the east
Speaker 1: end to the west end three hundred meters okay, three
Speaker 1: hundred yards fifty semi subterranean pitouse, semi subterranean house remains,
Speaker 1: and I mean it was obviously an area that had
Speaker 1: been used a lot, so he decided he wanted after
Speaker 1: his dad told him about it, he decided that he
Speaker 1: wanted to excavate that site for his PhD dissertation at
Speaker 1: the University of Wisconsin. So he went up there in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven with an Eskimo crew and they did
Speaker 1: a bunch of work and they found a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: and then I think he went back the next year
Speaker 1: found a little more. And I'm not going I'm not
Speaker 1: if I if I start going down or this rabbit
Speaker 1: trail of how come and why, I will be here forever.
Speaker 1: So all I'm going to say is fifty seven was
Speaker 1: essentially the last year he did anything. All right. He
Speaker 1: went back in sixty one or sixty yeah, sixty one
Speaker 1: and did some more work, and he came up with
Speaker 1: this um idea that he translated into a hypothesis of
Speaker 1: a pan Arctic culture called the the Arctic small Tool tradition.
Speaker 1: It stretched all the way from Alaska to Greenland and
Speaker 1: and predated, no, preday Eskimos. Not well, yeah, predated Eskimos
Speaker 1: because the aspect today we call that culture the Denby
Speaker 1: Flint Complex. That the dates on that that complex or
Speaker 1: that group of people existed between four thousand years ago
Speaker 1: and three thousand years ago. But the importance of it
Speaker 1: was that that that cultural group originated in Alaska and
Speaker 1: in a time span of less than probably two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years, had spread all the way to Greenland.
Speaker 1: I mean that with big news, very successful, and this
Speaker 1: the Arctic small tool tradition. He formulated it demonstrated it
Speaker 1: that it existed, and it has withstood the test of time.
Speaker 1: I mean Alaska all the way to Greenland. I mean
Speaker 1: that's a that's a long road. So any rate punic
Speaker 1: point is in the petroleum reserve. One of the things
Speaker 1: that Irving found, Now, when he was doing this, it
Speaker 1: was just radiocarbon dating was just starting to be accepted
Speaker 1: by archaeologists. It had been being used for maybe ten years,
Speaker 1: and not used to widely for one reason, it required
Speaker 1: a tremendously large sample to do it all right back
Speaker 1: in the early days, a large sample of datable material.
Speaker 1: So any rate he got I think only one or
Speaker 1: two radiocarbon dates. But what I'm gonna say, one of
Speaker 1: the things that he found when he was excavating there
Speaker 1: were some blue glass beads, and he was he found
Speaker 1: those blue glass beads and occupations were much more recent
Speaker 1: than the Arctic small tool tradition. Okay, but the site
Speaker 1: had been used for you know, five four or five
Speaker 1: thousand years by different people. He thought that those beads
Speaker 1: were historic. So he thought that it was a historic occupation,
Speaker 1: that those Eskimo's probably got those beads from the whalers,
Speaker 1: you know, the whalers. They were trade beads, and they
Speaker 1: showed up camped on his old ass site and left
Speaker 1: the stuff. But they showed up all all in eastern
Speaker 1: North America during the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds and
Speaker 1: in sights you know, occupied by um Native peoples. And
Speaker 1: so I mean, he just said, Okay, there must have
Speaker 1: been a historic occupation here, period of historic occupation, or
Speaker 1: those beads wouldn't be here. He also found some cold
Speaker 1: hammered native copper. And there's a lot of raw native
Speaker 1: copper in Alaska, and you know, the native people have
Speaker 1: used it for years. You know, you find nuggets and
Speaker 1: streams instead. I mean you just pound it into whatever
Speaker 1: you want, all right, I mean, that's nothing new. So anyway,
Speaker 1: Irving just said, yeah, in his dissertation, Yeah, there's some
Speaker 1: glass beads there, so there must be a historic occupation. Well,
Speaker 1: any rate, that site is in the patrolling reserve, and
Speaker 1: because as a patrolling reserve, archaeologists, there was money available
Speaker 1: to go back and look at sites that had had
Speaker 1: some environmental degradation just because of natural causes. At a
Speaker 1: typical like when the ice goes out at the end
Speaker 1: of the winter, the prevailing winds blow these huge chunks
Speaker 1: of ice right up into that site. I mean, it
Speaker 1: just bulldozes that HiT's the bank right at the edge
Speaker 1: of the of the of the lake, and it just
Speaker 1: peels the tunderback. You know, we're talking about chunks of
Speaker 1: ice that weigh five six hundred pounds. Prevailing wind just
Speaker 1: blowing him right off into it, and as a result,
Speaker 1: the site's being severely impacted, you know, but by natural forces.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, give me some money. I'll go
Speaker 1: up there and you know, with Irving's dissertation in hand,
Speaker 1: and see how much damage is actually occurring there, and
Speaker 1: you know what the loss is, and how concerned we
Speaker 1: have to be about this very very famous and important
Speaker 1: archeological site. You know, the instigation of the article small
Speaker 1: tool tradition. See if we need to consider doing something
Speaker 1: about this, if there is something or first of all,
Speaker 1: seeing if there is something we can do. So we
Speaker 1: go up there and and I was you know, one
Speaker 1: of another archaeologist in our office. I asked him to
Speaker 1: come up and help me with it at Robin Mills.
