Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A . C O M 21 Rarely are organic artifacts like the foreshaft preserved long enough for archaeologists to find them, but the frozen environment of ice patches has held them in a state of suspended anima- tion for hundreds or even thousands of years — that is until, the ice began to melt. As the climate warms, once perennial patches of snow and ice in Montana's alpine country are melting faster than ever before, yielding artifacts made of wood, leather, and plant fibers that have lain frozen beneath the surface for thousands of years. e melting ice patches and the artifacts they are revealing have given rise to the emerg- ing field of ice patch archaeology. Like glaciers, ice patches are areas of perennially frozen ice and snow. But because ice patches are small, they don't move under their own weight as glaciers do. Instead, ice patches accumulate layers of snow and ice over centuries or longer which makes the ice at their cores as old as the ice patch itself. e older and more stable ice contained within ice patches preserves artifacts from long ago that would otherwise be crushed under the shifting weight of glaciers. But how did the foreshaft that Lee recovered come to be buried in ice in the first place? Lee says that ice patches were attractive to Native Americans in part because the ice patches attracted the animals they hunted. Bison, bighorn sheep, elk, and deer may have used ice patches as sources of water, to cool off, or even to escape bit- ing insects as lower elevation areas became warmer and drier throughout the summer. Although many of the artifacts recovered from Montana's ice patches have to do with hunting, people also used alpine areas for travel, to escape the summer heat, or for gathering plants, says Lee. In 2007, archaeologist Dr. Craig Lee was surveying a patch of ice near Yellowstone National Park when he no- ticed what looked like a small branch poking through the snow. e branch turned out to be the foreshaft of an ancient hunting weapon, an atlatl dart or throwing spear, carved from a birch sapling more than 10,000 years ago and the oldest organic artifact ever to be recovered from an ice patch. On closer inspection, Lee noticed three evenly spaced notches on either side of the weapon. "ose markings were probably made by the hunter to indicate ownership," says Lee, a scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, Colorado and Montana State University. "e hunter expected to get his weapon back." ice patch by LISA BARIL RACHEL RECKIN RACHEL RECKIN archaeology Team working the fore field of an ice patch in GNP

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