Northwest History. Alaska 7. Archaeology, United States

• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1935
• Subjects: Alaska; Stone Age; college campus; Fairbanks; skeptical archaeologists; America; American Museum of National History; migration; American continent; Gobi Dessert; American antiquity; Asiatic tools; Paleolithic; immigrants moving; Bering strait; Dr. N. C. Nelson; Azilizn-Tardenoisian stage; Alaska Agricultural College; School of Mines; Jack Dorsch; Dr. C. E. Bunnell; college president; Northwest; Pacific > History > 20th century; Bering Strait; Flint; Pacific; Dorsch
• Online Access: http://content.libraries.wsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/clipping/id/89017

Recent Discovery Indicates Alaska Settled In Stone Age. Recent Discovery Indicates Alaska Settled in Stone Age Broken stone tools, discovered through a chance bit of digging on a college campus at Fairbanks, Alaska, may convince still skeptical archaeologists that America is no recently discovered new world, but has been inhabited since the old stone age. The stone tools unearthed in Alaska are pronounced at the American Museum of Natural History, "The first clear archaeological evidence of early migration to the American continent." Like Gobi Dessert Tools. American antiquity is demonstrated to archaeological satisfaction by discovery that the Alaskan tools match Asiatic tools of the Gobi desert's Paleolithic or old stone age. The matched tools point a trail of ancient men from Asia to America, and indicate that the immigrants moving across Bering strait were people not yet advanced out of Asia's old stone age. Dr. N. C. Nelson, curator of prehistoric archaeology at the American museum, announced this new evidence for early Americans in an initialed note in the museum's publication, Natural History. Examining the Alaskan tools, he found two kinds, consisting of small semi-conical flint cores and small endscrapers to be "identical in several respects with thousands of specimens found in the Gobi desert by the central Asiatic expedition in 1925-1928." Early Migration. "The specimens," continued Dr. Nelson, "furnish the first clear archaeological evidence we have of early migration to the American continent, apparently during the final or Azilian-Tardenoisian stage of the paleolithic culture horizon possibly 7000 to 000 B. C." First of the Alaskan stone tools j came to light when a posthole was dug on the campus of the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines at Fairbanks, in 1933. Stimulated by this discovery relating to prehistoric man, Jack Dorsch, working under direction of Dr. C. E. Bunnell, college president, dug a trench across the campus last summer. His excavations revealed about 400 hamrner-stones, projectile points, rejected flakes, cores and endscrapers, most of the ancient tools being fragmentary.