Speaker 1: And so we're running this thing. I got an excavation crew,
Speaker 1: I got some of my old buddies there. Dale Slaughter
Speaker 1: was there again, and Rick Ernier was there again, and
Speaker 1: so any rate, because Irving had found the copper, all right,
Speaker 1: I said, the first thing let's do, let's do a
Speaker 1: metal detector survey of this area, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: this big site area, and see what we can find,
Speaker 1: all right, Because what we wanted to do is as
Speaker 1: much uninvasive exploration is that we didn't want to go
Speaker 1: around digging holes everywhere. So when we got this one
Speaker 1: hit on the on the metal detector, we go and
Speaker 1: we dig this thing and you know, just just a hole,
Speaker 1: this big, all right, and down underneath the vegetation, in
Speaker 1: other words, underneath the sod level into the soil about
Speaker 1: five centimeters deep, all right, which is deeper than any
Speaker 1: historic stuff would be. We find this little tumble of
Speaker 1: two iron pendants, two silver or two copper rings, and
Speaker 1: three blue glass beads in this little pile, and one
Speaker 1: of the copper bangles circular thing there's no way the
Speaker 1: natives could weld anything. So what they did when they
Speaker 1: made bangles out of raw copper, cold hammered it. They
Speaker 1: bang on it and they make this crescent and keep
Speaker 1: banging it and banging it and banging it until it
Speaker 1: was circular. Then they bang it some more. So those
Speaker 1: two ends overlapped. Yeah, wed not the weld of it, no,
Speaker 1: join it. And then they wrapped it with with willow twine.
Speaker 1: Keep it shut. Then you can string it on something
Speaker 1: like a necklace or a bracelet. Right, one of those
Speaker 1: bangles had. First of all, we interpreted this thing as
Speaker 1: a as an object of personal adornment. Three beads, two bangles,
Speaker 1: you know, two um the iron things pendance, And obviously
Speaker 1: it was personal adornment. But we could date this thing
Speaker 1: because it had this organic twine wrapped around it. We
Speaker 1: could see fourteen dated and we when we dated it,
Speaker 1: it said it dated to about sixty years earlier than
Speaker 1: Columbus's original landing at Hispaniola. So it's how do we
Speaker 1: get glass beads made in Europe? Well, now we said,
Speaker 1: we said venice, all right, but by this certain method
Speaker 1: that wasn't even really maybe not supposed to exist at
Speaker 1: that time in an archaeological site in Alaska in the
Speaker 1: lower forty eight. None of this type of beads. There's
Speaker 1: a whole hierarchy, you know, thing of beads with all
Speaker 1: these numbers associated with them. So archaeology, these are two
Speaker 1: a forty beads, and there are none of those beads
Speaker 1: found west of the Rocky Mountains. All of them are
Speaker 1: found in the East, and they date fifteen hundreds and
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. Okay, no, no more recently than that, all
Speaker 1: post Columbus. No that I mean Columbus is fourteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: The stuff in the East is the people from Europe
Speaker 1: colonizing the Uniteds. Yeah, okay, but none of it is
Speaker 1: in the West, where colonization appeared took place later, all right.
