Excavations at Delta Creek (XBD-110)

I received a National Geographic Young Explorers grant to conduct fieldwork at the Delta Creek Site in the Tanana Flats. This deeply stratified, multicomponent site holds clues to what people were eating during the second half of the Holocene, beginning around 6,000 years ago. We found lots of material during our brief field season, including a scatter of hundreds of grey chert flakes in the earliest component.

What does this mean? Likely that a highly mobile hunter-gatherer group of Northern Archaic peoples stopped to make a series of tools from a local material while using this vantage point to look for caribou. From the site, you can see almost 100 miles to the west. Even though we had our heads in our holes, we still caught a glimpse of a caribou running down Delta Creek! We also found bones that appeared to be from a caribou femur, indicating that some successful hunters processed part of their dinner at the site.

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