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Ep. 427: The OG of Archaeology · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to Hunt podcast,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by First Light creating proven
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: For every hunt, first Light, Go farther, stay longer. Holy cow.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Mike Couns is here. Archaeologist and paleontologists who I knew.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: You could probably tell me the exact date we met
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Mike from your little h Yeah, June twenty eighth, two
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: thousand and six. There you have it. I'll never forget it.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Archaeologist and paleontologists when we had If you go back
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: to an episode episode three h six, um one of
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: many affiliations of Mike Couns, University of Alaska and the BLM,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: and I knew the Bureau Land Management. I knew him
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: in his Bureau of Land Management capacity when he was
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: directing a bunch of archaeological work. And also like all
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: aircraft in the Arctic in the National Patrol and Reserve Alaska,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: which if you read the news a lot, you're probably
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: reading a little bit about that place lately. An episode
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: three or six of this podcast. We had an episode
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: called an Alder scholt Hellhole in which we interviewed some
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: of Mike's colleagues. You know they're not here. I'm gonna
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: say this because we couldn't get Mike. Does that make
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: you feel better? It was like getting the V. It
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: was like having the VP. Like you're like the news
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: and the President. K You're like, oh, I guess we'll
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: take the VP. Like when you see the VP on
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the news. They couldn't get the president. So we had
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: we had Mike. We had Dan and Pam doctor Pamela
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Groves and Daniel Mann. Dan Man. Yeah, we had him
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: on and on that episode. Why couldn't you get Mike?
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: That episode? Because Mike when the beginning, when when the
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: COVID began, he said he's not gonna go anywhere until
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: COVID ends, which turned into like a year's long thing.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: And then he's got all these other reasons why he
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: doesn't want to go anywhere. He's kind of like he's
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: kind of I don't know that. I mean, I don't know.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: I'm getting the hermit. I get a hermit vibe off him. Yes,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: he likes to be in the Arctic. Um. So we
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: had him on. I don't remember this, but apparently we
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: called Mike cons the It's good We called him the
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Forrest Gump of archaeology, to which he took to which
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: we have to do some clarifications. He had wrote it
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: after that episode and said, yes, I did know this
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: is a correspondent between him and Krinn. He said, yes,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I did know that Pam and Dan had done an
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: episode with Steve, and yes, I have listened to that episode.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Comments about me by Dan, Pam and Steve made me
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: sound like some benevolent, benabulous creature that wandered the north
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: slope dolling out helicopters to researchers. I also found out
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: that my old buddy David Meltzer has been on twice.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: I haven't yet listened to the Meltzer episodes. I don't
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: suppose he told you that I started my archaeological career
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis Type site, while he was
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: still in grade school. So uh so, Krin suggested that
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: rather than calling him the Forrest Gump of archaeology, is
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: the Godfather of archaeology or the og of archaeology, You're
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: just like archaeology comma og people, people, people know you.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Do you want to know what I was called when
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: the last twenty years I was ad blm up in
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: the patrol em Reserve. No, I do want to know, Okay,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Meltzer I think coined this the MASSI a group of
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: native group in in Africa. They're prestoral and the social
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: standing and a wealth of any individual family is measured
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: by the number of cattle they have, all right, So
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: I think it was Meltzer decided that I had control
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: of more helicopters on the north Slope than anybody else,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: and therefore I was the most important man on the
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: north slope. And as I recall, I think it might
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: have been somebody else christened to me the Emperor of
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: the North and the King of the West. You know,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: I got it. As a first question, this is I'm
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: bringing this one up first because then we're going to
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: touch on a couple things that we're going very quickly
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: get back. But I'm bringing this one up first because
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: this one just as a free standing question. You told
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  Speaker 1: me a story. Well, first of I'll let you set
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: the scene. I spent time and we'll get to this.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: I spent time with Mike cons and some other researchers
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: in on the north slope of the Brooks Range, and
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: we were surveying the ground for projectile points, and there
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: was a bit of interest then in um looking for
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: evidence remains interest with interest at the time of looking
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: for evidence of you know who, possibly the first Americans
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: right who had crossed the baring Land Bridge. You had
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: once said to me, this is not the question. You
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: had said to me something like ony, on June twenty fourth,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: the mosquitoes will be here. If that was a date
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: on June twenty third. On June twenty second, there are
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: no mosquitos. June twenty third, I go like, oh wow,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: mosquito on my arm and smack it. On June twenty four.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Holy shit, it would we would have. We would eat
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: in a wall tent at night, and the first thing
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: you would do is going and bomb it, like bug
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: bomb the wall tent. And I'm not joking. These guys
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: would go in with a broom and a dust pan
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: to sweep, and they would sweep up with legit dust
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: pan of mosquitos and throw them out the door, and
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: then you'd sit down and eat. It sounds like a
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: beautiful place. You've never seen anything it's like maddening. It's
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: daylight all the time. The sun just goes around over
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: your head. They don't go by the activities are not
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: governed by time of day. They're governed by wind speed.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: So three in the morning wind dies down. All right,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: it's you don't know what way is up, Mike? Did you?
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  Speaker 1: Did you have people that would get kind of squirrely
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: up there because of those the biggest, the biggest problem.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: Most of our crews were composed of undergraduate or graduate
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: archaeology students from various universities, and the thing that seemed
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: to bother them the most was the eternal daylight. Oh yeah,
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: and I and they said, well, how do you sleep?
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I just close my eyes and go
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: to sleep. But most of them would like tie a
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: T shirt around their eyes or something like that. Yeah,
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: and that was the bigger The other thing is, and
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: I'll interject this here. When I was talking with a
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: prospective crew member on the phone, you know, like they
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: lived in Maryland or you know, texar Cana or someplace,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: and I would one of the things I always told
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: them was that you could have something happen to you
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: where you are now. And because you have access to
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: an ambulance in a hospital, it doesn't matter. It's something
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: they could take care of. And fifteen minutes. If something
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: happens to you out here, I'd be lucky to be
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: able to get you out of here in twenty four hours.
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  Speaker 1: Even if I had the helicopter sitting on the ground
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  Speaker 1: and the weather was was, you know, on its ass,
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: you couldn't go in. So just keep in mind that
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: something as simple as almost a hangnail that can't do
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: any damage to you. In civilization, you could die from
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: up here, So consider that before you tell me if
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: you really want to come up here. So let me
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: ask you my freestanding question. Now, I've tried to tell
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: this story dozens of times, but I don't know the details,
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: so I don't know how to end the story. You
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: told me something to the effect of that you were
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: flying along in a helicopter with a pilot and you
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: saw an Arctic fox run into the carcass of a
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: beached whale. You advised your pilot to tap the whale
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  Speaker 1: with the landing gear of the helicopter, and how many
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  Speaker 1: foxes came out of the whale. Well, it wasn't quite
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: like that. Okay, help me out. My colleague Dale Slaughter,
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  Speaker 1: who was with me when we found the MASA site
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  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, I was working on his site
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  Speaker 1: for his PhD dissertation at a place called the Sharrock
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: up on the Arctic coast between Windwright and Piered Bay,
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  Speaker 1: and the California gray whale had washed up on the
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  Speaker 1: beach and so the Arctic foxes had drilled into it.
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  Speaker 1: How big is a California gray whale? Approximately, it's not
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: one of the bigger whales, but it's it's probably, and
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: it depends on the age, but let's say this, and
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: was probably It was a matur one, all right, that's all.
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  Speaker 1: That's the best they can do, maybe twenty five feet long,
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  Speaker 1: something like that. So anyway, we had seen foxes go
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  Speaker 1: into it, and I just said, hey, let's go over
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  Speaker 1: and just bounce on this thing once and you know,
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  Speaker 1: let see what happened. And we did, and a whole
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  Speaker 1: bunch of foxes came running out of these out of
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  Speaker 1: the whale. You didn't count them, no, but there were
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: there are a lot of probably at least a dozen.
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  Speaker 1: So I think when I tell it, I'd like to
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  Speaker 1: say that thirteen came out that you can you can
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: tell that you can tell that story anyway you wont
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: I have. I have no particular feeling of priority on it. Okay,
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  Speaker 1: I got one more. I got one more free standing question,
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  Speaker 1: and then we're gonna get back into longer answer things.
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  Speaker 1: You told me one time, sitting there in our pile
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: of mesquite dead mosquitos. You're telling me about going to
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: some lake and how many casts in a row you
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: caught Lake Trout m Yeah, every cast. That was when
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: we were working on trans Alaska pipeline. It was in
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four or fiveborn really yeah, Okay, So anyway,
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: we um the surveyors and the archaeologists were out ahead
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: of everybody on that project, on any project like that,
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  Speaker 1: because we had to clear the right away for the
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  Speaker 1: actual construction work. And if the surveyors had lay laid out,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: and then we'd be right behind them looking for archaeological
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  Speaker 1: sites because the regulation said you can't. You can't, you know,
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  Speaker 1: on federal property or on any project that has federal
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  Speaker 1: money in it. You can't destroy cultural history, all right,
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  Speaker 1: So we were right behind them and that and we're
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: weight out in front of everything and that's one of
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: the reasons that just the archaeologists and the surveyors, we
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: were the only working group that could carry firearms because
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: we're out there totally by ourselves, and you do run
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: into grizzly bears pretty frequently. So it was one of
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: these things we'll let the archaeologists and the surveyors. Well,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: basically we said we aren't going out there if we
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: can't take our shotguns with it. So what was your question?
