The Ancient B.C Tools Frozen In The Yukon Secrets From The Ice Odyssey

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I mean, this could be, you know, your relative. Prehistoric secrets frozen in time until now. Oh my god. In a government lab in the Yukon, a collection of ancient hunting tools that holds the secrets to a missing chapter of human history. This one here is my particular favorite, and I don't know if you can see this, but this small segment, about three inches long, it's got a couple of twists of sinew on it and parts of a feather that are still wedged underneath that sinew. This is actually the piece that started the whole ice patch phenomena. When we got the radiocarbon date back at 4300, it's just all the lights went on and we saw that this was one of the oldest preserved organic artifacts found ever in Canada. Organic artifacts, that's the key. Wood and feathers and sinew that otherwise would have rotted away centuries ago. Instead, they were preserved in the southern Yukon's ice patches. But what is an ice patch anyway? And how is it different from a glacier? The really big difference is the glaciers move. For ice to move, it needs to be about 30 to 40 meters thick, so roughly 100 feet or more. And when the ice is that thick, because of its own weight, it deforms under its own weight and starts moving. So in the 1960s, they had a little kind of research camp up here. Behind us, we have a crashed Cessna aircraft. This crashed probably about 50 years ago. When I first worked here about 10 years ago, it was about a kilometer up glacier from here. The moving glacial ice has actually carried the plane wreck down to this spot. If that plane had crashed on an ice patch, it would have remained in the same place. So in ice patches, because they're not moving, the material that falls on the surface really becomes preserved in place. And things can be preserved for thousands and thousands of years. So ice patches can be big, but not as big as glaciers. And they've been sitting in the same place for thousands of years. That is, until now. Their rate of melting is unprecedented. And while the rapid thaw is scary for climatologists, Greg Hare and Christian Thomas have chanced across an entirely new scientific discipline, ice patch archaeology. Chris was just walking along the edge of the ice for about three meters from the the edge of the ice here and he found a dart shaft that has melted out of the ice and looks like perhaps it's been caught in a meltwater channel and moved in several pieces down to where we see it now. When you look around this landscape, there's no trees. So the only way for a substantial piece of wood like this to get up here is for someone to actually bring it up. So when we see wood, we automatically know it's an artifact. This type of artifact, this is going to be more than a thousand years old. You wouldn't find this in a non-frozen site. That wood would have rotted away hundreds of years ago. So we know this is pretty fresh out of the ice. There's a good fit right there, Chris. Looks like it. Perfect. Oh, good one, Chris. Good eye. Another fragment of the dart. You know, people hypothesized that there were feathers on the end of these weapons. Actually finding ancient examples of the weapons allows us to know how people positioned feathers on the shaft so that we don't have to hypothesize. We can look to the collection and measure and see how they constructed these things and how they intended them to fly. The Yukon used to be an archaeological backwater. Then, suddenly, the artifacts were being disgorged, and Canada was leading the way and unravelling the many secrets of the melting ice. You might think what they have just found is an old arrow. It's not. It's a technology that predates bows and arrows by thousands of years. It's a hunting tool called an atlatl. An atlatl is a carved piece of wood that allows the hunter to hurl a dart with greater force over a greater distance than he could by simply throwing a spear. This is where members of the World Atlatl Association meet to compete and see how well they can compare to other throwers. There are actually atlatl leagues around the world, but most of the best dart throwers are here. Ryan Grossmeier is an engineer at the University of Missouri. Grossmeier has taken the dimensions of those ancient wooden atlatl shafts found in the Yukon and made exact replicas to study how effective they were as hunting tools. These are all accurate replicas of individual darts that have been recovered from ice patches on mountaintops. When they're thrown, atlatl darts have to flex a lot to fly properly. The dart shafts wobble wildly in the air from the force of the throw, but then amazingly find their mark on the target. The feathers are important for keeping the dart flying straight. When you apply force to the back end of the dart, it can cause the dart to spin around like this. The feathers are what start the dart spinning and cause the back end to stay behind the front end. Otherwise, you can have the dart spin around and fly. These darts from the Yukon are actually very sophisticated. They are more sophisticated, in fact, than any modern dart that modern competitors are throwing. This would have taken a lot of time to do with stone tools, but I think it was integral to how these fly accurately. In