An Alaska camp with more than 80,000 artifacts shows life near the Bering Land Bridge

More than 80,000 archaeological specimens have come out of Shég’ Xdaltthʼiʼ, a ridge-top base camp in interior Alaska that people used between roughly 13,800 and 12,700 years ago. Kelly Graf, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, has directed the excavation for more than a decade and reports the results in a new paper in Science Advances. The site, whose name is said to mean “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan, gives an unusually detailed picture of daily life near the Bering Land Bridge.

A ridge above the Tanana River

The camp sits on a small ridge overlooking the Tanana River. In the late Pleistocene the ridge was covered in shrub-tundra, while today it is ringed by spruce. The University of Kansas release describes three early archaeological components at the site, dated to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, so people used the location at three separate moments across roughly eleven centuries of the Late Pleistocene, according to the university’s announcement.

The Bering Land Bridge, which linked Asia and North America, formed about 35,000 years ago and went under rising seas around 12,000 years ago. Graf’s camp therefore belongs to the last chapter of that connection, when the land was still dry but the water was closing in.

The paper calls the site a base camp, and the finds fit that description. A base camp is where people lived, repaired gear and processed food, as opposed to a short-lived hunting stand, and the activity areas preserved at Shég’ Xdaltthʼiʼ let the team see where particular jobs were done. Graf joined the University of Kansas in 2022, and her expertise spans Ice Age archaeology, environmental archaeology and the peopling of the Americas, which is the question this camp bears on most directly. She has said it is fascinating to her how people evolved and how humble beginnings as hunter-gatherers led to the present day.

Mammoth, bison and bird-bone needles

The finds paint a working camp. Graf’s team recovered a distinctive hafted-biface form, tools made of bone, diverse animal remains and well-preserved activity areas. The animals hunted included mammoth, bison and horse, all now extinct in the region, along with caribou, which remains important to Alaska Native people today. Needles were fashioned from bird bones, a small and specific detail of the camp’s toolkit.

One of Graf’s favorite discoveries, the release says, is a large stone anvil inside a dwelling feature. Around it lay broken bison bones and quartz and quartzite hammerstones, which the team interprets as the debris of cracking bones open for marrow and possibly grease. A large earth oven sits nearby, so the anvil appears to have been one station in a larger food-processing routine rather than an isolated find. The mix of species is itself informative: mammoth, bison and horse are now extinct, while caribou remains, so the same bones that document a lost fauna also connect the camp to the hunting traditions of Alaska Native communities today. The hammerstones, the oven, the anvil and the needles describe people who stayed long enough to organize their space.

Diamond-shaped points and a link to Russia

The most pointed evidence for travel comes from the stone weapon tips. The excavation produced numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, possibly sharpened weapon tips. Graf said the shape is unique in the state: “It’s the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond shape.” Points of that kind in a northern context are otherwise known only from the Russian side of the land bridge.

From that pattern Graf draws a cautious inference. In her words, “It suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to and possibly from this location.” The wording leaves open movement in both directions, which matters for debates about how the first peoples of the Americas spread, and the argument rests on the match between point shapes on the two sides of the land bridge.

Years of fieldwork and who paid for it

Graf began visiting the site in 2013 and returned every year until the COVID-19 pandemic, then went back in 2021, 2023 and 2025. She secured several grants from the National Science Foundation totaling $400,000, and the NSF funder portal lists related releases. Co-authors include Ted Goebel, a Kansas professor and department chair, doctoral student Mia Harbort and undergraduate Mason Sewing, with other academics from the United States and Europe. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

The paper, titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltthʼiʼ and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska,” is available through its Science Advances page. Images of the excavation site and a bison bone image accompany the release. Graf recalled taking a North American archaeology course as an undergraduate and falling for the Bering Land Bridge concept, and she framed the broader value of the work as showing how past humans adapted and responded to life’s exigencies.

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

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