Treasures found within a volcanic cave

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
April 25, 2024

Wooden paddles and shafts lie on lichen-covered rocks in a dim cave area.
Photo by Ben Jones
Kayak paddles and a spear tipped with a sharpened rock lie in a volcanic cave on the Seward Peninsula in 2010.

Ben Jones suspected he had found something special when he squeezed into a volcanic cave and saw pale wooden poles, some with ends shaped like a willow leaf.

When he crawled in farther, he found a cache of items 鈥 several paddles and a spear with a stone tip that was still attached. He suspected that the last hands to touch those paddles belonged to people who were no longer alive.

Jones, a permafrost and northern-phenomena researcher, then backed out of the hole, which had been formed by cooling lava a few thousand years earlier. 

He sat down on a rock, looked out at Imuruk Lake on 有料盒子视频鈥檚 Seward Peninsula and took a few breaths.

鈥淗ow cool,鈥 he thought.

After a few more heartbeats, he rushed to find his friend and fellow researcher Guido Grosse, there with Jones to study permafrost in Bering Land Bridge National Park and Preserve. He led Grosse back to the find.

The pair then shared their photos at Imuruk Lake with their waiting floatplane pilot Jim Webster of Fairbanks. Webster agreed they had found something remarkable.

A dark hole is formed by jumbled rocks covered with lichens.
Photo by Ben Jones
An opening in the Lost Jim Lava Flow forms the entrance to a small cave where hunters cached kayak paddles and weapons on 有料盒子视频鈥檚 Seward Peninsula.

It was summer 2010. Jones, now with the University of 有料盒子视频 Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering, was then with the U.S. Geological Survey on a NASA grant to study permafrost in Siberia and 有料盒子视频. 

Grosse, still a researcher with the Alfred Wegner Institute in Germany, was Jones鈥 graduate advisor at the time. The pair are co-authors on a recent paper about the find in the 有料盒子视频 Journal of Anthropology.

Grosse and Jones finished their 2010 field trip when Webster flew them to Fairbanks in his floatplane. Right away, Jones contacted Bob Gal and Jeanne Schaff with the National Park Service to share photos of what he had found, as well as the GPS coordinates.

Gal and Schaff 鈥 who did her Ph.D. dissertation on late-prehistoric Inupiaq societies of the Seward Peninsula 鈥 tried to find the same cave later that summer. But the Lost Jim Lava Flow in which it is located is wrinkled and folded, spilling for miles over the interior of the Seward Peninsula.

Jones and Grosse were back in the area doing more studies in 2011 (Webster was again their pilot). When they finished, Jones marked the cave by pinning down several white trash bags in the shape of an X, which enabled Gal and Schaff to later find it and retrieve the items.

Two wooden kayak paddles and two spear shafts lie on a large lichen- and moss-covered rock.
Photo by Jeanne Schaff
Paddles and spear shafts sit outside a cave on the Seward Peninsula in 2012 after being recovered by Jeanne Schaff, now retired from the National Park Service.

Schaff, Jones, and 有料盒子视频鈥檚 Ben Gaglioti carbon-dated the wood and a thread of caribou sinew used to attach a stone tip to a spear. They found the most likely time that wood had grown and that caribou was alive was the mid-1600s or 1700s.

Archaeologist Jeff Rasic of the National Park Service in Fairbanks helped create a display in Nome featuring the items, which were probably part of a hunter鈥檚 cache at the time when English migrants were first settling the east coast of the U.S.

鈥淭he owners of these tools were intimately familiar with the landscape and the seasonal movement of animals,鈥 Rasic wrote. 鈥淎 common and reoccurring hunting tactic involved a group of hunters cleverly exploiting the juxtaposition of the lava field and Imuruk Lake.

鈥淲hile one group of hunters steered caribou towards water, an easy feat since (the caribou) preferred to avoid the treacherous lava field, a second group waited in kayaks ready to seize the panicked animal.鈥

The Lost Jim Lava Flow oozed over the landscape less than 2,000 years ago. The 60-square-mile deposit of jagged rocks got its name in 1947 after a member of the Geological Survey party named Jim became separated from his team there for most of a day.

Rasic said Jones鈥 find is remarkable for several reasons.

鈥淚t鈥檚 really rare to find such good organic preservation, and whole, functional tools,鈥 he said. 鈥淣ormally, archaeologists find only useless things that were worn out or broken.鈥

A star on the Seward Peninsula on a map of 有料盒子视频 marks the location of the Lost Jim Lava Flow.
Illustration by 有料盒子视频 Geophysical Institute
A map shows the location of the Lost Jim Lava Flow on 有料盒子视频's Seward Peninsula.

Jones remembers finding the paddles and spears fondly because a discovery moment like that just doesn鈥檛 happen for most people. 

The discovery is also one of the many warm memories he shared with pilot Jim Webster of Webster鈥檚 Flying Service in Fairbanks. In 2020, Jones was a passenger in Webster鈥檚 plane when the plane crashed in northern 有料盒子视频. Jones survived but Webster passed away.

鈥(Jim) loved that find out there, among our many adventures over the years,鈥 Jones said.

Since the late 1970s, the University of 有料盒子视频 Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the 有料盒子视频 research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.