A 13,800-Year-Old Camp in Alaska Links Ice Age Hunters to Siberia. Here’s What Archaeologists Found

Around 13,800 years ago, a group of hunters set up camp on a small ridge above the Tanana River in interior Alaska. A new study of that site, now called Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, shows that this 13,800-year-old Alaska camp may be one of the clearest links yet between the first Alaskans and people on the Siberian side of the Bering Land Bridge.

The research, led by Kelly Graf of the University of Kansas, was published in Science Advances and reported by Archaeology Magazine on 15 October.

“They were there”

The site’s Athabascan name means “they were there.” Today the ridge is covered in spruce. At the end of the last Ice Age, it overlooked shrub tundra. The excavation found three occupation layers, dated to about 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago.

What the oldest layer holds

Excavations have recovered more than 80,000 artifacts. Among them are hafted stone blades shaped on both sides and mounted on handles, along with bone remains.

The diamond-shaped points

The most telling finds are diamond-shaped stone points. According to Graf, no other site in Alaska has points with this clear shape. The only northern sites of the same age with similar points are on the Russian side of the land bridge.

Why it matters for the peopling of the Americas

The study names Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ the earliest known Nenana Complex site east of the Bering Land Bridge. Because sites west of the bridge share the same point style, the researchers see a cultural link across Beringia, the region that once connected Asia and North America.

Graf says this points to people crossing the land bridge to this spot, and possibly moving onward from it. It adds to a growing body of evidence on how and when people first reached the Americas, a question we have followed in stories such as the 13,000-year-old butchered bones found in Chile.

More in our Science section.

Source: Graf, K. E. et al. (2026). Science Advances, 12(42). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeh0802; Archaeology Magazine.

Featured image: Río Tanana, Tanacross, Alaska, Estados Unidos, 2017-08-29, DD 33 by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.