terms of accuracy, there are competitors here today who can easily hit a dinner plate-sized target from about 20 meters. And that's definitely accurate enough to take down something like a caribou or any kind of deer. In my mind, I envision, say, half a dozen hunters in pursuit of a herd of caribou. One or two get hit by the darts, and meanwhile, the darts that missed the mark perhaps got buried in the snow and then incorporated into the ice. So it's like a giant deep freeze. Anything that's been lost either on the ice or at the edge of the ice or happened to die around the ice often becomes entombed in the ice for hundreds or thousands of years. And we happen to be in the decade or in the century that that ice is melting. We don't know how old this particular ice patch is. The oldest thing we found from here, I think, is 900 years old. But other ice patches are as much as 9,000 years old. So it's a real window into the past. We have got a preserved record of ancient people's hunting techniques and traditions. Looks like what we got here is maybe a swan or goose leg bone that's been split and one end of it's been ground into a point, likely used as an awl for punching holes in leather and material for repairing objects. My mind immediately goes to the, what's the story behind it? Because I've got a storyteller mom. I always am like, oh, I wonder how, how did that get there? What's the story around the person who prepared it? So this is definitely the first time I think we found an awl on an ice patch. It's one of the first times we found a non-projectile point on an ice patch. That's a beauty. Is it a woman's tool or a man's tool? Is it a, how did they lose it? In this valley here or this next one over there? This is Friday Creek. It runs down into this area. The artifacts are telling a story that the elders heard about from their grandparents, that these mountains were once overrun with caribou. We're at the ridge between the Friday and Alligator ice patches. And this is a stone hunting blind. That's one of a series of seven blinds that run along the crest of this ridge. And I first came here in about 1999 and Art showed us where these blinds were. When did you first know about these blinds, Art? Oh boy, I can't, I was about eight or nine years old. Let's assume there were people behind each set of blinds and the caribou or sheep would go through them and then you'd shoot them with your arrow or your dart. We didn't find anything organic that we could date. But last year, two years ago, was the first time that we came here and we found a couple of broken spear points. And from our work within the ice patches, we know that the spear points were used right up until 1,200 years ago and they were replaced then by antler arrow points. And because we've got spear points right next to these blinds, we know they're older than 1,200 years old. Were there a lot of caribou up here? I don't know why. But they disappeared from this area in 1898. Because you ask the old timers about the caribou, they'll say there were so many caribou in those mountains back there, you'd think the whole mountain is moving with caribou. And the ---- in these snow patches proves it. See all those dark streaks in the ice? That's all caribou dung. And when caribou biologists first found it in the mid-90s, it was stunning news. No one knew how it got there, because as far as anyone knew, the herds had disappeared a century earlier. It was amazing, like you could see as it was melting out, the caribou dung, almost like it had been deposited days ago in some cases, quite fresh looking. So we knew that this wasn't some phenomenon in recent time, that it had to have been laid down by generations and generations of caribou. So we just said, well, we better collect some of it. As they were scooping up their dung samples, Don Russell and his partner found the pieces of what they thought were bits of an arrow shaft, and they took them back to Whitehorse. And they said, first of all, it's not an arrow shaft, it's an atlatl shaft. And then we could run a date on it, because it looked like an arrow shaft. And I said, oh, that's pretty cool. Run a date, it comes back over 4,000 years old. And we, uh-oh. I think the fecal sample that I collected was, I think, 1,600 years old. And the atlatl dart was 4,300 years old. So that kind of started the whole thing. And all of a sudden, we're not getting just the stone, we're getting the whole weapon. We're getting, you know, the spears with the stone points, the wooden shafts, and the feathers, and the sinew. We're getting the arrow shafts with the feathers and sinew, and the ochre on them. And we're seeing for the very first time as archaeologists, the whole weapon. And we were absolutely flabbergasted. That's, we've never had access to that knowledge before, right? It was, you know, what we could learn from talking to the elders about life in the old days. And all of a sudden, we have an arrow, we can date it. We know exactly that it's, you know, 150 years old or 300 years old. Or we can take a dart and say, oh no, this one's 6,000 years old. So we couldn't do that with stone. Now we could. They could get an age on the artifacts because organic material can be carbon dated. Stone can't. The ice was melting. And at the base of the ice, sometimes on the surface of the ice, there were