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Over the past few centuries, the Yup’ik peoples of Alaska have told grisly tales of a massacre that took place during the Bow and Arrow Days of War, a series of long and often brutal wars on the shores of the Bering Sea and in the Yukon. According to one account, the massacre began when one village sent a war team to raid another. However, the residents were reported and removed the looters by setting up an ambush. The victors then attacked the defenseless town, set it on fire and massacred its inhabitants. No one was saved.

For the past 12 years, Rick Knecht has been conducting an excavation at an area called Nunalleq, about 400 miles west of Anchorage. Archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Dr. “When we started, the hope was to learn something about Yup’ik prehistory by digging up an average village,” Knecht said. “We knew very little that we were digging anything approaching the Yup’ik equivalent of Troy.”

Their most surprising discovery was the charred remains of a large communal weed house. The floor was black and clayey, and hundreds of slates were riddled with arrow points, as if from a prehistoric chariot shot. In total, researchers and native Yup’ik people living in the area uncovered more than 100,000 well-preserved artifacts, as well as the burned carcasses of two dogs and the bones of at least 28 individuals, nearly all women, children and children. the elderly. Many had apparently been dragged out of the house, tied with grass rope, and killed—some had their heads cut off. Dr. “It’s a complex crime scene,” Knecht said. “It is also a rare and detailed archaeological example of Indigenous warfare.”

Until recently, the site was frozen deep below the ground known as permafrost. As global temperatures gather pace, permafrost and glaciers are rapidly thawing and eroding across large areas of Earth, releasing many of the objects they have absorbed and revealing aspects of life in a once inaccessible past.

Dr. “The surrounding world is, or was, filled with miraculously preserved sites like Nunalleq,” Knecht said. “They offer a window like no other into the unexpectedly rich lives of prehistoric hunters and gatherers.”

The Ice Man appears

Glacial archeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice literally broke in the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Ötztal Alps saw a half-buried tea-colored corpse on the Italian side of the Austrian border. Originally mistaken for a modern mountaineer who died in a climbing accident, Ötzi the Ice Man was shown to have died around 5,300 years ago by carbon dating.

Ötzi, a short, heavily tattooed man in his mid-40s, wore a bearskin hat, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer skin, and shoes with grass-studded bearskin soles to keep his feet warm. The Iceman’s survival gear included a long badger bow, a quiver, a copper axe, and a kind of first aid kit filled with herbs with powerful pharmacological properties. The chest X-ray and CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep within Ötzi’s left shoulder, suggesting that Ötzi may have bled to death. His murder is humanity’s oldest unsolved cold case.

Six years later, hunting tools dating back thousands of years from melting ice surfaced in Yukon’s snowfields. Soon, similar findings were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies, and the Swiss Alps.

In 2006, a long, warm autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of exploration in the snow-capped Jotunheimen mountains, home to the rock and ice giants of Norse mythology, Jötnar. Of all the debris that was displaced, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford, most likely made of reindeer skin.

The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe marked the beginning of glacial survey at the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archeology Program was launched in 2011. Outside of Yukon, it is the only permanent salvage project for ice exploration.

Glacial archeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. GAP researchers generally conduct fieldwork during the short period of time between the melting of old snow and the arrival of new snow, mid-August to mid-September. “If we start too early, most of the snow from the previous winter will cover the old ice, reducing the chances of exploration,” said Lars Holger Pilo, co-director of the Glacier Archeology Program. “Starting late is also dangerous. We may get early winter snow and the field season may be over before it starts.” Glacial discoveries tend to be limited to what archaeologists can gather on previously ice-covered ground.

When the program began, the finds were predominantly Iron Age and medieval, between 500 and 1,500 years ago. But as the melting expands, older periods of history are revealed. Dr. “In some places, we went back to the Stone Age with pieces as old as six thousand years,” Pilo said. “We’re going back in time fast.”

To date, the Glacial Archeology Program has recovered approximately 3,500 artifacts, most of which have been preserved with extraordinary finesse. Norway has more than half of the world’s prehistoric and medieval finds from ice. A newly frozen mountain pass in use at Lendbreen about 600 to 1700 years ago has revealed evidence of traders passing by: horseshoes, horse manure, a primitive ski, and even a box filled with wax.

Over the past decade, remnants that have melted from the Alps have included the mummified remains of a Swiss couple who had been missing since 1942, and the wreckage of an American military plane that landed in turbulent weather in 1946. In Russia, scientists regenerated reproductive tissue. From the unripe fruit of a freeze-dried narrow-leaf camp under the tundra for 32,000 years. A far-sighted arctic squirrel hid the fruit in its nest.

