Nine thousand years after human hands first shaped them, stone tools from Anangula Island in the Aleutian archipelago have found a new home in a modern laboratory in the UA Museum of the North.

The tools, numbering in the thousands, come from the oldest archaeological site in the Aleutians and the oldest fully maritime economy found in North America.

"It is a very unusual collection in that it contains no bifaces, that is, tools worked on both sides," says Daniel Odess, the museum's archaeology curator and an associate professor of anthropology. "When it was excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the only such collection in the Americas and was considered very enigmatic. It still remains a puzzle."

What's not a mystery is how archaeology students are helping prepare the collection for further study. Thanks to grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Odess is able to train and pay undergraduates to properly transfer the artifacts from their old containers to new ones.

"The grant is important in training the next generation of arctic researchers at the same time that we are preserving this important collection and making it available for study," Odess says. "Anangula is a prominent collection in arctic prehistory. It is another example of an important archaeological collection that arctic scientists come to Fairbanks to study."