Alaska's thaw threatens prehistoric sites once frozen in time
The first artifact — a wooden mask — was discovered in 2007 by a child who stumbled upon it while playing on the beach near his home in Quinhagak, a village in western Alaska that sits by the Bering Sea. Over the following months, hundreds of similar objects — baskets, finely carved harpoon shafts, lip plugs, wooden dolls, ivory tattoo needles — emerged from the earth as melting permafrost and erosion driven by climate change revealed a Yupik Eskimo settlement dating back to the 1600s. Today, more than a decade after the first find, an extraordinary collection of some 100,000 prehistoric Yupik artifacts — the largest such collection in the world — sits in a small newly opened museum in Quinhagak, home to an indigenous community of about 700 people. “This is by far the highlight of everything I’ve ever excavated in my 40-year-career — and I’ve worked on some pretty spectacular sites,” said Rick Knecht, an archaeologist with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. For the past 10