Mysterious Disks Found In Alaska Have Experts Puzzled

The four small pieces, formed from clay, are round and adorned with markings. Two have neatly centered holes. They may be 1,000 years old and, at the moment, what they were used for is anyone's guess.

The existence of similarly decorated boulders at old village sites in Noatak National Preserve was first recorded by archaeologists in the 1960s. But the sites remained unstudied until last summer, when Scott Shirar, a research archaeologist at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, took an expedition for a closer look at two locations.

Making small-scale excavations, they came upon the disksThe first one looks like a little stone that had some scratch marks on itWe got really excited when we found the second one with the drilled hole and the more complicated etchings on it. That's when we realized we had something unique.We only opened up a really small amount of ground at the site, so the fact that we found four of these artifacts indicates there are probably more and that something really significanthappening."The artifacts were unusual in several respects. They were made of clay, not carved from stone or bone. In the course of the excavations, the team encountered a fine gray clay that could have been worked to create the objects, which weredefinitely hand made."Then there are the markings. Petroglyphsthe catchall term for any human-made marks on naturalstone -- are found around the world and are common in Southeast Alaska and the Kodiak regionin northern and interior AlaskaThey're very rare."The meaning behind the petroglyphs is a source of conjecture for archeologists, he said. "It's almost limitless, the ideas you can come up with.Those ideas range from maps or storytelling to mystical symbols or simple artistic decorationIt's the first time we've found anything like thatWe've combed through the collections here at the museum and found a similar, though not identical, ivory disk from St. Lawrence Island