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: You took You took some number of casts. Yeah, okay,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: so rough didn't catch a lake tripe? Well that was
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: it at Kellic Lake? Okay? Where where where I started
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: digresses that almost everybody that ran the camp, like the
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: kitchen help and a guy running the sewer treatment plan,
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: and the guys in the small engine shop and etcetera, etcetera,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: never got out of camp ever, all right, And I mean, well,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: you're having all these adventures and they come up to us,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: you know, and dinner at dinner time, and they say, hey,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: could you take my camera when you go out tomorrow
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: morning and just circle camp once and take a couple
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: of you know, aerial photos of camp, you know, so
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: I can you know, take them home home with me,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: you know, when I go back on R and R
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: and we and we'd say yeah, sure, you know, but
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: we didn't always get exactly what they wanted. So we
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: had a helicopter, and what the pipeline guys were doing
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: with the big wheels in order to make sure that
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: they had enough helicopters, they would offer contracts to the
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: helicopter companies that said, we'll pay you for eighty hours
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: a month, regardless of how much we fly. If we
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: fly your ship ten hours, we'll still pay you for
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: eighty and so everybody, yeah, man, I want to get
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: one of those contracts. So I talked with the cap
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: manager one night and I said, hey, can we do
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: something about this. You know, these guys are stuck here
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: all the time. I said, how about if our pilot
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: says okay, he's okay with it, you know, because he's
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: on his free time, and after dinner at night, two
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: people can go with the pilot. He'll take them and
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: they take their own pictures and get what they want.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: One of the things that we were also doing at
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: the same time was taking people over to Akillic Lake.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: All right, we weren't supposed to do this, but we
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: did to fishing a lot of good lake trout over there.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: I don't think I can go to jail now because
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: that was, you know, forty five years ago. But at
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: any rate, there was one time and I had a
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: small crew over it at Killock Lake, which was about
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: fifteen miles over the mountains from Galbreath Lake, which was
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: where our headquarters with we had I think I had
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: five guys in that crew, and then I brought about
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: three more over and they were all fishing, and they
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: all I mean, this didn't just happen every time, but
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: at one moment everybody, they're nine people had a lake
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: trout on. They're standing about maybe ten yards apart, and
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: one of them thirty eight inches long and thirty three pounds. Wow. Yeah,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: that's a true story. Yep. I can't even name everybody
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: that was there, but so there was no consecutive cast.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: He might have forgotten. Oh no, no, they were not
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: everybody that what I just related. Only thing happened once.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: I mean when you had everybody. But there was never
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: a time with everybody standing on shore where at least
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: one or two or maybe three people had a fish on.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: I mean always, always, if all nine people cast out.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: At least two of them would get a fish on
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: every time. So because nobody ever really fished there before.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: I got a question about something you said earlier in
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: your story. How often would you be forced to reroute
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: that pipeline because you found something like was it common
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: or never? Did it never? And I'll tell you what.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: The regulations are bad in the sense that they never
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: work the way they're supposed to work, and in or
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: what we were supposed to do was protect any site
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: that was eligible for inclusion on the National Register of
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Historic Places. It takes about two years after the nomination
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: of a site to be included, to go through all
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: the paperwork and everything else before it can be put
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: on the register. Two years. We're out there building a pipeline, right,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: we can't wait two years for every time we find
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: a site. So what the senior archaeologist, the guy that
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: we worked for at the university decided was any site
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: that we find within the CZW, which was construction zone
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: with not the right of way, but the construction zone
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: with which is wider than the right way because you
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: have to have activities and sillary to the right away
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: all the time. If it was in the CZW. And
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: we found a site, we excavated it no differently than
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: we'd excavate any site, but we'd excavate it totally. We'd
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: have all the notes there, all the maps, everything else
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: in a museum, so that if there was to be
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: designation for inclusion on the annual Register, all the stuff
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: was there and we didn't have to wait two years
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: for it to happen and then say, Okay, you guys
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: can now move another quarter mile because we found another site.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: That how many sites did you excavate? Two dozens? Dale
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: and Dale Slaughter and I were in charge of the
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: northernmost section of the pipeline that ran from a place
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: called Linda Creek on the south side of the Continental
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Divide in the Brooks Range all the way to Prudo Bay,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: all right to the end of the It's about probably
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: close to two hundred and fifty three hundred miles. I
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: don't remember as long time ago, but I know that
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: we excavated in that area. Let me put it this way.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: I know that we discovered more than two hundred archaeological
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: sites within the cz W of the pipeline in that distance. Yeah,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: we didn't. We didn't excavate them all, all right, Well
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: you couldn't have. But that's about what we've found. What
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: was that light being out ahead of that out ahead
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: of that pipeline construction and you feel like he got
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: like this, uh I forget like the geopolitics of it
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: in the oil security, but you got like just this
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: monster coming behind you. Just rotal till on the ground, man,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: and that thing's gonna be there and you canna be
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: able to see it from outer space and it ain't
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: ever going away. We were usually far enough ahead so
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: that we didn't we didn't encounter we weren't working near
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: a lot of the equipment. But I do have one
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: picture where the engineers had decided they wanted to use
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: one material site that was different than the one they
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: had originally told us they were going to use. So
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: we went and looked at that and we found a
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: site there, and but it turned out that was the
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: only material site that was located so it could be
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: used on this one stretch of the road, and we
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: literally I've got a picture I took from the helicopter
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: of us on this stock of dirt and rocks sticking
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: up in the air like this, and about six scrapers
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: and five pushcats working all around us, and we're on
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: this little stock sticking up in the air about fifteen
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: twenty feet and these guys were mining all the stuff
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: all on us. So that's the only time that something
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: like that happened. Yeah, yeah, And what were you guys
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: working on there? Well, there was an archaeological site that
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: we had to excavate because they were gonna they were
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: gonna take everything that was in that in that Okay,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: I gotta step back. And then most of the material,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: all of the material came from the local surroundings, from
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: the you know, the countryside. Most of it came out
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: of glacial deposits, ancient glacial glacial deposits. Because when the
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: ice bladed, when it melted, when the glacier receded, all
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: the junkeet had scooped up all along its course for
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: thousands of years just stops right along with the ice.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: The ice melts out, and here's this big blob of
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: rock and soil and everything else that just gets set
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: down there. And it's big enough so it's actually a hill.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: You know, you can you can hike those. Sometimes you
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: hike in on them. It's like you're on an elevated sidewalk.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Well those are those are cames, okay, all right, which
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: which is what I was describing, but their linear cames,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: and sometimes they're small lateral moraines or eskers. But the
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: whole point of this thing is that all that stuff
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: was mined to make the road on that project, which
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: most people don't realize. There's actually it was almost like
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: two separate projects. There was the road that had to
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: be built north of the Yukon River, all right, and
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: then that road because the road had to be built
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: before you could even begin to build the pipeline. So
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: it was like two separate projects the project when we
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: built the road, and once the road was all built,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: then we could start the project to build the pipeline.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: And the project that does the most environmental damage by
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: far is the road, because you're mine and all this stuff,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: you're tearing up the country side, etc. Etc. So that's
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: where the bulk of the of the concern is is
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: on the road. Secondarily, after the project's done, still the
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: road provides most of the impact to the surrounding ecology
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: because that's where everybody's going up and down. Dust is
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: going all over the place. The main concern on the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: pipeline at the time was that it would disrupt caribou
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: migrations because caribou would never seen a pipe line, and
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: so they're gonna you got this eight hundred mile pipe.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Well I shouldn't say the pipeline is eight hundred miles long.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: But the part they were worried about was the first
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: three hundred miles, okay, with the artic Cariboo heard, Western
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: artic heard, and the porcupine heard. Like a lot of
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: talk about would they go under it, would they cross it?
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: Because they don't go understuff. Well, I got lots of
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: pictures of caribou all nestled down in the shade of
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: the pipeline taking a break. Okay, now, because that is
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: is that like how people will tell you that the
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: developments are great for muldier because sometimes there's a mulder
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: in their yard. Well, we're laying next to us. Yeah,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: go ahead, Yeah, Well there used to be a thousand there,
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: now there's two. And yes, they're in your yard. Yeah,
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: Now that's there by mean that you're subdivisions a good mulderer.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: That's a little different, all right. What the concern was
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: legitimate at first because this had never been done before,
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: all right, and you got oh sure, yeah. I'm not
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: trying to downplay the concern. The western caribou heard at
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: that time was probably about two hundred and fifty thousand animals.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Porcupine heard was probably even a little bigger. But if
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: they couldn't migrate to their various seasonal locations, then I
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: was going to have a tremendous impact on caribou. And
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: at that time, more so than now, a lot of
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: the native communities still relied very, very heavily on the
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: environment to provide them with their food and so forth.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: And what it turned out to be was like anything else.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, wildlife biologists no knew this, but it had
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: never been demonstrated with caribou. If if you give the
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: animals enough time, they'll acclimate to almost anything, all right,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: as long as they don't associate any bad, harmful occurrence
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: with whatever it is that's there, all right. So if
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: the pipelines there and nobody's shooting at them and killing
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: them and doing this or that to disturb them, sooner
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: or later, they're gonna get used to it. And you know,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: one of them is gonna say, hey, Fred, you see
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: that shade? There were two hundred miles from a tree.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: We got shade. Now, oh yeah, let's go wide down
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: under it. And so is that why they initially not initially?
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Is that why they had the five mile buffer on
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: either side for hunting. Yes, that's a simple answer. Yes,
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: to make it not to not instill paranoia around that,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: not to not instill paranoia, but not to that road
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: would provide access to hunt. In other words, it eliminates
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: fair chase to a degree. All right, That's that's the
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: basic thing. In other words, not eliminates, well, enforces a
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: definition of it. Well yeah, yeah, but what I mean
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: it eliminates the concept of fair chase. If you have
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: these guys all lined up, you know, taking it easy someplace,
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: and you get out of your veiling and go and
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: blow away three of them, all right, that's not fair chase,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: all right? And almost all phishing game regulations anywhere are
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: based on fair chase. In other words, you can't you
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: can't have an edge that's unfair and will ecologically threaten
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: the the herd or you know, the population and put
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: it into some kind of danger or something. What's in
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: your career, what's the most care but you ever saw
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: at anyone given time. Well, you were out at Udicoc
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Udicot camp. Um, it was probably in It was fairly
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I'd say it's like two thousand nine or ten. We
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: had a heard come through Udicoc heading east. They were
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: about a quarter of a mile wide and about two
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: and a half miles long. Mm, so there, I mean
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I never figured it out, but there had to be
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: somewhere on the order of somewhere between thirty and forty
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: thousand and Yeah. That's unbelievable. What time of year it
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: was in the fall? No, I to take it back,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: It wasn't well, no, I was into fall for up there. Okay,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: late summer for here. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Uh. That's
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: not far from the MASA site. Yeah, that place was,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: I mean that was a Uticac Uticoc. What's your guys camp?
