Cape Krusenstern National Monument ⓘ

The story of Arctic archeology is dominated by one towering figure – J. Louis Giddings. A tall, soft-spoken man, he was nevertheless one of the loudest and most respected voices in his field. During his twenty-five years of fieldwork in Northwest Alaska, Giddings worked on five major excavations. He was instrumental in the identification of several previously unexplored cultures and the discovery of many of the most important sites in Arctic archeology. His work at the Cape Krusenstern beach ridges and Onion Portage formed the basis of the modern understanding of the human history in Arctic Alaska. Although he arrived in Northwest Alaska thousands of years after its first inhabitants, he is an instrumental part in the telling of their story.

Giddings was born in Caldwell, Texas in 1909, but both his professional and personal passion soon drew him to the land of the midnight sun. After earning his BS from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1931 and studying at the University of Arizona, he was hired as an anthropology professor by UAF in 1938. The following year, Froelich Rainey, a fellow professor, invited Giddings to join his summer excavation near the village of Point Hope, 150 miles north of the town of Kotzebue. The excavation uncovered the first remains of the Ipiutak civilization, a previously unstudied culture that carved intricate masks and figurines out of ivory two thousand years ago. The Ipiutak ruled over an extensive empire stretching from the Bering Straits to Point Barrow for nearly a thousand years. It was Giddings’ introduction to fieldwork and Arctic archeology, an experience he described as “more dramatic to me than the opening of Tut-ankh-amen’s tomb,” but it was his solo trip down the Kobuk River in search of wood samples the following summer that would ultimately define his career.

At the University of Arizona, Giddings had studied under A. E. Douglass, the father of dendrochronology. Dendrochronology is the science of using tree rings to date a piece of wood, and therefore objects made from the wood. A tree’s growth rings vary from year to year as a result of environmental conditions. The better the weather, the larger the growth ring. Over time, a tree’s growth rings form a pattern that can be matched to the growth ring patterns of other trees in the area. When a tree is freshly cut, each growth ring can be matched to an exact year on the modern calendar. If a section of a known growth ring pattern matches the pattern in a piece of old wood, such as a piece of timber used in an old house, archeologists can date when the wood was cut and the house was built.

Dendrochronology is invaluable as a way of dating historic artifacts and sites, especially in the years before radio carbon dating. Giddings, who was interested in the arrival of humans to Northwest Alaska and the development of the local Inupiaq culture, hoped that collecting wood cores from trees along the Kobuk River would allow archeologists to date when people first arrived in North America.

Maps of Alaska’s Interior were still more of rough sketches in the first half of the twentieth century. When Giddings’ embarked on his journey in July of 1940, his map showed a 50 mile wide blank space between the headwaters of the Kobuk River and the nearest town. Undeterred, he flew to the village of Allakaket on the Koyukuk River and set off on foot towards the Kobuk River with only a 40 pound pack, a compass and a rifle for hunting. Missionaries in Allakaket were so concerned that he would die in the wilderness that they sent a letter to the president of UAF begging him to launch an aerial search for his remains. For six days, Giddings battled stifling heat, rough terrain and unending assault from mosquitos before arriving on the banks of the Kobuk River. There he built a crude raft out of driftwood and floated down the Kobuk for three days before arriving at the fish camps of Henry Stocking and Roxy Douglas 20 miles from the village of Shungnak.

Daisy Tickett, who was a young child when Giddings floated up to her family’s camp, later recalled Giddings’s remarkable arrival: “The arrival of Mr. Giddings..., I always thought it may have been July or August, but he arrived at the time we were in summer camp...His raft was remarkable in that it was very short and small and seems like it was constructed to sit on it by placing several pieces of wood. It was in the afternoon when we see a stranger in view on a raft. The stranger stopped in front of us and got off. So that was Louis Giddings who arrived.”

With help from local residents, Giddings continued his trip down the Kobuk to the village of Kiana, stopping periodically to take tree cores and conduct rudimentary excavations. He returned the following year with a graduate student and hired eight local men to assist with more in-depth excavations, including the Onion Portage site. This was arguably his more important find, but he didn’t recognize its age or significance until much later.

Following a stint in the military during World War II, Giddings returned to the Alaska where he spent another summer working on the Kobuk River. He then turned his attention to the coast and spent four seasons excavating at Norton Bay on the Seward Peninsula. At the site of Iyatayet, he uncovered a second previously unexplored Arctic culture, the Denbigh Flint Complex, which dated to 4,000 BCE.