artifacts just lying around. And it was just, it was amazing that summer, summer of 1999. It was every day the helicopter would come back with new amazing artifacts that nobody had seen before. It was incredible. So the dung and the artifacts were very old. But a big question remained. Why were they finding it all up so high in the mountains? Why weren't the hunters simply killing animals in the valleys where they didn't need to expend so much energy climbing? It turns out they were hiking up to where their prey was finding relief from the summer heat. One of the things is that caribou are very well adapted for cold conditions and not very well adapted for warm conditions. So it's an opportunity to help them thermoregulate so that by congregating on the ice, by laying down on the ice, they can stay cool. But I think more important than that was avoiding harassing insects. See how those caribou are twitching like that? They're being harassed by the warbler flies and the botflies. You can just see the whole animal shaking and shimmering to try to get rid of those. Yeah, it's only hot days in summer when you find them on the ice and snow patches up on the high mountains. We went up to an ice patch to get some water to drink on a hot day and a big mountain caribou came right up to us and he didn't see us. His eyes were drooping and his tongue was hanging out. He was hot and he was bothered and there was a cloud of flies. The warble flies is like a bee. It looks like a bee and it buzzes around like a bee and drives them nuts but it doesn't bite them. It lays eggs on the legs, on the fur. As they hatch, a little larva would drill into the skin and go through the bloodstream up to the back. And then they just leave a nice little hole. Which is okay, on a fur you can't see the holes. But on a piece of leather, full of holes, not very many people can appreciate that. When they get onto the ice, those insects stay off to the sides. They can't fly, they don't congregate around the caribou. So the caribou get relief when they're on the ice. And then it's a matter, a question of if the caribou is 20 meters away or 40 meters away, can you hit it with the dart? Can you shoot it with the arrow? Do you have to get closer? I said, holy, that's a long ways to throw a spear or a long ways to throw an addle addle. But to throw a good addle addle, you know, you got to put your hand back like that and you have to have that momentum to be able to throw. That's technology. That is experience. Imagine the anticipation each summer, heading up here to see what these ice patches have to offer up next. But imagine too that the artifacts are your family heirlooms, left there by your ancestors. Each piece that is found carries with it a loaded double meaning. This is one of our, I suppose, most illustrious artifacts. It's a moccasin that was found at the Gladstone Ice Patch a number of years ago. And it was only through the efforts of our conservator that it was determined that it was actually a moccasin. She spent hundreds of hours conserving this material. She said it was like working with wet toilet paper, trying to put this on a mount and get the right shape and everything. And it slowly emerged that this was a moccasin. This has been dated, it's about 1,500 years old. And this is certainly the oldest moccasin ever found in Canada. The massive Gladstone Ice Patch is the biggest one in the Yukon. And it's been producing artifacts for years. Gladstone is in the traditional territory of the southern Tushoni. In order for Greg to visit the ice patches, he has to get permission from the different First Nations whose members are eager to go up and take part themselves. He found this projectile point. Wow. How old do you think that is? Well, it's a tip for a throwing dart. And this part of the ice patch has actually produced a bunch of dart shaft fragments. They're all between 3,000 and 9,000 years old. So it's pretty hard to say what this is, but you can see it's a pretty good quality chert. This is a really nice little stone point. The artifacts, the items, the lance points or the atlatl points or the arrow shaft or arrow points that come out of these ice patches, they're just part of the story of this land. They're not the story itself. They're only one part of that story. They're part of that caribou story. They're part of my grandma's life. They're part of my great-grandfather's life. And that has all given us life here to today. So when we look at some of those items and that, it's like the stories are alive yet. The artifacts really help solidify that narrative, I think. And then for our younger generation, they are able to have that tactile proof that we have history here. Tactile proof. One of the key jobs for an archaeologist is to ground human history within the landscape, to reveal to us that people were here and to tell us what they were doing. This is central Norway. That petroglyph carved into the rock depicts a reindeer, a first cousin to the caribou of North America. Experts think this was etched into stone 6,000 years ago and tells a story of how important reindeer were to the people who hunted this land. Past the treeline, up in the Dovre Mountains, the ice patches look incredibly familiar, just like the Yukon. They, too, are melting, revealing their own secrets. These really, in Norway and