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: That was by that MAZA site Ivachech Okay, Yeah. The
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: maze is six miles south of Ivotech. Udicoc is one
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: hundred and forty miles west of Ivotech. Got it, So
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: it's a long ways away. What were you doing? Explain
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: when you were doing the day you found the MAZA
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: site and what it was that you found. Um, well,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Dale and I had gotten dropped off by the helicopter
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: because what we were doing at the time, almost without exception,
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: all of the wells we drilled on that project. And
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: you got to remember, the Trolling Reserve is about the
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: size of the state of Indiana. Okay. It's the single
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: largest chunk of land managed by a single federal agency
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: in the country. Okay. It's also, like, by various mathematical parameters,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: is the remotest place in America in terms of distance
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: from road, distance from city, distance from this you're there's
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: a sign at Ivotech, okay, and it says welcome to Ivotech.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: When you're here, you're still nowhere, all right, And it
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: says like who however many people are there? You hang
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: up little things? Population eight or three or whatever. Yeah,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: you walk. If you walked east from there, you would
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: go hundreds of miles until you hit the pipeline. Right, Okay,
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: I'll center it for you. Here's Ivotech. It's four hundred
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: miles from the near yest city, Fairbanks, Okay. All right.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: It's two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest town,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Barrow now known as a Yavic, And it is one
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty miles sixty five miles from the nearest
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: highway road, which is the Dalton Highway going to Pruda Bay,
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: and it is ninety miles from the nearest Eskimo village,
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: anactoic pass. So that gives you an idea of exactly
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about. I mean, it's the middle of nowhere,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: but any rate to get back to me and Dale
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: find in the Mesa. So we get dropped off. And
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: the reason is we were digging a site near the
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: proposed well site of Lisburne, and so they the guys
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: come by and say, we want you to go out
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: and look at this stuff because Lisburne, along with two
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: other well sites, we're going to be what they called
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: deep strat wells. They were going to be not excuse me,
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: drive to find oil at all. They wanted to know
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: what the subsurface strateigraphy was for a long way down
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: that well at Lisburne with seventeen thousand feet, Damn, you're
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: putting china on it. The well at Innigoc was nineteen
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: thousand feet and the will At well at Tune the
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Lick was twenty one thousand feet. That drill it's got
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: to come out hot, right, well, it's hot down there.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: We're only a little way under the story here. So
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: all the other wells that we drilled up there over
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: a three year period, we were looking for hydrocarbon resources.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: They were all done in the winter because in the
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: winter you can make your airstrip, you can make your
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: camp pad, you can make the drill pad, everything out
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: of ice and snow. You go in there. You're only
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: drilling between five and seven thousand feet on those things.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: You know, your rig up, spud the well, drill for
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: six weeks, rig down, and you're gone. Everything melts, nothing left.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: No one ever touched the ground. Well, I mean not,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: that's not true. Literally, yea, it would look like that.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: But you build every single thing out of ice and snow,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: and you know, you put a if you got a lake.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: The idea was to have you start off with a
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: small crew going out of Lonely. Lonely was the headquarters.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: It's an old new line station about ninety miles east
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: of Barrow Dow line. That is the thing to make
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: sure the Rooskies weren't coming, yeah, the distant early warning line.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: So what you do is you have this little overland
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: crew go. You're walking a D seven cat, probably a
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: seven ninety nine loader, um, a couple of tucker snow cats,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: maybe another dozer pulling a trailer full of stuff. You
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: get these guys over there to where you're gonna build
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: drill your well, all right, and hopefully there's a lake
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: close enough. But if there isn't there almost always is,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: then you have to build one on the tundra. You
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: build it out of ice. So this first ground crew
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: gets over there and they'll build a little twin otter
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: strip on a lake. Then you can start bringing more
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: people in. You get enough people over there, then you
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: can build a big five thousand foot herk strip on
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: the ice or on a lake, or else building one
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: on a tunder all right, then you start herking a
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: rig in. In the meantime, there's a whole crew over
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: there building the ice pad for the well, building the
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: pad for the camp, and the guys start hrking in
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: a rig. They rig up and they start drilling. So
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: you have to have c one thirty hercules is making about.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: I can't remember how many trips, something like eighteen trips
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: to get a TBA rig in there, which stands for
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: transportable by anything, all right, just depends on how many
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: chunks you want to break it down into. And that's
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: how the whole thing worked. But with the wells at Innigac,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: Lisbon and Tuna Lake, you can't drill that deep in
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: that amount of time. I can't. I mean, it took
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: two years to drill those things. So everything has to
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: be built just like it would be built if you
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: were doing it in Wyoming, you know, in that petroleum
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: reserve down there, as to all be built out of
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: rocks and you know, sand and gravel and all that
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So now we get back to Dale
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: and me finding the MASA site. Right, you're you're you're
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: surprised that I can keep track of this. It's just
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: phenomenal man, all right. So anyway, Dale and I are
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: out there because the engineers what's Dale's name, Slaughter? Dale Slaughter, Uh,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: he was up there when you were up there, when
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: you were up at Utica. I was mixing him up
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: with Dale. Was a Dale Guthrie that found Dale Guthrie.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: He found a lot of ship coming out of the
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: perma frost, right like yeah, bison and yeah, yeah, mammoth.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: So any rate, the end engineer said, we need something
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: to cap that runway at Lisburne because we have to
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: have that five thousand foot herk strip there to be
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: able to you know, put the well in, and we
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: need some kind of really resistant rock. Well, all that
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: rock in that whole general area. The rock that underlay
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: is a huge area is referred to his country rock, okay.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: In other words, that's that's the rocks that's there, and
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: da da da da da. That covers everything. It's still subsurface,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: but it's a uniform formation. But right around uh Lisburne, Uh,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: there were some igneous intrusions through that country rock. In
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: other words, magma had come up, not volcanic, but hard rock,
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: all right, and they'd surfaced up through the limestone country rock.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: And that stuff was hard. This gotta be Perkin Spencer
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: right up Spencer and the don't you have a headset on?
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: He's still interested and um so that what the engineers
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: wanted to do was find a good location for that
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: stuff and drill it and shoot it, run it through
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: a crusher, and then the final lift on the airstrip
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: would be that hard resistant rock. Well. So Dale and
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: I are out there doing it because all of these
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: things are upthrusts, you know, they're like maces or ridges
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: or something like this. Um they're perfect for an archaeological encampment,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: for a for use by the you know, prehistoric people,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: because you're up high, you've got a great view, you
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: can look around the area for a game. You're up
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: high on the breeze. Bugs aren't going to be too bad.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: It's well drained. You're not gonna have to be slopping
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: around and goosh all the time when it rains. And
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: so almost always, and it was the same of those
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: littler things like cames and came terraces and escers I
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: was talking about a little while ago. That's where all
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: the sites were, and those are the things that all
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: the engineers wanted to you. So you can see there's
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: you know, there's a problem at any rate. So Dale
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: and I had been out there all day and it
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: was one of those days where it was just lousy.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: It wasn't really raining. But you know, this was in
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: I think early August, and it was probably twenty eight degrees,
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: about ten knots of wind missed and I mean everything
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: was wet. It was cold, you know, there was enough wind,
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: so the chill factor was down probably about ten degrees
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: from the actual ambient temperature just you know, and we've
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: been out all day and we were cold. And so
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: what we had done is we'd flown out all the
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: way to right to the front edge of the Brooks
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: Range where all these igneous in truces were, and we
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: were working our way back towards where the well site
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: was going to be. And so we'd been out there,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: and you work twelve hours a day, so we've been
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: out there for by that time, about ten hours. We
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: climbed up and down stuff. We'd probably watch eight seven
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: eight miles and we came to this one spot and
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: there was this beautiful ridge that was right between us
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: and the rain, and we said, screw it, man, let's
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: just sit out here and get out of the weather.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: And we're just gonna take it easy to well, you're
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: the helicopter coming. And so we were quitting like forty
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: five minutes earlier or some So we're sitting there and
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: I looked in front of us, and I see what
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: it's just absolutely per You can look on it. You
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: could look on the cover of that thing, all right.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: That's the mason. That's what I see out there, all right,
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: except I'm looking at it from the back side. I
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: see that. I think sticks, Oh, I see that. You know,
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: we're looking at it from the back side, because we
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: were on the bricks range side of it, and anyway,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: looks like if you're watching a John Wayne Western and
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: they always shoot him in that same spot where there's
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: little sweet maces in the background. It's like that, but
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: in the Arctic. So any rate, I said, man, that
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: really looks good. I said, We've never looked at that.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: So I said, hey, I'm gonna walk across this little
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: draw here and climb up there and see what's there.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: And Dale says, go ahead, I'm I'm staying here. I'm
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: staying out of the wind. So I didn't. I climbed
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: up there, and I came up on the on the
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: windward side, which you know, was a prevailing wind, and
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: it was fairly well desiccated. There's been a lot of
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: alien damage up there, erosion. They're blown off a lot
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: of the vegetation, and so the mineral soil and the
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: organic soil under the DA there's lots of exposures. So
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: I'm walking along, I look looking down, I'm seeing flakes,
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: you know, chirt flakes, the byproducts of making stone tools,
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: and I'm looking. I say, well, I was right, you know,
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: I figured there'd be something up here. And I'm walking.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: All of a sudden, I said, projectile point lying there,
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: it's broken. I look, man, geez, that looks I could
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: be walking around in New Mexico or Colorado and see
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: this thing. And I think it was a paleo and
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: projectile point in other words, you know, terminal place to scene.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: And I thought, huh, well, you occasionally find those kinds
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: of things, you know, they're just oddness like that. I
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: took about another ten steps and I saw another one,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: and then I saw another one. They were all broken,
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: but I could but they were the basal portions of them,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: which gives you a whole lot of information. And I
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: found I said, so let's start looking at him. And
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: they were dead ringers for Paleo Indian projectile plant points
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: from the high plains of continental US. I mean, I
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: could have got a basketfull of them and walked out
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: and started casting them around in New Mexico and Texas
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: and Oklahoma and Nebraska and Iowa, and nobody would have
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: batted an eye when they found him. All right, Oh,
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: there's another paleo Indian projectile point. So in the meantime,
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: Dale's been watching me and he sees me all of
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: a sudden start bending down, you know, getting up and
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: walking on, bending down again, and he knew I'd found
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: something big, and anybody's pissed off because he didn't go
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: up there with me, so he can run across the thing.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: And he gets up there and he says, you probably
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: found all the good stuff already, you know, And I said,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: now this, I mean there's you've been up there. There's
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: a lot of area on top there. So in that
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: small and then we hear blappappappap where here comes to
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: our helicopter to pick us up. So any rate, I
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: grabbed a few I marked marked where they where I'd
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: picked him up, probably five or six of them, and
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: stuck him in my back and I took him back
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: to camp with me and nobody there there. For those
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: of you who don't know when I first started out
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: and how to be an archaeologist school, I was at
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: Eastern New Mexico University, which is about a five minute
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: drive from Blackwater Draw which is the Clovis type site.
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: And that's where I cut my teeth in excuse me,
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: an archaeology, so I knew Paleo Indian project And just
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: to be clear for people who might not like understand,
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: those things weren't supposed to be there, is that this
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: stylistically occasionally in the Arctic and in the interior of Alaska,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: a point like that might be found in an isolated occurrence,
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: all right, but no conglomeration, and nobody a lot of
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: the somebody who might be up here working might publish
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: a little article that said, and we found two projectial
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: points that look very reminiscent of projectile points from New
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: Mexico at terminal places. Do you mimmy laying out the
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: great mystery? Real quick? What I want to lay out? This?
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: What kind of what Brody's getting? Now? I'm gonna lay
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: out the great mystery as quickly as possible. Do it? Okay.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: There's a long running debate about how long humans have
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: been in the Western hemisphere, and there are changing fashions
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: to explain how they arrived and how they came to be.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: For a while, there was an idea that they entered
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: in through Alaska, were held up in Alaska for a
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: long time, and then an ice free corridor opened up
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: sort of between the eastern and western ice sheets, and
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: humans emerged down to the Great Plains around Edmonton, Alberta.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: That sounds good. That idea was replaced by an idea
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: that they came along the coasts. That's a good idea too.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: There is long ben For a long time people thought
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: that Clovis were the Clovis people were the first Americans. Yeah,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: now it's better understood that that Clovis was a sort
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: of creation of some pre existing population of Americans. I'll
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: say maybe to that. Maybe I'm not saying I agreed
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: with you on everything so far, but that because you're you.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: When you have a couple sites from thirteen four thousand
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: years ago, what are the odds that you found the
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: first place someone dropped something? Right, they're very bad. So
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: a lot of mystery about where did these cultures develop
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: and where they came And because it was first found
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: in the high plains, this idea emerged. And they agree
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: with this or not, this idea emerged that these cultures
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: developed there. So to see these traveled there, yeah, so
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: to see these diagnostic points of what might have been
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: the first Americans to enter the New World. Maybe you're
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: looking at the ship they dropped thousands of years before
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: anybody made their way down. For a long time, the
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: oldest site in the New World was in Chile monte Verde.
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: But there's some now now. The snake rivers beat it.
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: Some of those sites over there in Idaho are a
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: little no the salmon. Is it? The salmon or the snake?