Throughout the 50s, Giddings established himself as an expert in Arctic prehistory and earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, but it was the excavation of the summer of 1958 that truly set him apart from his peers. That summer, with the help of Almond Downey, a native of the village of Noatak, Giddings left Kotzebue in search of old beach ridges. Beach ridges form when the prevailing winds and ocean current cause big sediment dumps along a shoreline. Eventually, the sediment grows high enough that waves no longer wash over it and a new beach is formed. Over thousands of years, a series of ridges form, stretching out into the ocean with the oldest beaches now miles away from the water.

Coastal people who rely on the ocean for food and transportation will choose to live as close to the water as they can – waterfront property has always been the most valuable real estate. This means the remains of the most recent culture will be found on the beach ridge closest to the ocean while older cultures will be found on beach ridges further back. The further a culture is from the ocean, the older it is. Giddings hoped to find a series of beach ridges old enough to have been used by all the different Arctic civilizations, allowing archeologists to firmly date them in relation to each other.

Downey, who worked with Giddings for two decades, guided the crew across the Kotzebue Sound to the windswept shores of Cape Krusenstern, just south of the Krusenstern Lagoon. Here, Giddings discovered a series of 114 parallel beach ridges stretching inland for nearly three miles. Over the next five years, excavations uncovered the remains of 200 generations of people who had hunted and fished along the shores of Cape Krusenstern. Every known Arctic culture plus several new ones were represented in the beach ridges’ 5,000 year history.

The Cape Krusenstern beach ridges were a remarkable find, one that allowed Giddings to show when different cultures existed in relation to others, but using beach ridges as dating method was unorthodox. Skeptics argued that there was no proof that every group of people would live on the beach ridge closest to the water. Giddings needed to find a site that matched the sequence of cultures found on the beach ridges, but stacked one on top of other. He needed to dig deep.

In July 1961, Giddings took a break from the excavations at Cape Krusenstern to return to Onion Portage on the Kobuk River. During his first visit, he had abandoned the site after excavating just four recent house pits, but he had always thought that there was more to be found. Twenty years later, he returned to Onion Portage to see what he had missed. The answer was… a lot. Onion Portage would turn out to be one of the oldest and best dated sites in not just the Arctic, but all of North America. It would be the most significant find in Giddings’ long and illustrious career.

When Giddings first arrived on the Kobuk, local villagers told him that they would gather at Onion Portage, named for the wild onions that grow along the banks, to wait for the caribou to arrive on their yearly migration across the Brooks Range. They would wait until the caribou were crossing the river, then shoot them, a method known as intercept hunting. As Giddings began to dig beneath the floor of his previously excavated house pit, it was soon apparent that its inhabitants were not the first people to recognize the strategic position of Onion Portage. It was exactly the site that Giddings had been looking for.

Giddings returned to Onion Portage in 1964 to continue excavations. As his crew worked, it quickly became apparent that people from cultures along the coast and new, inland cultures had been coming here to hunt for thousands of years. Ultimately, the excavation found evidence of nine different cultural groups dating back 10,000 years at Onion Portage. It is one of the best-dated sites in all of North America, and the most significant find in Arctic archeology.

Louis Giddings died as a result of complications from a car crash in December, 1964. During his three decades of work in Northwest Alaska he greatly expanded the understanding of human occupation in the Arctic. His passion and dedication inspired a generation of future archeologist who continued his work in what is now Cape Krusenstern National Monument and Kobuk Valley National Park.

Along the beach ridges stretching back from the coast, evidence of 4,000 years of seasonal subsistence camps is preserved. 200 generations of people have hunted marine animals and fished along the Chukchi Seas, and that tradition continues today. Though much has changed since Otto von Kotzebue first sailed along the coast of Cape Krusenstern in 1816, subsistence – noncommercial, customary and traditional use of wild resources – remains an important part of Iñupiaq culture today. Wild salmon, whitefish, seal, and caribou are staples for many Iñupiat living along the Chukchi Sea, just as they have been for many generations.

Subsistence defines the seasons as much as the weather in Northwest Alaska. Whitefish season gives way to salmon season, just as sure as summer is followed by fall, and people organize their lives accordingly. Many families leave their homes in the nearby villages and spend their summers at subsistence camps in the Monument, taking advantage of the long hours of sunlight to set nets for salmon and whitefish, and to pick wild greens and berries on the tundra. Visitors to Cape Krusenstern National Monument need to be sensitive to these activities and not interfere with the age-old subsistence harvests taking place in the monument, especially during the key seasons of summer and fall. To learn more, watch this video, Respect the Land (Kamaksrił̣iq Nunam Irrusianik): Iñupiaq Values and Subsistence Management in Western Arctic National Parklands filmed and directed by Kristen Green, Anne Beaudreau, Savannah Fletcher made with support from: U.S. National Park Service--Western Arctic National Parklands, Ocean Alaska Science and Learning Center (Agreement # P17AC00303); Emmett Family Collaboration Grant, Stanford University; University of Alaska Fairbanks

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), the legislation that established Cape Krusenstern National Monument and many other Alaskan national parks, specifically protects subsistence harvest by local residents. Subsistence is vital to the everyday survival of many rural Alaskans. It preserves both the traditional way of life and generations of accumulated knowledge in Northwest Alaska.

