COMPARING GLACIAL GEOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE WITH ALASKA NATIVE ORAL HISTORY IN GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA: BRIDGING THE CULTURAL GAPS BETWEEN QUATERNARY GEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND ANCIENT HUMAN OBSERVATIONS

In cooperation with the National Park Service, University Alaska Southeast undergraduate students in Geology and Anthropology received credits for Field Geology, Archeology, and Ethnology courses while participating in a 17-day study of a Tlingit Cultural Landscape in Bartlett Cove near Glacier Bay National Park headquarters. Previously published historical accounts and archeological and glacial geology research in the area (Vancouver, 1794; Akerman, 1996; Mann and Streveller, 1997) provided baseline historic and glacial landscape information. Oral accounts of landscape change and noteworthy glacial events have been passed down through generations of Alaska Native Tlingit clan members who lived in Glacier Bay throughout Holocene time. Their descendents now live around the Icy Straits region and shared their stories with the students.

In Little Ice Age time, the advances and coalescence of all tidewater glacier tributaries filled Glacier Bay with ice. Previous Holocene landscapes dominated by large glacial outwash plains and dune fields remain in Tlingit oral accounts of the region but have been erased by subsequent ice advance to be replaced by the present deep marine fjord. Episodes of ice advances out of Glacier Bay and across Icy Straits are also recorded in Tlingit stories.

One of the aims of this study was to continue to document the available archeological and glacial geologic record around Bartlett Cove and compare it with Tlingit knowledge of the area. The obstacles to be overcome include breaking through the barriers created by the cultures of different scientific disciplines as well as Alaska Native and Euro-American knowledge of the region. By pooling the rich data collected by Tlingit elders, Quaternary geologists, archeologists and cultural anthropologists, National Park Service resource managers will be better able to build park resource data, devise management programs and propagate policies that benefit all user groups.