Speaker 1: So it's like the first thing is how come these
Speaker 1: beads are in Alaska? Well, and then it's like, how
Speaker 1: come there's no historic occupation at Puny Point. But we've
Speaker 1: got these beads that everywhere they exist in the New World,
Speaker 1: they're in a historic context, you know, I mean, how
Speaker 1: do we resolve this? So neither Robin nor I were
Speaker 1: bead people, you know, I mean, I dug a few sites,
Speaker 1: you know, historic sites where their beads occurred. And everybody,
Speaker 1: I mean, we never researched beads at all. I mean
Speaker 1: we just didn't, all right, So we had to we
Speaker 1: had to learn. So we found a couple of real
Speaker 1: bead researchers and we said, hey, we've got these beads.
Speaker 1: What can't you tell you know we I mean, we
Speaker 1: hired them, all right, say to look at these beads
Speaker 1: and write us a report, which they did, and the
Speaker 1: report said that these are two a forty glass beads.
Speaker 1: They're made by a process called uspa ao that was
Speaker 1: developed in Europe, and there are amongst the earliest beads
Speaker 1: made by that process, and we think they came There
Speaker 1: are a lot of little teeny tiny bubbles in the glass,
Speaker 1: and we think they were pretty sure. They were made
Speaker 1: in like the Netherlands and France and maybe a few
Speaker 1: other European places, and they were made specifically as trade
Speaker 1: beads to trade with native populations in Africa and the
Speaker 1: New World and so on and so forth. But they
Speaker 1: were always made during a historic period, all right, well,
Speaker 1: historic period and the Old World goes back way for
Speaker 1: But what what I'm saying is they were made in
Speaker 1: a period that was not historic over here. These cultures
Speaker 1: were still prehistoric in a last, all right, and so
Speaker 1: it's how did they get there? So Robin and I
Speaker 1: knew that first of all, this this methodology was developed
Speaker 1: in Venice, all right, and that Venetian Venice was one
Speaker 1: of the was the primary trader of the eastern Mediterranean,
Speaker 1: all right. They traded with a lot of the cultures
Speaker 1: you know in the in the Near East, all right,
Speaker 1: the Turks and Arabs and stuff like this that are
Speaker 1: on that far eastern coast of the Mediterranean. And there
Speaker 1: was no Italy then. There were just these city states,
Speaker 1: and Venice was one of the most powerful city states
Speaker 1: in that area. They had a big navy. Well anyway,
Speaker 1: so we figured, okay, if the Venetians developed up this
Speaker 1: method of making beads, I'm not going to go into it,
Speaker 1: but it's very distinctive if you see that, you know,
Speaker 1: all right, at least originally that had to come from Venom.
Speaker 1: And we said, so, if they're trading, they have these
Speaker 1: caravans going on the Silk Road, okay, And that's a
Speaker 1: very generic term. There are a whole bunch of roads.
Speaker 1: And you just called all those roads together going to
Speaker 1: the east the Silk Road. All right. Well, if a
Speaker 1: lot of those are going through Aboriginal territory in the
Speaker 1: old world, and these traders aren't going to miss a beat.
Speaker 1: So they're taking a bunch of these trade beads with them,
Speaker 1: and it's getting into the native community and gets into
Speaker 1: the Drizzles down into the Rush and far East, and
Speaker 1: these guys into the Eskimo habitations there, and these guys
Speaker 1: are trading with Alaska Eskimos and the Bearing Straight and
Speaker 1: so back and forth. And that's how we figured those
Speaker 1: beads got to Alaska and the main well you could
Speaker 1: call at the back door, but it's not really it's
Speaker 1: really yeah, it's really not. Because the Aboriginal cultures have
Speaker 1: been trading each other back and forth across the Bearing
Speaker 1: Straight for thousands of years, all right, But so this
Speaker 1: and they're still doing it at this time. And you
Speaker 1: get these beads into their you know, they're getting them
Speaker 1: from the from the traders, just like they're supposed to.