in the Yukon, these high mountain alpine locations are removed from the villages and the town centres and places where archaeology is usually done and have not been very well investigated. And now, for the first time, we're seeing the importance of the margins and we're seeing just how adventurous and how comfortable people were at high elevations. There's one piece of shaft here. This one is hard to say. Could be 800 years old, could be until about 300 years old, somewhere between that. Martin Callinan is an Irishman who studies ice patch archaeology at the University of Trondheim. This spot lies between central Norway and the coast and it was heavily travelled by people we now know as mountain vikings. In the Middle Ages, in the late Middle Ages, they really started to use this place a lot and I think it has got something to do with it is relatively close to the village or to the village at that time and that this was their local snow patch in a way. Martin ends up getting a lot of his artifacts from trusted local collectors who know what to look for. Thor Bretten is a park ranger with a keen eye for spotting new items in the meltwater. He and his colleague Ingolf Rottweil meet Martin in the Opto Parks office to unveil their latest finds. That's wonderful. When you see the arrow and realize it's an arrow, it's like, hard to describe, it feels like an electrical shock in a good way. At first you say, oh, that's an arrow shaft. Can I find the arrowhead? Where's the rest of it? Oh, yes, it's complete. I found at least 47 different artifacts, arrows or pieces of bows, found over several years in small fragments, so maybe 250 different pieces from arrows or bows. I found it, it was like this when I found it. When I tried to lift it, it broke. To me, that tells a story about my ancestors. Those are my ancestors who did hunt up there, and I'm also a reindeer hunter, and on a warm day, I would hunt on an ice patch. So this shaft melted out and was found about in the middle of the snow patch. Found in different fragments, but as you can see, they fit together. And there's nice preservation on this. We have the nock at the back, which the archer would have held when he released the string from the bow. The last person to touch this arrow before Ingolf found it on Thursday was probably the hunter 16 or 1800 years ago as he released the arrow hunting. And the question is whether they belong together, and this is part of the fragments game. If it doesn't fit, we're going to have to go back there and look again for that. But I think it fits, but I don't dare. Get the hammer. Wonderful. One of the things that's difficult about the snow patch archaeology is that the ice patches, they go from being heaven for old objects, frozen in ice, stable, and it's the perfect environment for organic material like wood or bone or antler. But the moment the objects come out of the ice, then it becomes hell, because then it's very important to secure the object straight away. Once they are thawed, the wooden artifacts are damp, even soggy. They'll need to be dried out and then treated with preservatives. In a burial ground near Vong in Norway, these mounds mark graves from the Viking era. Archaeologists estimate that there are between 750 and 800 people buried here, going as far back as 1500 years ago. The thing to remember is that the people that lived here in Scandinavia during the Viking age, they also were farmers, hunters. They worked in the landscape around them. And some of the arrows that we find on the snow patches, they may have belonged to the people that are lying in the graves here. In fact, we find arrowheads in the graves, in some of the graves. They're exactly like the arrows that we find on the ice patches as they melt. Well, not exactly. The metal hunting points recovered from the Viking graves are corroded by chemical elements in the soil. You can get an idea of what they would have looked like when they were new from their shape. But when you see a similar point recovered from the ice, where those chemical elements aren't present, well, just look at it. It's pristine. It was found early in the morning, and the way the light was shining on the snow patch, and it just really had melted straight out of the ice. It's almost as if the hunter was there the day before. So it actually sort of captures what ice patch archaeology is about, just trying to be there at the right time and save the object as best we can. A metal point is something they'd dearly love to find in the Yukon. But that artifact hasn't turned up there yet. The key strategy in both places is to be ready, to spend the summers keeping an eye out for what gets offered up next. What we're seeing here is a little knob at the top where the bow would have been stringed. And we can see a fragment of the arm of the bow. Of course, it would have been much longer at that time, but the hunter would have held up perhaps here. And only this part has been preserved. Perhaps this is exactly where it broke. So this may be one of those other moments where the hunter has strung his arrow, has drawn his string, and instead of loosening an arrow, the bow has cracked. And then it was discarded on the snow patch. So there may have been wailing and gnashing of teeth around this piece. In the 80s, there was one or two little finds. 