The Manuport of Campus Site
One day in November 1934, distinguished anthropologist Nels Nelson received a little box that had traveled a long way from the Territory of Alaska to reach his office in New York's American Museum of Natural History. Inside the box lay an array of small stone artifacts, and the corroboration of a controversial theory. As he wrote later, some of the implements "...are identical in several respects with thousands of specimens found in the Gobi desert." It was the first concrete evidence supporting the hypothesis that humans had crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to populate the Western Hemisphere.
That is one of the often-surprising details I learned while copyediting a manuscript for the University of Alaska Press recently. The author is Charles M. Mobley, probably better known as Chuck to the oil cleanup workers he herded away from prehistoric and historic sites on the shores of Prince William Sound throughout summer 1989.
Mobley's manuscript isn't about the emergency preservation of last summer. It's a scholarly monograph on a restudy of archaeological artifacts and findings from the Campus Site, which lies on the southeastern brow of the hill where the University of Alaska Fairbanks now sits.
It was the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines back in the early 1930s, when a stone artifact turned up in dirt excavated from a posthole. The piece reportedly led to jokes about primitive College Man, and eventually to a formal site investigation. The American Museum of Natural History hired students who struck stone--hand-worked stone pieces, and lots of them. The result was that box on Nels Nelson's desk in New York, the news that startled the world of anthropology, and much more work at the site.
Although the site was enormously significant to understanding prehistoric population movements, the intense effort lasted only a few years. It's thought there's now little left to find. A graduate student with a good arm could nearly hit the site by throwing a small artifact from the present Anthropology Department window at UAF, but no students dig and sift there nowadays. Campus Site rests unmarked.
Mobley's manuscript outlines the early digs and discusses later ones, but the history and status of Campus Site isn't his chief concern. Most of the monograph is a careful discussion of the artifacts, complete with many illustrations.
Editing that portion of the book draft wasn't as much fun as the historical section. There was lots of wonderful jargon: spells and non-diagnostic shatter, bifacial prismatic flakes, microblades and macroblades (which are bigger than microblades), potlids, buries. Yet I like human adventure better than lithic technology. I could identify with students' excitement, even developing some feeling for the academic politics of archaeology and the scientific panic when the university decided to build a road over a corner of the site. I couldn't develop much feeling for the long-gone people who made those ancient tools, except dim awe at their ability to live in this harsh place. We had nothing in common.
Or so I thought until I came to Mobley's discussion of miscellaneous stone artifacts. That category includes stones evidently used as hammers, pieces altered by human effort but insufficiently to guess for what purpose, and unworked rocks that don't belong in the site's geological setting. Most of those rocks are clearly raw material for the blade-making work no one ever got around to doing.
One rock was too small to be useful. Mobley called it a "manuport." I remember enough Latin to figure out this means something carried by hand. The manuport is a pebble, half bright red, the other half glossy white. Someone had just been captivated by the thing's looks, picked it up, brought it home to the campsite.
From that peculiar detail came a sudden pang of fellowship, one thing shared across thirty centuries. Sometimes you just have to stop and pick up an attractive pebble--at least I do. In 1990 they may travel in pockets of ripstop nylon instead of (perhaps) rawhide pouches, but manuports are still on the move.