Speaker 1: And then they're bringing some of them across the Bearing
Speaker 1: Straight to the Alaska and ask him a trade fairs
Speaker 1: on our side of the Bearing strait. That's how they
Speaker 1: got there, all right. But we still had demonstrate the
Speaker 1: age of these things because in our article, if you
Speaker 1: look at it as say pre Columbian presence of Venetian
Speaker 1: glass trade beads in Arctic Alaska. So how do we
Speaker 1: demonstrate this. One of the things we did was we
Speaker 1: had the beads analyzed by through a process called neutron
Speaker 1: neutron activation instrumental neutron activation. And what that does is
Speaker 1: it gives you a fingerprint of the elements that are
Speaker 1: present in the glass. And our beads up up in
Speaker 1: Alaska matched the same elemental pattern as the beads in
Speaker 1: Northeastern America did the same kind of bead. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the genesis of these beads is the same. That doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that they were made in Venice, but it means
Speaker 1: that they had to be made the same place these
Speaker 1: other beads were made. Okay, so you know that, you know,
Speaker 1: we start getting interested. Now. These beads that we've got
Speaker 1: an article Alaska are two a forty glass beads. That's
Speaker 1: their you know, name in the archaeological register, and they
Speaker 1: have a date on them that's pre Columbian. So but
Speaker 1: we've only got one date, right, and you can always
Speaker 1: have one date is nice, but if you really want
Speaker 1: to have your theory old water, you better had a
Speaker 1: couple other corroborating. So anyway, one of the things we
Speaker 1: also wanted to do up on your point was excavate
Speaker 1: one of these semi subterranean house remains that Irving had
Speaker 1: never touched, okay, and to see exactly what was going
Speaker 1: on in all right, because all our evidence said there's
Speaker 1: no historic occupation, there's no period of historic occupation here. Irving,
Speaker 1: who didn't really do much dating, all right and was
Speaker 1: working in more of mixed context, just assumed because there
Speaker 1: were glass beads, that there was a historic occupation of
Speaker 1: the site. So anyway, we were excavating House eleven, well,
Speaker 1: our outwood we called House eleven. We excavated down onto
Speaker 1: the floor near the hearth, and guess what we found more,
Speaker 1: We found a half of a glass bead. All right.
Speaker 1: The house had only had one episode of use because
Speaker 1: there was only one floor layer in the house. Because
Speaker 1: you live in one of those things during the winter
Speaker 1: and it's a wintertime occupation, all right. Everything gets from
Speaker 1: the house gets from the hearth, and the house gets
Speaker 1: chomped down into the floor. And I mean you can
Speaker 1: see that flip. The floor layer may only be this thick,
Speaker 1: but you can see that layer all right, because all
Speaker 1: the jump. What will happen subsequent to that is the
Speaker 1: reason there's an occupation there is because there's a willow
Speaker 1: patch next to that lake that has sufficient wood in
Speaker 1: it for two or three families to get through the
Speaker 1: winter on it. But after that winter, they aren't enough
Speaker 1: there anymore. So you got to wait about ten years
Speaker 1: before that willows renew themselves and somebody else will yields
Speaker 1: it again. In the meantime, all this stuff drifts into
Speaker 1: this abandoned house, and so the next time somebody inhabits it,
Speaker 1: they create another floor layer. But if I go in
Speaker 1: there and excavate it, I hit this floor layer, and
Speaker 1: I say, oh, here's here's the floor and these I
Speaker 1: went right through it, and then I hit this layer
Speaker 1: of no occupation at all, And then the next thing
Speaker 1: I knew, I hit the next layer. So I know
Speaker 1: if I only get one layer all right, that that's
Speaker 1: the only occupation of that house. And I know that
Speaker 1: the charcoal and that hearth directly relates to that floor
Speaker 1: and whatever that date is, that's how old that occupation is.
Speaker 1: That bead got smushed down into the floor. That date
Speaker 1: was fourteen hundred something. I can't remember. That's how old
Speaker 1: that damn beads. Okay, So this is why I'm getting
Speaker 1: back to the forensic Yeah, all right, that's why we're
Speaker 1: responsible for forensic science archaeologists. All right. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know that at any rate. So then
Speaker 1: we've we've got this, We've corroborated our our date on
Speaker 1: the on the bangal bead thing, right, I mean it's
Speaker 1: not exactly the same, but they overlap. Okay. A couple
Speaker 1: of years later, we're working at a place called Kenyak
Speaker 1: Sugvic where there was a huge karigi this is a
Speaker 1: men's house, huge bowlers this big, you know, and a
Speaker 1: huge circle um and there were there was it's another
Speaker 1: lake with Cariboo. The Cariboo came by their drive lines
Speaker 1: called the Nuxuk where the natives would you know, fill
Speaker 1: they'd be up build these stone lines every now and
Speaker 1: then set a stick up, tie a couple of feathers
Speaker 1: to it and a piece of skin so blow on
Speaker 1: the line and get all the cariboo coming down them,
Speaker 1: run them down into the lake, come out in their
Speaker 1: kayaks and lance the cariboo while they're in the lake.