2000, early 2000, 2003, it just explodes. It explodes in central Norway, southern Norway. We start to hear news from Canada, southern Yukon. They've got hundreds of finds. And then we realize, wow, this is something very different. And I think that this applies to glacial archaeology as a whole, that we are everybody in a kind of a rescue mode. And we're trying to find the best way to document the things now, here and now. The real detailed research and study of these things is going to come, you know, decades and centuries in the future. This is research material and this is material for archaeologists for generations. This is the front line of the archaeology of climate change. I think that there's a lesson, we're being shown something here, that when 5,000, 6,000-year-old objects are starting to melt out of alpine ice, that something is changing in the mountain landscapes. And, you know, there are lots of other indications around us. This is only one of many different signs that there is something changing in the nature that surrounds us. With the speed of climate change, people know now that anything could come out of the ice next. And with each discovery, the past speaks more loudly, more clearly, challenging us to interpret our human story in dramatically different ways. The significance of finding even bones that you're not sure if it came from last year's hunt, or 40 years ago the hunt, is that the ice that persists up here preserves everything. So this could be 10 years old, it could be 3,000 years old. You just can't tell from looking at it. You literally have to collect everything that you find and do the scientific tests later, because we found that when you collect everything, you create this incredible archive of animal life in the alpine that can be studied for genetics or trace elements. And you can really learn a lot about the past. We've got sheep, we've got caribou, we've got bison, we've got wolves, we've got bears. Basically, anything that was living around the ice and died on the ice, even if it wasn't hunted by humans, could be preserved in the ice. Probably the best example we have is this sheep skull. We found this beside an ice patch a few years ago. And when we started to do the analysis on cut marks, we decided to radiocarbon date this one. And we sent in a very small sample, and this one turns out to be about 4,500 years old. So it's far older than we thought it was going to be, but it's the best example we have of someone in ancient times butchering one of these animals. So these are stone tool cut marks across the brow of this sheep skull. You know, people have in their mind the iconic spear points and arrow points and scrapers and those kind of things. But actually, when you get to an archaeological site and you're digging, you almost never find those perfect preserved spear points and arrow points. What you find are the waste flakes, the debitage that comes off when people are making stone tools. So this represents a very general archaeological site in the subarctic where you have hundreds, if not thousands, of waste flakes. And when I look at this collection today, it just pales in comparison to what we're learning from the ice patches or the quality of tools. And I think this is really typical for most archaeological sites in the subarctic. We're at the Gladstone Ice Patch and Sheila just found another stone spear point. And you can see it is, you know, that's either basalt or dacite. Another day, another historic find. This time, it's the stone hunting point from the tip of an atlatl. Greg Herr is with college student Nansana Murphy, a member of the Champaign-Ashak First Nation. And with anthropologist Sheila Greer. And you could shape it. They chose, the old people knew what they were doing. They chose rock that they could shape. Like I have seen somebody personally pick up a stone tool and go, you mean this is made by my ancestors? And you go, yeah. I don't know. It's crazy. I love it. So cool. To know that this has been here for like hundreds of years and you're just seeing it now. For much of the 20th century, the residential school era cut First Nations children off from their relationship to the land. I was five when I was taken from family in that year. I don't know people really realize what kind of impact that had on communities. The discovery of that first artifact in 1997 coincided with a Yukon native culture beginning to find itself again. Hardly anyone was doing traditional carving and there were no traditional dancers like the Daka'kwan troupe. Now look. Preserving culture and a connection to the land are one in the same. For those young people now that are going to be the caretakers, they're the ones that are going to look after the land. They have to know where they come from. We're trying to do make sure that the young people that participate in ice patch work have that expanding knowledge of this land here that they call their homeland. Like you can feel it viscerally right through your body when you're picking up a piece and it's like whoa. Like which ancestor actually touched this? Like who was that person? Where did they, what did they look like? How did they live, you know? It's not just an artifact. It is a piece of who you are. 20-25 years ago, no kids in the Yukon would have known what an atlatl was or a throwing dart. And today