The birch bark-lined cellar turned out to be almost a thousand years old – the oldest discovery of its kind in Southcentral Alaska, archeologists said.
A depression around the cache where soil samples were taken during the archeologists’ visit in summer 2024.
The cache – which is essentially a root cellar – was likely used for storing food. It was discovered in June at an existing archeological site at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, military officialsThe site has been associated with Dene, or Athabaskan, culture. In Alaska, the Dene include Dena’ina and Ahtna people, as well as other cultural groups of the Interior and Southcentral regions.
“In the scale of Alaska archeology and history, it's not very old, right? But there's no sites that are that old on this side of the Inlet,” she said about the discovery. “It's just like a little time capsule up there.”Margan Grover describes a Dene cache believed to be nearly 1,000 years old unearthed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage while Liz Ortiz listens on Jan. 10, 2025.
Eklutna elders remember a fish camp in the area that belonged to the Theodore family with ties to Eklutna and Knik tribes, and some of them believe that the carving was an identifier for the camp, Grover said.A letter “T” carved into a birch tree near the cache.
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