Speaker 1: So there they and so there's sub semi subterranean houses there.
Speaker 1: We were excavating one of those because it was a
Speaker 1: little bit later than some of the others, all right,
Speaker 1: And we were water screening the stuff we were getting
Speaker 1: out of the houses because it was a little different
Speaker 1: than it was at Punic Point. It was a kind
Speaker 1: of mushy and so forth, and so we were putting
Speaker 1: the stuff in the screen and then pouring water over
Speaker 1: to print it out rather than shaking it, you know.
Speaker 1: Found another bead, so we but the trouble was that
Speaker 1: we couldn't tell if that was from the house or
Speaker 1: from the trash midden that was associated with the house,
Speaker 1: and that house had been occupied more than once. But
Speaker 1: but we took a date on an organic some organic substance,
Speaker 1: I don't remember what it was, from the same date
Speaker 1: as the bead, and it came out where it barely
Speaker 1: overlapped in terms of age with what we found it
Speaker 1: at Punyac Point. It was a little bit off, all right,
Speaker 1: but it was close, but we're still close in your terms.
Speaker 1: Before it was like fourteen hundred something, so it was,
Speaker 1: it was, it was more than that, maybe forty years off.
Speaker 1: All right, I should be able to say this right,
Speaker 1: but I can't so any rate. And it still wasn't
Speaker 1: what you would call a good date because there was
Speaker 1: a possibility it came out of the trash pit, and
Speaker 1: we couldn't absolutely say that. Even if the date was right,
Speaker 1: we couldn't say it was absolutely associated with that object. Well,
Speaker 1: in the meantime, one of the guys up at the
Speaker 1: museum had been doing this research on a certain period
Speaker 1: of time amongst a number of sites uh in the
Speaker 1: in the area that were related by time. And I
Speaker 1: can't remember exactly what it was, but when he did
Speaker 1: this the excavation, and i'm i'm, it was at a
Speaker 1: place called Lake Kayak. He found in a he found
Speaker 1: a two half beads, one half in one house, one
Speaker 1: half in the other house, and if you put them together,
Speaker 1: they made a single bead. Yeah, and the date on
Speaker 1: it overlap somewhat with the date that we had at
Speaker 1: Puny Point. And that was the only non native artifact
Speaker 1: found in either of those two houses. Every other artifact
Speaker 1: found him in. Those two houses were native made and
Speaker 1: dated earlier than the historic period. So now, all right,
Speaker 1: we had, like the three beads we found, we had
Speaker 1: a couple that Irving had found, although we didn't have them,
Speaker 1: So we found out what museum they were in, and
Speaker 1: we got in touch with them and said, hey, could
Speaker 1: you And Irving had found a couple bengals too, and
Speaker 1: Irving and so we got them all right, and on
Speaker 1: one of those bangles that was with Irving beads with
Speaker 1: willow wrapped up around the bengal all right, just like
Speaker 1: it had been we found. So we dated it and
Speaker 1: it came back about one hundred and fifty years too recent.
Speaker 1: But what happened when we unwrapped that stuff was that
Speaker 1: that bangle they never hammered it up far enough so
Speaker 1: that it overlapped when they wrapped it up, So they
Speaker 1: put a piece of willow across that gap to close
Speaker 1: the gap and then wrapped it up, and we dated
Speaker 1: that piece of willow and it matched our date. So
Speaker 1: now we've got a couple of little beads are blowing
Speaker 1: up people's idea of it. So anyway, that's the whole
Speaker 1: background that thing, all right, So then beds. So then
Speaker 1: we said, okay, all right, we said we've got good
Speaker 1: enough radiocarbon data here on these beads that say they
Speaker 1: could well be pre Columbian. We also know that the
Speaker 1: glass that those glass beads, they were some of the
Speaker 1: earliest made by the Aspiao process, and there's a really
Speaker 1: good chance that they were made in Venice, all right.
Speaker 1: And and we also know that you know, you've heard
Speaker 1: of Akham's razor. A razor is a It's like the
Speaker 1: simplest explanation of something is almost always the right one.