Provisions in ANILCA established a Subsistence Resource Commission (SRC) for Cape Krusenstern National Monument, providing a venue for local subsistence users to participate in the management of their land.

Ten thousand years ago, there was no beach at what is now Cape Krusenstern National Monument. Instead of the crashing waves of the Arctic Ocean, an endless sea of grass teaming with wildlife stretched as far as the eye could see. This was Beringia – the thousand mile wide land bridge that connected the old world to the new.

During the Ice Age, the huge amounts of water locked up in the massive, continent-spanning glaciers caused the sea level to drop by 300 feet, exposing the floor of the shallow Bering and Chukchi Sea. The flat, grassy plain that was exposed by the retreating water was the Bering Land Bridge, an expansive corridor which linked Asia and North America for thousands of years. Herds of massive Ice Age animals like wooly mammoths, Arctic camels and muskox lumbered across the fertile plain in search of food. They were followed by tribes of nomadic hunters – the first Americans.

When the glaciers melted, the Bering Land Bridge disappeared beneath the waves. Many early North Americans settled along the shore of the Chukchi Sea where they hunted seals and whales and fished for salmon and sheefish. The beach ridges of Cape Krusenstern show that the ancestors of the Inupiaq people used the coastline for centuries.

Beach ridges form when wind and ocean currents dump huge loads of sediments just offshore. Eventually, the sediment deposit grows high enough that the waves cannot wash over it, creating a new beach. Over time, beach after beach was formed, creating a series of ridges stretching out into the ocean. The people who came to Cape Krusenstern to hunt marine animals settled on the beach closest to the water, resulting in an archeological timeline of Cape Krusenstern’s history. Archeologist Louis Giddings , who excavated the three-mile wide complex of 114 beach ridges at Cape Krusenstern in the 1950s, uncovered old houses, caches, and living areas from generations who had hunted along the beaches of Cape Krusenstern for the last 5,000 years with an evolving culture and technology.

Because of its central location, settlements at Cape Krusenstern National Monument have long served as an economic and cultural hub for the area. Every summer a large trade fair (Qatŋut in Iñupiaq) was held at Sisualik, a fish camp located on a fringe of land surrounded by salmon and beluga rich waters at the southern tip of the monument. For two weeks in late July, 2,000 people would converge on Sisualik from throughout the Arctic, even coming as from as far away as Siberia to trade food and goods, socialize, dance and compete in traditional games. Qatŋut is still held every two years in Kotzebue, just 14 miles across the Kotzebue Sound from Sisualik.

The Iñupiat from Kotzebue and Noatak maintain subsistence camps along Cape Krusenstern National Monument’s shore. The rich bounty of the ocean, lagoon and tundra remains an important source of food in Northwest Alaska. As people set fishnets, collect berries and eggs and hunt for seal and beluga off the coast, they are carrying on a 200 generation long tradition of living off the land.

During the long, dark winters, Cape Krusenstern National Monument lays quietly under a thick blanket of snow, but as the days grow longer, life returns to the tundra. No sign of spring is quite as dramatic or loud as the arrival of the thousands of migratory birds who fly to Northwest Alaska every summer to breed. While summers in the Arctic are short, the endless sunlight and still lakes on the tundra make food incredibly abundant. Every year, 150 species of birds (PDF 395 KB) flock to Cape Krusenstern National Monument’s unspoiled tundra, lagoons and coastline to lay their eggs and raise their young.

Birds travel from all over the world to breed in Cape Krusenstern National Monument. The Arctic tern is a slim, graceful seabird that is a common sight throughout Alaska in the summer. Every year, it flies between Antarctic and the Arctic – 12,000 miles each way. The 24,000 mile yearly migration is the longest of any species on earth. Because the Arctic tern sees both the Arctic and Antarctic summer each year, it experiences more sunlight than any other animal.

Only slightly less dramatic is the migration of the American Golden Plover, a small shorebird that crosses almost all of North and South America on its route from its winter grounds in southern Argentina to its breeding grounds high on the Arctic tundra. Plovers are strong, fast flyers and can make the several thousand mile non-stop flight over the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Hawaii and other Pacific islands in just a few days.

