Sifting through a slice of Southeast's history

A dozen Hoonah teens got a feel for their own Alaska Native history recently when they helped local U.S. Forest Service archaeologists catalog a motherlode of artifacts that have been sitting in boxes for 45 years.

• Photos

Courtesy Of U.s. Forest Service

Highlights include 8,000-year-old obsidian microblades, iron harpoons, stones with geometric markings, and a whole lot of rocks.

"It's a very, very cool collection," said Myra Gilliam, a Forest Service archaeologist based in Juneau who went to Hoonah to work with the students.

Part of the allure is the mystery. For example, microblades are tough to make. And it's tough for archaeologists to say just how they got to Ground Hog Bay, considering the closest obsidian is in southern Southeast Alaska.

Archaeologist Robert Ackerman dug up these artifacts in 1964 and 1965 from three sites near Ground Hog Bay in Icy Strait, ancestral lands of the Kaagwaantaan clan of Tlingits. Ackerman did some initial studies, but didn't do much with them - the Hoonah students took the first item-by-item look at some 1,600 of about 3,000 artifacts.

The students described, photographed and catalogued the artifacts in a database over several days in late April.

Ackerman, now an emeritus professor at Washington State University, had a permit from the National Park Service to excavate in Ground Hog Bay. But he apparently strayed over the property line into U.S. Forest Service territory and excavated the artifacts beyond his permit's bounds, according to Mary Beth Moss of the Hoonah Indian Association.

In 2006, the Hoonah Indian Association, with the Forest Service's help, retrieved the artifacts from Washington and brought them to Alaska.

Radiocarbon dating puts some of the artifacts at about 10,000 years old, plus or minus 800 years, Gilliam said. It's hard to say whether their original owners were Tlingit.

"There is no way to determine whether the 10,000-year-old items were used by the ancestors of present-day Tlingits, with the data that's available," said Moss, who talked about the cultural significance of the items with the students. "I think what archaeologists would tell you is that it's unlikely."

Gilliam hopes an ambitious young graduate student will take on the collection as a thesis project.

"We have so much more to learn. We have not scratched the surface," Gilliam said.

Much of the collection is more recent and definitely Tlingit.

As the students worked on the collections, little teachable moments came up, Moss said. "Why would you need something like this?" Moss would ask.

They'd learn, for instance, that the stones incised with geometric marks might have belonged to a young girl. She would use them to scratch herself in lieu of fingernails, as custom dictated.

"My table, we went through a lot of rocks," said Treana White, a recent Hoonah High School graduate. "Mostly, the rocks I saw seemed like plain rocks."

And every now and then they'd find treasure in the boxes. Student Kristin Johanson saw some needles and beads, and a stone bowl the size of an ashtray she liked.

But even the rocks were cool, she said - not because of how they looked, but because they represented a connection to her ancestors.

As her fellow student, recent grad Jill Meserve, put it: "Wow. This is probably something that my great-great-great grandma has touched."

For now, the collection will be housed in Fairbanks at the university museum. The Hoonah Indian Association hopes to bring it home after it builds a cultural heritage center, but that's a few years out.

• Contact reporter Kate Golden at 523-2276 or kate.golden@juneauempire.com.