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Where that? Okay, let you take it away. I want
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: one more sense, Give one more sense. Yeah if if
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: if linguistically genetically okay, it's well established that the first
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: Americans came from Siberia in Asia, and your oldest site
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: is in far South America. There is a lot of
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: shit between Siberia and South America in which people drop shit. Yeah,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: in a number of ways they could have gotten there,
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: but no one's found it. So we can find something
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: really old Alaska. You could for a moment hold out
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: hope that maybe these were the first people's stuff who
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: ever stepped foot, and theoretically that stuff would be older Oka,
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: the oldest stuff, the oldest stuff in the New World,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: by definition, has to be in Alaska. Correct, Yes, that's
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: totally correct. Believe in UFOs or you believe in the
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: salutary and hypothesis. Let's don't start talking Dennis Stafford stuff
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: to me, all right. Jeez, I couldn't believe when when
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Dennis got wrapped around the axle on that one. Anyway, Um,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: you're sort of yes and no, all right, Yeah, I'm
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: little expert there. Well it doesn't matter. There's a lot
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: of experts suit or yes and no. Okay, So anyway,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: let me finish my Masis story, and I don't go
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: back to this. Okay, Well no, but yeah, because he's
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: he's the one interrupted you. Yeah, he said, well, why
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: does that matter? All right? So what I'm gonna say
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: is that I still, even though I had all this
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: experience with Clovis and Paleo Indians and the High Plains
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: and the Lano Esticado, I still wish wanted somebody to
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: corroborate this agree with me when I brought this stuff
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: into camp. But nobody up in Alaska had ever worked
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: with any Paleo Indian stuff because there wasn't any Paleo
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: Indian stuff in Alaska, all right. And all the folks
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: we had working for us at the time, we're from Alaska,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: or there's probably a couple that weren't, but had never
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: had any Paleoindian experience except from one girl citizen Well
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: was from North Dakota and when she was a junior,
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: I think it wherever she was going to school in
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: North Dakota State or something like this. She worked under
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: Surrey crew and that's in Paleo Indian country down there.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you find old stuff, that's what you're
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: going to find. And so I asked Susan, I said, hey, hey,
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: what do you think? And she said that looks just
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: like Paleo Indian stuff. I didn't I didn't prime her
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: or anything. I just said what do you think of this?
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: And that's the first words out of her mouth. And
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: then I said, hallelujah, all right because that confirmed for
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: me that I was absolutely right. So any rate, we
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: then well immediately said to the engineers, not doing this.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: And then the site we were already excavating, we had
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: found some other stuff that was really important, and we said, uh,
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: you're not doing this. So they ended up getting a
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: special permit from the core engineers to actually mine gravel
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: out of oh Tuck Creek near the airstrip there to
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: use as the overlayment the final lift on the runway.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: Because all the preferred materials were burdened by archaeological sites
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: and um, so that's that's how the mason was found
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: and how it survived. Give a couple, because there's so
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: many other things I want to touch on. Give a couple. UM,
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: give a recap with a significant stuff like what want
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: to be in the dates, the abundance, what were they
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: doing up there? Most except for fairly recent prehistoric sites,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: and these would be residential sites, all right, You like villages, Um,
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: you don't get a lot of horse fires remnants of fires,
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: and that's what you want to date most. That's what
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: you if you have your druthers, that's what you want
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: to date. Are those remnants of those fires, the charcoal
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: and those fires. You have to have an organic substance. Well, yeah,
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: you can't date you can't date a rock. But if
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: you're dating these these these camp fires, right or cooking fires,
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: you're you know, you're dating something that people did. This
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: isn't you know, a wildfire remnant or you know, a
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: lightning strike or something. This is people fires, all right,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: So you're dating what they did and what the date
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: you get back is going to be related pretty directly
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: to them, to their occupation of that spot at that time.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: But the Mason was not a habitation site. It was
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: a game hunting lookout. And well, what was taking place
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: there was the guys, mostly guys, were up there on top,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: sitting around these little fires, warming fires, you know, keeping
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: an eye out there. You can see for miles from
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: up there, as you know, keeping a lookout for game.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: And they're working on their hunting equipment, their work, you know,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: taking to busted projectile points out of the out of
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: the half and putting new ones in. They what they
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: did was even the ones that they could resharpen when
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: they broke on a hunting expedition, if enough of it
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: was sticking out of the half, they just resharpen it
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: real quickly and a half. So you find a lot
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: of these stubby things that were thrown away. You can
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: see the point is made exactly right up until just
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: about here, and then all of a sudden it goes
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: like that, and you say, wait a minute, it's been
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: very sharpened, all right. But once they got to a
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: place like the Mesa where they could do work on
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: their stuff, they threw them away all right and made
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: new ones and put them in. So at any rate,
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: that place was used so much. And I'm grasping at
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: a number here, but it'll be close, or it'll say
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: right in that the book I left you, we found
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: pretty damn near fifty camps fires up there. I don't
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: know if you took most, if you took all of
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: the Paleo Indian camp fires that have been found in
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: all the Paleo Indian sites in New Mexico and Colorado,
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: it wouldn't total fifty. So I mean, this was like,
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: Holy God, I can't believe that. Now. We didn't know
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: this right away. We didn't know until we started excavating.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: There fifty horrors that we can date. Every one of
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: these horrors has flint, you know, chips thrown into it,
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: you know, from when they were working on things. Some
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: of the times they just pulled an old, busted point
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: out at the end of the thing and just tossed
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: it into the fire. And so a lot of these
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: these projectile points, broken projectile points have potland fractures on them.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: And a potland fracture occurs when you heat chirt to
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: a certain point, all right, it'll fracture like this because
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: chirt and flint's the same way. Has a physical property
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: called conchoidal fracture. That's what allows you to make to
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: flake them because you you know that that you whack it,
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: and that flake is going to come over off of there.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: You'll know how it comes all you. Ever remember when
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: you're a kid and you shot the window with your
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: BB gun, Sure made a little hole in front and
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: this cone shaped thing behind it. Now, when I shot
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: Joe Suki's windshield with the Daisy red Rider. All right,
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: but you know what I'm talking You know what I'm
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: talking about, right, all right? That cone shaped thing, Well,
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: that glass is cryptocrystalline, just like shirt or flint or obsidian,
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: and has the property of conchoidal fracture. It's controllable. It
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: depends on the angle you hit it at, how hard
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: you hit it, what you hit it with, whether it's
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: soft hammer or hard hammer. And once you get to
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: know how to do this, you can make any damn
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: thing you want out of stone. I mean, you can
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: make any shape you want, all right, That's how it works.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: And so when you heat these things up to a
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: certain point, it'll pop a flake off and it'll pot
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: and that conchoidal fracture principle works the same way so
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: you'll get these rounded pitch shape, you know, holes, you know,
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: maybe the size of your thumbnail or some depending on
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: how big the piece of shirt was. In the surface
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: of the thing. The only way they can get there
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: like that is by heat. It's a heat fracture. And
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: so even if, for example, that hearth over the years,
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: it all blew away, all the charcoal blew away, everything
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: blew away, but the heat fracture projectile point didn't blow
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: away because it was too heavy. And so you've excavated
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: ten thousand years later and scooping it up there, and
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: you pick it up and you see that conchoidal fracture
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: right in the middle of it there. You know that
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: it had to be heat fractured, and that means it
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: had to be definitely associated with some kind of heat.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: And if there's no evidence for wildfire or grass fire
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: or anything else in the sub soil of the site
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: you're digging, there's only one answer. It got done that
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: way because it ended up in the campfire. So there's
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: all these interpretive things that have to go along with
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: all of this, and you got to do archaeology for
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: quite a while before you pick up on all this
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: stuff and archaeologists are the first forensic scientists, all right,
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: but instead of their clues being six hours old, they're
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: six thousand years old. And so back in the old
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: days for example, in fact, at the beginning of my career,
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: it was still happening. Forensic police worker never hadn't been developed.
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: And when the police, the local police department, and run
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: into something that we're talking that was sort of inexplicable,
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: is some kind of a clue they knew, but they
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: didn't know what, they call up the local university and
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: have archaeologists go down to look at it to see
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: what they could tell them. After archaeologists were doing that
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: for him for a while, somebody came up to the idea, Hey,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: why didn't we just train our own guys to think
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: that way and do that stuff, so we don't get
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: to do that anymore. But the beginning of my career
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: I got asked to do a couple of things like that,
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: and it was really neat. It was interesting, you know,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: to kind of get out of the contexts of archaeology
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: and use those same skills too, you know, answer a
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: different question. Is it possible that those uh folks up
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: there we're watching for mammoth's or does it not line
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: up time wise? The old estate from the MESA calendar
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: year date is thirteen thousand and six hundred and sixty
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: years ago. There's another one that's eleven thousand, two hundred
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: years ago. In terms of our all the paleontological work
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: that we did up there that Pam Dan and I didn't,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: I wasn't directly well, I was directly involved in it
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: because I was funding it. But we did not find
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: any mammoth remains that were that recent. I think the
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: most recent mammoths we found was about maybe fifteen or sixteen. Yeah,
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: what game do you think that they were looking at? Then? Caribou,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: dire wolves, deer, bison. But I wouldn't be after dire wolves.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: But no dire wolves ever existed in uh, you know,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: the North America, in the western hemisphere. There were no
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: dire wolves over here. That's like a tribute question. Wrong,
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: that's embarrassing. Fields um Cariboo had been around forever, all right,
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: Uh Bison, bison priscus. Uh, there was never any modern
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: bison up here, at least not as far as there's
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: a real there's there's sort of this developmental transition with bison.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: Bison priscus was the was the place to see bison,
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: the rootstock, all right. There was never any evolution of
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: bison in the Arctic like there was down in the
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: in North America. All right, there are bison priscus down there,
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: but there's also bison ladder frons, bison oxenden talas, and
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: bison antiquis. All of those evolved out of bison priscus
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: down there. But up in Alaska in the Arctic, that
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: that progression of evolution never happened. It was always bison priscus.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: And when were they still on the ground at that point, Yes, okay,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: there were Our most recent bison was ten thousand years horse.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: There was probably there were probably still some horses around
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: and that was a big game game at well, you
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: think they are hunting bears. No, they we don't have
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: any evidence of them. There are two kinds of bears.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: There are short faced bears and there are grizzly bears.
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Same grizzly bear we have today. There were lions, the
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: European cave lion pantera. That was over here, all right,
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: Um spilea, pan spilea, Thank you whoever sent that to me.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: And they were predators are in such small numbers and
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: compared to herbivores. The other thing is anybody nobody's going
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: to go out after a lion with a piece of
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: flint on the end of a stick that's this long,
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: all right? Um, the same for the bears. So we
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: don't have any evidence of those kinds of place to
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: see megafauna from archaeological sites in Alaska. What was your question, Spencer?
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: Can I argue with you for a second. I googled
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: it while we were sitting here, says in North America,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: dire wolves have been found as far north as Alaska
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: and down into southern Mexico National Park Services. Then how
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: far does Alaska go down? And how far is that more?
