An Alaska camp used 13,800 years ago gave up more than 80,000 artifacts from its oldest layer alone

More than 80,000 artifacts came out of the oldest layer of a hunter-gatherer camp in interior Alaska, a site that people used about 13,800 years ago and kept returning to for more than two centuries. University of Kansas archaeologist Kelly Graf led the team that excavated the site, called Shég’ Xdaltth’í, an Athabascan name that means “they were there.” The count covers the oldest occupation layer only, not everything the site has produced.

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The age places the camp inside a long-running debate about when and how people first reached the Americas. Most evidence suggests the ancestors of Indigenous Americans arrived around 21,000 years ago, and only a couple of sites, including Bluefish Caves in the Yukon at roughly 24,000 years old, hint at earlier settlement in Beringia. A dense, long-used base camp from 13,800 years ago gives researchers a rare chance to study daily life in that landscape rather than a single hunting stop.

What 80,000 artifacts in one layer looks like

The study, published October 14 in Science Advances as “Late Pleistocene site in Alaska yields evidence of a trans-Beringian cultural connection,” describes the stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, animal and plant remains, and the more than 80,000 artifacts, according to the AAAS news release on EurekAlert. The authors interpret the site as a settled base camp rather than a brief stopover, because the layer shows repeated use over more than 200 years.

Graf summed up the density in remarks reported by Gizmodo: “There’s just so much stuff.” The outlet described a base-camp layer packed with stone tools, an anvil, hammerstones and diamond-shaped points, alongside a variety of animal bones, a pit and a hearth inside a dwelling. The full technical account sits in the paper itself under its digital object identifier.

A hearth, a post stain and an earth oven

Live Science’s account of the study places the site about 34 miles, or 55 kilometers, southeast of Fairbanks, in eastern Beringia. The earliest occupation includes a hearth, a small pit and a stain from a wooden post that may mark the remains of a lean-to or early tent, and a nearby earth oven held charcoal and animal bones, possibly used to slow-cook meat for a large group. The researchers call it the earliest potential habitation structure in North America, a claim worth reading as the authors’ reading of limited evidence.

The Live Science report adds smaller finds that show how varied the toolkit was: eight bone needle fragments described as the oldest eyed needles in the Western Hemisphere, an antler pendant with a drilled hole, and obsidian carried from a source hundreds of miles to the northwest. Bones from more than a dozen wolf-like canids belong to a population unique to central Alaska, and their genetic ties to Siberian wolves hint at early dog ownership, although that remains circumstantial.

A hafted-biface form that echoes western Beringia

The tool type is the center of the paper’s argument. The release says the camp produced a distinct hafted-biface form, a stone blade mounted on a handle or shaft, that resembles tools from Beringian sites farther west. Gizmodo notes that the diamond-shaped points had not appeared at other Alaskan sites but have been found at two contemporaneous sites in Russia. Graf said the form “mirrors what’s going on on the western side of the Bering Land Bridge,” and suggested a shared group identity may lie behind the similar point styles, though she framed that tentatively.

The authors therefore propose a trans-Beringian cultural connection, a link across the land bridge that once joined Siberia and Alaska. That is an inference from tool shape, not a demonstrated migration route, and the release also notes that other artifacts at the site resemble those from pre-Clovis, Clovis, Folsom and Late Paleoindian sites in temperate North America.

What the camp does and does not settle

Spencer Pelton of the University of Wyoming wrote a companion Focus piece revisiting the long-debated idea that groups entering North America around 20,000 to 15,000 years ago paused in Beringia until the ice sheets retreated enough to open a way south. A camp this large and this well-organized at 13,800 years sits comfortably within that debate without resolving it.

Graf was candid about the open end of the story. Gizmodo reports she said the site suggests “there must have been folks that were there far earlier,” an older presence that has yet to be found. The same outlet describes that idea as speculative, and notes that a coastal-route theory, in which early people arrived by boat, is now more widely accepted than a land-bridge crossing. For now, the 80,000 artifacts stand as a large, well-dated body of evidence about one camp, and the wider story of the first Americans still turns on what future excavations in Alaska and Siberia turn up.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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