Mammoth ivory excavated in Alaska for jewelry, curios
Jeannette J. Lee /Associated Press May. 28, 2006 12:00 AM
AZ Central.com, AZ
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – In downtown ivory shops, alongside whale-baleen baskets and walrus-tusk statuettes, tourists finger curios made from the fossils of shaggy Ice Age beasts that died on the tundra thousands of years ago.
Woolly mammoth fossils, abundant on riverbanks and beaches in the interior, are shaped into jewelry or etched with scrimshaw, then sold to collectors and retail shops.
Alaska’s borders contain the largest caches of mammoth remains in the United States, and a consistently cold climate has kept much of them in carvable condition.
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“In the rest of the country, it isn’t in very good shape and it’s rather rare. The permafrost and the muck helped preserve it better here,” said Dale Guthrie, professor emeritus at the Institute of Arctic Biology in Fairbanks.
As the warmer temperatures and round-the-clock daylight of summer draw tourists to the state, ivory-shop owners anticipate the inevitable questions about mammoth ivory.
“Most people don’t even know about it until they come up here, and then they see it in the store and go, ‘Hmmm, mammoth ivory?’ ” said Barbara Lynd, owner of Alaska Arts and Ivory.
Many don’t know that mammoth ivory is legal to carve and, unlike hundreds of other wildlife products, can be taken across nearly any border in the world. A few have asked where they can see a live mammoth.
“They’re not really clued in to the fact that they’re extinct,” Lynd said.
Delicate lines of scrimshaw depict a herd of the elephant-like beasts on a slab of a tusk in front of her cash register. The piece will sell for about $4,500, Lynd said. Necklaces of polished beads cost between $100 and $400.
Mammoth fossils, which look like large pieces of driftwood, are unearthed by shifting rivers and eroding coasts in a swath stretching from Fairbanks to Bethel, up the western coast and through the great oil fields of the North Slope.
For the past 15 years, Charles Foster of Kotzebue has searched for mammoth tusks and bones every summer at a secret location along a river. He sells the ivory to buyers in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. He keeps leftover bones and tusk fragments in a bulging cardboard box under a table in his small living room. A dark closet next to the front door contains several dusty tusks.
Using a shovel and pick, Foster collects about 15 pieces a summer near Kotzebue, just above the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s western coast. A school maintenance worker known for his fossil-finding skills, he sells the teeth for $500 each, while the tusks sell for a higher price, which he wouldn’t disclose.
“I can get a four-wheeler with four of these teeth,’ ” Foster said as he picked through the box of mammoth tusks, teeth and leg bones.
The remains are somewhat protected by laws that ban their removal from state or federal land. But with an uncountable number of mammoth fossils spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles of sparsely populated land, law enforcement can’t keep tabs on them all.
Lynd said most of her inventory comes from people she has known for two decades.
“I trust they are getting it from the right places,” she said.