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: He's talking about the Arctic? No, sure, I didn't say that.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: I was just asking if they've ever been found there.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: We've never found dire wolves and part of Alaska that
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: I've worked in, and I still would take issue with
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: the Park Service on dire wolves being Now, so this
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: this tattoo right here, and now I was referring to
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: his tattoosdence hold on this tattoo thousand years old. We'll
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: come around that that is the cattle brand for the
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: original owners of the Librea tarpet and when I was there,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: I was it was one of the things that moved
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: me so much was seeing it was like a hundred
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: dire wolve skulls that they have extracted from the Librea tarpets.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: That's that was the inspiration from my skull wall hit
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: me like a diamond. That's where I went with beautiful.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: My first day with my wife was a tarts. So anyway,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: what are they extracting? Then? If they're not dire wolves,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: I should I should actually back step. There are none
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: in Alaska. To my National Park Services, there are all right,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: I have to say. Since I didn't work in that area,
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know. But I was of the opinion since
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: I had never read anything about that, that there were
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: dire wolves in the Western hemisphere. So that's my answer.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: But I don't know everything is you're finding out. I
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: want to move on to polar bears. Yeah, ask him
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: a question about the points? Yeah, man, is there any
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: way to infer This is Yanni, Papa Yanni, this is Yanni.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Ah. What percentage of these people that were
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: there hunting making these points? What percentage of them had
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: the skills to make the point or is that just
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: every single one of them unknown, every single one of them.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: In fact, I think you asked them. I'm gonna jump
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: away forward thousands of years to escam Okay, if you're
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: living out in the middle of Arctic Alaska, and we'll
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: say especially in the wintertime, but it could be where
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: it's dark all the time, you can't see anything or
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: very little. I mean when I say it's dark all
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: the time, it gets to be twilight, but that's about
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: the best it gets for a long time, especially if
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: you're north of seventy degrees latitude. The winter encampments were
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: small because there weren't enough resources for a family, and
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: the families were small as well to be able to
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: survive through the winter. If you had more than two
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: or three families living in the same place, I mean,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: you'd use up a big wool patch for your firewood fast. Okay.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: So if the men have to leave to go out, honey,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: you try and always camp someplace where there's a reliable
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: food resource. That's why most of these winter encampments occur
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: on the shores of a big lake that has a
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: reliable fish resource in it. So you can at least
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: get fished through the ice. Also, hopefully caribou migrate through
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: there in the fall and by this lake, so you
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: also have a cariboo resource. But if the cariboo don't
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: show up, you've always got that lake with a fish
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: resource that you can get through. So Dad goes off
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: to do something with say two or three of the
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: other men, and that maybe all of it were in
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: that encampment, go off, do a little honey. That leaves
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: the women there all by themselves. Now commonly what they
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: would do would be set little snares for ptarmigan and
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: other smaller critters like that, But there's no guarantee you're
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: going to get them. What if the guys don't come
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: back or don't come back for a long while, or
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: vice verse of what if the guys go out, they
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: ripped their parka and they're in any woman there to
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: sew it up. Every single adult Eskimo could do every
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: single thing there was to do to be able to live.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: The men may not have been the greatest seamstresses in
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: the in the world, but I guarantee you they could
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: fix anything that ripped or tour or anything else. They
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: could do anything that women could do except to have
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: a baby, of course. But and the women, they could
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: make a projectile point, they could make a you know,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: lester point. They had to be able to because there's
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: no way they're going to survive if you didn't. So,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: in my opinion, that evidence is transferable as far back
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: as you want to go in the Arctic. If you
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: want to go up five thousand years, ten thousand years,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: fifteen thousand years adults, every adult could do everything you
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: needed to do to be able to stay alone. Was
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: the chart that they were using really abundant up there?
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: Did they have to source it from some far away place?
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: Everybody that I ever had up there, like Tony Baker
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: was one of the first ones to make that. He
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: hadn't been up there the first time he came up
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: to work with me. He hadn't been up there ten minutes,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: and he didn't before. He said, I can't believe the
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: chirt up there. It's everywhere. He said, if this was
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: done in New Mexico, they wouldn't have thrown that stuff away,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: you know, the big waist flakes and stuff like that.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: And I said, I know, Tony, That's where I went
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: to school in New Mexico. The reason is is because
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: chert in the Arctic, especially within the petroleum reserve, because
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: it's a sediment rock, it forms that way. It is
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: totally ubiquitous. It is everywhere. You can find it in
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: every gravel source, you can find it in every stream bed,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: you can find it everywhere. Anybody that I ever brought
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: up that was already an archaeologist from you know, down south,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: would say, I can't believe this. God, this stuff is
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: laying it well, you know, I mean they'd pick up
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: five big pieces and say, you'd never find this on
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: an archaeological site down there. They use this stuff because
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: there's chunks is big. You know, you could have made
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: three projectile points out of it. But the stuff is
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: like growing on every tree up there. So people just
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: took the best, just used what they wanted, didn't worry about.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: The only time you might have an issue would be
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: in the wintertime when you can't really access it too well.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: But people were probably making a supply, all right. They
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: during the summer, you know, the good months, they'd make
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: what we call preforms. They'd make a you know byface
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: preform about like this, yeah, well not even that big,
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: just you know, like about like this, and you could
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: use then use that to make almost anything and anything,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: anything big and anything small. All right, the wate flakes,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: you could make them out on the waste flakes. So
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: that would be the only the only instance where you
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: just literally could not find. Now there are spots where
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: there isn't any, but by and large, it's just everywhere.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: So you keep saying, make anything. The only thing I've
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: seen or heard of is that there's points for projectiles.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: What else did they make? Scrapers, hide scrapers, knives not
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: Usually those were made out of bone. Whatever. Anything to
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: do with selling was pretty much made out of out
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: of bone or antler. Well, no, what's that spoke? What's
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: you guys are talking about? A spokeshaver? So a spokeshave
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: Well that's different, I know, but I'm just trying to
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: save myself. You didn't do a real good job, but
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: I'll let it go any rate. So, um, there are
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: things called burns. I mean, i'd have to go into
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: a description gravers. Graver was like a Marlin spike. When
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: guys are working on their equipment and they have to
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: undo knots that they made to half your wrapping stuff
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: in a half a knife or a projectable point. They
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: have these little things called gravers which have these little
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: pronks sticking out on them, and they're you're used just
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: like sailors use a marlin spike. They're used to undo
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: a knot, all right, so you can whatever that knot
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: is holding in place, you can get it out or
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: get it away. So there's all kinds of different things
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: that projectile points were not the primary thing that we're made.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: These sort of semi formal tools that you just needed
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: for everyday. Use things to slice hide with it, or
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: slice made or make holes for sewing, or you know,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: all of this kind of stuff. So there's an all
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: in the back of his head. Okay, go ahead, it'll
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: be quick. It's a yes or no. Did they make
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: any big stuff like hatchet heads or large spear points
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: or it depends on where they were there at a time.
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: There were warmer periods up there. I mean we find
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: buried spruce stumps up there. Uh you know, but there
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: are one hundred and fifty thousand years old when it
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: was warmer up there. We find beaver chewed sticks, all right,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: But if you dated when it's gonna be over one
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: hundred and forty five or over forty five thousand years old.
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: So um, you know what, mostly when humans were there,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: there just wasn't anything that was big enough to require
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: an axe or ads or and they didn't they didn't
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: hollow out logs to make boats. They were all skin
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: boats made on us. So what were they burning and
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: the fires you guys were founding? Okay, will you know what? Yeah,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: probably something would need A big point would be a
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: that what you're gonna say. I was gonna tell Brody's
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: something interesting when I'm talking about the trees. How you'll
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: find trees but then they're super old, you know, because
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: like things constantly change when you're when you're looking, like
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: when you get up around the northern tree line, like
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: you're going up in the Brooks Range and you see, uh,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: what looks like you'll you'll see bands of trees. You know,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: at a point you'd be like, well, there's the last
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: tree you were going to look at, and then there's
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: gonna be no more trees to the north. In your head,
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: you're like that tree is advancing. No, you think like
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: a point like, oh, look at he's growing out, like
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: he's heading a peer. Yeah, he's a survivor, right, you know,
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: he's like hanging on man, like his buddies are all dead. Yeah, okay,
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: you ready talking about polar bears. I recently, we've been
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: we were wanting to talk about this long time ago.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: There was recently an article where a he's some kind
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: of population ecologist or someone was discussing that his information
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: about polar bear population dynamics was being labeled misinformation online. Oh,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: I know, because he was saying that polar bear numbers
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: are strong and growing and a lot of the they
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: have become an emblematic megafauna for climate change. Yeah, and
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: a lot of they've become a poster boy for climate change.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: And the narrative is is that as climate change continues,
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: we will lose the polar bear. The polar bear will
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: be this emblematic loss of a charismatic species because of
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: climate change, and many it annoys many climate change activists
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: that they're not vanishing, and they get embarrassed by the
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: fact that polar bear numbers are strong, and so by
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: pointing out that polar bears are doing fine, you are
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: you become accused of of misinformation. Not because it's misinformation,
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: but it's it's it's not helpful propaganda. Okay, you're talking
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: about Lomberg, and we sent this to you to say,
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: what do you think about all this? Yeah, okay, I
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: can tell you. And I was given a very biased telling. Okay,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: I can tell you. Okay. Lomberg said, essentially, if polar
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: bearers are on the way out, how come the population
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: is four or five times as great as it was
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies. That's what he said.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: That was a and I know he knows this, but
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: he's on the other side of the coin, Okay, in
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: terms of climate change, like he has an ax to grind, well,
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: he's grinding an axe. Because that is deliberately a disingenuous comment, okay.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: And I'm gonna tell you why. Please. Back in the
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: sixties and into the very very early seventies, there were
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: basically no controls on recreational hunting of polar bears. The
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: reason that the worldwide population was down to around four
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: or five thousand was because of uncontrolled hunting, all right,
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: trophy hunting. All the countries that had polar bears, in
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: other words, had Arctic sea ice parts, you know, exposures
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: on their countries got together and they said, we need
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: to do something about this. This is in like I say,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, and
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: our kin and they did, and our country too, I
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: guess you could call them. Landmark regulations were passed, the
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, and
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: that those banned any commercial hunting polar bears in the
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: United States. It's stopped as of nineteen seventy two, when
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: those when that legislation seventy three seventy two, when that
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: legislation was passed. Natives Alaska natives can do it for special,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: specific cultural reasons, all right, but there has to be
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, it has to be a good reason, all right.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: So as a result of that, polar bear populations started growing.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: So why are polar bears on the Threatened and Endangered
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: Species Act and a Marine Mammals Protection Act if the
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: population is growing, Because it is. There's somewhere between probably
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: ten and fourteen thousand polar bears now in that what
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: thirty four year span of time. The reason that they
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: are considered threatened or endangered has nothing to do with
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: their population at all. It has to do with habitat loss,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: and as the temperatures warm, both in the atmosphere and
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: in the seawater, sea ice diminishes, they're threatened and endangered
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: because they aren't going to have any place to live.
