A race to rescue frozen artifacts (BBC)
By Matt Stirn
18 September 2019
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As an alpine archaeologist, I study how past cultures lived at high altitudes and snowy environments above the tree line. Visitors, eyes squinting and necks straining, often describe the alpine landscape’s wind-whipped crags and icy gorges as harsh and intimidating. But growing up at the foot of Wyoming’s Teton Range in the heart of the Rockies, I have always felt at home here. In fact, 3,000m is where I feel the most alive. Yet, it wasn’t until I started exploring my backyard from a different perspective that I realised the wilderness holds a vault of forgotten and untold stories that intertwine people and nature.
As a teenager, I spent my summers guiding mountaineering trips throughout Wyoming. During one particular trip into the Wind River Range, I found an arrowhead next to our camp, and the notion that our tents were pitched in the exact spot where someone else had camped 2,000 years prior made me wonder why mountains have always attracted mankind. Upon starting college that autumn, I tried to research the history of Wyoming’s mountains, but could only find one reference in an old archaeological journal stating, “the high country was too harsh to support prehistoric people”.
Several months later, I discovered that an archaeologist from Wyoming named Dr Richard Adams had just unearthed an entire prehistoric village only a few miles away from where I had found the arrowhead. I contacted him and he invited me to join him on a project to excavate the village he had found. Adams showed me that the mountains held ancient secrets waiting to be uncovered, so I traded in my climbing rope for a trowel and began an exhilarating new career in search of our hidden past.
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In mountain ranges across the world, ancient people used snowfields, glaciers and ice patches to hunt, store food and use as bridges over otherwise impenetrable terrain. Just like modern-day trekkers, these ancient hikers occasionally dropped personal items, which, over time, became trapped and preserved in the ice. While we unearth many non-biodegradable, prehistoric stone artefacts, our most fascinating discoveries are so-called “ice patch artefacts” like arrow shafts and twine made of wood, leather and other organic material that would have otherwise decomposed if not entombed in a natural freezer.
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While ice patches and glaciers possess a trove of scientific information, they are in imminent danger of being lost forever. Because of increasing global temperatures, mountain ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, and these frozen perishable artefacts that have remained preserved for thousands of years are quickly thawing and disintegrating. As a result, searching for ice patch artefacts is both an exciting opportunity, and a desperate race against time.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190916-a-race-to-rescue-frozen-artefacts
This topic first caught my attention because of the excellent book Locust, by researcher Jeffrey Lockwood. The Rocky Mountain Locust, which once swarmed in the billions, went mysteriously extinct towards the end of the 19th century, and Lockwood and his colleagues searched through thawing snowpack to find remains of the insects for DNA analysis. With rising temperatures, the amount of material available for study is shrinking rapidly, and a similar fate awaits the artifacts described in the BBC article.
