Cold cases: Yellowstone author traverses ice patch science in new book

BILLINGS – The 2007 discovery of a 10,300-year-old atlatl dart found near an ice patch atop the Beartooth Mountains would eventually launch Lisa Baril on a trip across the world.

“I was just amazed that something that old could have been preserved in the ice for so long,” she said. “So I set a Google alert just to get some ideas of what else might be melting out of the ice. And it turned out this was happening all over the northern hemisphere, and I thought it would make a great book.”

After four years of research, travel and writing, Baril’s “The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice” was published in September by Timber Press.

Craig Lee, a professor at Montana State University’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology, was the person to discover the atlatl dart. He praised Baril’s nonfiction book as making the science of ice patch archaeology approachable.

“Lisa’s narrative weaves together the most salient information from locations in Europe, South America, Asia and North America,” Lee wrote in an email. “It is presently the single most complete/up-to-date source of information on this topic, and I will assign it for the next iteration of my ‘Archaeology of Snow and Ice’ class at Montana State University.”

Slow snow

Ice patches, unlike glaciers, don’t move, and therefore provide safe cold storage across centuries for organic artifacts like wood and leather that would otherwise rot, decay and disappear.

Baril’s book was written following a career transition. For seven years she worked as a wildlife biologist in Yellowstone National Park’s bird program. Her husband still works for the Park Service, so they live at Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, site of the park’s headquarters.

In 2009, she earned her master’s degree at Montana State University in Bozeman, nine years after graduating with a biology degree from Eastern Connecticut State University. More recently, she’s been writing for the Park Service as well as science articles for magazines.

“Lisa puts in the work and has an admirable and enviable long-term focus,” Lee said. “Lisa is thorough and puts in the time … numerous field expeditions and to travel to these locations. I think she does a good job of running the details to ground. She is also a fine writer, which makes it easy to read and digest the content.”

The Iceman

Baril’s book begins with one of the most significant ice-patch archaeology finds, the remains of a 5,300-year-old man discovered in 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps.

The period in which the Iceman lived corresponds to the end of the Stone Age, when humans were transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, Baril noted. For a deep time perspective, that’s also before the Egyptian pyramids and England’s megalithic monument Stonehenge were constructed.

Ötzi, one of several names he was given by combining Yeti with his location in the Ötztal Range, was killed when an arrow was shot into his back, severing an artery.

Scientific studies

His preservation for centuries was so perfect that scientists later detected 61 tattoos decorating his body. They could even identify his last meal – ibex and red deer, wild wheat, fat and a fern. A paleobotanist used pollen in Ötzi’s digestive tract to identify plants to track where he had traveled.

“He was able to show that Ötzi started out in the mountains, in his last like 36 hours of life came down the mountain, had a violent encounter with someone from his village because he had a what looks like a defensive wound on one of his hands, and fled back up into the mountains where he was eventually shot in the back with an arrow,” Baril said. “It’s a crazy story.”

Ötzi is on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, behind a thick pane of glass in a custom-built chamber chilled to 21 degrees. The three-story museum is dedicated entirely to the Iceman who was 45 when he died.

“Some scientists have based their entire career studying this one mummy and the objects he was found with,” Baril said, which included a copper ax so well preserved it was still attached to a yew handle by leather cord.

World view

As part of her research, Baril visited the museum and recounted seeing Ötzi in her book: “He looked exactly as I expected. But to be honest, I was a little creeped out being this close to his remains. These weren’t just bones. Ötzi was a real person.”

She also trekked to the alpine terrain where he was discovered, hiking up the mountain from Italy, spending the night in a hut, then visiting where Ötzi was found before descending into Austria.

Although she also visited Norway where ice-patch archaeology is a growing field of science, it was a trip to Peru that made the biggest impression on Baril. In the Andes, instead of just exploring natives’ past use of the high mountains, she took part in a centuries-old annual festival.

“The Quechua speaking people travel from all over the Andes to climb this mountain and pay homage to a glacier up there,” she said. “It’s three days of dancing and festivities and prayer and worship.”

