How Fossil Ivory Is Found at The Boneyard Alaska

Every piece of woolly mammoth fossil ivory I work with starts the same way — in a bucket, set out on wooden pallets to dry before it moves into a blue bin. :) If you know, you know.

Small broken fragments, sorted and saved. Whole tusks get carefully banded as soon as they expose themselves. Recovering a buried full mammoth tusk frozen in permafrost takes more time than you’d think.

You would imagine the massive "Giant" nozzles spraying water would melt the ice wall quickly. They don’t. I once worked on a single large frozen boulder that had sloughed off the wall for two full seasons.

That’s what this place is. The Boneyard Alaska in Fairbanks, run by my brother John Reeves and the Reeves family — one of the most significant fossil ivory recovery operations in the United States. John came to this work with an acute curiosity and a deep respect for what’s been preserved in that frozen ground. Most people never see what goes into it. Follow him on Instagram @theboneyardalaska for his latest discoveries. He’s also appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience three times — #1918, #2080, and #2271 — if you want the full story, any of them are worth a listen. You can also watch the first reveal of the Boneyard findings worldwide on the Boneyard Alaska documentary on Vimeo.

Gold country

What most people don’t know is that The Boneyard Alaska sits on active gold mining property. At today’s prices — near $5,000 an ounce — John could lease or mine the gold that’s there. The economics would make sense to most people. But John isn’t most people. Before the gold is to be gotten, he wants to find the bones.

The bones, the ivory, the story of what lived and died in this place tens of thousands of years ago. Woolly Mammoth, Steppe Bison, Dire Wolves, Ice Age Badgers, Short-Faced Bears — and species not previously known to have inhabited the area before The Boneyard’s discoveries.

The University of Alaska Arctic Research Center and Museum has been a valuable resource in identifying the Pleistocene bones and remains recovered. That work has to happen before gold mining can, and John is in no hurry to skip it. He is more fascinated by what came out of the ice than what might be beneath it — even at $5,000 an ounce.

It starts with attention

Finding fossil ivory isn’t a dig in the traditional sense. It’s a daily practice of paying attention. Hundreds of bends, climbs, lifts, and squats in a day — checking material in the creek wall, along the bottom, washing things pulled from the water to get a better look. More often than not, what comes up is a rock or a piece of waterlogged wood. But you check anyway, because you can’t always tell.

The thumbnail test

In the field, there’s a simple way to tell ivory from wood: press your thumbnail into it. If it indents, it’s wood. If it doesn’t give at all, you look closer. That’s the moment — that small resistance under a thumbnail — where a piece of Ice Age material announces itself.

What the ground gives it

The frozen muck and biological material that has surrounded this ivory for tens of thousands of years doesn’t just preserve it — it transforms it. Tannins and minerals absorbed into the deteriorating ivory over millennia give each piece its own color and character. No two are alike. That’s not a selling point. It’s just true.

Why the lines matter

When I shape a piece, I try to work with the ivory rather than against it. The natural grain, the mineralization, the color variations built up over 12,000 to 40,000 years in the earth — those aren’t flaws to sand away. They’re the record of where this material has been. I kept the tusk lines on the heart pendant because erasing them felt wrong. They tell a story I wasn’t there for, and I didn’t want to be the one to end it.

Mammoth Magic

There’s a moment that happens when someone holds a piece of mammoth ivory for the first time. I’ve seen it enough times to believe it’s real — something shifts. You’re holding something that has outlasted everything around it. The animal it came from walked the earth before humans built cities, before written language, before almost everything we take for granted. And now it’s in your hand.

That’s what I think about when I’m working. Whose hands will touch this next.