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: I can give you a personal, a personal example of
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: that when we were remember we talked about earlier one
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: of the deepest well on the north slope twenty one
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: thousand feet well, we found a couple of archaeological sites
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: where the engineers wanted to put the herk strip for
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: the Tna Lick Well site. And we're right out near
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: the coast, and so we were excavating those to get
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: them out of the way so they could go ahead
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: and build a HIRK trip. And we were looking right
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: out at Icy Cape, all right. And Icy Cape is
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: kind of you come up through the Bearing straight all right,
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: going north. Then you want to turn to go to Barrow,
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: all right, to go to Alaska and Art of Canada.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: So you turn east, turn right up there, you go
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: around Icy Cape, and then you go right up the
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: coast to Barrow and Barter Island, and you know, you
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: get into the Canadian Arctic. But Icy Cape was named
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: for a reason. It was icy what happened very frequently.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: There was that the sea ice never cleared out, lasted
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: all summer long, and so there was no way to
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: get around the corner to get into the rest of
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: the Arctic to the east. You couldn't get through there.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: The sea ice stayed there all summer, you know, it
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: was there all winner and it was there all summer.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: That didn't happen every single summer, but it happened relatively frequently.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: When they were trying to develop Prudeo Bay. There were
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: summers where all this stuff's coming up from Seattle on
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: these huge barges, these huge module camp units and everything.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: They sat off icy cape all summer long until the winter,
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: see I started to grow and went back to Barrow.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: They couldn't get through. The last year that I know
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: that that happened was when we were digging Tunelik in
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, because we were there from I think
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: we were there through most August. By the before the
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: end of August, you're starting to have ice grow again. Anyway,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: that ice never went out. It was everybody turned around
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: and went back down to Seattle. So that happened, and
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: I could be wrong, all right. The reason I remember
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: it so graphically is because I was there watching it.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: I wasn't there for that purpose, but we just you know,
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: just remember it. I mean we could see look out
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: every day. It wouldn't foggy and you could see it.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: So what happens to these polar bears when that stops happening?
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: All right? I mean that's just an example. That's just
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: a place where you could see it, all right. It
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: was easy to see. Well, if they don't have that
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: sea ice exploit, it's going to get to a point
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: sooner or later where their numbers are going to start dropping.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: There's just no way around it. As early as two
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: thousand and nine, a couple of my USTs colleagues had
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: some weather cams set up and drew Point, which is
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: about maybe fifteen miles west of Lonely. And when Frank
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: went out to check the cameras in the summer, there's
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: this polar bearer sow and two cubs on land and
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: so this camera the camera's right on the edge of
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: the of the Arctic Ocean right and in the background
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: you can see the entire Arctic Ocean as far as
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: you can see, not a spec of ice anywhere. And
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: one of the cubs. In fact, I got a picture
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: right here. I could show you one of the cubs.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: If you look at it is all dirty, brownish kind
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: of because he's been down in the crevices of the
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: front where the land is breaking off because of storm surges,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: because of climate change, because of the melting ice lenses,
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: because of the climate change. He's down there groveling around
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: looking for stuff to eat. And those polar bears are
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: stuck there until the winter sea ice come. I mean,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: they're there from the time the sea ice seasonally disappears.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: If they're not on the ice, all right, If they're
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: on if they're on the inside limit of the pressure ridges,
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: all right, they form and they don't get out of
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: there fast, just like that mom and her two kids.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: They're on land untill it's till winter comes again. And
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: in most cases they're going to have a really hard
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: time surviving because they're not terrestrially adapted in terms of hunting,
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: you know, I mean the things they eat your seals, basically.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: And that's why that statement by Lomberg is so disingenuous
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: because it has nothing to do with the population numbers.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: It has the fact to do with We already know
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: that these guys are on the downhill slide because pretty
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: soon they aren't going to have what they need to survive.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: And that's it. What's your take on, um, what are
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: your feelings about the Ambler Road? Whereas there's there's two
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: there's two things about the Ambler Road. Ye tell people
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: what it is to the State of Alaska wants to
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: build the road. They want to build the road so
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: that they can open the Ambler area for exploration and
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: possible mining. Mining companies huge amounts precious metals. Yeah, well
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: you looked at it's like absurd amounts of precis The
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: point is that the oil companies, after they discovered the
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: biggest oil deposit in North America in Prudeo Bay, they
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: built their own damn road, all right. The state didn't
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: go into up to their ears in debt or beyond
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: building a road to entice them. The oil companies knew
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: that stuff was up there. I don't know they footed
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: the bill for the road. Hell yeah, yeah. Now the government,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: the federal government, which most of that road goes through
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: at least north of the Yukon River, all right, they
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: gave them. They were selling them material from the material sites,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: you know, from these glacial things I was talking about.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: They were selling that stuff to him for I like
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: about fifty cents a yard. If anybody here's ever bought gravel,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: you know, it sells for a hell a lot more
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: than fifty cents a yard. And so the federal government
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: was given him a break on it. But I mean
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: they were still getting something out of all right. The
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: state of Alaska wants to do that too. In the
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: oil companies didn't need any enticement. They knew there was
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: enough resource up there that they could build that they built.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: As I recall, they built that road predicated on the
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: fact that oil at twenty dollars a barrel would pay
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: for it an X number of years could have made
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: that road in diamonds. And now, I mean there's other
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: economics involved, but I mean, now, as a general you know, okay,
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: so like it would have been worth it at twenty
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: but they're still pulling oil. They were pulling the oil
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: when it was one hundred dollars, all right. They figured
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: the lifetime of the Trans Alaska Pipeline would be twenty years.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: It's into its fortieth year or now, all right. Now,
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: granted they do decent maintenance on it, but they figured
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: it'd be a goner after about twenty years, and it isn't.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: All right, they're still good Conical Phillips is just in
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: the process of developing developing their willow prospect up in
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: the patrolling reserve. They're going to drill one hundred two
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: hundred wells off of five five locations at their approval
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: of the Biden administration. Yeah, and it's all gonna go
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: down the pipeline. So the point is that the state
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: of Alaska wants to build this road so that the
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: mineral companies will go in there and develop that area. Well,
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: if the prospects are so great, how come to mineral
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: companies aren't going in there to do it themselves, just
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: like the oil companies did on the pipeline. That's the question,
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: all right, But you have to have an attitude about it,
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: the goals beyond what makes economic sense. As a person
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: who spent their life in the Arctic, well, what I'm
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: saying is, I'm not a lot of people aren't necessarily
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: strong environmentalists, but they wonder why that same formula doesn't
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: work for the mining companies that work for the oil
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: company it's why should my state go to the trouble
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: of building this road. In the expense of building this road,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: it's like betting on the come all right, and it
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: probably would pay off, I would say that, But why
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: should you give the guys a free reign, a free ride?
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Use your damn money. That's what you got it for.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: If you think it's so great, build a road, We'll
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: give you permits, federal government will give you. Probably Park
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: Service is still pout about it, but BLM would probably
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: issue all the necessary permits. But if you want that
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: and there's so much money to be made, you shouldn't
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: be afraid or reluctant to build the road yourself. I
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: think that's what a lot of people think. So got
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: you got that. You got that aspect of it, which
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: which wasn't an aspect of the trans Alaska Pipeline road
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: all right. The other aspect is that a road, as
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, is about it that has the greatest
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: potential to create harm to the environment any other thing
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: that would be associated with that prospect? Was that even
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: on your radar when they were building the road up
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: to Prudeo Bay, Like, was that like even a concern
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: at that time that that the road would environmentally like damaging. Yeah,
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: I don't want to say it was a huge concern,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: but it was a concern that was addressed by both
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: the state, and it's a huge concern for the Ambler
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: Road now. Yeah, well, because first of all, you got
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: to cross Park Service land. That's one thing gates of
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: the Arctic Um and that's pretty much a big no
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: no nationwide. It's just like trying to drill for oil
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: and the National art and the Artic Wildlife refuge Um.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: And uh so there's there's that aspect of it that
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: people don't like as well. And I think that in
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: the native the native community. I don't want to go
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: into that too far, but I'm sure there is a
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: lot of most of the local residential Native community that
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: would be along that road is very probably not in
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: favor of I don't know. I didn't go to any
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: of the meetings because I'm an old XBLM guy and
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: I've got all this experience and everything else, and I
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: didn't want to go to any of those meetings and
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: stand up and make some kind of a statement. And
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: because I felt like it was somewhat it would be
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: somewhat unfair and bias of me to do something like that,
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: because I don't think any there was anybody there that
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: could argue me off my stance, whatever it was, because
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: I got too much experience. You're ready change topics again.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: I want to change topics again. Okay? Can we back
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: up real quick? When you introduced the polar bear idea,
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: you said that you have a bias. What was the bias?
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: I was putting my stance in a biased form, expressing
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: the l You were the author who wrote that. But
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: I've heard that, I've heard of that viewpoint expressed by
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: many people who don't want to be bothered by the
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: inconveniences of climate issues and others. And I was I
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: was laying out an expression of how it's how that
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: is spun. Got it? Uh? When I met you long
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: long ago, last time I saw you, twenty before I
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: even came close to having kids, you were all excited,
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: You're all worked up about some beads you had found.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: Oh well we didn't yes, and no, all right, we
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: didn't find the original beads. Okay, okay, all right. This
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: is a site called Punyak Point typically probably since we
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: can use Ivatuk as a reference we have been. If
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: you were at Ivatuk and you flew southwest in a helicopter,
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: you could be at Tivolik Lake and Punyak Point in
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: twenty minutes. In the nineteen fifties, there was an archaeologist
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: by the name of Bill Irving who is getting his
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and his dad was
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: a biologist and had been associated with the University of
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: Alaska for a number of years and was doing some
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: biologic surveys in that general area with his Eskimo assistant,
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: Simon Penniak, and round a Tivolik Lake. They found in
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: the process of their biological investigations, they found I think
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: something like thirteen or fourteen archaeological sites. One of them
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: was huge. It covered about from let's say the east
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: end to the west end three hundred meters okay, three
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: hundred yards fifty semi subterranean pitouse, semi subterranean house remains,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: and I mean it was obviously an area that had
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: been used a lot, so he decided he wanted after
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: his dad told him about it, he decided that he
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: wanted to excavate that site for his PhD dissertation at
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: the University of Wisconsin. So he went up there in
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven with an Eskimo crew and they did
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: a bunch of work and they found a bunch of stuff,
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: and then I think he went back the next year
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: found a little more. And I'm not going I'm not
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: if I if I start going down or this rabbit
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: trail of how come and why, I will be here forever.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: So all I'm going to say is fifty seven was
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: essentially the last year he did anything. All right. He
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: went back in sixty one or sixty yeah, sixty one
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: and did some more work, and he came up with
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: this um idea that he translated into a hypothesis of
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: a pan Arctic culture called the the Arctic small Tool tradition.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: It stretched all the way from Alaska to Greenland and
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: and predated, no, preday Eskimos. Not well, yeah, predated Eskimos
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: because the aspect today we call that culture the Denby
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: Flint Complex. That the dates on that that complex or
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: that group of people existed between four thousand years ago
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: and three thousand years ago. But the importance of it
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: was that that that cultural group originated in Alaska and
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: in a time span of less than probably two hundred
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: and fifty years, had spread all the way to Greenland.
