GEOLOGIC EVIDENCE FOR NEOGLACIAL ICE TERMINUS ADVANCE, MARINE INCURSION AND GLACIER FLOODING DESCRIBED IN TLINGIT ORAL NARRATIVES IN GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY, GEO-ETHNOLOGY RESEARCH PROJECT WITH UNDERGRADUATES

The process for nominating a Traditional Cultural Property site to the Federal Register requires a substantial data gathering effort to collect sufficient information for documentation of areas of cultural importance to indigenous Americans. Near the entrance to Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska, University Alaska Anthropology and Geology faculty and undergraduate students are collaborating with NPS Cultural Resource Specialists and Alaska Native Tlingit elders to gather ethnographic and geologic data to nominate a Alaska Native village and salmon saltery site in Bartlett Cove near Park headquarters. As part of this effort undergraduate students received training in cultural site mapping methods, surficial geology field mapping, and interpretation of glacier and marine stratigraphy. Students used increment borers to core onsite trees for chronological information as well as traditional surveying techniques and differential GPS, to collect data for GIS maps. They interacted with Tlingit elders now living outside of the park and listened to the oral records of natural events and landscape changes that occurred throughout Holocene and Neoglacial time during the past 10,000 years in the Icy Straits region.

The village/saltery site provided evidence for recent ice withdrawal, followed by local sea level rise, and finally land uplift of ~4 m over the past 200 years. Additional evidence will be gathered in the future to better understand Tlingit accounts of a glacier surge-like event that forced abandonment of the village, then located along a sandy river near the present fjord entrance to Glacier Bay.