The Tanana River flows through the interior of Alaska, roughly a hundred miles southeast of Fairbanks, draining a broad valley between mountain ranges that define the middle of the state.

The valley is subarctic — cold winters of genuine severity, summers short enough that the trees stay small and the ground never fully thaws, a landscape defined by spruce forests, river floodplains, wetlands, and the periodic drama of flood and fire that shape subarctic ecology.

The Indigenous peoples of this region are the Athabascan-speaking nations — communities that have inhabited the Tanana Valley and its surrounding territory for thousands of years.

Among them, the people who identify as Tanana Athabascans have the most direct historical connection to the landscape around the Upward Sun River site, which sits in their traditional territory.

Their relationship to this land — and to the ancient people whose remains were found within it — would shape the terms under which the scientific research at Upward Sun River proceeded.

The site itself is not dramatic in appearance.

It occupies a low terrace above the Upward Sun River, a tributary of the Tanana.

The terrace is the kind of location that prehistoric people chose repeatedly across North America and the rest of the world — elevated enough above the river to be protected from most floods, close enough to the water to have reliable access to fish and game, sheltered from the worst of the wind by the surrounding topography.

Archaeological survey of the region had identified the site prior to the major excavations, and initial testing suggested the presence of cultural material at depths that indicated considerable age.

Excavations led by Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks began in earnest in the mid-2000s.

Potter’s team worked systematically through the site’s stratigraphy — the layers of sediment that had accumulated over thousands of years — documenting the distribution and association of artifacts, animal bones, charcoal, and other materials that together built up a picture of human occupation through time.

What the excavations found, over multiple seasons, was evidence of a campsite that had been used repeatedly during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene — the transition from the Ice Age to the modern geological epoch.

People had camped here, processed game animals, made tools, and conducted the ordinary business of subsistence life in the subarctic.

The animal bones recovered from the site documented a diet that included salmon, small mammals, and birds — the kinds of foods available in the Tanana Valley and that remain central to Indigenous subsistence economies in the region.