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Photo courtesy of Roger Topp.
Clockwise from left, Gerad Smith, Audra Darcy and Lauren Bridgeman excavate an archaeological site at Hollembaek Hill southeast of Delta Junction in 2023. The work was funded in part by an endowment created by long-time ����Ӱ��n Nancy Eliason.

By Sam Bishop

The ulu, Nancy Eliason noticed, had small flakes of material stuck to the surface of its blade.

Eliason was volunteering at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in the late 1980s when she picked up the ulu — a traditional knife used by northern and western ����Ӱ��’s Native people. The museum had 60 of them, and Eliason was helping the collections curator with a project to describe each.

“The one that really got me was the one that still had salmon scales fastened to it,” she recalled in an interview from her home in Seattle this summer. “I just wondered, ‘Who made you? Who used you? What’s your story?’”

Eliason is still asking such questions about ����Ӱ��’s early history, but now she is also helping to answer them.

Eliason has created two endowments at the University of ����Ӱ�� to support research into the early human residents of Beringia — the geographic area encompassing Russia’s Far East, ����Ӱ��, Canada’s Yukon and the now-inundated Bering Land Bridge.

Eliason’s interest in such history was first sparked by the ulus in Sitka, where she retired in 1987 after 22 years as a public health nurse for the state. Her interest continued to grow after she moved to Anchorage in 1999, following her husband’s death two years earlier. She started volunteering at what is today the Anchorage Museum.

She gave tours, during which visitors would sometimes ask her about the land bridge.

“They always pictured the Bering Land Bridge as being just a narrow little path to walk across,” Eliason said. “They did not appreciate that it was 500 miles from north to south. And it wasn't just out the Aleutian chain; it was way up there by Nome.”

While describing the land bridge, which disappeared about 12,000 years ago as the most recent ice age ended and sea levels rose about 500 feet, Eliason always had more questions.

“That just amazed me to know that when the Native people were sort of drifting over from Asia into North America,” she said. “And then came the question, ‘How'd they ever get down in the lower Americas?’

“Well, we still don't know,” she said. “But I got interested in all of that as I'm giving these tours and people are asking questions that I can't answer.”

Today, Eliason’s endowments — one for work at the University of ����Ӱ�� Museum of the North and another for UA work statewide — are helping researchers dig up details that could contribute to those answers.

“Everything that they're learning eventually someday may help with finishing out that story,” she said.

The people connection

The UAMN Eliason Beringian Research Endowment has already helped uncover one small part of the story — the earliest evidence in the Americas of canines coexisting with humans.

Researchers at ����Ӱ�� and elsewhere presented the evidence in a study published in December 2024. Their report was based in part on an excavation at Hollembaek Hill southeast of Delta Junction.

“Nancy funded two years of excavation there, and I could hire students, and I could hire staff,” said Josh Reuther, a co-author on the study and ����Ӱ�� anthropology professor who serves as archaeology curator at the museum.

The study concluded that ancestors of today's dogs lived with humans in ����Ӱ�� as early as 12,000 years ago. That’s 2,000 years earlier than previously known.

Researchers reached that conclusion by comparing the bones of known modern and ancient Interior ����Ӱ�� wolves to those of canines excavated at historical human camps on Hollembaek Hill and another site northwest of Delta Junction called Swan Point.

The canine bones had isotope markers indicating a substantial amount of salmon in their diet. Known wolf bones, meanwhile, reflected very little salmon consumption.

The conclusion? Humans were sharing their fish with the canines.

“Hollembaek was really the first indication that, ‘OK, we think that these are really dogs because there's multiple individuals coming up,’” Reuther said. “(But) the genetics were unclear, so we turned to diet to look at that. And then it turned out that one individual from Swan Point, which was pretty old, 12,000 years ago, had the same sort of dietary indicators.”

Reuther said Eliason’s endowment not only helped with the excavation but also with the analysis of the material.

“Part of that funding helped us out with radiocarbon dating and isotope stuff,” he said. “You've got to send it to a lab, and they charge for it.”