Speaker 1: That's my theory of automotive automotive mechanics, so any rate,
Speaker 1: what's it called. So what I'm saying is the the
Speaker 1: simplest way that those beads could have gotten there with
Speaker 1: overland from the old world. And so that was the
Speaker 1: general hypothesis, well supported hypothesis of our article, and it
Speaker 1: got public, all right, a lot of people disagreed with it.
Speaker 1: There have been other developments since then that show that
Speaker 1: we were probably more right than we you know, we're
Speaker 1: giving credit for but we don't have time. That could
Speaker 1: come another day, and people that want to argue, like
Speaker 1: the perspective is that. I mean, what's groundbreaking about it
Speaker 1: is that the world, that the New world was connected
Speaker 1: with the old world in some like unexpected way, and
Speaker 1: that materials could somehow flow from like prior to Columbus,
Speaker 1: materials were flowing from Italy into artic Alaska. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there was a chain of like presumably discussion and exchange
Speaker 1: that would have led to that at a time when
Speaker 1: people thought that that was hundreds of years away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it said no, I got it from a dude.
Speaker 1: He was white. Yeah, Like, let's uh, like, let's assume
Speaker 1: you're right, bees showed up whatever fourteen hundred, Um, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure we're really right, right, But but what would
Speaker 1: have been like after that point, what would have been
Speaker 1: the next point at which those people could have been
Speaker 1: exposed to someone who could have given those them beads
Speaker 1: that like, if they hadn't come from that direction to
Speaker 1: this to this day, there are the only two a
Speaker 1: forty beads that exist in Alaska. Okay, So that was it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there an so they wouldn't run. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: the Russians brought in, But none of this, none of
Speaker 1: these things, you know, next time he's on he needs
Speaker 1: to tell you about the old crazy Roosky shotgun. We
Speaker 1: need to have them on like five more times. I
Speaker 1: feel like we could because they got a crazy Roosky shotgun.
Speaker 1: And I think you guys found some crazy old traps too,
Speaker 1: well they were they're not old. Well, there were a
Speaker 1: good a cash of about fifty or sixty steel traps.
Speaker 1: We didn't get to all those. Now I've got them.
Speaker 1: We didn't get to We didn't get to all the
Speaker 1: good wildlife stuff, the moose stuff, and the dude. You
Speaker 1: just need to come for a week next time. You
Speaker 1: need to. Yeah, like your buddy Meltzer, he had to
Speaker 1: come on twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Long there's no more
Speaker 1: pandemics that prevent you from going anywhere for three years. Yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I would. I would be willing to come back. But
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot there's you know, I kind
Speaker 1: of bumbled my way through this because I didn't really
Speaker 1: I could have made myself a little clearer on some
Speaker 1: of these things. There was no missing clarity. Yeah okay,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying that, Um, I'd be happy to
Speaker 1: come back and talk some more about this stuff. Because
Speaker 1: on the bead thing, there's there's stuff that we have
Speaker 1: done since then, I gotta tell you, but yeah, you
Speaker 1: guys tied it into Marco Polo. The biggest thing of
Speaker 1: this was that when the University of Alaska put this out,
Speaker 1: you know, as a press release, I mean the press
Speaker 1: pit up on this. I stumbled into it and it
Speaker 1: was I was like, I already know about them beads. Though,
Speaker 1: the best part of this whole thing that I got
Speaker 1: the biggest kick out and we did numerous interviews and yeah,
Speaker 1: La Parisian and Paris did this fifteen minute video interview
Speaker 1: and they had an artist do all this stuff to
Speaker 1: make it all classy in her I mean, it was amazing.
Speaker 1: But the best thing I want to make two points here.
Speaker 1: The best thing was that I love the most was
Speaker 1: that our beads, which were on the front cover of
Speaker 1: American Antiquity, the volume it was published in, appeared on
Speaker 1: the front page of the Venice newspaper. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And the other thing was because it got so much
Speaker 1: publicity in the press. Some guys that have been researching glass,
Speaker 1: some you know, scientists researching glass produced in Venice their
Speaker 1: Italian for at least the last thirty thirty five years
Speaker 1: got in touch with us and said, would you be
Speaker 1: willing to do laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
Speaker 1: on the glass on those glass beads, which is a
Speaker 1: different thing than than than we had done than instrumental
Speaker 1: neuton activation analysis, because we think that there's a good
Speaker 1: chance those beads were made in Venice. So we did,
Speaker 1: and we got a slightly different part using that other
Speaker 1: method and one of the researchers, and so we gave
Speaker 1: all our information to the Italian researchers and we're in
Speaker 1: the process of deciding how we're going to handle this.
