by: Katie Writer – KTNA, Talkeetna
This past Saturday, the Walter Harper Ranger Station and University of Alaska’s Museum of the North hosted a Culture Camp Open House. Local students have been conducting an archaeological dig at a site in Downtown Talkeetna, and invited the public to see what they found. KTNA’s Katie Writer attended the open house and has this report:
Denali National Park Archeologist Phoebe Gilbert led a group of Youth Conservation Corps members in a dig next to the Ranger Station.
“One of the first things the students found was a metal dinner plate with an enamel cover [and] ’T.S. Germany’ on the back, so that was pretty cool. That was within the first five minutes of the dig.”
With the help of YCC members, the site was carefully excavated with hopes of 
discovering artifacts of Talkeetna’s past. Items that were found range in age from 1916 to the 1980’s. Haley Loper describes some of the more interesting finds.
“We found a lot of bottles that could be dated to the mid-twenties, and we found some newspapers that were from 1924 preserved under some metal roofing.”
Aden Jolley’s first scoop on the site unearthed beaver bones that became part of the display for visitors at the Open House.
A selection of items found this past week were displayed on a table, except for the newspaper, for which a color copy was sufficient to get the picture of it’s remarkably preserved state.
An old shovel blade, glass bottles, a tea kettle lid, wallpaper, a plate, a glass inkwell, a wood burning stove damper lever, and a double bit ax head were this week’s finds.
In addition to local artifacts, Sam Coffman manned a table with an incredible array of Museum of the North’s collection.
Coffman offered visitors the opportunity to hold items that they might otherwise never touch, including polar bear teeth, arrow heads, beads, a beautiful ulu knife and hunting tools, such as harpoon spearheads.
Other activities included a mock dig for kids, an Atlatl throw at Mammoth targets, and a tour of the actual site.
According to Phoebe Gilbert, the Downtown Talkeetna site will be excavated through July 16th in an attempt to recover as many artifacts as possible before the next phase of another type of excavation…
The construction of a parking lot.
“Basically, on the west side and south sides of the lot, there’s going to be fourteen spaces put in, so part of the reason for this project is to get as much information about the areas that are going to be impacted by those parking spaces out before they get put in.”
According to Phoebe, the remaining areas to be excavated include outhouse and trash deposit sites that are likely to be full of ‘archeological’ treasures.