Eliason said she wants her funding of Beringia research to focus primarily on ����Ӱ��’s ancient peoples, and the inquiry into the canines’ salmon diet meshed well with that intention.

“It takes people to get the salmon, so, you see, there's the people connection,” she said.

Following the obsidian trail

Researchers are also using funding from Eliason’s endowments to investigate sources and distribution of obsidian around ����Ӱ��. The glassy volcanic rock, which makes excellent stone tools and points, is found at many camps and house sites occupied by early ����Ӱ��ns.

“These folks knew more about obsidian than we will ever know, and they probably knew the locations that we'll never even find,” Reuther said. “The depth of knowledge that folks had, I mean, it's incredible.”

Archaeologists know the geological source location for less than 5 percent of the obsidian artifacts in collections, Reuther estimated. A team from ����Ӱ��, UAA and other institutions is trying to find more sources, he said. For example, team members flew in a helicopter to collect samples from a remote obsidian deposit in the Matanuska area in September 2024, he said.

“The company that we're working with is about $5,500 to $6,000 for a minimum flight time of four hours,” he said. “So luckily we were able to do that with Nancy. And then she's actually funding us to do lab work.”

Obsidian found in archaeological sites can be matched to natural deposits across the landscape, such as the one in Matanuska, using chemical analysis in the lab, Reuther said.

“Essentially, it's a big flashlight with a spectrometer on it,” he said of the laboratory tool. “So we've been trying to basically zap any sort of obsidian that we get from anywhere in the Interior and see if we can match it up with that geological location.”

Identifying the sources of obsidian can tell archaeologists about the social connections of the people using it, Reuther noted.

“If we have it coming from all directions, there's a lot of networking and a lot of probably trade and alliances and things like that, a lot of familial ties, interconnectedness,” he said.

Still contributing to ����Ӱ��

Eliason, born Nancy Hastings, grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a bachelor’s degree and a registered nurse credential in 1962. She then worked as a public health nurse in Denver, Colorado.

“After three years, it was either stay and be in a rut or move on,” she said. “I just wanted to do something  a little bit different.”

So she inquired about who hired public health nurses in ����Ӱ��. “The state wrote back and said, ‘We do. Here's an application.’ So I filled it out, and they hired me.”

She first spent two years in Glennallen, serving the Copper River basin and the upper Tanana River valley.

It wasn’t emergency work. That was handled by the small mission hospital in Glennallen. Her multifaceted job included administering immunizations, educating pregnant mothers, ensuring that children with disabilities received care and acting as a nurse for schools — “because they certainly didn’t have their own,” she said.

At the time, the state transferred single nurses to a new location every two years, she said.

“So I spent two years in Glenallen,” she said, “and then I was two years in Juneau, covering Haines, Skagway and Yakutat, which meant flying up to one of those communities every Monday and flying back for the weekend.”

A nurse position in Sitka opened, and she applied and got the job.

“I took a voluntary demotion and was the health center nurse in Sitka, with a couple of logging camps and a fishing community. But no overnighting the way I had been doing before,” she said. “I wanted more of a home base.”

There, she met and married an engineer for ����Ӱ�� Lumber and Pulp named Vern Eliason — no relation to the former mayor and state senator from Sitka, Dick Eliason.

“No, but let me tell you, when their public health nurse married a guy from Sitka whose last name was Eliason, very fast they cleared whether or not it was the politician,” she said with a laugh.

After her husband died in 1997, Eliason moved to Anchorage, where she volunteered at the museum. In 2017, she moved to Seattle.

“I was 52 years in ����Ӱ��,” she said. “I retired to Seattle because there's no place like the place in which I'm living in ����Ӱ��. It’s a retirement community, but it's got a lot of amenities. But I still love ����Ӱ��, and I wanted to contribute to ����Ӱ��.”

Eliason most recently returned to ����Ӱ�� in 2024. She was able to visit with Reuther at the museum and see some of the results from her endowment funding.

And she continued to ask more questions.

“The curiosity with Nancy is off the charts,” Reuther said.

 

Sam Bishop is an editor and writer with the ����Ӱ�� Office of University Relations.