13,800 years ago, people in Alaska smashed bison bones around a stone anvil. Archaeologists found the anvil. The hammerstones. The broken bones still scattered around it. That is a hell of a thing to find. The site is Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, on a ridge above the Tanana River. Research published October 14 describes an Ice Age base camp where enough survived to begin following the work around it. Excavations recovered more than 80,000 archaeological specimens, including tools and animal remains. Around that anvil, people appear to have been extracting marrow and probably processing bone for grease. A large earth oven stood nearby. Killing a bison left a considerable amount of work ahead of you. Here is where some of it happened. Researchers identified a hearth, a small pit and a possible posthole. Their arrangement, together with the distribution of tools and bones, suggests a shelter opening south. Bone processing happened near the entrance. A discard pile accumulated a few meters away. I like being able to get that specific. Where somebody worked. Where the waste went. What survives of a place after the shelter itself is gone. Then there are the needles. Eight fragments. Several still preserve part of the eye. There were scrapers, knives sharpened repeatedly, an adze and a drilled pendant. Radiocarbon dates suggest people returned periodically over as much as two centuries. The researchers interpret the evidence as a base camp used by a group larger than a small hunting party. These people also knew a much larger country than the excavated patch suggests. Obsidian came from Batza Téna, roughly 230 miles west-northwest. We know the source. We don’t know every hand it passed through. Distinctive diamond-shaped stone tools resemble examples from Nikita Lake and Berelekh in Siberia. That gives researchers a specific connection to investigate across Beringia, though it cannot tell us exactly who traveled where. I want to know how people reached the Americas too. But I get impatient when the whole discussion hurries them south. Somebody knew where to get good stone here. People invested work in an oven and kept returning to this ridge. There was sewing to do, meat to process and a growing pile of bones outside.