if you go around to almost any school in the Yukon, all the kids know what a throwing dart is or an atlatl is. They know how to make them. They know how to throw them. And that's, you know, that's a cultural shift that has just taken place in 20 years. The early ice patch discoveries also coincided with the Yukon First Nations signing their land claim agreements. It gave them power and it gave them a say in how heritage would be handled and interpreted. And then in 1999, this happened. Some sheep hunters in northern British Columbia, just across the border with Yukon, found a body melting out of the ice. Scattered pieces of his belongings, including his spruce root hat, his gopher skin robe, a bag of tools and various wooden implements, indicated that this was no recent casualty. You now have a human being. You now have a relative. And that really struck home to the community. And, you know, like you want to know who this person is. You really want to find out. I mean, this could be, you know, your relative and you really need to know. It's beautifully made, not just finely made. It's gorgeous. We really had to get into the driver's seat. We really had to, as a First Nation, we really had to get control. That was, I think, the biggest task that we had, to ensure that we're not going to allow people, scientists or whomever, to come and dictate to us or tell us how we were going to be treating our own relative. Since the early 90s, people around the world have been finding bodies melting out of the ice. Lost climbers, hikers, two soldiers missing since the First World War, and Ötzi. Ötzi is world famous. A 3,300-year-old ice man who has been studied ever since he thawed out of the Alps in 1991. One thing about Ötzi, though, no indigenous group ever claimed him as their own. It was a different story in North America. Take the 9,000-year-old skeleton of Kennewick Man. A bitter fight ensued in Washington state over who should have control of his remains. The government or the First Nations. No one in the Yukon or B.C. wanted a repeat of that. Everybody had a sort of bad taste in their mouth from the Kennewick Man situation. Champion Asiak and the B.C. government were able to come to a resolution that allowed science to take place and still honour the cultural values. A resolution born out of compromise. Not only with the scientists, but also within the First Nations communities. There were people who felt it was a bad idea to disturb the remains of this man, whoever he was. Even now, images of the body cannot be shown because of sensitivities and respect for the dead. I think the biggest lesson for the community is that I need to honour what my ancestors, I need to honour what my ancestors have taught me. So they gave this lost man a name, Kware Dansinchi, Southern Tishoni for Long Ago Man Found. And then they told the scientists from the B.C. government that they could study his remains and belongings, but only for a year. You know, science had their results out of the project, but also the rights and the respect for other people's beliefs, or the First Nations' beliefs, they've also been respected in the process too. So this balance or this compromise agreement, to me, it seems to me from the outside at least to be a very Canadian solution to a Canadian situation. And we knew from the very beginning at the end they were cremated. So we really tried to take the best samples we could and do the best analysis we could at that time. We were really surprised when we looked at his bone, which gives you sort of a 10-year record of diet, of all these breakfasts, lunches and dinners over 10 years. And it was almost entirely marine diet. So it looks like that his, he would have been spending most of his time on the coast. The scientists managed to isolate Kware Dansinchi's mitochondrial DNA and determined that he was connected to native groups from the Pacific Northwest. I mean, given the radiocarbon dates suggest that, you know, he's somewhere between 200 and 300 years old, it makes sense that he would be related to people. And that was the height of the trade between the coastal Tlingit and the interior Athabascans was in that period of time. So people were back and forth a lot. For many people, that was a really profound discovery and made the importance of Kware that much more significant. Even more significant was news that Kware Dansinchi was related to 17 people who were living today. It makes you feel really solid, you know. Yes, we do belong. Yes, this is, you know, our traditional territory. And it just, it's right in your bones. It's in your blood and you feel really good about it, you know. When we got the phone call from Pearl, it really, it affected me and it stayed with me for a long time. I was curious about what he was doing up there, where he was going, what his history was, who his family was back then. And most of all, how he passed, how he died. And because he was found alone. That's where the science, scientific knowledge and the traditional knowledge, you know, they come together and they agree with each other. So we buried his ashes back in the mountain where he was found. And we did it in a very, we held a potlatch and we did it in a very respectful manner of having elder advice from the coast and the interior. My personal belief is that he would have wanted to