Here is the little red R-44 helicopter we use to get to our remote site and to do survey work from the site. It's a great helicopter that can haul all our gear - although we have to take a little bit…
Today the students are going to explain a few of the terms they have learned during their stay at the archaeology camp. After they define these new words, they will describe what they did today:…
Glory be, we awoke to a gorgeous sunny day without a single cloud. Sunlight is shimmering on the river and green hills are all around under a canopy of endless blue.
The archaeologists are very…
The visitors have arrived! Tia and Jackie came first and they have stayed all day. Stanley came too and fed us some of his seal blubber and meat for lunch. He had so many amazing stories to tell! He…
We are so excited to have our native visitors from the village of Kivalina. The helicopter just left to go pick them up. I called the village on the satellite phone and spoke with Stanley, the elder…
Who were the people who left these tiny flakes of stone? Did they sew animal skins together to make clothing? Did they hunt the 15-foot-tall wooly mammoth or were those extinct already? Did they…
DEET is the super-strong bug repellant we use. You can get 30 percent DEET, which works well, but 100 percent DEET is the strongest. It will melt the plastic off your Swiss Army knife! Usually we…
Stan Hermens of Hermens Helicopters shows us how to board his aircraft on the runway at the Red dog Mine. We flew there in a Cessna 208 Caravan. Stan flew us in pairs out to our remote dig site from…
See all the light-tan colored area? That's where the Bering Land Bridge was between what it is now Alaska and Russia. All of that area would have been above sea level. It wasn't just a thin peninsula…
Here is an aerial view of Kotzebue, Alaska, located about 3 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Kotzebue has about 3,000 people. As you can see, it's located on a peninsula. To the left or west is the…
Through a cold, gray drizzle we landed in Kotzebue this afternoon, about 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle. One of the archaeologists, Ian from Oregon, and I met our BLM contact John Erlich at the…
Today's training started with bear awareness. We learned that most bears will leave the area before people even know they are there. We also learned the major differences between black bears and…