Spectacular glacier finds always involve luck, as Craig Lee, an archaeologist at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Studies, can attest. Fourteen years ago, in the mountain ice outside of Yellowstone National Park, he saw the front shaft of a throwing spear, called the dodge dart, carved from a birch sapling 10,300 years ago. The primitive hunting weapon is the oldest organic artifact ever recovered from a piece of ice.

“The ice floe discoveries in the Yukon have given us new insights into the copper-working tradition of pre-European Indigenous peoples,” said William Taylor, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. “At Rockies, researchers have recovered everything from frozen trees documenting significant changes in climate and vegetation to hunting gear of some of the continent’s earliest peoples.”

Dr. Taylor’s own work focuses on the relationship between climate and social change in early nomadic societies. His continued research on the melting ice margins in Western Mongolia’s Altai Mountains has produced artifacts that overturn some of the most basic archaeological assumptions about the region’s history. While people in the area have long been classified as shepherds, Dr. Taylor’s team discovered an icy killing field of argali sheep, with spears and arrows used to kill them. Laboratory analyzes revealed that large-game hunting has been an important part of pastoral livelihood and culture in the Eastern Steppes for more than 3,500 years.

Meet the ancient insects

About 10 percent of the planet’s landmass is covered by glacial ice, and as the world thaws, ancient creatures large and small are buried. Dozens of nearly complete ichthyosaur skeletons have been unearthed near the Tyndall Glacier in southern Chile. Marine reptiles lived between the Triassic and Cretaceous periods, stretching from 66 million to 250 million years ago.

Three-million-year-old insect fossils have been found in eastern Alaska (blind lice of the genus Otibazo) and the western Yukon Territory (notiophilus aeneus species, more commonly known as rice-like big-eyed insects).

The most spectacular archaeological finds in Yakutia, a republic in northeastern Siberia, are the carcasses of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, steppe bison, and cave lions that once roamed the northern hemisphere. Extinct animals, like the grapes in Jell-O, hung in their refrigerated tombs for nine thousand years or more.

In 2018, a flawless 42,000-year-old foal, a long gone species known as the Lena horse, was found buried in the ice of Siberia’s Batagaika Crater, with urine in its bladder and liquid blood in its veins.

That same year, in other parts of Yakutia, mammoth hunters stumbled upon the severed head of a disappeared wolf subspecies, and researchers found an 18,000-year-old puppy that was unlike anything alive today. “There may be an evolutionary link between the dog, wolves and modern dogs,” said Swedish geneticist Love Dalén, who sequenced the creature’s genome. “It’s called Dogor, which means ‘friend’ in Yakut, and it’s also a clever play on the question of ‘dog or wolf’.”

Dogor was exhumed in an icy mud pile near the Indigirka River. Patches of ice turn out to be where most discoveries are made. The main difference between a glacier and a piece of ice is that a glacier moves. An ice floe doesn’t move much, which makes it a more reliable protector.

From the Glacier Archeology Program in Norway, Dr. “The constant movement within the glaciers damages both bodies and artifacts, and eventually dumps the distressing debris into the mouth of the ice floe,” said Pilo. “Due to the movement and constant renewal of ice, glaciers rarely protect objects for more than 500 years.”

From the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Studies, Dr. Lee likens the destruction caused by glacial degeneration to a burning library. “Now is not the time to stand around pointing at each other to blame the fire,” he said. “It’s time to save what books can be kept for future organization.”

It’s a deplorable joke among glacial archaeologists that their study site is one of the few to benefit from climate change. But while the ice and snow retreat make some prehistoric treasures briefly accessible, exposure to the elements threatens to quickly destroy them.

Once soft organic materials—leather, textiles, arrow hairs—surface, researchers have at most a year to recover products to preserve them before they deteriorate and are lost forever. “After they’re gone,” said Dr. “With them went our opportunity to use them to understand the past and prepare for the future,” Taylor said.

E. James Dixon, former director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, agrees. “The magnitude of the loss is enormous relative to the number of archaeologists investigating these sites,” he said. “It’s like an archaeological mass extinction, in which all of the sites of a certain type disappear at approximately the same time.”

Climate change has brought with it a number of consequences. Oceanshore erosion has been devastating. In parts of Alaska, as much as a mile of coastline has been withdrawn over the past 80 years, and with it the entire archaeological and fossil record. Dr. “Sites don’t just wash away, they’re literally rotting on the ground,” Knecht said.

“Saving what we can is not just about preserving Yup’ik culture or northern prehistory is the legacy of all humanity,” he said. “After all, how all humans live for the vast majority of our collective existence on Earth is hunting and foraging.”