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: I mean that with big news, very successful, and this
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: the Arctic small tool tradition. He formulated it demonstrated it
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: that it existed, and it has withstood the test of time.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: I mean Alaska all the way to Greenland. I mean
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: that's a that's a long road. So any rate punic
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: point is in the petroleum reserve. One of the things
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: that Irving found, Now, when he was doing this, it
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: was just radiocarbon dating was just starting to be accepted
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: by archaeologists. It had been being used for maybe ten years,
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: and not used to widely for one reason, it required
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: a tremendously large sample to do it all right back
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: in the early days, a large sample of datable material.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: So any rate he got I think only one or
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: two radiocarbon dates. But what I'm gonna say, one of
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: the things that he found when he was excavating there
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: were some blue glass beads, and he was he found
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: those blue glass beads and occupations were much more recent
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: than the Arctic small tool tradition. Okay, but the site
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: had been used for you know, five four or five
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: thousand years by different people. He thought that those beads
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: were historic. So he thought that it was a historic occupation,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: that those Eskimo's probably got those beads from the whalers,
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: you know, the whalers. They were trade beads, and they
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: showed up camped on his old ass site and left
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: the stuff. But they showed up all all in eastern
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: North America during the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds and
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: in sights you know, occupied by um Native peoples. And
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: so I mean, he just said, Okay, there must have
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: been a historic occupation here, period of historic occupation, or
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: those beads wouldn't be here. He also found some cold
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: hammered native copper. And there's a lot of raw native
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: copper in Alaska, and you know, the native people have
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: used it for years. You know, you find nuggets and
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: streams instead. I mean you just pound it into whatever
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: you want, all right, I mean, that's nothing new. So anyway,
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: Irving just said, yeah, in his dissertation, Yeah, there's some
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: glass beads there, so there must be a historic occupation. Well,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: any rate, that site is in the patrolling reserve, and
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: because as a patrolling reserve, archaeologists, there was money available
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: to go back and look at sites that had had
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: some environmental degradation just because of natural causes. At a
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: typical like when the ice goes out at the end
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: of the winter, the prevailing winds blow these huge chunks
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: of ice right up into that site. I mean, it
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: just bulldozes that HiT's the bank right at the edge
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: of the of the of the lake, and it just
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: peels the tunderback. You know, we're talking about chunks of
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: ice that weigh five six hundred pounds. Prevailing wind just
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: blowing him right off into it, and as a result,
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: the site's being severely impacted, you know, but by natural forces.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: So I said, okay, give me some money. I'll go
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: up there and you know, with Irving's dissertation in hand,
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: and see how much damage is actually occurring there, and
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: you know what the loss is, and how concerned we
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: have to be about this very very famous and important
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: archeological site. You know, the instigation of the article small
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: tool tradition. See if we need to consider doing something
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: about this, if there is something or first of all,
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: seeing if there is something we can do. So we
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: go up there and and I was you know, one
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: of another archaeologist in our office. I asked him to
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: come up and help me with it at Robin Mills.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: And so we're running this thing. I got an excavation crew,
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: I got some of my old buddies there. Dale Slaughter
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: was there again, and Rick Ernier was there again, and
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: so any rate, because Irving had found the copper, all right,
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: I said, the first thing let's do, let's do a
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: metal detector survey of this area, you know, I mean
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: this big site area, and see what we can find,
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: all right, Because what we wanted to do is as
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: much uninvasive exploration is that we didn't want to go
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: around digging holes everywhere. So when we got this one
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: hit on the on the metal detector, we go and
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: we dig this thing and you know, just just a hole,
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: this big, all right, and down underneath the vegetation, in
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: other words, underneath the sod level into the soil about
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: five centimeters deep, all right, which is deeper than any
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: historic stuff would be. We find this little tumble of
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: two iron pendants, two silver or two copper rings, and
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: three blue glass beads in this little pile, and one
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: of the copper bangles circular thing there's no way the
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: natives could weld anything. So what they did when they
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: made bangles out of raw copper, cold hammered it. They
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: bang on it and they make this crescent and keep
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: banging it and banging it and banging it until it
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: was circular. Then they bang it some more. So those
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: two ends overlapped. Yeah, wed not the weld of it, no,
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: join it. And then they wrapped it with with willow twine.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: Keep it shut. Then you can string it on something
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: like a necklace or a bracelet. Right, one of those
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: bangles had. First of all, we interpreted this thing as
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: a as an object of personal adornment. Three beads, two bangles,
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: you know, two um the iron things pendance, And obviously
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: it was personal adornment. But we could date this thing
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: because it had this organic twine wrapped around it. We
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: could see fourteen dated and we when we dated it,
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: it said it dated to about sixty years earlier than
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: Columbus's original landing at Hispaniola. So it's how do we
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: get glass beads made in Europe? Well, now we said,
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: we said venice, all right, but by this certain method
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: that wasn't even really maybe not supposed to exist at
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: that time in an archaeological site in Alaska in the
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: lower forty eight. None of this type of beads. There's
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: a whole hierarchy, you know, thing of beads with all
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: these numbers associated with them. So archaeology, these are two
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: a forty beads, and there are none of those beads
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: found west of the Rocky Mountains. All of them are
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: found in the East, and they date fifteen hundreds and
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. Okay, no, no more recently than that, all
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: post Columbus. No that I mean Columbus is fourteen ninety two.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: The stuff in the East is the people from Europe
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: colonizing the Uniteds. Yeah, okay, but none of it is
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: in the West, where colonization appeared took place later, all right.
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: So it's like the first thing is how come these
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: beads are in Alaska? Well, and then it's like, how
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: come there's no historic occupation at Puny Point. But we've
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: got these beads that everywhere they exist in the New World,
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: they're in a historic context, you know, I mean, how
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: do we resolve this? So neither Robin nor I were
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: bead people, you know, I mean, I dug a few sites,
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: you know, historic sites where their beads occurred. And everybody,
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, we never researched beads at all. I mean
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: we just didn't, all right, So we had to we
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: had to learn. So we found a couple of real
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: bead researchers and we said, hey, we've got these beads.
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: What can't you tell you know we I mean, we
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: hired them, all right, say to look at these beads
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: and write us a report, which they did, and the
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: report said that these are two a forty glass beads.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: They're made by a process called uspa ao that was
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: developed in Europe, and there are amongst the earliest beads
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: made by that process, and we think they came There
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: are a lot of little teeny tiny bubbles in the glass,
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: and we think they were pretty sure. They were made
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: in like the Netherlands and France and maybe a few
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: other European places, and they were made specifically as trade
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: beads to trade with native populations in Africa and the
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: New World and so on and so forth. But they
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: were always made during a historic period, all right, well,
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: historic period and the Old World goes back way for
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: But what what I'm saying is they were made in
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: a period that was not historic over here. These cultures
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: were still prehistoric in a last, all right, and so
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: it's how did they get there? So Robin and I
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: knew that first of all, this this methodology was developed
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: in Venice, all right, and that Venetian Venice was one
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: of the was the primary trader of the eastern Mediterranean,
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: all right. They traded with a lot of the cultures
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: you know in the in the Near East, all right,
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: the Turks and Arabs and stuff like this that are
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: on that far eastern coast of the Mediterranean. And there
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: was no Italy then. There were just these city states,
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: and Venice was one of the most powerful city states
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: in that area. They had a big navy. Well anyway,
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: so we figured, okay, if the Venetians developed up this
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: method of making beads, I'm not going to go into it,
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: but it's very distinctive if you see that, you know,
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: all right, at least originally that had to come from Venom.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: And we said, so, if they're trading, they have these
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: caravans going on the Silk Road, okay, And that's a
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: very generic term. There are a whole bunch of roads.
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: And you just called all those roads together going to
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: the east the Silk Road. All right. Well, if a
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: lot of those are going through Aboriginal territory in the
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: old world, and these traders aren't going to miss a beat.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: So they're taking a bunch of these trade beads with them,
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: and it's getting into the native community and gets into
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: the Drizzles down into the Rush and far East, and
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: these guys into the Eskimo habitations there, and these guys
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: are trading with Alaska Eskimos and the Bearing Straight and
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: so back and forth. And that's how we figured those
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: beads got to Alaska and the main well you could
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: call at the back door, but it's not really it's
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: really yeah, it's really not. Because the Aboriginal cultures have
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: been trading each other back and forth across the Bearing
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: Straight for thousands of years, all right, But so this
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: and they're still doing it at this time. And you
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: get these beads into their you know, they're getting them
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: from the from the traders, just like they're supposed to.
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: And then they're bringing some of them across the Bearing
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: Straight to the Alaska and ask him a trade fairs
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: on our side of the Bearing strait. That's how they
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: got there, all right. But we still had demonstrate the
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: age of these things because in our article, if you
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: look at it as say pre Columbian presence of Venetian
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: glass trade beads in Arctic Alaska. So how do we
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: demonstrate this. One of the things we did was we
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: had the beads analyzed by through a process called neutron
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: neutron activation instrumental neutron activation. And what that does is
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: it gives you a fingerprint of the elements that are
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: present in the glass. And our beads up up in
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: Alaska matched the same elemental pattern as the beads in
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: Northeastern America did the same kind of bead. Okay, so
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: the genesis of these beads is the same. That doesn't
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: mean that they were made in Venice, but it means
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: that they had to be made the same place these
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: other beads were made. Okay, so you know that, you know,
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: we start getting interested. Now. These beads that we've got
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: an article Alaska are two a forty glass beads. That's
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: their you know, name in the archaeological register, and they
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: have a date on them that's pre Columbian. So but
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: we've only got one date, right, and you can always
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: have one date is nice, but if you really want
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: to have your theory old water, you better had a
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: couple other corroborating. So anyway, one of the things we
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: also wanted to do up on your point was excavate
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: one of these semi subterranean house remains that Irving had
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: never touched, okay, and to see exactly what was going
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: on in all right, because all our evidence said there's
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: no historic occupation, there's no period of historic occupation here. Irving,
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: who didn't really do much dating, all right and was
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: working in more of mixed context, just assumed because there
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: were glass beads, that there was a historic occupation of
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: the site. So anyway, we were excavating House eleven, well,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: our outwood we called House eleven. We excavated down onto
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: the floor near the hearth, and guess what we found more,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: We found a half of a glass bead. All right.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: The house had only had one episode of use because
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: there was only one floor layer in the house. Because
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: you live in one of those things during the winter
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: and it's a wintertime occupation, all right. Everything gets from
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: the house gets from the hearth, and the house gets
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: chomped down into the floor. And I mean you can
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: see that flip. The floor layer may only be this thick,
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: but you can see that layer all right, because all
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: the jump. What will happen subsequent to that is the
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: reason there's an occupation there is because there's a willow
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: patch next to that lake that has sufficient wood in
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: it for two or three families to get through the
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: winter on it. But after that winter, they aren't enough
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: there anymore. So you got to wait about ten years
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: before that willows renew themselves and somebody else will yields
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: it again. In the meantime, all this stuff drifts into
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: this abandoned house, and so the next time somebody inhabits it,
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: they create another floor layer. But if I go in
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: there and excavate it, I hit this floor layer, and
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: I say, oh, here's here's the floor and these I
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: went right through it, and then I hit this layer
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: of no occupation at all, And then the next thing
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: I knew, I hit the next layer. So I know
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: if I only get one layer all right, that that's
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: the only occupation of that house. And I know that
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: the charcoal and that hearth directly relates to that floor
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: and whatever that date is, that's how old that occupation is.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: That bead got smushed down into the floor. That date
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: was fourteen hundred something. I can't remember. That's how old
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: that damn beads. Okay, So this is why I'm getting
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: back to the forensic Yeah, all right, that's why we're
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: responsible for forensic science archaeologists. All right. I just wanted
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: to let you know that at any rate. So then
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: we've we've got this, We've corroborated our our date on
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: the on the bangal bead thing, right, I mean it's
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: not exactly the same, but they overlap. Okay. A couple
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: of years later, we're working at a place called Kenyak
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: Sugvic where there was a huge karigi this is a
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: men's house, huge bowlers this big, you know, and a
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: huge circle um and there were there was it's another
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: lake with Cariboo. The Cariboo came by their drive lines
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: called the Nuxuk where the natives would you know, fill
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: they'd be up build these stone lines every now and
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: then set a stick up, tie a couple of feathers
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: to it and a piece of skin so blow on
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: the line and get all the cariboo coming down them,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: run them down into the lake, come out in their
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: kayaks and lance the cariboo while they're in the lake.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: So there they and so there's sub semi subterranean houses there.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: We were excavating one of those because it was a
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: little bit later than some of the others, all right,
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: And we were water screening the stuff we were getting
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: out of the houses because it was a little different
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: than it was at Punic Point. It was a kind
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: of mushy and so forth, and so we were putting
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: the stuff in the screen and then pouring water over
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: to print it out rather than shaking it, you know.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: Found another bead, so we but the trouble was that
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: we couldn't tell if that was from the house or
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: from the trash midden that was associated with the house,
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: and that house had been occupied more than once. But
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: but we took a date on an organic some organic substance,
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: I don't remember what it was, from the same date
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: as the bead, and it came out where it barely
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: overlapped in terms of age with what we found it
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: at Punyac Point. It was a little bit off, all right,
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: but it was close, but we're still close in your terms.
