Valley high school students unearth prehistoric artifacts

June 24, 2007

By Will Elliott

Frontiersman

WASILLA - The finds ranged from hide scrapers to hammering stones to tiny stone flakes likely made by sculpting from a larger tool. Roasted caribou bones, cracked hearthstones, and refuse suggests groups were staying in the area for awhile, and obsidian blades evidence trading with craftsmen upriver.

Burchell High summer school students made the discoveries this month during a nine-day archeological expedition to the Yukon River west of Eagle. There the Tanana Chiefs Conference and archeologist Robert Sattler have conducted research for the past 13 years into the lives of the Han Gwich'in people, who populated the area up to 6,000 years ago. Their descendants occupy the northern Yukon today. With TCC and grant support, the students helped Sattler study that culture, while learning something about their own and a great deal about themselves.

Summer school teachers Paul Morely, Geoff Penrose and Nikki Sargent have led classes to the dig for three years. After driving 500 miles up the Taylor Highway - the optimistically named narrow road over the mountains to Eagle - the class headed down river by boat to the dig site. The exact location is undisclosed to protect what Penrose called one of the most significant - if not the most significant - sites in Alaska. There students camped for a week, digging, discovering and conducting ecological experiments.

Burchell is an alternative high school in the Mat-Su Valley with a variety of programs for students who aren't well-served by traditional high schools. Some may need a flexible schedule so they can work to support a family, others might hail from a village or milepost and benefit from Burchell's tight-knit community more than a larger high school's cliques and crowds.

Often the test-and-textbook approach is not as effective with some students because their life experiences may have given them other priorities besides class, Sargent said. That's where the field school comes in.

&#8220The key word is relevancy,” Morely said.

&#8220The three Rs can be learned all day out of a book,” Penrose said. &#8220But until you have to plot the X, Y, Z coordinates of an artifact you dug out of the ground with your own two hands, it doesn't matter much.”

Students feel better about reading those books when they can apply that knowledge in the field and see tangible results, he said.

Although science was the curricular backbone of the program, some of the students' largest gains are in social learning, Sargent said. Many of them had never been camping before and hailed from backgrounds diverse enough to make expeditionary intimacy a challenge. In the end, sharing tents, living in wilderness and learning the work of an unfamiliar field all brought the students closer together and gave them experience and confidence to draw on as they encounter future challenges.

In-town youth programs make similar claims, but Burchell's students said their wilderness field school offered some things they could not have experienced back in the settled world.

Student Shy Mulholland came away with a renewed appreciation for her lifestyle, while student Chris O'Hara said he came away with what he called a new life perspective.

&#8220I saw parts of a world I never knew existed,” O'Hara said.

The Han Gwich'in's self-reliance in an unfriendly land offers a window for urban students into how different human beings can be. Yet their humanity persists despite that difference. To a diverse class, that lesson in commonality is especially pertinent, O'Hara said.

&#8220We called our camp Camp Trail Mix, because out of such a wide diversity of cliques and groups, we all turned into just human beings,” O'Hara said.

That's a perspective that will serve students well in the settled world as the global increasingly impinges upon the local, he said. Lessons about humility and the relentless impermanence of a changing world were similarly helpful.

&#8220I thought about people digging us up one day,” he said. &#8220We think of ourselves too highly.”

While archeology may not seem a forward-looking science, O'Hara found himself digging up postmodern critiques in the prehistoric setting.

Experiencing life at the dig firsthand, rather than through media, made those experiences more significant, he said. And removed from the press of population and what he called the trivialities of urban life, students had an opportunity to be themselves, not just more people in a crowded town, O'Hara said.

&#8220I definitely consider it more real out there. This town is a river,” he said of Wasilla. &#8220You throw a stone in and you're not going to see a ripple. Out there it's a lake, tranquil and calm. What you do really has an effect.”

The teachers hope to reprise their partnership with Sattler and TCC next year and are seeking donations of outdoor gear and clothing for the students. Contact Burchell High at 373-7775 to help.

Contact Will Elliott at 352-2252 or will.elliott@frontiersman.com.