The Andes is such a dry landscape that Baril said the locals still view glaciers as intricately connected to the success of their crops.

Takeaway

Baril said she hopes her book encourages all people to realize humans’ long-standing connection to mountain environments. Although they are difficult landscapes with harsh environments, for thousands of years they have provided resources for people – from game animals to hunt to plants, berries and water.

“They are the water towers of the world,” Baril said. “We depend on them for fresh water, even people as far away as Oklahoma and Texas, which are not mountainous states, but the snow melt from these mountains supplies water to their rivers.

“So we’re deeply connected to these landscapes. And I think ice patch archaeology really shows that deep connection through time.”

She also sees the historic stories like Ötzi’s as a “great gateway” for people to talk about Earth’s warming weather, because the loss of mountain snow and ice is a “visible manifestation of climate change.”

“You can see from one year to the next that glaciers are shrinking,” Baril said, evidenced by photographs taken years apart in places like Glacier National Park or Tibet.

“I think climate change is one of those things that’s hard for people to wrap their minds around in terms of what it means for their day to day lives,” she said. “Archaeology is a great way to kind of make that connection for a lot of people.”

In some areas, however, that connection has continued across centuries. In talking to First Nations people in the Yukon, Baril found some hunters still using stone blinds constructed hundreds or thousands of years ago. They have been constantly modified as rocks fell off or more were added. Such a long history between people, the landscape, animals and plants gave Baril a different sense of historic features.

Time sensitive

Since records began being kept in 1850, 2023 was the warmest year chronicled. “The 10 warmest years in the 174-year record have all occurred in the last decade,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I was personally horrified/shocked/saddened by the level of melt revealed this year,” said Lee, of MSU. “In short, there has been much melting going on ‘out of sight’ … hidden by the seemingly preservative late lying snows of the last decade plus. Essentially, catastrophic collapse has occurred at some research sites which may herald the end of ice-based research and a shift toward postmelt observations.”

Such weather adds a sense of urgency to the work of ice patch archaeologists, many of whom are hampered by a lack of funding, remote and hard-to-access locations and short field seasons dictated by the variations of high-elevation weather.

Once ancient artifacts long frozen in snow are uncovered, they immediately begin to deteriorate, Baril noted.

“So, it is like a race against time for archaeologists around the world to go and visit these ice patches and to collect a lot of these artifacts before they decay,” she said.

If they aren’t found quickly, they are lost to history, along with the insights they provide.

“These ice patches preserve this beautiful cultural record of how we’ve adapted and responded to climate change in the past,” Baril said. “They’re allowing us to learn about the past. At the same time, this melt is signaling how our future is compromised. So, we can use the knowledge that we’ve gained from melting ice to help us respond, I think, more thoughtfully when we consider the kind of future we want to have for, not only ourselves, but for future generations of humans that aren’t even born yet.”

Still vibrant

Following her four-year journey through time and across the world, Baril has begun to see the mountains she hikes differently. Before, Baril saw them from a recreationist’s perspective for the hiking or skiing they offered, as well as their stark beauty.

Now she also sees them as ancient repositories for cultural heritage, as well as still vibrant wildlife habitat for animals like pronghorns, mule deer and elk that continue to make ancestral migrations to through mountainous regions.

If she could hop in a time machine, Baril said she would travel to her home in the Rocky Mountains before European colonization to see what life was like among the tribes that roamed the region – the Apsáalooke and Shoshone, to name two.

She recalled visiting a drive line and buffalo jump at an elevation of 10,000 feet in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. The site overlooks a “gorgeous” valley where she could imagine families living as they butchered, dried and ate the bison. This drive line is one of the “heretofore unpublished observations regarding the archaeoecology (or archaeo-ecology) of the midlatitude Rocky Mountains,” Lee said, including work by Todd Gunther and Jacki Klancher through Central Wyoming College.

The high-elevation archaeological site is a historic reminder.

“Humans are really resourceful, and the First Nations people of this region knew exactly how to live in this environment and be comfortable and happy with the resources that were available to them,” Baril said.