Speaker 1: So this is a news flash. Sandro says that given
Speaker 1: the results of that, you know study, that the beads
Speaker 1: were probably made in Venice. Noah, So that's the next chapter.
Speaker 1: You need to find the ancestor of the man that
Speaker 1: made him. That's impossible. But the point is, and I'll
Speaker 1: make this last point, Robin and I are breed spacelists.
Speaker 1: We didn't know anything to beat about beads anything else.
Speaker 1: What we did was we took the evidence we had
Speaker 1: and we went what it told us. Even though we
Speaker 1: were swimming upstream on this thing with the beads and
Speaker 1: everything else. We just said, Okay, this says this, So
Speaker 1: that's the simplest answer is probably it is this, this
Speaker 1: is this, and we arrived at this. That looks like
Speaker 1: now with this new research, it's it's going to be
Speaker 1: sufficiently proven it's true just because we followed the lines
Speaker 1: of every and in your field of research, do you
Speaker 1: like do some do you know some folks who tend
Speaker 1: to get maybe distracted by what's not the simplest explanation,
Speaker 1: like they look they want to look for things that
Speaker 1: are some crazy. I think what happens is if you don't,
Speaker 1: if you can't come up with a pretty reasonable answer,
Speaker 1: then you start casting about looking for something else and
Speaker 1: you can't find And so every time you do a
Speaker 1: new cast about you're moving a little further away from
Speaker 1: from the chances of it being react. That's a that's
Speaker 1: the path that leads to um that they're bigfoot beats exactly.
Speaker 1: UFOs dropped them. Hey you know bigfoot guy, the big
Speaker 1: foot guy. I don't know about the big foot Well
Speaker 1: the guy at Washington State University. Oh yeah, Grover Krantz. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I went to graduate school at Washington State University and
Speaker 1: my first year. My first year there was Grover Krantz's
Speaker 1: first year as a professor there, so and we all
Speaker 1: thought he was crazier. Oh man, it was good to
Speaker 1: have you on. Uh, get that book out, hold the
Speaker 1: book up. Oh you can get that online again. I
Speaker 1: was gonna yeah. Just just all you gotta do is
Speaker 1: say masa site, uh maza se Paleo Indians above the
Speaker 1: Arctic Circle. Yeah, Michael cons and it'll take you right,
Speaker 1: It'll take you right to the BLM wood page and
Speaker 1: you can download that whole thing. But you can also
Speaker 1: just go goal m I K E K U n
Speaker 1: Z and mostly like University of Alaska, right, because you
Speaker 1: have published a ridiculous number of journal scientific journal articles
Speaker 1: on all things from ancient polar bear, brown bear hybridization too.
Speaker 1: I don't even know so exactly people of Arctic archaeology.
Speaker 1: People can spend the rest of their lives reading Mike's words. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you made it down. I'm glad you're able
Speaker 1: to provide some context to what your your former colleagues
Speaker 1: had to say about proper normanclature. Yeah. Um, thanks man.
Speaker 1: Oh and everybody check I'll remember that email. Your chet
Speaker 1: k questions too. So you got etiquette questions, which we
Speaker 1: call chetick questions, email them too. Why don't we have
Speaker 1: our own like what we'll get it for email to
Speaker 1: them eat or at them eater dot com. No, it's
Speaker 1: meat eat the meat eater at themmeater dot com as
Speaker 1: it should be subject line chattkit. We'll read the whole
Speaker 1: episode on addicott chatt ict. So we need your questions, yep.
Speaker 1: And if it's uh, if today is like April third
Speaker 1: or April fourth, then great. But if it's April after
Speaker 1: April fourth, don't bother. It's too late. I don't care
Speaker 1: what the hell date it is. Go and pre order
Speaker 1: our new kids activity book, Catch a Crayfish Count the Stars. Um,
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Speaker 1: Count Stars four, said children. And raise him right all right, everybody,
Speaker 1: thank you, Oh seal Ram shine like silver in the sun,
Speaker 1: right on, all right, on alive on sweetheart. We're done,
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