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: Before it was like fourteen hundred something, so it was,
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: it was, it was more than that, maybe forty years off.
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: All right, I should be able to say this right,
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: but I can't so any rate. And it still wasn't
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: what you would call a good date because there was
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: a possibility it came out of the trash pit, and
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: we couldn't absolutely say that. Even if the date was right,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: we couldn't say it was absolutely associated with that object. Well,
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: in the meantime, one of the guys up at the
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: museum had been doing this research on a certain period
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: of time amongst a number of sites uh in the
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: in the area that were related by time. And I
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: can't remember exactly what it was, but when he did
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: this the excavation, and i'm i'm, it was at a
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: place called Lake Kayak. He found in a he found
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: a two half beads, one half in one house, one
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: half in the other house, and if you put them together,
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: they made a single bead. Yeah, and the date on
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: it overlap somewhat with the date that we had at
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: Puny Point. And that was the only non native artifact
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: found in either of those two houses. Every other artifact
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: found him in. Those two houses were native made and
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: dated earlier than the historic period. So now, all right,
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: we had, like the three beads we found, we had
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: a couple that Irving had found, although we didn't have them,
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: So we found out what museum they were in, and
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: we got in touch with them and said, hey, could
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: you And Irving had found a couple bengals too, and
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: Irving and so we got them all right, and on
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: one of those bangles that was with Irving beads with
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: willow wrapped up around the bengal all right, just like
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: it had been we found. So we dated it and
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: it came back about one hundred and fifty years too recent.
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: But what happened when we unwrapped that stuff was that
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: that bangle they never hammered it up far enough so
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: that it overlapped when they wrapped it up, So they
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: put a piece of willow across that gap to close
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: the gap and then wrapped it up, and we dated
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: that piece of willow and it matched our date. So
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: now we've got a couple of little beads are blowing
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: up people's idea of it. So anyway, that's the whole
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: background that thing, all right, So then beds. So then
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: we said, okay, all right, we said we've got good
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: enough radiocarbon data here on these beads that say they
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: could well be pre Columbian. We also know that the
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: glass that those glass beads, they were some of the
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: earliest made by the Aspiao process, and there's a really
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: good chance that they were made in Venice, all right.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: And and we also know that you know, you've heard
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: of Akham's razor. A razor is a It's like the
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: simplest explanation of something is almost always the right one.
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: That's my theory of automotive automotive mechanics, so any rate,
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: what's it called. So what I'm saying is the the
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: simplest way that those beads could have gotten there with
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: overland from the old world. And so that was the
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: general hypothesis, well supported hypothesis of our article, and it
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 1: got public, all right, a lot of people disagreed with it.
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: There have been other developments since then that show that
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: we were probably more right than we you know, we're
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: giving credit for but we don't have time. That could
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: come another day, and people that want to argue, like
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: the perspective is that. I mean, what's groundbreaking about it
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: is that the world, that the New world was connected
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: with the old world in some like unexpected way, and
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: that materials could somehow flow from like prior to Columbus,
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: materials were flowing from Italy into artic Alaska. Yeah, and
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: there was a chain of like presumably discussion and exchange
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: that would have led to that at a time when
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: people thought that that was hundreds of years away. Yeah,
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: and it said no, I got it from a dude.
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: He was white. Yeah, Like, let's uh, like, let's assume
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: you're right, bees showed up whatever fourteen hundred, Um, I'm
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: pretty sure we're really right, right, But but what would
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: have been like after that point, what would have been
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: the next point at which those people could have been
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: exposed to someone who could have given those them beads
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: that like, if they hadn't come from that direction to
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: this to this day, there are the only two a
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: forty beads that exist in Alaska. Okay, So that was it. Yeah,
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: I mean there an so they wouldn't run. Yeah, that
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: the Russians brought in, But none of this, none of
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: these things, you know, next time he's on he needs
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: to tell you about the old crazy Roosky shotgun. We
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: need to have them on like five more times. I
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: feel like we could because they got a crazy Roosky shotgun.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: And I think you guys found some crazy old traps too,
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: well they were they're not old. Well, there were a
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: good a cash of about fifty or sixty steel traps.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: We didn't get to all those. Now I've got them.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: We didn't get to We didn't get to all the
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: good wildlife stuff, the moose stuff, and the dude. You
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: just need to come for a week next time. You
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: need to. Yeah, like your buddy Meltzer, he had to
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: come on twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Long there's no more
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: pandemics that prevent you from going anywhere for three years. Yeah, yeah, No,
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: I would. I would be willing to come back. But
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot there's you know, I kind
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: of bumbled my way through this because I didn't really
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: I could have made myself a little clearer on some
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: of these things. There was no missing clarity. Yeah okay,
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: but I'm just saying that, Um, I'd be happy to
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: come back and talk some more about this stuff. Because
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: on the bead thing, there's there's stuff that we have
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: done since then, I gotta tell you, but yeah, you
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: guys tied it into Marco Polo. The biggest thing of
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: this was that when the University of Alaska put this out,
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: you know, as a press release, I mean the press
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: pit up on this. I stumbled into it and it
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: was I was like, I already know about them beads. Though,
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: the best part of this whole thing that I got
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: the biggest kick out and we did numerous interviews and yeah,
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: La Parisian and Paris did this fifteen minute video interview
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: and they had an artist do all this stuff to
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: make it all classy in her I mean, it was amazing.
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: But the best thing I want to make two points here.
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: The best thing was that I love the most was
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: that our beads, which were on the front cover of
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: American Antiquity, the volume it was published in, appeared on
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: the front page of the Venice newspaper. Yeah yeah, yeah.
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: And the other thing was because it got so much
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: publicity in the press. Some guys that have been researching glass,
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: some you know, scientists researching glass produced in Venice their
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: Italian for at least the last thirty thirty five years
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: got in touch with us and said, would you be
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: willing to do laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: on the glass on those glass beads, which is a
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: different thing than than than we had done than instrumental
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: neuton activation analysis, because we think that there's a good
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: chance those beads were made in Venice. So we did,
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: and we got a slightly different part using that other
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: method and one of the researchers, and so we gave
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: all our information to the Italian researchers and we're in
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: the process of deciding how we're going to handle this.
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: So this is a news flash. Sandro says that given
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: the results of that, you know study, that the beads
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: were probably made in Venice. Noah, So that's the next chapter.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: You need to find the ancestor of the man that
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: made him. That's impossible. But the point is, and I'll
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: make this last point, Robin and I are breed spacelists.
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: We didn't know anything to beat about beads anything else.
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: What we did was we took the evidence we had
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 1: and we went what it told us. Even though we
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: were swimming upstream on this thing with the beads and
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: everything else. We just said, Okay, this says this, So
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: that's the simplest answer is probably it is this, this
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: is this, and we arrived at this. That looks like
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: now with this new research, it's it's going to be
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: sufficiently proven it's true just because we followed the lines
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: of every and in your field of research, do you
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: like do some do you know some folks who tend
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: to get maybe distracted by what's not the simplest explanation,
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: like they look they want to look for things that
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: are some crazy. I think what happens is if you don't,
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 1: if you can't come up with a pretty reasonable answer,
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: then you start casting about looking for something else and
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: you can't find And so every time you do a
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: new cast about you're moving a little further away from
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: from the chances of it being react. That's a that's
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: the path that leads to um that they're bigfoot beats exactly.
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 1: UFOs dropped them. Hey you know bigfoot guy, the big
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: foot guy. I don't know about the big foot Well
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: the guy at Washington State University. Oh yeah, Grover Krantz. Yeah, Well,
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: I went to graduate school at Washington State University and
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: my first year. My first year there was Grover Krantz's
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: first year as a professor there, so and we all
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: thought he was crazier. Oh man, it was good to
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: have you on. Uh, get that book out, hold the
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: book up. Oh you can get that online again. I
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: was gonna yeah. Just just all you gotta do is
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: say masa site, uh maza se Paleo Indians above the
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: Arctic Circle. Yeah, Michael cons and it'll take you right,
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: It'll take you right to the BLM wood page and
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: you can download that whole thing. But you can also
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: just go goal m I K E K U n
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: Z and mostly like University of Alaska, right, because you
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: have published a ridiculous number of journal scientific journal articles
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: on all things from ancient polar bear, brown bear hybridization too.
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: I don't even know so exactly people of Arctic archaeology.
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: People can spend the rest of their lives reading Mike's words. Now. Yeah,
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: I'm glad you made it down. I'm glad you're able
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: to provide some context to what your your former colleagues
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: had to say about proper normanclature. Yeah. Um, thanks man.
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: Oh and everybody check I'll remember that email. Your chet
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: k questions too. So you got etiquette questions, which we
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: call chetick questions, email them too. Why don't we have
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: our own like what we'll get it for email to
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 1: them eat or at them eater dot com. No, it's
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 1: meat eat the meat eater at themmeater dot com as
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: it should be subject line chattkit. We'll read the whole
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 1: episode on addicott chatt ict. So we need your questions, yep.
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: And if it's uh, if today is like April third
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: or April fourth, then great. But if it's April after
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: April fourth, don't bother. It's too late. I don't care
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: what the hell date it is. Go and pre order
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: our new kids activity book, Catch a Crayfish Count the Stars. Um,
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: if you want to have kids, that gotta you know,
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: you know, tough kids to understand nature and have kind
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: of a raw bloody edge to them. Get Catch Crayfish
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: Count Stars four, said children. And raise him right all right, everybody,
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 1: thank you, Oh seal Ram shine like silver in the sun,
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: right on, all right, on alive on sweetheart. We're done,
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 1: beat this damn horse to death, taking a new one
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: and ride. We're done beat this damn horse today. So
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 1: take your new one and ride on.