Global warming is allowing archeologists in the Northwest Territories to expand their understanding of how people interacted with caribou in mountainous regions thousands of years ago.
The International Polar Year Ice Patch Study, which has involved 53 people from 22 organizations, has allowed archeologists to retrieve artifacts of caribou hunting tools from melting ice patches in the Mackenzie Mountains.
Archeologist Tom Andrews says the melting ice in the mountains, located about 800 kilometres northwest of the territorial capital, has yielded bow and arrow fragments and spear-thrower tools -- at least one of them 2,400 years old.
"(Ice melting) is always bad, but we're just there to pick up the collateral stuff that comes off of it," he told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Yellowknife.
Andrews is affiliated with Yellowknife's Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre and the lead researcher on the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study.
Archeologists first became aware of the phenomenon of ice patch archeology when a group of sheep hunters in the mountains near Whitehorse, Yukon, noticed a thick band of caribou dung in a melting ice patch, Andrews said.
Sitting in the dung was what appeared to be a piece of dowel wrapped in a string. Archeologists determined it was in fact a 4,300-year-old dart shaft.
Andrews and his colleagues began to wonder whether they might find a similar phenomenon in the mountainous ice patches of the Northwest Territories. They identified 20 ice patches that were likely to yield artifacts, and on investigations in the summers of 2007, 2008 and 2009, found artifacts in eight of them.
The artifacts speak to moments in time when hunters, believed to be the descendents of the present-day Shutaot'ine people, or Mountain Dene, would travel by foot into the mountains in the summertime to hunt the caribou.
"This is really a new discovery about how hunters captured caribou in the past," Andrews said.
The ice patches in question are found on northern mountain faces. Because those areas receive little sunlight, the ice patches used to remain frozen year-round. The snowfall from each winter accumulated on the ice patches, making them a prime summertime destination where boreal caribou would go to cool off and avoid the scourge of insects
Geophysicists have examined core samples of the ice patches in the Mackenzie Mountains and found alternating layers of caribou dung and ice that date back almost 6,000 years, Andrews said.
The eight ice patches have yielded pieces of bow and arrow technology that date back to between 270 and 850 years ago. The arrows are made of birch or spruce, and the bow is made of willow, Andrews said.
The ice patches have also turned up artifacts from a dart and spear-thrower technology that dates back to 2,300 and 2,400 years ago. Most of the dart artifacts are made of birch, but one artifact is made from part of a branch of Saskatoon berry, Andrews said. The Saskatoon berry artifact dovetails with a story about Yamonzah, a cultural hero of the Mountain Dene, who was told to fashion arrows out of Saskatoon berry to complete a set of tasks.
"This is a beautiful intersection of between two knowledge systems, an archeological one and a traditional Dene one," Andrews said.
It is not known why the ice patches are melting or how long they will take to melt, leaving Andrews and his team unsure of how much time they have to retrieve artifacts from the dung as the ice melts.
The discovery of perfectly preserved wood artifacts in the ice and dung is especially significant in the Northwest Territories, where the coniferous forest cover creates acidic soils that do not allow organic artifacts to survive. Before the phenomenon of ice patch archeology was discovered, researchers would "make inferences about the past based on the few bits of stone that we find left at archeological sites," Andrews said.
"To come to a place where we've still got the stone arrowhead attached to the entire piece of technology ... it's exciting, but it's also a tremendous gain to our knowledge about these hunting technologies, how they were made and how they were used," he said.
"People are incredibly skilled and very knowledgeable, and have been that way for thousands of years."
