Archaeologists Unearth Rare 1,000-Year-Old Food Storage Pit in Alaska

On a hill of birch and spruce overlooking the Knik Arm, a narrow stretch of the Gulf of Alaska that extends northwest of Anchorage, archaeologists have unearthed a remarkably intact cache pit used by the region’s Indigenous Dene people. The discovery is offering a new perspective on the long human history of the region, as well as how to preserve and protect its legacy for generations to come.

Cache pits are like root cellars, as Elizabeth Ortiz, an archaeologist and cultural resource manager at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER), the military complex where the discovery was made, says in a statement.

Located along a well-known Dene trail that led north out of the modern-day Anchorage area, the pit measures about 3.5 feet deep. It was dug into well-drained soil and lined with birch bark and grass, which preserved fish, meat and berries through the harsh seasonal extremes of southeastern Alaska.

The Dene, also known as Athabaskans, include the Dena’ina and Ahtna people. In the summers, they would have stayed in the area to catch and preserve salmon and terrestrial meat, with houses and smokehouses lining the bluffs above the Cook Inlet, according to Arkeonews.

Archaeologists expected the cache pit to be a few hundred years old. However, radiocarbon testing revealed that it was actually much older.

“When we got the results back that said it was 960 years, plus or minus 30, we were shocked,” Ortiz tells Alena Naiden of KNBA, a local radio station. “[We] were jumping up and down in our cube in tears. It was very, very exciting.”

The new analysis “further substantiates Dena’ina and Ahtna oral traditions that JBER and the surrounding area have been used for a very long time,” Margan Grover, an archaeologist with JBER, says in the statement.

The team conducted additional radiocarbon and stable isotope tests to determine whether the food buried in the cache pit was from the land or the sea. Initial findings suggest the presence of moose or caribou, though researchers plan to test the surrounding soil to confirm whether such animals were stored in the cache or were just passing by.

Occasionally, archaeologists find comparable cache pits in areas like Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley and the Kenai Peninsula. Other Alaskan archaeological sites like Swan Point, which contains evidence of humans hunting mammoths, can date back as many as 14,000 years.

In this case, most of the area surrounding the cache had been razed by the military in the 1940s, when JBER was under construction. To find such an old and well-preserved site in the Anchorage Bowl, as the developed region surrounding Alaska’s largest city is known, is much rarer and holds “extra significance” to the region’s Indigenous groups, according to the statement.

“We know we can’t stop development,” Aaron Leggett, president of the Native Village of Eklutna and a curator at the Anchorage Museum, tells KNBA. “But can we use these opportunities to fill in the picture?”

In the statement, Leggett expresses his hope that the tribal governments and the U.S. government will use the cache site as motivation to work toward their “shared goals and the co-production of knowledge about our past.”

Today, half of Alaska’s population lives within traditional Dene lands, according to KNBA. The archaeologists are collaborating with local tribes and stakeholders to gain additional context and understanding of the surrounding area.

“There are things that we know inherently from what was passed down about living in a place, but there are other things that these archaeological sites tell us about the past,” Angela Wade, the historic preservationist of the Chickaloon village, tells KNBA.

“I feel like every site that we learn about, every site that we can further investigate, is a piece of our history that was potentially lost,” Wade adds. “So this is kind of regaining some of the history that we were separated from.”