The annual expedition to and research of the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, also called the Lake Huron Caribou Hunters Project, has started.
Starting in 2008, researchers have surveyed and explored a 9,000-year-old archaeology site located in the center of Lake Huron. So far, the site has revealed aspects of hunter-gatherer life, possible caribou trails, and other details of the landscape and wildlife during that time.
John O’Shea is the director of the research project, as well as the curator of Great Lakes Archaeology at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. While the annual research of the ridge usually starts in May, he said it was delayed this year because he was working on a second project in Serbia.
“This is an interesting project, because it’s interdisciplinary,” he said. “We have a lot of very dedicated applicational people, particularly on the scuba side, that we work with. Meshing everybody’s schedules and dive tours … It’s kind of blending all of these pieces together to get ourselves out here.”
O’Shea said that, last year, the crew discovered stratified layers of peat, or decayed plant matter, from the time period. He said finding that is exciting for many reasons.
“Not only can you date it using carbon dating, so we’ll know very precisely how old it is, but it preserves a record of the plant life that was out there at the time, and, to an extent, possibly the animal life,” he said.
Another researcher on the project is Ashley Lemke.
Lemke started on the project while she was attending college in 2011, and now she is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She said she enjoys working underwater because it helps preserve organic matter better and it isn’t buried underground like on land archaeology projects.
“You have it kind of trapped in this nice equilibrium,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of direct sunlight, so there isn’t a lot of erosion or deterioration. So we get types of data that we normally don’t find on land.”
She said researchers have currently been doing “preliminary research,” using sonar, underwater robots, and other remote controlled vehicles from their 25-foot boat. She said the most recent discovery this year is a structure that looks like a stone hunting blind made by humans, to which researchers will send divers.
This year, O’Shea and Lemke said, researchers are focusing on using auditory sonar to map the area and find flint scatters, or the debris from making stone tools. O’Shea said the crew has found very small stone tools during the span of their research.
“We’re finding the debris from manufacturing tools, which tells us what tools were there,” he said. “But the people carried (tools) away with them. For example, the obsidian flakes that we found basically tell us about a larger bifacial tool that these people were using, and then they carried away with them. But they resharpened while they’re working on this one kill site.”
O’Shea said this week they will send divers into the water to collect samples and detailed photographs. He said they will work in Lake Huron until autumn.
