Global Warming

Global Warming: Key to Unbolt Archeological Secrets

Global Warming, the name itself is holding more and there is a cruel possibility lying behind. Future is unforeseeable but strong are our characteristics and determination to hold. The dangers of global warming have received a great deal of attention, but the alarming trend does have certain potential advantages. Global warming is allowing archeologists in [...]

Global Warming, the name itself is holding more and there is a cruel possibility lying behind. Future is unforeseeable but strong are our characteristics and determination to hold.

The dangers of global warming have received a great deal of attention, but the alarming trend does have certain potential advantages. Global warming is allowing archeologists in the Northwest Territories to expand their understanding of how people interacted with caribou in mountainous regions thousands of years ago.

In the frozen reaches of Canada, warmer temperatures brought on by climate change have yielded a bounty of historical information for archaeologists. Using the new discipline of ice patch archeology, scientists in recent years have uncovered in the Mackenzie Mountains 2,400-year-old spears, 1,000-year-old snares, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years. Ice patches are accumulations of snow that used to remain frozen all year, but which are now melting and revealing artifacts that have been hidden for centuries.

Melting ice in the mountains, located about 800 kilometres west of the territorial capital, has yielded bow and arrow fragments and spear-thrower tools — at least one of them 2,400 years old are the words from the mouth of archeologist Tom Andrews.

(Ice melting) is always bad, but we’re just there to pick up the collateral stuff that comes off of it,” he told CTV. The ice patches have also turned up artifacts from a dart and spear-thrower technology that dates back to 2,300 and 2,400 years ago. Most of the dart artifacts are made of birch, but one artifact is made from part of a branch of Saskatoon berry, Andrews said. The Saskatoon berry artifact dovetails with a story about Yamonzah, a cultural hero of the Mountain Dene, who was told to fashion arrows out of Saskatoon berry to complete a set of tasks.

“This is a beautiful intersection of between two knowledge systems, an archeological one and a traditional Dene one,” Andrews said.

“To come to a place where we’ve still got the stone arrowhead attached to the entire piece of technology … it’s exciting, but it’s also a tremendous gain to our knowledge about these hunting technologies, how they were made and how they were used,” he said.

In addition to archaeologists, biologists have benefited from access to the exposed, once-frozen terrain. Finds include dung containing plant remains, insect parts, pollen and caribou parasites, as well as DNA evidence that’s yielding information on the lineage and migration patterns of caribou.