Archaeologists working in the Olympic National Park have recovered perfectly preserved organic artifacts emerging from a melting ice patch at an altitude of 1,800 meters. The finds include a fragment of a complex cedar-root fishing net and several notched stone sinkers, likely used by the ancestors of the Coast Salish peoples for high-altitude lake fishing nearly 3,000 years ago.
This discovery is a significant breakthrough in climate archaeology, as organic materials like wood and fiber rarely survive in the acidic soils of the Pacific Northwest. The preservation afforded by the ice provides a rare window into the textile engineering and subsistence strategies used by Indigenous communities to exploit mountain resources during the Late Holocene.