The charcoal from the hearth features provided high-quality radiocarbon dates.

And the infant burials, documented with the systematic care that Ben Potter’s team brought to the excavation, preserved not just the skeletal remains themselves but the context that made those remains interpretable.

The animal bones associated with the site’s occupation horizons told a story about the diet and subsistence strategies of the people who had camped there repeatedly over the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

Salmon bones indicated that the river had been fished — that the people at the site had access to and were using the fish runs that remain a defining feature of Alaskan subsistence economies.