Some of Cape Krusenstern National Monument’s summer visitors can only been seen in Northwest Alaska. Common, Spectacled, King and Steller’s Eiders, large sea ducks that are rarely seen outside of the Arctic, make their nests on the tundra at Cape Krusenstern in the summer. They spend their winters on the open ocean where they dive for mussels, crabs and small fish, then migrate to shore once the sea ice breaks up.

All five species of loons, including the rare Yellow-billed loon, can be found at Cape Krusenstern National Monument. The Yellow-billed loon – the largest of the five loon species – only nests on the low, Arctic tundra near large, clear fish-filled lakes. They dive both to find fish and aquatic plants and to escape danger. It is one of the rarest birds in North America. The worldwide population is only about 10,000 birds, half of which come to Northwest Alaska to breed.

Loons, which spend most of their life in the water, have been impacted by increased water pollution and have disappeared from many of their traditional breeding grounds. Known as the “spirits of the wilderness,” their haunting cry over the tundra is a testament to the undisturbed wilderness of Cape Krusenstern National Monument.

The spectacular diversity of birds at Cape Krusenstern National Monument isn’t just due to its ideal conditions. Two major flyways (the traditional migration path stretching between breeding and nonbreeding grounds) converge in Northwest Alaska, bringing birds from throughout the Pacific and North and South America. It is also located at the edge of a third flyway, which brings the occasional bird from Asia and Europe.

Bluethroats, which are common throughout Asia and Europe, are almost never found in North America. Only 1% of the population flies to Northwest Alaska to breed. They are best known for their distinctive blue and red throats, but are difficult to spot unless they are singing. The Yellow Wagtail is another visitor from Asia. This small yellow and olive bird is common in Cape Krusenstern National Monument, but almost nowhere else in North America.

The ocean and land environments in Cape Krusenstern National Monument are closely intertwined. Marine waters make up half of the monument’s perimeter and no point of land is far from the coast. This means that the lives of virtually all the animals at Cape Krusenstern are tied to its productive marine waters or the biologically rich brackish lagoons. Cape Krusenstern is home to one of the last great migrations left on the planet. Every spring and fall, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd – a quarter of a million animals – passes through parts of the monument on the 600 mile trek between their summer and winter grounds. In our rapidly urbanizing world, many of the great migrations have disappeared, and Cape Krusenstern National Monument helps to protect this millennia-old journey that is vital to both the caribou and the people who live in their path.

Millions of birds flock to the sheltered lakes and rivers of Cape Krusenstern every spring to breed, some of them traveling unimaginable distances. The arctic tern flies all the way from the coast of Antarctica - the longest migration of any bird in the world. Ducks, cranes, loons, geese and swans all make the valley their home for a few months each year.

Summer is a time of plenty in Cape Krusenstern, but any animal that makes its home in the Arctic must contend with the winter. Temperatures plummet, the rivers freeze and the sun disappears. Heavy snow and ice blanket the landscape, hiding the willows and lichen from sight. Food becomes scares. As the nights grow long and the temperatures drop, many animals leave, migrating south for the winter. Most of the animals that stay hibernate, spending the long winter asleep underground, but a few, such as the Arctic wolf and the ptarmigan, are active all winter long. They make do with what food remains on the snowy tundra, scraping by until sun and the bounty of summer returns.

Caribou, wolves, and bears oh my! Kobuk Valley is home to a wide array of wild mammals. Caribou are often seen trotting across the sand dunes and swimming the Kobuk River while making their migration each spring and fall. While the caribou are migrating, the moose are wading in the swampy areas feeding and keeping a close eye out for their biggest predators, the grey wolf and brown bear. If you head into the upland areas you might find a few Dall's Sheep hangout out on the mountain tops. For the lucky visitor, you might even catch a rare glimpse of one of the solitary wolverines calling Kobuk Valley their home. Total, there are 32 mammals found in Kobuk Valley national park.

Kobuk Valley is home to one of the last great migrations left on the planet. Every spring and fall, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd –a quarter of a million animals –passes through the valley on the 600 mile trek between their summer and winter grounds. In our rapidly urbanizing world, many of the great migrations have disappeared, and Kobuk Valley National Park protects this millennia-old journey that is vital to both the caribou and the people who live in their path. ***Please note that due to contiguous habitats and ecosystems throughout our parks, there is considerable overlap in flora and fauna between then. When you click some links below, you will be taken to the Kobuk Valley National Park version of that page.***