A human skull discovered on the outskirts of Kotzebue in October is ancient, the Native Village of Kotzebue official said.
A resident reported on Oct. 25 a discovery of a human skull near the old structure under the power lines in the South Tent City area of Kotzebue, Kotzebue Police Department said in a statement online.
Police officers responded to the scene that day but couldn’t reach the location because of the challenging terrain and the risk of getting their vehicle stuck, police said.
By the time an officer was able to make it to the location near the shore, the remains had already been picked up by the village staff, said Christopher Cook, interim police chief.
The remains showed signs of age, with no soft tissue present, police said. There were no active missing persons cases in the area and the discovery did not require an immediate response from the police, they said.
An archeologist and the Alaska Medical Examiner’s Office assessed the skull, said Alex Whiting, a village coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“They all determined it was not modern, or at least it was not contemporary,” Whiting said.
The area where the skull was found — South Tent City — used to be the original burial site for the village, and numerous graves are located there, Whiting said.
The village will rebury the skull at the Kotzebue Ancecteral Plot behind the South Tent City, he said.
The location is about a mile away from one of the active runways for small planes and is also a place where many residents currently have fish camps, said Henry “Boyuk” Goodwin from Kotzebue. The spot is also known as the location for many unmarked graves, he said.
When Goodwin was working for Brice Construction on a runway expansion project in 2013, he said the crews had to shut down their work because the dozer ripped up some remains.
Since the recent flooding, police said they received three reports of remains washing up on shore in the Kotzebue area. Two other occurrences were in the airport area and were found to be animal bones, Cook said.
In the past decade, human remains have been found in and around the Kotzebue area about 20 times and turned to either the village or to archeologists, police said.
While there are no active missing people cases in Kotzebue, there are cases from the region, for example, Angela Foxglove and Tim Snyder in Selawik, said Missing and Murdered Indigenous People advocate Antonia Commack.
“People travel between villages and Kotz,” Commack said.
In June, Alaska State Troopers found human bones approximately 1.3 miles northeast of Selawik, said troopers spokesman Austin McDaniel. Troopers collected the bones and sent them to the State Medical Examiner’s Office for identification, which has not happened yet, McDaniel said.
The wellness coordinator at the village of Selawik Lorraine Ballot confirmed: “We didn’t hear anything back yet.”