share with the world what he had to offer. No one really knows why Kware Dansinchi was crossing the ice towards the interior. But the message he delivered a few centuries after his death is profound for the people who live here now. That this vast and open wilderness has been a human place for a very long time. Huddled into an overlook at Snohatta, Norwegian hikers learn about the animals up in their local mountains. And how ancient hunters headed up to the ice. But the story gets more complex in the traditional territory of the Southern Sami people. They were reindeer herders and their history here goes back thousands of years. Martin Kallinen is just laying the groundwork to start searching the Sami ice patches. No artifacts yet, but it's early days. The story of the Sami is almost identical to government treatment of the Yukon native people. So they had a really strong policy making the Sami children go to boarding schools, had to speak Norwegian. And they only learned Norwegian in schools. And they had teachers coming from the south, being teachers in this area. And it was forbidden actually to teach in the Sami language. So these Sami are hoping archaeology can help them reclaim part of their culture. I think that there will come older things in the ice that we haven't seen before. And I think these kind of findings will be a way to establish that prehistory and say that this is what happened. It will be a way of reclaiming history. I think it will be very important to have something to say that, look, this is my story. The story in this area is long. It's a multi-ethnic context. It's not the one group over the other. That is part of the job of archaeology, is to help to add the past as a quality to our life and try to weave in the past in our present. It doesn't really belong to one or the other group that are here today. The point of that for me is that if you come there from a Norwegian ethnicity, you see that, aha, this is my past. But it's also important to remember that southern Sami also reach back into the past and say, aha, this is my past too. And they have the same feeling of belonging and the deep time to this landscape as the Norwegian visitors have as well. At times, it resembles a scavenger hunt. Over a good Yukon summer like this one, the discoveries just keep on coming. Okay, so we got three pieces of an arrow here. It's kind of interesting because these two broken pieces, one's the small end, so that's going to be at the proximal end of this arrow. And the other piece besides that is probably going to go at this side. So let's just see what we got here. It is a lovely straight arrow shaft. Put that back and let's see what these other pieces look like. Oh, look at that. It's the knocked end of the arrow. That's a beauty. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Oh, really nice. I'm not exaggerating to say that most archaeologists would die and found they'd gone to heaven to be able to find something like this. Not just archaeologists, you know, anyone. A nearly complete arrow. The opportunity to find something like this that's just melted out of the ice after a thousand years, it's incredible. Greg Hare's team has learned that even the most inconsequential looking ice patches deserve attention. They know that in another age, hunters might have stalked there. It's one of those things that you would never have predicted, like when you're at university and you're studying things, you would never predict that the opportunities within archaeology would change so dramatically that you'd be involved in something that is kind of redefining the discipline. I'm just going to take some video of the context here. Greg Hare is going to remove the artifact and we'll see what we got here. Whoa, it's got an end blade on the end and there's a sinew binding the end blade to it. A massive copper point attached to the end of a caribou antler arrowhead. Oh, it has feathers. Is that a feather? All right, let's see what you got. It looks like it could be another stick. It has that general shape. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. Isn't that something? Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. Isn't that something? Oh, my goodness. Oh, it's perfect. We're seeing the full barbed antler point actually with a copper end blade. That's something we haven't seen before here in the Yukon. It's just a perfect piece. And yes, we finally have one. God, that is stunning. Isn't that something? That is just beautiful. Wow. Is it a new poster child? It is. It has just been elevated to that. Look at this. The craftsmanship of this copper hunting point attached with sinew to a barbed antler is astounding. When the team ran carbon dating tests on it later, they found out it was 850 years old. Further tests showed that the point was processed from local copper nuggets, so the metal was not an outside trade good. Whoever lost this lost not just a weapon, but something of value, perhaps a talisman. There's an amazing story here embedded in just this one piece. Bit by bit, the ice is giving up its secrets. We've only got one chance at this, you know. Ten years from now, many of these patches may have either melted out or the artifacts that were present have melted out and they're gone now. So we've got this one opportunity and we're trying to make sure that we